Science Special News

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The Amazon's Mapinguary

Perhaps it is nothing more than a legend, as skeptics say. Or maybe it is real, as those who claim to have seen it avow. But the mere mention of the mapinguary, the giant slothlike monster of the Amazon, is enough to send shivers down the spines of almost all who dwell in the world’s largest rain forest. The folklore here is full of tales of encounters with the creature, and nearly every Indian tribe in the Amazon, including those that have had no contact with one another, have a word for the mapinguary (pronounced ma-ping-wahr-EE). The name is usually translated as “the roaring animal” or “the fetid beast.”So widespread and so consistent are such accounts that in recent years a few scientists have organized expeditions to try to find the creature. They have not succeeded, but at least one says he can explain the beast and its origins.“It is quite clear to me that the legend of the mapinguary is based on human contact with the last of the ground sloths,” thousands of years ago, said David Oren, a former director of research at the Goeldi Institute in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River.

“We know that extinct species can survive as legends for hundreds of years. But whether such an animal still exists or not is another question, one we can’t answer yet.”Dr. Oren said he had talked to “a couple of hundred people” who had said they had seen the mapinguary in the most remote parts of the Amazon and a handful who had said they had had direct contact. In some areas, the creature is said to have two eyes, while in other accounts it has only one, like the Cyclops of Greek mythology. Some tell of a gaping, stinking mouth in the monster’s belly through which it consumes humans unfortunate enough to cross its path.

[Rasputin]

Boeing's psychic lab

Boeing researchers don't just spend their days designing killer drones and networked tanks. They also investigate unexplained powers of the mind, sometimes. Especially if those times are the late '60s. This study, New Correlation Between a Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator, conducted in 1967, "tentatively conclude[s]" that people can basically will particular numbers to appear. According to the Boeing-ites, there "exists a weak but significant correlation" between the experiment's "statistical processes" (that would be the generation of random numbers, "connected to four lamps and four corresponding pushbuttons") and "the experimenter who initiates the processes" ("the human subjects, asked to press the buttons... with the objective in mind of obtaining a high number of coincidences").

There's no mention of follow-up studies. But this Boeing experiment is one of a number of fringe and alternative science projects we found after a quick dig through the online archives of the Defense Technical Information Center. You'll get a kick out of the others. So keep reading...

[Rasputin]

Dinosaur bones 'used as medicine'

Villagers in central China have been using dinosaur bones as medicine - thinking they were from dragons. These bones have been dug up, then boiled in soup or ground down to make traditional medicines for decades. The news emerged this week when scientists displayed some excavated bones at a museum in Henan Province. "[People] believed that the 'dragon bones' were from dragons flying in the sky," one Chinese scientist told AP news agency. These 'dragon bones', found in Henan's Ruyang County, were sold for about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram. "Local people used the bones as medicine to treat conditions such as dizziness and leg cramps," said Zhang Xinliao from Henan Geology Museum. They were also made into a paste and applied to fractures and other injuries. "Some locals even made a business out of collecting the bones. One had collected up to 8,000 kg," Mr Zhang added. Bones displayed this week at the museum were from an 18m-long plant-eating dinosaur.

[Rasputin]

Scientists find water on extra-solar planet

Scientists have, for the first time, conclusively discovered the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System, according to an article appearing in Nature. They made the discovery by analysing the transit of the gas giant HD 189733b across its star, in the Infrared using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.Giovanna Tinetti, ESA fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris, and colleagues from around the world, targeted planet HD 189733b, 63 light-years away, in the constellation Vulpecula.The planet was discovered in 2005 as it dimmed the light of its parent star by some three percent when transiting in front of it. Using Spitzer, Tinetti and the team observed the star, which is slightly fainter than the Sun, as its starlight dim at two infrared bands (3.6 and 5.8 micrometres).Had the planet been a rocky body devoid of atmosphere, both these bands and a third one (8 micrometres), recently measured by a team at Harvard, would have shown the same behaviour. Instead, as the atmosphere absorbed less infrared radiation at 3.6 micrometres than at the other two wavelengths indicating the presence of water vapour.“Water is the only molecule that can explain that behaviour,” says Tinetti.The presence of water vapour does not necessarily make it a good candidate in the search for planets that harbour life. “This is a far from habitable world,” she adds.

