Science Special News

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Magnets may make the brain grow stronger

Could magnets make the mind grow stronger? In mice at least, stimulating the brain with a magnetic coil appears to promote the growth of new neurons in areas associated with learning and memory. If the effect is confirmed in humans, it might open up new ways of treating age-related memory decline and diseases like Alzheimer's.Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been used experimentally to treat a range of brain disorders, including depression and schizophrenia, and to rehabilitate people after a stroke. TMS uses a magnetic coil to induce electric fields in the brain tissue - activating or deactivating groups of neurons, although the exact mechanism has remained unknown. One theory was that it aided learning and memory by strengthening brain circuits through a process called long-term potentiation (LTP).

To investigate, Fortunato Battaglia at the City University of New York and his colleagues gave mice TMS for five days, then analysed their brains for evidence of LTP or cell proliferation.They confirmed that TMS enhanced LTP in all areas of the brain tested, by modifying key glutamate receptors so that they stayed active for longer. The team also saw large increases in the proliferation of stem cells in the dentate gyrus hippocampus. These cells divide throughout life and are now believed to play a crucial role in memory and mood regulation.

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New frog species found in Thailand

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: A new species of mountain frog that changes colour in response to its surroundings has been discovered in northeast Thailand, a biologist said Wednesday. The Odorrana aureola, known locally as the Phu Luang Cliff frog after the national park where it was found, can grow to 80 millimeters (3.5 inches) and has a green body which occasionally turns brown, researchers said."It reflects its surrounds," said Tanya Chan-ard, curator of Bangkok's National Science Museum, who studied the frog with a team of government biologists and researchers.Tanya told AFP it was the world's newest species of mountain frog, and was found only in Phu Luang National Park, which covers parts of the three mountainous northeastern Thai provinces.The frog can only be found at waterfalls and creeks between 1,000 and 1,500 metres (3,300 and 4,900 feet) above sea level, he added.

"We found the frog quite some time ago but we began seriously studying it at the DNA level last year," said Tanya, who presented his findings at a seminar in Bangkok on Tuesday.The team's findings were confirmed by US-based experts with the natural history journal Fieldiana last year, he added.Researchers do not know how many of the Odorrana aureola are in the Thai wild, but Tanya said there were probably not very many as they did not breed very often.

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Man stays awake for 11 days/nights

A Cornish man says he has broken the world record for sleep deprivation by staying awake for 11 days and nights. Tony Wright, 42, from Penzance, was trying to beat the Guinness world record of 264 sleepless hours set by Randy Gardner in the US in 1964. He fought off tiredness by drinking tea, playing pool and keeping a diary. The Guinness Book of Records has since withdrawn its backing of a sleep deprivation class because of the associated health risks. Weary Mr Wright told BBC News: "I feel pretty good, It's been a bit of a slog, but I got there." He said that his 'Stone Age' diet of raw food helped parts of his brain to stay awake and remain functional for long periods. He said: "It makes it much easier to switch from one side of the brain which is really tired, to the other. "But both are pretty tired at the moment."

During the record attempt, Mr Wright noticed his speech becoming incomprehensible at times and colours appearing very bright. A webcam and CCTV cameras monitored him 24-hours a day. The attempt was part of Mr Wright's research into the body's relationship to sleep. He argues that parts of the human brain require a different amount of sleep and it is possible to stay awake and remain functional for long periods.

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The surprising realites of mythical creatures

While sailing the ocean near Haiti, Christopher Columbus in 1493 reported seeing three mermaids from a distance. The Genoese explorer was not impressed.Up close, the sea maidens were "not as pretty as they are depicted," he wrote in his journal, "for somehow in the face they look like men."Many scientists now think that what Columbus probably saw was a manatee, an aquatic mammal that resembles a flippered hippo.In a new exhibition opening at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) here this weekend, viewers can digitally superimpose the picture of a mermaid atop that of a manatee and see how Columbus and countless other sailors might have been fooled.Entitled Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids, the exhibition traces the possible origins of some of the world's most famous "imaginary" beasts and also their lesser-known counterparts. "This museum has a long history of studying and presenting great stories about the natural world and the culture of humanity," said AMNH president Ellen Futter at a press preview of the exhibition earlier this week. "In this exhibition, we extend that tradition further, by looking at the intersection of nature and culture, those moments when people glimpse something fantastical in nature."

