Science Special News

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What is red mercury?

Three men have been cleared of trying to procure the raw ingredients for a "dirty bomb" which the prosecution claimed could have devastated a British city if it fell into the hands of terrorists. But mystery surrounds the material at the centre of the plot. So what exactly is red mercury?The most bizarre aspect of the trial of Abdurahman Kanyare and his two co-defendants was the fact that no-one in the court could be certain whether the terrifying substance on which the entire prosecution case was based actually existed. The prosecutor, Mark Ellison, admitted the police had no idea if there even was such a thing as red mercury - supposedly the main ingredient for a "dirty bomb" which could have devastated London. But he told the jury at the outset: "The Crown's position is that whether red mercury does or does not exist is irrelevant." He warned the jury not to get "hung up" on whether red mercury actually existed at all. Mr Ellison said the fact was that the three defendants had hit upon a meaning for it as a substance which was highly dangerous and expensive, and they pursued it. The indictment accused them of "conspiring together and with persons unknown to possess and article, namely a highly dangerous mercury-based substance, in circumstances which gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that it was to be possessed for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism."

It emerged during the trial at the Old Bailey that red mercury was something of an urban myth, a substance which was either radioactive or toxic or neither, depending on who you spoke to. Indeed some of the conversations between undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood and the prospective buyers were bordering on the farcical. At one meeting in a shopping arcade in Edgware, north London both sides kept asking what it was that they thought the other side was there to buy or sell. Mahmood kept repeating, probably for the sake of his covert recordings: "Now let's just make it clear what exactly it is you want to buy." Kanyare replied: "You know what we're here for." When he gave evidence Kanyare said he believed red mercury was a liquid which could be used to wash soiled money.

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What lies in the outser Solar System ?

Researchers say they have found the first evidence that the frozen outer reaches of our solar system could be littered with many more objects than we think. Astronomers have been trying to get a picture of the region, known as the Kuiper belt, because it is believed to contain debris from the birth of our solar system and so could tell us how planetary systems form.About 1000 large bodies, including Pluto and the recently discovered Xena, have been located in the Kuiper belt so far.But smaller objects have evaded detection as they are about 15 billion kilometres from the Sun, making it impossible to see them even with a powerful instrument like the Hubble Space Telescope.Now an Australian team from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) has used optical fibre technology to detect signs of smaller Kuiper belt objects for the first time.They did this by observing split-second 'winking', or darkening, of stars which suggests a Kuiper belt object is passing in front, or occulting the star.UNSW student George Georgevits presented his research at a recent workshop attended by international Kuiper belt experts in Italy.

His colleague Associate Professor Michael Ashley of UNSW says the observations offer the first evidence the Kuiper belt contains many more relics of the infant solar system than estimated."Basically our observation showed that that are many more, maybe five or 10 times as many, of the smaller objects than theory predicted," he says.Ashley says Georgevits and fellow researcher Dr Will Saunders of the AAO found evidence of many objects ranging in size from 300 metres to one kilometre across using a 6DF instrument on the UK Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring.The 6DF, which uses fibre optics, monitored 100 stars simultaneously over two weeks, the equivalent of 7000 star hours, or watching a single star every night for 3 years."We've got 100 fibres, each one of which is positioned on a star and then we feed the fibres into a high speed camera," he says.Ashley says it's been suggested there are around 100 billion objects in the belt, but the latest observations suggest this could represent only a fraction of what's there."We saw at least 100 very definite [occultations] and as ... you look for smaller, less significant events we could have seen up to 1000," he says.

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Ghostly links to Scotland's past

Scotland has long been a country fascinated with the unexplained. Whether it is the haunting sounds of the headless drummer of Edinburgh Castle or the lonely child ghost pining for her doll in Mary King's Close, many of our most important historical moments and landmarks are associated with some form of paranormal activity.While there is a plethora of highly documented work on the existence and prevalence of ghosts in Scotland, many stories of sightings have also proved to be pranks of adolescents.During the 1930s in particular - with a surge in filmic, theatrical and literal representations of them in popular culture, coupled with the antics of the famous ghost hunter Harry Price at the Borley Rectory in England - ghosts were a popular fascination and a source of many mischievous deeds.One such case was highlighted in The Scotsman on 4 August 1936. James Frail, a young man from Fife, was fined for breaching the peace after spooking Harry Bayne on a farm in Kelty.

As the newspaper reported, Frail jumped out on the road in front of Bayne, emulating a terrifying spook before his victim "ran a distance of half a mile in a state of extreme fright and perspiring freely. Since then he had had pneumonia and, while that could not be deliberately attributed to the fright he had, the fact remained that he had been very ill since then."While this story gives us all a chance to muse over the style of newspaper reporting from the time, it is only one of many instances of such impish fun.Another tale comes from the far reaches of Campbeltown, on Kintyre. During the autumn and winter months between 1937 and 1939, The Scotsman noted how the citizens of Campbeltown, in particular women and children, were terrorised by practical jokers who masqueraded around the area.

