Science Special News

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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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'Clive of India's' 250-yr-old tortoise dies

tortoise that once belonged to British colonial general Clive of India in the 18th Century has died in a zoo in Calcutta. Adwaita, "the only one" in Bengali, was found dead by keepers in Alipore Zoo on Wednesday. His shell cracked some months ago and a wound had developed. West Bengal officials said records showed Adwaita was at least 150 years old but other evidence pointed to 250. The shell of Adwaita, an Aldabra tortoise, will now be carbon-dated. Forestry minister in the West Bengal government, Jogesh Barman said: "Historical records show he was a pet of British general Robert Clive of the East India Company and had spent several years in his sprawling estate before he was brought to the zoo about 130 years ago." Mr Barman said Adwaita was probably brought from the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean and presented to Clive, an increasing force in the East India Company's military hierarchy. Aldabra tortoises are found in the four-island Aldabra atoll of the Seychelles, a UN World Heritage Site that now has about 152,000 giant tortoises.

They average about 120kg (265lbs) and are thought the longest-lived of all animals. The BBC's Amitabha Bhattasali in Calcutta says Adwaita brought in many of the zoo's visitors and when he fell sick for the first time eight years ago with a leg infection a full medical board was instigated to treat him. The director of the zoo, Subir Chowdhury, said Adwaita's shell would be preserved and kept there. One zookeeper told the Reuters news agency: "This is a sad day for us. We will miss him very much." Lord Clive, the son of a Shropshire squire, became a soldier and adventurer who rose through the East India Company.

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Image of Jesus' crucifixion may be wrong

The image of the crucifixion, one of the most powerful emblems of Christianity, may be quite erroneous, according to a study which says there is no evidence to prove Jesus was crucified in this manner. Around the world, in churches, on the walls of Christian homes, on crucifixes worn as pendants, in innumerable books, paintings and movies, Jesus Christ is seen nailed to the cross by his hands and feet, with his head upwards and arms outstretched. But a paper published by Britain's prestigious Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) says this image has never been substantiated in fact. Christ could have been crucified in any one of many ways, all of which would have affected the causes of his death, it says. "The evidence available demonstrates that people were crucified in different postures and affixed to crosses using a variety of means," said one of the authors, Piers Mitchell of Imperial College London. "Victims were not necessarily positioned head up and nailed through the feet from front to back, as is the imagery in Christian churches."

The authors do not express any doubt on the act of Jesus' crucifixion itself. But they note that the few eyewitness descriptions available today of crucifixions in the 1st century AD show the Romans had a broad and cruel imagination. Their crucifixion methods probably evolved over time and depended on the social status of the victim and on the crime he allegedly committed, says the paper in April's issue of the RSM journal. The cross could be erected "in any one of a range of orientations", with the victim sometimes head-up, sometimes head-down or in different postures.

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McKinnon: "I was just hunting UFOs"

To the United States, he is a seriously dangerous man who put the nation's security at risk by committing "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But Briton Gary McKinnon says he is just an ordinary computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens and UFOs exist.During his two-year quest, McKinnon broke into computers at the Top of Form 1Bottom of Form 1Pentagon, Top of Form 2Bottom of Form 2NASA and the Johnson Space Center as well as systems used by the U.S. army, navy and air force.U.S. officials say he caused $700,000 worth of damage and even crippled vital defense systems shortly after the September 11 attacks.The unemployed computer programmer is now battling extradition to the United States, where, if found guilty, he faces up to 70 years in jail and fines of up to $1.75 million. His lawyer fears he could even be sent to Guantanamo Bay.It's all a far cry from how he first got into hacking: watching a film about a teenage boy who breaks into a military central computer and almost starts World War Three."I had seen the film 'War Games' and I do remember clearly thinking at the time, that's amazing -- a great big military computer system and a young, spotty teenager," the softly spoken 39-year-old told Reuters in an interview. A decade later, McKinnon, armed with information gleaned from the book, "The Hacker's Handbook," began his snooping.

