Science Special News

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Marshall blamed for UFO coverup

Kecksburg, which was the location of something mysterious -- some would say something extraterrestrial -- 40 years ago, isn't Southwestern Pennsylvania' s only connection to unidentified flying objects. Uniontown native Gen. George C. Marshall was chief of staff of the Army during World War II, secretary of defense and secretary of state in President Harry Truman's administration and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of a Europe devastated by the war. Some extraterrestrial experts believe that he was also part of a government coverup of alien visitors, although he couldn't be blamed for the handling of the purported Kecksburg landing since it happened six years after his death Larry Bland, the editor of the Marshall papers at the George C. Marshall Foundation Library in Lexington, Va., said there has been a stream of UFOlogists visiting the library to authenticate Marshall's signature on various documents.



But Bland doesn't believe there's anything to a UFO coverup, and he said that Marshall's signature could have been added to the bottom of some documents with the aid of scissors and a copying machine. Marshall does have a connection to outer space in NASA'a Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala. But Bland said the center was named after him because it was originally an Army facility and it was opened at about the time of his death, not because he had any particular interest in outer space. There are a number of reminders of Marshall in Uniontown, including the George C. Marshall Highway bypass around the city, a park and a memorial plaza at Uniontown's Five Corners intersection at Main and Fayette streets and Mt. Vernon Avenue.

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Mystery reptile lurking around Otay lakes

Fishermen flocking to Otay Lakes are discovering there is more than just fish in the water. The area just opened last week, but instead of talking about fishing, people have something else on their minds, 10News reported. Since June 2005, a creature dubbed "Otayzilla" has been lurking in and around the water. The mystery monster has been spotted at several places around the lake, which is located just south of Otay Lakes Road in Otay Mesa. "I was actually coming up on a boat at the end of Otay arm," said Jose Gutierrez, a fisherman. "There have been other fisherman who have seen it." It's not quite as scary as Godzilla, but Otayzilla is very real, according to 10News. "I know one fisherman, about a week ago, he said he thought it was an alligator," said Gutierrez. Officials say Otayzilla is not an alligator, but a monitor lizard.



A lot of people haven't seen Otayzilla, but most have heard about it. Several fishermen told 10News they had never seen Otayzilla. Mark Gartland is actually looking forward to seeing the creature. "I hope to see him. I'd like to be able to spot him," Gartland told 10News. Rick Sturm is a herpetoculturist and knows his reptiles, according to 10News. "It does look like a Nile monitor," Sturm said about Otayzilla.

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Could 'Bigfoot prints' be orang utan?

Another group which calls itself Asia Paranormal Investigators (API) claims to have shed some light on the Johor Bigfoot mystery. After doing historical research, map analysis and interviews of locals in Johor, API's founder Charles Goh, 38, a part-time tour guide, claims that the Bigfoot sightings in Johor were nothing more than misinformation.'Many different sightings reported actually stemmed from just one incident last November. The sightings in Mawai of three fish farm workers and the sightings in Kahang of three Orang Asli are the same,' said Mr Goh.He has led a few trips to Johor to verify witness accounts that were reported in the press.After carefully going through various media reports, he found inconsistencies, possibly due to insufficient information being released or poor interviewing techniques.For example, one reported sighting seemed to involve two locations - Kincin River and Kampung Mawai - but these are actually 80km apart.Mr Goh thinks the creature sighted in November could have been an orangutan species that managed to survive in Peninsular Malaysia for thousands of years.



He said: 'The other two known species are in Sumatra and Borneo island.'This could well be the third because Johor lies within the same geographical band.'The reason for there being more sightings in recent years could be due to human encroachment into pristine jungle habitats.'He added that there have been historical records of encounters between early settlers and orangutans on Mawai.

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New 'assassin spider' discovered

Researchers scouring the remote forests of the African island nation of Madagascar have found that tiny assassin spiders, grotesque-looking bugs that prey on other spiders, are more diverse than previously thought. The newly discovered species could shed light on how assassin spiders evolved, and perhaps point scientists to other places in Madagascar where other types could be located.Scientists from the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and researchers in Madagascar caught more than a million bugs, including the nine new species of assassin spiders, during a four-year expedition through the island's rain and deciduous forests.The bizarre-looking assassin spiders were once widely found around the world, but now are found in Madagascar, Australia and South Africa. About a dozen species of assassin spiders were previously discovered.



