Science Special News

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Planet searching COROT launched

The European space telescope Corot, designed to search for planets, was launched into orbit in outer space at 14:23 GMT, Wednesday, from the Russian Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The 670-kilogramme satellite was lifted into orbit on board a Soyuz-2 rocket, the Russian news agency, Interfax, reported. From 827 kilometres above the earth, the 4.2-metre satellite, equipped with a telescope, will speed up the search for planets outside our solar system for three years.Most planets have been discovered by watching the way their gravity affects their parent stars or their stars' light. However, this brute method usually led to the discovery of huge planets which usually are just gigantic balls of gas, more like Jupiter than Earth, which are unlikely places for sustaining life.The new telescope is designed to detect planets when they cast a shadow on the star they orbit. Corot will observe up to 60,000 stars over the course of its mission, with scientists hopeful of finding large gas planets like Jupiter although finding a smaller, "Earth-like" planet that could sustain life would be more exciting.As COROT, the Convection Rotation and Planetary Transit satellite, orbits from pole to pole it will aim its telescope at two patches of sky, on opposite sides of the Earth, looking for stars that dim. Every 150 days it will switch to spy on two more areas.

Its mission will be about two and a half years long and it's expected that the device will detect between 10 and 40 small rocky planets.The Corot mission is led by French space agency, Cnes, which is working with six international partners: the European Space Agency (ESA), Austria, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Brazil.The European Space Agency says COROT should spot relatively small worlds, planets only "several times larger than the Earth". "Astronomers expect to find between 10 and 40 of them, together with tens of new gas giants, in each star field that COROT will observe," it said.

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The mathematics of cloaking

The theorists who first created the mathematics that describe the behavior of the recently announced have revealed a new analysis that may extend the current cloak's powers, enabling it to hide even actively radiating objects like a flashlight or cell phone. Allan Greenleaf, professor of mathematics at the University of Rochester, working with colleagues around the globe, has announced a mathematical theory that predicts some strange goings on inside the cloak--and that what happens inside is crucial to the cloak's effectiveness. In October, David R. Smith, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, led a team that used a circular cloaking device to successfully bend microwaves around a copper disk as if the disk were invisible. In 2003, however, Greenleaf and his colleagues had already developed the mathematics of invisibility. "We were working on improving the mathematics behind tumor detection," says Greenleaf. "In the final section to one paper, we spelled out a worst-case scenario where a tumor could be undetectable. We then wrote a couple of additional articles describing when this could happen. At the time, we didn't think further about it because it seemed extremely unlikely that any tumor would be covered with the necessary material to be hidden that way." This past summer, however, Greenleaf and his colleagues learned about a paper that researchers at Duke and Imperial College had published in the journal Science, which used nearly identical equations to give a theoretical proposal for a cloaking device. Once Greenleaf and his colleagues saw that their results could also be used to show how to "hide" an object, they decided to analyze and improve the proposed cloaking device, using the techniques they had developed in their earlier work.

They knew that a crucial question would be: What was going on inside the cloaked region? Smith, a physicist, gave a description of why the cloaking device should work. Greenleaf, as a mathematician, knew that to have any hope of extending and improving the cloaking, it was important to fully understand its mathematical underpinnings. Then, in October, Smith published another paper, describing how he and his team actually built a cloaking device. This made it even more crucial to carefully analyze the underlying structure. Greenleaf and his collaborators used sophisticated mathematics to understand what must be happening inside the cloaked region. Everything seemed fine when they applied the Helmholtz equation, an equation widely used to solve problems involving the propagation of light. But when they used Maxwell's equations, which take the polarization of electromagnetic waves into account, difficulties came to light.

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Nigerian Christmas without 'evil' Santas

There are no Christmas decorations, the radio stations are still playing hip-hop and rap and some children recoil at an image of Santa decrying it as evil. "His costume looks phoney and his face is strange," says eight-year-old Ifunanya Chima when shown a picture of the benign bearded old man in his trademark red cloak with white fur trimmings. "We prefer masquerades," he told me referring to the traditional colourful dancing which is a big part of the festive season here. And there is also hope of a white-ish Christmas in this sub-Saharan West African country. For a dusty harmattan haze hangs over most of the country as the north-east trade wind sweeps in from the Sahara Desert. Markets across the country are heaving with punters hoping to net late bargains. Soon, the major cities will become ghost cities as most people return to their native villages to share the traditional "Christmas rice". "I can't spend Christmas in Abuja," says Nick Ibechukwu who owns a business in Nigeria's capital city. "I have to go back to my village in the east to join the rest of my family and relatives because this is the only time in the year that we get to see one another."

