Science Special News

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Meet the giant spear-fishing penguins

Hollywood gave us all-singing, all-dancing penguins, and surfing penguins, but leave it to evolution to give us giant, prehistoric spear-fishing penguins from Peru. In a case of fact being stranger than fiction, or at least animation, paleontologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a fearsome new species of penguin that lived on the southern coast of Peru about 36 million years ago, according to a study released Monday.The ancient bird, Icadyptes salasi, stood five foot tall and had a pointed seven-inch beak which it probably used to spear its prey.The now extinct penguin species is one of the largest ever reported and was recovered from the coastal desert of Peru.Paleontologists also discovered the skull and partial skeleton of a second extinct penguin species, called Perudyptes devriesi, in the same region.That penguin lived around 42 million years ago and was comparable in size to the modern King Penguin, 0.75 to .90 meters (2.5 to three feet), which makes its home on sub-Antarctic island groups, including the Falkland Islands.The penguin fossils are among the most complete ever recovered and are challenging long-held assumptions about the timing and patterns of penguin evolution and dispersal.

Paleontologists and students of the penguin lineage had assumed that penguins evolved in colder climates in the Antarctic and in New Zealand and had only moved to lower latitudes closer to the equator about 10 million years ago -- long after significant global cooling about 34 million years ago."We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species, even the small penguins in equatorial regions today," said Julia Clarke, a paleontologist and assistant professor of marine, Earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh."But the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in 65 million years of Earth's history. The evidence indicates that penguins reached low latitude regions more than 30 million years prior to our previous estimates."

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Confession revives Roswell conspiracy

Exactly 60 years ago, a light aircraft was flying over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, at a height of around 3000m. Suddenly, a brilliant flash of light illuminated the aircraft. Visibility was good and as pilot Kenneth Arnold scanned the sky to find the source of the light, he saw a group of nine shiny metallic objects flying information. He estimated their speed as being around 2600km/h - nearly three times faster than the top speed of any jet aircraft at the time. Soon, similar reports began to come in from all over America. This wasn't just the world's first UFO sighting, this was the birth of a phenomenon, one that still exercises an extraordinary fascination. But last week came an astonishing new twist to the Roswell mystery. Lieutenant Walter Haut was the public relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued the original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard. Haut died last year but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death. Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar. He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.

He wasn't the first Roswell witness to talk about alien bodies. Local undertaker Glenn Dennis had long claimed that he was contacted by authorities at Roswell shortly after the crash and asked to provide a number of child-sized coffins. When he arrived at the base, he was apparently told by a nurse (who later disappeared) that a UFO had crashed and that small humanoid extraterrestrials had been recovered. But Haut is the only one of the original participants to claim to have seen alien bodies.

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'First west Europe tooth' found

Scientists in Spain say that they have found a tooth from a distant human ancestor that is more than one million years old. The tooth, a pre-molar, was discovered on Wednesday at the Atapuerca site in northern Spain's Burgos Province. It represented western Europe's "oldest human fossil remain", a statement from the Atapuerca Foundation said. The foundation said it was awaiting final results before publishing its findings in a scientific journal. Several caves containing evidence of prehistoric human occupation have been found in Atapuerca. In 1994 fossilised remains called Homo antecessor (Pioneer Man) - believed to date back 800,000 years - were unearthed there. Scientists had previously thought that Homo heidelbergensis, dating back 600,000 years, were Europe's oldest inhabitants.

Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, co-director of research at the site, said that the newly discovered tooth could be as much as 1.2 million years old. "Now we finally have the anatomical evidence of the hominids that fabricated tools more than one million years ago," the statement said. It was not yet possible to confirm to which species the tooth belonged, it said, but initial analyses "allow us to suppose it is an ancestor of Homo antecessor".

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60 years of the 'flying saucer'

It's 60 years since the term flying saucer was coined and the most celebrated "extraterrestrial" episode - Roswell. Alien believers are dismissed as cranks, but even the earthly explanations of objects in the sky are fascinating. Sixty years ago Kenneth Arnold saw something which changed his own life and the lives of millions of others, and impacted on popular culture like a shockwave. Flying his plane near Mount Rainier in the US state of Washington, he observed a line of strange objects either crescent-shaped or disc-like, flying with the motion of a saucer skimming on water. Arnold's sighting, quickly picked up by the press, was followed a fortnight later by the revelation of perhaps the most notorious episode in the history of UFOs, at Roswell in New Mexico. Having announced it had recovered a "flying disk", the Army airfield backtracked and referred only to a weather balloon. What followed was perhaps one of the greatest conspiracy theories of all time, involving post-mortem examinations of swollen-bellied grey aliens, the cloning of sophisticated extraterrestrial technology and an epic cover-up. Or not, as the case may be.