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Ancient human footprints discovered

About 20,000 years ago, humans trekked along the margins of a shallow lake in Australia, leaving behind records of their passage in the soft, wet sand. In 2003, an aboriginal woman who is likely a descendant of those early Australians stumbled across dozens of timeworn footprints in the same area. Excavations of the site have since uncovered hundreds more.The discovery, detailed in a recent issue of the Journal of Human Evolution, represents the largest collection of Pleistocene human footprints in the world, and the only footprints from that era ever found in Australia. In total, 457 footprints have now been uncovered."The preservation is just remarkable," said study team member Matthew Cupper of the University of Melbourne in Australia. "You can see quite clearly how mud oozes between the toes."The footprints were found in southeastern Australia, along the shore of one of 19 dried up lakes that comprise the Willandra Lakes system.The researchers believe the prints were made over a series of weeks or months about 20,000 years ago when the site was exposed.

Males and females, ranging from children to adults, are represented, and many of them seem to be doing different things."Quite a few people seem to be running and heading the same way," Cupper told LiveScience. "Some of the little children were walking slower. This may suggest that there were several events represented."Australia is thought to have first been colonized by humans about 50,000 years ago. Those who made the newfound footprints were likely the ancestors of today's Australian aborigines, the researchers say.

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New 'Bigfoot' photos released

A local legend is getting new life. In the last two weeks, there were three separate Bigfoot sighting in rural Atoka County. The final sighting included photos that some say is the mysterious creature itself.Talk to people around Clear Boggy Creek in Atoka County and you will here thousands of stories. But last week, the legend himself, Bigfoot, was supposedly spotted in those very woods.They have grown up on these woods and know them well. But last week, 13-year-old Morgan Whatley and her 12-year-old brother Garrett came across something strange right across the creek was a creature she'd never seen before.But the claims of the Whatley kids were passed off as a child's imagination. That changed just days later when a woman in her fifties had to be taken to a hospital. She reported seeing a big hairy creature in her yard and had an anxiety attack.

It's all over the newspaper and on everyone's mind; what was seen at boggy bottom? Some people say it is Bigfoot. Others aren't believers yet.A local store owner set up game cameras hoping to catch a glimpse. The pictures are below. We'll let you be the judge.

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Australian 'Nessie' fossils found

Australia was once home to ancient reptiles that swam in huge icy lakes, fossil evidence suggests. The large, carnivorous reptiles lived 115 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs, when much of the continent was covered in water. Fossils of two new species of plesiosaur were discovered near Coober Pedy in South Australia. Plesiosaurs are popular in science fiction and are said to resemble Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster. The Australian specimens are described in recent editions of the journals Biology Letters and Palaeontology. One, known as Umoonasaurus demoscyllus, was about 2.4m (7.2ft) long and had crests on its head, perhaps for display or mating purposes. "Imagine a compact body with four flippers, a reasonably long neck, small head and short tail, much like a reptilian seal," said the lead author of the two papers, Dr Benjamin Kear of the University of Adelaide. The other species, Opallionectes andamookaensis, grew to about 5m (16ft) long and had small needle-like teeth. Some 30 fossils were discovered at an opal mine near the outback mining town of Coober Pedy.

They are made up of the mineral opal, which filled the spaces left by bones when the original fossil-bearing rock was dissolved away by acidic ground water. The fossils include several skeletons and a complete skull of Umoonasaurus, and a partial skeleton of Opallionectes. They are thought to be of juvenile animals, suggesting the lake was a breeding and nursery ground. Scientists believe sea-dwelling adults returned to the shallow inland waters to breed and raise their young. At the time, Australia was much colder, and the inland ocean would have frozen over in places during the winter.

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Reward offered for spiritual healing proof

A group of rationalists of Indian origin here has renewed its offer of 16,000 pounds to any occult practitioner or spiritual healer who can scientifically prove the ability to cure people of any disease or solve any problem. Newspapers catering to Asian and Afro-Caribbean readerships have several pages of advertisements from such practitioners, promising magical cures and manna to those who believe in spells and occult practices.Lavkesh Prashar, president of the Asian Rationalist Society of Britain (ARSB), said such witch doctors and charlatans were exploiting superstitious and gullible people from these communities and earning thousands of pounds every year.Prasher said: "We challenge them to prove that they have magical powers under scientific conditions.They charge anything up to 300 pounds for a simple chat and claim they can cure anything from serious illness to bad luck."

The call was renewed at a recent meeting of the ARSB in Birmingham as part of the society's efforts to educate the people about the "so-called gurus and babas and tantriks who are exploiting the innocent people mentally, financially and sometimes physically as well".Prashar said: "If these babas and gurus have any magical or supernatural power then why not they accept our challenge? Why do they back off when we challenge them?"

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Where are all the crop circles ?

