Science Special News

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Ancient weapons discovered in Syrian ruins

Submitted by Tower of Babel: It was the ancient version of a last stand: Twelve clay bullets lined up and ready to be shot from slings in a desperate attempt to stop fierce invaders who soon would reduce much of the city to rubble. The discovery was made in the ruins of Hamoukar, an ancient settlement in northeastern Syria located just miles from the border with Iraq. Thought to be one of the world's earliest cities and located in northern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, it is the site of joint excavations by the University of Chicago and the Syrian Department of Antiquities. Excavations have been going on at the site since 1999, but in digs conducted this past fall, researchers uncovered new evidence of the city's end and more clues about how urban life there may have begun. The University of Chicago was to announce the findings Tuesday. The site is so close to Iraq that Clemens Reichel, the American co-director of the expedition, has seen explosions on the other side of the border.

"It's somewhat surreal. We're not living in a vacuum there. We know exactly what's happening across the border," Reichel said. "But working in Syria is like working in the eye of the storm. It's very peaceful to work there. Practically no problems." The site was anything but peaceful in approximately 3,500 B.C. The archaeologists have previously detailed how they believe Hamoukar's independence was ended by a battle that caused its buildings and walls to collapse and burn.

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Dharma & Greg's Jenna Elfman Expecting a Baby

Mona Lisa death mystery solved

An expert on the “Mona Lisa” says he has ascertained with certainty that the symbol of feminine mystique died on July 15, 1542, and was buried at the convent in central Florence where she spent her final days. Giuseppe Pallanti found a death notice in the archives of a church in Florence that referred to “the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, deceased July 15, 1542, and buried at Sant’Orsola,” the Italian press reported Friday.Born Lisa Gherardini in May 1479, she is thought to have been the second wife of Del Giocondo, a wealthy silk merchant, with whom she had five children.While intrigue has surrounded the identity of the woman in the famous unsigned, undated Leonardo da Vinci painting housed at the Louvre in Paris, Lisa Gherardini is widely accepted to have been the subject.

Sant’Orsola, where she died at age 63, now disused and in ruins, is near the San Lorenzo basilica.“It was in this convent that Mona Lisa placed her youngest daughter Marietta, who later became a nun. And it was there that Lisa, as stipulated in the will of her husband who died four years before her, ended her life,” Pallanti told the daily La Repubblica.Pallanti, author of “Mona Lisa Revealed: The True Identity of Leonardo’s Model,” has spent nearly three decades combing Florence’s archives.

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Iranians report 'radiant UFO'

Submitted by Mj12 Mason: A UFO omitting a "yellow ray" has been seen across Western Iran, the Fars News Agency claimed in a report recently. "Witnesses told FNA (Fars News Agency) that the object has been observed for more than an hour," the report said, adding: "In a similar incident last Monday, an Unidentified Flying Object was witnessed in the same area and at the same time." According to eye witnesses, "the UFO has been as big as a ball, with a yellow ray and a bright reddish color in the center. They also stated that the object has been flying at a very low altitude." The FNA said Iranian officials declined to comment. The Iranian news outlet also reported a UFO "crashing" last Wednesday, "in Barrez Mounts in the central province of Kerman."

"Deputy Governor General of Kerman province Abulghassem Nasrollahi told FNA that the crash, which was followed by an explosion and a thick spiral of smoke, has caused no casualties or damage to properties," the report said, adding: "He further denied earlier reports that the explosion has been the result of a plane or chopper crash, reminding that all the passing aircrafts have been reported as sound and safe." Iranian authorities were investigating the crash, described by witnesses as an explosion "caused as a result of the crash of a radiant unidentified flying object onto the ground. "

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Revealing the real Frankensteins

Hidden deep in a Russian forest, and guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot intruders on sight, the medical research laboratories on the outs***ts of Moscow were one of the Soviet Union's best-kept secrets. So the carefully-vetted journalists who were allowed past the forbidding perimeter fence on a cold February morning in 1954 were both apprehensive and curious about what lay ahead. Led to a courtyard outside an austere brick building, they waited in the bright winter sunshine to find out why they had been summoned. For a few minutes, only the sound of birdsong and the rustling of leaves filled the air but then a door slowly opened to reveal experimental surgeon Vladimir Demikhov - accompanied by the strangest looking animal they had ever seen. Blinking unhappily in the daylight as Demikhov paraded it on its lead, this unfortunate beast had been created by grafting the head and upper body of a small puppy on to the head and body of a fully-grown mastiff, to form one grotesque creature with two heads. The visitors watched in horror and fascination as both of the beast's mouths lapped greedily at a bowl of milk proffered by Demikhov's assistants.

Resembling something dreamed up by Mary Shelley's Dr Frankenstein, it seemed literally incredible. But as the Soviet propaganda machine informed the world, this canine curiosity was both very real - and a scientific triumph. As revealed in a National Geographic documentary to be screened later this month, the creation of the two-headed dog was the first step in an astonishing race by Cold War scientists to achieve the seemingly impossible - the first ever human head transplant. In pursuing this medical goal, Vladimir Demikhov - and his American rival, Robert White - may seem to be the epitome of immoral scientists who ignored all ethical considerations in their pursuit of scientific advance. But in their own minds, they were brilliant pioneers prepared to think the unthinkable for the greater good of mankind.

