Science Special News

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Big bang pushed back two billion years

Our universe may be 15% larger and older than we thought, according to new measurements of the distance to a nearby galaxy. Researchers led by Alceste Bonanos at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, US, used data from telescopes including the 10-metre Keck-II telescope in Hawaii, US, to measure the distance to a pair of stars in the Triangulum Galaxy.The team used light, velocity, and temperature measurements to calculate the true luminosity of the two stars, which eclipse one another every five days. By comparing this intrinsic luminosity to their observed brightness, the team calculated that the galaxy lies 3.14 million light years away from us. Surprisingly, this is about half a million light years farther than previously thought.Measuring astronomical distances is not simple. Distant, bright objects, for example, can look the same as closer, dim ones. So astronomers have built a ladder-like system that starts by using several independent methods to accurately determine the distance to nearby objects. They then use these measurements to define a more distant cosmic yardstick, and so on.

“In every step, you accumulate errors,” says team member Krzysztof Stanek at Ohio State University in Columbus, US. “We wanted an independent measure of distance – a single step that will one day help with measuring dark energy and other things.”Gauging distances by observing a binary star has cut out those extra steps, says team member Norbert Przybilla at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. "This is the farthest distance that anyone has been able to measure directly," he told New Scientist. "It's the cutting edge of what can be done with these telescopes."

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Mad Ludwig's flying car was a smart idea

It's been a long wait, but finally King Ludwig II of Bavaria can rest easy in his grave: 120 years after his death, German scientists have shown him to be one of the unsung pioneers of flight. Ludwig, whose fantastical castle at Neuschwanstein aptly featured in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, drew up plans for a flying car more than two decades before the Wright brothers took to the air, but when he tried to build it he was declared insane and stripped of his crown. But now German aeronautical experts who have studied Ludwig's designs say they would have worked. Sketches recovered from letters between the ruler and Austrian engineer Gustav Koch show the monarch had planned to create a fleet of flying machines that would take him across his beloved Alpine lakes to his many castles, including the fairytale Neuschwanstein. The craft he designed looked like flying cable cars powered by steam engines. They were decorated like peacocks. But his dreams of flying over the mountains of Bavaria only convinced his opponents that he was mad, and he was declared insane on 10 June, 1886, and deposed.

He died shortly afterwards and his drawings were consigned to an archive. Now aeronautical experts have dug them out and re-created them on computer. Dalibor Karacic is working on the project to re-draw the machines. He said: 'King Ludwig was unbelievably progressive. He understood technology. The flying peacock cars may have looked funny, but technologically they were sound and certainly would have worked. He couldn't have been mad, otherwise his ideas would never have worked. He was simply ahead of his time.'

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After 10 years, life-on-Mars rebuked

It was a science fiction fantasy come true: Ten years ago this summer,Top of Form 1Bottom of Form 1 announced the discovery of life on Mars. At a Washington, D.C., news conference, scientists showed magnified pictures of a four-pound Martian meteorite riddled with wormy blobs that looked like bacterial colonies. The researchers explained how they had pried numerous clues from the rock, all strongly supporting their contention that microscopic creatures once occupied its nooks and crannies. It was arguably the space agency's most imagination-gripping moment since Apollo. Space buffs and NASA officials said that it just might be the scientific discovery of the century."If the results are verified," the late Carl Sagan pronounced, "it is a turning point in human history."Ten years later, the results have not been verified. Skeptics have found non-biological explanations for every piece of evidence that was presented on Aug. 6, 1996. And though they still vigorously defend their claim, the NASA scientists who advanced it now stand alone in their belief.

"We certainly have not convinced the community, and that's been a little bit disappointing," said David McKay, a NASA biochemist and leader of the team that started the scientific episode.But even though the majority of his colleagues don't buy his "life on Mars" theory — McKay's own brother, also a NASA scientist, is one of his most prominent critics — many say they respect him and greatly appreciate his efforts.

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Cryptid discoveries abound in Vietnam

In 1992, Western scientists cataloged the ''discovery'' of the planet's largest new mammal in more than half a century, a forest-dwelling ox named the saola. Not merely a new species, it represented an entirely unrecorded genus of life. As of the publication of the fascinating Vietnam: A Natural History, scientists still had not sighted another free-ranging saola in the wild, although villagers sometimes kill an animal for meat.Since then, researchers in Vietnam have identified three new species of deer and a striking striped rabbit, 63 new terrestrial vertebrates and 45 fish. An animal once thought extinct on the Asian mainland, the lesser one-horned rhinoceros, was rediscovered. A wild pig, a monkey, a pheasant and at least two other varieties of birds have been re-sighted almost a century after they were identified and then vanished from scientists' view.The era of grand biological discovery pretty much ended long ago across most of the globe.