The exhibition deftly combines nature and myth, paleontology and anthropology, and delightfully campy models of mythical creatures with real fossils. Upon first entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a 17-foot-long, green, European dragon of the sort that legend says Saint George slew. Its sinuous and colorful Chinese counterpart hangs from the ceiling in one of the last rooms of the exhibition. In the mythical water-creatures section, large tentacles and the head of a giant squid-inspired kraken rise from the floor, its body mostly hidden.Mythic Creatures borrows specimens and artifacts from the fossil, art and anthropological collections of the AMNH and other museums, and examines how such objects might have-through imagination, misidentification, speculation or outright deception-given birth to fantastical creatures.

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UFOs invade Manhattan

New York City will play host to scholars, entertainers, artists, UFO enthusiasts and actual alien abductees in the first annual UFO's: The Culture of Contact Multimedia Festival June 22-24. Marking the 60th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sightings, which initiated the modern UFO era, the festival will feature movies, lectures by top investigators, music, theater and artwork related to UFO/Alien contact. The Festival will be held at the Pioneer Theater, Lit Lounge and P.S. 63, all in Manhattan's own bastion of the unusual: the East Village. Sponsored by UFO Magazine and JayVay Productions, the 3-day Culture of Contact Festival will give the public a chance to sample the many ways UFO's have impacted modern culture. The Festival is conceived and curated not only by educators, investigators and scholars, but by individuals whose interest in the phenomenon is as up close and personal as it gets: actual UFO witnesses and alien abductees.

Attendees to this groundbreaking event will enjoy:

• Classic "flying saucer" sci-fi films and new UFO movies
• Lectures and panel discussions by renowned scientists, investigators, witnesses, authors and abductees
• Live music inspired by UFO's and sci-fi
• Theater, standup and readings
• A gallery of UFO art by abductees and enthusiasts

Participating personalities include bestselling authors Budd Hopkins and William J. Birnes, noted psychic and UFOlogist Farah Yurdozu, and UFO investigator-filmmaker-author Jeremy Vaeni.

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Flying saucerer's apprentice

Anthony North: We need to ask a few questions about Ufology. First of all, would the UFO exist if Ufologists were not here to define it? And second, is the UFO a definite phenomenon, or does it constantly change?The answer to the former question is difficult – a ‘chicken and egg’ scenario. But the latter question is different. Ufology itself defined the term ‘cultural tracking’ to explain its constant evolution to new forms. Specific Criteria: The more I research the UFO, the more a specific methodology of change seems to present itself. And central to this methodology is a simple fact – where an evolved UFO, alien or scenario arises, a Ufologist has gone before.Of course, this is not to say that unexplained phenomena does not occur before a Ufologist gets involved. There are many incidents where this is the case. But those cases rarely become defined until a Ufologist arrives on the scene.Bearing this in mind, I want to put forward a simple theory. Could it be that, in becoming involved in a specific case or area of research, the Ufologist plays the primary role in deciding how phenomena will occur?

Focusing on the problem: Let me make something clear. I do not believe aliens are really visiting our planet. Rather, I think the UFO is a cultural phenomenon – a kind of psycho-sociology – and UFO scenarios evolve as the cultural interpretation changes.The cultural interpretation invariably revolves around a Ufologist, or group of Ufologists. But for cultural change to actually affect the nature of the phenomena experienced, then the Ufologists involved must be central to the mystery.One way to look at the problem is to place upon the phenomena the possible mechanisms behind the poltergeist. And central to a poltergeist infestation is the idea that at the centre of phenomena is a ‘focus’ – a person who makes phenomena happen.

