Science Special News

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Memorizing Pi to its 22,514th place

Daniel Tammet has peculiar skills. He sees numerals and words as "shapes, colors, textures and motions,'' and that ability makes him a whiz at doing arithmetic and memorizing numbers and phrases. The young Englishman -- he's 28 now -- set a European record in 2004 by publicly reciting the first 22,514 digits of pi from memory. To prove he can learn foreign tongues rapidly, he conversed in Icelandic with a TV interviewer after just a week of exposure to the language. But, as Tammet makes clear in his memoir "Born on a Blue Day,'' there's a tradeoff for these skills: His differently wired brain also makes him awkward in social settings and obsessive about following routines. He uses an electronic scale to make sure he eats exactly 45 grams of porridge each morning -- a gram too much or too little would ruin his day. People like him used to be called idiot savants, though the medical community of today uses "savant syndrome'' for this rare combination of disability and genius. Tammet, who calls himself an autistic savant, has a neurological condition known as synesthesia, meaning that his senses of color and shape are triggered by numbers and words.

Given the public's fascination with extrasensory perception, it's important to note that Tammet's talents have been proved. He isn't a crackpot plugging the paranormal; he has been studied by brain scientists at Cambridge University and elsewhere. His take on life reflects his abilities, as when he describes pi, the irrational number representing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, as "an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing.... Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.'' The author was born on a Wednesday, to him a "blue'' day because his synesthesia prompts him to associate Wednesdays with blue. Growing up in East London he suffered from epilepsy, which he got over only to be diagnosed, at 25, with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism.

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NASA's mental breakdown guidelines

Long before NASA was confronted with an off-duty astronaut's bizarre behavior and arrest in Florida earlier this month, the agency had developed procedures to deal with a mental breakdown in space. The guidelines were developed to respond to an attempted suicide or severe anxiety, paranoia or hysteria aboard the international space station. Astronauts are instructed to bind the stricken flier's wrists and ankles with duct tape, restrain the torso with bungee cords and administer strong tranquilizers.The procedures have been in effect for at least six years, but the space agency did not develop any protocols for dealing with astronauts who become unstable while on the ground.NASA said Friday that it has never had to take the drastic actions outlined in the procedures in 46 years of human space flight."If there had been anything like this, you would have heard about it," said James Hartsfield, a NASA spokesman. "Our policy is that anything that impacts a mission, any medical matter that impacts a mission, we make it public knowledge."The directions for dealing with a psychological emergency are included in a 1,051-page NASA document titled the International Space Station Integrated Medical Group Medical Checklist. The checklist, which was written in Russian and English, was compiled in 2000 and 2001 to coincide with the permanent staffing of the space station. Three dozen astronauts and cosmonauts have lived aboard the orbital outpost for periods of up to six-and-a-half months since full-time staffing began in early November 2000.

The lengthy checklist, which NASA posts on a Web site available to the public --www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/163533main_ISS_Med_CL.pdf -- includes responses for a wide range of potential medical emergencies, including severe chest pain, choking, burns, broken bones and severe allergic reactions."We try to predict every possible circumstance that could affect a mechanical system or a medical problem. We try to prepare," Hartsfield said. "The checklists deal with anything that a crew emergency might have to deal with, from injuries and illness to systems on board the station."

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Medieval Muslims' stunning math breakthrough

Submitted by Marvy: Magnificently sophisticated geometric patterns in medieval Islamic architecture indicate their designers achieved a mathematical breakthrough 500 years earlier than Western scholars, scientists said on Thursday. By the 15th century, decorative tile patterns on these masterpieces of Islamic architecture reached such complexity that a small number boasted what seem to be "quasicrystalline" designs, Harvard University's Peter Lu and Princeton University's Paul Steinhardt wrote in the journal Science.Only in the 1970s did British mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose become the first to describe these geometric designs in the West. Quasicrystalline patterns comprise a set of interlocking units whose pattern never repeats, even when extended infinitely in all directions, and possess a special form of symmetry."Oh, it's absolutely stunning," Lu said in an interview.