During 2000-1 from his home in Hornsey, north London, and using a computer with just a limited 56K dial-up modem, he turned his sights on the American government and military."My main thing was wanting to find out about UFOs and suppressed technology," he said insisting his intention was not to cause damage. "I wanted to ... find out stuff the government wouldn't tell you about."He said it was easy, despite being only a rank amateur. Using the hacking name "Solo," he discovered that many U.S. top-security systems were using an insecure Microsoft Windows program and had no password protection at all."So I got commercially available off-the-shelf software and used them to scan large military networks ... anything I thought might have possible links to UFO information," he said.

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UFOs are "atmospheric effects"

British defence authorities have come up with an explanation for UFOs that is bound to disappoint those who are convinced they've seen a flying saucer. A Ministry of Defence report, which will be made public later this month, says what UFO watchers may be seeing unusual atmospheric effects like glowing plasma clouds."Considerable evidence exists to support the thesis that the events are almost certainly attributable to physical, electrical and magnetic phenomena in the atmosphere," the report concludes.Plasma is an ionised gas described by Sir William Crookes in 1879 as 'radiant matter' because of its tendency to glow.A plasma effect is also responsible for spectacular auroras like the northern lights (aurora borealis) and southern lights (aurora australis), says astronomer Dr Paul Francis of the Australian National University.Francis says he sometimes investigates reported UFO sightings at the Mount Stromlo Observatory, where he is a fellow, and plasma clouds provide a plausible explanation."It's quite clear that there are lights in the sky that people really do see and it's quite clear they're not aliens," he says.Plasma clouds are electrically conductive collections of charged particles.

They form when there's an equal distribution of positive and negative charges, making the overall charge neutral."A plasma cloud is going to be by nature composed of electrons and ions," says Professor Iver Cairns, a space physicist from the University of Sydney <http://www.usyd.edu.au/>."When they recombine to form atoms they're going to release light and therefore they will glow."He says plasma clouds tend to stick together but they can be shaped by magnetic forces and factors like winds in the normal atmosphere.Lightning can also cause plasma clouds, Francis says."Whenever you get a lot of energy such as a lightning bolt, or an aurora caused by the winds of the Sun, this generates plasma," he says. "Gas has to be pretty hot to turn into plasma."

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What if there is nobody out there at all ?

Despite 40 years of effort, it has yet to produce a single result. Millions of pounds have been spent and thousands of man-hours expended, yet Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, remains the great unfulfilled hope of modern astronomy. On Friday, at the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists will reassess their prospects of finding aliens in our galaxy. They will gather at a special meeting to explain current programmes and outline a series of projects aimed at finding out whether or not we are alone. 'Twenty years ago, scientists were confident there were at least a million alien civilisations in our galaxy,' said the meeting's organiser, Dr Ian Morison of Jodrell Bank Observatory. 'No one thinks there can be anything like that number now.' Scientists' failure to hear ET's call accounts for some of this loss of optimism. For 40 years, radio astronomers have trained their telescopes at stars to try to pick up a single 'Hello, I'm here' signal. Earth's own growing ecological woes have also led astronomers to fear that civilisations, if they do emerge, may be extinguishing themselves in very short timespans. 'I am sure life exists on other worlds,' said Morison. 'But it may be rather primitive. Few other worlds may have the right conditions for complex organisms to evolve as they have on Earth.' For example, our moon keeps our planet spinning in a stable manner while our sun does not have wild fluctuations in radiation output. On other worlds, battered by radiation bursts and crashing comets, life may be so disrupted that it has remained rooted at the level of amoebas and primitive pond life. This is known as the 'aliens are scum' scenario. However, such dwindling hopes have only sharpened astronomers' appetites and at this week's meeting scientists will highlight new methods.

One idea - to be outlined by Dr Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College, London - involves using Nasa's next manned missions to the moon to search its surface for space debris from alien civilisations. 'We are not talking about digging up monoliths like those in 2001: A Space Odyssey,' he said. 'The idea is to look for microscopic fragments of alien spacecraft.' Russian scientists have calculated that a civilisation capable of space travel would produce massive amounts of debris, like the space junk - old rocket boosters, lens caps dropped by astronauts - that is building up around Earth today. This alien detritus, which would include microscopic particles shorn from spacecraft, could have drifted across space for billion of years, eventually becoming embedded on our moon and ready for astronauts to dig them up. Crawford proposed the idea to Nasa at a special meeting on lunar science earlier this month.

