Science Special News

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Did Portugal discover Australia ?

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: A 16th century maritime map in a Los Angeles library vault proves that Portuguese adventurers, not British or Dutch, were the first Europeans to discover Australia, says a new book which details the secret discovery of Australia. The book "Beyond Capricorn" says the map, which accurately marks geographical sites along Australia's east coast in Portuguese, proves that Portuguese seafarer Christopher de Mendonca lead a fleet of four ships into Botany Bay in 1522 -- almost 250 years before Britain's Captain James Cook.Australian author Peter Trickett said that when he enlarged the small map he could recognize all the headlands and bays in Botany Bay in Sydney -- the site where Cook claimed Australia for Britain in 1770."It was even so accurate that I found I could draw in the modern airport runways, to scale in the right place, without any problem at all," Trickett told Reuters on Wednesday.Trickett said he stumbled across a copy of the map while browsing through a Canberra book shop eight years ago.He said the shop had a reproduction of the Vallard Atlas, a collection of 15 hand drawn maps completed no later than 1545 in France. The maps represented the known world at the time.Two of the maps called "Terra Java" had a striking similarity to Australia's east coast except at one point the coastline jutted out at right angles for 1,500 km (932 miles)."There was something familiar about them but they were not quite right -- that was the puzzle. How did they come to have all these Portuguese place names?," Trickett said.

Trickett believed the cartographers who drew the Vallard maps had wrongly aligned two Portuguese charts they were copying from.It is commonly accepted that the French cartographers used maps and "portolan" charts acquired illegally from Portugal and Portuguese vessels that had been captured, Trickett said."The original portolan maps would have been drawn on animal hide parchments, usually sheep or goat skin, of limited size," he explained. "For a coastline the length of eastern Australia, some 3,500 kms, they would have been 3 to 4 charts.""The Vallard cartographer has put these individual charts together like a jigsaw puzzle. Without clear compass markings its possible to join the southern chart in two different ways. My theory is it had been wrongly joined."Using a computer Trickett rotated the southern part of the Vallard map 90 degrees to produce a map which accurately depicts Australia's east coast.

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Futuristic NASA think tank to be shut down

NASA will likely shut down its Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funds research into futuristic – and often far-out – ideas in spaceflight and aeronautics, officials say. The controversial move highlights the budgetary pressures the agency is facing as it struggles to retire the space shuttles by 2010 and develop their replacement.The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) was established to "give an opportunity for people outside of NASA to develop really revolutionary and creative concepts for future aeronautics and space missions", says Robert Cassanova, who has served as the institute's director since its inception in February 1998.The institute, which operates from an office in Atlanta, Georgia, US, receives about $4 million per year from NASA. Most of that is used to fund research into innovative technologies; recent grants include the conceptual development of spacecraft that could surf the solar system on magnetic fields, motion-sensitive spacesuits that could generate power and tiny, spherical robots that could explore Mars.Now, the future development of those and other projects has been thrown into doubt, since NIAC was unofficially told by NASA last week that it was to be shut down, perhaps in August.

"We've been verbally informed that that is likely to happen, but we don't have anything official yet," Cassanova told New Scientist.The reason appears to be down to NASA's tight budget. The agency funds NIAC through its exploration systems programme, which also pays for the development of the shuttle's planned replacement – the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and Ares rockets. That programme is expected to lose an estimated $600 million or so in the agency's 2008 budget due to the higher-than-expected costs of returning the shuttles to flight after the Columbia disaster in 2003 and new legislation limiting NASA's 2007 funding to that of 2006."NASA is in a very difficult position," Cassanova says. "The cuts have to come from somewhere."

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Do monkeys have 'culture' ?

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: Research in Brazil has produced fresh evidence that primates may have something approaching human "culture". A scientist has observed capuchin monkeys banging stones together, apparently as a signalling device to ward off potential predators. The researcher says the animals appear to be learning this skill from each other - and even teaching incomers to the group how it should be done. The research is reported in the scientific journal Folia Primatologica. Dr Antonio Moura from the University of Cambridge, UK carried out his work in the Serra da Capivara National Park, in the Piaui state of north-east Brazil. The use of stone technology in foraging for food is well known in non-human primates; monkeys will use rocks to crack open nuts. But this may be the first time they have been seen using stones to create a noise to keep predators away, and warn one another of potential danger. Dr Moura describes how the monkeys, as he approached several groups of them, would first search for a suitable loose stone, then hit it on a rock surface several times in an aggressive manner.