Not so for Vietnam, which continues its struggle to emerge from the darkness of war. This natural history, compiled by three scientists from the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at New York's American Museum of Natural History, is the latest chapter in the postwar development of one of the world's most remarkable, and mysteriously rich, landscapes.

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Do we live inside a hollow Earth ?

There are two hollow earth theories. According to the first one we live on the crust, but there is another world on the inside where lies - some say - the realm of Agartha, the home of the King of the World (see, for example, the fantasies of French philosopher René Guénon). The second theory has it that while we think we live on the outer crust, we actually live in the interior (on a convex surface instead of a concave one).One of the first hollow earth theories was proposed in 1692 by the English astronomer Edmund Halley (discoverer of the now-famous comet), who suggested that the Earth was composed of four spheres, each embedded in the others like so many matryoshka dolls, illuminated by a luminous atmosphere and perhaps inhabitable. The theory was reproposed in the early 19th century by J Cleves Symmes of Ohio, who wrote to various scientific societies: "To all the world: I declare that the Earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one inside the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees." Symmes believed that at the north and south poles there were two apertures that led to the interior of the globe. He attempted to raise funds for an exploration of the polar regions to locate these entrances. The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences still has a wooden model he used to explain his theories. The idea was later championed by Jeremiah Reynolds, a newspaper editor, who took it upon himself to promote the expedition at the expense of the American government (a request ultimately denied). The journey was unsuccessful, since he and his party were thwarted by Antarctic ice. At the end of the century the theory was revisited by cult leader Cyrus Reed Teed, who said that what we believe is the sky is a gaseous mass that fills the interior of the globe with areas of bright light (sun, moon and stars would not be heavenly bodies but visual effects). It is widely rumoured on the internet that the hollow earth theory was taken seriously by top-ranking Nazis who believed in the occult sciences.

In some circles of the German navy it was purportedly believed that the hollow earth theory would make it easier to pinpoint the exact position of British ships because, if infrared rays were used, the curvature of the Earth would not have obscured observation. Hitler allegedly sent an expedition to the Baltic island of Rügen where a Dr Heinz Fischer trained a telescopic camera toward the sky in order to spot the British fleet sailing on the interior of the convex surface of the hollow earth. It is even said that some V1 missiles went astray because their trajectory was calculated on the basis of a hypothetical concave surface instead of a convex one.

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Is the Patterson Bigfoot film a hoax ?

A recent book by author Greg Long, The Making of Bigfoot, purports to "expose" the famous Patterson/Gimlin film taken on October 20, 1967 at Bluff Creek in northern California. In the book, Long interviews dozens of witnesses who claim that in one way or another, Roger Patterson was a crook and a thief, a liar and a swindler. Long, not being too particularly bright (and driven by a seeming hatred for Patterson) takes this to mean that if Patterson was all of this, he must have faked the film as well. He interviews two important people to his investigation, the man who claims to have worn the "suit", Bob Heironimus, and the man who claims to have made the suit, Philip Morris. However, there are discrepancies in both men's stories which cast doubt on their versions of the truth. There are apparently no less than two conflicting stories about the alleged "suit"; Heironimus' version describes a 3-piece suit made from skinned red horsehide which stunk, while Morris' version describes a 6-piece suit made from artificial materials. These two stories directly contradict each other, yet Long, his associate Kal Korff and television producer Bob Kiviat don't see anything wrong with that.

Now, two more stories as to the origin of the alleged suit have come out in the past 6 months; one comes from the mouth of Bob Heironimus, who claims that the maker of the suits for the film "Planet of The Apes" was the maker of the suit, which contradicts his earlier statement from Long's book; the second new story that has come out is that Heironimus' sister called Mrs. Roger Patterson, the widow of Roger Patterson, to try to get her to go along with a story of a GREY horsehide suit allegedly worn by Heironimus in the film so they could all make money off it. The problem is, Heironimus has been going around Yakima for over 30 years claiming that he had the suit that he claims to have worn in the film in the trunk of his mother's car.

