Science Special News

[Rasputin]

China to join Russia in Phobos flight

China will participate in a Russian project to fly to a Martian moon, a deputy head of Russia's Federal Space Agency said Tuesday. "An agreement is being prepared whereby a Chinese micro-satellite, worth some $1 billion, will be installed on the Russian station Phobos-soil," Yury Nosenko told a press conference. "While entering the orbit of Mars, the Chinese satellite will be detached from the Russian spacecraft and will become an artificial satellite of Mars," he said. A project developer said in September that Russia will launch a spacecraft to Phobos, the larger of two Martian moons, in 2009, which will then return to Earth with a sample of its soil. Dr. Efraim Akim, of the M.V. Keldysh Institute of Applied Mechanics, said the craft will be launched from a platform deployed in an intermediary near-Earth orbit. He said there will be no need to use a heavy booster rocket, which are expensive to launch. The launch window for the voyage to Phobos is October 2009, and the journey will take 10 to 11 months. The spacecraft will begin its return journey to Earth in 2011, which will take another 10 to 11 months. Phobos is a highly non-spherical moon, orbiting Mars at a distance of less than 6,000 kilometers (3728 miles) and traveling faster than the rotation of Mars itself. According to Russian Academy of Sciences member Mikhail Marov, Phobos became a satellite of Mars millions of years ago, so studying material from the asteroid will give scientists information as to the origins of the Solar System and of the Earth. Neither NASA nor the European Space Agency (ESA) are planning flights to Phobos, Marov said.

"This is a niche that foreign space agencies have left us, not only because it is an exceptionally difficult task, but also because we have already invested work in this area of planetary research." The landing will be a complicated operation due to the moon's small size and high orbital speed. The spacecraft will use new materials, allowing for a substantial reduction in weight compared to its predecessors, and high-precision Earth-based control systems will be employed for the project.

[Rasputin]

Early sketch of Stonehenge found

They got the date wrong by some 3,000 years, but the oldest detailed drawing of Stonehenge, apparently based on first hand observation, has turned up in a 15th century manuscript. The little sketch is a bird's eye view of the stones, and shows the great trilithons, the biggest stones in the monument, each made of two pillars capped with a third stone lintel, which stand in a horseshoe in the centre of the circle. Only three are now standing, but the drawing, found in Douai, northern France, suggests that in the 15th century four of the original five survived.In the Scala Mundi, the Chronicle of the World, Merlin is given credit for building Stonehenge between 480 and 486, when the Latin text says he "not by force, but by art, brought and erected the giant's ring from Ireland". Modern science suggests that the stones went up from 2,500 BC, with the bluestone outer circle somehow transported from west Wales, and the double decker bus-size sarsen stones dragged 30 miles across Salisbury plain. The drawing, recently identified by the art historian Christian Heck, has never been exhibited, but according to the Art Newspaper it will be seen next year in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, marking the 300th anniversary of the Society of Antiquaries.

There are two earlier images of Stonehenge, one in the British Library and one in the Parker Library in Cambridge, but the Douai drawing is unique in attempting to show how the monument was built. It correctly shows tenon joints piercing the lintel, a timber construction technique, although in fact the real Stonehenge tenons only go partly into the top stone. Stonehenge is rare among prehistoric landscapes, because its sheer bulk meant it was never lost. An Anglo Saxon poet wondered about the origin of the stones and inspired some of the earliest photographs.

[Rasputin]

Global warming already causing extinctions

No matter where they look, scientists are finding that global warming is already killing species—and at a much faster rate than had originally been predicted. "What surprises me most is that it has happened so soon," said biologist Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas, Austin, lead author of a new study of global warming's effects. Parmesan and most other scientists hadn't expected to see species extinctions from global warming until 2020. But populations of frogs, butterflies, ocean corals, and polar birds have already gone extinct because of climate change, Parmesan said. Scientists were right about which species would suffer first—plants and animals that live only in narrow temperature ranges and those living in cold climates such as Earth's Poles or mountaintops.

"The species dependent on sea ice—polar bear, ring seal, emperor penguin, Adélie penguin —and the cloud forest frogs are showing massive extinctions," Parmesan said. Her review compiles 866 scientific studies on the effects of climate change on terrestrial, marine, and freshwater species. The study appears in the December issue of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.

