Science Special News

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Trees in Antarctica within 100 years ?

Trees could be growing in the Antarctic within a century because of global warming, an international scientific conference heard. With carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere set to double in the next 100 years, the icy continent could revert to how it looked about 40 million years ago, said Professor Robert Dunbar of Stanford University."It was warm and there were bushes and there were trees," he told some 850 delegates in the Tasmanian capital Hobart, the national AAP news agency reported.The delegates are attending the combined meetings of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs.Dunbar said climate experts were predicting a doubling of the levels of carbon dioxide by 2100, "but it actually looks like it's going to come sooner unfortunately."

Scientists blame greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, for causing rising temperatures worldwide.

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Ninka Nanka remains elusive

It has a long mane and an even longer body - 10 metres (30ft) from crested head to mirror-scaled tail. But the Ninki Nanka, legendary "killer dragon" of west Africa, continues to prove elusive. Six people from the Devon-based Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ) went to Gambia this month to look for the beast, which has often been "seen" by locals but never captured or photographed. In books it is usually portrayed as a giant lizard or a kind of dinosaur. The team spent a fortnight collecting reports of sightings and traipsing through swamps believed to be the Ninki Nanka's habitat. "Lots of people claimed to us that they knew someone, usually a grandparent or uncle, who had seen the creature," said Richard Freeman, the CFZ's director of zoology. "But very few had seen one themselves."

Folklore could explain the lack of witnesses: anyone who sees the Ninki Nanka is supposed to die within five years. But Mr Freeman wants to continue the search in Guinea: "People can laugh, but new species are still out there. This year a pig the size of a sofa was found in Brazil."

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Bringing the T-1000 to life

Submitted by Merreton: Remember the shape-shifting cyborg that chased Arnold Schwarzenegger through Terminator 2? You know the one: the robot from the future that can change forms at a moment's notice. One minute, he's Robert Patrick, the next he's mercury. (Okay, polymimetic alloy.) To most people this villainous character—known as the T-1000—is an awfully cool special effect. When James Cameron's sci-fi blockbuster hit movie screens in 1991, the T-1000 was the ultimate in computer-generated imagery, and it's still hailed as a major turning point in the history of motion pictures. To Wei-Min Shen, it's just a blueprint. He wants to build the real thing. As the director of the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory at the University of Southern California, Dr. Shen spent the past year building what he calls superbots, modular automatons that can break themselves apart and re-form as entirely new devices capable of entirely new things. Yes, he's a long way from building a cyborg that can turn itself into molten metal and slip through the bars of a jail cell, Robert Patrick–style. But he's just another 12 months from finishing a version that can run for a full kilometer, then reshape itself for a climb up a 60-degree slope. "Our dream is to build a robot that changes shape and size by itself, depending on the environment and the task at hand," Shen says. "We hope to build a robot that can become, say, a snake if it needs to crawl through a narrow space. Then, if it needs to climb some other obstacle, it can grow legs. Or, if it needs to go downhill, it can change into a ball and roll.

We often say that we're building a baby version of the T-1000." You can see prototypes in action on the lab's Web site. At this point, the demos are pretty rudimentary—the bots can't actually reconfigure themselves yet; they need a little help from researchers. But the basic building blocks are there. Today, a superbot consists of up to six separate modules capable of working in tandem. When connected in a ring, they can roll across the floor. In another form, they can crawl. They can even shovel sand from a sandbox or pour Dr. Pepper into an empty cup. Measuring about 2 inches deep and 4 inches long, each individual module is built around an ultra-minicomputer with a Atmega chip and 256KB of memory. Using a trio of tiny motors and various sensors that determine where it is and which way it's facing, this tiny PC can move the module in three distinct ways. But the movement of each module is dependent on what all other modules are doing. All the while, they're communicating via miniature radio transmitters and receivers.

