Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Princeton ESP lab plans to close its doors

Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events. But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time. The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university’s engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling. “For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data,” said the laboratory’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”Princeton made no official comment. The closing will end one of the strangest tales in modern science, or science fiction, depending on one’s point of view. The laboratory has long had a strained relationship with the university.

Many scientists have been openly dismissive of it. “It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton,” said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.” “Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.”PEAR has been an anomaly from the start, a ghost in the machine room of physical science that was never acknowledged as substantial and yet never entirely banished. Its longevity illustrates the strength and limitations of scientific peer review, the process by which researchers appraise one another’s work. “We know people have ideas beyond the mainstream,” said the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, author of “Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States” and senior vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ”but if they want funds for research they have to go through peer review, and the system is going to be very skeptical of ideas that are inconsistent with what is already known.”

[Rasputin]

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."

[Rasputin]

Phobos mission 'could be key test'

Mars' moon Phobos could be the target for a technology trial that would seek to return rock samples to Earth. A UK team is developing a concept mission that aims to land a spacecraft on the potato-shaped object and grab material off its surface. These small rock fragments would then be despatched to Earth in a capsule. "It is being seen as a technological demonstrator for an eventual Mars sample return," said Dr Andrew Ball from the Open University. Those aspects of the mission that worked well could be incorporated into a full-scale assault on the Red Planet. Both Europe and the US have made the objective of bringing back Martian rocks to Earth laboratories a top priority for their space programmes. A joint venture is likely to occur within the next 15-20 years. But getting on and off a large planet will be extremely difficult, and the British satellite manufacturer Astrium is proposing to test the required technologies on the low-gravity target of Phobos first. "It would be a three-year mission. We're looking at a 2016 launch," said Marie-Claire Perkinson, a principal mission systems engineer at the Stevenage company.

Even so, the Phobos concept has a number of challenging steps, all of them capable of killing the mission if a single element goes wrong. It is envisaged that a "mothership", powered by an ion engine, would fly into orbit around Mars where it would release a lander craft down on to the surface of the moon. This robot vehicle might do some in-situ experiments but its main task would be to core, drill, or scoop up surface "soil" into a sealed vessel. Then, it would lift off from Phobos using chemical thrusters to attempt to dock with, or be captured by, the passing mothership. If that succeeds, the sample vessel would be transferred across and packaged inside an additional bio-secure sealed-container ready for the trip home.

[Rasputin]

Large body of water found in Earth's mantle

A seismologist at Washington University in St. Louis has made the first 3-D model of seismic wave damping — diminishing — deep in the Earth's mantle and has revealed the existence of an underground water reservoir at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. It is the first evidence for water existing in the Earth's deep mantle. Michael E. Wysession, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, working with former graduate student Jesse Lawrence (now at the University of California, San Diego), analyzed 80,000 shear waves from more than 600,000 seismograms and found a large area in Earth's lower mantle beneath eastern Asia where water is damping out, or attenuating, seismic waves from earthquakes. The traditional method seismologists use to image the Earth below us is to measure the speed of seismic waves. This will provide a sort of CAT scan of the Earth's core and mantle. Using wave speeds alone is a problem, however, because they cannot distinguish between temperature and composition variations. The research is described in a forthcoming monograph, Earth's Deep Water Cycle, which is in press to be published by the American Geophysical Union.

[Rasputin]

How long is the Great Wall of China ?

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: Researchers are to carry out the first detailed survey of the Great Wall of China to establish just how long the ancient barricade is, Xinhua reports. Along with checking its dimensions the four-year study, which starts in May, will map the wall's exact route. And it will check the condition of the fortification, built to protect the northern border of the Chinese Empire. The wall, the world's largest man-made structure, is estimated at over 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) in length. The study will be conducted by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping in 13 provinces, regions and municipalities, the Xinhua official news agency said. Archaeologists had lobbied for the survey to be done to provide scholars with an accurate understanding of the construction. Known to the Chinese as the "long Wall of 10,000 Li", the Great Wall is in fact a series of walls and earthen works begun in the 5th Century BC and first linked up under Qin Shi Huang in about 220BC. It was listed as a Unesco world heritage site in 1987.

[Rasputin]

Princeton ESP lab plans to close its doors

Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events. But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time. The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university’s engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling. “For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data,” said the laboratory’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”Princeton made no official comment. The closing will end one of the strangest tales in modern science, or science fiction, depending on one’s point of view. The laboratory has long had a strained relationship with the university.

