Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Space Shuttle crew check for damage

Discovery's crew used highly sensitive cameras attached to a 15-metre boom yesterday to carefully examine the space shuttle for any signs of damage from the previous day's launch. Nothing serious was reported, but it was much too early to draw any conclusions, officials said. The only unusual thing found, at least for now, was a whitish splotch on Discovery's right wing that looked like a bird dropping. There was one on the wing nearly three weeks ago at the launch pad; flight director Tony Ceccacci said he saw it there from a distance of no more than three metres. "We didn't touch anything if that's what you're asking," Ceccacci said, drawing a big laugh. Ceccacci said the imagery experts will study the splotch and make sure it's nothing more than a bird's shuttle signature. If that's what it is, it will burn off during the ride back from space, he said. There wasn't enough heat during launch to get rid of the residue, he said.

Discovery was on target for a linkup today with the International Space Station and operating well, the flight director said. Live video of Discovery's Independence Day launch showed small chunks of debris falling from the external fuel tank, at least one piece hitting the shuttle. Using new inspection techniques implemented after the 2003 Columbia disaster, the astronauts yesterday were taking more images with laser, digital and video cameras that can spot damage as small as three millimetres.

[Rasputin]

10 years after Dolly: No human clones

Is she a monster or a miracle? This was the front-page question posed by Britain's Daily Mail newspaper in 1997. The article was just one of hundreds of news reports on the world's first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep. Born July 5, 1996, at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, Dolly was the genetic copy of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe. Because of a patent application on the cloning process, her birth was kept a secret until February 27, 1997. Researchers, religious leaders, and politicians immediately began debating the ethical implications of cloning mammals. Specifically, the announcement of a cloned sheep sparked concern that human clones wouldn't be far behind. The U.S. and British governments both called for reports on the implications of the achievement, while the Vatican urged a worldwide ban on human cloning. A decade later human clones seem no closer to reality, but scientists have created copies of a barnyard's worth of animals.

"It's really astonishing," said Irina Polejaeva, referring to the number of species cloned within the last decade. Polejaeva is the chief scientific officer for Austin, Texas-based ViaGen—one of several U.S. companies offering commercial cloning services.

[Rasputin]

UFO conference held in South Africa

Thanks to Hollywood and the X-Files, most people know something about unidentified flying objects. But few people would know how, or where, to report a sighting.Cristo Louw, a "ufologist" from Bellville, discussed this and other issues about extra-terrestrials at a UFO conference, held at the University of Cape Town on Saturday. About 50 people who claim to have had close encounters with aliens and mysterious objects attended the Unbind Your Mind conference, held to mark World UFO Day, celebrated internationally on Sunday."The most interesting discussion was about 'star kids' or children who are born wise beyond their years," said Louw.He said star kids were "highly evolved" beings who knew they had come to Earth from somewhere else and often have the solutions to global problems.Louw said other topics discussed included the history of UFO sightings in South Africa and the proposed Open Contact law that would permit people to make contact with extra-terrestrials. Louw also told the group about a letter written to President Thabo Mbeki asking him about his knowledge of UFO sightings.

Despite having made more than 20 calls, he continued to await a response from the president, Louw said. But an amused Louw said Mbeki's office did say that the department of environment and tourism would handle UFO-related queries. Louw, who has been interested in all things celestial since he was a child, is one of the few South Africans who can legitimately claim to be a UFO "expert".

[Rasputin]

Woman tries to clear name of convicted witch

Grace Sherwood was a healer, a midwife and a widowed mother of three sons. Her neighbors thought she also was a witch who ruined crops, killed livestock and conjured storms. On July 10, 1706, the 46-year-old woman was tied up and "ducked"--dropped into a river--in what is now Virginia Beach. The theory behind the test was that if she sank, she was innocent, although she'd also likely drown. She floated--proof she was guilty because the pure water cast out her evil spirit. Three hundred years later, a modern-day resident of this resort city has asked the governor to exonerate Sherwood, Virginia's only convicted witch tried by water. Belinda Nash, 59, also is raising money to erect a bronze statue of Sherwood and trying to find a place to put it. "I would like to see her name cleared because I don't believe she was a witch," said Nash, who has an affinity for Sherwood in part because Nash's reputation for having things she wishes for come true earned her the nickname "Samantha the Witch."

"Otherwise, I'd be ducked (too)," she added with a smile in an interview at the Ferry Plantation House, a historic home where she volunteers as director and, dressed in costume, tells visitors about "poor Grace." The courthouse where part of Sherwood's witchcraft trial took place was located on the old Ferry farm property, Nash said. Nearby is the Western Branch of the Lynnhaven River, where Sherwood was ducked at a site now known as Witchduck Point. Nash hopes Gov. Timothy M. Kaine will decide whether to vindicate Sherwood's name by the 300th anniversary of the ducking, which Nash and a small group will commemorate with a re-enactment, as they do yearly, her daughter playing Sherwood.