Assassin spiders, which grow to less than an eighth of an inch long, are notorious for stabbing helpless spiders with their sharp, venom-filled fangs attached to their super-sized jaws. Assassin spiders also possess very long necks so they can attack their prey from a distance.They do not spin webs to entrap their prey and they pose no threat to humans, said Charles Griswold, a curator at the academy.

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Dinosaur fossils could contain soft tissue

Soft-tissue dinosaur remains, first reported last year in a discovery that shocked the paleontological community, may not be all that rare, experts say. A 2005 paper in the journal Science described what appeared to be flexible blood vessels, cells, and collagen-like bone matrix from fossils of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. Mary Schweitzer, the North Carolina State University paleontologist who announced the finding, said her team has now repeated that feat with more than a dozen other dinosaur specimens. To make sense of the surprising discovery, scientists are beginning to rethink a long-standing model of how the fossilization process works. Schweitzer gave an update of her team's progress unraveling this mystery last Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held this year in St. Louis, Missouri. Traditional ideas of how fossils form do not allow for the preservation of soft, perishable organic tissues.



"We propose now that soft-tissue components of bone might persist in a lot more different animals, in a lot more ages and environments, than we once thought," Schweitzer said. "All we have to do is look." The researchers have applied their original technique of dissolving away the mineral content of bones and fossils to many different specimens, from contemporary to ancient.

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Phoenix worship started 7,400 years ago

New archaeological discoveries show that the worship of the phoenix by ancient Chinese can be dated back as early as 7,400 years ago in central China. A large amount of pottery, decorated with the patterns of beasts, the sun and birds have been excavated at the Gaomiao relics site in Hongjiang, Huaihua City of central China's Hunan Province, according to a report by the Guangming Daily. "The patterns of birds should be the phoenix worshipped by ancient Chinese," said He Gang, a researcher with the Hunan Institute of Archaeology. The worship of the phoenix, an imaginary totem like the dragon, originated in ancient people's praying for sunshine, rain and harvest, said He. The phoenix patterns at the Gaomiao ruins were some 400 years older than the phoenix patterns on ivory objects, unearthed from the 7,000-year-old Hemudu Neolithic site in east China's Zhejiang Province. Archaeologists said they have found a sacrificial altar, the earliest sacrificial site in China, at the Gaomiao site, covering an area of 1,000 square meters.

The bones of dozens of animals including deer, pigs, cattle, bears, elephants and rhinoceros have been excavated from the 39 sacrificial pits at the site. "The discovery of the altar and phoenix patterns are of great importance to research into the origin of religion and ancient civilization," said He.

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"Poor little Frankie"

Are spiritually aware parents really any better at parenting? CJ Stone advocates a few more cuffs around the ear... CJ Stone: My son is 24 years old and his name is Joe. Sometimes, under certain circumstances, I find myself obliged to explain how he was brought up. This is where it gets complicated. Officially I was a single parent. Unofficially, we lived in a commune, and the child-care was shared by all the adults in the household. I won't go into discussions of communal life at this point. Let's just say that I was relieved when it was all over, and that Joe - bless his heart - has turned out relatively normal. Too normal, I sometimes think. But at least he has had the experience of a variety of different points of view. I wasn't the only star in his firmament. We lived next door to an illustrator of children's books and his family: his wife and their eight-year old son Frankie. She was a Buddhist and we used to hear her chanting in the morning. It was hard to make out the words through the breakfast room wall. The tone, however, was like an hysterical vacuum-cleaner on hormone-replacement therapy, and the words sounded, to our uneducated ears, like "a-hole-in-yer-bum, a-hole-in-yer-bum, a-hole-in-yer-bum," repeated endlessly, over and over again. They were a very right-on New Age family. Wholefood-eating vegetarians, pacifist, ecologically-minded.

