Science Special News

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Uri Geller seeks "heir" on TV

After four decades of bending spoons, halting clocks, reading minds, and penning metaphysical thrillers, Uri Geller is seeking a paranormal protege. A reality television show being produced in Israel, where Geller grew up, will feature 10 contestants vying for the title of "heir" to the world-famous celebrity psychic."The format will be something like 'American Idol'. We will keep the performances that are most riveting and amazing," Geller told Reuters on Wednesday, adding that viewers with "intuitive powers" will also be invited to call in and compete.Geller, 59, declined to elaborate on what supernatural skills the contestants claim to have, and whether clairvoyants -- who might be assumed to have an edge in predicting judges' votes -- are taking part. He described the prize, simply, as "huge".

Keshet, a franchise of Israel's Channel Two television, confirmed on its Web site that the show was being produced but gave no further details."This is not a show where people have to prove to me that they are for real," Geller said, adding that he has no plans to retire. "I just want to be amazed."

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Piltdown's lessons for modern science

A new book reveals how recent research has uncovered a goldmine of information about the history of human habitation in Britain. Here, Homo britannicus author Chris Stringer describes how efforts to search for evidence of early Britons were hampered by wrong turns and false leads, including the granddaddy of all scientific forgeries. In the early years of the 20th Century, British archaeologists were becoming increasingly desperate for a human fossil to show that our island had deep prehistoric roots. Our greatest rival, Germany, had the Heidelberg jaw and the original Neanderthal bones. France had Neanderthal fossils and early modern humans at Cro-Magnon to complement their beautiful cave art. Even the Dutch had Java Man, which they had brought back from the Dutch East Indies. Stone handaxes had been found in Britain, so it was clear that early people had lived here. Some scientists also believed in more primitive stone tools called eoliths, though we now know these were often no more than naturally broken rocks.

The absence of a single significant human fossil from Britain was conspicuous. The time was right for the appearance of Piltdown Man: the earliest Englishman with the earliest cricket bat. Charles Dawson, a British solicitor and amateur fossil hunter, claimed that some time before 1910, a workman had handed him a thick, dark-stained piece of human skull that had been found in gravels at the village of Piltdown in Sussex. By 1912, Dawson had found more of the skull, and had contacted his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, the keeper of geology at the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum, where I work).

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Residents share details of UFO encounter

A man and woman in Billerica claim their lives have been altered since a huge, luminous object they said appeared over their porch one winter evening, levitating the woman, blistering the man's hand, and leaving white, powdery material that quickly disappeared afterward. A UFO investigation reported in the Billerica Minuteman has now caught the attention of an international audience, after a couple in town posted a firsthand narrative on a Canadian UFO Web site and UFO sites worldwide picked up links both to their account and the Minuteman article. The couple, identified only as Robert and Anne, are scheduled to share their story in an interview with radio talk show host Jeff Rense Friday, Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. on the Jeff Rense Show, which is broadcast on a satellite network.The show is also available on line at www.rense.com.The couple are scheduled as guests of Vike, who, holds a regular spot on the radio show and who posted the narrative on his UFO research Web site, hbccufo.org.

"I knew this story and experience was a dandy, as we do not hear many stories like this," Vike said.The report is also under investigation by Mark Petty, a former Billerica resident now living in Nashua, N.H., and a volunteer with Massachusetts Mutual UFO Network, which follows up on reports of unusual sightings of or contacts with objects in the sky.

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More than a meteor killed the Dinosaurs

Growing evidence shows that the dinosaurs and their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact alone, according to a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period. The Chicxulub impact may have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteor impacts and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years, say Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller and her collaborators Thierry Adatte from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Zsolt Berner and Doris Stueben from Karlsruhe University in Germany. A final, much larger and still unidentified impact 65.5 million years ago appears to have been the last straw, said Keller, exterminating two-thirds of all species in one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of life. It's that impact - not Chicxulub - that left the famous extraterrestrial iridium layer found in rocks worldwide that marks the impact that finally ended the Age of Reptiles, Keller believes. "The Chicxulub impact alone could not have caused the mass extinction," said Keller, "because this impact predates the mass extinction."