Many scientists have been openly dismissive of it. “It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton,” said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.” “Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.”PEAR has been an anomaly from the start, a ghost in the machine room of physical science that was never acknowledged as substantial and yet never entirely banished. Its longevity illustrates the strength and limitations of scientific peer review, the process by which researchers appraise one another’s work. “We know people have ideas beyond the mainstream,” said the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, author of “Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States” and senior vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ”but if they want funds for research they have to go through peer review, and the system is going to be very skeptical of ideas that are inconsistent with what is already known.”

[Rasputin]

Ancient chimps 'used stone tools'

Submitted by Pandora & Waspie: Chimpanzees in West Africa used stone tools to crack nuts 4,300 years ago. The discovery represents the oldest evidence of tool use by our closest evolutionary relative. The skill could have been inherited from a common ancestor of chimps and humans, the authors say, or learnt from humans by imitation. Alternatively, humans and chimps may have developed tool use independently, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal reports. Chimpanzees were first observed using stone tools in the 19th century. Julio Mercader and colleagues found stone tools at the Noulo site in Ivory Coast, the only known prehistoric chimpanzee settlement. The excavated stones showed the hallmarks of use as tools for smashing nuts when compared with ancient human or modern chimpanzee stone tools.

Also, several types of starch grains were found on the stones, which the researchers say is residue derived from cracking local nuts. "Chimpanzee material culture has a long prehistory whose deep roots are only beginning to be uncovered," write the researchers in Proceedings. The tools were found to be 4,300 years old, which, in human terms, corresponds to the later Stone Age, before the advent of agriculture. The age of the tools was determined by subjecting charcoal from the same ground layers to the technique of radiocarbon dating.

[Rasputin]

Faces, faces everywhere

More than a decade ago, Diana Duyser of Hollywood, Fla., received a religious message through an unlikely medium: a grilled cheese sandwich she had made herself. As she gazed at the brown skillet marks on the surface of the bread, a familiar visage snapped into focus. “I saw a face looking up at me; it was the Virgin Mary staring back,” she told reporters in 2004. “I was in total shock.”After holding onto the stale relic for 10 years, Ms. Duyser put it up for sale on eBay. The auction generated so much excitement that the sandwich eventually sold for $28,000, proving that she was not alone in seeing a face where none should reasonably exist. (Efforts to locate her to comment for this article were unsuccessful.)Such faces made headlines again near the end of 2006, when Mars Express, an orbiter from the European Space Agency, captured the highest-quality three-dimensional images to date of what looks like a face in the Cydonia region of Mars. The photos reignited conspiracy theories that governments on Earth are trying to hide the existence of intelligent life on Mars.Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills?

Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun? Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists who are gaining new insights into how the brain recognizes and processes facial data.Long before she had heard of Diana Duyser’s grilled-cheese sandwich, Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist at the University of Bremen in Germany, had an inkling that people might process faces differently from other objects. Her suspicion was that a particular area of the brain gives faces priority, like an airline offering first-class passengers expedited boarding.

[Rasputin]

Giant squid lights up for attack

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: Enormous deep-sea squid emit blinding flashes of light as they attack their prey, research shows. Taningia danae's spectacular light show was revealed in video footage taken in deep waters off Chichijima Island in the North Pacific. Japanese scientists believe the creatures use the bright flashes to disorientate potential victims. Writing in a Royal Society journal, they say the squid are far from the sluggish, inactive beasts once thought. In fact, the footage, taken in 2005 - the first time T. danae had been captured on camera in their natural environment - reveals them to be aggressive predators. The squid, which can measure over 2m (7ft) in length, deftly swim backwards and forwards by flapping their large, muscular fins. They are able to alter their direction rapidly by bending their flexible bodies. The films, taken at depths of 240m to 940m (790 to 3,080ft), also show the cephalopods reaching speeds of up to 2.5m (8ft) per second as they attack the bait, capturing it with their eight tentacles. However, the intense pulses of light that accompanied the ferocious attacks surprised the research team.

Dr Tsunemi Kubodera from the National Science Museum in Tokyo, who led the research, told the BBC News website: "No-one had ever seen such bioluminescence behaviour during hunting of deep-sea large squid." The footage reveals the creatures emitting short flashes from light-producing organs, called photophores, on their arms. Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team said: "[The bioluminescence] might act as a blinding flash for prey." The light would disorient the squid's intended prey, disrupting their defences, they added. It could also act, the scientists commented, "as a means of illumination and measuring target distance in an otherwise dark environment."