"They made tilings that reflect mathematics that were so sophisticated that we didn't figure it out until the last 20 or 30 years."Lu and Steinhardt in particular cite designs on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran, built in 1453.Islamic tradition has frowned upon pictorial representations in artwork. Mosques and other grand buildings erected by Islamic architects throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere often are wrapped in rich, intricate tile designs setting out elaborate geometric patterns.

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Space probe performs Mars fly-by

A European space probe has completed a close fly-by of the planet Mars in a crucial manoeuvre on its 10-year journey to land on a distant comet. The unmanned Rosetta craft passed within some 250 km (150 miles) of Mars. In a precise move, the probe used the planet's gravity to change course on its voyage to the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet out near Jupiter. Rosetta is due to reach the comet's orbit in 2014 and send a lander to its surface to study its chemistry. The probe must harness the gravitational forces of the planets to build up the speed it needs to chase down and catch the comet. Rosetta's flight takes it round the Sun four times, Mars once and the Earth three times, before hurtling out towards Jupiter. This was the first and only time the spacecraft was to fly past Mars. As expected, experts at the mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, lost contact with the probe as it went behind the planet for the 15-minute manoeuvre.

During this time, Rosetta had to rely for power in onboard batteries, as Mars blocked light to its solar panels. As radio contact was restored, there was applause in the control room. Spacecraft operations manager Andrea Accomazzo said the manoeuvre was "fundamental to the mission". "It's a very big success, so we are very happy." The probe will perform two similar fly-bys of Earth this year as it accelerates towards the comet. The craft is named after the Rosetta stone, which led experts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. Scientists hope that this hi-tech Rosetta will, through its exploration of the comet, help solve some of the unexplained mysteries of the Solar System and how it evolved.

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Strange sea creatures found in Antarctica

Submitted by Tower of Babel: Spindly orange sea stars, fan-finned ice fish and herds of roving sea cucumbers are among the exotic creatures spied off the Antarctic coast in an area formerly covered by ice, scientists reported on Sunday. This is the first time explorers have been able to catalog wildlife where two mammoth ice shelves used to extend for some 3,900 square miles over the Weddell Sea . At least 5,000 years old, the ice shelves collapsed in two stages over the last dozen years. One crumbled 12 years ago and the other followed in 2002. Global warming is seen as the culprit behind the ice shelves' demise, said Gauthier Chapelle of the Polar Foundation in Brussels. "These kind of collapses are expected to happen more," he said. "What we're observing here is probably going to happen elsewhere around Antarctica." Melting ice shelves are not expected to directly contribute much to global sea level rise, but glaciologists believe these vast swaths of ice act like dams to slow down glaciers as they move over the Antarctic land mass toward the coast. Without the ice shelves, glaciers may move over the water more quickly, and this would substantially add to rising seas.

Since 1974, 5,213 square miles of ice shelves have disintegrated in the Antarctic Peninsula. But the collapse of the ice shelves gave the scientists a unique opportunity to see what had been hidden beneath them; before the collapse, researchers could only peer through holes drilled deep into the ice. Chapelle and other scientists from 14 nations traveled to the area aboard the icebreaking vessel Polarstern in a 10-week voyage to investigate underwater wildlife along the Antarctic peninsula, the part of the southern continent that curves up toward South America.

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What is the Loch Ness Monster ?

The Loch Ness is a lake in Scotland that holds the largest volume of freshwater in the United Kingdom. But rather than being known for its size, it is famous for the mysterious legend of the Loch Ness monster. For hundreds of years, people have reported catching a glimpse of a huge creature in the lake while others have shared photos they claim to have taken of this sea creature. The legend is so great that even scientists have been intrigued and many have conducted experiments and come up with theories to try and explain what people could be witnessing.It has been proposed that Nessie, as the Loch Ness monster is commonly called , could be a prehistoric creature called a plesiosaur, an animal that spanned up to ten meters in length and has long been considered to be extinct. Adrian Shine, the leader of a British team called the Loch Ness Project, has spent over 30 years trying to rationally explain the monster sightings by researching the ecology of the region.