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Evolution reversed in mice

US researchers have taken a mouse back in time some 500 million years by reversing the process of evolution. By engineering its genetic blueprint, they have rebuilt a gene that was present in primitive animals. The ancient gene later mutated and split, giving rise to a pair of genes that play a key role in brain development in modern mammals. The scientists say the experiments shed light on how evolution works and could lead to new gene therapy techniques. "We are first to reconstruct an ancient gene," said co-researcher Petr Tvrdik of the University of Utah. "We have proven that from two specialised modern genes, we can reconstruct the ancient gene they split off from. "It illuminates the mechanisms and processes that evolution uses, and tells us more about how Mother Nature engineers life." The study, published in the academic journal Developmental Cell, involved a suite of genes involved in embryonic development. Until about 500 million years ago, early animals had 13 such Hox genes. Then each gene split into four, making 52 genes.

Over the course of evolution, further mutations occurred, and some genes became redundant and disappeared, leading to today's tally in mammals of 39 Hox genes. The Utah team looked at two of these genes; Hoxa1, which controls embryonic brain development, and Hoxb1, which plays a key role in the development of nerve cells that control facial expressions in animals.

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Sunderland UFO's turn out to be balloons

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) launched an X-Files-style probe after the Echo reported that dozens of it's readers had spotted UFOs floating over Sunderland and Seaham 10 days ago. But the truth is out there now. Seaham couple Paul McKinney and Emma Henfrey have revealed what was really in the sky that night.Paul, 28, and Emma, 30, celebrated moving into their new home in Wycliffe Road, Westlea, by holding a party for friends and set floating lanterns, bought by neighbour Quentin Carr, into the air.But the orbs, which glowed bright orange then silvery white, caused a real stir and some stargazers thought they were seeing extraterrestrial spaceships overhead. Paul was going to remain tight-lipped about the prank, but when he heard the MoD was investigating, the systems analyst contacted the Echo.He said: "It was an awesome experience to watch these lanterns float up and away and we never though for a second that people would think that they were aliens."I wasn't going to say anything because I thought it was quite funny, but then my cousin saw something in the Echo about the MOD investigating so I thought I better tell."I thought, with all that's happening in the world at the minute and the increased terrorism level in the UK I should put people's minds at rest."

He added: "Maybe there are extraterrestrials out there, but they did not visit Seaham on July 29, I can assure you."The lanterns party-goers set off that night are on sale on the internet for about £10 and carry a manufacturers' warning that they have been mistaken for UFOs.They can fly up to 1,000ft high in the sky and look just like hot air balloons – they are made from a plastic bag, copper wire and paraffin cube which glows as the fuel burns slowly propelling the device into the air.

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UT professor debunks chupacabra myth

UT professor Pamela Owen can add one more title to her resume: educator, scientist and supernatural investigator. The producers of "Mystery Hunters," an educational TV program for kids, asked Owen to help identify bones reported to belong to the mythical chupacabra. The chupacabra, whose name means goat-sucker in Spanish, is a fabled creature which attacks and mutilates live-stock, sucking the blood of its prey.The bones belong to rancher Devin Macanally who shot the animal while it was attacking chickens on his ranch in Elmendorf. Photos of the animal, which later became known as the "Elmendorf Beast" show a small, hairless, dog-like creature.Owen, who holds a doctorate in mammalogy with a specialization in carnivores, said that when she first heard about the "Elmendorf Beast," she agreed with biologists' initial findings that it was some kind of coyote with severe mange.Owen's suspicions were later confirmed when the show's producers e-mailed her a photo of the creature's exhumed skull.

Owen, who has been identifying bones for the Texas Memorial Museum for six years, was able to recognize the skull almost instantly."I wrote back and said, 'Nice coyote.'" she said.Owen said she could understand how an average person could mistake the creature for a new species."What [Macanally] described was certainly not like any coyote," she said. "It was this hairless blue-skinned thing with disfigured teeth. This was a sick animal."What is called supernatural phenomena can often be explained within the context of a natural world, Owen said."I still think the stories are great, but they are based on interesting natural phenomena," she said.

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Mars rover visits Beagle crater

Those industrious robots on Mars—NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers—remain on duty as they gather new science data from their respective spots on the red planet.Opportunity has just concluded a survey of Beagle Crater, a relatively young feature, said William Farrand, a research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He is also a member of the Mars Exploration Rover science team.Farrand told SPACE.com that Beagle is named after the ship, H.M.S. Beagle, that naturalist Charles Darwin served on. Over the weekend, Opportunity’s Panoramic Camera was busy collecting a color sweep of Beagle Crater and its blanket of tossed out material. “So that should make for a pretty spectacular data product when all the full frame scenes are finally downlinked,” Farrand said. In addition, Opportunity ground handlers snagged multispectral views of the scene. In addition, by using the robot’s Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES), data on the mineralogy of rocks and soils at Beagle was obtained, he said.

