Science Special News

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Origin of deja vu pinpointed

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: The brain cranks out memories near its center, in a looped wishbone of tissue called the hippocampus. But a new study suggests only a small chunk of it, called the dentate gyrus, is responsible for “episodic” memories—information that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart.The finding helps explain where déjà vu originates in the brain, and why it happens more frequently with increasing age and with brain-disease patients, said MIT neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa. The study is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.Like a computer logging its programs’ activities, the dentate gyrus notes a situation’s pattern—it’s visual, audio, smell, time and other cues for the body’s future reference. So what happens when its abilities are jammed?When Tonegawa and his team bred mice without a fully-functional dentate gyrus, the rodents struggled to tell the difference between two similar but different situations. “These animals normally have a distinct ability to distinguish between situations,” Tonegawa said, like humans. “But without the dentate gyrus they were very mixed up.”

Déjà vu is a memory problem, Tonegawa explained, occurring when our brains struggle to tell the difference between two extremely similar situations. As people age, Tonegawa said déjà-vu-like confusion happens more often—and it also happens in people suffering from brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. “It’s not surprising,” he said, “when you consider the fact that there’s a loss of or damage to cells in the dentate gyrus.”

[Rasputin]

Behind the curse

Anthony North: It can get to you. It can grip you, turn you inside out, and even kill you. At least, that’s what some people believe. But even if you don’t believe, the idea of the curse can still send a frightening tingle down the spine. From witches sticking pins in an effigy, to the Voodoo bokor placing a curse on you, occult literature is full of incidences of successful curses, driving people mad and making them have accidents. But is there a reality to the curse? Coincidence: The usual sceptic’s answer to the curse is that life is full of coincidences, and some time, some place, life will throw up incidences that suggest a curse could be at work. But in reality, it is nothing at all. It’s just the inevitability of chance.Those who take a Jungian view would add synchronicity to coincidence. Here, coincidences become meaningful, as if your own mind is affecting the world about you. In this scenario, if you believe a curse can work, then you make it happen yourself.And then there are the people who just seem to have bad luck. Obstacles rise up before them, and they can form an attitude that they are cursed throughout life. Studies suggest luck is all to do with being able to calculate odds. Is this important to the issue?

A calculating mind: Clearly if you can calculate odds better than the average, good luck will seem to cling to you; and equally clearly, if you cannot, then you’ll go through life from one disaster to another. In one sense, this can be related to an optimistic or pessimistic state of mind.For instance, the optimist tends to walk through life, whilst the pessimist expects to see disaster and so he does. Indeed, pessimism can have an effect if you think you’re cursed. And it is all to do with a feeling of absolute hopelessness.There is a medical term called ‘vegal inhibition.’ This is a state where a sense of hopelessness slowly shuts down the autonomic nervous system. If it goes to the ultimate, death can be the result. A belief in a curse can, it seems, be a killer.

[Rasputin]

Shuttle lifts off on year’s first mission

A patched-up Atlantis blasted off with seven astronauts Friday on the first space shuttle flight of 2007, putting NASA back on track after a run of bad luck and scandal that included a damaging hailstorm and a lurid love triangle. Its big orange fuel tank covered with white blotches where the foam insulation had been repaired, the spaceship rose from its seaside launch pad with a roar and climbed into a clear and still-brightly lit sky at 7:38 p.m. ET, setting a course for the international space station.“See you in a couple weeks,” Atlantis commander Rick Sturckow said shortly before lifting off.The countdown was nearly flawless, but it appeared that something fell from the tank more than two minutes into the ascent, several seconds after the solid rocket boosters separated from Atlantis. Falling debris from the tank poses the most danger to the shuttle from liftoff to around that point in the ascent.Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said at a news conference that foam did fall off the tank, as expected, but that it happened too late in the ascent to be a problem.

A preliminary analysis showed it didn’t strike the shuttle, he said.“The tank performed in a magnificent way, despite having several thousand repairs to it,” Hale said. “(The debris) should not be a hazard that late in the flight.”The shuttle smoothly settled into orbit around the Earth.Minutes after launch, Atlantis’ contrails formed an intricate and unusual knot in the Florida sky, framed by the colors of sunset and with the bright light of Venus peeking through. Veteran shuttle watchers oohed and aahed at the second sky show of the night.

