Science Special News

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Scientists debunk astrology

One of the largest studies of the possible link between human traits and astrology found little, if any, connection between the traditional sun signs of the zodiac and characteristics of individuals. The study adds to the growing body of evidence that there is no scientific basis for star signs, such as Aries, Taurus and so on. These signs are based on the place of the sun in relation to the date of birth of the subject. The researchers, however, leave open the question as to whether other, more detailed and personal forms of astrology hold any validity. "When considering the current scientific standing with respect to sun signs, it becomes clear that there is little or no truth in sun signs," said Peter Hartmann, who led the study, which will be published in next month's Personality and Individual Differences journal.

Psychology at Denmark's University of Aarhus, added, "This does not necessarily mean that all astrology is without truth, but only that the independent effect of sun signs is most likely to be irrelevant. As for the weekly horoscope based on mere sun signs, then according to the current scientific standing, there is probably more truth in the comic strips." Hartmann and his colleagues used computer analysis and statistical methods to study possible astrological connections between over 15,000 individuals. They derived these test subjects from two sources.

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Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon

Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost. The end of World War II saw an intense scramble for Nazi Germany's many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing the same. The range of Germany's technical achievement astounded Allied scientific intelligence experts accompanying the invading forces in 1945. Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops and factories, even as Germany was losing the war. And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to uncover Hitler's scientific secrets. In May 1945, Stalin's legions secured the atomic research labs at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin, giving their master the kernel of what would become the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal. US forces removed V-2 missiles from the vast Nordhausen complex, built under the Harz Mountains in central Germany, just before the Soviets took over the factory, in what would become their area of occupation. And the team which had built the V-2, led by Wernher von Braun, also fell into American hands.

Shortly afterwards Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe, wrote: "Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research. "If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited." Thus began Project Paperclip, the US operation which saw von Braun and more than 700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the US's allies. Its aim was simple: "To exploit German scientists for American research and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union."

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No closer to cracking the JFK assassination case

The conference was optimistically titled "Cracking the JFK Case," but it was widely noted that many of the speakers and members of the audience had grown gray hair or lost much of it while looking for the answers. One of the presentations at the three-day session revived doubts about the famous "single bullet theory" that the House Select Committee on Assassinations thought it had resolved in the late 1970s. Another demolished persistent claims that the Zapruder film -- the "clock" of the Kennedy assassination -- had somehow been altered or contradicted by other photographic evidence. Still another speaker demonstrated how the sounds on Dallas police tapes showed that four and perhaps five shots had been fired -- meaning that at least one other person besides alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had squeezed a trigger.None of that solved the whodunit, although the conferees could still count themselves and like-minded historians and researchers winners in a way. Three out of every four Americans think President John F. Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, was the result of a conspiracy.

Almost as many think there was a coverup.But the proposition that drew about 135 people to a Bethesda hotel this past weekend -- that it is not too late "to solve the greatest mystery of the 20th century" -- has less traction with the public. According to the most recent poll, conducted in 2003 for the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination, 75 percent of the public does not want another government investigation.Washington lawyer Jim Lesar, president of the nonprofit Assassination Archives and Research Center, the main sponsor of the conference, was undeterred. "The lone assassin theory" -- the Warren Commission's conclusion in 1964 that Oswald was solely responsible for the killing -- "is more discredited than it has previously been," he said in opening remarks.

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Is AIDS a man made virus ?

The disease was first uncovered in homosexual men from Manhattan. "Gay cancer," in the form of Kaposi's sarcoma skin tumors, was the most striking telltale sign; and drugs, promiscuity, and anal sex were all thought to play a role in the unprecedented suppression of the immune system. It was soon obvious that the disease was not limited to gays: the mysterious agent was in the national blood supply, and an epidemic of AIDS was also uncovered in Central Africa. In April 1984 Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced his discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS. Subsequently, Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris filed a lawsuit claiming he had first discovered the AIDS virus at Pasteur, and that Gallo had stolen the French virus after it was sent to his lab for study. Twenty-five years later, the origin of AIDS still remains a mystery. The disease is widely believed to have originated in Africa when a primate (monkey) virus "jumped species" to first infect Black Africans.

However, it is important to note that this belief is theory, not proven fact. Montagnier has wisely cautioned that it is extremely important to distinguish between the ancestral origin of HIV and the actual beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The animal virus ancestor of HIV may indeed be centuries old, but it is obvious that the epidemic itself is new.The epidemic did not begin in Africa. The first AIDS cases were uncovered in Manhattan in 1979. At that time there were no reported African cases. In fact, the AIDS epidemic in Africa did not begin until the autumn of 1982 at the earliest.