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The girl who was raised by dogs

For five years, Oxana Malaya lived with dogs and survived on raw meat and scraps. When she was found she was running around on all fours barking. Elizabeth Grice hears her incredible story She bounds along on all fours through long grass, panting towards water with her tongue hanging out. When she reaches the tap she paws at the ground with her forefeet, drinks noisily with her jaws wide and lets the water cascade over her head.Up to this point, you think the girl could be acting - but the moment she shakes her head and neck free of droplets, exactly like a dog when it emerges from a swim, you get a creepy sense that this is something beyond imitation. Then, she barks.The furious sound she makes is not like a human being pretending to be a dog. It is a proper, chilling, canine burst of aggression and it is coming from the mouth of a young woman, dressed in T-shirt and shorts. This is 23-year-old Oxana Malaya reverting to behaviour she learnt as a young child when she was brought up by a pack of dogs on a rundown farm in the village of Novaya Blagoveschenka, in the Ukraine. When she showed her boyfriend what she once was and what she could still do - the barking, the whining, the four-footed running - he took fright. It was a party trick too far and the relationship ended.

Oxana is a feral child, one of only about 100 known in the world. The story goes that, when she was three, her indifferent, alcoholic parents left her outside one night and she crawled into a hovel where they kept dogs. No one came to look for her or even seemed to notice she was gone, so she stayed where there was warmth and food - raw meat and scraps - forgetting what it was to be human, losing what toddler's language she had and learning to survive as a member of the pack.A shameful five years later, a neighbour reported a child living with animals. When she was found, at the age of eight in 1991, Oxana could hardly speak and ran around on all fours barking, mimicking her carers.

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'Apocalypto' now for Mel, Maya and historians

Call it "The Passion of the Maya": Mel Gibson is quietly filming a movie in a Mexican jungle about the collapsed civilization. Given Gibson's cinematic history, experts on the ancient Maya are looking forward to his upcoming epic, "Apocalypto," with a mixture of curiosity and dread. They're pleased that Hollywood will feature a period of world history still little understood but worry that once again a movie may sacrifice historical accuracy for the sake of a good story."A lot depends on how well they depict the Maya. It may serve as a really good springboard into a lecture," says archaeologist Lisa Lucero of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "Or it may be something we have to nip in the bud in that first lecture."Gibson wasn't available for comment, and the public relations firm for his Icon Productions declined to offer any details on the film's plot.But according to the film's website, "Apocalypto" promises "a heart-stopping mythic action-adventure set against the turbulent end-times of the once-great Mayan civilization." The story centers on a kidnapped hero's bid to escape a mass sacrifice at one Maya center.

According to another description of the plot in Time magazine's March preview, a ruler orders the mass sacrifice of hapless captives to appease the gods and avert a drought.The only problem, and big cause for worry among archaeologists, is "the classic Maya really didn't go in for mass sacrifice," Lucero says. "That was the Aztecs." Other concerns: the modern-day Mayan Yucatec language spoken in the film is not the language of the ancient Maya, and the film's Mexican shooting locale is not the classic Maya homeland, says Penn State archaeologist David Webster.

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Live cryogenic freeze to be shown on TV

The first-ever footage of a person Liquid nitrogen being cryonically frozen after death is to be shown on Channel Five. The 60-minute film Death in the Deep Freeze will follow a woman who is terminally ill with cancer. It will also show the 'shocking and compelling' invasive procedure used to freeze her, along with interviews while she is still alive. The process, which has been performed on about 150 people, involves freezing the body in the hope that it can one day be brought back to life. Soon after the person dies, water in the body is replaced with an antifreeze to stop cells deteriorating. Once the water has been replaced, the body is cooled using dry ice until it reaches -130°C (-202°F) The final step is to put the body into a metal container and immerse it in a tank full of liquid nitrogen. Independent production firm Zig Zag spent months negotiating to secure access to the procedure. Executive producer Jes Wilkins said: 'We're really very proud of what we have achieved with this programme.

The human and emotional journey we captured and the ethical questions raised makes for one of our most fascinating productions to date.' The Cryonics Institute in Michigan, where the film was made, has 70 bodies in liquid nitrogen. Its president Ben Best said he was happy for viewers to see the procedure. 'I hope this film opens people's eyes to the benefits of cryonics,' he added. However, the Linacre Centre of Health Care Ethic, a Catholic science group, believes it is a waste of time. Member Anthony McCarthy said: 'This is not a serious medical treatment. I'm concerned people are spending vast amounts on a procedure where there is no evidence that it works.' The programme is due to be shown at the end of the month.