[Rasputin]

Ancient computer surprises scientists

A computer in antiquity would seem to be an anachronism, like Athena ordering takeout on her cellphone. But a century ago, pieces of a strange mechanism with bronze gears and dials were recovered from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece. Historians of science concluded that this was an instrument that calculated and illustrated astronomical information, particularly phases of the Moon and planetary motions, in the second century B.C.The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the world’s first computer, has now been examined with the latest in high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. A team of British, Greek and American researchers was able to decipher many inscriptions and reconstruct the gear functions, revealing, they said, “an unexpected degree of technical sophistication for the period.”The researchers, led by Tony Freeth and Mike G. Edmunds, both of the University of Cardiff, Wales, are reporting the results of their study in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

They said their findings showed that the inscriptions related to lunar-solar motions and the gears were a mechanical representation of the irregularities of the Moon’s orbital course across the sky, as theorized by the astronomer Hipparchos. They established the date of the mechanism at 150-100 B.C.

[Rasputin]

The king and the hypnotist

In the months immediately before his abdication, Edward VIII was hypnotised by a doctor who was fascinated by the occult and counted fascists among his patients, it was claimed last night. A report from a country vicar that Dr Alexander Cannon, a qualified psychiatrist who used spirit mediums to advise hypnotised patients on how to counter alcoholism and other problems of addiction, reached the Archbishop of Canterbury on Dec 4, 1936.So seriously did the archbishop, Dr Cosmo Lang, take the information that he immediately questioned a Harley Street doctor to find out about Dr Cannon and later informed Downing Street of the news.According to a BBC documentary broadcast last night, the news reached Lambeth Palace when a parishioner in Eye, Suffolk, told her vicar she had heard Dr Cannon boasting that he was treating the king for alcoholism.Dr Cannon's other patients included George Drummond, a banker who subsidised Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, and his British Union movement.

The timing of the information was critical.Two days earlier, a speech by the Bishop of Bradford had brought into the open what everyone "in the know" in Britain had been gossiping about for months: the affair that the king had been conducting with Mrs Wallis Simpson, a divorced Roman Catholic American.Both Church and State were in a fevered state of uncertainty as to how the King would act and whether his mental frailties would cause an implosion of the royal dignity.It was in this context that the vicar contacted the archbishop to tell him about the King's hypnosis treatment, the programme claimed. Dr Lang's chaplain immediately replied asking for further details.

[Rasputin]

Tombs of pre-Inca elite discovered

A complex of tombs recently discovered under a pyramid in Peru offers landmark clues to a thousand-year-old pre-Incan culture, archaeologists report. A team co-led by Izumi Shimada, an archaeologist with Southern Illinois University, found 22 artifact-laden tombs about 420 miles (675 kilometers) northwest of Lima, the capital. Among the findings are meticulously arranged human remains; gold, gilt copper, and bronze artifacts; and the first decorated tumi, or ceremonial knives, ever discovered by archaeologists at a burial site. The graves belong to elite members of the Middle Sican culture, a gold-working people whose farming culture thrived in Peru's desert coastal region from around A.D. 900 to 1100. Shimada and colleague Carlos Elera Arevalo, director of Peru's Sican National Museum, say the discovery is yielding crucial clues to this ancient civilization. "What is most important about our fieldwork is we found an intact pre-Hispanic elite cemetery," Shimada said in an email interview.

The tombs formed a kind of religious complex that had managed to escape looters who commonly pillage burial sites throughout Peru. Shimada said finding these rare objects undisturbed can help researchers "divine the context in which ceremonial items were used."

[Rasputin]

The future of war

At a recent exhibition of new military technology one independent expert stood almost agog as the prototype for a new killing machine was rolled out. It went by the acronym of URV or Unmanned Robot Vehicle - and it looked like something from the movies."It was frightening. The [URV] has laser radars at the front and these things were scanning up and down and from side to side," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.Org, a Washington-based military studies group. "It was the most Sixties, sci-fi thing I have ever seen." Pike and others believe this is the future of warfare - or at least part of the future. Technology will increasingly allow the most sophisticated and best equipped militaries - primarily that of the US - to fight battles using robots rather than soldiers: robots which can detect, assess and attack a target."Robots can kill without mercy, remorse or pity. They are all stone-cold killers," said Pike. "And we don't have to write letters to their families."The United States army is already developing an arsenal of robotic weapons that could be deployed within a decade or so. In the air, Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) are now being used extensively in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere - both for surveillance as well as dropping so-called "Hellfire" missiles.

