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UFOs cause a stir over London

Dozens of mysterious lights were spotted hovering in the sky above Archway - spreading panic among residents below. Unidentified flying orange objects stopped traffic and left residents staring skyward in disbelief at around 5.30pm on Thursday.Islington police received four calls within a matter of minutes.Witness Alix M*spam filter*ter, 34, a market stall trader from Bredgar Road, Archway, said: "I just picked up my son from nursery in Bredgar Road. I had just come out of the door when I noticed what was going on in the sky."There were a group of them - 10 to 15 of them moving together. My first impression was that they reminded me of a squadron of aeroplanes in formation. But they didn't have a proper formation and they were all moving at the same speed."I thought for a while that something was happening in the centre of London. Bombs and planes crossed my mind. But I realised very quickly that they didn't look like any aircraft I'd seen before."They were coming from the north and moving south. And then they kind of stopped and they were hovering. There was no sound.

They seemed to fade away and I saw more coming and then they stopped. It lasted about 10 minutes."Islington police informed Contact International UFO Research about the sightings. Soon after another witness contacted the Oxford-based organisation, which is devoted to solving the mystery of UFOs, and described what he saw.A spokesman for Contact International said: "He told me he was picking his daughter up from school and he saw many people looking up in the air. Traffic had stopped and people were staring.

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DNA clue to presidential puzzle

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: DNA tests carried out on two British men have shed light on a mystery surrounding the ancestry of Thomas Jefferson, America's third president. In the 1990s, DNA was taken from male relatives of Jefferson to see if he fathered a son with one of his slaves. They found the president had a rare genetic signature found mainly in the Middle East and Africa, calling into question his claim of Welsh ancestry. But this DNA type has now been found in two Britons with the Jefferson surname. Professor Mark Jobling, from the University of Leicester, and colleagues discovered the two British Jeffersons possessed the same rare male (or Y) chromosome type as the third US president. Genetic analysis showed the British men shared a common ancestor with Thomas Jefferson about 11 generations ago. But neither knew of any family links to the US. The unusual lineage has not been found in white Britons before. Last month, Professor Jobling's group reported the discovery of seven white men from Yorkshire carrying a West African Y chromosome.

The Y chromosome is a package of genetic material passed down from father to son, more or less unchanged - just like a surname.Over many generations, it does accumulate small changes in its DNA sequence, allowing relationships between different male lineages to be studied. Y chromosomes can be classified into broad groups (haplogroups) which, to some extent, reflect a person's geographical ancestry.

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Which Jupiter moon will reveal the most ?

Yogi Berra supposedly suggested that when you come to a fork in the road, you are supposed to take it. That's just what planetary scientists studying the rich data set from the Galileo Mission to the outer solar system are doing now. They're taking the fork.According to William B. McKinnon, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, the community suffers from an embarrassment of riches, because each of the moons of Jupiter differs in the way that they can reveal more about planets and how they behave. But he thinks it is Europa that clearly commands the most attention. There are four large, moons of Jupiter that in their character and behavior are more like planets than Earth's moon: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The last three are icy. Io's volcanic hyperactivity is well known, but there are mysteries about the temperature of its magmas and its spectacular mountains and what they might reveal about the satellite's interior processes. As for the exterior moon Callisto, how did it acquire an ocean yet not be deeply differentiated?

Ganymede's liquid iron core is still generating a magnetic field. This was not predicted beforehand, and thus has much to teach planetary scientists on how magnetic fields are generated in the solar system. Then, there is Europa. "Of the four Galilean moons, Europa is the one that has the best chance to reveal the most about the origin of life, which is the biggest unanswered scientific question we have, bar none," he said. "With its massive body of liquid water, multiple energy sources proposed and different ways to provide carbon and other biogenic elements, the central question must be Europa's potential for life. What greater question can you ask of a planet?"

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Nest of dinosaur eggs found in India

Three Indian explorers are giving amateurs a good name. The fossil enthusiasts recently set out on an 18-hour hunt near the central city of Indore and ended up with more than a hundred dinosaur eggs."They are the typical, spherical eggs that researchers interpret as having been laid by sauropod dinosaurs," paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues told National Geographic News via email after viewing photos of the find. Sues is an associate director for research and collections at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and a former member of the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. Distinguished by their long necks and tails, plant-eating sauropods are among the largest creatures known to have roamed the Earth.These particular sauropod eggs were found in clusters of six to eight, one of the discoverers told the Hindustan Times.

The eggs were laid during the Cretaceous period, roughly 146 to 66 million years ago, by dinosaurs between 40 and 90 feet (12 and 27 meters) long, he added. Along with the eggs, the fossil hunters uncovered fossilized footprints of the dinosaurs, which used to come from miles around to make their nests in the sandy shores of a long-gone waterway. Dinosaur eggs have been found at hundreds of sites worldwide, Sues said, and "there are thousands of such eggs from the Late Cretaceous in central India." While "it is neither unusual nor unexpected," Sues said, "this is a nice find."

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