Science Special News

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Research: 'Planet killer' not in the stars

The risk that an asteroid capable of wiping out humanity will crash into Earth is minuscule, new calculations suggest, but the chances of a smaller one destroying a city or setting off a catastrophic tsunami remain unclear and may be higher than previous estimates. The calculations were presented at a four-day meeting in Washington this week, leading scores of scientists present to conclude that NASA needs to move aggressively to meet a congressional deadline for identifying most of the potentially hazardous smaller asteroids and to develop ways to deflect them if they home in on Earth.But in a report released to Congress yesterday, the space agency said it does not have the funds to do the precautionary work, called for in its 2005 authorization bill.The agency said it is technically feasible to meet the congressional goal of identifying most small "near Earth objects" by 2020, but it said it would have to rely on telescopes built for other purposes and on spacecraft being developed by other agencies. It did not address who would fund research on ways to destroy or divert an asteroid before it became a danger."Due to current budget constraints, NASA cannot initiate a new program at this time," said the report, obtained by The Washington Post.The NASA document was immediately criticized by the chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.).

"We are still reviewing the report, but it's clear that NASA's recommended approach isn't a credible plan to achieve the goal specified in the NASA Authorization Act," he said in a statement. "The Committee will continue to pursue this issue in the coming year with the goal of obtaining a more responsive approach."The chairman of this week's Planetary Defense Conference, William Ailor of the Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit established by Congress to support the Air Force's space defense program, said scientists generally agree that the risk to Earth from large asteroids is small. Researchers have identified more than 700 of these potential "planet killers" -- out of an estimated 1,000 -- and found that not one is on a collision course with Earth.

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Subliminal images impact on brain

The brain does register subliminal images even if a person is unaware they have seen them, UK researchers report. The research, in Current Biology, suggests subliminal advertising is probably effective. The practice, which was first used in the 1950s, has been banned in the UK, but is still permitted in the US. Using brain scans, a team from University College, London, showed people only registered the images if the brain had "spare capacity". Subliminal images may be contained in other information, which people are aware of receiving. The researchers cite the example of the film Fight Club, where a character who works as a cinema projectionist inserts a single frame of pornography into the 24 frames of a film shown each second. In the movie, those watching were unaware of the split-second shot, but felt depressed or aggressive afterwards.Although it has long been thought that subliminal images can be detected without people being aware of them, and have been used in techniques such as subliminal advertising, this is the first time researchers have provided physiological evidence of the impact. The seven participants in the study wore red-blue filter glasses that projected faint images of everyday objects, such as an iron, on to one eye and a strong flashing image on the other.

The strong flashing image meant the participants were not consciously aware of the faint images projected on to the other eye. At the same time, they were asked to carry out an easy task, such as picking out the letter T from a stream of letters, or a harder task of picking out a white N or a blue Z. Using functional MRI brain scanning, the researchers found that during the easy task the brain registered the 'invisible' object although the participants were unaware they had seen it.

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Experts reveal 'ancient massacre'

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: Bones found at a prehistoric burial site indicate they belonged to victims of an ancient massacre, say scientists. Remains of 14 people were discovered at Wayland's Smithy, near Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire, in the 1960s. Latest techniques date the bones at between 3590 BC and 3560 BC, and have led experts to believe the people may have died in a Neolithic Age massacre. English Heritage carried out the work with the help of Cardiff University and the University of Central Lancashire. Michael Wysocki of the University of Central Lancashire says the findings suggest the Neolithic Age was more violent than previously thought. The victims - three of them probably killed by arrows - could have died in a rush for land or livestock, he added. He said: "We know one person was shot through the lower abdomen because we have found the tiny tip of a flint arrowhead embedded in their pelvic bone. "We also know that the bodies of two people were scavenged and partially dismembered by dogs or wolves before their remains were buried in the monument. "All this new evidence suggests that the period between 3625 BC and 3590 BC may have been one of increasing social tension and upheaval."

The research also indicates that the use of Neolithic long barrows was short-lived - and did not take place over hundreds of years as previously thought. English Heritage radiocarbon dating expert Alex Bayliss said: "With this research, we can now think about the Neolithic period in terms of individuals and communities and make useful and revealing comparisons between their choices and behaviour in the remote past. "This dating programme demands a revolution in our thinking about prehistory and not just that of early Neolithic burial monuments in southern Britain."

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Scottish team investigate haunted bar

Sceptics would dismiss the shadow that traversed Glasgow's oldest bar at 3.35am yesterday as no more than a trick of the light. But to paranormal experts investigating the Scotia Bar's spooky past, this moving figure was the latest proof that ghosts walk - or float - among us. Spirit Finders, Scotland's answer to Ghostbusters, were on a mission to detect signs of paranormal life lurking amidst the bar stools of this Glasgow institution. The five-strong crew arrived in the witching hour with an entourage of cameras, camcorders, voice recorders, 'ghost detectors' and temperature sensors to seek out the dead. And it wasn't long after last orders before spirits ran high. "He's over there!" said Shania, a self-declared psychic 'white witch' and key member of the group, which travels across Scotland investigating what they claim is the country's ghost community. "I can see his shadow. He's medium build and moving towards the cellar now." Silence. Everyone glances around in the dark. Then some rattling noises emanated from inside the cellar. It had been empty when it was locked. Of course, Scotland's obsession with the paranormal is well known.

BBC bosses captured our national fascination in the hit paranormal drama, Sea Of Souls. Set in a fictional university parapsychology department, the psychic team ventured into back alleys and tenements to find answers to modern-day mysteries. Yesterday's mission made the TV series a reality. Viewers may have scoffed from the comfort of their sofa at the suggestion that spirits were responsible for unsolved mysteries in contemporary Scotland. But when strange things started happening in the Scotia yesterday, it made even the sceptics among us stop and think.