The US is trying to develop ways for UAVs or drones to work in swarms, attacking targets en masse or operating an aerial delivery system to cover an entire region.Technology is also changing the nature of munitions. Already there are devastating thermobaric bombs which have more destructive power than any other conventional weapon, while microwave bombs or transient electromagnetic devices (TEDs), which release a massive burst of electromagnetic energy sufficient to disable computers without killing people, are also in development.

[Rasputin]

Uncovering the Brown Mountain mystery

A mystery that has eluded Boone researchers for centuries may soon be solved.Long before the establishment of Appalachian State University, reports existed of mysterious lights appearing in the vicinity of the Linville Gorge, known as the Brown Mountain Lights.Astronomy and physics professor Dr. Dan B. Caton said the lights appear at completely random intervals and 90 to 95 percent of the occurrences can be explained.But Caton isn’t interested in those; instead, he is making it his goal to study the other 5 percent – the occurrences that science has tried to explain, but has not been able to.Observers of the lights have reported them to appear as bright, glowing orbs above Table Rock, Linville Gorge and Brown Mountain.Caton said they have been reported in every color, and sometimes last for a few hours. Caton received an e-mail from someone who saw the lights from a distance of eight feet in a parking area.Caton’s idea to research the Brown Mountain Lights is in the form of a web-cam, which he has already procured through university funding.Caton received permission from the U.S. Forest Service to place the web-cam on a pulpit at the Wiseman’s View overlook off the Blue Ridge Parkway, but realized the camera might be destroyed by vandalism.

To solve that problem, Caton and his associates proposed the building of a tower to house the web-cam. Permits for the tower are expected to be approved by the Forest Service next month.However, the funding for construction of the tower through the University Research Council was recently denied.“Now we’re in the odd position that the U.S. Forest Service is likely to approve the permit, but we lack funding,” Caton said.“If I get approval, I will make it happen somehow,” Caton said.

[Rasputin]

Move to new planet, says Hawking

The human race must move to a planet beyond our Solar System to protect the future of the species, physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has warned. He told the BBC that life could be wiped out by a nuclear disaster or an asteroid hitting the planet. But the Cambridge academic added: "Once we spread out into space and establish colonies, our future should be safe." Prof Hawking, 64, was speaking before receiving the UK's top science award, the Royal Society's Copley Medal. He said there were no similar planets to Earth in our Solar System so humans would "have to go to another star". Professor Hawking said that current chemical and nuclear rockets were not adequate for taking colonists into space as they would mean a journey of 50,000 years.

He also discounted science-fiction ideas from programmes such as Star Trek, such as using warp drive to travel at the speed of light, for taking people to a new outpost. Instead, he favoured "matter/anti-matter annihilation" as a means of propulsion.

[Rasputin]

Discovering the first human ritual

A startling discovery of 70,000-year-old artifacts and a python's head carved of stone appears to represent the first known human rituals. Scientists had thought human intelligence had not evolved the capacity to perform group rituals until perhaps 40,000 years ago. But inside a cave in remote hills in Kalahari Desert of Botswana, archeologists found the stone snake that was carved long ago. It is as tall as a man and 20 feet long."You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python," said Sheila Coulson of the University of Oslo. "The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving."More significant, when Coulson and her colleagues dug a test pit near they stone figure, they found spearheads made of stone that had to have been brought to the cave from hundreds of miles away.

The spearheads were burned in what only could be described as some sort of ritual, the scientists conclude. "Stone age people took these colorful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there," Coulson said today. "Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site."

[Rasputin]

Robot to penetrate Cheops pyramid

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: A robot archaeologist is to be sent deep inside Egypt's largest pyramid in a bid to solve secrets revealed by a first foray more than four years ago, antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass said. "The new robot will be sent down very narrow passages in the so-called Queen's Chamber, where the first robot was sent in 2002," said Hawass, who heads Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Teams from Egypt and Singapore and a joint group from Britain and Hong Kong plan to insert the robot in February inside the Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, near to Cairo. Equipped with tiny cameras, the robot will be sent down the chamber's north and south passages in the hope of discovering what lies behind two inner walls -- or doors -- revealed during the first robotic expedition in September 2002.

At the time, the robot was sent into a northern shaft leading from the Queen's Chamber, only to be blocked about 65 metres (yards) from the chamber by "a stone wall or door" with copper handles. It also revealed the existence of a similar obstruction the same distance down the south passage.