Only as they became more used to his visits over time did the stone-banging decrease. The scientist said he saw adults and juveniles hitting the stones together without paying him any attention at all - suggesting that the younger monkeys were learning the skill from their elders.

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France opens secret UFO files

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades. The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists."It is a world first," said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of "non-identified aerospatial phenomena."Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption."Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like a flying roll of toilet paper" are clearly not worth investigating, said Patenet.But many others involving multiple sightings -- in at least one case involving thousands of people across France -- and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.A phalanx of beefy security guards formed a barrier in front of the space agency (CNES) headquarters where the announcement was made, "to screen out uninvited UFOlogists," an official explained.Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly 25 percent are classified as "type D", meaning that "despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can't explain," Patenet said.

On January 8, 1981 outside the town of Trans-en-Provence in southern France, for example, a man working in a field reported hearing a strange whistling sound and seeing a saucer-like object about 2.5 meters (eight feet) in diameter land in his field about 50 meters (yards) away.A dull-zinc grey, the saucer took off, he told police, almost immediately, leaving burn marks. Investigators took photos, and then collected and analyzed samples, and to this day no satisfactory explanation has been made.The nearly 1,000 witness who said they saw flashing lights in the sky on November 5, 1990, by contrast, had simply seen a rocket fragment falling back into earth's atmosphere.Patenet's answer to questions about evidence of life beyond Earth was sure to inflame the suspicions of those convinced the government is holding back: "We do not have the least proof that extra-terrestrials are behind the unexplained phenomena."But then he added: "Nor do we have the least proof that they aren't."The CNES fields between 50 and 100 UFO reports ever year, usually written up by police. Of these, 10 percent are the object of on-site investigations, Patenet said.

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New images reveal the 'impossible' on the Sun

The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun's chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode. The observatory will have as dramatic an impact on our understanding of the Sun as the Hubble Space Telescope has had on our view of the universe beyond, scientists told a NASA press conference in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday."Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date," says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "We've seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success."Hinode (Japanese for "sunrise") was launched in September 2006 to study the solar magnetic field and how magnetic energy is released as the field rises into the Sun's outer atmosphere. The mission was formerly known as Solar-B.The spacecraft carries an optical solar telescope (SOT), an X-ray telescope (XRT) and an ultraviolet spectrometer.

It orbits the Earth in a permanent twilight zone between night and day, which gives it a continuous view of the Sun.Hinode has sent back startling images of the Sun's outer limb. Where astronomers expected to see a calm region called the chromosphere, they saw a seething mass of swaying spikes."These structures are 8000 kilometres long and some extend twice that high," says SOT science team member Alan Title from Lockheed Martin Advance Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, US. "Their speed is such that if you sat on the end of one, which I don't recommend, you could travel from Washington, DC, to San Francisco in about four minutes. These things are really moving."

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Hidden fossil, flying dragon

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: Around 120m years ago, as the dinosaurs neared the climax of their dominion, high above their heads an extraordinary creature flitted from tree to tree. The bizarre lizard, named the "flying dragon" by its Chinese discoverers, glided using a flap of skin spread over eight ribs. The find is remarkable because almost all gliding species, such as "flying" frogs and squirrels, use a membrane spread between their toes or between their body and legs to generate lift. Only two other species evolved the rib-gliding tactic. Xianglong zhaoi is also the first lizard fossil with gliding ribs to be found.Li Pipeng and colleagues at the Shenyang Normal University in north-eastern China say: "Gliding is an energetically efficient mode of locomotion that has evolved independently, and in different ways, in several tetrapod groups."

The fossil lizard, which was found in Liaoning, north-eastern China, is 15.5cm (6in) long, including a 9.5cm tail. But its strangest feature is eight elongated ribs around 4cm long, covered in a skin flap. The fossil's extraordinary preservation meant scientists could see details of the flap as well as the bones.

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Sleep disorder creates 'Mr Hyde'

A quiet night's sleep is not an option for Derek Rogers or his wife - because he turns from a mild-mannered "Dr Jekyll" by day to a "Mr Hyde" by night. Mr Rogers, 70, from Bedford, has a rare sleep disorder which causes him to become violent when he sleep-walks. He has destroyed furniture, attacked his wife and injured himself during the night - but remembers nothing. Doctors at Papworth Hospital have found a drug which has successfully treated Mr Rogers' "unique" condition. Since he developed the condition in 1998, Mr Rogers has visited casualty up to three times a week. He has broken his nose, fractured his ribs and split his head open. South-African born Mr Rogers tried six different treatments before he was referred to the sleep clinic at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. He said: "I am not violent - I do not swear or curse and I can't believe what I do at night." His wife Linda has had to sleep in a different room to avoid her husband lashing out.

