Science Special News

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Italy police seek 'Satan squad'

Italian police want to set up a special unit to tackle the growth of new religious sects, particularly a violent new breed of home-grown Satanists. The new police squad would include psychologists, as well as a priest who is an expert on the occult. It would co-ordinate - nationwide - investigations into potentially dangerous religious movements. The move follows a spate of high profile, gruesome murders blamed on a new generation of Satanists. They indulge in a lethal blend of black magic, hard drugs, sex and heavy metal. In the most recent case a gang known as the "Beasts of Satan" bludgeoned, then buried alive, two of their own members - a young woman and her boyfriend - in woods outside Milan. Experts say the number of Satanists in Italy is tiny - and the product as much of youthful alienation as of any more traditional religious conviction.

But more than a million Italians belong to other minority religions, and some experts are worried that the new police squad could target members of them as well - even though, despite their perhaps strange beliefs, they are entirely harmless.

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Martian life frozen in underground oceans ?

A top UK space scientist Dr. John Murray has said that Mars could be lurking with killer aliens lying frozen beneath its surface. He has said that bringing them to Earth will be catastrophic, as they will wipe out humanity. Now Dr. Murray, who is also UK lead scientist with Europe's Mars Express mission, has said he has overwhelming evidence of the life surviving in the frozen ocean near its equator, where simple life could thrive as microbes.Prospects for life on Mars were boosted last week by NASA's discovery of running water on the Red Planet, reports The Sun.Dr. Murray believes the aliens are all lying in a dormant state. As such, a rocket should be used to blast a crater into ice floes in the region - named Elysium - allowing access to the aliens and water should be sprinkled on the dormant creatures to revive them."Then we could land a follow-up probe to scoop up the soil, put it under a microscope and add water," he said. However, the danger was in bringing them to Earth, he said."Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) plan to bring samples of Mars 48million miles back to Earth in the next decade to be studied in a lab.

That is where the danger lies," he said."It is going to be extremely primitive life. We are talking about bacteria. The only danger is if we brought it back and it escaped, we could have a War Of The Worlds situation," he added."Earth bacteria killed the invading Martians in that. The Martians brought to us could kill off humans. We'd best have a good look at things on Mars before bringing anything back," he said.

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Revealing Britain's UFO secrets

Robert Verhaik : Introduced two years ago, the Freedom of Information Act has forced the British Government to give up its darkest secrets and present many of its most sensitive documents for public inspection. The National Archives Office in Kew, formerly known as the Public Records Office, holds the largest database of secrets in the world. Millions of documents in electronic and hard copy have been painstakingly filed under classified headings ranging from "restricted viewing" to "top secret". For an investigative journalist there can be no more exciting a phrase than the words that flashed across the top of my documents: "Classified - not for release until 2010". The black ink stamp of secrecy meant that mine was the first unrestricted eye to see these documents for 30 years. Since the 1950s, when the first reports of UFOs reached this country from America, the men from the ministry had maintained a contemptuous silence about the possibility of alien visitors. So it is still surprising to me, even today, that there exists at the heart of the Ministry of Defence, working in a committee room supported by secretarial staff, a special unit whose sole purpose is to investigate and collate reports of UFOs. These papers are Britain's very own X-Files.

Many of the documents contained fanciful reports from old ladies, children or UFO enthusiasts - and, on the whole, they do not make very convincing reading. But after a great deal of digging I finally came across a slightly thicker file, with much more MoD correspondence than any of the others. This time the observers were not children, confused old ladies or UFO nuts but an RAF pilot and two NCOs based at RAF Boulmer in Northumberland.

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Vatican unearths St. Paul's tomb

A white marble sarcophagus believed to be the final resting place of St. Paul has been unearthed from beneath the altar of Rome's second-largest basilica after centuries hidden from view, but those curious about its contents will have to wait still longer. Vatican experts, announcing Monday that the coffin had been unearthed, said they hoped to be able to examine it more closely and maybe even look inside.But Giorgio Filippi, a Vatican archaeologist, said researchers' first concern was to free it from centuries of plaster and debris in the hope of finding other clues on the sarcophagus itself."Right now we can treat it as a symbol, regardless of its contents," Filippi said.According to tradition, St. Paul, also known as the apostle of the Gentiles, was beheaded in Rome in the 1st century during the persecution of early Christians by Roman emperors. Popular belief holds that bone fragments from his head are in another Rome basilica, St. John Lateran, with his other remains inside the sarcophagus.The 8-foot-long coffin, which dates from at least A.D. 390 and was buried under the main altar of St. Paul's Outside the Walls Basilica, has been the subject of an extended excavation that began in 2002 and ended last month.

