Science Special News

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Ghosts created by low frequency sounds

Our story begins at a medical manufacturing facility in the midlands of Great Britain. Vic Tandy, an engineer from Coventry University, was doing research in a laboratory at the company. Tandy is an expert in computer-assisted learning. Workers at the lab told Tandy that the building was haunted, but being a reasoning man of science, he didn't believe them. At least, not at first. Late one night, when Tandy was burning the midnight oil all alone at the laboratory, he had a face-to-face encounter with the unexplained. As he sat at his desk working in the silent, desolate building, a gnawing unease began to overtake him. Although he couldn't put his finger on anything out of the ordinary, something was not right."I was sweating but cold and the feeling of depression was noticeable -- but there was also something else. It was as though something was in the room with me," Tandy said. "Then I became aware that I was being watched, and a figure slowly emerged to my left. It was indistinct and on the periphery of my vision, but it moved just as I would expect a person to. It was gray, and made no sound. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck -- I was terrified."Tandy steeled himself and turned to face the ghostly shape dead-on, but he said it immediately faded and completely disappeared. Concerned that his mind must be playing tricks on him, Tandy packed up and went home.

But in the great tradition of haunted house encounters, he didn't flee from the ghost-ridden building and swear never to return -- no sir, he came right back for more. And he got it.The morning after his weird sighting, Tandy took a break at the lab to spend some time on a hobby of his, namely the sport of fencing. He clamped a fencing foil in a vise so that he could make some adjustments on it, perhaps subconsciously thinking he might need the sword to fight off any unruly ghosts. Tandy briefly left the room, and then returned to see a phenomenal sight. The tip of the foil was vibrating intensely and continuously, for no apparent reason.The average person might have freaked out and concluded that the poltergeists were trying to go on a foil-whacking spree upside somebody's head. But not Vic Tandy, professional engineer. His first thought was that there might be low frequency sound waves coming from somewhere in the laboratory -- subsonic sounds that can be seen (in the form of surrounding vibrations) but not heard.

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Hubble glimpses faintest stars

Researchers peering at the Universe's first-born stars have uncovered the key to predicting a star's destiny. Stars that don't have enough mass never shine, dying billions of years before their bigger counterparts. But astronomers have never been able to measure the exact mass limit, because the lightest stars that do shine can be simply too faint to detect. Now, new images show for the first time how big a star must be to avoid impending doom. Reporting in the journal Science, astronomers have viewed high quality pictures of some of the faintest stars in our galaxy for the first time. The images come from the dimmest members of the NGC 6397 cluster - ancient stars that orbit the Milky Way's centre in a close-knit group. "The light from these faint stars is so dim that it is equivalent to that produced by a birthday candle on the Moon, as seen from Earth," said lead author Harvey Richer, from University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. The Hubble Space telescope's advanced camera was focused on the stars for five days to detect the tiny pinpricks of light. Although the telescope would have been able to detect fainter stars, none could be found- so it appears that they simply don't exist. "We checked the instruments over and over again," said Professor Richer, "but we don't see any stars fainter than this". The new pictures finally answer one of astronomy's burning questions. By calculating the mass of the faintest ancient stars, researchers can work out the minimum mass needed for a star to survive.

Potential stars that fall just short of the limit die before they're even born. Almost everything about a star's fate is determined by the mass of the gas cloud from which it is formed. Gravity pulls the gas into a giant ball, or protostar. As the ball gets bigger and more solid, its centre becomes extremely hot. For large protostars, the heat becomes so intense that the star begins to burn hydrogen by fusion, and so starts to shine. These stars can sustain themselves for billions of years, because their heat is self-replenishing. Some could live longer than the estimated lifespan of our Universe - in effect, forever.

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NASA loses Moon walk footage tapes

The heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable. But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told the Herald."Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo 11's mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made. However, when he later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, they could not be found."People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we don't need these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive hunt will locate them.If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to treat the world to a very different view of history.

But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible."We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to be seen," Mr Sarkissian said."There will only ever be one first moon walk."Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.

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Man survives 1000m fall

A man from Bloemfontein survived a 1 000m fall by landing in a ploughed field after his parachute failed to open properly while he was executing his first jump. Shocked family and friends stood watching at Tempe airport in Bloemfontein as Benno Jacobs, 35, struggled to disentangle the ropes of his parachute while hurtling through the air at a dizzying speed. "As it was my first jump, I thought it was only a bad jump, and not a fall," said the father of two. Jacobs didn't even break a bone or tear a ligament. He suffered a few bruises, a bruised lung, a swollen lip and an aching body. "It's a miracle. I wasn't really injured." Jacobs was admitted to the neurological unit of Bloemfontein Medi-Clinic for observation. The only things on his mind as he was falling about 1 066m on Saturday afternoon, were his children and a prayer. "It must have been a very short prayer," he smiled. His mother-in-law, Rika van der Spuy, who watched him fall, described the incident as an absolute miracle on Sunday. "It was terrible," she said.

