Science Special News

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Space Shuttle crew check for damage

Discovery's crew used highly sensitive cameras attached to a 15-metre boom yesterday to carefully examine the space shuttle for any signs of damage from the previous day's launch. Nothing serious was reported, but it was much too early to draw any conclusions, officials said. The only unusual thing found, at least for now, was a whitish splotch on Discovery's right wing that looked like a bird dropping. There was one on the wing nearly three weeks ago at the launch pad; flight director Tony Ceccacci said he saw it there from a distance of no more than three metres. "We didn't touch anything if that's what you're asking," Ceccacci said, drawing a big laugh. Ceccacci said the imagery experts will study the splotch and make sure it's nothing more than a bird's shuttle signature. If that's what it is, it will burn off during the ride back from space, he said. There wasn't enough heat during launch to get rid of the residue, he said.

Discovery was on target for a linkup today with the International Space Station and operating well, the flight director said. Live video of Discovery's Independence Day launch showed small chunks of debris falling from the external fuel tank, at least one piece hitting the shuttle. Using new inspection techniques implemented after the 2003 Columbia disaster, the astronauts yesterday were taking more images with laser, digital and video cameras that can spot damage as small as three millimetres.

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UFO conference held in South Africa

Thanks to Hollywood and the X-Files, most people know something about unidentified flying objects. But few people would know how, or where, to report a sighting.Cristo Louw, a "ufologist" from Bellville, discussed this and other issues about extra-terrestrials at a UFO conference, held at the University of Cape Town on Saturday. About 50 people who claim to have had close encounters with aliens and mysterious objects attended the Unbind Your Mind conference, held to mark World UFO Day, celebrated internationally on Sunday."The most interesting discussion was about 'star kids' or children who are born wise beyond their years," said Louw.He said star kids were "highly evolved" beings who knew they had come to Earth from somewhere else and often have the solutions to global problems.Louw said other topics discussed included the history of UFO sightings in South Africa and the proposed Open Contact law that would permit people to make contact with extra-terrestrials. Louw also told the group about a letter written to President Thabo Mbeki asking him about his knowledge of UFO sightings.

Despite having made more than 20 calls, he continued to await a response from the president, Louw said. But an amused Louw said Mbeki's office did say that the department of environment and tourism would handle UFO-related queries. Louw, who has been interested in all things celestial since he was a child, is one of the few South Africans who can legitimately claim to be a UFO "expert".

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Woman tries to clear name of convicted witch

Grace Sherwood was a healer, a midwife and a widowed mother of three sons. Her neighbors thought she also was a witch who ruined crops, killed livestock and conjured storms. On July 10, 1706, the 46-year-old woman was tied up and "ducked"--dropped into a river--in what is now Virginia Beach. The theory behind the test was that if she sank, she was innocent, although she'd also likely drown. She floated--proof she was guilty because the pure water cast out her evil spirit. Three hundred years later, a modern-day resident of this resort city has asked the governor to exonerate Sherwood, Virginia's only convicted witch tried by water. Belinda Nash, 59, also is raising money to erect a bronze statue of Sherwood and trying to find a place to put it. "I would like to see her name cleared because I don't believe she was a witch," said Nash, who has an affinity for Sherwood in part because Nash's reputation for having things she wishes for come true earned her the nickname "Samantha the Witch."

"Otherwise, I'd be ducked (too)," she added with a smile in an interview at the Ferry Plantation House, a historic home where she volunteers as director and, dressed in costume, tells visitors about "poor Grace." The courthouse where part of Sherwood's witchcraft trial took place was located on the old Ferry farm property, Nash said. Nearby is the Western Branch of the Lynnhaven River, where Sherwood was ducked at a site now known as Witchduck Point. Nash hopes Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will decide whether to vindicate Sherwood's name by the 300th anniversary of the ducking, which Nash and a small group will commemorate with a re-enactment, as they do yearly, her daughter playing Sherwood.

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Satanic curses

In September this year, a woman in Guyana was convicted of bludgeoning a friend to death. Her friend, she explained, was possessed, and she was trying to beat the Devil out. In Romania, meanwhile, a priest and four nuns from the Romanian Orthodox Church are on trial, accused of murdering a 23-year-old novice. In his defence, the priest who led the exorcism has claimed his approach was better than the medical treatment she had been receiving for her schizophrenia. It's an older story, though, that inspired a film out this month, The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It concerns the death of Anneliese Michel, a Bavarian woman who died in 1976, aged 23, also after an exorcism. The two priests involved were charged with negligent homicide. So were the woman's parents. Born in 1952, Michel was raised in a strict Catholic family. While other teenagers were experimenting with sex and rebelling against authority, she tried to atone for the sins of wayward priests by sleeping on a bare floor in the middle of winter.

