Science Special News

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Up jumps the 'Da Vinci' devil

Doubt the Bible? Question Jesus? Hint at secrets? Make way for crowds. Books and movies about conspiracy theories and skeptical views of religion are sure paths to popular attention. And some people say the devil is behind such works - whether the authors are aware of this or not, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup survey.The nationwide telephone survey of 1,013 U.S. adults, conducted May 5-7, found that 19 percent see Satan trying to destroy people's religious faith when sales soar for books, movies and studies that raise doubts about Jesus or the Bible. People who attend church weekly were more likely to believe that.The movie version of Dan Brown's mega-selling novel, "The Da Vinci Code," which claims the Catholic Church conspired, even killed, to hide Jesus' secret marriage to Mary Magdalene, opens May 19.It follows closely on the heels of "The Gospel of Judas," released at Easter time by National Geographic.

That was the first translation of an ancient manuscript that presents Judas as Jesus' best buddy doing God's will, not the vile betrayer shown in the Bible.However, most people (72 percent) say it's human nature to be skeptical about religion. And Catholics, whose historical church fathers take a heavy beating in Brown's book, were least likely to blame an evil force."The devil has always been a scapegoat," says Terrence Tilley, a professor of philosophy of religion and Catholic theology at the University of Dayton in Ohio.Still, "some of (Brown's book) is so like what people would like to believe that it's easy for people to start believing the whole thing. Scholars really get their dander up when obvious fiction and legend is called fact," say Tilley, who has spoken about the book on panels from Dayton to Dublin.

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Does the 'lost city' of Johor exist ?

The "lost city" of Gelanggi or Linggiu, claimed to have been hidden in the jungles of Johor for more than a thousand years, does not exist, said an archaeologist in the National Heritage Department. Khalid Syed Ali, the curator of archaeology in the department's research and development division, said a team of researchers carried out a study over a month in July last year but found no evidence of the "lost city".The 15-strong team was headed by the Director-General of Museum and Antiquity Datuk Dr Adi Taha, he said in a working paper presented at a forum organised by the National Museum here.The search was launched following a claim made by an independent researcher Raimy Che Ros that he had found evidence of the "lost city" after 12 years of research.

The claim, published in a newspaper in February last year, created public excitement because Linggiu was said to be older than the Borobudur Buddhist temple in Indonesia built between 750 and 842 A.D. and Cambodia's Angkor Wat built 300 years later.Khalid said Raimy was believed to have come up with his claim based on his research of literature on Malay history and did not discover any physical traces of the "lost city".The search team led by Adi comprised researchers from his department, Malaysian Centre for Remote Sensing, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Malaya, Universiti Perguruan Sultan Idris and Malaysian Archaeology Association.

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'Brazilian Stonehenge' discovered

Brazilian archaeologists have found an ancient stone structure in a remote corner of the Amazon that may cast new light on the region's past. The site, thought to be an observatory or place of worship, pre-dates European colonisation and is said to suggest a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy. Its appearance is being compared to the English site of Stonehenge. It was traditionally thought that before European colonisation, the Amazon had no advanced societies. The archaeologists made the discovery in the state of Amapa, in the far north of Brazil. A total of 127 large blocks of stone were found driven into the ground on top of a hill. Well preserved and each weighing several tons, the stones were arranged upright and evenly spaced. It is not yet known when the structure was built, but fragments of indigenous pottery found at the site are thought to be 2,000 years old. What impressed researchers was the sophistication of the construction.

The stones appear to have been laid out to help pinpoint the winter solstice, when the sun is at its lowest in the sky. It is thought the ancient people of the Amazon used the stars and phases of the moon to determine crop cycles. Although the discovery at Amapa is being compared to Stonehenge, the ancient stone circle in southern England, the English site is considerably older. It is thought to have been erected some time between 3000 and 1600 BC.

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UFOs ? It's just the weather

Cheltenham ufo expert Robin Cole has backed a government report dismissing the idea that mysterious objects in the sky are aliens. Defence Intelligence Staff examined 30 years of flying saucer sightings and came to the conclusion that UFOs are probably caused by the weather.The 400-page report says those seeing glowing round or cigar-shaped objects in the sky were describing unusual but entirely natural events in the atmosphere.Maintenance engineer Robin, 40, says he sees a lot of sense in the report.A member of the Cheltenham-based Circular Forum, one of the longest running UFO groups in the country, he said: "I don't think aliens exist in the way the media suggests they do. I call them unidentified flying anomalies rather than objects because they aren't always solid."If people see something in the sky, they think it's a UFO because that's the conclusion they've been educated to come to."I'm always more objective in my line of thought.