Doctors at Papworth decided to try a new £13,000 a year drug mix, which acts to break the circuit between the sleeping brain and muscles in the body. Mr Rogers said: "Some people have a glass of whisky before going to bed. I just have a potion." Dr John Shneerson, the director of the sleep clinic, said: "Quite aside from the physical side, the apprehension of what he was going to do at night was a difficult thing to live with.

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Pyramid's secret doors to be opened

Doors will soon open to reveal one of the mysteries of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Discovery News in an exclusive interview. Hawass, one of the world's leading Egyptologists, said he will show what lies behind secret doors inside the 4,500-year-old pharaonic mausoleum by the end of this year."Finally, people all over the world will know what is behind the second door in the southern shaft and the third door in the northern shaft," Hawass said.Built in 2550 B.C. for the pharaoh Cheops, also known as Khufu, the Great Pyramid is the largest of a family of three pyramids on the Giza plateau, on the outs***ts of Cairo.The last remaining wonder of the ancient world has lost little of its original height of 481 feet, and contains 3.4 million cubic yards of material. Its base covers an area of 13.1 acres, which could accommodate the cathedrals of Florence, Milan, London's St. Paul's and Rome's St. Peter's and still have plenty of space.The monument has long been rumored to have hidden passageways leading to secret chambers, and archaeologists have puzzled over the meaning of four narrow shafts deep inside the pyramid since they were first discovered in 1872.Two shafts, extend from the upper, or "Kings Chamber" exit into open air. But the lower two, one on the south side and one on the north side in the so-called "Queen's Chamber" disappear within, deepening the pyramid mystery.Widely believed to be ritual passageways for the dead pharaoh's soul to reach the afterlife, these 8-inch square shafts remained unexplored until 1993, when German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink sent a robot through the southern shaft.

After a steady climb of 213 feet from the heart of the pyramid, the robot had to stop in front of a mysterious limestone slab adorned with two copper handles.Nine years later, Hawass performed an investigation of the southern shaft on live television. As the world held its breath, a tomb-raiding robot pushed a camera through a hole drilled in the copper handled door — only to reveal another door.The following day, Hawass sent the robot through the northern shaft. After crawling for 213 feet and several sharp bends, the robot came to an abrupt halt in front of another limestone slab.As with the Gantenbrink door, the stone was adorned with two copper handles. "I dedicated my whole life to study the secrets of the Great Pyramid and I must say that these doors create many exciting questions. It is intriguing that the door in the northern shaft and the first door in the southern shaft are equidistant from the queen's chamber."Moreover, they are very similar, as they both feature the same copper handles," Hawass said.

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Dinosaur den diggers discovered

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: The fossil remains of small dinosaurs that burrowed into the ground have been found by scientists in Montana, US. The 95-million-year-old bones are from an adult and two juveniles and were unearthed in a chamber at the end of a 2.1m-long sediment-filled tunnel. The researchers say the discovery is the first definitive evidence that some dinosaurs dug dens and cared for their young in such structures. Details are reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Burrowing also represents a mechanism by which small dinosaurs may have exploited the extreme environments of polar latitudes, deserts and high mountain areas," Dr David Varricchio and colleagues tell the publication. The Montana dinosaurs have not been seen by palaeontologists before and have been given the scientific name Oryctodromeus cubicularis, meaning "digging runner of the lair". The team says the species' snout, shoulder girdle and pelvis have features one would expect to see in an animal that dug into the ground. Judging from the preserved vertebrae, the adult would have been about 2.1m (6.8ft) from nose to tail, with the major part of that (about 1.2m; 3.9ft) being the tail itself.

The estimated width of the animal fits neatly with the size of the tube it was digging (about 30cm;1ft in diameter). What is left of the tunnel structure is sloping and has two sharp turns before ending in a chamber. The team says its architecture is similar to the dens of modern burrowers, such as the striped hyena, puffin and some rodents. The dinosaur remains were covered in the coarse-grained sediment from an ancient flood; but Dr Varricchio, of Montana State University, said this did not explain the animals' deaths. "The bones are disarticulated; they are not in life position," he told BBC News.