Opportunity will next be examining a banded ripple and then resume its drive towards Victoria crater, Farrand said. The 115-foot (35-meter) Beagle Crater and the rover are both about 1,837 feet (560 meters) from the rim of Victoria.Victoria Crater is nearly half a mile (800 meters) in diameter. That’s nearly six times wider than Endurance Crater, the feature that Opportunity explored for several months in 2004 studying rock layers affected by ancient water.

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UFO sightings over Bahrain

A second GDN reader has come forward claiming to have seen a UFO over Bahrain on Monday evening, but one of the country's top astronomers has dismissed suggestions that it was a flying saucer. Indian Joy Michael, aged 35, claimed he saw a "strange sight" over the Bahrain Financial Harbour (BFH) at around 6.10pm while he was driving home from work.Mr Michael, who works as an administration and finance officer at Techind, said he told his friends about it, but they also dismissed the sighting. "I was driving home from work with a colleague of mine at 6.10pm when I saw this apparently revolving dish-like thing for a few seconds," said Mr Michael told the GDN yesterday. "But the report in the GDN proved something was there, for a while."The GDN carried a picture on its front page yesterday taken by a Sri Lankan couple, which they claimed showed a UFO that flew over them as they were driving along the Sitra Causeway. Engineer Omerdeen Hamad Idrees, aged 35, said he his wife, Shiyara, took the picture when they were on their way to Sitra Mall with their four-year-old son Imran at around 9pm.

Mr Idrees, who works for Products for Projects, said the object moved very slowly in the sky and made circular movements over Tubli Bay before passing over his car. However, Bahrain University applied physics professor Dr Waheeb Alnaser claimed there was probably a rational explanation.

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Arctic thawed in prehistoric global warming

The last time massive amounts of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere, the North Pole was an ice-free expanse of open ocean that was teeming with tropical organisms, a study has found. Scientists have discovered that the complete disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, 55 million years ago, coincided with a dramatic increase in concentrations of carbon dioxide or methane in the atmosphere - which must have caused global warming.After analysiing the sediments on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, an international team of researchers working for the Arctic Core Expedition (Acex) came to the conclusion that the region was once extremely warm, unusually wet, and ice-free.The scientists also found that the Arctic is currently experiencing one of the fastest temperature rises on record, with more sea ice melting each summer than at any time in hundreds and possibly thousands of years.

The Acex research team drilled frozen sedimentary cores from the ocean floor, which can be dated to 55 million years ago, a period known as the palaeocene-eocene thermal maximum (PETM). Surface temperatures in some parts of the world were then 8C (15F) higher than now.

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Designer creates floating bed

A young Dutch architect has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force and comes with a price tag of 1.2 million euros ($1.54 million). Janjaap Ruijssenaars took inspiration for the bed -- a sleek black platform, which took six years to develop and can double as a dining table or a plinth -- from the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 cult film "2001: A Space Odyssey.""No matter where you live all architecture is dictated by gravity. I wondered whether you could make an object, a building or a piece of furniture where this is not the case -- where another power actually dictates the image," Ruijssenaars said.Magnets built into the floor and into the bed itself repel each other, pushing the bed up into the air. Thin steel cables tether the bed in place.

"It is not comfortable at the moment," admits Ruijssenaars, adding it needs cushions and bedclothes before use.Although people with piercings should have no problem sleeping on the bed, Ruijssenaars advises them against entering the magnetic field between the bed and the floor.They could find their piercing suddenly tugged toward one of the magnets.

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The haunting of Connaught hospital

