Science Special News

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A close encounter with flying saucer business

Move over, Roswell. South Orange County is recording its own share of UFO sightings. Several residents have reported the sightings to the Orange County Sheriff's Department in recent months. And word has even reached a Canadian UFO researcher who has posted information about the sightings on his Web site.In one case, witnesses reported seeing glowing disks zigzagging through trees and hovering above the Aliso Viejo Town Center at night. About a yard in diameter and studded with flashing lights, the four UFOs dance around one another in the night sky.These flying saucers aren't a top-secret military project. But they aren't being piloted by Martians, either.The saucers are made in the garages of Gaylon Murphy and Steve Zingali, who get their kicks shocking people and hope to earn a few bucks hawking their remote-controlled saucers. After all, a few UFO sightings can only be good for business."We fly them in formation. It's pretty funny," said Murphy, a cardiovascular surgeon and Aliso Viejo resident. "People stop, people scream, one cabdriver ran his car up off the road."Nick Peterson was stunned when he saw one of the disks fly past his girlfriend's upstairs apartment."I thought, 'That can't be a UFO, can it?' " he said. "It's pretty weird."

The disks are made of foam and weigh about a pound. Each runs on a 7.4-volt lithium battery and has a propeller.On weekends, Murphy flies the disks in Aliso Viejo, Newport Beach, Mission Viejo and Laguna Niguel. He and Zingali, a facilities engineer and Mission Viejo resident, have sold four of the gizmos at $1,000 each and concede their streaking light show is part hobby, part promotion."It's good marketing," he said.The Canadian UFO Web site, which logs oddities from supposed saucer sightings to alleged alien abductions and offers an assortment of paranormal literature, indicates that the homemade disks have captured the attention -- and the imagination -- of both the skeptical and the true believer.The disks sparked a confrontation between Murphy and Erik Strong, a manager an Aliso Viejo restaurant and bar. Strong said Murphy was spooking his staff by hovering his disk near the restaurant."It looked like something right out of a movie, a little too real," Strong said. "I wouldn't say I made the determination that they were actual UFOs, but it did pique my curiosity enough to see where it was coming from."

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'Cloaking device' idea proposed

The cloaking devices that are used to render spacecraft invisible in Star Trek might just work in reality, two mathematicians have claimed. They have outlined their concept in a research paper published in one of the UK Royal Society's scientific journals. Nicolae Nicorovici and Graeme Milton propose that placing certain objects close to a material called a superlens could make them appear to vanish. It would rely on an effect known as "anomalous localised resonance". However, the authors have so far only done the maths to verify that the concept could work. Building such a device would undoubtedly pose a significant challenge. Cloaking devices are a form of stealth technology much favoured by Star Trek baddies such as the Romulans and Klingons. The complex mathematical phenomenon outlined by Milton and Nicorovici closes the gap a little between science fiction and fact. The phenomenon is analogous to a tuning fork (which rings with a single sound frequency) being placed next to a wine glass. The wine glass will start to ring with the same frequency; it resonates.

The cloaking effect would exploit a resonance with light waves rather than sound waves. The concept is at such a primitive stage that the scientists talk only at the moment of being able to cloak particles of dust - not spaceships. In this example, an illuminated speck of dust would scatter light at frequencies that induce a strong, finely tuned resonance in a cloaking material placed very close by. The resonance effectively cancels out the light bouncing off the speck of dust, rendering the dust particle invisible. One way to construct a cloaking device is to use a superlens, made of recently discovered materials that force light to behave in unusual ways.

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Science is akhareshe....man oloom doost vadaram

mercy RW jan!

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Monsters from beneath the Bermuda Triangle

In the permanently dark waters beneath the Bermuda Triangle, scientists have uncovered a remarkably diverse range of extraordinary sea creatures. Many of the new species could shed light on the state of the world's oceans.Retrieving tiny sea animals - zooplankton - at depths of up to three miles, and even reading their genetic codes on a rolling sea, scientists carrying out a census of marine life have revealed new details about the role of these fragile creatures in the climate and food chain, from fish to whales.Among the thousands captured, 500 species have been catalogued and 220 of them have had their DNA sequences analysed on board the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ship Ronald H Brown to reveal up to 20 new species."We are charting the plankton in the sea like astronomers chart the stars in the sky," said the cruise's scientific leader, Dr Peter Wiebe, the senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, America.

"With the zooplankton chart, we can assess what changes - man-made and natural - are taking place in the largest habitat on Earth."The 20-day cruise, which ended on April 30, is part of an ambitious global inventory of all species of zooplankton, which is expected to double from the current number of 7,000 by 2010.The Census of Marine Life initiative will shed light on some important global ecosystem processes, including the impact that ocean acidification may have on sea life.The oceans soak up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere as zooplankton migrate up and down the water column.By one rough estimate, 10,000lb of phytoplankton is needed to feed 1,000lb of small zooplankton, which in turn support 100lb of larger zooplankton, which support 10lb of small fish species (such as herring or anchovies), which support 1lb of a larger fish species.

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Creationism dismissed as 'paganism'

Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday. Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies. He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because it harked back to the days of "nature gods" who were responsible for natural events. Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. "Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That's why science and religion need to talk to each other," he said.

"Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do."

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Cyclic universe - a cosmic balancing act

A bouncing universe that expands and then shrinks every trillion years or so could explain one of the most puzzling problems in cosmology: how we can exist at all. If this explanation, proposed in Science by Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, New Jersey, and Neil Turok at the University of Cambridge, UK, seems slightly preposterous, that can't really be held against it. Astronomical observations over the past decade have shown that "we live in a preposterous universe", says cosmologist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. "It's our job to make sense of it," he says.In Steinhardt and Turok's cyclic model of the Universe, it expands and contracts repeatedly over timescales that make the 13.7 billion years that have passed since the Big Bang seem a mere blink. This makes the Universe vastly old. And that in turn means that the mysterious 'cosmological constant', which describes how empty space appears to repel itself, has had time to shrink into the strangely small number that we observe today.In 1996, it was discovered that the universe is not only expanding but is also speeding up. The cosmological constant was used to describe a force of repulsion that might cause this acceleration. But physicists were baffled as to why the cosmological constant was so small.

Quantum theory suggests that 'empty' space is in fact buzzing with subatomic particles that constantly pop in and out of existence. This produces a 'vacuum energy', which makes space repel itself, providing a physical explanation for the cosmological constant.But the theoretically calculated value of vacuum energy is enormous, making space far too repulsive for particles to come together and form atoms, stars, planets, or life. The observed vacuum energy, in contrast, is smaller by a factor of 10120 - 1 followed by 120 zeros. "It is a huge problem why the vacuum energy is so much smaller than its natural value," says Carroll.

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Tourist shoots 'UFO' in Penang

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: Could the object in the picture be an Unidentified Flying Object? These are among the questions raised after the object was captured on film by a guest at the Paradise Sandy Beach Resort in Tanjung Bungah on Tuesday. The Australian tourist was photographing the sunrise around 8am from the balcony of his hotel room when he caught the object on film.The tourist, who wished to remain anonymous, only realised the presence of the object a day later, when he was checking out.Hotel public relations officer Virginia Scully said the tourist left a copy of the photograph with the hotel before leaving for Australia."He asked if we had seen such sightings from the hotel," Scully said at the hotel yesterday.

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Telescope to search for ET light signals

A new telescope at an observatory outside Boston will become a key tool in the search for extraterrestrials as scientists try to detect light signals from distant civilizations. An optical telescope dedicated Tuesday at the Oak Ridge Observatory, about 35 miles west of Boston, is the first to be used exclusively for a project called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.The 22-year-old SETI project has largely relied on radio telescopes to search for radio signals from outer space that could indicate the presence of intelligent beings.While some scientists are skeptical that such an approach could yield such evidence, the scientists who will use the Oak Ridge telescope believe extraterrestrials may be just as likely to communicate with high-intensity, tightly focused light beams carrying information as they are to use radio transmissions."If I were a betting man, I'd bet radio would work before light," said Paul Horowitz, a Harvard physicist who heads a SETI project at the university. "But we've done that for 20 years, and we haven't explored much with light."Scientists began using optical telescopes on the SETI project in 1998 at Oak Ridge and other sites. Until now, they've had to share time on optical telescopes with other astronomers doing different work. The new telescope will be scan the night skies uninterrupted and exclusively for SETI.

Harvard graduate students at the school's Cambridge campus will remotely analyze data from the telescope, searching for light patterns that could indicate an intentional communication.Older optical telescopes weren't well-suited for the broad searching of the heavens that scientists will undertake at Oak Ridge.The new telescope has a 72-inch mirror -- larger than any U.S. telescope east of the Mississippi River -- and other features that will enable scientists to scan the heavens more than 500 times faster than older telescopes, Horowitz said."It's like a bug-eyed monster view of the universe, rather than looking through a soda straw," he said.

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Man may have caused pre-historic extinctions

New research shows that pre-historic horses in Alaska may have been hunted into extinction by man, rather than by climate change as previously thought. The discovery by Andrew Solow of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, US, David Roberts of the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew and Karen Robbirt of the University of East Anglia (UEA) is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The accepted view had previously been that the wild horses became extinct long before the extinction of mammoths and the arrival of humans from Asia - ruling out the possibility that they were over-hunted by man. One theory had been that a period of climate cooling wiped them out. However, the researchers have discovered that uncertainties in dating fossil remains and the incompleteness of fossil records mean that the survival of the horse beyond the arrival of humans cannot be ruled out. The PNAS paper develops a new statistical method to help resolve the inherent problems associated with dating fossils from the Pleistocene period. The aim is to provide a far more accurate timetable for the extinction of caballoid horses and mammoths and, ultimately, the cause.

"This research is exciting because it throws open the debate as to whether climate change or over-hunting may have led to the extinction of pre-historic horses in North America," said UEA's Karen Robbirt. The Pleistocene period refers to the first epoch of the Quarternary period between 1.64 million and 10,000 years ago. It was characterised by extensive glaciation of the northern hemisphere and the evolution of modern man around 100,000 years ago. It is known that the end of the Pleistocene period was a time of large-scale extinctions of animals and plants in North America and elsewhere but the factors responsible have remained open to question, with climate change and over-hunting by humans the prime suspects.

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