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Nasa names shuttle launch date

After weeks of delay, space shuttle Atlantis has finally been given a launch date for its mission to the International Space Station (ISS). US space agency officials said the blast-off was scheduled for 8 June from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The orbiter will deliver new equipment to the space station. The mission was due to take place in March but repairs had to be made to the shuttle's external tank, which was damaged by a hailstorm in February. Golf-ball sized hail stones hit the launcher vehicle system, causing hundreds of dents and minor surface damage to the tank's foam covering and to heat shields on the orbiter itself. Since the destruction of Atlantis's sister shuttle Columbia and the death of its crew in 2003, shuttle damage has been a major cause of concern for Nasa. Columbia's heat shield was damaged during its launch and the ship was destroyed as it returned through the atmosphere 16 days later. After extensive repairs, Nasa is now confident Atlantis is ready to fly. "We're good to go," said Wayne Hale, Nasa's space shuttle programme manager.

"We have no show stoppers ahead of us." Atlantis will have a crew of seven: Rick Sturckow will command the mission and Lee Archambault will serve as Atlantis' pilot. Mission specialists James Reilly, Patrick Forrester, Steven Swanson, John Olivas and Flight Engineer Clayton Anderson make up the rest of the team.

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Interview with an ape

The Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, is home to seven bonobos -- a close relative of the chimpanzee -- and three orangutans. But if you think Iowa might be a strange place for them to live, don't say it out loud … these apes understand English. You can talk to the apes, and they know what you are saying.The residents of the Great Ape Trust are part of groundbreaking language research where the apes are being taught to communicate with humans by pressing 350 lexigrams -- symbols that appear on a screen and represent thoughts and objects.The superstar is 26-year-old Kanzi, whom Bill Fields has been working with for years. To communicate, Fields speaks to Kanzi, who then points to the lexigrams to respond and demonstrate a level of understanding. "Qualitatively, there is no difference between Kanzi's language and my language," Fields said. "It's a matter of degree." The key to ensuring they grasp the language, the researchers said, is to start teaching them when they are young, just like you would with human babies. "Language is culturally acquired. Its not learned," said Fields. "It's acquired in the immediate postnatal antogyny of the organisms life. The only organism capable of learning language are babies."

They've been communicating with bonobos through the keyboard for almost three years, relying on a technique developed in 1971 and also used at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University and other facilities. At the Great Ape Trust, researchers said the apes would likely never be able to vocalize words like humans; they are limited by the range of their vocal chords among other things. However, Fields swears he has heard Kanzi try to say "thank you."

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Great wall of China for world wonder

China is so worried that its iconic Great Wall will not be named one of the "new" seven wonders of the world, it has launched a campaign to get Chinese people to vote for it, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday. More than 45 million votes had so far been cast in an online campaign by the non-profit New7Wonders Foundation (www.new7wonders.com) to choose the world's seven "new" wonders, the foundation said. The final result will be unveiled on July 7.According to the Academy of the Great Wall of China, the wall has recently dropped out of the top seven and it blamed the voting process, saying relatively few Chinese used the Internet and those that did had poor English-language abilities.But people can now vote by mobile telephone, and some of the Web site has been translated into Chinese, Xinhua added."China's Great Wall missed an opportunity 2,000 years ago when the Greeks named the Seven Wonders of the World. It would be extremely regretful if it became an also-ran this time," the academy said in a statement.

Among other monuments or sites nominated were the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Taj Mahal in India, Peru's mountaintop city of Machu Picchu, Britain's Stonehenge and New York's Statue of Liberty.The New7Wonders Foundation was set up in 2001 by Swiss-Canadian adventurer Bernard Weber to protect humanity's heritage.The ancient Greeks chose the original Seven Wonders but only one of those remains -- the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

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New Loch Ness Monster video surfaces

