Science Special News

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Scientists to create human-rabbit embryos

Scientists are poised to press ahead with controversial plans to create hybrid human and rabbit embryos. It emerged yesterday that three British teams - including one led by Professor Ian Wilmut at Edinburgh University - are due this month to seek licences from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority allowing them to create embryos that are 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent rabbit. The scientists are also looking at the possibility of creating similar "chimera" embryos by mixing human and cow genes. The aim is to find a ready source of "human" embryonic stem cells without the ethical problems of tampering with human life. Making the chimeras would involve removing the nuclei from animal eggs and replacing them with genetic material taken from human cells. The embryos would be mostly human, but would contain animal genes as there are genes outside the nucleus that sit within tiny rod-like powerplants in the cell called mitochondria. These structures, which supply energy, would remain in the animal eggs after the nuclear transfer of human DNA.

Professor Stephen Minger, of King's College London, who leads one of the groups, wants to use stem cells extracted from the embryos to investigate human neurological diseases. "The idea is to gain information that we can't get from animal models," he said."We want to create tools we can use in academic and pharmaceutical research. We want to create disease-specific cell lines - predominantly neurological disorders with a known genetic basis, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. It could lead to new therapies."

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UK to join hunt for 'killer' asteroid

UK astronomers are to join a search for Earth-threatening asteroids measuring less than 1km (0.6 miles) across. Researchers from three universities have signed an agreement to use one of the world's most advanced telescopes - the Pan-Starrs observatory in Hawaii. Pan-Starrs, sited on the island of Maui, is equipped with a huge digital camera. While searching for near-Earth asteroids, it will build up the most detailed image yet of the Universe. This will enable astronomers to investigate small Solar System objects and search for exploding stars, to produce three-dimensional maps of galaxies and dark matter, to measure the properties of dark energy and to investigate how galaxies have evolved. Researchers from the University of Durham, Queen's University Belfast and the University of Edinburgh have signed an agreement to start using the facility. "The current generation of search telescopes are designed for the objects about 1km across and larger, because if one of those hits, it could cause instant global climate change," said Alan Fitzsimmons, a professor of astronomy at Queen's University Belfast.

"The smaller objects need a larger telescope and a more efficient camera system - they're the kinds of objects Pan-Starrs has been designed to detect. "Even though they're smaller and don't cause as much damage, there are more of them and they hit more frequently." Although sub-1km asteroids might not cause devastation on a global scale, they could cause death and destruction at a local and regional level, potentially wiping out millions of lives. The last significant event like this occurred in 1908, when an asteroid or comet exploded above the Tunguska region of Siberia. The area was sparsely populated and, as a result, did not cause extensive loss of life.

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Harry Potter 'satanism' claims continue

All this time we thought the Harry Potter books were about coming of age, triumphing over adversity and eating jelly beans that taste like earwax and vomit. It turns out we have not been paying close attention. There are people out there, lots of people, who think Harry, Hermione and Ron are recruiters for Satan's army.Last week, a suburban Atlanta mother of four made news by asking the board of education to banish Harry and the Hogwarts gang from school libraries. She says the books are an "evil" attempt to indoctrinate kids into the Wicca religion, and foster the kind of culture that leads to atrocities like the Columbine school shootings.Plenty of other parents, clergy and teachers worry that the J.K. Rowling series promotes an unhealthy interest in witchcraft. The books have been removed, restricted, banned and burned so many times that they rank first on the American Library Association's list of "challenged" books from 2000-2005.The Harry-and-Satan theory picked up steam several years ago when the satirical tabloid The Onion ran a story headlined "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children." (The article reported that since 1995, applicants to Satan worship had increased from 100,000 to 14 million children and young adults.)

The story was excerpted in e-mail chain letters forwarded by folks who didn't get the joke--and the next thing you knew the Internet was loaded with rebuttals by angry Wiccans, Harry Potter fans and truth-squad Web sites like snopes.com.Naturally, this has not hurt Harry's popularity. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week, the ALA asked readers to vote for their favorite banned titles. The Harry Potter series finished first in all three age categories--preteen, teen and adult.