In 1969, according to court findings, Michel experienced her first epileptic fit; by 1973 she was suffering from depression and considering suicide. As her feelings of torment grew stronger, she reported seeing faces of demons on the people and things around her (a phenomenon eerily portrayed in the film) and hearing voices informing her that she was damned.

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'Invisibility beam' technology proposed

It sounds like magic: walls, curtains, even dresses could be rendered transparent by bathing them in a specially crafted beam of light. Rescuers could use the beam to peer through rubble after an earthquake, while doctors could gaze at a damaged lung after making a patient's skin and ribs vanish. This remarkable disappearing trick is the kind of sorcery that would grace the pages of a Harry Potter book, yet it is a prediction of real-world science. Magic and science do, after all, have their roots in a fundamental urge to make sense of the world so that we may manipulate it to our own ends. And, in the sense that a wizard is a wise man, they still exist today; wizards (and a few witches) can be seen in the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science. Next week, a team led by Prof Chris Phillips, a quantum conjurer from Imperial College London, will join an elite coven at the Royal Society's summer exhibition (see below for details), where they will present tantalising evidence of how to make objects disappear. At the flick of a switch, he and his colleague Dr Mark Frogley can make something invisible, albeit just a fraction of a millimetre square of a special material and only for a one ten thousandth of a millionth of a second.

Things are visible because of the way that their atoms interact with a beam of light. When the beam, an electromagnetic wave, hits an atom on this page the electrons in the lowest energy state of the atom absorb the wave's energy and rise to higher energy levels. Only light of exactly the right colour, the one that corresponds to the energy difference between the two levels, will be absorbed - all other colours pass through.

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Gene reveals mammoth coat colour

The coat colour of mammoths that roamed the Earth thousands of years ago has been determined by scientists. Some of the curly tusked animals would have sported dark brown coats, while others had pale ginger or blond hair. The information was extracted from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia using the latest genetic techniques. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said a gene called Mc1r was controlling the beasts' coat colours. This gene is responsible for hair-colour in some modern mammals, too. In humans, reduced activity of the Mc1r gene causes red hair, while in dogs, mice and horses it results in yellow hair. Using ancient DNA extracted from the excavated mammoth bone, the international team of researchers were able to look at the variations in copies of the Mc1r gene. Dr Michael Hofreiter, an author on the paper and an evolutionary biologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, said analysis revealed two different versions of the gene were present - a fully active and a partially active version. The researchers propose that hair coloration in mammoths is likely to have been determined in the same way as in present-day mammals.

This means that mammoths with one copy of the active gene and one of the partially active gene would have had dark coats - most likely dark brown or black. While mammoths with two copies of the inactive gene would have had paler coats - possibly blond or ginger. The scientists said they were unsure why different-coloured mammoths existed. Other research published in the same journal found that beach mice, whose coat colour is also controlled by the Mc1r gene, have varying colours for survival reasons. The researchers said Florida beach mice were lighter than their mainland cousins because their pale fur helped them to hide from predators in their sand-dune habitat.

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Finding life on extrasolar planets

A huge sunshade a million miles from Earth could help astronomers search for signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars, a study says. The daisy-shaped "occulter", as it is known, would use a powerful telescope trailing thousands of miles behind. The shade, described in the journal Nature, would stop light from the planet's star swamping the telescope. The concept by Professor Webster Cash of the University of Colorado has already received funding from Nasa. He believes an occulter could be in space within seven years "stalking" Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. "We have proposed to build a star shade to launch a couple of months later and follow it out to its orbit," he said. "We believe this the fastest way to get operational." Scientists are already searching for planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Researchers hunt for these extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, using a number of techniques. More than 170 have so far been discovered.

However, all the discoveries have relied on indirect methods of detection. For example, astronomers look for the dimming of light as planets pass in front of their parent stars. Indirect techniques like this mean that only relatively large planets tend to get identified. Astrobiologists, though, are really interested in finding smaller, Earth-like planets which could, in theory, have the right conditions for supporting life. To do this, astronomers need a method of directly imaging the dim planets. Numerous proposals have been put forward, including massive optical telescopes on Earth, or flotillas of space-based telescopes such as the Europe's Darwin mission or Nasa's Terrestrial Planet Finder. All these schemes are still in development.

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[jsmith]

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