[Rasputin]

Acropolis, Chichen Itza lead new 7 wonders

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: The Acropolis in Athens and Mexico's Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza are among the leaders in a competition, ending in one month, to choose the New Seven Wonders of the World, the organizers said on Thursday. The winners will be chosen through a global online and phone vote, organizers of the New 7 Wonders of the World competition said, a far cry from the methods used by the Greeks who chose the original Seven Wonders more than 2,000 years ago.Some 50 million people have voted so far in the competition designed to produce a 21st century list of the world's greatest man-made heritage sites, but Tia Viering, a spokeswoman for the organization, said the result is wide open.The winning list will be announced in Lisbon on July 7.Many countries are carrying out special events to encourage people to vote for their sites, Viering said. "There are some really creative, phenomenal things going on in the last four weeks that will influence the final result."

These include an Indian singer dedicating a song to the Taj Mahal and Brazil's soccer team urging Brazilians to vote for Christ Redeemer, the statue that adorns Rio de Janeiro's skyline.The most popular 10 sites so far include both the Taj Mahal and Christ Redeemer, along with the Colosseum in Rome, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, Peru's Machu Picchu, Petra in Jordan, and the statues of Easter Island.Viering said the number of votes so far for each site will not be divulged as it could influence the final result.

[Rasputin]

Mystery skeleton spotted on iceberg

Marine scientists in Canada and abroad are puzzled by bizarre photographs that appear to show the skeleton of a large mammal jutting out of an iceberg that recently drifted past Newfoundland's east coast. The six pictures show what looks like a brown rib cage and spinal column, slightly bent, sticking out of a crust of ice. But researchers throughout Canada, Greenland and Norway are unable to determine the origin of the skeleton, said Garry Stenson, a marine mammal scientist with the federal Fisheries Department. "It's definitely unusual," Stenson said Monday. "It's not something that I've encountered before." His colleagues have been debating whether the carcass belongs to a bearded seal, a walrus or a beluga whale. But without the actual specimen in his hands, Stenson said he can't resolve the mystery. "It would be really nice to get a copy, a sample, a hold of it, but at this point we're not quite sure what it is," he said. The photos were taken near Newtown, in Bonavista Bay, by Eli and Donna Norris on the weekend of May 26, said Ruth Knee, a friend who forwarded them to the Fisheries Department in hopes of identifying the bones. The Norris family couldn't be reached for comment Monday. Knee said the retired couple didn't want to be interviewed, but said she could vouch for the authenticity of the photos. "Not everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame," Knee said.

Stenson said he is fairly certain the pictures aren't a hoax. "If it was Photoshopped, it's a damn good job," he said. "The way that it's laying there, with what looks to be part of it underwater, looks authentic." Stenson said he was told the backbone was roughly 2.4 metres out of the ice, leading him to believe the spine belonged to a large mammalian creature. But he is uncertain whether the animal would have fallen into a crevasse in an iceberg and then got stuck, or if it simply died on an ice floe and later became embedded by other pans of ice. "It could be a walrus, for example, that died and is laying on its back and the pressure of the snow and the ice has flattened those ribs," he said. The bones don't appear very weathered, and it looks like there may be tissue still attached to them. Stenson wouldn't speculate on how old they are because the ice may have preserved them for years. The iceberg's location, or if it was still intact, weren't known Monday.

[Rasputin]

Patient bleeds dark green blood

A team of Canadian surgeons got a shock when the patient they were operating on began shedding dark greenish-black blood, the Lancet reports. The man emulated Star Trek's Mr Spock - the Enterprise's science officer who supposedly had green Vulcan blood. In this case, the unusual colour of the 42-year-old's blood was down to the migraine medication he was taking. The man's leg surgery went ahead successfully and his blood returned to normal once he had eased off the drug. The patient had been taking large doses of sumatriptan - 200 milligrams a day. This had caused a rare condition called sulfhaemoglobinaemia, where sulphur is incorporated into the oxygen-carrying compound haemoglobin in red blood cells. Describing the case in the Lancet, the doctors, led by Dr Alana Flexman from St Paul's Hospital, Vancouver, wrote: "The patient recovered uneventfully, and stopped taking sumatriptan after discharge.

