Science Special News

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Mystery humming sound captured

A New Zealand scientist believes he's captured a recording of the mystery hum that has been heard by scores of people living and in and around the city of Auckland. Dr Tom Moir, a computer engineer at Massey University's Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, made the recording at a house in Auckland's North Shore suburb of Glenfield earlier this week.Dr Moir and his colleague Dr Fakhrul Alam have dubbed the sound an unidentified acoustic phenomena.Four people who previously reported hearing the low-level hum have confirmed that this is the sound they can hear in their homes."If this is indeed the hum, then it's acoustical and not electromagnetic," Dr Moir said.Dr Moir previously pinpointed the low-level drone at a frequency of 56Hz, which is very close to the 50Hz frequency produced by the 240 volt AC main electricity supply delivered to homes in New Zealand (and Australia).Although 56Hz is within the standard range of human hearing - which can range from 20 to 20,000Hz - it is too low for many people to pick up.One of Dr Moir's students, Ms Nair Tsuji, who is able to hear the sound, has acted as Dr Moir's "ears".

She also confirmed that the sound they heard in the Glenfield home was the same as the one she hears in her home in Whangaparaoa, about 30 minutes' drive north of Auckland.All the 30-plus cases reported to Dr Moir are occurring in Auckland's north.Dr Moir said the next step was to triangulate the sound in the hope of pinpointing the source.

[Rasputin]

Do UFO's exist in the history of arts ?

The desire to communicate is inherent in the man. It is a part of his own nature. Since the first graffito to the Renaissance, since the Baroque to the Impressionism, Art has been and it is the first form of communication, base of our civilization. Only with this Muse is possible to express totally our reality in a spontaneous way.It is almost unbelievable as by artworks or signs gushed from an hand one can know enough thoroughly aspect of cultural, social and political situation of the environment surrounding the artist. Actually Art can be considered as a book of history, culture and science telling the man in many of his aspects in a more complete form than an unique branch of knowledge. Since the beginning of man, humans have always felt a need to reproduce celestial events, first on the wall of caves, and then on canvas.

It is not a case that sometimes History, Arts, Archaeology and Anthropology have been often rewritten on occasion in light of new elements whose existence no one had previously suspected.From the past we receive strange signals of interference in our life and in our culture. Strange flying objects depicted in ancient works of art raise disturbing questions about our history and the role of man in the Universe.

[Rasputin]

9 billion-year-old ‘Dark Energy’ reported

A strange thing happened to the universe five billion years ago. As if God had turned on an antigravity machine, the expansion of the cosmos speeded up, and galaxies began moving away from one another at an ever faster pace.Now a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that billions of years before this mysterious antigravity overcame cosmic gravity and sent the galaxies scooting apart like muscle cars departing a tollbooth, it was already present in space, affecting the evolution of the cosmos.“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity.

The group reported their observations at a news conference yesterday and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.The results, Dr. Riess and others said, provide clues and place new limits on the nature of dark energy, a mystery that has thrown physics and cosmology into turmoil over the last decade. “It gives us the ability to look at changes in dark energy,” he said in an interview. “Previously, we knew nothing about that. That’s really exciting.”

[Rasputin]

Robot discovers itself, adapts to injury

Submitted by Waspie_Dwarf: Nothing can possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ... The truth behind the old joke is that most robots are programmed with a fairly rigid "model" of what they and the world around them are like. If a robot is damaged or its environment changes unexpectedly, it can't adapt.So Cornell researchers have built a robot that works out its own model of itself and can revise the model to adapt to injury. First, it teaches itself to walk. Then, when damaged, it teaches itself to limp. Although the test robot is a simple four-legged device, the researchers say the underlying algorithm could be used to build more complex robots that can deal with uncertain situations, like space exploration, and may help in understanding human and animal behavior. The research, reported in the latest issue (Nov. 17) of the journal Science, is by Josh Bongard, a former Cornell postdoctoral researcher now on the faculty at the University of Vermont, Cornell graduate student Viktor Zykov and Hod Lipson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Instead of giving the robot a rigid set of instructions, the researchers let it discover its own nature and work out how to control itself, a process that seems to resemble the way human and animal babies discover and manipulate their bodies.