If in fact a large creature was living in the lake, there would have to be evidence of a food chain for it to survive. A creature like the Loch Ness monster would most likely eat fish, which in turn would live off large quantities of microscopic animals called zooplankton. There would have to be enough zooplankton in the lake to support populations of larger animals.

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Sleeping puts the world in order

Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day. Bob Stickgold from Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that people were better able to recall lists of related words after a night's sleep than after the same time spent awake during the day. They also found it easier to recollect themes that the words had in common - forgetting around 25 per cent more themes after a waking rest. "We're not just stabilising memories during sleep," says Stickgold. "We're extracting the meaning."In another experiment, people were shown cards with symbols followed by reports of various weather outcomes - so for example, diamond shapes might be followed by rain 70 per cent of the time.

Twelve hours after training, people felt able to guess the weather from the symbols, though they struggled to voice their "rules". After sleeping, their predictions were 10 per cent better.Sleep helps us extract rules from our experiences, says Stickgold. It's like knowing the difference between dogs and cats, he says, even if it is hard to explain. He presented the results last week at a meeting organised by The Science Network at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

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Asteroid threat to Earth in 2036 ?

The United Nations will shortly be asked to take on a new and unfamiliar mission - to save the Earth not from drought, war or disease, but from the cataclysm that could occur after a direct hit by an asteroid. A group of former astronauts and cosmonauts is warning that at least one asteroid is on a path that could see it collide with our planet in 2036. They say work should begin on considering a strategy to protect humankind from this and other asteroids.Specifically, members of the Association of Space Explorers are planning meetings over the next two years - to be attended by diplomats, astronomers, astronauts and engineers - to draft an international treaty to address the threat. It will be presented to the UN for adoption in 2009."You have to act when things look like they are going to happen. If you wait until you know for certain, it's too late," Russell Schweickart, an Apollo 9 astronaut, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco. "We believe there needs to be a decision process spelled out and adopted by the UN."

Congress recently instructed Nasa to increase its efforts to identify asteroids that could threaten Earth. The agency is monitoring the paths of 127 "near-Earth objects" that may strike the planet.An asteroid named Apophis risks passing very close to Earth on 13 April, 2036. Astronomers warn there is a one in 45,000 chance of a direct hit. Its impact would wipe out an area the size of England.

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Fossil hunting on Mars

Hunting for traces of life on Mars calls for two radically different strategies, says ASU professor Jack Farmer. Of the two, he says, with today's exploration technology we can most easily look for evidence for past life, preserved as fossil "biosignatures" in old rocks.Farmer is a professor of geological sciences in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, where he heads the astrobiology program. He reported on his work Feb. 16 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco."Searching for extraterrestrial life must follow two alternative pathways, each requiring a different approach and tools," Farmer says. "If we're looking for living organisms, we are doing exobiology. But if we are seeking traces - biosignatures - of ancient life, it's better to call it exopaleontology."Unfortunately, he notes, "for the next 10 or 15 years, technology limitations will force us down the exopaleontology path." The core issue is accessibility. "To find living organisms on Mars," says Farmer, "you need to find liquid water. Because liquid water is unstable on the Martian surface today, that means going deep into the subsurface."Water saturates the ground in high latitudes north and south, and around both poles, only a few inches below the surface, Farmer explains. But this water remains frozen year round. "Environments with liquid water will likely lie far deeper, perhaps miles below the surface."Organisms have been found living in fractured rock, thousands of feet underground on Earth, Farmer notes.