[Rasputin]

Rewired brain revives patient after 19 years

A study of the "miraculous" recovery of a man who spent 19 years in a minimally conscious state has revealed the likely cause of his regained consciousness. The findings suggest the human brain shows far greater potential for recovery and regeneration then ever suspected. It may also help doctors predict their patients’ chances of improvement. But the studies also highlight gross inadequacies in the system for diagnosing and caring for patients in vegetative or minimally conscious states.In 1984, 19-year-old Terry Wallis was thrown from his pick-up truck during an accident near his home in Massachusetts, US. He was found 24 hours later in a coma with massive brain injuries.Within a few weeks he had stabilised in a minimally conscious state, which his doctors thought would last indefinitely. It did indeed persist for 19 years. Then, in 2003, he started to speak.Over a three day period, Wallis regained the ability to move and communicate, and started getting to know his now 20 year old daughter – a difficult process considering he believed himself to be 19, and that Ronald Reagan was still president. o try and find out what was going on inside Wallis's brain, Nicholas Schiff and colleagues from the Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City, used a new brain imaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). The system tracks water molecules and so reveals the brain’s white matter tracts – akin to a wiring diagram. They combined this with more traditional PET scanning, to show which brain areas were active.

The team's findings suggest that Wallis’s brain had, very gradually, developed new pathways and completely novel anatomical structures to re-establish functional connections, compensating for the brain pathways lost in the accident.They found that new axons – the branches that connect neurons together – seemed to have grown, establishing novel working brain circuits.Surprisingly, the circuits look nothing like normal brain anatomy. A lot of the damage had been to axons that passed from one side of the brain to the other, torn by the force of the accident. But Schiff says that new connections seem to have grown across around the back of the brain, forming structures that do not exist in normal brains.

[Rasputin]

Gary McKinnon and official propaganda

T. Stokes: Many people wonder how, if as the British and U.S government have always claimed that U.F.O’s do not exist, how can computer nerd Gary Mc’kinnon be charged with breaking into these files and reading about them ? How can you read what does not exist ?And we are told 97 of these U.S defence computers held this relevant data.So to prosecute him, means an about turn on official policy and all statements since Roswell in 1947.Recently Gary was sent to the U.S.A. to go on trial.Enforced rendition has already been declared illegal under international law.Remember, the Human Rights act instructs us that a prosecution based on untruths cannot legally go ahead, and both British and U.S administrations have based their complaint on a bed of lies. But why not, ? The British government lies continually, over Iraq, immigration, the N.H.S, crime rates, the Deepcut army barrack murders, the heterophobic agenda, W.M.Ds, and so much more.So after so many opportunities to tell the truth to the public over the huge numbers of U.F.O sightings.The recent admission that U.F.Os do exist after all, but are in the main are dismissed as reflections, light distortions, Japanese fishing boats, and cloud formations, was only forthcoming as a rearguard action to distort the mass of classified information expected if Gary is convicted.

Lets not forget that spy Jonathan Pollard has claimed Mossad hacked the U.S defence files for Israel on a daily basis year in year out, yet no convictions here.But lies are an essential part of the British diet,The result is that none believes any government statement any more, particularly on U.F.Os and only a fool will think his vote means anything.T Stokes lecture in paranormal studies

[Rasputin]

The return of nuclear fusion

The world's biggest ever nuclear fusion reactor is about to begin construction in the hills of Provence. But with persistent doubts over fusion's capacity to generate energy efficiently and a raft of engineering conundrums, is this really money well spent?They call themselves "fusion gypsies"—scientists who have travelled the world, moving from one nuclear reactor to the next, living the dream that some day, somewhere, they can re-create the reactions that take place in the heart of the stars to generate huge amounts of cheap, clean electricity for the world.Their goal is nuclear power, but not as we know it. This is fusion and not fission. Fission involves mining, processing and irradiating vast amounts of uranium, and leaving behind an even larger legacy of radioactive waste with half-lives stretching into the next ice age. Whereas, say the fusion gypsies, a small vanload of fuel supplied to a fusion power station could supply the electricity needs of a city of 1m people for a year, and leave behind only paltry amounts of radioactive waste that will decay to nothing within a century.