The ability to build this "self-model" is what makes it able to adapt to injury. "Most robots have a fixed model laboriously designed by human engineers," Lipson explained. "We showed, for the first time, how the model can emerge within the robot. It makes robots adaptive at a new level, because they can be given a task without requiring a model. It opens the door to a new level of machine cognition and sheds light on the age-old question of machine consciousness, which is all about internal models." The robot, which looks like a four-armed starfish, starts out knowing only what its parts are, not how they are arranged or how to use them to fulfill its prime directive to move forward. To find out, it applies what amounts to the scientific method: theory followed by experiment followed by refined theory.

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Cat gives birth to puppies ?

From Brazil comes a zoological first or a tall tale, depending on who you believe. Cassia Aparecida de Souza, 18, the owner of Mimi the cat, claims that Mimi bred with the dog next door. She says Mimi then gave birth to three kittens - all of which died - and three puppies - which survived. Miss de Souza, a student from the city of Passo Fundo, claims they are the world’s first known canine-feline hybrids. However, experts, who are conducting blood tests on the animals, are sceptical. Professor Robin Dunbar, an expert in evolution from Liverpool University, said: “You should never say never in science, but it seems very implausible to me.” Two highly similar species, such as horses and donkeys, can produce hybrid offspring because their chromosomes match in number and structure. However, cats and dogs are believed to be too far apart genetically to mate successfully.

Experts say the real explanation may be that the "puppies" are in fact mutant kittens that just look dog-like. Alternatively, the puppies may have lost their mother at the same time as Mimi lost her kittens and now the cat is raising the dogs as her own.

[Rasputin]

Physics promises wireless power

The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires. The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said. Although the team has not built and tested a system, computer models and mathematics suggest it will work. "There are so many autonomous devices such as cell phones and laptops that have emerged in the last few years," said Assistant Professor Marin Soljacic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers behind the work. "We started thinking, 'it would be really convenient if you didn't have to recharge these things'. "And because we're physicists we asked, 'what kind of physical phenomenon can we use to do this wireless energy transfer?'."

The answer the team came up with was "resonance", a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied.

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Did asteroid impact cause ancient tsunami ?

At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface. The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land. Most astronomers doubt that any large comets or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years. But the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean. Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion.

Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every 1,000 years. The researchers, who formed the working group after finding one another through an international conference, are based in the United States, Australia, Russia, France and Ireland. They are established experts in geology, geophysics, geomorphology, tsunamis, tree rings, soil science and archaeology, including the structural analysis of myth. Their efforts are just getting under way, but they will present some of their work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco.

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What will life be like in 2056 ?

A limitless supply of spare organs, hard evidence for aliens and a machine that puts you in the mind of an animal. These are some of the predictions about the world of 2056 by a batch of the planet's most prominent scientists, including the psychologist Steven Pinker, the philosopher Dan Dennett, the astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, and the architect of the Beagle 2 Mars mission, Colin Pillinger. New Scientist magazine has assembled their thoughts to mark its 50th anniversary, and high on the list was proof that we are not alone. A visit from little green men in flying saucers seems unlikely by 2056, but the experts are convinced the universe will soon feel a less lonely place. Freeman Dyson at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton is undeterred by our failure to find any cosmic neighbours so far. He told the magazine: "That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless." Once we find proof of extraterrestrials, further discoveries will follow quickly, as we will know what we are looking for, he said.

Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University in Tempe, speculated that we may not have to look far. "There could be aliens right here, under our noses. Most life is microbial, and you can't tell just by looking whether a microbe is 'our' life or alien," he said. "The search for terrestrial aliens has only just begun. If they are here, they could be identified soon." "How different might alien life be?" asked Chris McKay at NASA, "It might be as different as English and Chinese." Life on Earth will also be transformed, scientists predict, with farms designated to grow human organs. By 2056, even the most sophisticated medicine of the 20th century will begin to look barbaric.

