Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Reports of Bigfoot body revealed as false

Breanna Bishop, SDSMT's public information coordinator, issued the unusual press announcement Wednesday morning. The release was sent after an Internet site "reported" that the body of one of the mythological creatures was on campus after it had been shot near Slim Buttes last week. According to a report appearing on a number of blogs, Bigfoot was shot and killed Tuesday, Aug. 1, on the Pine Ridge Reservation," the release states. "After a smudging ceremony, the body was allegedly transported to a School of Mines laboratory for studies."The body was supposedly seen and given a ceremonial treatment by three Lakota elders, including Wilmer Mesteth and Oliver Red Cloud."Tell them it's a bunch of baloney," Mesteth said Wednesday in a telephone interview. "I think someone is playing a practical joke."He said he was starting to get phone calls from people who had heard the report. He said Red Cloud is an amputee who does not travel and could not have gone to the site of the Bigfoot shooting.Bigfoot, which is referred to as "Chiye-tanka" or "The Big Man" is in some books about Native American culture and spirituality.SDSMT chose to play the story as a joke.

"Despite receiving nearly $14 million in research and development funding in the 2006 fiscal year and having a wide array of cutting-edge research initiatives, the School of Mines has no facilities dedicated to Bigfoot or other cryptozoology research," the release stated.

[Rasputin]

New book details Canadian UFO sightings

They were likely too busy cowering in terror to appreciate the milestone then, but Jesuit missionaries living in 17th-century New France recorded Canada's first -- and, perhaps, most lyrical -- UFO sighting. "We saw fiery Serpents (flying) through mid-air, borne on wings of flame," they wrote."Over Quebec we beheld a great ball of fire, which illumined the night almost with the splendour of day, had not our pleasure in beholding it been mingled with fear, caused by its emission of sparks in all directions."Steven Spielberg movies and supermarket tabloids have stripped much of the poetry and urgency from contemporary UFO accounts, but an author and self-described "ufologist" says more Canadians than ever are convinced they're seeing unusual objects -- even alien spacecraft -- in the firmament.Chris Rutkowski, co-author with Geoff Dittman of the new book The Canadian UFO Report: The Best Cases Revealed, says opinion polls suggest one in 10 Canadians -- some three million of us -- have seen a UFO.From 1994 to 2004, official Canadian UFO accounts more than quadrupled, from 189 to 882, as sighters took advantage of the convenience and anonymity afforded by the growing number of UFO reporting sites on the Internet.Rutkowski's book offers a rigorous, almost scholarly, accounting of Canadian UFO sightings through history.

The timeline begins with the Jesuits' eerie encounter and ends in March 2004 with the "very bright light falling from the sky ... with smoke trailing" witnessed in southern Alberta by the pilot of then prime minister Paul Martin's jet and reported as a UFO to Edmonton International Airport authorities.Rutkowski thinks Martin's pilot likely saw a streaking chunk of meteor or comet that late-winter night. (Martin probably saw it, too, though the Prime Minister's Office refused to return Rutkowski's calls on the matter.)Many other UFOs -- a shorthand whose simple definition of "unidentified flying object" has been hijacked by pop culture to mean "flying saucers" -- can likely be assumed to be stars or airplanes, Rutkowski says.

[Rasputin]

GM grass plant escapes in the US

A nondescript grass discovered in the Oregon countryside is hardly an alien invasion. Yet the plant - a genetically modified form of a grass commonly grown on golf courses - is worrying the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) enough that it is running its first full environmental impact assessment of a GM plant. It is the first time a GM plant has escaped into the wild in the US, and it has managed it before securing USDA approval. The plant, creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera, carries a bacterial gene that makes it immune to the potent herbicide glyphosate, better known as Roundup. The manufacturer, The Scotts Company, Marysville, Ohio, is hoping the grass will provide a turf that makes it easier for golf course owners to manage their fairways and greens by letting them kill competing weedy grasses with glyphosate.