HD 189733b is a 'hot jupiter', a gas giant that is roughly the size and mass of Jupiter but orbits very close to the star. These planets tend to have extensive atmospheres because heat from the nearby star gives them energy to expand. HD 189733b’s atmospheric temperature is about 1000 Kelvin or higher, implying that the significant amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere cannot condense to fall as rain or form clouds but the temperature is far too hot to produce clouds and rain.That does not mean the atmosphere is sedate as the planet is gripped so tightly by the gravity of its star that one hemisphere constantly faces the star, heating the planet only on one side generating fierce winds sweeping from the day-side to the night-side. “There are a thousand things to learn about these planets,” says Tinetti.

[Rasputin]

The perpetual myth of free energy

Irish company Steorn made headlines around the world when it took out a full page advert in The Economist claiming to have developed a device that produced "free energy". Throughout early July, the company planned to display the device to the public for the first time. Professor Sir Eric Ash, electrical engineer and former rector of Imperial College London, visited the demonstration for the BBC News website. "Marvellous things can happen in this world. As an engineer, whenever I look at a new baby I say categorically that there can be no such thing - it's far too complicated to work. Yet we know this lack of faith in the marvellous is misplaced. So, the fact that a device or an invention looks too marvellous to be true is not conclusive evidence that it isn't. I believe that it is thinking on such lines that encourages inventors - and there have been many since the 12th Century - to pursue what would be a true marvel: a perpetual motion machine.

The most recent attempt is from Mr Sean McCarthy, the Chief Executive Officer of an Irish company called Steorn. His invention, known as the "Orbo", is a mechanical device which uses powerful magnets on the rim of a rotor and further magnets on an outer shell. Mr McCarthy is convinced that it is working. He took a full page advertisement in the Economist last year to say so, and to attract volunteer scientists to check the authenticity of his claims. They are still in the process of doing so. In the meantime Mr McCarthy was hoping to demonstrate the machine to the public at the London Kinetica Museum, which is devoted to displaying dynamic art, particularly of artefacts at the interface of science and art.

[Rasputin]

Hope for the alien hunters

Nasa this week unveils a new emissary in the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which launches next month, marks just the latest instalment in a quest that has exercised the imaginations of writers and scientists since long before the adventures of Jules Verne. In the 17th century Johannes Kepler, the architect of our modern understanding of the solar system, imagined a journey to a moon inhabited by serpent-like creatures called Prevlovans who endured the lunar night "bristling with ice and snow under the raging, icy winds". Regrettably, however, here is no reliable account of a real encounter with alien life-forms. Many doubt whether they exist at all. The Phoenix mission to Mars is very much in pursuit of liquid water, the key to life. Every watery place on our own planet, from the depths of the ocean to the tips of the highest mountains, supports life. The hardiest organisms, bacteria called extremophiles, can endure more or less anything the terrestrial environment can muster, from boiling acid baths to cold briny seas. But take away water, or freeze it or boil it to steam, and nothing grows.

Life requires water and the water has to be in the liquid state for it to be useful. Water is common in the universe, but is liquid only within a narrow window of temperatures and pressures. In our own solar system, temperatures range from 480C on the surface of Venus to -230C on Pluto. The habitable or "Goldilocks zone", as it is sometimes called, because it's neither too hot nor too cold, occupies a narrow band of our own solar system of less than 1% of the distance from the sun to the outer edges. This is precisely where the Earth orbits.

[Rasputin]

Giant squid washed up in Tasmania

A giant squid has washed up near Strahan on Tasmania's west coast. The squid, measuring about six metres long, was found last night on Ocean Beach by a member of the public.Zoology experts from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are hoping to examine the squid to find how old it was and how it died.The museum's senior curator of Antarctic and Southern Oceans, David Pemberton, says it is known that squid live off the west coast and feed on blue grenadier."The only strandings on beaches we ever had were in the east and south-east of Tassie and to me this one's intriguing because it's turned up on our west coast," he said."We must bear in mind that all of this is to do with the Southern Ocean and perhaps to a giant squid, there's not much difference."It's the first record that I know of one on a beach off the west coast."