. Stokes: Walthamstow village in east London, has many tales to tell from its old buildings. Dating in the main back to before the Norman conquest of 1066, and I thought this conservation area would be a good one to do one of the now popular “Ghost walks".Word was duly put out from the little Spiritualist church in Vestry Rd,I anticipated perhaps half a dozen people,but the response shook me rigid to see the enormous crowd that turned out on a cold night, to hear the tales of local spookery.The site of Connaught hospital in Orford Rd., was started in 1880 as a children’s hospital, it took the name Connaught from 1928 when the Duke of Kent helped raise £17000 for running costs.Many local people supported the hospital with legacies from wills etc, even properties were left to run the cottage hospital and to keep it independent.But things were not to be, the government hospitals survey committee in 1945 while promising to build a larger hospital on site, secretly planned to demolish the localWanstead, Chingford, Thorpe Combe and Connaught hospitals.These were built on valuable pieces of land and although Connaught was built from private subscription, the government wanted to steal the site and the hospital was gradually run down and demolished in the 1980s.Small housing was built on the site, and several homes nearby alleged spirit manifestation.My mother was for many years the night casualty sister, and she reported to senior staff that late at night a new African nurse went missing from her post, only to be found sitting on a patients bed, with the blood drip in her mouth, drinking away the patients life blood, real vampire fashion.It turned out she was a serial offender for this abomination in other hospitals.The Old Town hall next door, which was part of the Connaught buildings,Was taken over and used as an centre for Asian studies in the 1970sI was at that time a trauma counsellor, and was promoted to multicultural counsellor,And I remember the outrage when white people who paid for the building were racially excluded.Opposite is Summit Rd where a young man in unusual military uniform has been seen over many years, the cottage where he is seen radiating a feeling of great unhappiness and despair, has been the subject of so many paranormal studies that the family who lived there, were totally fed up and just accepted the sad stranger in military uniform who appeared there.

The old lady who lived there between the wars on her deathbed told the church cannon that the apparition was her elder brother, an asthmatic and nervous boy who was pressured to join the army under age for W. W. 1. And badly shell-shocked, ran away after the battle of the Somme,After seeing a swarm of rats eating the dead and wounded.And at age 16 was shot for desertion. Government propaganda was behind many children being pressured to enlist under age and then murdered for “cowardice” by firing squads.Britain now part of the E.E.C is the only country out of step, and refuses to acknowledge these crimes against its own soldiers.The sad young man is said to be waiting his pardon.Walthamstow museum which was the old work house, is haunted by several ghosts, At times a lady in grey has been seen, but the children can often be heard running in heavy shoes across the wooden boards chatting and laughing.Between the railway bridges over Orford Rd and West avenue is where a bullied teenage boy with learning difficulties ended his life in the sixties, train drivers still occasionally see his shape as they drive past the spot.The Spiritualist church which is a quaint old building, would often be full to bursting afterThe ending of W.W.1 and W.W.II when it was said every family in the land lost someone, Strangely the church full of spirits during meetings is not itself haunted.Opposite the Castle public house at number 8 is where the ghost of the chap known as the “coin man” lived and did religious research and is said to have discovered the“Plates of Nephi” on which the Mormon Church was founded, after several years of deep research the theory was very controversially, narrowly rejected by Church hierarchy in Salt Lake City.In years gone by the house was a butchers shop and abattoir, and these premises are often the focus of strange psychic activity, and one evening here some time backSeveral of us with an EMF ( electro magnetic field meter) which picks up ghostly electrical currents, a handheld temperature gun for assessing drops in temperatures, night vision cameras and simple EVP equipment ( electronic voice phenomena) for recording sounds from the past, all gathered to see what occurred. Certainly an amazing experience.Hospitals are the most haunted places on earth, because people pass over in a drugged up confused state, and can remain that way for some considerable time, particularly if their mindset is of the sceptical variety, and the old hospital site has many tales from its past, but that will be another day.

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Malaysia museum seeks ghost busters

A Malaysian museum will let a US research team from Ripley's Believe It or Not! conduct scientific tests on genies, ghouls and other paranormal items on display in an exhibition to determine whether they are real. The three-month Mysteries, Genies, Ghosts and Coffins exhibition at the Sultan Alam Shah Museum in central Selangor state has drawn criticism since it began in July 4. Some accuse it of being un-Islamic, while others have denounced the items as fakes.The exhibition has drawn tens of thousands of visitors. Officials say the approximately 100 items on display include a preserved mermaid; the shrivelled skeletal remains of a half-woman, half snake; a goblin trapped in a bottle; and other creatures from Malay folklore.Amzah Umar, chairman of the Selangor Museum Board, said on Friday the organisers and the owner of the exhibits have agreed to Ripley's request to examine the items. Ripley's Believe It or Not! is a franchise which deals in bizarre events, having started in 1918 as a newspaper cartoon panel featuring unusual and startling facts from around the world.

Umar said: "They have written to us for permission to analyse the items. A team from US will be coming to conduct scientific tests."This will put to rest any allegations that the exhibits are fake."He did not say when the tests would be conducted.