In the 60 years since 1947's first major wave of sightings, thousands of ordinary people have claimed to have seen inexplicable objects in the sky. When the Ministry of Defence released papers on its own investigations into the phenomenon in 2006, it was revealed more than 10,000 eyewitness accounts had been collected. And for every sceptic who prefers explanations of weather balloons and freak atmospheric conditions there is someone who genuinely believes intelligent life is visiting the planet.

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Clever orangutans confirm Aesop's fable

A team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig threw down a challenge to five female orangutans, aged seven, 11, 16, 17 and 32, housed in the local zoo. The apes were presented with a tasty peanut that floated in a plastic tube. The container was a quarter-filled with water, which meant that the nut was frustratingly out of reach to the animals. The orangutans realised, though, that by taking mouthfuls of water from a cup placed nearby and spitting the water into the tube, they could make the nut float to the top and recover it easily. At the start, it took the apes nine minutes on average to figure out the trick. But by the end of the 10-trial experiment they had whittled this down to a zippy 30 seconds. The Leipzig team believe this illustrates orangutan inventiveness, showing the primates can use a "liquid tool" to get a reward. Breaking the tube was impossible and there was no stick available as an alternative retrieval method.

The study appears in Biology Letters, published by Britain's Royal Society, the de-facto British academy of sciences. In Aesop's fable, a thirsty crow finds a pitcher of water but the water level is so low as to be out of reach. The bird places stones in the pitcher to raise the water level and thus quench its thirst.

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Siberian window on the Ice Age

A Russian biologist has been trying to recreate a fully fledged Ice Age eco-system in a remote corner of Siberia, complete, if possible, with woolly mammoths. From the plane, the landscape was green - thousands of kilometres of seemingly empty tundra, forest and scrubland, punctuated by oxbow lakes, meanders and intricate waterways. But from the small boat driven by Sergei Zimov along the Kolyma River, everything was blue. The vast, cloudless sky was almost perfectly reflected in the water, which stretched for several kilometres between either bank and disappeared like a sea ahead. Sakha - also known as Yakutia - is a huge Russian province in eastern Siberia, a place of large distances, long histories, and big ideas. Sergei Zimov's is one of the biggest.

At the end of the Pleistocene era - 10,000 years ago - woolly mammoths, rhinoceroses and tigers might have watched our progress from the riverside, and herds of horses, bison, musk-ox and Siberian antelope would have roamed the meadows and savannah to either side. But now all I can see on the banks are dense willow shrubs, and the only predators are shifting clouds of mosquitoes waiting for me to disembark. Ten thousand years ago, as the climate warmed, the grass gave way to moss and forest, habitats disappeared, and the large mammals went with them. Or so the theory goes. But Sergei reckons climate had little to do with it and that all these animals would be thriving here now, if it hadn't been for man overhunting them to extinction.

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Babies not as innocent as they pretend

Whether lying about raiding the biscuit tin or denying they broke a toy, all children try to mislead their parents at some time. Yet it now appears that babies learn to deceive from a far younger age than anyone previously suspected.Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life.Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old. Following studies of more than 50 children and interviews with parents, Dr Vasudevi Reddy, of the University of Portsmouth's psychology department, says she has identified seven categories of deception used between six months and three-years-old. Infants quickly learnt that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention.

By eight months, more difficult deceptions became apparent, such as concealing forbidden activities or trying to distract parents' attention.By the age of two, toddlers could use far more devious techniques, such as bluffing when threatened with a punishment.Dr Reddy said: "Fake crying is one of the earliest forms of deception to emerge, and infants use it to get attention even though nothing is wrong. You can tell, as they will then pause while they wait to hear if their mother is responding, before crying again.

