Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Baby monitor picks up video from NASA

An elementary school science teacher in this Chicago suburb doesn't have to turn on the news for an update on NASA's space mission. She just turns on her video baby monitor. Since Sunday, one of the two channels on Natalie Meilinger's baby monitor has been picking up black-and-white video from inside the space shuttle Atlantis. The other still lets her keep an eye on her baby."Whoever has a baby monitor knows what you'll usually see," Meilinger said. "No one would ever expect this."Live video of the mission is available on NASA's Web site, so it's possible the monitor is picking up a signal from somewhere."It's not coming straight from the shuttle," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said. "People here think this is very interesting and you don't hear of it often — if at all."

Meilinger silenced disbelieving co-workers by bringing in a video of the monitor to show her class on Tuesday, her students' last day of school. At home, 3-month-old Jack and 2-year-old Rachel don't quite understand what their parents are watching."I've been addicted to it and keep waiting to see what's next," Meilinger said.

[Rasputin]

Pentagon sought to develop "gay bomb"

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon."The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

"The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay," explained Hammond. The Pentagon told CBS 5 that the proposal was made by the Air Force in 1994."The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform," said a DOD spokesperson, who indicated that the "gay bomb" idea was quickly dismissed.

[Rasputin]

Paranormal's £1m afterlife gamble

A paranormal investigator claimed today he is in line to win £1 million after betting he could prove the existence of an afterlife. Ross Hemsworth, 49, from Glastonbury, has placed a £100 bet with odds of 10,000/1, that he will provide evidence of an afterworld beyond reasonable doubt. If the self titled "scientific investigator of anomalous phenomena" is proved correct not only will he bag the money but will also become one of the most famous men in modern history. Mr Hemsworth denied his scheme was crackpot and said a team of scientists and doctors were working around the clock to prove existence of the after life. He could not provide details of the evidence he is set to produce as it was being kept "under wraps". The evidence must be provided and accepted by bookmakers William Hill before the end of the year or the business entrepreneur would lose his bet.

He said: "There is something out there trying to make contact. "With the evidence we have got we are not a million miles away from proving it. "The whole point of the project is to prove that there is something there. "More and more people are coming away from religion, there are more and more wars. "If we can prove this we hope it will make some difference to peoples' lives." He added that voice communication, video and photography would be among the evidence he would produce. William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said of the unusual bet: "We are used to taking bets on matters as bizarre as the existence of the Loch Ness Monster; whether Elvis Presley is still alive and when UFOs may land, even on whether ghosts exist.

[Rasputin]

Maury Island’s UFO: 60 years later

Roswell, once just a military base in the New Mexican desert, is known today as the site of the United States’ most high-profile and controversial UFO sighting and crash. But few Islanders know that Maury Island was home to the first alleged UFO sighting in U.S. history, and it took place weeks before two crafts fell from the sky in Roswell. Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the Maury Island Incident, as it was later dubbed in books and newspaper articles. It took place in June 1947, two years after World War II ended. The nation was abuzz with paranoia and suspicion, and it was in this atmosphere that first one, then two, then hundreds of Americans reported seeing strange, unidentifiable, usually saucer-shaped, objects whizzing through the sky. These were the incidents that triggered UFO hysteria, which gripped the nation for decades and spawned countless movies and books. But it all started with one close encounter. One X file. It all started with Maury Island. “I consider (the Maury Island Incident) the most complex mystery in Washington,” said Charlette LeFevre, co-director of the Seattle Museum of the Mysteries, the state’s only paranormal science museum.

“It wasn’t as well promoted as Roswell, but it was the beginning of modern UFOlogy.” While no one can say for sure what happened that afternoon in the Puget Sound, after cobbling together the various eyewitness, secondary, government and media accounts, a story with a life of its own emerges: At 2 p.m. on June 21, 1947, Tacoma seaman Harold Dahl was trolling the waters just east of Maury Island, looking for loose logs, which he collected and sold for profit. “As I looked up from the wheel on my boat I noticed six very large donut-shaped aircraft,” Dahl later told one of the investigators of the incident. “I would judge they were about 2,000 feet above the water and almost directly overhead.” He said the ships were 100 feet in diameter, had no “visible signs of propulsion” and made no noise.