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Sahara desert once lush and populated

At the end of the last Ice Age, the Sahara Desert was just as dry and uninviting as it is today. But sandwiched between two periods of extreme dryness were a few millennia of plentiful rainfall and lush vegetation.During these few thousand years, prehistoric humans left the congested Nile Valley and established settlements around rain pools, green valleys, and rivers.The ancient climate shift and its effects are detailed in the July 21 issue of the journal Science. Some 12,000 years ago, the only place to live along the eastern Sahara Desert was the Nile Valley. Being so crowded, prime real estate in the Nile Valley was difficult to come by. Disputes over land often were settled with brutality, as evidenced by the cemetery of Jebel Sahaba where many of the buried individuals had died a violent death.But around 10,500 years ago, a sudden burst of monsoon rains over the vast desert transformed the region into habitable land.This opened the door for humans to move into the area, researcher's found through 500 new radiocarbon dates of human and animal remains from more than 150 excavation sites.

"The climate change at [10,500 years ago] which turned most of the [3.8 million square mile] large Sahara into a savannah-type environment happened within a few hundred years only, certainly within less than 500 years," said study team member Stefan Kroepelin of the University of Cologne in Germany.In the Egyptian Sahara, semi-arid conditions allowed for grasses and shrubs to grow, with some trees sprouting in valleys and near groundwater sources. The vegetation and small, episodic rain pools enticed animals well adapted to dry conditions, such as giraffes, to enter the area as well. Humans also frolicked in the rain pools, as depicted in rock art from Southwest Egypt.

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Original neanderthal found 150 years ago

It was the early part of August 1856 when two workers at a limestone quarry found strange-looking bones in a cave they were digging in the Neander Valley east of Dusseldorf. Thinking the bones belonged to a bear, the quarrymen showed them to a local amateur naturalist, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, who identified them as human and very old. Fuhlrott believed the 16 bone fragments he examined represented the remnants of an ancient human race, different from contemporary humans. But this view was not immediately accepted as it contradicted literal interpretations of the Bible and came before Charles Darwin's work about evolution was published. It took some years before the Neanderthal man gained acceptance as a species of the homo genus that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe as early as 350,000 years ago, by 130,000 years ago full blown Neanderthal characteristics had appeared and by 50,000 years ago Neanderthals disappeared from Europe, although they continued in Asia to 30,000 years ago.

More than 300 examples of homo neanderthalensis have been found in different parts of Europe and the Middle East since the original discovery. But the bones found in the Neander Valley remains to this day the most popular and best researched prehistoric man in the world. "The Neanderthals were much further developed than we originally believed," according to Frankfurt-based palaeo-biologist Friedeman Schrenk.

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Tropical Stonehenge may have been found

A grouping of granite blocks along a grassy Amazon hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old astronomical observatory — a find archaeologists say indicates early rainforest inhabitants were more sophisticated than previously believed. The 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet tall, are spaced at regular intervals around the hill, like a crown 100 feet in diameter.On the shortest day of the year — Dec. 21 — the shadow of one of the blocks, which is set at an angle, disappears."It is this block's alignment with the winter solstice that leads us to believe the site was once an astronomical observatory," said Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist at the Amapa State Scientific and Technical Research Institute. "We may be also looking at the remnants of a sophisticated culture."Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous populations were acute observers of the stars and sun. But the discovery of a physical structure that appears to incorporate this knowledge suggests pre-Columbian Indians in the Amazon rainforest may have been more sophisticated than previously suspected."Transforming this kind of knowledge into a monument; the transformation of something ephemeral into something concrete, could indicate the existence of a larger population and of a more complex social organization," Cabral said.Cabral has been studying the site, near the village of Calcoene, just north of the equator in Amapa state in far northern Brazil, since last year.

She believes it was once inhabited by the ancestors of the Palikur Indians, and while the blocks have not yet been submitted to carbon dating, she says pottery shards near the site indicate they are pre-Columbian and maybe older — as much as 2,000 years old.Last month, archaeologists working on a hillside north of Lima, Peru, announced the discovery of the oldest astronomical observatory in the Western Hemisphere — giant stone carvings, apparently 4,200 years old, that align with sunrise and sunset on Dec. 21.While the Incas, Mayans and Aztecs built large cities and huge rock structures, pre-Columbian Amazon societies built smaller settlements of wood and clay that quickly deteriorated in the hot, humid Amazon climate, disappearing centuries ago, archaeologists say.

