Science Special News

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TV's "Ghost Hunters" return for conference

Starting Thursday, Penn State will host the only university-backed paranormal conference in the country, UNIV-CON. The event, which is in its fifth year, is organized by the Penn State Paranormal Research Society and is expected to become the largest paranormal convention in the country. It spans four days and boasts some of the most well-known paranormal investigators and celebrities.This year, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of The Atlantic Paranormal Society and the popular Sci-Fi Channel show "Ghost Hunters" return to Penn State to lecture for their third year in a row. The Ghost Hunters will speak on Saturday from 8 to 9:30 p.m. in 100 Thomas. First, Hawes and Wilson will explain what they do and why they do it. Then they will delve into specific cases and provide numerous photographs, audio and visual recordings of what they believe to be some of their most convincing evidence of paranormal activity. Afterwards, they will answer questions from the audience."Jason and Grant have helped pave the way for paranormal investigators on television, said Ryan Buell, director of the Penn State Paranormal Society.

"They've introduced paranormal investigation in a whole new way through the media. I truly think they're influencing a new generation of investigators. Some people argue that that's a bad thing, but ultimately time will tell. Regardless, I think they're a positive influence. People never really knew what a ghost hunter or paranormal investigator was until their show came out. Now people are aware of this type of work." Hawes and Wilson are from Warwick, R.I., where they work as plumbers. Of course, they no longer work as much as they did, given the huge success of "Ghost Hunters." Occasionally Hawes and Wilson are filmed doing real plumbing jobs on the show in between investigations.

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Watching how the planets form

With the VISIR instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have mapped the disc around a star more massive than the Sun. The very extended and flared disc most likely contains enough gas and dust to spawn planets. It appears as a precursor of debris discs such as the one around Vega-like stars and thus provides the rare opportunity to witness the conditions prevailing prior to or during planet formation. "Planets form in massive, gaseous and dusty proto-planetary discs that surround nascent stars. This process must be rather ubiquitous as more than 200 planets have now been found around stars other than the Sun," said Pierre-Olivier Lagage, from CEA Saclay (France) and leader of the team that carried out the observations. "However, very little is known about these discs, especially those around stars more massive than the Sun.

Such stars are much more luminous and could have a large influence on their disc, possibly quickly destroying the inner part." The astronomers used the VISIR instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope to map in the infrared the disc surrounding the young star HD 97048. With an age of a few million years, HD 97048 belongs to the Chameleon I dark cloud, a stellar nursery 600 light-years away. The star is 40 times more luminous than our Sun and is 2.5 times as massive.

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The prophet of gases

The Oracle at Delphi in central Greece was a major religious center for more than 1000 years. Citizens and rulers alike made pilgrimages there to get advice on everything from mistresses to military conquests. The officiant at the oracle was always a woman, referred to as the Pythia, who perched on a tripod above a chasm in the bowels of the Temple of Apollo and inhaled fumes from the earth that would induce a prophetic, often crazed, trance during which she would relay the wisdom of the gods. The story was dismissed as a myth during the first half of the 20th century, when excavation of the temple and studies of the area by archaeologists turned up no sign of a chasm or a large fissure of any sort. But in the late 1990s, geologist Jelle de Boer of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, suggested that two faults crossing directly under the temple could have been the source of the chasm and the vapors. De Boer's group found traces of ethylene, a central-nervous stimulant that can produce euphoria, in a local spring and concluded it was the likely source of the oracle's frenzied trances. Giuseppe Etiope of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome, Italy, and his colleagues are skeptical.

They assert that the marine limestones underlying the temple couldn't have contained ethylene in high enough concentrations to account for the Pythias' trances or the sweet smells reported by Plutarch, a high priest of the temple in the first century. The team brought a portable laser sensor to Delphi and discovered only traces of ethylene but more significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane seeping from the ground in the area. Etiope's group suggests that if gas was having a neurotoxic effect on the prophetic women at Delphi, it was most likely carbon dioxide and methane causing oxygen deprivation in the enclosed temple chamber that was the source of the Pythias' inspiration. They speculate that the sweet smells Plutarch reported could have been from benzene fumes coming from local springs, although they did not detect the gas.

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'Monster' fossil find in Arctic

Norwegian scientists have discovered a "treasure trove" of fossils belonging to giant sea reptiles that roamed the seas at the time of the dinosaurs. The 150 million-year-old fossils were uncovered on the Arctic island chain of Svalbard - about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. The finds belong to two groups of extinct marine reptiles - the plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs. One skeleton has been nicknamed The Monster because of its enormous size. These animals were the top predators living in what was then a relatively cool, deep sea. Palaeontologists from the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum discovered the fossils during fieldwork in a remote part of Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago. Jorn Harald Hurum, co-director of the dig, said he was taken aback by the sheer density of fossil remains in one area. "You can't walk for more than 100m without finding a skeleton.