[Rasputin]

Volunteers sought for Mars test

The European Space Agency (Esa) is seeking volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crew spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow. Once the hatches are closed, the crew's only contact with the outside world is a radio link to "Earth" with a realistic delay of many minutes. It sounds like Big Brother, but there are no plans to televise the test. The modular "spacecraft" measures some 550 cubic metres (19,250 cubic feet), the equivalent of nine truck containers. It is based at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems in the Russian capital. The goal is to gain insight into human behaviour and group dynamics under the kinds of conditions astronauts would experience on a journey to Mars. With the exception of weightlessness and radiation, the crew will experience most other aspects of long-haul space travel, such as cramped conditions, a high workload, lack of privacy, and limited supplies. The volunteers will be put through a number of scenarios, such as a simulated launch, outward journey of up to 250 days, an excursion on the Martian surface, followed by the return home.

The 500-day duration is close to the minimum estimated timescale needed for a human trip to the Red Planet. The Earthbound astronauts will have to deal with simulated emergencies and perhaps even real ones. But, while Esa says it will do nothing that puts the lives of the simulation crew at unnecessary risk, officials running the experiment have made it clear they would need a convincing reason to let someone out of the modules once the experiment had begun. "The idea behind this experiment is simply to put six people in a very close environment and see how they behave," Bruno Gardini, project manager for Esa's Aurora space exploration programme, told BBC News.

[Rasputin]

Large lake in southern Chile goes missing

Submitted by Jon Williams & Pandora: A lake in southern Chile has mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole. The lake was situated in the Magallanes region in Patagonia and was fed by water, mostly from melting glaciers.It had a surface area of between 4 and 5 hectares (10-12 acres) -- about the size of 10 soccer pitches."In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal ... we went again in May and to our surprise we found the lake had completely disappeared," said Juan Jose Romero, regional director of Chile's National Forestry Corporation CONAF. "The only things left were chunks of ice on the dry lake-bed and an enormous fissure," he told Reuters.CONAF is investigating the disappearance.One theory is that the area was hit by an earth tremor that opened a crack in the ground which acted like a drain.Southern Chile has been shaken by thousands of minor earth tremors this year.

[Rasputin]

Archaeologist sparks hunt for Holy Grail

An archaeologist has sparked a Da Vinci Code-style hunt for the Holy Grail after claiming ancient records show it is buried under a 6th century church in Rome. The cup - said to have been used by Christ at the Last Supper - is the focus of countless legends and has been sought for centuries. Alfredo Barbagallo, an Italian archaeologist, claims that it is buried in a chapel-like room underneath the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura, one of the seven churches which Christian pilgrims used to visit when they came to Rome. Mr Barbagallo based his claim on two years spent studying mediaeval iconography inside the basilica and a description of a particular chamber, in a guide to the catacombs written in 1938 by a Capuchin friar named Giuseppe Da Bra. The friar describes a room of about 20 square metres with a vaulted roof ceiling. "In the corner of a wall-seat there can be seen a terracotta funnel whose lower part opens out over the face of a skeleton," he wrote. Da Bra then explains that giving liquid refreshment (refrigerium) to the dead was part of ancient funeral rites.

According to Mr Barbagallo, who heads an association called Arte e Mistero [Art and Mystery], this funnel is the Grail. He also points out to several beautiful mosaics and frescos in the basilica which feature images of the sacred cup. Mr Barbagallo added that its presence in the church fits the sketchy accounts of its early guardians. In 258 AD, during a phase of Christian persecution, Pope Sixtus V reportedly entrusted the treasures of the early Church to a deacon called Lawrence, Lorenzo in Italian. This deacon was martyred four days later and since then no one has ever seen the Grail. Various legends have it that the cup, given the name Holy Grail in the Middle Ages, was taken to different countries - including Britain. Dan Brown’s work of fiction, The Da Vinci Code, said the cup had been buried at Rossyln Chapel in Scotland, and sparked off a stampede to the isolated location as thousands flocked to see it for themselves. Mr Barbagallo said he believed it never went anywhere, and stayed with St Lawrence in his tomb.

[Rasputin]

Skull of giant panda's ancestor found

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: The first skull of the earliest known ancestor of the giant panda was been discovered in China, researchers report. Discovery of the skull, estimated to be at least 2 million years old, is reported by Russell L. Ciochon in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Ciochon, an anthropologist at the University of Iowa, and a team of U.S. and Chinese researchers, made the find in a limestone cave in south China.The animal, formally known as Ailuropoda microta, or "pygmy giant panda," would have been about three feet long, compared to the modern giant panda, which averages in excess of five feet.Previously this animal had been known only by a few teeth and bones, but a skull had never been found.

Judging by the wear patterns on its teeth it also lived on a diet of bamboo, the main food of the current giant panda, the researchers said.Other than size, the animal was anatomically similar to today's giant panda, said Ciochon, pronounced, pronounced schuh-HON.The work was funded by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation and University of Iowa.