I've made a few enemies in the UFO field for taking that stance."Robin has been interested in UFOs since spotting one when he was a child growing up in Leckhampton.He reckons he witnessed a solid metallic object at close quarters. He said: "Who knows what they are and that's why there is such an interest."There's no solid evidence to back anything up. The Government is saying it's an anomaly and that theory has been going around for years."

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US releases 9/11 Pentagon video

The US justice department has released the first video of the plane crashing into the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the US military headquarters, killing 184 people, after it was hijacked as part of an al-Qaeda plot. The release of the video, taken from a Pentagon security camera, comes after a Freedom of Information Act request by legal watchdog Judicial Watch. The group said it hoped to dispel conspiracy theories about the crash. "Finally, we hope that this video will put to rest the conspiracy theories involving American Airlines Flight 77," president Tom Fitton said. Some theorists have suggested the aircraft was shot down in flight, and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile. Stills released in 2002 showed the moment the hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon, killing 125 people in the building and 59 passengers and crew. The crash came shortly after two other hijacked airlines were flown into the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York. Judicial Watch filed the freedom of information request in 2004, but the Pentagon refused to release the video because it was part of the investigation involving al-Qaeda plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, the group said.

This February the group sued the government over its refusal, saying there was "no legal basis" for it. Washington agreed to release the video after a court sentenced Moussaoui to life in jail for his role in 9/11 earlier this month, a Judicial Watch spokeswoman told the BBC. The group said it fought to obtain the video because "it was very important to complete the public record" on the attacks. French author Thierry Meyssan alleged that Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon and suggested a truck bomb or missile caused the damage.

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Nasa tracks cataclysmic asteroid

Mark your calendar for Sunday, April 13, 2036. That's when a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis could hit the Earth with enough force to obliterate a small state.The odds of a collision are 1-in-6,250. But while that's a long shot at the racetrack, the stakes are too high for astronomers to ignore.For now, Apophis represents the most imminent threat from the worst type of natural disaster known, one reason NASA is spending millions to detect the threat from this and other asteroids.A direct hit on an urban area could unleash more destruction than Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake combined. The blast would equal 880 million tons of TNT or 65,000 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.Objects this size are thought to hit Earth about once every 1,000 years, and, according to recent estimates, the risk of dying from a renegade space rock is comparable to the hazards posed by tornadoes and snakebites. Those kind of statistics have moved the once-far-fetched topic of killer asteroids from Hollywood movie sets to the halls of Congress."Certainly we had a major credibility problem at the beginning - a giggle factor," said David Morrison, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

"Now, many people are aware this is something we can actually deal with, mitigate and defend against."In 1998, lawmakers formally directed NASA to identify by 2008 at least 90 percent of the asteroids more than a kilometer (0.6 mile) wide that orbit the sun and periodically cross Earth's path. That search is now more than three-quarters complete.Last year, Congress directed the space agency to come up with options for deflecting potential threats. Ideas seriously discussed include lasers on the moon, futuristic "gravity tractors," spacecraft that ram incoming objects and Hollywood's old standby, nuclear weapons.To help explore possible alternatives, former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart has formed the B612 Foundation. The organization's goal is to be able to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.

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Uri Gellar buys home of Elvis on Ebay

Psychic Uri Geller and two partners have bought the Tennessee house Elvis Presley lived in before moving to Graceland, with a winning bid of $905,100 on eBay, he said on Monday. "We are unbelievably pleased. This is a piece of history," Geller said by phone from England."We intend to restore it to its old glory. We would like to bring sick children there (for tours), Palestinian children, Israeli children, American children," the Israeli-born Geller said. "Hopefully one day we might get approval to turn it into a museum."Presley bought the four-bedroom, two-bath house at 1034 Audubon Drive in Memphis in 1956 with a down payment of $500. He lived there for 13 months before moving to Graceland, the now-famous Memphis estate where he died in 1977.During his time in the white, ranch-style house with an outdoor swimming pool, Presley's career took off with hits such as "All Shook Up" and "Don't be cruel."