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: The Loch Ness monster is back — and there's video. A man has captured what Nessie watchers say is possible footage of the supposed mythical creature beneath Scotland's most mysterious lake. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this jet black thing, about 45 feet long, moving fairly fast in the water," said Gordon Holmes, the 55-year-old a lab technician from Shipley, Yorkshire, who took the video Saturday.Nessie watcher and marine biologist Adrian Shine viewed the video and hoped to properly analyze it in the coming months."I see myself as a skeptical interpreter of what happens in the loch, but I do keep an open mind about these things and there is no doubt this is some of the best footage I have seen," said Shine, of the Loch Ness 2000 center in Drumnadrochit, on the shores of the lake.Holmes said whatever it was moved at about 6 mph and kept a fairly straight course."My initial thought is it could be a very big eel, they have serpent-like features and they may explain all the sightings in Loch Ness over the years."Loch Ness is surrounded by myth. It's the largest inland body of water in Britain, and at about 750 feet to the bottom, it's even deeper than the North Sea.

"There are a number of possible explanations to the sightings in the loch. It could be some biological creature, it could just be the waves of the loch or it could some psychological phenomenon in as much as we see what we want to see," Shine said.While many sightings can be attributed to a drop of the local whisky, legends of Scottish monsters date back to one of the founders of the Christian church in Scotland, St. Columba, who wrote of them in about 565 A.D.More recently, there have been more than 4,000 purported Nessie sightings since she was first caught on camera by a surgeon on vacation in the 1930s.

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Upright walking 'began in trees'

Submitted by Pendekar & Waspie: The ancestors of humans began walking upright while they were still living in trees - not out on open land, according to a new theory. The traditional view is of bipedalism evolving gradually from the four-legged "knuckle-walking" displayed by chimpanzees and gorillas today. Now, a study published in the journal Science disputes this idea. The British authors of the study say that upright walking was always a feature of great ape behaviour. Humans inherited it without ever passing through a knuckle-walking phase. They believe that knuckle-walking evolved only recently as a way of getting around the forest floor. Susannah Thorpe, Robin Crompton and Roger Holder came to their conclusions after analysing the movement of wild orangutans, which spend most of their lives in trees. They found that orangutans used upright locomotion to fetch food from the small branches of trees and to cross directly from one tree to another.

"Both access to fruits and crossing gaps in the trees would require an ability to navigate very thin, terminal tree branches which are liable to bend under body mass," said Professor Robin Crompton, from the University of Liverpool. "The logical conclusion from the environmental, fossil, and experimental evidence is that upright, straight-legged walking originally evolved as an adaptation to tree-dwelling."

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Identity of "Victor" revealed ?

Sam willey: The identity of “Victor” the man behind the footage which was allegedly smuggled out of Area51 and displayed a alien being interviewed may have finally been revealed. The footage of an alien which was said to have come from Area51 fist came to light on the Art Bell UFO radio show on March 13th 1997 when ufologist Sean David Morton was interviewed. Mr. Morton claimed that the footage had been taken in 1996.The colour footage lasts for around two minutes and it is reported that the interview was conducted by a US General and a telepathic aide and that the being was actually positioned behind a one way mirror. Morton later made the following remarks about the video and the environment in which the video was taken - "The film was shot through a large plane of glass. There was no sound accompanying the images. The interview took place in a darkened room, lit with an eerie greenish glow, I could make out the silhouettes of two men, one dressed in military uniform with what appeared to be the stars on the epaulet of his jacket, and another more casually dressed man with his hand occasionally rubbing his forehead. They sat with their backs to the camera at one end of a long table, which was littered with wires, chords and microphones. There were what appeared to be medical devices.

One in particular was blinking erratically, as if it was monitoring a very sick heart. And there sitting at the end of the table was a small, beige-skinned, black-eyed, bulbous headed creature, the like of which haunt the nightmares of thousands of unwilling abductees."As the two minute piece of films reaches its startling conclusion the entity seems to become alarmed and starts bobbing up and down all over the place. Some sort of light is seen near the being which begins to make erratic motions Morton described this light as being a hart monitor. As the being begins to make jerking motions medical personnel wearing white masks, white gloves and lab coats come to the beings aide and begin shinning a torch in his eyes presumably to see what the problem was.