Fission reactors split atoms to make power; fusion reactors force the elemental particles of the universe together till they fuse, releasing energy in the process. Fusion powers the sun, the gypsies say, and one day it could power the world's electricity grids too.Fusion research got going in the 1950s. The first fusion gypsies are approaching retirement. But scientific progress has been slow and funding sporadic. They have yet to see a watt of power delivered to any grid anywhere. But earlier this year, after more than a decade in the doldrums, the gypsies had their biggest boost, when governments representing most of the world's population decided to invest $10bn in trying to make the dream come true.

[Rasputin]

Satanic curses

In September this year, a woman in Guyana was convicted of bludgeoning a friend to death. Her friend, she explained, was possessed, and she was trying to beat the Devil out. In Romania, meanwhile, a priest and four nuns from the Romanian Orthodox Church are on trial, accused of murdering a 23-year-old novice. In his defence, the priest who led the exorcism has claimed his approach was better than the medical treatment she had been receiving for her schizophrenia. It's an older story, though, that inspired a film out this month, The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It concerns the death of Anneliese Michel, a Bavarian woman who died in 1976, aged 23, also after an exorcism. The two priests involved were charged with negligent homicide. So were the woman's parents. Born in 1952, Michel was raised in a strict Catholic family. While other teenagers were experimenting with sex and rebelling against authority, she tried to atone for the sins of wayward priests by sleeping on a bare floor in the middle of winter.

In 1969, according to court findings, Michel experienced her first epileptic fit; by 1973 she was suffering from depression and considering suicide. As her feelings of torment grew stronger, she reported seeing faces of demons on the people and things around her (a phenomenon eerily portrayed in the film) and hearing voices informing her that she was damned.

[Rasputin]

'Invisibility beam' technology proposed

It sounds like magic: walls, curtains, even dresses could be rendered transparent by bathing them in a specially crafted beam of light. Rescuers could use the beam to peer through rubble after an earthquake, while doctors could gaze at a damaged lung after making a patient's skin and ribs vanish. This remarkable disappearing trick is the kind of sorcery that would grace the pages of a Harry Potter book, yet it is a prediction of real-world science. Magic and science do, after all, have their roots in a fundamental urge to make sense of the world so that we may manipulate it to our own ends. And, in the sense that a wizard is a wise man, they still exist today; wizards (and a few witches) can be seen in the Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science. Next week, a team led by Prof Chris Phillips, a quantum conjurer from Imperial College London, will join an elite coven at the Royal Society's summer exhibition (see below for details), where they will present tantalising evidence of how to make objects disappear. At the flick of a switch, he and his colleague Dr Mark Frogley can make something invisible, albeit just a fraction of a millimetre square of a special material and only for a one ten thousandth of a millionth of a second.

Things are visible because of the way that their atoms interact with a beam of light. When the beam, an electromagnetic wave, hits an atom on this page the electrons in the lowest energy state of the atom absorb the wave's energy and rise to higher energy levels. Only light of exactly the right colour, the one that corresponds to the energy difference between the two levels, will be absorbed - all other colours pass through.

[Rasputin]

Gene reveals mammoth coat colour

The coat colour of mammoths that roamed the Earth thousands of years ago has been determined by scientists. Some of the curly tusked animals would have sported dark brown coats, while others had pale ginger or blond hair. The information was extracted from a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth bone from Siberia using the latest genetic techniques. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said a gene called Mc1r was controlling the beasts' coat colours. This gene is responsible for hair-colour in some modern mammals, too. In humans, reduced activity of the Mc1r gene causes red hair, while in dogs, mice and horses it results in yellow hair. Using ancient DNA extracted from the excavated mammoth bone, the international team of researchers were able to look at the variations in copies of the Mc1r gene. Dr Michael Hofreiter, an author on the paper and an evolutionary biologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, said analysis revealed two different versions of the gene were present - a fully active and a partially active version. The researchers propose that hair coloration in mammoths is likely to have been determined in the same way as in present-day mammals.

This means that mammoths with one copy of the active gene and one of the partially active gene would have had dark coats - most likely dark brown or black. While mammoths with two copies of the inactive gene would have had paler coats - possibly blond or ginger. The scientists said they were unsure why different-coloured mammoths existed. Other research published in the same journal found that beach mice, whose coat colour is also controlled by the Mc1r gene, have varying colours for survival reasons. The researchers said Florida beach mice were lighter than their mainland cousins because their pale fur helped them to hide from predators in their sand-dune habitat.