[Rasputin]

Mysterious "Sprites" caught on film

Blink during a thunderstorm and you may miss the unusual phenomenon of "sprites"—resplendent bursts of light that, for less than a second, burn brighter than Venus. These brief explosions, which can outshine everything except for the sun and moon, are so fleeting, that scientists still don't know much about how they work. So in a recent study, a group of physicists used an ultra high-speed digital camera to record sprites in unprecedented detail—10,000 frames per second. "We realized that all these branches and long luminous features that we saw in the sprites, that they didn't really exist," said lead author Hans Nielsen, a physicist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. "It's sort of like you take a time exposure on a highway, and then all the tail lights of the cars make long streaks in the image." Instead, sprites are made up of tiny bright balls that speed through the middle atmosphere at one-tenth the speed of light, said study co-author David Sentman, a physicist at the University of Alaska. These sprite balls shine five times brighter than Venus.

[Rasputin]

'Find of century' for Egyptology

Egyptologists say they have identified the 3,000-year-old mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's most powerful female ruler. Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass made the official announcement at a packed news conference in Cairo. It is being billed as the biggest archaeological find in Egypt since the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. Archaeologists hope the mummy, which has lain unrecognised for decades, will yield clues about the mystery of her death and subsequent disappearance. Mr Hawass has set up a DNA lab near the museum with an international team of scientists to verify the identification. The study was funded by the US television channel Discovery which is to broadcast a documentary on the subject in July. An important piece of the evidence is said to be that the mummy has a missing tooth, and the gap matches exactly an existing relic, a preserved tooth engraved with Hatshepsut's name.

Some archaeologists have expressed scepticism about the possibility of using DNA technology to identify the queen."It's a very difficult process to obtain DNA from a mummy," US molecular biologist Scott Woodward was quoted as saying by AP news agency. "To make a claim as to a relationship, you need other individuals from which you have obtained DNA, to make a comparison between the DNA sequences." DNA is the molecule that contains genetic information in all organisms and can be used to establish family relationships.

[Rasputin]

Operation Stargate, the CIA and psychic spies

Judyth Piazza: Long before Mrs. Cleo and her Psychic Friends Network sprang onto the American scene there was another group dabbling deep into psychic phenomena. In the early 1970s, the CIA created the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to begin a study of controlled clairvoyance under the direction of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. Under the rubric "Project Scanate" which stood for "scanning by coordinates," thousands of people were recruited, placed in dark rooms, and asked to describe what they saw at given longitudes and latitudes. Edwin May, a former director of Stargate, which was the remote viewing project that was spawned of the cold war as a result of the fear that the Soviet Union might already have established a psychic warfare program, has gone on record as saying, "we are exactly correct 50% of the time.""Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of early laser technologies, as well as being the co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities during the 1970s and 1980s.

He is a co-author of Mind Reach; Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities and The Mind Race, as well as Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities. Targ recently retired from Lockheed Martin which is a major defense contractor of the U.S. Government, working as a senior staff scientist, where he developed laser technology for peaceful applications."" Dr. Puthoff is currently the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, a position held for more than 10 years. He is considered one of the premier theoretical physicists in the field of vacuum zero point energy and has published several of the most respected papers in the field. A graduate of Stanford University, he has been a research associate and lecturer at the University in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Dr. Puthoff also served for several years as the Director of the Cognitive Sciences Program at SRI International. As a theoretical and experimental physicist, he has worked in the areas of fundamental electrodynamics, quantum vacuum states, gravitation, cosmology, and high power microelectronics. He has authored more than 30 technical papers and is co-author of the textbook Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, which is used in numerous Universities around the world. He is also listed in the publications, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in the World, and is also a Fellow of the Fetzer Institute."

[Rasputin]

Courthouse 'ghost' video mystery solved

Benjamin Radford: Over the past week, a glowing, fuzzy white blob became an unlikely international star. It was captured on videotape early Friday morning, June 15, by a security camera at a courthouse here. The “ghost video” has been seen over 75,000 times on YouTube; what started as a local curiosity soon became a national, then international, story. Theories abounded: Some said that the image was the ghost of a murdered man. Others thought it was just a video glitch, or a hoax, or a spider, or maybe a reflection from a passing car. As a scientific paranormal investigator, I was asked by a Santa Fe newspaper to look into the case. Over the past decade, I have conducted dozens of investigations into lake monsters, psychics, ghosts, crop circles, and many other “unexplained” phenomena. This was certainly unexplained, and I was intrigued.

