Science Special News

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Dinosaur tumour studied for cancer clues

Cancer in dinosaurs and illnesses in other animals are being studied in a groundbreaking new program that combines medical school with the study of natural history. Educators hope the effort will produce doctors with a better understanding of why we get sick.Despite being millions of years removed from our time and our own species, illnesses in animals like the dinosaurs can shed light on the evolution of human disease, says Christopher Beard, curator and specialist in vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. "Some diseases that afflict humans today, such as malaria, gout, and cancer, are truly ancient and were handed down to us from our distant ancestors," Beard told LiveScience. "By studying the distribution of these diseases in other living and fossil organisms, we can gain insights into the nature of these diseases." Students will now be offered the chance to learn about the history of disease as part of their regular medical school training, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center announced recently. The university is welcoming four renowned curators from Carnegie Museum into its classrooms to teach seminars and use the museum collection, which is considered one of the world's premiere displays of natural history artifacts, for demonstrations. Included in the collection is a 150-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur bone complete with a tumor.

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MUFON on aliens and conspiracies

Are unidentified flying objects real or just the product of overactive imaginations sparked by pop culture? Millions of Americans believe that extraterrestrials regularly visit Earth. The UFO industry has evolved over 50-plus years, starting in 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold flew near Mount Rainier in Washington State and spied nine crescent-shaped metallic objects in the distance traveling at speeds he estimated to be 1,000 mph. During the same year of Arnold's flight, another seminal UFO event occurred. An alien craft allegedly crashed on a local ranch in Roswell, N.M. Although the military initially released information to the press that a flying saucer was recovered, within days the official government explanation was that the debris found in the desert was simply a fallen weather balloon. The seeds of a government coverup were planted with the explanation. Area 51, a top secret military base in New Mexico, has since become a focus for "ufologists," or those who study the UFOs. Groups dedicated to researching the UFO phenomena have proliferated along with sightings of lights and objects darting through the skies. It's been 60 years since remnants of either a weather balloon or a spaceship was recovered in the desert, but the UFO industry that emerged has grown astronomically. Claims that the U.S. government is either in cahoots with aliens to cull their technology, or responsible for squelching data by disseminating misinformation was the basis of a recent meeting sponsored by the Ventura/Santa Barbara chapter of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network.

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Uncle Sam's scientists building insect army

A rocky foreign terrain. Platoons of remotely controlled cyborg-insects sniffing out landmines, transmitting their location back to human handlers. Can you picture it? No? Well, that's the difference between you and the scientists, "extreme thinkers," at DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, where soldier insects are already in the works. The agency's mandate is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military through "far-future" thinking. Its cutting-edge, some would say lunatic-fringe, researchers give new meaning to the concept of brainstorming. But way back at the dawn of computer time, circa 1969, they developed the precursor to the Internet, known as the ARPANET. They invented GPS, global positioning systems. They're credited, in fact, with half the major innovations in the high-tech industry, not to mention the 120-plus technologies they've come up with for the military, everything from the now standard M-16 rifle to stealth aircraft. But back to the bugs.

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NASA restarts cancelled asteroid mission

NASA decided Monday to restart a mission to explore two of the solar system's largest asteroids, just weeks after the project was killed because of budget woes. The space agency earlier this month scrapped the $446 million Dawn mission to orbit the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, nearly a half year after it was put on hold because of cost overruns and technical problems.NASA decided to review the cancellation after the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which managed the mission, made an appeal."Our review determined the project team has made substantive progress on many of this mission's technical issues, and, in the end, we have confidence the mission will succeed," NASA Associate Administrator Rex Geveden, who lead the review panel, said in a statement.Powered by a xenon ion engine, Dawn would be the first spacecraft to circle Ceres and Vesta, which are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.Ceres and Vesta are believed to have formed in different parts of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago, and studying them could provide clues to how the sun and planets formed.

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A connection between Nuclear weapons & UFOs

A former French military air traffic controller claims in a recently published journal article that UFO sightings can be correlated with nuclear weapons testing. Eric Julien served in the French Air Force for five years as an air traffic controller and later went on to become a senior airport manager in France. He analyses data gained from a number of sources available in France that point to UFO activity in the vicinity of nuclear weapons tests. He claims that a clear correlation exists between the 2419 nuclear tests on Earth from 1945 through 1998, and 140 cases involving radar and visual sightings of UFOs. In the article, released in the April edition of the Exopolitics Journal, he also studies the correlation between alleged UFO crash/retrievals and nuclear testing. Julien argues that the common view that UFOs pose a security threat to humanity is very likely misplaced. He concludes that it may be more likely that nuclear testing poses some kind of security threat to UFOs, and this is real reason for frequent UFO sightings on Earth.