Keller is scheduled to present that evidence at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Philadelphia, on Tuesday, October 24, 2006. "Chicxulub is one of thousands of impact craters on Earth's surface and in its subsurface," said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "The evidence found by Keller and colleagues suggests that there is more to learn about what caused the major extinction event millions of years ago, and the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous."

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Darwin's Works Made Available Online

The complete works of Charles Darwin followed perhaps its own natural evolutionary process this week when researchers began publishing the material online -- some of it for the first time.

The University of Cambridge said it will place the entire body of Darwin's works online -- which consists of 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images -- by the bicentenary of Darwin's birth in 2009.

Much of the material has come from the Darwin Archive, housed at Cambridge University. The project is being overseen by John van Wyhe, a researcher in the history of science based at Christ's College, Cambridge.

Darwin for the Masses

"The idea is to make these important works as accessible as possible; some people can only get at Darwin that way," said van Wyhe.

Users can also download audio versions of the works, including Darwin's most famous book, "The Origin of Species."

Van Wyhe said he has been compiling the materials from around the world over the last four years in order to make it as accessible to researchers as well as to those with casual interest in some of the most important scientific work in human history.

"It's also a new medium, and there's no reason why, if you can search and read the text and look at images of the original, you shouldn't be able to download and listen to it as well," he said.

Digitized Darwin

The online collection features many of Darwin's manuscripts that have been newly transcribed or were not previously published, including the field notebooks from his famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.

One of the works to be made available is the notebook Darwin carried in his pocket and with which he recorded his immediate thoughts on the Galapagos. The notebook was stolen in the early 1980s and is still missing, but the text has been transcribed from microfilm.

Van Wyhe said he is hoping that having a digitized version of Darwin's notebook available to a massive online audience might lead to someone recognizing it, prompting its return.

Most of Darwin's editions are appearing online for the first time, including the first editions of the "Journal of Researches" (1839), "The Descent of Man" (1871), "The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle" (1838-1843), and the second to fifth editions of "The Origin of Species."

The Web site also includes the largest Darwin bibliography ever produced, and the largest collection of manuscripts with over 30,000 entries, according to van Wyhe.

The site currently contains about 50 percent of the materials that eventually will be provided.

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Experts create invisibility cloak

A US-British team of scientists has successfully tested a cloak of invisibility in the laboratory. The device mostly hid a small copper cylinder from microwaves in tests at Duke University, North Carolina. It works by deflecting the microwaves around the object and restoring them on the other side, as if they had passed through empty space. But making an object vanish before a person's eyes is still the stuff of science fiction - for now. The cloak consists of 10 fibreglass rings covered with copper elements and is classed as a "metamaterial" - an artificial composite that can be engineered to produce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves. Like visible light waves, microwaves bounce off objects, making them apparent and creating a shadow. But at microwave frequencies, the detection has to be made by instruments rather than the naked eye. Water behaves differently. When water in a river flows around a smooth rock, the water closes up on the opposite side.

Someone looking at the water downstream would never guess it had passed around an obstacle. The metamaterial cloak channelled the microwaves around the object like water flows around the rock. "These metamaterials have opened a new chapter in electromagnetism. We've opened the door into the secret garden," co-author Professor John Pendry, from Imperial College London, told BBC News.

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Utah yields another Cretaceous-era creature

Its four prominent horns lend this new Utah dinosaur an intimidating air, but the rhinoceros-sized beast probably spent large parts of its day peacefully grazing. This 20-plus horned creature, which can easily hold its own in the spike department against its famed younger Triceratops cousin, is the latest major discovery by Utah scientists to be announced from the badlands of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Jim ***kland, state paleontologist, is scheduled to describe the 80-million-year-old creature for the first time today during a paleontology meeting in Ottawa, Canada. The official name of the dinosaur, dubbed "Last Chance Ceratopsian" for the location where it was found, will be unveiled sometime next year. "It's particularly gratifying to find something like this," said ***kland, who predicted such a find more than a decade ago. A member of the ceratopsid family of dinos, the creature was probably not using its horn-covered head to charge the occasional passing Tyrannosaurus rex.