Geller identified the sellers as Mike and Cindy Hazen, who bought the house some years ago, though not from Presley, for about $180,000.Geller had original bid $300,000 last month but a bidding war ensued and the price ballooned, he said. During the process he was approached by dozens of people wanting to go in with him, he said. He chose two, New York lawyer Pete Gleason and Lisbeth Silvandersson, a Swedish-born jewelry maker who lives in England, as equal partners.He had set a ceiling price of $1.11 million, said Geller, who acknowledges a paranormal fascination with the number 11."As the clock closed on the bidding Sunday," Geller said, "I felt intuitively I got the price. I was text messaging Gleason and it was exactly 11 on my mobile phone and suddenly the radio started playing an Elvis song. That was Elvis telling me we got the house!"

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Neanderthal yields nuclear DNA

The first sequences of nuclear DNA to be taken from a Neanderthal have been reported at a US science meeting. Geneticist Svante Paabo and his team say they isolated the long segments of genetic material from a 45,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil from Croatia. The work should reveal how closely related the Neanderthal species was to modern humans, Homo sapiens. Details were presented at a conference at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and reported by News@Nature. It is a significant advance on previous research that has extracted mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) specimens. This genetic material is contained in structures that power cells; and although the information it holds is very useful, it is more limited in scope than the DNA bundled up at the cell's centre. This nuclear DNA is what really drives an organism's biochemistry. So far, Paabo and colleagues have managed to sequence around a million base-pairs, which comprises 0.03% of the Neanderthal's entire DNA "catalogue", or genome. Base-pairs are the simplest bonded chemical units which hold together the DNA double helix.

The genetic material comes from a 45,000-year-old male Neanderthal specimen found in Vindija Cave outside Zagreb, the News@Nature website reports. Preliminary analysis shows the bundle of DNA responsible for maleness in the Neanderthal - its Y chromosome - is very different from modern human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes; more so than for the other chromosomes in the genome.

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The dark side of future technology

As far as anyone knows, the plight of civilization is nowhere near as dire as in the opening pages of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where alien spaceships are poised to destroy Earth to make way for an interstellar highway. Still, with resource consumption and environmental destruction rising at unsustainable rates, plenty of people view the future with alarm. That spotlights technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and nanotechnology, which are often cited as crucial to heading off economic and environmental disaster.The catch is that any technology powerful enough to improve life radically is also capable of abuse and prone to serious, unanticipated side effects. It's a great time to be a Hollywood screenwriter, but rough on policy makers and business strategists. Mix new technologies with the wide variations in how organizations and individuals behave, and you often have "a recipe for explosion," said Edward Tenner, author of "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences." The table setter for fears about potentially useful technology was nuclear power, which emerged as an energy source while images of the waste laid to Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in 1945 were still fresh.

"It's not the probability of a nuclear accident that matters in people's attitudes," said Charles B. Perrow, a risk analysis expert whose newest book, "Disaster Evermore? U.S. Vulnerability to Natural, Industrial and Terrorist Disasters," will be published this summer. "It's the possibility, which is very much there." Despite several close calls, the deadly explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 is the utility industry's sole catastrophic failure. But the costs imposed on power companies to manage risks had already halted expansion of the nuclear power industry in the United States and elsewhere in the 70's.

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80-yr-old woman eats stones for 70 years

There is a mystical old woman living in a small village in Guofu town, Qijiang county, Chong Qing city, China. The woman is nearly 80 years old. For the last 70 years, she has eaten smallstones every day and appears to be healthier than other villagers her age. According to the "Approaches to Science" TV program, Darong is a typical village in that area. However, because the strange old woman by the name of Luo Kairong lives there, this secluded village has become famous. A villager said, "She is very healthy. We have never seen her unwell. She is competent at several things. She can carry things in the fields in winter and cut firewood in her bare feet." We understand that Luo has eaten small stones for more than 70 years and even once ate half a wall. From her appearance, she looks like any other elderly peasant. There is nothing overtly different. Granny Luo said that she is particular about the stones she eats. She never eats "soft" stones; her favorites are the very hard green sandstones gathered from the mountains.

To her, the harder stones are tastier. She eats stones just like ordinary people munch on peanuts. Looking at the doubtful expressions in our eyes, she brings a red cloth bag from her house and stuffs her mouth with a handful of gravel. Granny Luo eats these stones nonstop and chews with great gusto. Seeing is believing. It is hard to believe that an 80-year-old woman could consume so many small stones. Granny Luo told us that her teeth have been worn down from eating the stones. She has had to replace her dentures three times. Then, why can an elderly person swallow a stone that is seemingly tasteless and hard to swallow without being choked or falling sick? Experts say this could possibly be related to the fact that Granny Luo has eaten soil since childhood.

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