"Everybody was in a shocked state. Nobody could believe that he had survived." Usually a jump took about six minutes, said Jacobs. Although it felt like ages, Jacobs hit the ploughed land within 60 seconds of leaving the aircraft. Jacobs, Daniel van der Spuy, his brother-in-law, and Theunis Lambrechts, a colleague, did a parachute course at the Bloemfontein parachute club on Friday evening. The three men executed their first jump on Saturday afternoon. Jacobs said he immediately realised the ropes were tangled.

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Team finds 'proof' of dark matter

US astronomers say they have found the first direct evidence for the mysterious stuff called dark matter. Dark matter - which does not emit or reflect enough light to be "seen" - is thought to make up 25% of the Universe. By contrast, the ordinary matter we can see is believed to make up no more than about 5% of our Universe. Until now, astronomers have only been able to infer the existence of this dark material through the gravitational effects it has on ordinary matter. The researchers have discovered what is effectively the gravitational signature of dark matter. This signature was created by dark matter and ordinary matter being wrenched apart by the immense collision of two large galaxy clusters. "The kinetic energy of this collision is...enough to completely evaporate and pulverise planet Earth ten trillion trillion times over," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US.

Study leader Doug Clowe, from the University of Arizona, said: "This provides the first direct proof that dark matter must exist and that it must make up the majority of the matter in the Universe." Astronomers have known since the 1930s that these galaxy clusters have far too much gravity to be explained by the amount of visible matter in them alone. This extra gravity has two possible explanations. One is that most matter in the clusters is in a form we cannot see, because it does not absorb or emit light. A second explanation is that gravity does not behave the same way in galaxy clusters light years in size as it does on Earth.

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Did the Nazis recover a UFO ?

Recent years have seen the emergence of a rumour that float around the internet like moths to a flame about a crashed UFO in the Black Forrest in 1936 which was spirited away to the dark heart of Nazi Germany. There it was to be dismantled and dilligently studied by, it is claimed, the members of the Vril Society. While no historically verifiable evidence for this tale has come to light, the idea of alien technology that has fallen into the hands of a select group, was already the subject of a film in Germany in 1920.Just two years after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, a little known silent film was released. Entitled Algol, it tells the story of a superior extraterrestrial from the Dogstar, who donates incredible technology that enables a wealthy industrialist to enslave the world by this free energy device. Lost for decades, copies of the film have surfaced in recent years. The illustration here is of the alien being, poised far away in the eternal blackness of the universe.

One may wonder how the age old ritual of the trafficking with otherworldly beings and intelligences, the angelic beings and the demons of the old magical textbooks, evolved with the aide of a film like Algol that expressed a specific message or thought, and gradually transformed into alien entities from far away planets in the feverish and strange undercurrents of the German occult movements.

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The world's oldest computer ?

It looks like a heap of rubbish, feels like flaky pastry and has been linked to aliens. For decades, scientists have puzzled over the complex collection of cogs, wheels and dials seen as the most sophisticated object from antiquity, writes Helena Smith. But 102 years after the discovery of the calcium-encrusted bronze mechanism on the ocean floor, hidden inscriptions show that it is the world's oldest computer, used to map the motions of the sun, moon and planets. 'We're very close to unlocking the secrets,' says Xenophon Moussas,an astrophysicist with a Anglo-Greek team researching the device. 'It's like a puzzle concerning astronomical and mathematical knowledge.' Known as the Antikythera mechanism and made before the birth of Christ, the instrument was found by sponge divers amid the wreckage of a cargo ship that sunk off the tiny island of Antikythera in 80BC. To date, no other appears to have survived. 'Bronze objects like these would have been recycled, but being in deep water it was out of reach of the scrap-man and we had the luck to discover it,' said Michael Wright, a former curator at London's Science Museum. He said the apparatus was the best proof yet of how technologically advanced the ancients were.

'The skill with which it was made shows a level of instrument-making not surpassed until the Renaissance. It really is the first hard evidence of their interest in mechanical gadgets, ability to make them and the preparedness of somebody to pay for them.' For years scholars had surmised that the object was an astronomical showpiece, navigational instrument or rich man's toy. The Roman Cicero described the device as being for 'after-dinner entertainment'. But many experts say it could change how the history of science is written. 'In many ways, it was the first analogue computer,' said Professor Theodosios Tassios of the National Technical University of Athens. 'It will change the way we look at the ancients' technological achievements.'

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