Instead, ***kland said, the horns were more likely used for sparring with others in its horned species to attract mates. ***kland, who has studied other horned dinosaurs from the Southwest U.S., theorized the horns above the brow in this family of dinosaurs likely appeared before the nose horns on later species.

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Gravity satellites see ice loss

Greenland is currently losing about 100 billion tonnes of ice a year. US space agency (Nasa) scientists have undertaken a new assessment of the rate of melting occurring on the great ice sheet that covers the region. Their data comes from satellites that detect changes in mass by monitoring tiny fluctuations in the pull of gravity as they fly over the Earth. Scott Luthcke, from the Goddard Space Flight Center, and colleagues report their study in the journal Science. The rate of ice loss observed using the Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) spacecraft is much lower than other recent research using the same data has suggested. The Luthcke team says it has used a different analysis technique - one that enabled the group to determine the behaviour of individual drainage systems instead of looking at the ice sheet as a whole. The results indicate that Greenland lost about 100 billion metric tonnes (or gigatonnes, Gt) of ice per year from 2003 to 2005. Other estimates for the same period have been close to 240 Gt of ice. Both figures, however, contrast with findings showing that the ice sheet's overall volume was roughly constant during the 1990s. The Science authors also found, as others have, that the ice sheet is thinning at the margins while growing a little in the interior.

This fits with climate models of a warmer world which expect increased melting at the edges of Greenland and increased snowfall on more central, higher locations. According to this study, though, Greenland is now losing 20% more mass than it receives from new snowfall each year. "This is a very large change in a very short time," said co-author Jay Zwally.

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'Vampire' claims she is not alone

The garlic theories and stakes through the heart may be the stuff of movies and folklore, but some still believe vampires are real and thriving in modern culture. Michelle Belanger, a self-proclaimed psychic vampire, spoke to UK students about the subculture of modern vampires last night in Memorial Hall as a part of Theoretical Thursdays, sponsored by the Student Activities Board."We create subcultures in our society because people want to free themselves from mundane reality and from a world stripped of excitement," Belanger said. "There are all kinds of subcultures: jocks, hippies, gangsters. Vampires are just another group expressing themselves."Belanger identified three types of vampires in the modern world: life-stylers, psychic vampires and sanguinarians, or blood-drinkers."Yes there are even blood-drinkers," Belanger said. "This is not something confined to Dracula and black-and-white horror movies. There are many vampires who insist they need to drink human blood."According to a census Belanger took in 2000, only 17 percent of self-proclaimed vampires are blood-drinkers.These vampires are often registered nurses so they do not hurt themselves and they only drink the blood of people who are willing."I know it is hard to believe that people are actually willing to do this," Belanger said. "But I promise you there are and these people are tested for STD's very frequently to ensure their health isn't compromised."Porphyries, often called the Vampire Disease, is a disease that is extremely rare but has been found in individuals who call themselves blood-drinkers.This disease causes severe anemia and often causes physical cravings for blood."It is much like the pregnant mothers who eat paper or clay for the nutrients they have," Belanger said. "They don't realize at the time that they are eating dirt, but their body craves what it is lacking."Psychic vampires make up 33 percent of the modern vampire population according to Belanger's census.

"As psychic vampires, we not only have psychic abilities but we also are people who crave and feed on vital energy," Belanger said. "Many of you may have encountered one. It is a person who touches you a lot when they talk and who after they leave, you find yourself mentally and physically exhausted."The remaining population of vampires is life-stylers. These people illustrate their identification with the vampire world as a fashion statement, as a sexual fetish or as a liberated persona. Belanger went on to call Hot Topic the "official vampire store."