Science Special News

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Falling ice perplexes scientists

The skies are raining big chunks of ice, and experts ranging from scientists to federal investigators are scrambling to learn what's going on. For the second time in a week, California was the victim of an aerial, icy assault, the latest being early Thursday when a chunk of ice the size of a microwave oven plunged out of a cloudless sky into the San Bernardino County town of Loma Linda. The ice punched through the metal roof of a recreation center, leaving a hole up to 2 1/2 feet wide, then fragmented into opaque, brilliant white chunks, one as big as a bowling ball. No one was hurt. Two tennis players were batting a ball around outside the Drayson Center at Loma Linda University on Thursday morning when they heard a strange sound, said Rolland Crawford, Loma Linda Fire Department division chief. "They described it as the sound an artillery shell would make -- shoosh, shoosh,'' he said. "They looked up. They didn't see the ice, nor did they see a plane.''

A similar incident occurred last Saturday in Oakland, where a plunging ice ball plowed into a field at Bushrod Park on Shattuck Avenue and blasted out a crater up to 2 feet wide. Again, no one was hurt. The simplest, least controversial hypothesis is that the ice was dropped from airplanes, but there's little direct support for that view. A few experts who study such phenomena have suggested that similar occurrences around the world owe more to exotic causes, perhaps even global warming. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the two latest cases under the theory that the ice fell from an aircraft, FAA spokesman Mike Fergus said Friday. Such cases can be very tough to solve, he said.

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Spirits in the sky

Across Australia, people are looking to the skies for a saviour. Many people have seen objects in the sky that they could not identify, and many believe that we are not alone in the universe.But there are also people who have built spiritual belief systems around the idea that aliens once came to Earth, and will return one day to take them away to a better place. The Raelians, who had their "annual awakening seminar" earlier this month in Queensland, are a prominent group in Australia that believe aliens created them and will return. These are most commonly referred to as UFO cults, the most infamous of which is Heaven's Gate, whose 39 members committed suicide in 1997 in the hope that their souls would catch a ride to the Kingdom of Heaven on a passing spaceship. But Monash University sociology professor Gary Bouma said religions based on UFOs are an "exceedingly tiny fraction" of religious groups. Professor Bouma, an expert on religion and society, said they were "one of the absolute fringes of spirituality". "It's simply a tiny little group pursuing an esoteric idea. Life has been full of them, they've come and gone," he said. "They never stand up against the mainstream, for a whole variety of reasons." But since space travel began in the 1950s, the idea of extraterrestrials has taken hold of people's imaginations.

Films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and television series like The X-Files have made aliens and UFOs a part of popular culture. There is even a predominant image of an alien - a small, grey creature with big, dark eyes. And with new technology such as the internet, small groups can have a large and enduring presence. The Raelians are one group that has used the internet to become a worldwide phenomenon. They have an international headquarters in Switzerland, and offices all over the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. They claim there are up to 70,000 Raelians worldwide, with about 500 in Australia. A registered non-profit organisation, their main aim is "to create peace on Earth".

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Asteroid impacts lead to primitive life

Australian National University scientists have observed a link between asteroid and comet bombardment of the Earth and the emergence of primitive bacterial life forms in the ancient oceans billions of years ago. Studying ancient iron-rich sediments in Western Australia and South Africa, Dr Andrew Glikson and colleague Mr John Vickers, from the Department of Earth and Marine Sciences at ANU discovered that the formation of banded iron formations, jasper and iron-rich shale coincided closely with asteroid and comet <http://physorg.com/news64678130.html> impacts. The impacts of the asteroids and comets caused volcanic and hydrothermal activity including eruption of iron-rich basalt, according to Dr Glickson. This created an environment which suited primitive bacteria that lived on the floor of the early oceans, and which derived their energy by oxidising water-soluble (ferrous) iron into insoluble (ferric) iron. This bacterial activity is thought to have precipitated iron and silica-rich sediments, known as banded iron formations, in areas such as the Pilbara in Western Australia.

These banded iron formations host the huge Hamersley and Yarrie iron ore deposits of the Pilbara region. Dr Glikson made the link when studying whether extraterrestrial impacts could be one of the underlying factors in the appearance of these banded iron formations, spanning ages of 3.5 to 2.4 billion years, which extend over distances of hundreds of kilometres in Western Australia, South Africa, Brazil and Canada. He found that deposition of iron-rich sediments closely followed massive collisions between asteroids and the Earth at several points in Earth history, including at 3.47, 3.26, 3.24 and 2.63 billion years ago.

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Malaysia denies catching 'baby Bigfoot'

Malaysian wildlife officials denied capturing a baby "Bigfoot" on Thursday, amid fevered speculation over the existence of the mythical creature in the nation's southern jungles. The Berita Harian newspaper reported that a young Bigfoot was caught by a group of men thought to be from the Wildlife and National Parks Department (Perhilitan) near the southern town of Kota Tinggi two weeks ago.The paper quoted local residents as saying they had spoken to men who described shooting the creature with tranquilliser darts. The locals then peeked into the back of the their truck to see a large, hairy creature.But the department's director general Datuk Musa Nordin denied the report."During the period reported, Perhilitan did not mount any operation in the area," Musa said in a statement carried by the official Bernama news agency.Freddie Long, the Tourism and Environment Committee chairperson in southern Johor state, said that if a Bigfoot had been captured, it should have been given to local authorities for research.Bigfoot fever erupted last December when some workers claimed to have spotted three of the beasts, two adults and a youngster, on the edge of a Johor forest reserve.