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Exploring the mystery of ball lightning

Ball-lightning, long dismissed as a myth, could be the consequence of lightning strikes and has been recreated in the laboratory. On October 21, 1638, a strange darkness descended over Widecombe, Dartmoor. In the church of St Pancras some 60 people were worshipping at afternoon service, taking refuge from the thunderstorm outside. According to written reports a sudden clap of thunder was heard and a "great ball of fire" ripped through the window. Part of the roof was blasted off as the fireball "bounced" through the church, burning dozens of the congregation and throwing them around like rag dolls, killing four. Then, with another deafening clap, the fireball disappeared without trace. Many consider this to be one of the earliest (and most dramatic) records of ball-lightning, a rare phenomenon which has eluded scientific explanation for decades.

Often described as "one of the big unsolved mysteries in physics", it is no surprise that ball-lightning has captured imaginations. However, in the absence of scientific explanation, it has become the domain of alien-abductees and conspiracy-theorists, which has given it something of a stigma within the scientific community. Certainly there are scientists who are reluctant to accept its existence. But the sheer number of sightings, combined with their apparent similarities, suggests that ball-lightning is more than a myth.

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Giant camel unearthed in Syria

Swiss and Syrian archaeologists working in Syria's Palmyra desert claim to have uncovered the remains of a giant camel that lived 100,000 years ago and once stood "as big as a giraffe or an elephant". Researchers at the University of Basel first came across a set of extraordinarily large bones three years ago while excavating in the El Kowm area, 250km north of the capital Damascus, but were only able to confirm the remains came from a camel once further fragments were found this summer. "We found the first traces of a big animal in 2003, but we were not sure if it was a giant camel," Jean-Marie Le Tensorer, a pre-history professor at the University of Basel, told Reuters. "This is a big discovery, a revolution in science." The ancient camel would have stood approximately three metres tall, almost twice the size of modern-day camels, and was apparently killed by humans as it drank from a spring. The find is scientifically remarkable not only because of the animal's incredible size but also because it proves that the dromedary camel species existed in the area at a much earlier date than had been previously thought - possibly as much as 90,000 years earlier. "It was not known that the dromedary was present in the Middle East more than 10,000 years ago," said Professor Le Tensorer. Bone fragments were also found in different layers of rock suggesting the giant camels had existed in the region for thousands of years. Human remains discovered near by, including tools made from animal foot bones that dated from the same period, suggested the camel was killed by humans but scientists are unsure whether those remains come from the homo sapiens or Neanderthal species. Peter Schmid, an anthropologist from the University of Zurich, called the camel find a sensational evolutionary discovery. "This find is sensational as it could help us understand the evolution of the camel," he said.

The Syrian government has been particularly excited by the discovery because it places the evolutionary ancestor to the modern-day camel, an animal of immense importance to Arab culture, squarely inside Syria. Bassam Jamous, head of the country's Department of Antiquities, told the Syrian Arab News Agency: "This discovery shows that the Syrian desert is where the camel, the so-called 'ship of the desert' first emerged on Earth." Evidence of human habitation in Syria dates as far back as 1.5 million years and the El Kowm region, a 14-mile plain nestled between two mountain ranges, is a particularly rich area for Paleolithic finds. More than 180 sites, some dating as far back as 750,000 years, have shown that the area was of great importance to nomadic tribes and animals because of an abundance of water sources there.

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Who was Spring-Heeled Jack ?