Jay Reichman and colleagues at the US Environmental Protection Agency's labs in Corvallis, Oregon, identified nine escapees out of 20,400 plants of various grass varieties sampled within a 4.8-kilometre radius of the site where the bentgrass is being cultivated, the most distant 3.8 kilometres away. The team showed that the GM grass has spread both by pollinating non-GM plants to form hybrids, and by seed movement.

[jjbb]

قرص ضد حماقت هم موجود است!


جام جم آنلاین: محققان آلمانی در حال آزمایش یک قرص ضد حماقت هستند!.
به گزارش شورت نیوز ، این قرص سلولهای مغزی خاصی را فعال می کند که به تثبیت حافظه کوتاه مدت کمک می کنند و دقت و توجه را افزایش می دهند.
تابه حال این دارو روی موش و مگس میوه آزمایش شده و نتایج نشان داده اند در رفع نقصان حافظه کوتاه مدت موثر بوده است

[Rasputin]

X-rays reveal Archimedes secrets

A series of hidden texts written by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being revealed by US scientists. Until now, the pages have remained obscured by paintings and texts laid down on top of the original writings. Using a non-destructive technique known as X-ray fluorescence, the researchers are able to peer through these later additions to read the underlying text. The goatskin parchment records key details of Archimedes' work, considered the foundation of modern mathematics. The writings include the only Greek version of On Floating Bodies known to exist, and the only surviving ancient copies of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion. In the treatises, the 3rd Century BC mathematician develops numerical descriptions of the real world. "Archimedes was like no-one before him," says Will Noel, curator of manuscripts and rare books at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland and director of the imaging project. "It just doesn't get any better than re-reading the mind of one of the greatest figures of Western civilisation."

Revealing Archimedes' writings presents a huge challenge to the imaging team. The original texts were transcribed in the 10th Century by an anonymous scribe on to parchment. Three centuries later a monk in Jerusalem called Johannes Myronas recycled the manuscript to create a palimpsest. Palimpsesting involves scraping away the original text so the parchments can be used again. To create a book, the monk cut the pages in half and turned them sideways.

[Rasputin]

French police hunt mystery 'panther'

Scores of policemen, some armed with shotguns, are hunting a mysterious big black feline spotted in northern France, officers said. The operation was launched Wednesday near the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer after several panicked people first raised the alarm on seeing what they described as a "panther" about 1.2 metres (four feet) long on a popular beach. Some 80 officers and a helicopter were immediately deployed on a search, and the beach was closed for a day, but they failed to find their quarry. Belgian tourists and residents then reported seeing the black beast on Friday, and on Saturday people out strolling saw it in the middle of a cornfield. Police finally spotted it through binoculars. "It's a black or dark feline, fairly hefty, not very high but pretty long. It's not a panther. It's a big cat with at least a metre in length," one officer said. He added that it appeared to disappearing into forested areas, frustrating efforts to catch it or kill it.

The type and origin of the big cat was unknown. A circus in the area denied having lost any animals. The sightings recalled those of a similar beast seen in the nearby town of Touquet in 1986 which was never found despite the efforts of 50 officers and a helicopter.

[Rasputin]

The day the Dinosaurs died

The following is a chapter from the new book by Robert Walker O'Neal Ph.D which provides a fictional account of the asteroid impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago which caused the death of the dinosaurs. Destination: Earth: The cosmic hammer was a space rock. The Earth was its timber. The hammer was fashioned in a violent inferno, when two planets collided billions of years before the rock would visit Earth. An asteroid-size stone was but a parcel amid the rubble. For eons, this rock tumbled at an unimaginable velocity toward a small blue planet parked along the galaxy's suburbs. This alien boulder was the size of Mount Everest. Given water and artificial atmosphere, it could have sustained several space colonies for humans and animals. But no space colonies would ever inhabit that real estate. During Earth's Cretaceous era, humans were yet to be born. Dinosaurs reigned over lesser animals and pterosaurs ruled the skies. Beneath the immense Western Interior Seaway, the great Megalodon shark was large enough to eat whales for breakfast. Although billions of years had passed since those alien worlds collided, these animals' fates were sealed from the moment of the planetary impact. All would be the victims of Earth's Fifth Mass Extinction.