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Oldest chunk of Earth's crust ever found

The oldest substantial chunk of Earth’s crust has been found in Greenland, and dates back at least 3.8 billion years. The find is important because it is of a type known as an ophiolite – a signature of plate tectonics – and provides the best evidence yet that plates have been moving across the Earth's surface for at least a billion years longer than thought. Plate tectonics would have begun soon after the first solid crust grew dense enough to sink back into the then-molten mantle below it, thereby starting a cycle of crust generation and destruction.Ophiolites form when a piece of ocean crust is forced up onto a piece of continental crust. Ocean crust is denser than continental crust, and so it usually is forced under, meaning ophiolites are quite rare. They are created when two tectonic plates are moving towards each other, with one being forced under the other. The fragments of the descending - or subducted - oceanic plate can be shaved off and left on top of the other plate, forming an ophiolite.Until now, the oldest example of an ophiolite was an example in China dated to 2.5 billion years ago, and its identification had been questioned.

Now Harald Furnes at the University of Bergen in Norway and colleagues have analysed an ophiolite fragment embedded in the Isua supracrustal belt in south-west Greenland. The fragment was part of a distinctive layered deposit called "sheeted dikes" that are a key component of ophiolites, measuring about 30 by 50 metres.

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UFO case data crashes French servers

On an August day in 1967, two children tending a herd of cows outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and trail of sulfuric odors.The alleged extraterrestrial sighting, described by the French government as "one of the most astonishing observed in France," is among 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half century that the country's space agency opened to the public for the first time Thursday.The voluntary decision by France's National Center for Space Studies to dump more than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audiotapes from its secret UFO archives onto its Internet site for worldwide viewing is an unprecedented move among Western countries. Most of them, the United States included, consider such records classified.Within three hours of posting the first cases Thursday morning, the French space agency's Web server crashed, overwhelmed by the flood of viewers seeking the first glimpses of official evidence on a subject long a target of both fascination and ridicule."The data that we are releasing doesn't demonstrate the presence of extraterrestrial beings," said Jacques Patenet, who heads the Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, the space agency's UFO investigative team.

"But, it doesn't demonstrate the impossibility of such presence either. The questions remain open."In one of the cases considered most credible, a 13-year-old boy and his 9-year-old sister were tending their family's cows near the village of Cussac on Aug. 29, 1967, when the boy spotted "four small black beings" about 47 inches tall, according to the documents.As they watched, the four beings became agitated and rose into the air, entering the top of what appeared to be a round spaceship, about 15 feet in diameter, which hovered over the field. Just as the sphere rose, one of the passengers emerged from the top, returned to the ground to grab something, then flew back. The sphere rose silently in a spiral pattern, then "became increasingly brilliant" before disappearing with a loud whistling sound. It left "a strong sulfur odor after departure," the report said.

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Software ensures earth-to-Moon supply chain

If an outhouse on the moon ran out of toilet paper, an intrepid settler might have to waddle about 240,000 miles to get a fresh roll back on Earth. To make sure that doesn't happen, scientists have developed a software tool that tracks and ensures a reliable stream of necessities from the Earth to the moon. Released this month, the computer model, called SpaceNet 1.3, will be critical, say the scientists, for establishing a human presence on the Moon by 2020, as laid out in the space vision by President George W. Bush in 2004.“The further away you get from Earth, the riskier it gets when there are failures of any equipment or shortages of consumables,” said co-researcher Olivier de Weck of MIT. “There aren’t many back-up options.” De Weck and MIT’s David Simchi-Levi developed SpaceNet. The software evaluates several hypothetical missions to the moon, with each building upon the previous. It’s set up as a network of nodes that represent either a source of materials, point of consumption or transfer point for space exploration logistics. The resulting supply chain would operate similarly to the flow of materials on terra firma. But unlike Earth-based delivery service that can suffer delays of hours or days, goods headed to the moon could easily be months late.

Just witness the frequent delays in getting a shuttle to the International Space Station, which is just a little more than 200 miles away. Plus, shipping capacity will be extremely limited for the expensive, three-day one-way trip to the moon. De Weck describes the dilemma in Earthly terms. “If I sent you on a one-month trip, and I said you can only pack what fits into your glove compartment, you would probably still go,” De Weck said, “but you’d have a really hard time [trying] to pick what to take with you because there are all of these competing demands.”