Robert Hardman: Supernatural energy is, apparently, buzzing all around us from beneath the flattened wheat. John Latta from Seattle is wandering round in a trance-like state. Katharyn Henderson, 24, a teacher from New Zealand, is lying on the ground, lost in a cosmic daze. We are in the middle of a newly-discovered crop circle, an elaborate pattern carved into an unharvested field. This one is not a particularly memorable example but it is already attracting quite a crowd for one reason: the crop circle appears to be an endangered species. This summer will go down as a dismal year for strange apparitions amid the cereal. Numbers are way down and no one knows why. Those who believe the patterns are extra-terrestrial signals claim the alien messengers have despaired of planet earth and have driven their UFOs off to another galaxy. Others claim there is a farmers' conspiracy to destroy all circles as soon as they appear.

The curious death of a well-known crop-trampling enthusiast has also been cited, as has the present heatwave. No one has blamed John Prescott just yet but it can only be a matter of time. So, I am not surprised to find a busload of devotees embracing this formation outside the Wiltshire village of Avebury.

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Black holes may not exist at all

They swallow everything that comes their way and exercise the world's finest minds, but the portrayal of black holes as awe-inspiring celestial menaces may be woefully inaccurate, a team of scientists claim. Indeed, they might not exist at all. According to the researchers, the traditional astronomers' view of a universe liberally sprinkled with invisible, all-consuming black holes should be replaced with an alternative that sees strange, magnetic balls of plasma floating in their place. If the finding is verified - an event some scientists do not see on the horizon - it would dramatically overturn a theory that emerged from an English geologist's calculations in 1784, was verified by Einstein and confined by four laws drawn up by Professor Stephen Hawking. The scientists, lead by Rudy Schild at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, spotted what they claim to be the death knell for black hole theory while observing a quasar, lurking nine billion light years from Earth. Quasars are believed to have black holes at their centres, but to test this assumption, the scientists set up 14 telescopes to keep an unprecedented watch on the object. By analysing the gentle flickering of the quasar, the team were able to probe the structure of its interior. They discovered a gaping hole in a disc of material surrounding the centre of the quasar, as wide as 4,000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun.

The hole, they believe, could only be caused by a vast ejection of material propelled by a strong magnetic field. Because black holes do not have magnetic fields, Dr Schild's team suggest in The Astronomical Journal, the quasar must be powered by a dense ball of plasma called a MECO (magnetospheric eternally collapsing object). But according to the astronomers' theories the MECOs' existence precludes the possibility of black holes. "I believe this is the first evidence that the whole black hole paradigm is incorrect," said Darryl Leiter, a scientist on the team told the New Scientist.

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Bigfoot lawsuit kicks up a notch

Sometimes, with this Bigfoot business, it's hard to know what to believe. And that's not even addressing the purported existence of the publicity shy ape.No, there is a fissure among three Bay Area Bigfoot researchers. It all came to light when the Mercury News wrote a story about a July 11 lawsuit filed by C. Thomas Biscardi, a Redwood City man who bills himself as a ``World Renowned Bigfoot Researcher.''He sued North Bay residents Carole Rubin and Robert Shorey of the Great American Big Foot Research Organization, of which Biscardi used to be CEO.It seems, Biscardi said, that the pair and their organization owed him $185,000 and the return of his Bigfoot library, which included many treasures of the animal and its legacy, including films, pictures and plaster footprint casts.Rubin thinks -- to quote her directly -- that Biscardi ``is interested only in self-promotion and not in the genuine study and research of Bigfoot.'' Rubin and Shorey said the deal was to pay him $65,000 and an additional $60,000 if profits came in, which they didn't.

And they promised another $125,000 for Bigfoot-finding expeditions.And while most grown-ups think Bigfoot is an amusing myth, Rubin said her group spent more than the $125,000 on expeditions last year -- paying for high-tech gadgets and whatnot to find the elusive primate, more than what's needed to satisfy their deal.

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Experts to check out Trevor crop circle

From the road it doesn't look like much. Just a field of ripening wheat stalks, rippling in the breeze.At the top of a rise partway into the field the even pattern of golden wheat breaks up a little bit, like there was a patch of seed that didn't take. The stalks aren't as crowded there, and when the wind moves past it's not the same even, water-like ripples that move across the rest of the field.In that spot, circles of wheat have been bent over, the once upright stalks now running horizontal in a counterclockwise circle.Trevor has a crop circle.Mary Sutherland, a investigator with Burlington UFO and Paranormal, learned of the circle earlier this week, when a man who lives near the field sent her an e-mail.In the e-mail he told Sutherland about the circle, noting that it could just be that someone drove around in the field, but there are no tracks leading up to the disturbed area.

Instead, it's like a giant wheel lay flat in the field and spun, pushing the wheat over gently but firmly, so that it stayed bent but did not strip the grains from the stalks. Sutherland went out to investigate after she learned of the circle. She took photos and soil samples, and she called in the experts. One was coming in Friday to take aerial photographs, she said. Another group was due to stop by the field today. They'll likely bring Geiger counters and audio equipment, and they will compare wheat from within the circle and without, to try and figure out if the circle is real or if it is a hoax.Sutherland believes it is real."If it was a hoax, they would have made it more visible from the road," she said.

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