The tale was given wide coverage in the national press, which also carried stories of other sightings, some dating back decades, and printed photographs of supposed footprints -- vague impressions in the jungle floor.Local authorities treated the claims seriously, with plans for an official expedition to track down the mysterious beasts, and setting up a telephone hotline to report sightings.Suggestions that the story has been cooked up to lure tourists to Johor have been denied.Stories of mythical ape-like creatures have been reported in wilderness areas all over the world. They are known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch in the United States and Canada, and yetis in the Himalayas.

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Mapasaurus joins ranks of largest carnivores

Scientists are learning more about what appears to be one of the biggest meat-eating dinosaurs known, a two-legged beast whose bones were found several years ago in the fossil-rich Patagonia region of Argentina. One expert called the discovery the first substantial evidence of group living by large meat-eaters other than tyrannosaurs like T. rex.The creature, which apparently measured more than 40 feet long, is called Mapusaurus roseae.The discovery of Mapusaurus included bones from at least seven to nine of the beasts, suggesting the previously unknown animal may have lived and hunted in groups. That hunting strategy might have allowed it to attack even bigger beasts, huge plant-eating dinosaurs.The find was reported in 2000 by The Associated Press. It is described in the latest issue of the journal Geodiversitas by paleontologists Rodolfo Coria of the Carmen Funes Museum in Plaza Huincul, Argentina, and Philip Currie of the University of Alberta in Canada. They oversaw the excavation of the dinosaur's remains about 15 miles south of Plaza Huincul from 1997 to 2001. Mapusaurus is estimated to have lived about 100 million years ago.Currie, in an e-mail, said it's hard to say how long the biggest specimen was because no complete skeleton was found.

He estimated it may have measured about 41 feet from the snout to the tip of the tail.It may have been about a foot longer than Giganotosaurus, also found in Patagonia, but without a complete skeleton "you will never know,'' he wrote.The Field Museum in Chicago says its T. rex skeleton, Sue, is 42 feet long.Thomas Holtz Jr., a University of Maryland dinosaur expert, said that Mapusaurus clearly joins Giganotosaurus, T. rex and a huge African beast called Spinosaurus as among the biggest carnivorous dinosaurs. But he said it's impossible to know exactly how they rank in overall size. The fossil record is too fragmentary, and unlikely to capture the biggest individual of each species, he said.

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Secret rivers found in Antarctic

Antarctica's buried lakes are connected by a network of rivers moving water far beneath the surface, say UK scientists. It was thought the sub-glacial lakes had been completely sealed for millions of years, enabling unique species to evolve in them. Writing in the journal Nature, experts say international plans to drill into the lakes may now have to be reviewed. Any attempts to drill into one body of water risks contaminating others. "What this paper shows is that not only could you contaminate a lake, you could contaminate the whole drainage system," lead author Duncan Wingham, of University College London, told the BBC News website. The sub-glacial lakes of Antarctica are regarded as "time capsules" of the period when the continent began to freeze over. Scientists believe any life they contain might shed light on extreme environments on other worlds, such as the ice-bound ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa. The presence of the drainage system may change current thinking on the chances of finding microbial life that has evolved "independently".

"The notion that these things have been sitting in the lakes evolving for millions of years probably won't wash," said Professor Wingham. "I think the idea that they have an isolated biological environment where things have gone their own way will have to be re-examined." Professor Martin Siegert, of the University of Bristol, a co-author of the Nature study, said there would still be a very interesting microbiological story to uncover. "We have always thought of sub-glacial lakes as being distinct bodies isolated from each other," he said. "For at least some of these lakes, that won't be true but they will still be isolated from the atmosphere."

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Can sleep patterns explain close encounters ?

Over the past 30 years or so thousands of people around the world have reported being abducted by aliens. The basics of their experiences are familiar to us all, courtesy of a host of television shows and documentaries.It goes something like this: one moment they were lying in bed or driving along a lonely road, and the next they'd been whisked away to a flying saucer and subjected to shocking experiments by extraterrestrials with big heads, almond eyes and slits for nostrils.The people who report such visitations are utterly convinced they happened, but there is no evidence that aliens have ever been on the planet. In an effort to understand this disparity, researchers have been studying the psychology of alien abductees, with some revealing results.A recent study was reported by Professor Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, University of London.French and his colleagues wanted to compare the psychology of a group of 19 people who believed they had had experiences of alien encounters and another group of 19 age-and gender-matched people who hadn't. The team subjected all the people to tests that measured their tendency to have paranormal beliefs and hallucinations, the ease with which they become engrossed in experiences and their propensity to enter into altered states of consciousness.