[Rasputin]

NASA's Mars plan has rocky future

NASA's scientific exploration plan for Mars is missing a few pieces, warns a report released Thursday. The space agency had asked the National Research Council, which advises the government on science issues, to evaluate its Mars plans, particularly in light of budget cuts to science missions.Headed by planetary scientist Reta Beebe of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, the NRC panel finds that Mars plans for the next decade — involving a series of robotic rovers and an orbiting science lab — broadly meet NASA's scientific goals.But after that, budget and planning woes threaten to derail NASA's goals, the report states, particularly the elimination of probes designed to return Mars rocks to Earth and a Mars-wide weather-monitoring network."If we are going to send people to Mars, we simply have to understand the planet," says Beebe.

NASA's 2009 plan to land a rover laboratory, the Mars Science Laboratory, fits with scientific goals, she says, "but beyond, there is a big threat to the program."More than $2 billion over five years has been diverted from NASA's planned Mars budget to the space shuttle and plans for a future manned space mission, says NASA's Doug McCuistion.."Overall, the report is a good one," says McCuistion, who heads the Mars Exploration Program. "They didn't find any big gaping holes in our plans but have given us good food for thought on the choices we face." But given budget cuts, McCuistion said a mission to retrieve Mars samples is unlikely until the 2020s. The panel made other recommendations to get NASA's Mars plans back on track, including:

• Ensure that a planned 2013 Mars orbiter is designed to include a science mission, "not simply to serve as a telecommunications relay."
• Delay until 2018 a proposed "astrobiology" lander designed to look for life on Mars. This would give scientists time to design instruments capable of building on the achievements of missions that take place in the less distant future.
• "Clarify" for the space-science community how mission costs are weighed against research benefits.

NASA has built up a sizable research community through the Mars rover programs and other missions, Beebe says. A disorganized or misdirected Mars exploration program that sacrifices fundamental research questions about the Red Planet will fritter away that expertise as scientists turn to more productive research, she says.

[Rasputin]

Finding life on extrasolar planets

A huge sunshade a million miles from Earth could help astronomers search for signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars, a study says. The daisy-shaped "occulter", as it is known, would use a powerful telescope trailing thousands of miles behind. The shade, described in the journal Nature, would stop light from the planet's star swamping the telescope. The concept by Professor Webster Cash of the University of Colorado has already received funding from Nasa. He believes an occulter could be in space within seven years "stalking" Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. "We have proposed to build a star shade to launch a couple of months later and follow it out to its orbit," he said. "We believe this the fastest way to get operational." Scientists are already searching for planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Researchers hunt for these extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, using a number of techniques. More than 170 have so far been discovered.

However, all the discoveries have relied on indirect methods of detection. For example, astronomers look for the dimming of light as planets pass in front of their parent stars. Indirect techniques like this mean that only relatively large planets tend to get identified. Astrobiologists, though, are really interested in finding smaller, Earth-like planets which could, in theory, have the right conditions for supporting life. To do this, astronomers need a method of directly imaging the dim planets. Numerous proposals have been put forward, including massive optical telescopes on Earth, or flotillas of space-based telescopes such as the Europe's Darwin mission or Nasa's Terrestrial Planet Finder. All these schemes are still in development.

[Rasputin]

Those amazing quantum honey bees

Ken Korczak: Warning! What I am writing about today may fry your brain. If you don’t like the thought of your cerebral cortex sizzling like a corndog in a vat of boiling vegetable oil, don’t read this column. In fact, if this column does not fry your brain, then your brain is just unfriable. Is “unfriable” a word? I don’t know, but I digress. Now, on with the brain buzz, and you'll soon understand what I mean by "buzz."Imagine having the ability to see, with your naked eye, a quark particle spinning in the weird and shadowy quantum world. Imagine being able to perceive subatomic particles winking in and out of existence. What would it be like if you could easily see electrons shimmering in their orbits around atoms? Furthermore, think about what it would be like if you could exist naturally in a realm of six dimensions, rather than being cramped into the three-dimensional world you live in now. What if you could perform a sensational six-dimensional dance?

Well, that may be what the world of the common honey bee is like. If the theories of mathematician Barbara Shipman are correct, honey bees can not only perceive the energies of the subatomic, quantum world directly, but they also use six-dimensional space to communicate with each other. The fact that Shipman stumbled upon this theory is a classic example of what Louis Pasteur called: “Chance favoring the prepared mind.”Shipman is a mathematician at the University of Rochester, but her father was a bee researcher for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Shipman would often stop by her father’s office and he would show her the amazing world of honey bees. One aspect of bee behavior which has fascinated and baffled scientists for more than 70 years is the mysterious dance they perform in their hives. The dance -- a kind of crazy wing-waggling jitterbug (no pun intended) -- communicates to other bees where new sources of yummy flower food can be found. By watching the dance of a scout bee, other bees, called “recruits” get an exact idea of the direction and distance of where new food can be found.Even though bees were not her field of study, Shipman could never get the mystery of bee dances out of her mind. In the meantime, Shipman’s work as a math theorist led her to an area only a select few other mathematicians were working on -- something called manifolds. A manifold is a geometric shape described by certain complex math equations. There are an infinite variety of manifold configurations.