This wasn't the first asteroid to hit our planet, and it won't be the last. 183 million years before, an asteroid ended the Permian-Triassic Age. And just one million years before, near what is now Mason, Iowa, a two-mile wide asteroid smashed into Earth's crust at 43,000 miles per hour, creating a twenty-mile wide and six-mile-deep crater. Its effect was that of ten times all the world's atomic bombs exploding together. But the rock now speeding toward Earth was three times the size of the Iowa asteroid. Three of the previous four extinction events had been by reason of earthborn calamities. The worst had been the Permian-Triassic extinction long before. 95 percent of all plants and animals vanished forever beneath the wrath of a ten-mile-wide asteroid.. Climate change was the identified killer for three mass extinctions. Only the asteroid from the Permian event had produced a tragedy comparable to the terror appointed to the inhabitants of the late Cretaceous. In previous epochs, plants had been of the non-flowering variety, like ferns and conifers. No one knows how or why flowers had developed just a few million years before. But here they flourished everywhere in this wild and wonderful age. Researchers most familiar with Charles Darwin's work admit that his most celebrated conclusion was more a leap of vast imagination than that of hard science. After all, no transitional fossil, indicating the change of one species to another, has yet been found. And those researchers find one failing of his imagination to be rather odd. Although Darwin could somehow envision that a single-celled creature might ultimately evolve to its standing as homo sapien, he couldn't figure out how primitive plants evolved into flowering plants. He called it an “abominable mystery.”

During its light-years' journey, the asteroid encountered an occasional floater, a rocky obstruction. Given the object's velocity, many of these road bumps understandably chipped away a random chunk or two. But in the relatively sterile vacuum of space, its gargantuan body had remained essentially intact from the day of its parent's destruction. So safe until that instant, the asteroid smacked into Earth's atmospheric shelf like a bus hitting a brick wall. Shards of pebbles and larger stones exploded at its outer perimeters and those fragments spider-webbed toward the planet below. Deeper into increasingly thickened atmosphere, the friction chafed its coat like sandpaper on wood. The main structure flamed blue-white and soon was chased by a forty-kilometer-long inferno of a tail that could now be spotted by inhabitants at the planet's surface. Had the rock not attained a targeted and directed velocity since the day its parent planet impacted another, it would have fallen straight down like any floater snared in Earth's gravity. Instead, its swift and angular trajectory hurled it from Earth's near edge toward its far side, facing the sun. At the asteroid's ultimate point of arrival, Earth's rotation had positioned that piece of real estate so that it was now early morning. The sun's rays would soon break at the far horizon.

[Rasputin]

Physics professor walks on fire

Physics professor David Willey doesn't use chalk and formulas to spark his students' interest in thermodynamics. He walks on fire."Nothing gets a student's attention like the possibility that I might kill myself," said Willey, this year's winner of the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.In reality, Willey doesn't even break a sweat, thanks to wood's insulating properties and a quick pace. And he's not alone.The ritual of walking on fire has existed for thousands of years. The first records of the practice date back to 1200 B.C. Around the world, from Greece to China, cultures set trails ablaze for rites of healing, initiation, and faith. In the United States, fire-walking has become popular as a team spirit-building business for corporations as well as a so-called alternative health remedy. Scientists in the 1930's first sought explanations for how participants of the ritual paced unscathed. The University of London's Council for Physical Research found that the witchcraft was in the wood, rather than religious faith and supernatural powers.Traditional fire-walking paths are made of wood, left to burn into smoldering coals.

The coals can reach high temperatures. Most fire-walks occur on coals that measure about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Willey once recorded someone walking on 1,800-degree coals. People survive because only a small amount of heat transfers from the glowing wood to the sole of their feet."Even if it's on fire, wood is a lousy conductor," Willey said.