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Dr. Crain's UFO claims raise questions

UFO stories don't get any wilder than this one. A Las Vegas man has developed a cult-like following around the world by claiming to have worked with a live extraterrestrial at Area 51. The story told by Dan Burisch is a whopper, but can he prove any of it? George Knapp of the Eyewitness News I-Team has the story of Dr. Dan's alien adventure. His name today is Dan Burisch. Before that it was Dan Catselas, and when Eyewitness News first ran into him, it was Dan Crain. "Doctor" Dan Crain, he says. But is he a doctor, and has he really been face to face with an alien in an underground lab? This story has a little bit of everything, including a lot of unanswered questions. When Channel 8 produced a story in 1994 about this volunteer teacher at the Boys and Girls club, he was introduced as Dr. Dan Crain. At the time, Dan Crain, now known as Dan Burisch, was supposedly participating in the most secret program in existence. But the secret is now out. Burisch has a worldwide following -- websites a message boards, books, audiotapes and DVDs. He has a publicist and a biographer, a high profile for a secret scientist.

Burisch says he worked in an underground lab at S-4 near Area 51, the same place first made public by Bob Lazar. Inside he met an extraterrestrial named Jrod and they became pals. He also met angels in the lab and they spoke in Hebrew. On Frenchman's Mountain, Burisch discovered the first seeds of life on earth. Who believes this stuff? His wife Deborah for one. She signed a sworn statement saying she too works for MJ-12, the secret government. Family friend Marcia McDowell, another alleged secret agent, supports the story too. It's grown more complex ever since we first heard some of it in 1990. It's more complex now.

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Stalin planned 'ape army'

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin tried to create an invincible army by crossing humans with apes, according to secret documents. The Kremlin chief ordered his scientists to create the mutant species that would be "resilient and resistant to hunger".Archive papers quote him demanding the breed should be of "immense strength but with an underdeveloped brain".Part of his terrifying plan was use the mutants to work on railway construction, according to The Sun.Secret laboratories and ape skeletons have been found in the Black Sea town of Suchumi in Georgia, by workmen building a playground for children.The bones are thought to come from apes captured in the 1920s and paid for by Stalin, who ordered scientist Ilia Ivanov to carry out the research.The leader used a French research station in Guinea for the work, where African women were seized to be impregnated with ape sperm.

No pregnancies resulted but the next stage was to implant human sperm in female gorillas.Ivanov was arrested in 1930 after his project failed and he died in a labour camp two years later

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Controversy over 40,000 year-old footprints

Are the footprints of surprisingly ancient Americans preserved in 40,000-year-old volcanic ash in southern Mexico? In December, an article in the journal Science cast a cloud of doubt over that claim. The authors, Michael Waters and Paul Renne, argue that the ash dated to 1.3 million years ago, much too old for humans on this continent, and that the so-called footprints were nothing more than marks made by the tools of modern workers quarrying the stone with crowbars. Now, Silvia Gonzalez, an archaeologist from Liverpool John Moores University, and several members of her research team have published their data and interpretations in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. Based on their results, the case is far from closed. According to the researchers, the early dates for the ash are wrong. They note that the overlying deposits range in age from 9,000 to 40,000 years, with no evidence of significant breaks in the sequence. Moreover, an article in the March issue of the Mammoth Trumpet states that Gonzalez and her team have dated lake sediments below the ash layer to about 100,000 years ago, which would mean the ash had to be considerably younger than the date reported in Science.

Gonzalez and her co-authors also claim the "footprints" are distinct from recent tool markings, which are sharply defined and unweathered. Also, many of the footprints appear to preserve details of foot anatomy that would not be duplicated by quarry tool divots. Finally, and most importantly, the team has identified more "potential footprints" in nearby locations "where no quarrying operations have occurred." Gonzalez told the Mammoth Trumpet that the only way to fully answer the critics would be "to excavate an area where there has been no quarry activity and uncover more footprints. We will do this as soon as we can."

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Gamers may soon control action with thoughts

Someday soon, video gamers may be able to use their heads, literally, to get better scores in their games. At least two start-ups have developed technology that monitors a player's brain waves and uses the signals to control the action in games. They hope it will enable game creators to immerse players in imaginary worlds that they can control with their thoughts instead of their hands.San Jose's NeuroSky has been testing prototypes of its system that uses a sensor-laden headband to monitor brain waves, and then uses the signals to control the interaction in video games. They hope that such games are just the beginning of a mind-machine interface with many different applications.``Research on brain waves is well known,'' said NeuroSky Chief Executive Stanley Yang. ``But we have worked on a way for detecting them with a low-cost technology and then interpreting what they mean. We think this will have broad applications.''Sensors in the head gear -- whether headbands, headsets or helmets -- measure electrical activity in the brain that scientists have studied for decades. Using NeuroSky's chip technology, the system can distinguish whether a person is calm, stressed, meditative or attentive and alert.