Spring-Heeled Jack (1837-1904), mystery assailant, was first reported, though not named, in early January 1838, when the lord mayor of London made public a letter he had received, signed "A resident of Peckham": "It appears that some individuals have laid a wager with a mischievous and foolhardy companion (name as yet unknown) that he durst not take upon himself the task of visiting many of the villages near London in three disguises - a ghost, a bear and a devil; and, moreover, that he will not dare to enter gentlemen's gardens for the purpose of alarming the inmates of the house. The wager has been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses." (Times, 9 January 1838 The publication of this letter elicited a host of reports of incidents dating from the previous autumn. Though the correspondents shared the belief that a malicious prankster was responsible, plainly many of their informants (frequently their servants) did not, but believed the incidents to be supernatural. They involved a mysterious figure who appeared, always after dark, chiefly in the forms of a bear, a man in armour, or the devil himself, and either frightened or attacked people by tearing at their clothing with his talons. His most usual target was young women.

By mid-February 1838 the assailant was known as Spring-Heeled Jack. A first-hand report of an attack was published: 18-year-old Jane Alsop had answered the door at Old Ford, near Bow, and been attacked by a figure who "vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flames from his mouth" and "tore at her neck and arms with his claws" before scampering away across the fields (Times, 22 February 1838. The scare was at its height; there had been reports from some 30 locations around London.

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Time capsule to be beamed from Teotihuacan

Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message. Those contributions--part of media company Yahoo's "Time Capsule" project--will be digitized and beamed with a laser into space on Oct. 25 from the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, now an archeological site near Mexico City. Archeologists say a culture centered in Teotihuacan, known as the City of the Gods, dominated Mesoamerica for hundreds of years during the first millennium. It is unclear what led to the society's collapse. "We have this incredible ancient site and from that site we can project contemporary content," Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo's editor in chief, told Reuters. "What is new is the ability to capture this information in such scale."

In the 1970s, astronomer Carl Sagan compiled a record with sounds and images, including a mariachi band and greetings in an ancient Sumerian language, to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. His record was sent out with the Voyager spacecraft in the hope that extraterrestrial life forms would eventually find it.

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Did North Korea's nuke test fail ?

North Korea sets off an earthshaking explosion and claims it was nuclear. Was it? For scientists, that was not a quick and easy question to answer. Like earthquakes, large explosions send out shockwaves that can be detected on seismographs. Big nuclear bombs make big waves, with clear signatures that make them fairly easy to detect, analyze and confirm that they were caused by splitting atoms. But smaller blasts _ as North Korea's appears to have been _ are trickier to break down. The natural sound of the Earth, with its constant seismic activity of tectonic plates grinding together, complicates the task of trying to determine whether a smaller blast was caused by conventional explosives or a nuclear device, said Xavier Clement of France's Atomic Energy Commission. He likened the problem to trying to "detect the violins or a flute in a symphony orchestra when you are playing the cymbals." His agency estimated the North Korean blast at around 1 kiloton or less _ equivalent to the explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT. For a nuclear device, that would be so weak that the French defense minister suggested that "there could have been a failure" with the North Korean reported test. Clement said it could take days before scientists can declare with certainty whether the explosion was nuclear. And when blasts are very weak, "we could be in a situation where we cannot tell the difference between the two," he said.

The United States, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea are among the countries with equipment strong enough and close enough to monitor a North Korean test, said Russian nuclear physicist Vladimir Orlov of the Moscow-based PIR Center, a nonproliferation think-tank. "It takes days, dozens of lab hours, to evaluate results. Now we can have only a rough estimate," he said. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, or CTBTO, has about 200 stations worldwide designed for monitoring nuclear tests as part of what it hopes will become the world's most reliable source for such tests. But until the treaty comes into force, the data are not made public, only released to governments and vetted partners.