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Meet the world's smallest horse

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: At just a hair over 17 inches tall, the miniature horse is more inclined to walk under fences than jump them. And her owners have sheltered the mare from ever gaining "circus-sideshow" or "one-trick-pony" status. As the world's smallest horse, 5-year-old Thumbelina, weighing in at 57 pounds, has a bigger mission: to raise $1 million for children's charities this year. Handler Michael Goessling, son of miniature horse farmers Kay and Paul Goessling, says Thumbelina is the ideal child advocate. Her name comes from the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of a woman the size of a thumb."When kids meet her in person, they want to talk to her and know what she likes and dislikes," Goessling said. "It's amazing because she is so loving with people. She craves attention."In the months after being named "World's Smallest Living Horse" by Guinness World Records last summer, Thumbelina has certainly not been short on attention.She's been showered with praise on the television talk-show circuit. The flow of schoolchildren who visit her is constant, and many leave with coloring books dedicated to the Goessling family pet."I'll have her out for hours. She's so mild mannered, everything just seems to brush off her shoulders. There have been 100 kids around petting her and she'll take a nap," Goessling said.When Thumbelina travels the country this year, she'll do so in style — in a recreational vehicle that's her converted stable on wheels. Goessling calls it the Thumby Mobile.

An upcoming "Thumbelina Children's Tour" is expected to include stops in the 48 contiguous states at children's hospitals, schools, summer camps, fairs, horse shows and charitable fundraisers.At Goose Creek Farms, the Goesslings breed miniatures for sale and for horse show competitions, a hobby that's brought them numerous ribbons for more than a decade.But Thumbelina's special. "We don't want to make a penny off of her," Michael Goessling said. "We never have. There will never be another Thumbelina."Most of her days are spent playing with like-size farm dogs. She even sleeps in a dog house.The family calls her a "miniature-miniature" and genetically she's a dwarf. Rules of nature say it's a bad idea for her to reproduce, Goessling said.Thumbelina often avoids the company of her taller, but still unusually small counterparts. Of the 40 or so miniature horses stabled on the ranch, most are more than a foot taller than Thumbelina.

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How long is a day on Saturn ?

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: Strangely, astronomers don't know how long a day is on Saturn, because they can't get a firm footing on the problem given the giant planet's gaseous nature. So they have long relied on radio measurements of the ringed planet's magnetic field to help estimate the length of the day. But that doesn't really work either, they realized, so estimates have remained loose. Now the scientists at least have a better handle on this aspect of the problem.Geyser activity from Saturn's small moon Enceladus weighs down the big planet's magnetic field so much that the field rotates more slowly than Saturn itself, new observations reveal. The moon is a mere 310 miles (500 kilometers) wide. "No one could have predicted that the little moon Enceladus would have such an influence on the radio technique that has been used for years to determine the length of the Saturn day," said Don Gurnett of the University of Iowa. Gurnett is the principal investigator on a radio and plasma wave science experiment on NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The idea has been to measure Saturn's rotation by taking its radio pulse.

The technique works pretty well on the other giant planets.But the new observations, reported online this week by the journal Science, show that the invisible magnetic field lines, which emanate from Saturn's poles and radiate out like a giant, skeletal pumpkin, slip in relation to the planet's rotation. The slip owes to the collective weight of electrically charged particles that originate in Enceladus' remarkable geysers of water vapor and ice. Particles in the geysers encircle Saturn and become electrically charged, forming a disk around the equator of hot gas called plasma.Meanwhile, measurements revealed last year that Saturn's day has gotten about six or eight minutes longer-now roughly 10 hours and 47 minutes-since the 1980s when measured by the Voyager missions. Nobody suspects the trend to continue forever (meaning the days would just get longer and longer at such a rapid rate), but they also don't know what's going on.

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Examining the Antikythera mechanism

There may be nothing new under the sun after all. It's been more than two millennia since a large ship went down off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera, and more than a century since a sponge diver discovered the ship's valuable cargo, which included bronze and marble statues, pottery, and glass and silver vases. But only now have researchers deciphered one of the wreck's--and classical archaeology's--most enigmatic artifacts: a corroded collection of bronze and wood fragments known as the Antikythera Mechanism. From early on, archaeologists identified pieces of inscribed gear wheels within the corroded lump, which led to the consensus that it was some sort of astronomical device. Throughout the twentieth century, from its home in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Antikythera Mechanism attracted sporadic visits from archaeologists and historians who marveled at its highly complex, precise, hand-cut gear system and the undeciphered inscriptions on both the gears and wooden casing.

The mechanism attracted sporadic scientific interest, including X-ray studies in the 1970s and '90s, but no one could completely understand its nature. How exactly did it work, and for what had it been used? Could such a sophisticated device have been created more than 1,400 years before similar objects were known to exist anywhere else in the world?