After the first day of investigations, I eliminated most of the theories. It was almost certainly not a hoax, because it’s unlikely anyone would think to make a blurry, indistinguishable blob on a courthouse surveillance video. Nor was it a reflection or a video glitch. I’ve seen dozens of “ghost” videos and images very similar to this. Usually they're simply misperceptions, camera artifacts, or common objects like dust or insects. The quality of the image is often inversely proportional to the belief that the object is a ghost; the fuzzier and more ambiguous the form, the more likely a ghost will be offered as an explanation. In cases like this, however, you have to eliminate all alternative explanations, and while a ghost remained a possibility, it was pretty far down on the list of likely candidates.

[Rasputin]

Buried 'aliens' are really tree trunks

Malaysians in a northern village were alarmed by rumors that space aliens had been laid to rest in their neighborhood cemetery, but authorities learned the graves had merely been filled with banana tree trunks for a superstitious ritual, police said Tuesday. Residents feared a local witch doctor had instructed grave diggers to bury extraterrestrials in the rural district of Pasir Mas on Sunday, causing police to detain the man for investigation, said district police chief Haliludin Rahim.The man was freed after he explained that banana tree trunks, not aliens, had been buried in a ceremony for "medicinal purposes," Haliludin told The Associated Press.The New Straits Times newspaper said the rumor started because of a misunderstanding after some of the grave diggers claimed to other people that they had been told they were burying aliens.Witch doctors and spiritual healers are common in rural parts of Malaysia where superstitious beliefs have long been entrenched.

[Rasputin]

Team makes Tunguska crater claim

Scientists have identified a possible crater left by the biggest space impact in modern times - the Tunguska event. The blast levelled more than 2,000 sq km of forest near the Tunguska River in Siberia on 30 June 1908. A comet or asteroid is thought to have exploded in the Earth's atmosphere with a force equal to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Now, a University of Bologna team says a lake near the epicentre of the blast may be occupying a crater hollowed out by a chunk of rock that hit the ground. Lake Cheko - though shallow - fits the proportions of a small, bowl-shaped impact crater, say the Italy-based scientists. Their investigation of the lake bottom's geology reveals a funnel-like shape not seen in neighbouring lakes. In addition, a geophysics survey of the lake bed has turned up an unusual feature about 10m down which could either be compacted lake sediments or a buried fragment of space rock.

Other features suggest a recent origin for the lake.Luca Gasparini, Giuseppe Longo and colleagues from Bologna argue that the lake feature, about 8km north-north-west of the airburst epicentre, may have been gouged out by remnant material that made it to the ground. "We have no positive proof this is an impact crater, but we were able to exclude some other hypotheses, and this led us to our conclusion," Professor Longo, the research team leader, told BBC News.

[Rasputin]

Kaspar Hauser

Anthony North: Known popularly as the ‘Nuremberg Enigma’, Kaspar Hauser stepped into history on 26 May 1828. An incoherent boy of approximately sixteen years of age, he was found staggering about in Unschlitt Square in Nuremberg. Wearing expensive but tatty clothing, he had an envelope addressed to: ‘The Captain of the 4th Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment.’Local cobbler George Weichmann took him to the local army guardroom, and from there a sergeant took him to the home of the captain to whom the letters was addressed - one Captain Wessenig.What a life:Opening the envelope, he found two letters. From them, a picture of Kaspar’s life emerged. Apparently he had spent his entire life in a small darkened cell, attended to by persons he had never seen. Now, it seemed, he was to be trained as a cavalryman, like his father, whoever he was.Taken to the local police, he was dismissed as a simpleton and placed in a cell. However, given pen and paper, he wrote his name - Kaspar Hauser - and when they attempted to teach him to read and write, it was discovered he could pick it up remarkably quickly. Indeed, Kaspar proved to be a bit of a genius.

The celebrity: The local town council decided it was their responsibility to look after him and appointed a guardian, a scientist called Georg Friedrich Daumer. Under his wing, Kaspar became quite a celebrity, with people coming from far and wide to meet him.He even wrote an autobiography in 1829, but it contained no clues to his identity. However, Kaspar’s life was to be short lived. On 7 October 1829 he claimed to have been attacked by a man with a blackened face who gave him a wound to the brow. This was the first of two attacks.The second occurred on 14 December 1833, following a couple of years touring Europe in the company of eccentric English aristocrat Lord Stanhope. On this day Kaspar stumbled into the home of a Dr Meyer near Nuremberg with a stab wound in his chest. On 17 December he died, ending a life that was both tragic and deeply mysterious. WAS HE PARANORMAL?