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Why aliens haven't found us yet

Submitted by Ccleslie: It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe - and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit. Now a Danish researcher believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven't had enough time to look. Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, proposed that a single civilisation might build eight intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for life. Once on their way each probe would send out eight more mini-probes, which would head for the nearest stars and look for habitable planets.

Mr Bjork confined the probes to search only solar systems in what is called the "galactic habitable zone" of the Milky Way, where solar systems are close enough to the centre to have the right elements necessary to form rocky, life-sustaining planets, but are far enough out to avoid being struck by asteroids, seared by stars or frazzled by bursts of radiation. He found that even if the alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - Nasa's current Cassini mission to Saturn is plodding along at 32km a second - it would take 10bn years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy. His study is reported in New Scientist today.

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Mystery deepens over 'feral woman'

When they found her last week, her father said, she was "bare-bones skinny" and shaking, scuttling like a monkey along the ground to snatch up grains of rice, her eyes "red like tigers' eyes". So when the first pictures of Rochom P'ngieng, the woman supposedly lost in the jungle for 18 years, emerged yesterday showing a calm and apparently healthy young woman rather than an emaciated, feral beast, the mystery surrounding her remarkable story deepened.Sal Lou, 45, a policeman from a remote village on the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, told a local newspaper on Thursday that his daughter, who disappeared, aged eight, in 1988 while tending a buffalo herd, had mysteriously re-emerged from the Cambodian jungle. She was naked and unable to speak any intelligible language but unquestionably, he insisted, she was his lost daughter Rochom P'ngieng. Yesterday, however, as further intriguing reports emerged of a mysterious naked man who had been spotted with the woman but ran off when challenged, the family began to close ranks. They have withdrawn permission to take DNA samples to confirm the woman's identity, and police have thrown a cordon around their isolated home, in an effort to keep at bay curious neighbours and the world's media. The family of the woman, who would be 27 if she is indeed their daughter, say they want to be left alone in order to make up for lost time. But Sal Lou's claims are so remarkable that there is little chance that they will be left in peace.

Pen Bonnar, a widely respected human rights campaigner in Cambodia, is due to arrive today in the Oyadao district where the family live, 200 miles from Phnom Penh, to assess the disturbed woman's needs and try to unlock the many puzzles surrounding her story. The remoteness of the village, in the rugged mountain area close to the Vietnamese border, has made disentangling the woman's story all the more difficult. Sal Lou says that he first heard the story last Saturday of a woman who had been captured after a farmer caught her stealing his rice. The naked woman was starving, with wild hair down to her face and a body blackened by dirt. Mr Lou says he travelled to the Rattana***i area where she had been found and was immediately convinced she was his daughter.

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Conservation for world's weirdest animals

A conservation effort announced today aims to protect some of the world's oddest and most overlooked animal species. The Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) program, led by the Zoological Society of London, focuses on animals that have unique evolutionary histories and face immediate risk of extinction. The project combined existing data on species relatedness and threat status to develop a list of a hundred top animals. In 2007 the project will focus on ten high priority species from that list "with potential for slipping through the gaps without notice," said Samuel Turvey, a project scientist with the zoological society. "Of the top 100 species which we're focusing on, more than 70 percent receive either no conservation attention or extremely limited attention," Turvey said. The highest priority species, the Yangtze River dolphin, may already be extinct, he added. Turvey recently visited China to survey the entire known range of the dolphin, which diverged from all other river dolphins 20 million years ago, and failed to locate any.

"It appears to have died out because there wasn't any conservation action done in time," he said. "For 20 years conservationists recommended things that needed to happen that no one ever acted on," he added. "We need to make sure that what happened to the Yangtze River dolphin never happens to any other species."

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Ghost hunters explore Teackle mansion

A group of paranormal investigators think the legends of Teackle Mansion ghosts could be true, particularly in a part of the house where their equipment batteries died and they felt a cold spot. "There's enough evidence to be suspicious," Christine Power, co-director of Eastern Shore Paranormal, said at a recent meeting of the Somerset County Historical Society.Power, along with her husband, James, and two other volunteer investigators, spent nine hours in the mansion just before Christmas armed with audio and video recorders, electromagnetic field meters and infrared thermometers. Although their equipment picked up suspicious sights and sounds all over the building, much of it could be explained by equipment problems or the wind and rain outside that night. However, investigators in a second-floor room couldn't explain why the batteries suddenly went dead in a two-way radio, a digital camera and a video camera at the same time, Power said. Group members also reported a "heavy" or close feeling in the room, which is located in the oldest part of the mansion. The thermometer also recorded a drop in temperature. "That's bizarre," said Historical Society President Jill Hall, who previously said she didn't believe in ghosts. "It does make you kind of wonder." The mansion -- which has had numerous owners and tenants since it was built in 1802 -- is now owned by the Historical Society which operates it as a museum.

None of the members have seen or heard a ghost, but some said they had suspicions about the upstairs rooms in the center section where the equipment batteries died. Most reported a "creepy" feeling whenever they went upstairs, even in broad daylight. Rooms in that part of the mansion originally served as Littleton and Elizabeth Teackle's bedroom, their young daughter's bedroom and Teackle's library. A stairway in the second-floor hall leads to a finished attic that once housed some of the Teackle slaves. Since the Teackles owned the house, it changed hands numerous times, and briefly housed a school. By the middle of the 20th century, it had been converted to apartments.

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