"But with current robotic technology, we simply can't drill that deep on Mars."Terrestrial deep drilling requires complex, heavy equipment, plus constant supervision and troubleshooting by human crews. Says Farmer, "We'll be lucky if, in the next decade or so, robotic drilling on Mars reaches a depth of a couple yards."So where does that leave us in the search for life on Mars? Farmer says our best choice is to pursue the exopaleontology path."Finding the signatures of an ancient Martian biosphere means exploring old rocks that might preserve traces of life for millions or billions of years," Farmer notes. Among the best places to look on Mars, he says, are deposits left by springs and former lakes in the heavily cratered highlands. "The rocks there date from a period in Martian history when liquid water was common at the surface." In fact, says Farmer, conditions on Mars then were likely similar to those on the early Earth at the time when life began.

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Chimp-human split 4 million years ago

Chimpanzees and humans split from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago -- a much shorter time than current estimates of 5 million to 7 million years ago, according to a study published on Friday. The researchers compared the DNA of chimpanzees, humans and our next-closest ancestor, the gorilla, as well as orangutans.They used a well-known type of calculation that had not been previously applied to genetics to come up with their own "molecular clock" estimate of when humans became uniquely human."Assuming orangutan divergence 18 million years ago, speciation time of human and chimpanzee is consistently around 4 million years ago," they wrote in their study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Genetics. Primate evolution is a central topic in biology and much information can be obtained from DNA sequence data," Dr. Asger Hobolth of North Carolina State University said in a statement.The theory of a molecular clock is based on the premise that all DNA mutates at a certain rate. It is not always a steady rate but it evens out over the millennia and can be used to track evolution.Experts agree that humans split off from a common ancestor with chimpanzees several million years ago and that gorillas and orangutans split off much earlier.

But it is difficult to date precisely when, although most recent studies have put the date at somewhere around 5 million to 7 million years ago.Hobolth and colleagues from the University of Aarhus in Denmark and the University of Oxford in Britain looked at four regions of the human, chimpanzee, and gorilla genomes.They used a statistical technique called the hidden Markov model, developed in the 1960s and originally applied to speech recognition.What they found may contradict some other recent research. They found evidence that it took only 400,000 years for humans to become a separate species from the common chimp-human ancestor.

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An upside-down rainbow ?

No, this isn't an upside-down rainbow, and the photographer hasn't faked the picture. It's an unusual phenomenon caused by sunlight shining through a thin, invisible screen of tiny ice crystals high in the sky and has nothing at all to do with the rain. Andrew G. Saffas, a Concord artist and photographer, saw the colorful arc at 3:51 p.m. on a beautiful day recently when a slight rain had fallen in the morning. He thought it was a rainbow, created by raindrops refracting sunlight the way glass prisms refract any bright beam of light. Instead, what Saffas saw was what scientists call a circumzenithal arc, according to physicist Joe Jordan, a former NASA space scientist at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, who is now director of the Sky Power Institute in Santa Cruz, which promotes solar power and other alternative fuels. The flat, six-sided ice crystals that cause the arcs are no larger than salt grains and usually form in the cold haze of wispy cirrus clouds about 5 miles up, said Jordan, who viewed the image shot by Saffas. In the far north, zenithal arcs are more common than rainbows, but here in the Bay Area's more moderate climate they are rare, even in winter. When the sun is low in the afternoon sky on a hazy day -- even though the sky appears bright blue -- sunlight can hit the flat face of the ice particles at a slant. Then the rays bend within each crystal and emerge with the colors appearing separated into all the rainbow colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. But, said Jordan, the colors in those arcs appear in the opposite position from the colors in rainbows: In zenithal arcs, as in Saffas' image, the red hues are on the bottom and the blue and violet are on the top.