"These excavations give us the full certainty and knowledge that the sarcophagus is St. Paul's tomb, whether it contains his remains or not," said Cardinal Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, head of the basilica.The cardinal said X-rays were unlikely to penetrate the thick marble, making it necessary to open the tomb to find out what is inside. "It has never been opened or explored," he said.

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Mountain range spotted on Titan

The Cassini spacecraft has spied the tallest mountains yet seen on Titan, Saturn's major moon. The range is about 150km long (93 miles), 30km (19 miles) wide and about 1.5km (nearly a mile) high. The feature was identified by the probe on a recent pass, using a combination of radar and infrared data. Dr Bob Brown, one of the scientists behind the discovery, said it reminded him of the Sierra Nevada mountains in the western US. "One could call them Titan's Sierras," the University of Arizona-Tucson researcher added. The mountains lie south of the equator. Scientists told the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting that the range was probably as hard as rock, but made of icy materials. The mountains appear to be coated with layers of organic, or carbon-rich, material. This could be methane "snow". Titan is smothered in a thick photochemical haze, so Cassini must use instruments other than its optical camera system to see features such as these mountains. Dr Brown, who leads Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (Vims) team, said a theory was now emerging to explain how the range formed. It was likely they grew as material welled up from below to fill the gaps opened when tectonic plates pulled apart, he explained. This is similar to the way mid-ocean ridges are formed on Earth today.

Dr Brown said the mountains were close to a circular feature which might be an ancient impact basin. He speculated that it was possible a space collision in Titan's past had kicked off the whole process. "The energy released in the impact was probably large enough for the impactor to punch through the crust of Titan which then caused tectonic disruption in the area, and that these [mountains] occurred some time afterwards.

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Earliest flying mammal discovered

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: Mammals took to the skies at least 70 million years earlier than previously thought, scientists say. A fossil uncovered in China suggests mammals were trying out flight at about the same time - or even earlier - than birds, the team reports in Nature. The researchers said the squirrel-sized animal, which lived at least 125 million years ago, used a fur-covered skin membrane to glide through the air. The creature was so unusual, they said, it belonged to a new order of mammals. The US-Chinese team said Volaticotherium antiquus, which means "ancient gliding beast", belonged to a now extinct ancestral line and was not related to modern day flying mammals, such as bats or flying marsupials. The fossil was discovered in the Inner Mongolian region of China. The rock beds it was found in date to at least 125 million years ago to the Mesozoic Era, a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. With a length of 12-14cm (5-6in) and weight of about 70g (3oz), the creature was comparable in size and shape to modern-day flying squirrels.

It had a fold of fur-covered skin membrane that stretched between the creature's fore and hind limbs. This large membrane combined with its light weight suggested it was an agile glider, the researchers said, although probably not deft enough to capture its prey mid-flight. V. antiquus had elongated limbs, like modern flying mammals, and its skeleton suggested the presence of a stiff tail, which would have acted as a rudder in flight.

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Student spots UFO over Swindon

He might be concentrating on his college work, but Chris Moran is also wondering if we really are alone in the universe. On two occasions on Monday night the 17-year-old spotted strange lights in the skies over Swindon. It was at 8.55pm when he made his first sighting.Chris said: "We were walking out the back of Cricklade Road near some open ground and out of the corner of my eye I saw it for just a few seconds."There was this oval-shaped object, quite bright, hanging in the sky. It was really odd."As I turned my head to look at it, it reacted like it had been seen, and it zoomed off."Chris turned to his friends but they all insisted that they didn't see it. But just over an hour later there could be no doubt in their minds."I was in town near Eastcott Hill and I saw it again, and this time so did the others," said Chris."It looked like it was just a few hundred feet up. All the guys saw it and so did one man who had come out of a pub."It was incredible, but I cannot begin to think what it was."It was oval again, a bit like a rugby ball, completely silent, and then travelled off so fast, it would have been impossible to estimate its speed. I cannot believe I have seen this object twice in one night. Other people must have seen it."Chris is confident what he saw was not an aircraft, helicopter or an astronomical object such as a shooting star.

"It seemed far too fast for anything I have ever heard of and it was silent, there was no rumbling or anything," he said.A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence said they had not received any reports about UFO sightings over Swindon on Monday evening.She said: "The MoD examines any UFO sighting reports it receives solely to establish whether there is any evidence to suggest that UK airspace has been compromised by hostile or unauthorised air activity.

