Science Special News

[Rasputin]

China to join Russia in Phobos flight

China will participate in a Russian project to fly to a Martian moon, a deputy head of Russia's Federal Space Agency said Tuesday. "An agreement is being prepared whereby a Chinese micro-satellite, worth some $1 billion, will be installed on the Russian station Phobos-soil," Yury Nosenko told a press conference. "While entering the orbit of Mars, the Chinese satellite will be detached from the Russian spacecraft and will become an artificial satellite of Mars," he said. A project developer said in September that Russia will launch a spacecraft to Phobos, the larger of two Martian moons, in 2009, which will then return to Earth with a sample of its soil. Dr. Efraim Akim, of the M.V. Keldysh Institute of Applied Mechanics, said the craft will be launched from a platform deployed in an intermediary near-Earth orbit. He said there will be no need to use a heavy booster rocket, which are expensive to launch. The launch window for the voyage to Phobos is October 2009, and the journey will take 10 to 11 months. The spacecraft will begin its return journey to Earth in 2011, which will take another 10 to 11 months. Phobos is a highly non-spherical moon, orbiting Mars at a distance of less than 6,000 kilometers (3728 miles) and traveling faster than the rotation of Mars itself. According to Russian Academy of Sciences member Mikhail Marov, Phobos became a satellite of Mars millions of years ago, so studying material from the asteroid will give scientists information as to the origins of the Solar System and of the Earth. Neither NASA nor the European Space Agency (ESA) are planning flights to Phobos, Marov said.

"This is a niche that foreign space agencies have left us, not only because it is an exceptionally difficult task, but also because we have already invested work in this area of planetary research." The landing will be a complicated operation due to the moon's small size and high orbital speed. The spacecraft will use new materials, allowing for a substantial reduction in weight compared to its predecessors, and high-precision Earth-based control systems will be employed for the project.

[Rasputin]

Early sketch of Stonehenge found

They got the date wrong by some 3,000 years, but the oldest detailed drawing of Stonehenge, apparently based on first hand observation, has turned up in a 15th century manuscript. The little sketch is a bird's eye view of the stones, and shows the great trilithons, the biggest stones in the monument, each made of two pillars capped with a third stone lintel, which stand in a horseshoe in the centre of the circle. Only three are now standing, but the drawing, found in Douai, northern France, suggests that in the 15th century four of the original five survived.In the Scala Mundi, the Chronicle of the World, Merlin is given credit for building Stonehenge between 480 and 486, when the Latin text says he "not by force, but by art, brought and erected the giant's ring from Ireland". Modern science suggests that the stones went up from 2,500 BC, with the bluestone outer circle somehow transported from west Wales, and the double decker bus-size sarsen stones dragged 30 miles across Salisbury plain. The drawing, recently identified by the art historian Christian Heck, has never been exhibited, but according to the Art Newspaper it will be seen next year in an exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, marking the 300th anniversary of the Society of Antiquaries.

There are two earlier images of Stonehenge, one in the British Library and one in the Parker Library in Cambridge, but the Douai drawing is unique in attempting to show how the monument was built. It correctly shows tenon joints piercing the lintel, a timber construction technique, although in fact the real Stonehenge tenons only go partly into the top stone. Stonehenge is rare among prehistoric landscapes, because its sheer bulk meant it was never lost. An Anglo Saxon poet wondered about the origin of the stones and inspired some of the earliest photographs.

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The king and the hypnotist

In the months immediately before his abdication, Edward VIII was hypnotised by a doctor who was fascinated by the occult and counted fascists among his patients, it was claimed last night. A report from a country vicar that Dr Alexander Cannon, a qualified psychiatrist who used spirit mediums to advise hypnotised patients on how to counter alcoholism and other problems of addiction, reached the Archbishop of Canterbury on Dec 4, 1936.So seriously did the archbishop, Dr Cosmo Lang, take the information that he immediately questioned a Harley Street doctor to find out about Dr Cannon and later informed Downing Street of the news.According to a BBC documentary broadcast last night, the news reached Lambeth Palace when a parishioner in Eye, Suffolk, told her vicar she had heard Dr Cannon boasting that he was treating the king for alcoholism.Dr Cannon's other patients included George Drummond, a banker who subsidised Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, and his British Union movement.

The timing of the information was critical.Two days earlier, a speech by the Bishop of Bradford had brought into the open what everyone "in the know" in Britain had been gossiping about for months: the affair that the king had been conducting with Mrs Wallis Simpson, a divorced Roman Catholic American.Both Church and State were in a fevered state of uncertainty as to how the King would act and whether his mental frailties would cause an implosion of the royal dignity.It was in this context that the vicar contacted the archbishop to tell him about the King's hypnosis treatment, the programme claimed. Dr Lang's chaplain immediately replied asking for further details.

[Rasputin]

Tombs of pre-Inca elite discovered

A complex of tombs recently discovered under a pyramid in Peru offers landmark clues to a thousand-year-old pre-Incan culture, archaeologists report. A team co-led by Izumi Shimada, an archaeologist with Southern Illinois University, found 22 artifact-laden tombs about 420 miles (675 kilometers) northwest of Lima, the capital. Among the findings are meticulously arranged human remains; gold, gilt copper, and bronze artifacts; and the first decorated tumi, or ceremonial knives, ever discovered by archaeologists at a burial site. The graves belong to elite members of the Middle Sican culture, a gold-working people whose farming culture thrived in Peru's desert coastal region from around A.D. 900 to 1100. Shimada and colleague Carlos Elera Arevalo, director of Peru's Sican National Museum, say the discovery is yielding crucial clues to this ancient civilization. "What is most important about our fieldwork is we found an intact pre-Hispanic elite cemetery," Shimada said in an email interview.