They can describe shapes of many dimensions. Shipman was working with a six-dimensional structure called a flag manifold, when suddenly, in one of those eerie moments of scientific coincidence, she realized that the flag manifold very closely resembled the pattern of the honey bee waggle dance.Now, because the flag manifold is a six-dimensional object, it cannot be perceived in our three dimensional world. We can visualize only an approximation of what it looks like by projecting its “shadow” into two dimensional space. The shadow of an ordinary sphere, for example, projects onto two dimensions as a flat circle. And when you project a sixth-dimensional flag manifold onto two dimensions, it matches exactly the patterns dancing bees make. But two-dimensional bee-dance patterns are not enough to explain how bees interpret these patterns to locate distant sources of food. A good explanation may be that the bees actually perceive all six dimensions. In order to do that, the eye or senses of the bee would need to be able to see subatomic activity directly! When a human scientist tries to detect a quark--by bombarding it with another particle in a high-energy accelerator--the flag manifold geometry is lost. If bees are using quarks as a script for their dance, they must be able to observe the quarks in their natural states.At first, scientists speculated that bees were perceiving their flight directions similar to the way birds follow migration routes. It is commonly accepted that birds sense the earth’s magnetic fields because they have a mineral called magnetite in their heads. Magnetite helps birds follow terrestrial magnetic fields like a directional beacon. Even though bees have been found to have tiny amounts of magnetite in their bodies, it does not explain the bee dance and communication process. Also, it is unlikely that the two-dimensional pattern of the bee dance is a perfect shadow for a six-dimensional flag manifold unless there is a connection.

What are the implications of bees being able to directly perceive the quantum, subatomic world? For one thing, it means that we have to reevaluate the fundamental nature of bees. One might speculate that bees have a kind of special cosmic ability to transcend three-dimensional space, operate in a multidimensional universe, and straddle multiple levels of time, space and existence. Bees may be living proof that higher dimensions of reality exist physically, and not just in theory. There also may be doorways for entering into those realities -- if you have the right equipment. But the bee evidence has much wider implications for quantum mechanics as a whole, which I won't get into here.I think this bee phenomenon borders on the miraculous. Imagine these amazing creatures -- honey bees -- plying the quantum oceans, transcending mundane three-dimensional space as they perform their common labors. A bee is like a tiny winged Prometheus, entering the realm of the gods to bring back a wonderful gift to mankind -- the sweetness of honey. Furthermore, I can’t help but speculate that there may be a way to harness the multidimensional ability of bees to expand our own perceptions and abilities. Can we tap into the bee nervous system to help ourselves more directly experience that which can currently only be described with numbers? Can bees in some way enhance the information we collect from gigantic atom smashers? Can bees become the instrumentality that opens a direct portal for us into higher dimensional realms? Can we create bee sensors to make a quantum beam that will shine into the eldritch spaces between atoms, electrons, protons and quarks? It stings the imagination! Or to paraphrase a great poet: "It sings the body electric!" At the very least, it gives my brain a buzz! Yours?

Ken Korczak: www.starcopywriter.com

[jsmith]

kasi hazer ast inja dar hali ke badanesh salem ast...vali azaye badanesho ba azaye robot avaz kone?????

[Rasputin]

Mini solar system could make new discoveries

Submitted by Marvy: A tiny, artificial solar system could reveal hidden spatial dimensions and test alternative theories of gravity, a new study suggests. If the system's "planets" moved slightly differently than expected from standard gravity, it would signal the presence of new physical phenomena – which have proven very difficult to test.Numerous theories that attempt to unify all the forces of physics into one cohesive model call for hidden spatial dimensions in addition to the three we can sense. In some of these theories, gravity would leak into the extra dimensions – explaining why it is a relatively weak force in the universe we know. This leakage would dilute its power and cause deviations from the standard law of gravity, which would be especially noticeable at very small scales. But scientists have not been able to measure the force of gravity between closely spaced objects in the lab with enough accuracy to test these theories.

"Direct measurement of the gravitational force at distances smaller than a fraction of a millimetre is an extremely difficult task," says Varun Sahni of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, India. Stray electromagnetic forces tend to overwhelm gravity in experiments at this scale, he told New Scientist.Sahni proposes an alternative way to measure gravity on small scales. He and colleague Yuri Shtanov at the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics (BITP) in Kiev, Ukraine, say it could be done by sending a "solar system in a can" into space.