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Probe peers into Venusian secrets

Submitted by Hurrikane: Venus is an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, inside a dense cloud of carbon dioxide (CO2). But a suite of orbiting instruments is proving its ability to penetrate the thick atmosphere and create a new and dynamic picture of Earth's sister planet. Scientists at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena, California, this week said that data streaming from the Venus Express probe had provided unprecedented detail of the Venusian atmosphere and the first-ever peek at its lower strata. They hope the spacecraft will help answer fundamental questions about the planet's atmospheric composition and dynamics, as well as solve key Venus puzzles: what drives its "super-rotation"; are its volcanoes active; and just what is the strange ultraviolet-absorbing substance swirling at the cloud tops? But for now, scientists are happy to report that all the instruments are in good working order and beaming back massive amounts of data. "It's a treasure trove of information," said David Grinspoon, a participating scientist with the mission, "and we've barely opened the chest and looked in."

The seven instruments on the spacecraft, in obit around Venus since April, are examining the planet over a wide swath of the spectrum: from ultraviolet to visible, to infrared, and even radio wavelengths. "Our main objective is to do a comprehensive study of the atmosphere," said Hakan Svedhem, Venus Express project scientist.

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Oxford resident writes ghostly guide

Oxford's creepy colleges and haunted homes are revealed in a new book by resident Rob Walters. Mr Walters, of Paradise Street, is a guide on the city's renowned ghost tours, so is well placed to document its spooky past. Locals may have heard about the phantom that wanders Christ Church Meadow, and the eerie ruins of Godstow Abbey are well known, but Haunted Oxford promises new anecdotes.Following a series of adverts he placed in the Oxford Mail, Mr Walters was contacted by a number of people with personal tales of ghostly encounters. These include a spook seen in the cellar by the previous manager of the historic Eagle and Child pub in St Giles and the ghosts of two twin undergraduates spotted in St Peter's College.Mr Walters said: "Just as people tell doctors their ailments, people always tell me their ghostly experiences - it's fascinating."There's about 16 stories in the book, from modern ones right back to the time of Henry II."He was particularly interested in the story of the two male twins in St Peter's College. He said: "The Bishop of Liverpool founded the college and we believe the ghostly apparitions seen were his two twin sons, who were undergraduates there."

"The chap that saw them didn't know anything about that - which made it particularly impressive."Mr Walters has never had a brush with a phantom himself, but said those on his tours had often reported strange happenings.He said: "Once a woman started screaming, saying something was touching her back."I don't know quite what it was but it obviously affected her."And he said Oxford had a long historical link with the paranormal.He added: "There was a survey done in England in the 19th century asking if people had experienced a ghost."Of the 27,000 people that replied, 10 per cent claimed they had and when they analysed the results, the most dense amount of people were in Oxford. We're the ghost capital.

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Row over Satanism night school course

An unholy row has broken out after a night-school course in Satanism was launched in a village hall. Occultist Scott Jones is guiding students through topics such as a witchcraft, Satanism and tarot during the course in Worle, Somerset.Students on the 10-week course, will learn how to "increase their mental and physical strength through meditation" discover the "magic alphabet" and investigate rituals with dolls.But the course, headed by Mr Jones, 35, has been heavily criticised by horrified locals, who claim the subject matter of the course is "distasteful and awful".Placard-waving protesters have campaigned outside the community centre while the class is taking place.And Mr Jones, who lives in Worle, has received hate mail and a petition asking him to stop the course immediately.He said: "The course is focused around studying the Luciferian path and how it can lead to self improvement."Students study a wide variety of topics from the history, philosophy and theory of witchcraft and Satanism to the use of emotion and meditation."There is no practical aspect to it so there's no spells being cast behind doors or any of that nonsense that people are so quick to believe."I've been absolutely shocked with the level of ignorance and pettiness that has been aroused around the area because of this course."I've run the course six times before in Coventry and never had problems like this."I've received lots of mail from people asking me to stop the course immediately, but there's no way that this will happen."

Mr Jones said that his students, who are mixed in age range from their early twenties to late sixties, have enjoyed what they have studied so far.But locals haven't been so impressed.One resident from the nearby village of Milton wrote complaining letters to Mr Jones telling him that he should be ashamed for running the course in the first place.The pensioner, who refused to be identified, said: "I think a lot of people are horrified that such a thing could happen.