[Rasputin]

The gravestone path

The winter was a long and hard one in the Britain of 1970, before the days of global warming, January would signify cold weather right across the country. Early one morning I had cleared a patch of snow in my tiny garden to put down food for the wildlife, an urgent knocking on my door showed and anxious looking old lady with a tiny Yorkshire terrier held tightly within her coat, and demanding to see the Exorcist.Inviting her into the warm, and asking her over a welcome hot cup of tea for her story,she began to pour out this amazing story.Her son was a parish gravedigger, these are a special breed of men who are often shunned for the work they do, yet their knowledge of the outdoors the changing seasons and who lives below ground in their graveyards, can be priceless to ghost hunters.The old lady told me that the little churchyard, where her son worked had sold off a part of the large old graveyard for a road widening scheme and for a small housing development.As the old defunct gravestones were cleared away, he had brought a load home and laid them down as her garden path, and on a visit there sure enough, you could read all the names of the long deceased all down the garden path to her washing line, the trouble was when you move these things about, you can disturb the dead, and they were expressing their anger in very strange ways.Since the laying of the pathway with the unwanted gravestones, she would hear strange noises, things would get moved and Trixie the Yorkshire terrier would be very unsettled at night.Now old people who live alone can report all these things, and they are actually more normal than paranormal, but in this instance I felt some examination was necessary, and was glad I did, because there were indeed memory traces and psychic residues from some long dead personalities, who were unhappy to have been disturbed,both in the garden and now in the home.The first thing was to call out a list of the names on the stones in prayer, consecrate the new ground for the stones, and to call for Gods blessings.

This used to be called “a holding at bay ceremony”. Electrical problems have been documented in psychic movement right back to the complete system failures in Cairo at the death of Lord Caernarvon, but here were some baffling phenomena such as lights coming on and off all through the night, music coming from the player, the heating packing up, the doorbell ringing when no one was there and her reading glasses going missing and being found all over the house; she said this was all driving her potty.The next door neighbour’s said she was batty anyway, so it was difficult to assess how much was genuine, but I believe the general thrust of what she said, and asked if I could bring in a few spiritual colleagues in what is called a “rescue circle” and round up these lost souls and help them to their proper place, this is expert work and must not be attempted without expert training.But in the meantime however she went to the church and told the Vicar there about the ghostly goings on, and he was furious she had sought help from someone such as myself.In the old days people who thought for themselves were murdered by the Christian hierarchy, and even today freelance exorcists were not seen in a pleasant light,But the need for them has only been because of Church attitude that only regular church goers can get church help or use church facilities.The Vicar was not very knowledgeable or helpful and kept insisting that“This would not have happened if she had kept up her regular church going and bible reading class” but did pray with her in the house.Over the coming weeks the strange phenomena did die down,And trixie the terrier went back to sleeping in her basket, but I am convinced the situation existed which could have got a lot worse, with the souls of the dead getting increasingly angry.Flash photographs taken at night show several streaks and shapes which could possibly be spirit,and I accept this is open to interpretation.But for me there really were a lot of dead people in that house, who I am pleased to say are now back at rest.

[Rasputin]

Seeing the shadow of extra dimensions

A satellite to be launched next year could see signs of extra dimensions in the afterglow of the big bang, a new study says. Some theories – such as string theory – that attempt to unify all known forces into a single "theory of everything" posit the existence of extra spatial dimensions beyond the three familiar ones. But string theory has proven stubbornly resistant to experimental tests (although some physicists say it could be tested in the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to open by the end of 2007).Now, Gary Shiu and Bret Underwood, both physicists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, US, say the shape of the extra dimensions could leave an imprint in the afterglow of the big bang. This glow, called the cosmic microwave background, reveals the structure of the universe about 370,000 years after the big bang.They use a popular model of the universe's early growth called Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) inflation, which is inspired by string theory.

It is one of a class of ideas called braneworld models, which state that our universe is like a sheet of paper floating in a higher dimensional space.Because we are confined to our 3D universe, we ordinarily have no way of seeing the extra dimensions. But Shiu and Underwood show that in this scenario, the big bang's afterglow is affected by the precise shape that the extra dimensions take. The effects are subtle, however, and Underwood points out that other inflation theories that do not require extra dimensions could probably produce similar signals. So the effects could not be used on their own as proof that extra dimensions are present.But if some other evidence is found that the DBI inflation scenario is correct, the new study shows that the detailed shape of those extra dimensions could be distinguished by Europe's Planck satellite, which is set to be launched in July 2008.Previous work by Shiu and others has indeed shown that DBI inflation could be distinguished from other scenarios through another effect on the cosmic microwave background – by causing the measured clumpiness of matter in the early universe to deviate in a characteristic way from a random distribution.