[Rasputin]

UFOs and Roswell, 60 years on

Nick Pope: 60 years ago a pilot saw something he couldn't explain and the term "flying saucer" was born. Then, just a few weeks later, something unidentified crashed in a place called Roswell. But what exactly happened all those years ago? And why, 60 years later, does the subject still fascinate us?On 24 June 1947 a light aircraft pilot called Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, at a height of around 10,000 feet. Suddenly, a brilliant flash of light illuminated his aircraft. Visibility was good and as he scanned the sky to locate the source of the light, he saw a formation of nine shiny metallic objects flying in formation. He estimated their speed as being around 1600 miles per hour - nearly three times faster than the top speed of any jet aircraft at the time. He described the craft as delta-shaped and said they moved in a jerky motion. When describing this motion to a reporter, he said the objects moved "liked a saucer would if you skipped it across the water".The reporter seized on this phrase and in his story described the objects as "flying saucers". The label stuck. Once the story appeared in the newspapers, similar reports began to come in from all over America. Flying saucer fever swept the country and the story became national, then international news. This wasn't just the world's first UFO sighting - this was the birth of a phenomenon.

Just two weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting, something happened that was to eclipse his story and lead to arguably the biggest conspiracy theory of all time. On or around 2 July 1947, something crashed in the desert near a military base at Roswell, New Mexico. Military authorities at the base issued an extraordinary press release, which began "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc". "Flying Disc captured by Air Force", screamed the headlines. Yet, just 24 hours later, the military changed their story and claimed that the object they'd first thought was a "flying disc" was just a weather balloon that had crashed on a nearby ranch, before being discovered by a puzzled local.

[Rasputin]

Who the Devil ?

The Devil may seem an archaic symbol of evil, but he is supposed to be alive in the world to this day with his Satanic conspiracies. From the 1960s onwards, one expression of him was the Church of Satan, set up in San Francisco by occultist, Anton La Vey.Said to have perverted many a star, his ceremonies involved a naked woman as an altar and his philosophy was based on unbridled hedonism. The death of Jane Mansfield was even put down, by some, to their rituals. Who is he ? The name, the Devil comes from the Greek ‘diabolos’, meaning slanderer. A fallen angel, in the 1970s we had his image of evil implanted with the film, The Exorcist. By the 1980s we were more sceptical and he appeared humourously in the Witches of Eastwick. He is first mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls as one of the sons of darkness, but in the Bible he is simply seen as temptation, his home - the future Hell - just a place of sleep.This was no good for frightening superstitious people into obedience, so the image of the Devil became a conspiratorial perversion of the ancient Greek god, Pan, a nature deity.

With the Roman poet Virgil devising Purgatory - a place where the dead lingered - and Dante’s Medieval vision of Hell as a place of eternal torment in the Divine Comedy, the Devil was becoming imprinted on our mind.Yet as with the future ‘devil-like’ Pan, our notion of Hell is more akin to the Greek Hades, an underworld for bad Titans such as Sisyphus and Tantalus, the former condemned to roll a rock up a hill forever, the latter never quite reaching the water and food in front of him.

[Rasputin]

A look at dowsing

One supposition of paranormality often ignored is its relationship to the environment. The paranormal is thought of as a human practice, involving interactions with humans, sometimes alive and sometimes dead.Yet there is a wealth of evidence that paranormal talents extend beyond the mere human and also have a close relationship with the environment. And nowhere is this better expressed than in Dowsing.Old or new ?Dowsing - the supposed ability to find water or minerals by mind power – can be an eccentric pastime. Using a forked twig, pendulum, in one case even a German sausage, the dowser walks an area of land and when successful the twig twitches or the pendulum spins.Dowsing is often thought of as a recent paranormal innovation, but this is not the case. In the 17th century the French Baroness de Beausoleil first adapted the dowsing rod. But in the Bible, Moses is portrayed finding water with his staff.In Medieval times the practice was used for finding coal, and Agricola’s treatise on mining, ’De re metallica’ of 1556, discusses dowsing. Hence, it has been practiced way back in history.