"When seen five weeks after his last dose, he was found to have no sulfhaemoglobin in his blood." The man had needed urgent surgery because he had developed a dangerous condition in his legs after falling asleep in a sitting position. The surgeons performed urgent fasciotomies - limb-saving procedures which involve making surgical incisions to relieve pressure and swelling caused by the man's condition, known as compartment syndrome. In compartment syndrome, the swelling and pressure in a restricted space limits blood flow and causes localised tissue and nerve damage. It is commonly caused by trauma, internal bleeding or a wound dressing or cast being too tight.

[Rasputin]

Plants raise chemical alarm

Planets send out SOS signals when they are under attack. If insects are feeding on them, some plants emit volatile chemicals that attract enemies of the insects. What is surprising, though, is that neighbouring plants not being eaten also send out distress signals to call in these bodyguards.Why so-called secondary signallers do it has been a mystery, but now Yutaka Kobayashi and Norio Yamamura of Kyoto University, Japan, think they have solved it.The answer is family values, or in evolutionary parlance, kin selection. "My hypothesis views secondary signallers as crying for help to save their family," says Kobayashi. The pair used an evolutionary model to show that if the cost of making the SOS signal was low and there was a high likelihood of having relatives growing nearby - both conditions which are often true in real life - then secondary signalling would evolve."Neighbouring undamaged plants emit the secondary signal probably to help the damaged plants," says Kobayashi.

[Rasputin]

Alien life to be discovered within 10 years ?

Intelligent extra-terrestrials almost certainly exist on distant planets beyond our solar system, leading British astronomers told the government yesterday. The scientists expect that the first evidence of primitive alien life, such as microbes and vegetation, will emerge within 10 years, with more substantial finds following future space missions. The experts, from high-ranking UK universities and research institutes, were gathered in London by the science minister, Malcolm Wicks, to describe the latest advances in the search for distant, habitable planets capable of harbouring life. A recent revolution in technology means astronomers can now spot Earth-like planets orbiting faraway stars, raising the chances of alien life being found. By analysing reflected light, it is becoming possible to find any that may host vegetation and breathable atmospheres. "Twenty years ago we only had one solar system to study and that's the one we live in. But since then, there's been an explosion in the number of planets outside our solar system that we've been able to detect," said Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council and former head of space physics at University College London.

Some 200 planets have been detected orbiting stars other than the sun. Scientists this year announced the discovery of a warm, rocky "second Earth" circling a distant star called Gliese 581, about 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra. Crucial measurements of the planet's surface temperature range revealed it was able to hold liquid water, believed to be a prerequisite for life. In 2015, the European Space Agency will launch a mission called Darwin, a cluster of four orbiting telescopes that will scour the heavens for life-bearing planets. For five years, the telescopes will peer at 500 stars and conduct spectral analyses of the 50 most promising planets it detects.

[Rasputin]

New evidence points to oceans on Mars

Scientists have found new evidence to support the presence of large oceans on Mars in the past. Published in the June 14 issue of Nature, the research suggests that changes in Mars’ orientation with respect to its axis might be responsible for large variations in the topography of shoreline-like features on the planet. Scientists have studied these features for more than 30 years, and the current study presents a new, alternative explanation for how they formed. Geophysicists have discovered that irregularities in proposed Martian shorelines might be explained by surface deformation from “true polar wander.” Through this phenomenon, Mars' spin axis and poles shifted by nearly 3,000 kilometers along the surface sometime within the past 2 or 3 billion years. Spinning planets bulge at their equator and solid surfaces deform differently than liquid sea surfaces.

As a result, surface topography of the shorelines deformed as the planet’s rotation axis shifted. In the 1990s, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft mapped the Martian topography and found that ancient shorelines aged between 2 and 4 billion years, known as Deuteronilus and Arabia, vary in elevation by about a half of a mile and more than a mile and a half, respectively. In contrast, changes in shoreline elevation on Earth are much gentler, leading many experts to argue against their connection to past oceans on Mars.