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Ghostly syllabus for new degree

Students are to investigate the existence of ghosts as part of a degree course looking at people's experience of the paranormal. Coventry University is offering the chance to look into haunted houses, extra-sensory perception and "the survival of bodily death". Tony Lawrence, director of the two-year parapsychology course, said it would be "controversial yet thought-provoking". The focus will be the "middle ground" between religion and science, he added. The 15 post-graduate students starting the first course this autumn will look at the paranormal using several scientific methods. For instance, some will investigate haunted houses, looking at statistics on which parts of buildings provide the most sightings. Extra-sensory perception - where two people seem to communicate without using sound, vision, touch or smell - will also be looked at. Dr Lawrence said: "We've got to look at what people are experiencing. "No one has bothered to look, so people's view of the world has been divided into two components: the secular and humanist, and the religious.

"We've got to look at the middle ground, otherwise all you have is Richard Dawkins (professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University) or the Pope. "Both have probably not quite got their finger on the real pulse. People out there are having interesting experiences and no one is really following them up. "It is less about Hammer House of Horrors and more about proper methodology." The course also looks at people's interest in the spiritual and paranormal, as seen on TV, in films and in books. It promises "an honest, open systematic examination of the evidence for these exceptional human experiences". Student will use yoga and meditation "to extend or enhance their personal development".

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Did neanderthals ever meet humans ?

The number of years that modern humans are thought to have overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe is shrinking fast, and some scientists now say that figure could drop to zero. Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia from 230,000 to 29,000 years ago, petering out soon after the arrival of modern humans from Africa. There is much debate on exactly how Neanderthals went extinct. Theories include climate change and inferior tools compared to those made by modern humans. Anthropologists also disagree on whether modern humans and Neanderthals are the same species and interbred. And now, some scientists dispute whether they lived side-by-side at all in Europe.The overlap figure shrank in February with new research by Paul Mellars of Cambridge University based on improved carbon-14 dating to show that modern humans started encroaching from Israel upon Neanderthal territory in the Balkans 3,000 years sooner than previously thought.

This rate suggests Neanderthals succumbed sooner to big climate shifts or competition from modern humans for resources and that they might have overlapped for only 1,000 years at sites in western France. Try zero years, says anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.There is no longer any biological evidence of overlap between Neanderthals and non-Neanderthals in Europe, Hawks wrote recently in his blog. Many anthropologists are aware of this but "would like to sweep it under a rug," Hawks told LiveScience.

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Hacker fears 'UFO cover-up'

In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK's national high-tech crime unit, after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks. He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology. America now wants to put him on trial, and if tried there he could face 60 years behind bars. Banned from using the internet, Gary spoke to Click presenter Spencer Kelly to tell his side of the story, ahead of his extradition hearing on Wednesday, 10 May. Q: Here's your list of charges: you hacked into the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and Nasa, amongst other things. Why? GM: I was in search of suppressed technology, laughingly referred to as UFO technology. I think it's the biggest kept secret in the world because of its comic value, but it's a very important thing. Old-age pensioners can't pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy. Q: Did you find what you were looking for? GM: Yes. Q: Tell us about it. GM: There was a group called the Disclosure Project. They published a book which had 400 expert witnesses ranging from civilian air traffic controllers, through military radar operators, right up to the chaps who were responsible for whether or not to launch nuclear missiles. They are some very credible, relied upon people, all saying yes, there is UFO technology, there's anti-gravity, there's free energy, and it's extra-terrestrial in origin, and we've captured spacecraft and reverse-engineered it.

Q: What did you find inside Nasa? GM: One of these people was a Nasa photographic expert, and she said that in building eight of Johnson Space Centre they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. What she said was there was there: there were folders called "filtered" and "unfiltered", "processed" and "raw", something like that. I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen. But what came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made. It was above the Earth's hemisphere. It kind of looked like a satellite. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic domes above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it, and although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up. This thing was hanging in space, the earth's hemisphere visible below it, and no rivets, no seams, none of the stuff associated with normal man-made manufacturing.

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