[Rasputin]

Mystery road disables car engines

It's a mystery that would be well at home in the Twilight Zone or the X-Files – and it's leaving residents baffled. Motorists leaving their vehicles on a 50-yard stretch of road have returned to find their cars won't start.Residents of Percy Road, Gosport, say 'unknown forces' are constantly shutting down their car immobilisers and electric starters.But despite putting forward various theories, including new telephone masts, remote broadband installations, and even MoD transmissions, they have been left scratching their heads at what is behind the problem.Wayne Dobson, 38, first discovered the problem when he came home from work, parked up as usual and tried to use his remote immobiliser to lock his V-registered Land Rover Freelander, but got no response.When he later tried to start the car, he found it was completely dead.However, when he pushed his car a few yards up the road, it started again without complaint.After talking to his neighbours, he discovered they had experienced exactly the same problem.

Mr Dobson said: 'It's all a bit Mulder and Scully. It's just these few car lengths outside our houses, and it started only at the end of last week. None of us can think of anything that would cause it.'It's not as if someone has just come and dropped a new radio mast nearby or anything. It's not a police issue, it's not a council issue – it's a mystery.'Despite the fact parking is at a premium on the street, the locals are now refusing to park in the 'twilight zone'.

[Rasputin]

Are we hard-wired for religion ?

Almost every faith centers on a Supernatural Enforcer. An invisible power - a god, ancestral spirits or karma - rewards those who follow the rules and punishes those who don't.Why do most religions have that in common? It's not inevitable, after all. A faith with a god who is indifferent toward people is simple to imagine. But it's much harder to find.Believers will say their religion reflects divine will: that's the way God (or something) planned it.But a less theological explanation finds support from an experiment conducted at a British college psychology department: Maybe that common element of modern religions was the product of Darwinian evolution.Refreshments are sold on the honor system in the break room at the University of Newcastle - people who get a cup of coffee or tea are supposed to leave money. Researchers found that when they added a picture of eyes above the payment box, more than twice as much money was deposited, compared with weeks when the eyes were replaced by a picture of flowers.

People were subconsciously triggered into acting more honestly, as if they were actually being watched, even though they knew the eyeballs were mere paper and ink.Those results, published last month in the journal Biology Letters, support a controversial theory that connects prehistoric humans to modern faiths.The theory says that so many of today's religions feature Supernatural Enforcers because of survival of the fittest. That sort of religion was most successful at prodding people into greater cooperation and honesty, which in turn helped their culture thrive, say the theory's supporters.

[Rasputin]

Experts meet to decide Pluto's fate

Astronomers are gathering in the Czech capital, Prague, hoping to define exactly what counts as a planet. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) hopes to settle the question of Pluto, which was first spotted in 1930. Experts are divided over whether Pluto - further away and considerably smaller than the eight other planets in our Solar System - deserves the title. The stakes were raised when a bigger planet-type body, known as 2003 UB313, was discovered by a US astronomer. Professor Mike Brown and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered several other planetary objects in an area at the edge of the Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. Now delegates to the Prague conference are being asked to agree on a formal definition of what is a planet for the first time. One potential outcome of the meeting would be the promotion of 2003 UB313 - nicknamed Xena - into the exclusive club of "official" planets. But Pluto's status as the ninth planet could also be in danger if the experts decide it no longer makes the grade. Discovered in 1930, Pluto is just 2,360km (1,467 miles) across, and is vastly different to more familiar planets such as our own Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn or even Neptune, Pluto's nearest neighbour.

But after being measured by the Hubble space telescope, 2003 UB313 was classified larger than Pluto, at some 3,000km (1,864 miles) across its diameter. About 3,000 astronomers and scientists are meeting in Prague to determine the fate of Pluto and the relevance of millions of schoolbooks and encyclopaedias around the world. There are suggestions the scientists could decide to include Pluto in a new classification system that marks it out as different to the eight larger planets. The meeting opens on Monday and is due to last 12 days.

[Rasputin]

Mystery water gurgles from tree

Lucille Pope's red oak tree has baffled tree experts, water specialists and nursery professionals. The knotted, towering tree, more than 100 years old, has become the root of scrutiny in her East Side neighborhood. The tree has gurgled water from its trunk for the past three months. Pope, 65, has sought answers from several specialists, calling experts from the Texas Forest Service, the Edwards Aquifer Authority and nurseries for an explanation. They've combed her backyard, probing the gnarled tree that leans away from a parked white 1980s Cadillac. After snapping pictures, doing taste tests and conducting preliminary studies, they're still working to give her a definitive answer. "I got a mystery tree," Pope said. "What kind of mystery do I have where water comes out of a tree?" The odd occurrence started in early April when her son, Lloyd Pope, noticed bark smeared with sap when he went to fill his the water trough of his stepson's dog Neno. After moving the Rottweiler's tray, he saw a wide stain that ran from the root up toward the branches, with fluid dripping to the ground from above.