The tombs formed a kind of religious complex that had managed to escape looters who commonly pillage burial sites throughout Peru. Shimada said finding these rare objects undisturbed can help researchers "divine the context in which ceremonial items were used."

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The future of war

At a recent exhibition of new military technology one independent expert stood almost agog as the prototype for a new killing machine was rolled out. It went by the acronym of URV or Unmanned Robot Vehicle - and it looked like something from the movies."It was frightening. The [URV] has laser radars at the front and these things were scanning up and down and from side to side," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.Org, a Washington-based military studies group. "It was the most Sixties, sci-fi thing I have ever seen." Pike and others believe this is the future of warfare - or at least part of the future. Technology will increasingly allow the most sophisticated and best equipped militaries - primarily that of the US - to fight battles using robots rather than soldiers: robots which can detect, assess and attack a target."Robots can kill without mercy, remorse or pity. They are all stone-cold killers," said Pike. "And we don't have to write letters to their families."The United States army is already developing an arsenal of robotic weapons that could be deployed within a decade or so. In the air, Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) are now being used extensively in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere - both for surveillance as well as dropping so-called "Hellfire" missiles.

The US is trying to develop ways for UAVs or drones to work in swarms, attacking targets en masse or operating an aerial delivery system to cover an entire region.Technology is also changing the nature of munitions. Already there are devastating thermobaric bombs which have more destructive power than any other conventional weapon, while microwave bombs or transient electromagnetic devices (TEDs), which release a massive burst of electromagnetic energy sufficient to disable computers without killing people, are also in development.

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Move to new planet, says Hawking

The human race must move to a planet beyond our Solar System to protect the future of the species, physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has warned. He told the BBC that life could be wiped out by a nuclear disaster or an asteroid hitting the planet. But the Cambridge academic added: "Once we spread out into space and establish colonies, our future should be safe." Prof Hawking, 64, was speaking before receiving the UK's top science award, the Royal Society's Copley Medal. He said there were no similar planets to Earth in our Solar System so humans would "have to go to another star". Professor Hawking said that current chemical and nuclear rockets were not adequate for taking colonists into space as they would mean a journey of 50,000 years.

He also discounted science-fiction ideas from programmes such as Star Trek, such as using warp drive to travel at the speed of light, for taking people to a new outpost. Instead, he favoured "matter/anti-matter annihilation" as a means of propulsion.

[Rasputin]

Discovering the first human ritual

A startling discovery of 70,000-year-old artifacts and a python's head carved of stone appears to represent the first known human rituals. Scientists had thought human intelligence had not evolved the capacity to perform group rituals until perhaps 40,000 years ago. But inside a cave in remote hills in Kalahari Desert of Botswana, archeologists found the stone snake that was carved long ago. It is as tall as a man and 20 feet long."You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python," said Sheila Coulson of the University of Oslo. "The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving."More significant, when Coulson and her colleagues dug a test pit near they stone figure, they found spearheads made of stone that had to have been brought to the cave from hundreds of miles away.

The spearheads were burned in what only could be described as some sort of ritual, the scientists conclude. "Stone age people took these colorful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there," Coulson said today. "Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site."

[Rasputin]

Robot to penetrate Cheops pyramid

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: A robot archaeologist is to be sent deep inside Egypt's largest pyramid in a bid to solve secrets revealed by a first foray more than four years ago, antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass said. "The new robot will be sent down very narrow passages in the so-called Queen's Chamber, where the first robot was sent in 2002," said Hawass, who heads Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Teams from Egypt and Singapore and a joint group from Britain and Hong Kong plan to insert the robot in February inside the Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, near to Cairo. Equipped with tiny cameras, the robot will be sent down the chamber's north and south passages in the hope of discovering what lies behind two inner walls -- or doors -- revealed during the first robotic expedition in September 2002.

At the time, the robot was sent into a northern shaft leading from the Queen's Chamber, only to be blocked about 65 metres (yards) from the chamber by "a stone wall or door" with copper handles. It also revealed the existence of a similar obstruction the same distance down the south passage.

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UFO crash reported in Russia

Russian officials said an unidentified flying object fell out of the sky and burned on impact Friday in the taiga of East Siberia, the news agency Interfax reported. Law enforcement authorities in the Krasnoyarsk region told Interfax residents had reported seeing a "flying apparatus" plunge from the sky at about 10 a.m. Residents of the remote area, some 260 kilometres north of the regional capital of Krasnoyarsk, said the surrounding area had been charred, showing signs of a fire. Authorities, however, said they had been unable to reach the scene due to inclement weather conditions. "Investigators and transport officials are now being sent from Krasnoyarsk to establish the reasons behind the crash," a police official said. Regional authorities have not speculated about what the object might have been, but they noted a helicopter had flown over the scene and that its crew had not seen any traces of fire.

The vast Siberian taiga, an area of boundless forest, famously played host to an explosion known as the "Tunguska event" in June 1908 after an object, now thought to be an asteroid or comet, slammed into a remote area north of Lake Baikal. The blast, which felled an estimated 60 million trees over 2,000 square kilometers, was later calculated to have been the equivalent of 10 to 20 megatons of TNT, similar in force to that of the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, the DPA reported.

[Rasputin]

Were the pyramids built of concrete ?

The ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study, The Times, London reported. The research, by materials scientists, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs' craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids. Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist. The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby quarries, heaved up huge ramps and set in place by armies of workers. Some dissenters say that levers or pulleys were used, even though the wheel had not been invented at that time, the paper reported. Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.

But according to Professor Gilles Hug, of the French National Aerospace Research Agency (Onera), and Professor Michel Barsoum, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the covering of the great Pyramids at Giza consists of two types of stone: one from the quarries and one man-made.