The arcs appear to terminate where the millions of ice crystals end, he said. "The arcs are like a Cheshire cat grin," Jordan said, "and they vanish just the same way." But the one Saffas saw Jan. 13 lasted at least an hour, he said -- plenty of time for him grab his Nikon D70 camera and shoot away. "We were having a huge family party, and everyone had stepped out on our deck," Saffas said, "when I saw this strange arc right overhead in the sky. It was a beautiful day, the sun was sinking behind the two tall redwoods in our yard, and the colors in what I thought was a rainbow upside down were absolutely brilliant." Alexandre Andronikos of Portland, who was at the party, vividly recalled "the fantastic sight." "Oh, my God, look up at the sky!" she remembers calling to everyone. "I never saw anything like it in my life, and we all ran into the house to grab our cameras. Mine is a Sony digital, and I got some wonderful pictures, too."

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Io volcano blows as space probe flies by

By fortuitous timing, a robotic science probe flew by Jupiter on Wednesday as a massive volcano on one of its moons erupted, sending a thick plume of dust into space that served as a celestial welcome mat. The plume from the volcano known as Tvashtar stretched about 150 miles above the surface of Io, a tortured moon baked and scrambled by the heavy grip of Jupiter's gravity.The images from this encounter are among 700 scientists plan to take during a six-month study of the Jovian system by New Horizons, a NASA spacecraft that is heading toward Pluto. The probe passed as close as 1.4 million miles from Jupiter early Wednesday to pick up speed for the rest of its 3-billion mile journey to Pluto. The slingshot maneuver off Jupiter added about 9,000 mph to New Horizons' speed, allowing it to clip three years off its trek. Even so, it will be 2015 before the spacecraft reaches Pluto and its primary moon Charon for the first detailed studies of the frozen, comet-like worlds.New Horizons cannot rotate to point its communications antenna at Earth so most of the science data collected during the Jupiter encounter will be stored onboard the craft until it can be relayed to Earth.

Scientists did manage to get a few pictures back, including two showing the volcanic eruptions on Io."This is the best image of a large volcanic plume on Io since the Voyager flybys in 1979," said John Spencer, deputy leader of the New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team from Southwest Research Institute.Ground-based telescopes and the Galileo Jupiter orbiter first spotted volcanic heat radiation from Tvashtar, which is one of Io's most active volcanoes, in November 1999, and the Cassini spacecraft saw a large plume when it flew past Jupiter in December 2000.The Keck telescope in Hawaii picked up renewed heat radiation from Tvashtar in spring 2006, and just two weeks ago the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the Tvashtar plume in ultraviolet.

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5 years since UFOs over Lincolnshire

Unidentified flying objects appear to have given North Lincolnshire a wide berth, according to official records kept by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The last sightings of flying saucer-type objects in the region were almost five years ago.The MoD UFOlogy files reveal things were really buzzing over the skies of North Lincolnshire in 2002, with three sightings reported in an eight-month spell.At 2.15am on March 31, an observer from S****horpe reported two lights circling around each other.They were yellow, red, green and blue in colour.Just a week later the MoD received another local alert, this time from Scawby, at 1.50am on Saturday, April 7.The witness testified he saw a blue light, then yellow shooting stars, followed by a loud bang.It was the second UFO sighting in the otherwise sleepy village of Scawby in nine years.UFO activity in North Lincolnshire then went quiet until 2.30pm on November 2, 2002.This time the mysterious object seen at Walcot was described as dark blue and torpedo-shaped and was followed by a white plume of smoke.Anyone who believes they have spotted a UFO is asked, in the first instance, to contact Humberside Police.The police, who pass on the information to the MoD, require a detailed report.

UFO spotters have to list nearby objects like high voltage lines, rivers and buildings, give names of any witnesses and describe the weather conditions.They also have to give a full description and exact positioning of the sighting and the direction in which it was first seen.Coun Mark ***k (4, deputy leader of the opposition Labour group on North Lincolnshire Council, and his wife Tina, know the routine only too well.In July 1978, the ***ks witnessed their very own close encounter of the first kind near Market Rasen."I don't know what we saw, but it was something we had never seen before," said Coun ***k."I used to be sceptical about UFOs, but if anyone ever told me they had seen one I would have to believe them."The object was about 150ft away, around 50ft above the ground and making no noise at all."

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