Sceptics and believers: As usual, James Randi was successful in showing up a group of dowsers in Australia in 1980. Hiding boxes and pipes in a field, some containing objects, others not, he tested a group of dowsers, and predictably they failed to perform adequately. Whether this disproves the ability to dowse, or simply proves those dowsers were not very good on that particular day is open to question.To 19th century dowser John Mullins such arguments were an irrelevance. He set up a dowsing company to find water and thrived. In 1938, dowser L L Latham adapted dowsing to archaeology, successfully mapping out some dig sites.During the Vietnam War, US Marines adapted dowsing to finding mines with a high degree of success. But if proof were needed of its ability, oil companies provide it. They employ dowsers to find oil.The fact that they continue to do so, and pay huge amounts for skilled dowsers, shows there is something to it. If something doesn’t work, big business soon drops it.

[Rasputin]

Giant chimps of the magic forest

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla. Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the shifting fortunes of warring rebel factions, and the heart of the animals' range is deep in impenetrable forest.But despite the difficulties, a handful of scientists have succeeded in studying the animals. Early speculation that the apes may be some yeti-like new species or a chimp/gorilla hybrid proved unfounded, but the truth has turned out to be in many ways even more fascinating. They are actually a population of super-sized chimps with a unique culture - and it seems, a taste for big cat flesh. The most detailed and recent data comes from Cleve Hicks, at the University of Amsterdam, who has spent 18 months in the field watching the Bili apes - named after a local town - since 2004. His team's most striking find came after one of his trackers heard chimps calling for several days from the same spot. When he investigated he came across a chimp feasting on the carcass of a leopard. Mr Hicks cannot be sure the animal was killed by the chimp, but the find lends credence to the apes' lion-eating reputation.

"What we have found is this completely new chimpanzee culture," said Mr Hicks. Previously, researchers had only managed to snatch glimpses of the animals or take photos of them using camera traps. But Mr Hicks used local knowledge to get closer to them and photograph them. "We were told of this sort of fabled land out west by one of our trackers who goes out there to fish," said Mr Hicks whose project is supported by the Wasmoeth Wildlife Foundation. "I call it the magic forest. It is a very special place." Getting there means a gruelling 40km (25-mile) trek through the jungle, from the nearest road, not to mention navigating croc-infested rivers. But when he arrived he found apes without their normal fear of humans. Chimps near the road flee immediately at the sight of people because they know the consequences of a hunter's rifle, but these animals were happy to approach him. "The further away from the road the more fearless the chimps got," he added.

[Rasputin]

Carl Jung - a paranormal Einstein ?

Anthony North: Paranormal research is more than narrating the cases an investigator comes across. Also important is the idea that the cases can be analysed in order to provide theory for what is going on. As data leads to theory in science, so too with the world of mystery.The problem with this approach, however, is that few theorists have achieved the audience they deserve. However, some stand out above the throng. Perhaps the greatest of those was psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung.Young Jung: Arthur C Clarke once commented that not only did the paranormal not have its Einstein, it was still awaiting its Aristotle. I disagree with this statement. Jung fits the bill more than adequately, rationalizing the paranormal like no other researcher.Jung was born in 1875 in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a very spiritual family. As an adult he became vain and obsessive and had many affairs, having almost a sex addiction. However, he was very much a genius, trapped between the academic and the more esoteric.This was apparent to him from the age of three when he began to have mystical dreams and was convinced another person lived inside him. He named this person Philemon and saw him as age old wisdom.

The psychologist: If Jung hadn’t become an academic, he would have become a great medium, already exhibiting elements of other personalities inside him. However, he trained medically in Basel before moving to a Zurich psychiatric clinic in 1900, eventually becoming a student of Freud.Vital to this period was his identification of two states of mind - introversion and extroversion. The mentally healthy person formed a balance between these two extremes, finding himself and realising who he is through a process Jung was to call Individuation.Most people only discovered their true self following what Jung termed a ‘midlife crisis’, when material values failed to satisfy, requiring an understanding of the more esoteric.