[Rasputin]

"Ghost" captured outside courthouse

Apparition or reflection, that is the question. A surveillance camera at the First Judicial District courthouse downtown captured a strange image Friday morning that left sheriff’s deputies, lawyers, clerks and judges scratching their heads as to what it might have been. Some thought it was the ghost of a man killed at the courthouse more than 20 years ago after bringing a rifle to the building and taking several people hostage. Others felt it had to be a reflection from a passing car or a piece of cottonwood tree fluff. Still others threw their hands in the air, but somehow liked the image anyway or at least the hullabaloo it prompted. “I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s neat that it showed up on a Friday,” said Sally Saunders, assistant to District Judge Stephen Pfeffer. “Now we have something to talk about.”Deputy Alfred Arana first noticed the image when he arrived at the courthouse early Friday morning and began reviewing the surveillance video from the night before, said Sgt. Vanessa Pacheco of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. Pacheco arrived half an hour later, and Arana said he’d seen something he couldn’t explain on the digital video and asked Pacheco to rewind it, she said.

When she watched the video, Pacheco was stunned. “It’s something unexplainable,” said Pacheco, who watched the 12-second clip over and over Friday. “I don’t believe in ghosts so I don’t think that’s what it is.”The image, which starts at 7:27:11 a.m., shows a bright spot of light that comes from either the roof or near the courthouse’s back door on Catron Street — which is used only by law enforcement personnel. The light flits with buglike movements toward the west, appears to move across the front bumper of a parked police car and then traces a small semicircle in a gravel area in the frame’s foreground before leaving the frame at 7:27:23.“To me, it looks like a person walking, but I don’t know why they have this neon light on their head,” said Steve Aarons, a lawyer.

[Rasputin]

Neanderthals 'were ahead of their time'

Big, brutish and stupid - it's a commonly held view that our prehistoric predecessors were as wild and unsophisticated as the animals they hunted. But Neanderthal man was not as slow-witted as he looked and was in reality as smart as we are, an archaeologist claims.They were actually innovators who used different forms of tools to adapt to the ecological challenges posed by harsh habitats as they spread through Europe. Although our ancestors have become the butt of jokes about people who are stupid or unenlightened, they were years ahead of their time.Dr Terry Hopkinson, of Leicester University, said Neanderthals were far from behaviourally static and incorporated different forms of tool construction into a single technique.

He said: "There has been a consensus that the modern human mind turned on like a light switch about 50,000 years ago, only in Africa."But the modern traits accompanying the change such as abstract art, the use of grindstones and elongated stone blades, and big-game hunting began to accumulate in Africa from 300,000 years ago.

[Rasputin]

Study explains rainforest similarities

Celebrated in Buddhist temples and cultivated for its wood and cottony fibers, the kapok tree now is upsetting an idea that biologists have clung to for decades: the notion that African and South American rainforests are similar because the continents were connected 96 million years ago. Research by University of Michigan evolutionary ecologist Christopher Dick and colleagues shows that kapok---and perhaps other rainforest--trees colonized Africa after the continents split when the trees' seeds traveled across the ocean. The findings, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), appear online this week in the journal Molecular Ecology. "This research provides vital information for one of the most highly threatened areas of the planet, tropical rainforests," said Sam Scheiner, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. "In order to plan for and mitigate global climate change, we need to understand the history of life on Earth through studies like this one."

Oceanic dispersal links the world's rainforests, said Dick, "and this study is one of the first to catch that process in action at the species level. Although single seeds are very unlikely to survive an oceanic voyage and then successfully become established elsewhere, such improbable events become probable over 10 to 15 million years." Dick studied the rainforest form of Ceiba pentandra, a species of kapok that grows taller than a 16-story building, its head poking above the forest canopy. Its flowers produce more than 50 gallons of nectar per tree in a season, attracting bats that travel as far as 12 miles between trees and transfer pollen in the process. When the seed pods ripen, they break open to reveal fluffy fibers that are used to stuff pillows and mattresses. The seeds, which are about the size of a sunflower seed, are buoyant and able to float down rivers along which the colossal trees grow.