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Air force picks up NASA's X-37 project

There’s new military life in an old NASA project—the X-37 technology demonstrator. The U.S. Air Force announced today that it is developing an Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), based on the design of a NASA X-37 craft. It is to be designated as the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle.The U.S. Air Force has decided to continue full-scale development and on-orbit testing of an unmanned long-duration, reusable space vehicle. The new OTV effort dovetails off of industry and government investments by Air Force, NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The OTV effort will be led by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office and includes partnerships with NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Boeing is the prime contractor for the OTV program—the same firm that was lead on the old NASA X-37 technology demonstrator.According to a statement from the Secretary of the Air Force, the OTV program will focus on “risk reduction, experimentation, and operational concept development for reusable space vehicle technologies, in support of long term developmental space objectives.”

The first orbital test flight of the OTV is planned for fiscal year 2008, with a launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on an Atlas V launch vehicle. The OTV is the first vehicle since the space shuttle with the ability to return experiments to Earth for further inspection and analysis.That maiden orbital flight of the X-37B would demonstrate and validate guidance, navigation and control systems – fault tolerant, autonomous reentry and landing hardware. Also on tap is a shakeout of lightweight high temperature structures and landing gear.

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Jack the Ripper's face revealed 120 years on

The face of Jack the Ripper has been pieced together by Scotland Yard experts from evidence left by the Victorian killer. Modern profiling techniques have been used to form the most accurate portrait ever of the murderer, whose identity has remained a mystery for 118 years. The clues also suggest that police at the time were probably searching for the wrong kind of man. The Ripper, who strangled and butchered five prostitutes in East London in seemingly motiveless attacks in 1888, is thought to have been aged between 25 and 35, about 5ft 6in (1.68m) tall and stockily built. Laura Richards, head of analysis at Scotland Yard's violent crime unit, which conducted the study, said: 'For the first time, we are able to understand the kind of person Jack the Ripper was. 'We can name the street where he probably lived, we can see what he looked like and we can explain, finally, why he eluded justice.' Ms Richards and former Metropolitan Police commander John Grieve assembled a team of experts including pathologists, historians and a geographical profiler to see whether the case could be solved.

They analysed the Ripper 's killings and examined 13 witness statements taken at the time to come up with a person who, according to Ms Richards, was 'frighteningly normal, yet capable of extraordinary cruelty'. Mr Grieve added: 'This is further than anyone else has got. 'It would have been enough for coppers to get out and start knocking on doors. They would have got him.'

[Rasputin]

Cosmonaut to hit golf ball in space

A Russian cosmonaut is preparing to hit a golf ball during a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS). Flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin will knock a lightweight ball off a tee above the ISS's Russian docking port. A Canadian golf club maker is paying the Russian space agency an undisclosed sum for Tyurin's time. Nasa held up the stunt for months while safety experts checked possible flight paths to make sure the ball would not head back towards the space station. "I play ice hockey and my understanding is that it is very similar," said Mr Tyurin, who has been taking many practice swings to brush up his technique ahead of the shot, which will be carried out during a spacewalk on Wednesday. Responding to discussion over the safety, the flight engineer replied: "No question it's safe." Nasa flight director Holly Ridings added: "Of course the crew is taking this very, very seriously so they've been doing a lot of practice. "There is absolutely no re-contact issue with the space station." Federal law bars the US space agency from getting any money for its involvement. Mr Tyurin, who has been aboard the station since September, isn't expected to smack the ball, just tap it with the club.

The ball itself weighs just 4.5g (0.16 ounce) instead of the standard-issue 45g (1.6 ounce) ball. The Russian has to make the shot one-handed because his bulky spacesuit prevents him from bringing his hands together. Station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, who is accompanying Tyurin during the spacewalk, will help set up a camera to film the shot for an upcoming television commercial. Tyurin's drive is expected to be one for the record books, though not everyone agrees on how long the ball will fly. Nasa figures it will fall into Earth's atmosphere and be incinerated within three days.