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Lab-grown bladders 'a milestone'

US scientists have successfully implanted bladders grown in the laboratory from patients' own cells into people with bladder disease. The researchers, from North Carolina's Wake Forest University, have carried out seven transplants, and in some the organ is working well years later. The achievement, details of which have been published online by The Lancet, is being described as a "milestone". The team is now working to grow organs including hearts using the technique. Bladder disease can raise pressure in the bladder leading to kidney problems. It is usually treated by reconstructive surgery but this can lead to complications. Standard reconstructive surgery uses tissue grafts from a section of the small intestine or stomach to build up the damaged bladder. The technique has been shown to protect kidney function and ease problems with incontinence. But because the intestine is designed to absorb nutrients and a bladder is designed to excrete, patients who have the procedure are prone to problems such as osteoporosis, increased risk of cancer and kidney stone formation.

The Wake Forest team identified seven young patients with a congenital condition called myelomeningocele which causes a weak bladder. They took a bladder biopsy from each patient and isolated muscle cells and special bladder cells called urothelial cells, which they grew in the lab.

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Sorry, E.T still not taking our calls

George Basalla: The year 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of humanity's strangest scientific quest: the use of giant radiotelescope dishes to listen for radio messages from alien beings in space. So far, the search has been a complete bust. The radioastronomers keep listening, but the stars aren't talking to us -- not yet, anyway. Oddly, the failure of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, has been largely ignored by the general public, journalists and Hollywood filmmakers. They continue to be enchanted by (and, in Hollywood's case, to commercially exploit) the hope that intelligent life is sprinkled across the galaxy like dandelions across a spring meadow, that those faraway intelligences wish to communicate with us by radio and that said communication would mutually benefit both parties. For example (we are told), aliens could transmit to us cures for cancer and warfare, while we could enlighten them on the mating and sexual rituals of hominids on the third planet of the star called Sol. Why does the public remain fascinated with a project, SETI, that has so far yielded only disappointment?

No doubt it's fun to think that the cosmos is more than "drops of mud," as Anatole France sneered. In an unhappy world, it's reassuring to think that no matter how miserable we are Down Here, there's all kinds of wondrous stuff going on Up There, i.e. that the center of our Milky Way galaxy is a celestial Broadway teeming with brilliant societies and buzzing with starships. Toward that stellar metropolis 30,000 light years overhead, we suffering terrestrials gaze wistfully, rather like the ragged working girls of romantic fiction who gaze longingly at the lights of Manhattan.

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Ethiopian skull may be a missing link

A hominid skull discovered in Ethiopia could fill the gap in the search for the origins of the human race, a scientist says. The cranium found near the city of Gawis, 500 km south-east of the capital Addis Ababa, is estimated to be 200,000 to 500,000 years old.The skull appeared "to be intermediate between the earlier Homo erectus and the later Homo sapiens", Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian research scientist at the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.It was discovered two months ago in a small gully at the Gawis river drainage basin in Ethiopia's Afar region, south-east of the capital.Sileshi said significant archaeological collections of stone tools and numerous fossil animals were also found at Gawis."(It) opens a window into an intriguing and important period in the development of modern humans," Sileshi said.Over the last 50 years, Ethiopia has been a hot bed for archaeological discoveries.Hadar, located near Gawis, is where in 1974 US scientist Donald Johnson found the 3.2 million year old remains of "Lucy", described by scientists as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in the world.Lucy is Ethiopia's world-acclaimed archaeological find.

The discovery of the almost complete hominid skeleton was a landmark in the search for the origins of humanity.On the shores of what was formerly a lake in 1967, two Homo sapien skulls dating back 195,000 years were unearthed. The discovery pushed back the known date of mankind, suggesting that modern man and his older precursor existed side by side.Sileshi said while different from a modern human, the braincase, upper face and jaw of the cranium have unmistakeable anatomical evidence that belong to human ancestry.