Christmas in Nigeria is a time for new clothes, long distance travels for family reunions, and lots of colourful masquerade dances in most villages. And for now, it does not matter that half of Nigeria's 130 million people are Muslims with a handful of pagans. At Christmas, most Nigerians forget their religious differences and just share their Christmas rice - a dish of boiled rice eaten with very spicy chicken stew.

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Mars rovers are taught new tricks

Nasa is testing a "smart" upgrade to its robotic rovers on Mars. Space agency scientists have begun testing four new skills included in flight software that has been uploaded to the rovers' onboard computers. The two American rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are approaching their third year on the Martian surface. One of the new capabilities is designed to allow the rovers to make "intelligent" decisions in the study of Martian clouds and dust devils. Spirit has photographed dozens of dusty whirlwinds in action, and both rovers have photographed clouds. Until now, however, scientists on Earth have had to sift through many transmitted images from Mars to find those few. With the new software boost, the rovers can recognize dust devils or clouds and select only the relevant parts of those images to send back to Earth. Another novel skill, called "visual target tracking", enables a rover to keep recognising a particular landscape feature as the rover moves.

"The rover keeps updating its template of what the feature looks like. It may be a rock that looks bigger as the rover approaches it, or maybe the shape looks different from a different angle, but the rover still knows it's the same rock," said Khaled Ali of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, US. Visual target tracking can be combined with a third feature of the software - autonomy in calculating where it is safe to reach out and analyse soil or rock with the science tools on the rover's robotic arm.

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FOIA releases reveal pilot UFO reports

Unexplained bright lights, `ghost' jets and mysterious shattering windscreens, have our nation's airline pilots made contact with alien intelligence? Reports obtained by the M.E.N. under the Freedom of Information Act show there have been 13 reports of unidentified flying objects to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) by air crew since 2000.The last-but-one incident was in Manchester airspace. In November 2004, the pilot of an inbound Boeing 757 reported seeing three military planes nearby. An investigation failed to establish that any air force jets were in the area at the time. Other unexplained `encounters' include the crew of a Boeing 737 noticing a `very bright white object' passing down the plane's left-hand side in April 2003.Radar at two ground control stations noted an object travelling at around 60 knots, and tracked it for three minutes.There were other similar readings on the radar, which the report said `could have been caused by atmospheric conditions'. Two separate pilots got a shock in May 2004 when both were travelling around 40 nautical miles apart and spotted a green flare coming from the ground.

No explanation is given in the CAA write-up, which notes `multiple reports of space debris falling' at the same time.In Feburary 2000, the pilot of an MD80 jetliner noticed a `small red object going fast down his right-hand side'. One of the most puzzling incidents, in February 2002, involved an unknown object striking the windscreen of an EMB 145, a small passenger aircraft. Crew reported a loud bang and a flash as the windscreen shattered. The aircraft slowed down and put out an emergency call before managing to land.

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Robots could demand legal rights

Robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights as humans, according to a study by the British government. If granted, countries would be obliged to provide social benefits including housing and even "robo-healthcare", the report says. The predictions are contained in nearly 250 papers that look ahead at developments over the next 50 years. Other papers, or "scans", examine the future of space flight and methods to dramatically lengthen life spans. "We're not in the business of predicting the future, but we do need to explore the broadest range of different possibilities to help ensure government is prepared in the long-term and considers issues across the spectrum in its planning," said Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser. "The scans are aimed at stimulating debate and critical discussion to enhance government's short and long term policy and strategy."

The research was commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation's Horizon Scanning Centre. The 246 summary papers, called the Sigma and Delta scans, were complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF).The papers look forward at emerging trends in science, health and technology. The scans explore a diverse range of areas from the future of the gulf stream and the economic rise of India, to developments in nanotechnology and the threat posed by HIV/Aids.

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Man claims to heal through aura imaging

When Otto Csanki was 14, a horse kicked him in the stomach. He wasn't expected to live. "I trained horses for dressage, for circuses," Csanki, 50, said. "An Arabian stallion accidentally kicked me. I was in the hospital for 18 months. The doctors gave me little or no chance to live." It was then the Hungarian learned he was different from others -- divinely gifted, as he might say. He healed himself by directing and redirecting healing energies he saw emanating from the healthy areas of his own body toward his afflicted area. He soon recovered from his injuries and thought no more about it. Flash forward to February of this year. "I lost my wife Elizabeth to ovarian cancer," he said. "It was the biggest failure of my life. I asked, 'How come I could not save her?' The answer came, 'You cannot heal one, but you can heal thousands.'" Too late to save Elizabeth, Csanki once again came face to face with the healing power of auras as a way he could help others back to health. Csanki began to do some research and found a company called Aura Imaging Systems, which helps people see what he says he can see already: auras and their healing properties. "What the machine does is a significant improvement over psychic ability -- improvement in a way you can show your clients what is happening with their auras," he said. The system is comprised of a computer, a camera and a biofeedback sensor, upon which the subject lays the left hand.