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The boy who could feel no pain

A young Pakistani street performer and members of three related families have enabled scientists to make a genetic breakthrough that could lead to more effective painkillers. During his short life, the unnamed boy never felt pain. He was a local celebrity in northern Pakistan where he astonished crowds by plunging knives through his arms and walking on burning coals. He died on his 14th birthday after jumping from a roof.By studying his case, and other individuals from families in the same clan, researchers have discovered that they all had a rare inherited genetic mutation that stopped them feeling pain."All six affected individuals had never felt any pain, at any time, in any part of their body," said Dr Geoffrey Woods, of the University of Cambridge Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) in England. The mutation Woods and his collaborators in Britain and Pakistan have discovered is on a gene called SCN9A. It stops a sodium channel, which produces nerve impulses that convey pain signals to the brain, from functioning. So the otherwise healthy individuals do not experience pain.Woods, who reported the discovery in the journal Nature, said drugs that block the function of the channel "have the potential to produce new and potentially safer analgesia."

The drug company Pfizer Inc. already has a new pain relief product in preclinical development based on the genetic discovery. Although it hurts, pain is a useful sensation because it warns people of danger and injury or if something is too hot or too cold. It also has a survival benefit because when people begin to feel pain they change their behavior to avoid it.

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Newton's rare 'theory of everything'

A new transcription of Isaac Newton's "theory of everything," providing rare insight into the scientist's views on nearly all known natural phenomena, is now available online to scholars around the world, thanks to an Indiana University research team. Isaac Newton, the seventeenth-century physicist and astronomer whom many consider the leading figure in the history of science, is widely known for his theory of gravitational attraction, which according to legend, he contemplated after observing a falling apple. Now, his largely unexplored views on topics ranging from the beginning of organic life to the origin of heat and flame, are available electronically for access by scholars, scientists and the general public. In an ongoing project to produce an online scholarly edition of Newton's work, William Newman, professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, oversaw the editing of Newton's "Of Natures [sic] obvious laws & processes in vegetation." "This is a highly significant testament of Newton's philosophy that has remained up to now unedited, untranslated and virtually unnoticed by Newton scholars," Newman says, referring to a section of the document that is written in Latin.

"The manuscript is important in part, because it shows how Newton linked alchemy to his early theory of gravitation," Newman says. "Many alchemists had argued that an ethereal substance circulated between the center of the earth and the sun, and that this invisible material was responsible for combustion, for the subterranean generation of metals, and for the preservation of life in general. In 'Of Natures obvious laws' the young Newton adopted this alchemical theory and modified it by saying that the ether pushed all matter towards the center of the earth, hence accounting for why things fall."

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Kenya: The mysterious Menengai Crater

Despite the serene and breathtaking marvel that is the Menengai Crater, locals believe that evil spirits haunt it. Boys living around the Menengai Crater go on hunting expeditions despite the risks.They claim that the evil spirits capture human beings and confuse them while touring the crater with beautiful walls.People have lost their lives while others have disappeared never to be seen again. Some have died through accidents and others have committed suicide.However, the crater continues to attract hundreds of people curious to explore the mystery cave. Guides who earn a living by escorting the visitors tell of strange happenings that leave visitors shocked.The stories are perplexing as they are scary with strange things happening inside the cave.People have strayed and lost direction in the cave only for them to be found hours later unable to explain how they lost their way."So many strange things happen here even though people do not seem to believe them," says Paul Ndung'u.

The locals have named the place "***ima kia ngoma" (Devil's place) as they claim it is under the control of evil spirits.No one knows how the crater came to be called Menengai but the locals say the name is a Maasai word meaning a place of corpses."It is believed the name means the place of the dead in the Maasai because many of them died here in the 19th century when they fought among themselves," says Daniel Kanyingi.

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Aboriginal language had ice age origins

Aboriginal languages may be much older than people think, argues a linguistic anthropologist who says they originated as far back as the end of the last ice age around 13,000 years ago. This challenges existing thinking, which suggests Aboriginal languages developed from a proto-language that spread through Australia 5000 to 6000 years ago.The key to the new hypothesis is prehistoric Australia's single land mass 13,000 to 28,000 years ago, when New Guinea and Tasmania were still attached, says Dr Mark Clendon in the journal Current Anthropology.Clendon says the continent, known as Sahul, was relatively densely populated on the land bridge connecting northern Australia to New Guinea, now separated by the Arafura Sea.The other populated area was along what is now Australia's eastern seaboard.The two population groups were separated by a vast, cold, windswept, arid stretch of land that covered most of the continent, says Clendon, who was with the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education when he published the research.

The eastern group spoke a tongue that became what is known today as Pama Nyugen and includes languages like Pitjantjatjara, Yolngu and Warlpiri.And the Arafuran group spoke another language used today in northern Australia today."What I'm suggesting is that Pama Nyugen and non-Pama Nyugen languages go back about 13,000 years to when there was a land bridge between New Guinea and Australia," he says.