[Rasputin]

Man photographs 'ghost' in park

Christopher Petty and his brother decided to spend a day outdoors, enjoying the warm Sussex sunshine. Little did they know when they started out that they would be joined by someone or something else. Sunday May 16th started like any other day in early Summer. The sun was shining and like many of us, Southern Counties web surfer Christopher Petty decided to make the most of the weather and get out and about.He and his brother decided to visit the National Trust's historic Sheffield Park Gardens in Sussex. They took their cameras; it is a particularly beautiful spot afterall, and a few photographs of the day would serve as a nice reminder. So, when they started snapping away, neither of them expected the following results, once the pictures were developed...

Chris explained: "On the photo there appears to be a shadowy figure of a woman to my right which I can't explain as: A. There was no-one beside me at the time and B. There was no statue in that part of the garden.On the picture there is a mark on the subject's shirt which looks similar to the sunlit leaves on the shrub behind, as visible to the right of the picture.After much consideration I can only guess that there is either a photographic explanation for this, or that the shadow is in fact a ghost".

[Rasputin]

Whales capable of 622 social sounds

A new study has revealed that humpback whales are capable of emanating as many as 622 social sounds. Scientists believe the whales' broad vocal repertoire enables them to communicate with their fellow whales, like summoning their young or even wooing potential mates by expressing emotions. Rebecca Dunlop, a researcher in the School of Veterinary Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia said that while some sounds are brief, some are unpatterned, distinct from lengthier, complex whale songs. She said the study threw new light on the fact that whales convey more meaning through vocalizations than previously thought. "I wouldn't say (whales possess) language, as that's a human term. Whales don't string these sounds together like words and form sentences. It's more like a simple vocabulary," Discovery News quoted Rebecca as saying. For their study, the team used a static hydrophone array - sensitive equipment that detects sound waves - to visually track 60 pods of whales migrating along the east coast of Australia. The waves linked the whale sounds to various activities and contexts. The team identified 622 distinct sounds, which fell into 35 basic types.

Rebecca said these included "wops" made by females, "thwops" made by males, "yaps" made when pods split, and high pitched cries that appeared to express anger. In addition to vocalizations, the team also found that whales sent messages through body language - by breaching the surface, slapping water with their tails and blowing underwater bubbles. She said the whales also sometimes even "speak" short song units individually instead of singing them. Males especially seem to do this when trying to woo a female. "Song is a loud broadcast signal and two singers singing at the same time is bound to be confusing to the receiver.

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Israel developing 'bionic hornet'

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet," would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said.It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants, it said. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to detect suicide bombers.The research integrates nanotechnology into Israel's security department and will find creative solutions to problems the army has been unable to address, Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres told Yedioth Ahronoth."The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons," Peres said.

The 34-day war in Lebanon ended with a U.N.-brokered ceasefire in mid-August. The war killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 157 Israelis, mostly soldiers.Prototypes for the new weapons are expected within three years, he said.

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Study reveals how magic works

Scientists are figuring out how magicians fool our brains in research that also helps uncover how our mind actually works. A great deal of what scientists now understand about how the human visual system works stems from research into our susceptibility to optical illusions."It made sense to look at magicians to advance knowledge of human cognition, since magicians have been working on figuring out how certain principles of psychology work for hundreds of years," said researcher Gustav Kuhn at the University of Durham in England, a cognitive psychologist who has also performed magic the past couple decades."Magicians really have this ability to distort your perceptions, to get people to perceive things that never happened, just like a visual illusion," he added.The researchers looked into a magic trick called the "vanishing ball," in which a ball apparently disappears in midair. It's done by faking a throw while keeping the ball secretly palmed in the magician's hand.

Kuhn videotaped himself performing two versions of the illusion. In the "pro-illusion" version, on the fake throw, his gaze and head followed an imaginary ball moving upwards. In the "anti-illusion" version, Kuhn's eyes stayed on the hand concealing the ball.Roughly two-thirds of volunteers watching the pro-illusion version on television had a vivid recollection of the ball leaving the top of the screen. "Often they claimed someone at the top of the screen caught the ball," Kuhn told LiveScience. In comparison, only a third of the people viewing the anti-illusion version experienced that illusion.