[Rasputin]

Hills' niece writes alien abduction book

There were decades during which Kathleen Marden didn't divulge who her aunt and uncle were. She'd witnessed firsthand the circus that engulfed their lives, pro and con. So later when the Stratham resident became a social worker and educator, she decided it was best not to mention her relationship to Betty and Barney Hill.But her interest and curiosity, as well as her love for the two people at the center of one of the most famous — alleged — UFO abductions, eventually led her back to the subject. Along with Stanton T Friedman, Marden has penned "Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience," which will be released in August by Career Press/New Page Books. It was 1961. Kathy, 13, was at home when Aunt Betty and Uncle Barney of Portsmouth dropped by. They'd come to tell the family what they could recall about their recent, life-changing trip to the N.H. White Mountains. They'd been abducted by aliens."I was absolutely flabbergasted. But, I had learned in school that none of the planets were inhabited.

I never though of anything outside the solar system," she says. "I just assumed we were the only life forms."Nonetheless she believed them. "I had a great respect for them. My aunt was a well-educated social worker for the state and Barney worked for the Boston Post Office and was active in the civil rights movement, a lifelong member of the NAACP. ...; But I was amazed."Marden goes on to explain how well established the two were. The importance of laying the ground is evident as she checks off their involvements and accomplishments. She knew these people. They were not crackpots.

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New hope over 'extinct' echidna

A species of egg-laying mammal, named after TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough, is not extinct as was previously thought, say scientists. On a recent visit to Papua's Cyclops Mountains, researchers uncovered burrows and tracks made by the Attenborough's long-beaked echidna. The species is only known to biologists through a specimen from 1961, which is housed in a museum in the Netherlands. The team will return to Papua next year to find and photograph the creature. The month-long expedition by scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) involved travelling to parts of the mountain range, covered by thick jungle, which had remained unexplored for more than 45 years. Jonathan Baillie, ZSL's Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (Edge) programme manager, said: "We hope that Sir David Attenborough will be delighted to hear that his namesake species is still surviving in the wilds of the Papaun jungle."

The creature had not been recorded since a Dutch botanist collected the only known specimen in the cloud forest of the Cyclops Mountains in 1961. As a result, it was widely assumed that the shoe box-sized species (Zaglossus attenboroughi) was extinct. But while the Edge team were in the area, they spoke to local tribespeople who said that they had seen the creature as recently as 2005. The scientists also discovered "nose pokes", holes in the ground made by the echidnas as they stuck their long noses into soil to feed. In the programme's blog, Dr Baillie wrote: "Attenborough's echidna is one of five monotremes (egg-laying mammals) that first inhabited the Earth around the time of the dinosaurs.

[Rasputin]

Ghost buster 'fraud' claim

A ghostbuster who boasted of his connections to the television show 'Most Haunted’ has been branded a fraud by its team of producers. Antix Productions has revealed that Shane Hull – the man behind Moray Paranormal Investigations – has no connection to the show.Mr Hull told 'The Scot’ last month that he had spent two years working behind the scenes with the Living TV programme.He claimed to have taken part in numerous haunting investigations while on placement with its resident spiritualist medium, David Wells.But we can now reveal that Mr Wells has never even met Mr Hull (36) and that he has never formed a part of the Most Haunted crew.

Liz Simpson, production manager with Antix Productions, said: “We wish to make it clear that this is a fraudulent claim on his part and he has misled your readers with this lie.“It is important that people are aware of the actions of individuals like Mr Hull, not only to reassure them of our position on the matter, but also to inform any potential locations that may actually be considering allowing Mr Hull to carry out paranormal investigations on the strength of him using his so-called Most Haunted connection to gain access.”Mr Hull, who works as a spiritualist medium, recently moved to the area from England and set up his paranormal investigation group. They have been carrying out studies at a number of locations across the area which are supposedly haunted, including the grounds of Spynie Palace, near Elgin.It has also emerged that his team’s visit to the site was not sanctioned by its owners, Historic Scotland.