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The MoD and remote viewing

Earlier this year (February) it was revealed through FOIA (Freedom of information act) documents that the UK MOD previously conducted secret tests into remote viewing in 2002. The MOD study concluded that even though they used complete novices with very shaky project structure and a 28% accuracy rate that 'remote viewing' was of little value. Yet this doesn’t actually seem to be the first time the British MOD investigated remote viewing, and it seems that certain branches of the MOD actually already had a closer relationship with remote viewing. Hidden amongst the confusion of the 89,901 CIA/DIA Stargate FOIA documents was a standard run of the mill report of the monthly activities of the current Stargate project manager circa June 1994. In this document he details an upcoming meeting with a secret arm of the UK MOD - DI-55.

Why is this interesting? – Firstly because it seems the MOD interest in remote viewing actually started well before the 2002 study (eight years before) and secondly, DI-55 is the branch of the MOD that allegedly deals with UFO’s. So yet again we have two intelligence services across the pond from each other and another UFO connection to American remote viewing projects.

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Ghost busters investigate Old Treasury

Professional ghost hunters have conducted a seance and collected video footage during an overnight search of the Old Treasury building in Spring Street. The members of Ghost Hunters of Australia have been investigating claims by employees, including a former curator, that the place is haunted.The claims go back 80 years and are part of Melbourne folklore. Today they endure as a weird form of office gossip.After "freaking out" one night — he ran down the stairs and out of the building, the ghost following — former catering official Eric Lely decided to raise the issue at a staff meeting."At first no one wanted to talk about it. It was like I opened a can of worms because everyone felt the same way," Mr Lely told The Sunday Age.A couple of his workmates were "big tall men like rugby players" and they also told of "shooting down" the stairs because they felt someone coming after them.Others told of the feeling that somebody was looking over their shoulder, somebody flitting past the open doorway.Cleaners talk about their mops and buckets being moved about. Strange noises, tappings on shoulders, whistling in the stairwell, heavy footsteps — everything but the rattling of chains and floating white sheets.

The word is, women have a friendlier experience. Former curator Helen Stuckey, now with ACMI, describes the ghost as "gentle; he was very kind to women and a nice presence to have in the building".Often alone in the building at night, Ms Stuckey "would have a sense of him passing her door," and the lift would often arrive at her level before she had pressed the button.The written testimony of Mr Lely and Ms Stuckey will appear in an exhibition, Spooks: Haunted Stories of Melbourne, at the City Museum at Old Treasury.Curator Simon Gregg says the exhibition is "believed to be the first of its kind in the world", featuring documentary evidence that bona fide ghosts prowl the Princess Theatre, Como House, the Old Melbourne Gaol, Werribee Park Mansion, Parliament House, State Library, MCG and the National Gallery of Victoria.

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Patent sought on 'synthetic life'

Scientists working to build a life form from scratch have applied to patent the broad method they plan to use to create their "synthetic organism". Dr Craig Venter, the man who led the private sector effort to sequence the human genome, has been working for years to create a man-made organism. But constructing a primitive microbe from a kit of genes is a daunting task. Dr Venter says, eventually, these life forms could be designed to make biofuels and absorb greenhouse gases. The publication of the patent application has angered some environmentalists. The Canada-based ETC group, which monitors developments in biotechnology, called on patent offices to reject applications on synthetic life forms. The J Craig Venter Institute's US patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic "free-living organism that can grow and replicate" made using those genes. It has also filed an international application at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which names more than 100 countries where the institute may seek monopoly patents. Dr Venter's team intends to construct an organism with a "minimal genome" that can then be inserted into the shell of a bacterium.

By removing genes, one by one, from a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium they identified the minimum number of genes required for this particular organism to replicate, or reproduce, in its controlled environment. They have been able to remove 101 of its 482 genes without killing the bacterium, meaning that 381 were required for replication. But generating a man-made living organism from the bottom up requires much more than just its minimal genome.