That's amazing anywhere in the world," he told BBC News. Dr Dave Martill, a palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth commented: "These sites are very unusual. To find that many individuals is a remarkable thing - that's a bonanza." Ichthyosaurs bore a passing resemblance to modern dolphins, but they used an upright tail fin to propel themselves through the water.

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Man recites pi to 100,000 places

A Japanese mental health counselor recited pi to 100,000 decimal places from memory on Wednesday, setting what he claims to be a new world record. A***a Haraguchi, 60, needed more than 16 hours to recite the number to 100,000 decimal places, breaking his personal best of 83,431 digits set in 1995, his office said Wednesday. He made the attempt at a public hall in Kisarazu, just east of Tokyo.Pi is a physical constant defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.It is usually written out to a maximum of three decimal places, as 3.141, in math textbooks. But the number, which has fascinated scientists for centuries, has no theoretical limit to the number of decimal places it can be written to. It is a constant that appears in the proofs of many equations defining the universe."What I am aiming at is not just memorizing figures, I am thrilled by seeking a story in pi," Haraguchi said.The Guinness Book of Records currently lists Hiroyuki Goto, also from Japan, as the official record holder for reciting pi from memory. He recited the ratio out to 42,195 decimal places in 1995.Guinness never entered Haraguchi's 1995 feat in its record book. The editors of the book could not be immediately reached for comment regarding Haraguchi's latest attempt.

Haraguchi, a psychiatric counselor and business consultant in nearby Mobara city, took a break of about 5 minutes every one to two hours, going to the rest room and eating rice balls during the attempt, said Naoki Fujii, spokesman of Haraguchi's office.Fujii said all of Haraguchi's activities during the attempt, including his bathroom breaks, were videotaped for evidence that will later be sent for verification by the Guinness Book of Records.Two local education officials joined 29 conference hall staff who worked in rotation to monitor Haraguchi.Haraguchi, who began reciting pi at 9 a.m. Tuesday, reached his previous record of 83,431 digits Tuesday night, finishing exactly at 100,000 digits at 1:28 a.m. Wednesday, Fujii said.

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Did Jimmy Carter withhold 1956 UFO report ?

In 1973, Jimmy Carter, then the governor of Georgia, filed a form with the NICAP to report a UFO sighting. Carter said that if he became president, he would make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public. But this was not to be. And one of the UFO incidents that the government continued to hold from the American people took place in Jasper, Colorado, in 1956, the subject of "The Top Secret UFO Project," filmmaker R. J. Thomas' parody of UFO documentaries."Jimmy Carter was the first president ever to admit that he had seen a UFO," Mr. Thomas said. "Many applauded him for his bravery. He was taking a chance. A man preparing for a presidential bid is in no position to say things that make him sound like a crackpot." It was 1969, and Governor Carter was in Leary, Georgia, for a meeting with the Lion's Club. Shortly after dark, he saw a bright object in the sky that was a big as the moon and kept changing colors.After he filed his report in 1973, he said, "If I become president, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists."But after Carter took office in January of 1977, Walter Wurfel, the administration's Deputy Press Secretary, made it clear that this would not be the case. "There might be some aspects of some sightings that would have defense implications that possibly should be safe-guarded against immediate and full disclosure," Wurfel told the press.And one of the stories covered up was the Jasper UFO Incident.According to "The Top Secret UFO Project," in the summer of 1956, mysterious occurrences in Jasper forced President Eisenhower to prepare for a showdown with aliens, setting up huge military operations in the little Colorado town south of Denver.Based on Thomas' 2004 novella of the same name, "The Top Secret UFO Project" chronicles the UFO-related events experienced by this tiny Colorado hamlet. According to the film, the town dealt with one unusual event after another.

After a farmer spotted a flying saucer zipping over his property, scientists rushed into Jasper to investigate, reporters rushed in looking for stories, and government officials rushed in to keep it a secret from the world. Billed as "the movie the government does not want you to see," "The Top Secret UFO Project," is a parody of the cheesy UFO documentaries of the 70's like "Overlords of the UFO" and TV programs like "In Search Of."Mr. Thomas plays a documentary filmmaker who, in 2003, discovered some top secret government films pertaining to the Jasper Incident of 1956. This inspired him to make a documentary about Jasper's UFO story, and to discover the truth behind what really happened that mysterious summer in Colorado.

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First teleportation between light and matter

At long last researchers have teleported the information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms, which is about as close to getting beamed up by Scotty as we're likely to come in the foreseeable future. More practically, the demonstration is key to eventually harnessing quantum effects for hyperpowerful computing or ultrasecure encryption systems. Quantum computers or cryptography networks would take advantage of entanglement, in which two distant particles share a complementary quantum state. In some conceptions of these devices, quantum states that act as units of information would have to be transferred from one group of atoms to another in the form of light. Because measuring any quantum state destroys it, that information cannot simply be measured and copied. Researchers have long known that this obstacle can be finessed by a process called teleportation, but they had only demonstrated this method between light beams or between atoms.