It analyzes the body temperature and energy field surrounding a client. A still picture is then taken, revealing the person's aura -- a wave of textured color, which Csanki says can tell a lot about the person's mental, physical and spiritual well-being. With this information, the computer prints out a detailed analysis of the person's overall state of health. Combined with all of this high-tech equipment is a course Csanki is taking called "Chios" (pronounced CHEE-oss) which, according to www.chioshealing.com, refers to "the upward growth of all life toward the light and enlightenment, and the struggle of the spiritual process."

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UFO hovers over O'Hare airport

It sounds like a tired joke--but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously. A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the world's second-busiest airport? A top-secret military craft? Or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes?Officials at United professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event--which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers--when the Tribune started asking questions recently. But the Federal Aviation Administration said its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal.No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.

The FAA is not conducting a further investigation, Cory said. The theory is the sighting was caused by a "weather phenomenon," she said.The UFO report has sparked some chuckles among controllers in O'Hare tower."To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," said O'Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych.Some of the witnesses, interviewed by the Tribune, said they are upset that neither the government nor the airline is probing the incident.Whatever the object was, it could have interfered with O'Hare's radar and other equipment, and even created a collision risk, they said.

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Meet Samsung's gun-wielding robot

Submitted by iCandy: As a CNET photo caption pointed out, the machine-gun-toting sentry robot recently unveiled by Samsung's Techwin division is the antithesis of Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics. The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot is a stationary unit armed with a 5.5-millimeter K3 machine gun and a second gun that fires rubber bullets. It can use its twin optical and infrared sensors to track and identify targets from up to 2.5 miles away in the daytime and about half that distance at night. It also has a microphone and speaker system to exchange passwords with human soldiers. If the password is incorrect, the robot can either sound an alarm or open fire on the target. "This is a frightening development in real-world 'Terminators,'" said Mike Adams, a technology commentator and ethicist. "Mounting machine guns on automated robotic platforms takes humans out of the decision loop. Before long, these robots will be self-propelled with legs, wheels or tracks, and then we're faced with a world of autonomous killing machines.

"There's no question that these types of robots will eventually be used to commit atrocities against humankind," he said. The robot was developed with the assistance of a South Korean university for deployment along the demilitarized zone between the North Korean and South Korean border. The northern border of South Korea is the most heavily militarized zone in the world, and the country has invested millions of dollars in automated military technology. According to Samsung, around 1,000 of the $200,000 units are expected to sell in the robot's first year of release.

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Poll results: Apollo hoax ?

Unexplained Mysteries: A popular topic this year on Unexplained Mysteries was that of the Apollo Moon landings. It is one of the most controversial conspiracy theories of modern times, and one that continues to maintain quite a following despite it being over 35 years since the Moon landings took place. Did humans really visit the Moon in 1969 ? Did Neil Armstrong set foot on the Lunar surface and utter those famous words, or was he really setting foot in a movie studio as part of the greatest hoaxed event in history ? This year we saw dozens of forum topics covering this subject, usually involving some heated debate between the hard core conspiracy believers and the hard core pro-Apollo side. But who is right ? Surely the greatest space voyage of all time couldn't have been fabricated ? Could it ? While we don't have an answer to that, we did cover this topic in our site poll for December 2006. We asked "Were the Apollo Moon landings a hoax ?".

No - 55%
The vast majority maintain that the Moon Landings did happen, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon in 1969 and everything occured as history records.

Yes - 31%
Almost a third of you who voted believed that the Moon Landings were hoaxed.

Undecided - 14%
A minority were undecided, and could be swayed either way.

The poll results suggest that there is still a lot of doubt over the genuinity of the Apollo Moon landings. The trouble is that there is very little evidence that would ever satisfy the true hard core conspiracy believers. Even if when humans one day set foot upon the Lunar surface, walk up to the Lunar rover or flagpole and take crystal clear images of the previous Apollo mission landing sites; someone somewhere will make the claim that all of it was put there beforehand to keep the coverup alive, and thousands more will believe them.