On all those scales, the 19 who said they had experiences of alien encounters scored significantly higher than the control group."What was interesting was that the 'experiencers' scored more highly for paranormal beliefs and other paranormal experiences," French says. "It's not just that these people have one-off experiences - they have a range of them."The researchers also asked the subjects if they had experienced a little-known phenomenon called sleep paralysis, a condition that takes place when our sleep cycles slip out of synchronisation. Rather than moving easily between sleeping and waking, we get caught midway.

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Experts find evidence of Bosnia pyramid

Researchers on Wednesday unearthed geometrically cut stone slabs that they said could form part of the sloping surface of what they believe is an ancient pyramid lying beneath a huge hill. Archaeologists and other experts began digging at this central Bosnian town last week to explore the team leader's theory that the 2,120-foot hill covers a step pyramid, which would be the first ever found in Europe."These are the first uncovered walls of the pyramid," Semir Osmanagic, a Bosnian archaeologist who studied the pyramids of Latin America for 15 years, said of the stonework found Wednesday."We can see the surface is perfectly flat. This is the crucial material proof that we are talking pyramids," he said.Osmanagic believes the structure will prove to be 722 feet high, or a third taller than Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.The huge stone blocks discovered Wednesday appeared to be cut in cubes and polished."It is so obvious that the top of the blocks, the surface is man-made," Osmanagic said.Earlier research on the hill, known as Visocica, found that it has 45-degree slopes pointing toward the cardinal points and a flat top.

Under layers of dirt, workers discovered a paved entrance plateau, entrances to tunnels and large stone blocks.Satellite photographs and thermal imaging revealed two other, smaller pyramid-shaped hills in the Visoko Valley.Last week's excavations began with a team of rescue workers from a nearby coal mine being sent into a tunnel believed to be part of an underground network connecting the three pyramid-shaped hills.They were followed by archeologists, geologists and other experts who emerged from the tunnel later to declare that it was certainly man-made.

[Rasputin]

Asteroid impacts lead to primitive life

Australian National University scientists have observed a link between asteroid and comet bombardment of the Earth and the emergence of primitive bacterial life forms in the ancient oceans billions of years ago. Studying ancient iron-rich sediments in Western Australia and South Africa, Dr Andrew Glikson and colleague Mr John Vickers, from the Department of Earth and Marine Sciences at ANU discovered that the formation of banded iron formations, jasper and iron-rich shale coincided closely with asteroid and comet <http://physorg.com/news64678130.html> impacts. The impacts of the asteroids and comets caused volcanic and hydrothermal activity including eruption of iron-rich basalt, according to Dr Glickson. This created an environment which suited primitive bacteria that lived on the floor of the early oceans, and which derived their energy by oxidising water-soluble (ferrous) iron into insoluble (ferric) iron. This bacterial activity is thought to have precipitated iron and silica-rich sediments, known as banded iron formations, in areas such as the Pilbara in Western Australia.

These banded iron formations host the huge Hamersley and Yarrie iron ore deposits of the Pilbara region. Dr Glikson made the link when studying whether extraterrestrial impacts could be one of the underlying factors in the appearance of these banded iron formations, spanning ages of 3.5 to 2.4 billion years, which extend over distances of hundreds of kilometres in Western Australia, South Africa, Brazil and Canada. He found that deposition of iron-rich sediments closely followed massive collisions between asteroids and the Earth at several points in Earth history, including at 3.47, 3.26, 3.24 and 2.63 billion years ago.

[Rasputin]

Spirits in the sky

Across Australia, people are looking to the skies for a saviour. Many people have seen objects in the sky that they could not identify, and many believe that we are not alone in the universe.But there are also people who have built spiritual belief systems around the idea that aliens once came to Earth, and will return one day to take them away to a better place. The Raelians, who had their "annual awakening seminar" earlier this month in Queensland, are a prominent group in Australia that believe aliens created them and will return. These are most commonly referred to as UFO cults, the most infamous of which is Heaven's Gate, whose 39 members committed suicide in 1997 in the hope that their souls would catch a ride to the Kingdom of Heaven on a passing spaceship. But Monash University sociology professor Gary Bouma said religions based on UFOs are an "exceedingly tiny fraction" of religious groups. Professor Bouma, an expert on religion and society, said they were "one of the absolute fringes of spirituality". "It's simply a tiny little group pursuing an esoteric idea. Life has been full of them, they've come and gone," he said. "They never stand up against the mainstream, for a whole variety of reasons." But since space travel began in the 1950s, the idea of extraterrestrials has taken hold of people's imaginations.

Films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and television series like The X-Files have made aliens and UFOs a part of popular culture. There is even a predominant image of an alien - a small, grey creature with big, dark eyes. And with new technology such as the internet, small groups can have a large and enduring presence. The Raelians are one group that has used the internet to become a worldwide phenomenon. They have an international headquarters in Switzerland, and offices all over the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. They claim there are up to 70,000 Raelians worldwide, with about 500 in Australia. A registered non-profit organisation, their main aim is "to create peace on Earth".