Little Frankie went to Steiner school. Which is all well-and-good, you might say. Nothing wrong with child-centred education and "honouring the child", except that - deliberately or not - the whole thing was actually really cruel. For instance, Frankie was made to wear backless clogs. Backless clogs! On an eight-year old! Have you ever tried to run in backless clogs? And isn't this exactly what an eight-year old is supposed to do: to run, in the sheer exuberance of his existence, for the joy of being alive? It was like he was being deliberately crippled. Poor little Frankie. It was the same with the wholefood diet. What child do you know who likes brown rice and lentils? Joe always got exactly what he wanted. At least that way he got food into his mouth. He liked fish-fingers and chips. He liked bacon and eggs. One day Frankie came round to play while Joe was eating his breakfast. Bacon and eggs and beans with a round of crusty white bread smothered in butter. And you could see it in Frankie's eyes. His pupils were dilating. He couldn't keep his eyes off the food. He was just staring and staring at the food on the plate and at Joe as he was eating it. And then he was salivating, really salivating. The drool was dribbling from his mouth and over his chin. Great globules of spit dripping down over his chest, soaking into the bib-front of his multi-coloured dungarees. Poor little Frankie. I would have loved to have given him a delicious plate of bacon and eggs too, only, of course, you cannot interfere. He was also not allowed to play with guns. You name me a boy-child who does not like to play with guns. I won't go into the Freudian implications of this, except to say that it is perfectly healthy. Almost anything can become a gun. One day Frankie was round our house again, playing in the back garden. He had a stick, and he was making "dat-dat-dat" noises with his mouth, aiming the improvised "gun" at the washing pole. "What are you shooting at Frankie?" I asked him. "I'm shooting my mum," he said, tottering on his backless clogs. "I've tied her up to the pole and I'm killing her. Dat-dat-dat. Dat-dat-dat. Drrrrrr. Ka-pow!" Poor little Frankie. I had to laugh though. At least he was getting his revenge. Sometimes I wonder what became of Frankie. The family only stayed next-door to us for a year or two. I expect he's a arms-trading psychopath by now, with a passion for raw meat. I only hope he is not cruel to his own children. But it makes you wonder, doesn't it? The things we do to our kids. It's one of the terrible consequences of the liberal sixties, that people stopped learning how to grow up. They became obsessed with their own spiritual path to personal enlightenment and refused to accept the burden of responsibility for their own children. Discipline was a dirty word. Kids were meant to develop "naturally", according to some sacred inner law of their being. Instead of which - and I've seen this - they just went feral. I think I understood this at a relatively early point. I went to a Divine Light mission once, at the invitation of a friend of mine who had joined the sect. This was in the early '70s. It was in a large hall in Acton.

Everyone was milling around with beaming smiles of bliss on their newly-enlightened faces, while the kids just ran around and played. No one was paying any attention to the kids. One of them came up to me. He did that trick - you know: he pointed to my chest and said, "what's that", and I looked and he brought his hand sharply up to my nose, and then laughed brattishly. Well I was a stranger. What could I do? I wanted to clip him round the ear, but it was not up to me to discipline the child. Meanwhile, his parents were somewhere else, hugging each other, no doubt, and looking lovingly into each-other's eyes. But actually kids love discipline. They need discipline. Watch a lioness with her cubs when one of them is annoying her. She will cuff it round the ear, in exactly the way I wished the parents of that child would do, just to teach him respect for his elders.

Which is how, at least, I brought my son up.

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Johor bans foreign ape man hunt

The southern Malaysian state of Johor has threatened to jail foreigners who venture into its jungles looking for a legendary ape man, dubbed 'Big Foot'. The state's Forestry Department says Big Foot enthusiasts found on its land without a permit will face up to three years jail or a fine of up to $2,500. The hunt for Big Foot has gripped Malaysia after a spate of sightings. Now authorities are determined that if the ape man exists, Malaysians will be the first to find him. Malaysians are being invited to pay just over $1 for a permit to roam around Johor state's forest reserves, where most of the reported sightings have taken place. The state also plans to sponsor a scientific expedition, and although Malaysia has few primate specialists, foreigners will again not be invited. Local tourism industry leaders told the BBC the ban on non-Malaysians entering forest reserves was daft and should be rethought.

