Science Special News

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Dog dials 911, saves owner's life

A US dog has won an award for saving her owner's life by dialling a phone number that alerted emergency services to her owner's diabetic seizure. Belle the beagle triggered a call to an ambulance crew by biting on her owner, Kevin Weaver's, mobile phone. The dog was trained to detect potential diabetic attacks by licking and sniffing Mr Weaver's nose to check his blood sugar levels and pawing him. Belle resorted to dialling for help when Mr Weaver fell unconscious. The dog used her teeth to press the number nine key, which the phone was programmed to interpret as a "911" call to emergency services. Ambulance workers answered the phone and, hearing nothing but barking at the end of the line, rushed to the caller's house in the city of Ocoee in Florida state.

The dog is the first animal to receive the Vita Wireless Samaritan Award. "I am convinced that if Belle wasn't with me that morning, I wouldn't be alive today," Mr Weaver said. "Belle is more than just a life-saver. She's my best friend."

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Front garden yields ancient tools

The Britons of 250,000 years ago were a good deal more sophisticated than they are sometimes given credit for, new archaeological evidence suggests. It comes in the form of giant flint handaxes that have been unearthed at a site at Cuxton in Kent. The tools display exquisite, almost flamboyant, workmanship not associated with this period until now. The axes - one of which measured 307mm (1ft) in length - were dug up from old sand deposits in a front garden. "It is a site where there would once have been a slow-moving river," explained Dr Francis Wenban-Smith, from the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton. "It would have periodically overflowed its banks; and there would have been occasional sand bars and islands that got exposed. Obviously, at some point, Palaeolithic man was doing something there, left his handaxes, and they got covered up."

The biggest of the tools - the second largest of its type found in Britain - is beautifully preserved and sharply pointed. It was probably used to butcher prey, which at that time would have included rhino, elephants, large deer and an extinct type of cattle known as aurochs.

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South Korea plans search for alien life

South Korea plans to launch a new space program to search for extraterrestrial life, government officials said Wednesday. The country's National Science Museum, which the government plans to open in September, is scheduled to initiate the program, dubbed SETI, by setting up a high-powered radio telescope in its exhibition hall, the officials said. SETI, which stands for search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, is a program which analyzes all kinds of radio waves from outer space in an effort to find non-human intelligent life forms. The museum will be the world's second institution to seek alienlife forms through a radio telescope after a program at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, according to the officials. The radio telescope with a 6-meter radius will be set up in the museum under construction in Gwacheon, a city 18 kilometres south of Seoul.

Participants in the SETI program, in which the public will be allowed to take part, will assess the possibility of alien life through analysis of radio wave data transferred to their personal computers. Incoming radio waves will also be used to map out hydrogen distribution in space as areas of high hydrogen concentration are considered to play a main role in the creation of new stars. "We expect a large number of youths to take part in the SETI program as there is no minimum qualification required to participate," said Lee Kang-hwan, head of the SETI program.

[Rasputin]

Test tube meat nears dinner table

What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.Currently involved in identifying the type of stem cells that will multiply the most to create larger quantities of meat within a bioreactor, the team hopes to have concrete results by 2009. The 2 million euro ($2.5 million) Dutch-government-funded project began in April 2005.

The work is one arm of a worldwide research effort focused on growing meat from cell cultures on an industrial scale."All of the technology exists today to make ground meat products in vitro," says Paul Kosnik, vice president of engineering at Tissue Genesis in Hawaii. Kosnik is growing scaffold-free, self-assembled muscle. "We believe the goal of a processed meat product is attainable in the next five years if funding is available and the R&D is pursued aggressively."

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But if you remember to dream about your project at night, your dreams may very well pitch in and help. By letting your dreaming mind get involved in whatever you are working on or struggling with, you are tapping into the vast power of your subconscious mind in a more direct way. You are using the symbolic language of dreams to show you a new and innovative way at looking at things.Your dreams can also help you solve personal problems, work out issues of anxiety or depression, and even solve problems in your personal relationships. In short, the potential of dreams is all but unlimited -- because they are as vast as the human imagination, which I believe is infinite.In the future, I will write more about this very rich subject, and my own extensive experiments with dreams, especially the incredibly fascinating practice of lucid dreaming. Also, I have a column on file here at Unexplained Mysteries describing one of my lucid dream adventures; it’s called “Restaurant on the Edge of Time.” Forgive the shameless plug, but my greater motive here truly is to get readers interested and excited about the enormous potential within their own minds, creative potential that is yours for the asking.

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"Yeti hand" picture goes on display

Cryptozoologist Marc E.W. Miller and four of his colleagues left Ohio for Nepal and the Tibet border in February 1986 to search for evidence of a yeti - commonly known as the abominable snowman or Bigfoot. When Miller, a Lancaster native, left for his great adventure 22 years ago, he never imagined he would hold what was believed to be the scalp of a yeti, receive possible hair samples from a yeti and take a picture with what is believed to be a yeti's hand."To find something is unexplainable," Miller said. "It's how you feel when you win. ... It's that adventure and excitement." A cryptozoologist is a researcher who studies creatures that haven't been proved to exist. The picture of Miller holding a case with the yeti's hand is now displayed for people from all over the world to see while enjoying the thrills of "Expedition Everest" at Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom. The Everest Expedtion rollercoaster train stops in the museum briefly during the ride. The ride opened two months ago in the Buena Vista, Fla., Disney theme park and features an exciting real-life depiction of what the Himalayan mountains are like - including a life-like encounter with the yeti. But finding possible evidence of the yeti is the outcome of only one of Miller's world expeditions.

Miller, who has practiced as a neuropsychologist in Lancaster for more than 20 years, has been all over the world. He has explored primitive society in Africa, searched for rare animals in China and Egypt, withstood various types of climates and dangerous situations and wrote two books about his adventures. One of his most prized finds was a rare species of the Asian elephant in China. "I was paralyzed when I saw it," he said.

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Contrails and the dark side

By now we're all familiar with global warming and its predicted consequences, even to the extent where people are finally listening to longtime environmentalist Al Gore! But in order to curb global warming it's likely that there'll be a number of lifestyle sacrifices we'll need to make. Arguably, one of the most inconvenient of these would be air travel. Jets certainly pump out their fair share of greenhouse emissions, which would be reason enough to consider cutting back air travel, but jets add to global warming in yet another way. In case you haven't heard, the long trails of condensation known as "contrails" emitted by jet airliners are now considered to be a significant factor in global warming. Furthermore, a group of UK meteorologists recently found that night flights make contrail troubles considerably worse. With airlines expected to continue expanding their routes and increasing frequencies of flights; what can be done to make airline travel greener?

While floating peacefully high above the Earth's surface, shuttle astronaut Dr. Fred W. Leslie says that he "remembers seeing contrails stretched across the planet." Australian astronaut Andy Thomas also considered contrails one of the planet's most striking features. "One of the most readily visible signs of human presence is the occurrence of contrails from aircraft in the upper atmosphere. They are very long lasting, and can be seen over virtually all parts of the world... radiating out from cities, like spokes in a wheel," recalls Thomas.

[mahsa88]