[Rasputin]

19th century manuscript describes UFO

Nowadays reports of UFO sightings appear in the media so frequently that they hardly catch anyone’s eye. More often than not the alleged UFOs turn out to be signal rockets, meteorological probes, airplanes or their traces. But this certainly does not apply to sightings registered centuries ago — when no rockets or airplanes existed at all. Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda publishes a document from a personal archive that tells of a UFO spotted over Kremlin back in 1808.“I found this document in the personal archive of a Moscow senator Peter Poludensky, who worked for the Tsar’s Secret Service and died in the middle of XIX century. Apparently the manuscript attracted his attention for some reason,” says Alexander Afanasyev, an expert of the Russian State History Museum, department of manuscripts.“Ufology is really not my area, but I am determined that the manuscript describes a UFO.”“On September, 1, 1808, at 8 o’clock and 7 minutes in the afternoon, in the sky, clear and sown with stars, a phenomenon appeared, incomparable in its beauty and rigor, as well as in radiance and enormous size, to anything seen before. As we noticed it, attracted by the loud cracking sound, it was rising in an arch over the horizon, from 55’ to almost 90’.

Having passed this distance in an instant, it stopped among the clouds as if over the Kremlin and looked like a long straight plate some nine arshin (6.35 meter) long and half arshin (0.35 meter) thick. Then on its front edge, turned to the South-West, an oval flame flared, some two arshin (1.4 meter) long and one and a half arshin (1.4 meter) thick, with a flame that can only be compared to the radiance of burning phosphor. Floating in a circle without open fire or sparkle, it nonetheless lighted everything around as broad daylight; then the flame went out, the light disappeared, but the bright plate remained and quite smoothly went perpendicularly upwards, reached the stars and still could be seen for some two minutes and then, without disappearing, it became invisible due to the extraordinary height.”

[Rasputin]

A shadow biosphere

Could there be aliens here on Earth? While this question tends to bring out tales of UFOs and bug-eyed interstellar voyagers, it is not considered a bizarre urban legend by some astrobiologists. By “alien” they don’t mean “coming from beyond Earth,” they mean “other” –- other forms of DNA, other amino acids used to build proteins, any other means by which the chemistry of early Earth could have combined to form life we’re not familiar with. If there are forms of life on Earth today with a biochemistry not like our own, how would we even know it? Carol Cleland is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. In the third of our series of “gedanken” thought experiments, Cleland explores the possibility that Earth could be host to an undiscovered “shadow biosphere” of alternative forms of microbial life.When scientists speculate about life as we don’t know it, they typically have in mind extraterrestrial life. The possibility that the present day Earth might harbor an alternative form of life is rarely considered.

Given that biologists have yet to encounter an alternative form of Earth life, this may seem reasonable. Indeed, if there were alternative forms of life analogous to plants and animals on Earth, we undoubtedly would have stumbled upon them by now. However, the situation is quite different for microbes, which are too small to be seen with the unaided eye. Could the contemporary Earth be host to “shadow microbes” -- undiscovered alternative forms of microbial life?

[Rasputin]

UFO crash reported in Russia

Russian officials said an unidentified flying object fell out of the sky and burned on impact Friday in the taiga of East Siberia, the news agency Interfax reported. Law enforcement authorities in the Krasnoyarsk region told Interfax residents had reported seeing a "flying apparatus" plunge from the sky at about 10 a.m. Residents of the remote area, some 260 kilometres north of the regional capital of Krasnoyarsk, said the surrounding area had been charred, showing signs of a fire. Authorities, however, said they had been unable to reach the scene due to inclement weather conditions. "Investigators and transport officials are now being sent from Krasnoyarsk to establish the reasons behind the crash," a police official said. Regional authorities have not speculated about what the object might have been, but they noted a helicopter had flown over the scene and that its crew had not seen any traces of fire.

The vast Siberian taiga, an area of boundless forest, famously played host to an explosion known as the "Tunguska event" in June 1908 after an object, now thought to be an asteroid or comet, slammed into a remote area north of Lake Baikal. The blast, which felled an estimated 60 million trees over 2,000 square kilometers, was later calculated to have been the equivalent of 10 to 20 megatons of TNT, similar in force to that of the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, the DPA reported.

[Rasputin]

Were the pyramids built of concrete ?

The ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study, The Times, London reported. The research, by materials scientists, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs' craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids. Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist. The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby quarries, heaved up huge ramps and set in place by armies of workers. Some dissenters say that levers or pulleys were used, even though the wheel had not been invented at that time, the paper reported. Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.

But according to Professor Gilles Hug, of the French National Aerospace Research Agency (Onera), and Professor Michel Barsoum, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the covering of the great Pyramids at Giza consists of two types of stone: one from the quarries and one man-made.