Days later, he saw water streaming onto the ground from the other side, and he showed his mother the sight. Lloyd Pope, 47, said the water was cool, like it came from a faucet. The only damp spot around the tree trunk is where the water lands. The peculiar incident has the Popes wondering if the water has properties not found on tap.

[Rasputin]

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.

[Rasputin]

The mother of all meat-eaters

A fishing dinosaur whose fossilised bones were discovered in Surrey could have spawned the biggest meat- eaters to walk the Earth. Baryonyx remains were found in Ockley in 1983, and recent analysis has led to a reassessment of life in Britain 125 million years ago. An estimated 10 per cent of teeth originally thought to have belonged to ancient crocodiles and kept at the Natural History Museum, in London, have been reidentified as belonging to Baryonyx.Further fossil finds on the Isle of Wight and in Spain, Thailand and Africa, have shown that the species and its descendants ruled lake, river and coastal regions for 45 million years. A 7ft-long skull recovered in Africa has been identified as belonging to Spinosaurus, a direct descendant of Baryonyx. It may have been the biggest meat-eater yet, but scientists cannot be sure because none of its body has been located. By comparison, Gigantosaurus, the biggest confirmed land meat-eater, had a 6ft skull.“Baryonyx is probably the ancestor of the biggest meat-eating dinosaur but we can’t be sure,” said Angela Milner, of the museum, who helped to excavate and study the remains. “The discovery of Baryonyx has led to the reinterpretation of a lot of remains in the rest of the world.“We’ve found many of the teeth finds going back to early Victorian times now turn out not to be crocodiles but this animal. The sheer number of remains suggests that Baryonyx wasn’t as uncommon as we thought.” She was speaking on the eve of the opening today of an interactive exhibition, Dino Jaws, at the museum. The centrepiece is a life-size, animatronic re-creation of the Baryonyx.

The fossils remain out of the public eye where scientists continue to analyse them. There is also a virtual fossil dig, animatronic dinosaurs to show how body design was suited to diet, and remains such as copralites — fossilised faeces — for children to examine.The Home Counties Baryonyx was about 35ft long and an adolescent. Fully grown it is thought to have been 50ft long, weighing more than two tonnes. It was a fish-eating dinosaur that would have caught its prey by scooping it out of shallow water. The dinosaur’s natural environment would have been lakesides, river banks and the sea shore. The discovery of an almost identical dinosaur in Thailand has led scientists to reassess the dates when Asia and Europe were joined, because the two continents were thought to be separated by sea at the time.

[Rasputin]

"Bigfoot" filmed for new TV show

Stories of Bigfoot sightings are often scoffed at, but if someone says he saw the big hairy beast last month in the mountains of West Virginia, it's true. A crew from the National Geographic Channel was in the state last month filming a show on the fabled creature. Two actors dressed as a cross between a human and an ape were filmed in numerous scenes shot in Canaan Valley and Smokehole Caverns. Pam Haynes, director of the West Virginia Film Office, said, "West Virginia stood in for central Mongolia. They filmed for four days the week of July 10." The shoot was especially exciting for Charleston resident and Capital High teacher Robert Haddy, a special effects artist who was contacted by the National Geographic producer to turn two actors into Bigfoot creatures. "When they called me I was on my way to the beach," Haddy said. "And I hadn't had a vacation in five years. But I don't get very many of those kinds of calls. "I was very ecstatic.

Then they told me they needed it in a week. I told them there was no way I could do a suit like that in a week, and I was out of town. But the producer was insistent that I do the show. "And she needed two suits, not one," he said." Haddy squeezed in a few days at the beach, then headed home to tackle the Bigfoot project in time to meet the crew for filming.