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Egypt tomb reveals ancient woven flowers

Archaeologists hoped the first tomb discovered in the Valley of the Kings in 80 years would hold the mummy of King Tut's mother. They opened the last of eight sarcophagi Wednesday, revealing no mummies but finding something almost as valuable: embalming materials and ancient woven flowers.Hushed researchers craned their necks and media scuffled inside the stiflingly hot underground stone chamber as Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass slowly cracked open the coffin's lid _ for what scientists believe is the first time in more than 3,000 years.But instead of a mummy, as archaeologists had expected, the coffin revealed a tangle of fabric and rusty-colored dehydrated flowers woven together in laurels that looked likely to crumble to dust if touched."I prayed to find a mummy, but when I saw this, I said it's better _ it's really beautiful," said Nadia Lokma, chief curator of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.The flowers were likely the remains of garlands, often entwined with gold strips, that ancient Egyptian royals wore around their shoulders in both life and death, she said.

"It's very rare _ there's nothing like it in any museum. We've seen things like it in drawings, but we've never seen this before in real life _ it's magnificent," Lokma said.Dug deep into white rock, the tomb is known only by the acronym KV63 _ the 63rd tomb found in the Valley, a desert region near the southern city of Luxor used as a burial ground for pharaohs, queens and nobles between 1500 and 1000 B.C.

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Boy recalls past life as a fighter pilot

James Leininger's parents want their 8-year-old son to have a great life -- his own life. But for the past 5 1/2 years, the Louisiana boy has been reliving pieces of the life of another James -- Lt. James McCready Huston, a World War II fighter pilot from Uniontown who was killed near Iwo Jima more than 50 years before James was born. At 2 1/2 years old, James began expressing aviation knowledge that surpassed not just a typical toddler's ability, but that of his parents. The child began reciting a collection of information and had recurring nightmares about being shot down by a Japanese plane with a red sun on it. James' parents, Bruce and Andrea, eventually realized their son's assertions were accurate and that something beyond the tangible was occurring. Their lives have not been the same. Beginning in 2004, James made a couple of TV appearances for ABC News and on the Montel Williams Show. Tuesday morning, James will tell his story live on ABC's "Good Morning, America," during a segment set to air between 8 and 8:30 a.m.

Bruce Leininger said although there are no new, earth-shattering revelations from James, he is glad to see his son's experiences help keep the memories and sacrifices of soldiers like Huston alive. "I am writing a book about these men as a tribute to the men of the Natoma Bay -- the ship Lt. Huston was stationed on. That's the way I've eternalized it. We shouldn't forget. We need to remember and realize all of our spirits are on a journey. That's what this is all about," he said in a telephone interview from his Lafayette home. Huston's sister, Anne Barron, 87, of Los Gatos, Calif., said she believes the boy's accounts. "It's very hard to describe, but I just can't help but say it has to be true," she said. "He knows too many things. For some reason, he knows these things."

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Titan may be riddled with caves

The highlands of Titan may be riddled with caves, according to the latest images of Saturn's giant moon. On 30 April, the Cassini spacecraft flew over a large bright region called Xanadu that spans about 4000 kilometres. Xanadu was already thought to be a highland area, where bright hills of ice poke up above Titan's dark sooty plains. A new picture made with the spacecraft's haze-penetrating radar confirms this.In fact, the interior of the region is crossed by mountain chains that rise more than a kilometre high – while most of the moon appears relatively flat. "These are the highest mountains measured on Titan so far," says radar team member Ralph Lorenz of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US. But it seems that the mountains are not solid. The radio waves bouncing off Xanadu reveal that it has peculiar electrical properties – specifically a low dielectric constant. "The only reasonable material makeup that could have a very low dielectric constant and still hold together enough to form the structures that we see would be some sort of porous stuff – most likely porous water ice," says another team member, Steve Wall of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US.