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Chile's missing lake mystery solved

Scientists said that a lake in southern Chile that mysteriously disappeared last month developed a crack which allowed the water to drain away. A buildup of water opened a crack in an ice wall along one side of the lake. Water flowed through the crack into a nearby fjord and from there into the sea, leaving behind a dry lake-bed littered with icebergs, scientists told Chilean state television on Tuesday."It looks like it's slowly filling up with water again," said Andres Rivera, a glacier expert who headed a team which recently flew over the lake in a bid to solve the mystery.The lake is situated in the Magallanes region in Patagonia and is fed by melt-water from glaciers. Earlier this year it had a surface area of 4 to 5 hectares (10-12 acres) -- about the size of 10 soccer fields.Scientists noticed it had disappeared during a routine patrol of the area in May.Rivera said the incident was evidence of the effects of global warming.

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Ghosts of chess players past

Is there chess after death? A weird experiment to substantiate reincarnation was devised in 1985 by Dr. Wolfgang Eisenbeiss at the Swiss Institute of Parapsychology. A game between Korchnoi and the spirit of Maroczy slogged on by mail for eight years. The conduit for White's moves was Robert Rollins, a medium who claimed Maroczy's spirit guided his hand on paper, a technique known as automatic writing. "Maroczy was actually able to enter my body and move my arm. I can't play chess and never even liked the game, but when he plays through me I'm one of the best in the world. It's eerie," alleged Rollins.I'm reminded of that old saw about a guy who was in jail for striking a happy medium. The game took so long because the medium moved only when the spirit moved him.This great hokum was reported in The National Enquirer decades ago and was revived last year in a lead article for the British journal of Psychical Research. The authors claimed that private details provided by Maroczy through automatic writing were confirmed by research to be 94 percent accurate.

Maroczy died at age 81 in 1951. He was one of the world's best players in his heyday at the turn of the 20th century. Hungary issued a stamp in his honor in 1974. "Maroczy plays in an outmoded style that nobody uses today, but he's tough," said Korchnoi. Yet White had little hope after botching the opening. The real Maroczy faced the Winawer Variation four times, choosing 4 exd5 twice and 4 Nge2 twice instead of the uncharacteristic 4 e5. Correct was 12 Ng5! Nxe5 13 f4 Rxg5 14 fxg5 N5g6 15 h4. And 14 Ng5! was far stronger than entering an inferior and tedious endgame in this ghostly encounter.

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Debunking the drones

Recent sightings of the so-called 'Drones' has prompted widespread speculation on internet forums and a flurry of news reports from within the UFO community from websites and in major media outlets. Very clear photographs of the drones have reportedly come from multiple different sources, centering around the Lake Tahoe area allegedly going as far back as 1995, but with no proof to that effect. The drones appear in several different configurations, normally characterized by a large hair-like array on top, and what appear to be large booms protruding from the sides of the craft, complete with strange writing on the exterior.The drones are a hoax. This case is reminiscent of the Billy Meier hoaxed photographs and film footage. There is no substantial proof or credibility offered in either case, and these photographs upon first glance are even more phony in general appearance than the majority of Meier's. For instance, the drone craft appears similar to a ceiling fan with an eggbeater on top, not very convincing even to the the earnest UFO believer when compared to past, more legitimate, mass sightings of black triangles and discs. We live in the post-Photoshop world, which has proven painful for the UFO field. Anyone can hoax a UFO photograph with knowledge of Photoshop, basic camera work and editing, or CGI movie making abilities.

It is imperative in light of these techniques to keep an objective viewpoint when analyzing photographs and video footage of UFO's. At the Paranormal report, we certainly believe that some UFO's appear to represent a superior intelligence of unknown, perhaps extraterrestrial origin, but this does not seem to be the case with the drone UFO's. MUFON field investigators have already very convincingly debunked the photographs as being CGI generated, but it seems to be deeper than just a good old fashioned hoax.The case has been linked to the CARET (Commercial Applications Research for Extra-terrestrial Technology) documents that have been surfacing recently from an anonymous source named 'Isaac'. Without getting into the problems inherent in anonymous sources releasing unverified documents, even this source claims that he is not familiar with the craft as a whole, but only sees similarities in the style of writing on the drone aircraft to that which he claims to have worked with in the 1980's. This is not silver bullet cooroboration of evidence as some have claimed, it is simply an association about how the writing looks from an anonymous releaser of unproven, very new and not yet well scrutinized documents.