In taking the next step, Eugene Polzik and his colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen shined a strong laser beam onto a cloud of room-temperature cesium atoms whose spins were all pointing in the same direction and fluctuating according to their given quantum state. The laser became entangled with the collective spin of the cloud, meaning that the quantum states of laser and gas shared the same amplitude but had opposite phases. The goal was to transfer, or teleport, the quantum state of a second light beam onto the cloud.

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Hubble discovers 16 new planets

NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy. Over the past 15 years, astronomers have identified more than 200 planets outside our solar system, but the new ones identified by the Hubble are at least 10 times as far from Earth.That planets can be found at the center of the galaxy, as well as near our solar system, has given NASA researchers confidence that they are likely to be everywhere. If that is the case, then the likelihood of other Earth-like planets becomes greater."We all are dreamers, and part of that dream is to find life somewhere," said Mario Livio, head of the science program at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees Hubble operations. "We're finding that the galaxy is full of planets, and the chances are, somewhere out there, we will find one with the conditions necessary to be habitable."The new planets were introduced yesterday as mostly "candidates," since only two could be definitively described as planets. But Livio and team leader Kailash Sahu said the chances are good that some, or even all, of the 16 will ultimately meet all the criteria to be called planets.

Based on the number of planets identified and the number of stars in the Milky Way, the scientists estimated that as many as 6 billion Jupiter-size planets exist in the galaxy."Our discovery . . . gives very strong evidence that planets are as abundant in other parts of the galaxy as they are in our solar neighborhood," Sahu said.One of the biggest surprises of their work, Sahu said, was that five of the likely planets orbit so close to their suns that they make it around in less than one Earth day. These close-in, Jupiter-size planets are not necessarily the most prevalent, he said, but rather are the ones most easily identified using the techniques available for peering deep into the galaxy. The planet closest to its star has an inhospitable estimated surface temperature of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Experts doubt Bosnian pyramid claims

In Bosnia's Valley of the Pyramids, only one man is king. Semir Osmanagic, new-age philosopher and amateur archaeologist, splits his time between Texas and Sarajevo, but these days is mostly to be found scraping away at a hillside 40 minutes north of the Bosnian capital. It is here that he claims to have made the most extraordinary discovery of the millennium: Europe's only pyramids, dating back to the late Ice Age, exceeding in scale and perfection those of ancient Egypt or Latin America. "This is the most magnificent construction complex built on the face of the planet," he said. "These pyramids are so old and so unique, it's hard to compare them to anything else in the world."The experts strongly dispute his claims. Mr Osmanagic, 46, says they are jealous. And at Visoko, an army of amateurs is busy digging up the hillsides to uncover traces of man-made structures that the Houston Bosnian insists date from a prehistoric cycle of civilisation rich in its sophistication and washed away "in the flood". The locals love it. Farmers are turning fields into car parks. Coach tours are arriving from all over Bosnia and beyond. Cafes, bars, and hotels are doing booming business in what was a severely depressed Muslim town on the frontline of a war that ended 11 years ago.

"It's amazing, we've got 300 people here today. We've had more than 200,000 visiting in the last few months," said Haris Delibasic, a Visoko accountant who now spends most of his time at the "pyramids" site. "We thought these were just hills. Now we know they aren't." Mr Osmanagic's epiphany occurred last year when he visited Visoko to research its medieval legacy. The town was a seat of Bosnian kings in the middle ages. Mr Osmanagic has been preoccupied with ancient pyramids for 20 years, touring central and Latin America, the Middle East and east Asia. Experts say the verdant rolling valleys of central Bosnia contain dozens of natural pyramid-shaped hills. But Mr Osmanagic is convinced he has uncovered ancient man-made structures in the form of four pyramids just outside Visoko. He has dubbed them pyramid of the sun, the moon, the dragon, and love.

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Laughter - All part of the mind ?

An Australian researcher who is trying to unravel the thought patterns that underpin humour says laughter involves a unique form of consciousness. Ann Hale, a medical anthropologist from the University of Sydney, spoke about the social and cultural context of laughter at a recent conference of the Australian Anthropological Society in Cairns.She believes jokes rely on the juxtaposition of two mismatched or incompatible concepts.For example, she tells the joke about the prisoner who plays cards with his wardens. But the prisoner cheats, so they kick him out of prison."Prisons have rules that they lock you up," Ms Hale said. "But if you cheat you get kicked out. So you have two concepts there."The same applies to slapstick humour.She says when we laugh at someone falling over, it is not the process of falling that tickles our funny bone but the attempt to stay upright.

"What makes people laugh at slapstick is not falling off the tightrope, but what you do to stay on," she said."We've got an idea that this is what you look like when you're upright and here's somebody trying to stay upright."It's within the same concept but it's incongruous, it's the mismatch ... it's not the fact that you've fallen onto your backside." Ms Hale says research has shown we instinctively recognise these "incompatible contexts" in the first year of life.