He suggests the region might be filled with caverns, presumably carved out by the methane rain that is thought to fall on Titan.That rain would also have created the long river valleys that meander among the hills nearer the fringes of Xanadu. Cassini scientists speculate that these rivers could carry ice grains down to the plains to form the dunes seen on much of Titan's surface.

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Seeking to understand ESP

Rex G. Stanford, Ph.D., was a high school student in Texas when he came to a conclusion that would shape his professional life: some of the world’s greatest mysteries, however puzzling, can be understood and explained through the principles of science. Today, Professor Stanford, who teaches psychology at St. John’s University, applies the principles of cognitive psychology to the scientific study of ESP, one form of what researchers call psi – currently unexplained interactions with one’s environment. The scientists who research these events usually are referred to as “parapsychologists.”“The purpose of science is to solve mysteries, to understand how to explain a given phenomenon,” says Professor Stanford. “With psi, there are things people – and possibly some other organisms – seem able to do that we currently don’t know how to explain. One of them involves acquiring information in ways that science does not yet understand.”“Parapsychologists assume,” he adds, “that these phenomena can be investigated scientifically and will ultimately prove to be scientifically understandable.”The author of more than 100 scholarly publications, Professor Stanford continues to win international recognition for his work.

This August, at its 49th annual convention in Stockholm, the Parapsychological Association will install him as president. Established in 1957, the association has an international membership of more than 200 scientists and scholars from various disciplines.In Portugal this spring, Professor Stanford was an invited speaker at the 6th Symposium of the Bial Foundation. Founded in 1994 by Bial Laboratories, a leading European pharmaceutical firm, the foundation supports and showcases international research in health and medicine.“Being invited to speak there was definitely a career highlight,” says Professor Stanford, who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in cognitive and social psychology at St. John’s. “The Bial Foundation’s invitation to eminent brain researchers and parapsychologists seems to me a tribute to the quality of work that is done in both fields.”

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Freak waves may explain mystery sinkings

Freak ocean waves that rise to a height of 10-storey buildings may be sinking ships in accidents that are attributed to nothing more than poor weather. Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freak or "rogue" waves have been recorded by shipping vessels and more accurately measured from oil and gas platforms at sea. The waves arise by chance when others combine, leading to giant walls of water that momentarily tower above the rest of the ocean, at heights in excess of 30 metres.Research at Imperial College, London, shows that far from being rare events, rogue waves can emerge frequently, and may be responsible for some of the 200 supertankers and container ships longer than 200m that have sunk in poor weather conditions in the past two decades. Chris Swan, who led the study, found that forecasts issued to warn shipping about the risks of rogue waves assume the choppiness of the sea varied little over the duration of a storm. But he said that a combination of wave tank experiments and theoretical calculations revealed that in small patches of ocean, measuring up to a square kilometre, sea states vary enough to trigger rogue waves.

"We've shown that in a storm, if your ship or platform happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it could experience much more severe wave conditions than you would expect from forecasts, including these freak waves that can cause enormous damage," said Professor Swan, whose study on freak waves appears in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society A. According to Nigel Barltrop, professor of naval architecture at Strathclyde University, so little is known about many shipping accidents, that it can be difficult to know when a rogue wave is to blame.

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Did the Apollo astronauts see a UFO ?

In the documentary "Apollo 11: The Untold Story," shown on Britain's Channel Five on Monday night, July 24, astronaut Buzz Aldrin says he, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins all saw a UFO shadowing their spacecraft. Apollo 11, which took off on July 16, 1969, was the first manned mission to the moon. Aldrin says, "There was something out there, close enough to be observed, and what could it be?" In the documentary, he says, "Now, obviously the three of us weren't going to blurt out, 'Hey, Houston, we've got something moving alongside of us and we don't know what it is,' you know? We weren't about to do that, because we knew that that those transmissions would be heard by all sorts of people and somebody might have demanded we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is." He says NASA knew about the UFO but covered up the information.

It has just been learned that all but two of the 700 boxes of Apollo 11 videos are mysteriously missing from the National Archives. The footage of the Apollo 11 mission was recorded on special 1-inch magnetic tape, and the only machines that can play it are at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which is being closed in the fall of 2006.