The country hopes to lure 20 million foreign visitors next year and its main attractions are its beaches and its jungles. Tourism bosses say the move will simply confuse and possibly drive away just the people they want to attract.

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A not-so-brief history of time

Dan Smail, a medievalist who arrived last month at Harvard's history department, is a time revolutionary. Historians, Smail says, are in thrall to a chronology of the human race that is, by now, embarrassingly out of date. He wants to move the start date of introductory history courses back, oh, 100,000 years or so.If you have taken the first part of a two-semester, college-level history survey class, you know how it usually starts: a few desultory comments about ''prehistory" and then a pronouncement that civilization as we know it had its first stirrings in the Fertile Crescent, around 4,000 to 6,000 BC. But as Smail points out in an article in the latest issue of the American Historical Review, when you consider recent (and not-so-recent) discoveries in archeology, anthropology, and biology -- the finding that all humankind traces to Africa, for example, or that humans were on the march out of that continent by roughly 100,000 BC, not to mention good guesses for when language, hunting, and farming arose -- the fixation on a start date of 4,000 to 6,000 BC begins to seem awfully arbitrary.And yet, as Smail goes on to argue in his essay, suggestively titled ''In the Grip of Sacred History," this chronological tick has a very interesting back-story.

''Every history curriculum in secondary schools and colleges that tacitly accepts a Near Eastern origin around 6,000 years ago," Smail writes, ''contains the unintended echo of the Judeo-Christian mythology of the special creation of man in the Garden of Eden."Through the 18th century and well into the 19th, Western historians, almost all of them Christian, thought that humankind (and Earth) dated to roughly 4,000 to 7,000 BC. (One especially influential estimate pinpointed 4,004 BC.) And many thought that the Garden of Eden could be traced to the Fertile Crescent. Smail's theory is that, in the 19th century, as the biblical timeline lost credibility and the staggering age of the Earth began to be glimpsed, historians reflexively clung to as much of the traditional timeline as they could. A true reckoning with the long timelines envisioned by Darwin never occurred.

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How advanced were the ancient Minoans ?

A geometrical figure commonly attributed to Archimedes in 300 BC has been identified in Minoan wall paintings dated to over 1,000 years earlier. The mathematical features of the paintings suggest that the Minoans of the Late Bronze Age, around 1650 BC, had a much more advanced working knowledge of geometry than has previously been recognized, says computer scientist Constantin Papaodysseus of the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and his colleagues.The paintings appear in a building that is still being excavated and restored in the ancient Minoan town of Akrotiri on the island of Thera. A catastrophic eruption of the volcano on Thera, now known as Santorini, around 1650 BC, is thought to have dealt a fatal blow to the Minoan culture. The blast covered Akrotiri, on the island's southern coast, in a thick layer of ash that preserved many buildings and artefacts.Ten or so buildings have been excavated in Akrotiri so far, including a large one known as Xeste 3, which stands close to the ancient quay. Judging from its large size and extensive wall decorations, Xeste 3 appears to have been some kind of public building, such as a temple or a place for ritual ceremonies.The most impressive feature of the paintings found in Xeste 3 is a series of spirals, each about 32 centimetres in diameter and embellished with dots. Papaodysseus and his team have shown that these are near-perfect Archimedes' spirals: shapes tightly defined by a simple mathematical formula, in which the distance between the windings is constant.



Some spirals, such as the ones found on snail shells, are common in nature. And others can be easily made by unwinding a thread around a central peg. But the Archimedes' spiral is not like either of these. "Seemingly it does not exist in nature," the researchers say."This is the earliest time that such advanced geometric figures have been spotted," says Papaodysseus. "The next such figures appear only 1,300 years later." The team report their work in the journal Archaeometry.Papaodysseus and his co-workers admit that they cannot know how much the Theran artists actually understood about the geometric principles they used for the paintings, because no written documents from this period are known to exist.