[Rasputin]

Dinosaur prints found in Mexican desert

Submitted by Pandora: A Mexican man has discovered dozens of dinosaur footprints dating back up to 110 million years along the banks of a dried river, scientists said on Tuesday. Biologist Oscar Polaco said the footprints, found by a local resident in a desert region in central Mexico, belonged to three prehistoric species that came to drink water in the area, once a swampy zone close to the sea.Polaco said more studies needed to be done to determine what species of dinosaur the fossilized prints, each one up to 60 cm (24 inches) across, belonged to."At the moment we can confirm these are footprints that belong to dinosaurs that lived during the early Cretaceous (period)," the scientist said.The early Cretaceous period began about 144 million years ago and followed on from the late Jurassic period. The Cretaceous period is considered the last period before dinosaurs disappeared from earth about 65 million years ago.

The footprints are spread across land belonging to a local cooperative, whose members have built a fence round the site to protect it.Last year scientists identified 30 other dinosaur prints in the same region, an area famous for the large numbers of fossils deposited there.The prints found in 2006 belonged to 20-meter (66 foot)-long animal that weighed between 30 metric tons and 40 metric tons, with a small head, long neck and heavy feet.Mexican researchers say those prints may have been made by a brontosaurus.

[Rasputin]

"This sent a chill up my spine"

A pack of ghost hunters got into the fundraising spirit by swapping their usual Friday night out for a spooky sleep over in a haunted house. The fearless four, who all work in the Express advertising office, faced their worst nightmares – and a few ghosts as well.To raise cash for leukaemia charity, the Anthony Nolan Trust, they braved a night's stay at the frightening Bolling Hall in Bradford, which recently featured on TV show Most Haunted Live. And Michelle Austerfield, 35, Kyrie Gordon, 20, Nicola Oldroyd, 20, and Hannah Bradbury, 21, all lived to tell their frightening encounters.Miss Austerfield said: "I saw two ghosts – one was stood right next me, his face next to mine, but what scared me most was a black shadow I saw creeping up one of the walls – that was terrifying."When we first got there, I thought to myself that the only spirit I wanted to see was the kind you get in a glass."And workers from Wakefield college – Karen Marshall, executive PA, and Anita Chalmers, reception assistant – also joined the spooky goings on.

Mrs Marshall said: "We did lots of seances in pitch black rooms where you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. "And occasionally the odd unexplainable sound would come from the corner of the room, or a feeling of someone stood right in front of you. This sent a chill up my spine."

[Rasputin]

We're all conspiracy theorists at heart

Why are conspiracy theories so popular? We may not always believe what we're told, but we still can't resist listening to them. Guy Smith, producer of 9/11: The Conspiracy Files, suggests the answer may lie deep within us all. Guy Smith: I admit it. If I'm being really honest, I can't deny that I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Perhaps we all are. It's easy to dismiss all conspiracy theories as "bunkum", but remember just occasionally they do turn out to be true. Remember Watergate? Iran-contra? Special Branch collusion with loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland? As Jim Fetzer, one of the leading 9/11 conspiracy theorists says, "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get you." I've just spent the best part of nine months investigating the numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the al-Qaeda attacks on 11 September, 2001. They range from the plausible - that intelligence agencies in the Middle East may have had some inside knowledge about what was planned - to the totally wacky - that United 93's passengers were abducted by government agents. But the deeper you dig in the dark world of conspiracies, the more you realise that different theories share much in common. The conspiracy theorist seizes on any apparent inconsistency and from that germ of truth the story is built up.

What happened to the white car apparently involved in Diana's accident? Was there a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll? And why did it take so long to scramble US fighters on 9/11? And we can't help but be fascinated by them. Perhaps it's because deep down, we're all story tellers. It's one of the things that makes us who we are. Since the dawn of time, we've been creating heroes and monsters as a way of trying to make sense of the world. In the beginning, we told those tales round camp fires. Now, it's through internet chat rooms or on mobile phones. But it's still basically the same process - weaving stories out of real life.

[Rasputin]

Ancient coin shows Cleopatra was no looker

Submitted by Tower of Babel: So maybe Mark Antony loved Cleopatra for her mind. That's the conclusion being drawn by academics at Britain's University of Newcastle from a Roman denarius coin that depicts the celebrated queen of Egypt as a sharp-nosed, thin-lipped woman with a protruding chin. In short, a fair match for the hook-nosed, thick-necked Mark Antony on the other side of the coin, which went on public display Wednesday at the university's Shefton Museum. "The image on the coin is far from being that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton," said Lindsay Allason-Jones, director of archaeological museums at the university, recalling the 1963 film "Cleopatra," which ignited the tempestuous romance between the two stars. The notion that Cleopatra was not in Taylor's league was hailed as a revelation in British newspapers on Valentine's Day, though the image is hardly a discovery. Replicas of the denarius can be found on eBay, and images on other ancient coins are no more flattering.

Cleopatra's legend has grown over the centuries. Plutarch, in the "Life of Antony" written a century after the great romance, said of Cleopatra: "her actual beauty, it is said, was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her."