Beyond games, the system might be useful for determining whether drivers are so drowsy that they need an alarm to awaken them.NeuroSky's chief technology officer and co-founder, Koo Hyoung Lee, is a South Korean scientist who for years studied how athletes concentrate. He formed NeuroSky in fall 2004. The company has raised seed money and is raising its first round of venture capital now.Lee's team of researchers figured out how to detect signals with simpler sensors than the devices used to monitor coma patients in hospitals. NeuroSky is selling the components for the monitoring as well as the software for interpreting the brain signals. Its customers and partners could include makers of game peripherals as well as developers who create games.

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Starlings recognise grammar in songs

European starlings are not just exceptional songbirds and mimics they also recognize a grammar in their songs in a way that was thought to be unique to humans. Scientists in the United States have discovered that the birds can be taught to identify different patterns of organizing sounds used to communicate. "We show that European starlings accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by a recursive, self-embedding, context-free grammar," said Timothy Gentner of the University of California San Diego (UCSD), in the journal Nature. Recursive grammar, in which words and clauses are inserted into sentences to create new meaning, is found in all human languages. It was considered a type of linguistic boundary that separated humans from other creatures. "Now we find that we have been joined on this side of the boundary by the starling. It should no longer be considered an insult to be called a bird-brain," said Daniel Margoliash of the University of Chicago, a co-author of the study.

While humans change a sentence from "the bird sang" to "the bird the cat chased sang" by inserting words, starlings combine chirps, warbles, trills, whistles and rattling sounds. The scientists discovered their ability by recording eight different starling sounds and combining them to make 16 artificial songs, some more complex than others, which had different grammars or patterning rules.

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Giant turtle's 5,000-mile odyssey

An astonishing 5,000-mile journey by the first giant turtle to be caught and tagged off the British Isles has excited scientists studying the endangered creatures. For eight months marine biologists have been tracking a 65st leatherback sea turtle that was caught off south-west Ireland last summer. People in the popular holiday resort of Dingle, Co Kerry, were enthralled when the huge reptile was rescued by scientists and a team from the local Oceanworld aquarium after becoming entangled in lobster pots. Her capture presented a unique opportunity for biologists hoping to learn more about the little understood feeding and mating habits of the largest member of the turtle family.Experts from University College Cork and the University of Wales, Swansea, fitted a satellite tracking device to the turtle before she was returned to the Atlantic.That has enabled them to follow a remarkable oceanic odyssey in which the Dingle turtle has so far swum 5,000 miles to the Cape Verde Islands, off west Africa.Leatherback turtles have been tagged in Nova Scotia and followed to their mating beaches in the Caribbean. But this is the first time that one has been tracked from the north-east Atlantic and the information gathered could help conservationists to save the species from extinction.

In 1980 there were an estimated 115,000 adult females but now there are fewer than 25,000 worldwide. The most pessimistic forecast suggests that they may be extinct in the Pacific within 50 years.Numbers in the Atlantic are a little more stable, although they are still threatened by commercial drift fishing, egg poaching and the building of hotels on nesting beaches."You don't think of these turtles being in waters near here," said Tom Doyle, a marine biologist at University College Cork."You find leatherback sea turtles in Nova Scotia and New England and they tend to mate in the Caribbean, which is a relatively short distance to migrate. What is unusual about this one is the distance we think it is going to have to travel to mate.

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"Intelligence gene" identified

Submitted by Kratos: Psychiatric researchers at The Zucker Hillside Hospital campus of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research have uncovered evidence of a gene that appears to influence intelligence. "A robust body of evidence suggests that cognitive abilities, particularly intelligence, are significantly influenced by genetic factors. Existing data already suggests that dysbindin may influence cognition," said Katherine Burdick, PhD, the study's primary author. "We looked at several DNA sequence variations within the dysbindin gene and found one of them to be significantly associated with lower general cognitive ability in carriers of the risk variant compared with non-carriers in two independent groups."The study involved 213 unrelated Caucasian patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 126 unrelated healthy Caucasian volunteers. The researchers measured cognitive performance in all subjects. They then analyzed participants' DNA samples.

The researchers specifically examined six DNA sequence variations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), in the dysbindin gene and found that one specific pattern of SNPs, known as a haplotype, was associated with general cognitive ability: Cognition was significantly impaired in carriers of the risk variant in both the schizophrenia group and the healthy volunteers as compared with the non-carriers.

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