[Rasputin]

Image of minotaur labyrinth discovered

Bulgarian archaeologists have found an image of the legendary labyrinth of King Minos, the Bulgarian National Radio reported. The exclusive find was unearthed near the village of Golyam Derven last week. The team of Professor Daniela Agre, who are doing excavation works in the area, stumbled upon the unique artefact while researching a an ancient Thracian tomb's entrance stone. The labyrinth image, which is carved on the slate, is perfectly preserved. The legendary labyrinth was considered a just a myth from the Greek mythology until the exclusive finding. According to the legends, King Minos ordered the construction of the labyrinth to keep inside the monstrous Minotaur. The Greek mythology tells about a dispute over the sovereignty of Crete that led Minos to ask Poseidon for help. He asked the god to send an offering as a sign of his true kingship. The god of the sea sent a gleaming pure white bull, which emerged miraculously from the waves.

This confirmed that Minos was a true king. However, as soon as King Minos saw the beast he refused to sacrifice it to Poseidon, and replaced it with another. Poseidon in retaliation sent Pasiphae into uncontrollable lust for this huge beast. So much so that she had the urge to mate with this huge animal. The result was the beast Minotaur. King Minos ordered Daedalus to construct a palace to hide the Minotaur, and Daedalus built Labyrinth.

[Rasputin]

What is a real UFO ?

Anthony North: I research most mysteries but none involve such emotion as the UFO. In no other area are views so entrenched. We talk about fundamental politics, fundamental religion, but they are insignificant compared to a fundamental stance in Ufology.Why is this? I think the answer lies in the contemporary nature of the phenomenon. A UFO can be seen in the sky now, and it will appear so real, so immediate, that it is impossible to consider it as anything other than existent.A broad church: This reality lies uncomfortably with Ufology, for the discipline is a broad church. Various researchers cover a host of aspects of the phenomenon. A short list will suffice to explain what I mean.Ufologists can specialize in the paranormality of the subject, in the psychology, the sociology, the physics, meteorology or mythology. The subject branches out into conspiracy theory and cults. Researchers can be skeptics or ‘nuts and bolts’ believers.And never the twain shall meet. There are some exceptions, but rarely does the discipline have the foresight to realistically pose the possibility of all these areas being intertwined and essential to the understanding of what is really going on.

Different realities: Some strange phenomenon is occurring in the skies above us, and it has been going on throughout history. Personally, I don’t think it is caused by extraterrestrial visitations, but the following is true whether it is ET visiting us or not.Reality is not a stable construct. Whilst we can argue for a ‘real’ world ‘out there’, how that world is viewed is coloured by our own prejudices and views. This is believed in from eastern philosophy to quantum physics, where the observer is essential to what is viewed.This is vital for placing the UFO in perspective. If we look at the subject in the historical perspective, sky phenomena has been seen as everything from gods in chariots to flying saucers, from sailing ships to ghost rockets. And in each case, the nature of what is seen is coloured by how it was reported.

[Rasputin]

What is the Starchild skull ?

Around 1930, the parents of a young American girl of Mexican heritage took her to visit relatives in a small rural village in the mountains southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. While there, the girl disobeyed a local taboo and went exploring in caves and mineshafts dotting the area. In a mineshaft she made a startling discovery: lying on the ground at the rear of the tunnel was a complete human skeleton. Coming up out of the dirt beside it was a misshapen hand, entwined in one of the human skeleton's upper arm bones. Gathering her courage, the young girl began to dig away the dirt the hand was rising from. She uncovered a shallow grave containing a being smaller than the human, with a body and skull as misshapen as the hand. She then removed both skulls from the mineshaft and brought them back into the U.S., where she kept them as souvenirs until her death in the early 1990's. They were then passed on to an American man who held them for five years, not knowing what to do with them but assuming, as the previous owner had assumed, that the "weird" skull was merely a natural human deformity.That man and his wife passed the skulls to a younger couple, Ray and Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas.

Melanie had been a neonatal nurse for several years and was quite familiar with all kinds of human deformity. She quickly realized the "deformed" skull defied all the rules of normal deformity. Most significantly, it was entirely too symmetrical, even more symmetrical than typical humans; and it was entirely too light relative to what any typically deformed skull should weigh.In addition to her neonatal experience, Melanie and husband Ray were members of El Paso's MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) chapter. They both knew that their new skull exhibited all the classic features of a skull that might fit into the head of a Grey alien. Realizing that, they determined to have the skull scientifically tested to determine its genetic heritage. They undertook that task with serious doubts, feeling certain it was probably a deformity, but they wanted to be certain.