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How huge whales hunt jumbo squid

In the cold, dark abyss of the Pacific lurk thousands of aptly named jumbo squid up to six feet long and 100 pounds nicknamed "red devils" by fishermen. Still, even these creatures can become prey to leviathans. The largest predators in the world, sperm whales, have a voracious appetite for squid, devouring perhaps 220 billion pounds a year or more, roughly equivalent to the entire annual harvest of all the commercial fisheries on Earth.Yet how sperm whales hunt jumbo squid has remained a mystery. Now, by electronically tagging both to peer at their habits up to thousands of feet underwater, scientists are discovering a deep sea version of "out of the frying pan and into the fire," with squid that flee the relative heat of surface waters potentially finding themselves in the maws of whales.Marine scientist William Gilly at Stanford University and his colleagues were tagging jumbo squid in the Gulf of California, also called the Sea of Cortez.

By good luck, they found marine biologist Randall Davis of Texas A&M University in Galveston and his collaborators tagging sperm whales nearby. After a dinner of tacos, beer and rum on Davis and his colleagues' research vessel, the scientists decided to work together to be the first to electronically track deep sea predators and their prey simultaneously."It's very rare to find a place like the Gulf of California where you can actually see sperm whales together with their prey," Davis said. "I can't think of another place in the world where this would be possible."

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UFOs sighted during Lunar eclipse

Mystery surrounds the sighting of a "spooky" UFO over west Oxfordshire. An object, described as "a slow-moving, orange light" was seen passing over Witney during the lunar eclipse two Saturdays ago.Among those who saw the object, shortly after 10.30pm, were Derek Hall, of Jacobs Mill, Witney, and his girlfriend Paula Siford.There were also reports of one or more unidentified objects flying over Oxford. Yet a week on, their identity still remains unknown.Mr Hall, a 43-year-old sales executive for a security company, said: "It was spooky. We were looking at the eclipse when we saw this bright glow, just to the side of the moon."It appeared as a slow-moving, orange light - as if a light aircraft was in flames. It was moving in a northerly direction, then bore round to the east. It disappeared in the direction of Woodstock. "There was no sound at all. It was very strange."He said it was not a plane, and could not have been a meteorite, as it changed direction.He added: "We thought there might have been something in the news since, but there hasn't been. I still don't know what it was, but I'm sure others must have seen it."I don't know whether the object we saw was extra-terrestrial, but it was certainly an unidentified flying object."A Witney householder, who asked not to be named, said: "We saw it up in the sky. It was very unusual."

Another witness was 14-year-old Lewis Ashton, who watched the object from his home in Burford Road, Witney. The Wood Green School pupil said: "It wasn't a plane or a satellite. I don't know what it was, but it seemed quite strange."Mr Hall contacted the Anomalous Phenomena Research Agency - which investigates UFO sightings in Oxfordshire and the Thames Valley.Research co-ordinator Brian P James said there had been sightings in Oxford at about the same time.He said: "We did get a report of a set of four low-flying lights heading east to west over Christ Church Meadow in Oxford. They were so low the witness thought it was an aircraft crashing. These lights split into two pairs, which then went off to the north and south. The witness phoned her daughter in Barton, who then saw another, or similar, four lights coming from the east."

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Rotorua a 'hive of UFO activity'

A surgeon hailed a pioneer in the removal of devices implanted into humans by aliens is headed for Rotorua. Dr Roger Leir won't be performing surgery when he visits in September but will speak at a conference, hosted by Ufocus New Zealand, which will focus on UFO sightings and other extraterrestrial-related phenomena.Although Rotorua was chosen to host the conference for practical reasons, it is coincidentally part of a triangular section of the Bay of Plenty - between Waihi Beach, Whakatane and Rotorua - which is a particular hotspot of UFO activity, according to Ufocus founder Suzanne Hansen. "There is also a pattern of increased sightings whenever there is seismic activity. It may be that the UFOs are tracking what is happening with the tectonic plates."Ufocus treasurer and conference facilitator Graeme Opie, who is also the senior air traffic controller at Hamilton Airport, said in the past year there had been about 12 "credible" UFO sightings in the skies over New Zealand."A lot of people don't report them because they are scared of being labelled kooks ... or they report them directly to the police or the defence force and we never get to hear about them."Between 150 and 250 people are expected at the conference in Rotorua with Dr Leir as a keynote speaker.

While his resume sounds like part of a script from an episode of The X Files, the organisers of the Future Perspectives conference, at the Rotorua Convention Centre in September, insist the American is the real deal and they want to be taken seriously.Dr Leir, who holds qualifications as a foot surgeon, is touted as a world pioneer in the surgical removal of devices planted into people, supposedly following alien abductions.According to the biography posted on the Ufocus website, Dr Leir has performed 12 separate operations to remove implanted objects from people, the most recent in September. As with the other 11 cases, the patient was an abductee who had "a lifetime of close encounter experiences".The website claims the objects he removed, some of which look similar to small metal pins, had been tested in some of the world's most prestigious laboratories and baffled scientists, in part because "some of the tests show [radioactive] isotopic ratios not of this world ... comparisons have been made to meteorite samples".

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Nepal's 'Buddha Boy' disappears again

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: A Nepalese teenager hailed as a reincarnation of the Buddha has vanished for a second time in southern Nepal, a member of his support committee said. Ram Bahadur Bomjam, 17, who shot to fame in 2005 when his supporters said he had begun a meditation session that would go on uninterrupted for years, went missing on Thursday night, the committee member said Saturday."He suddenly disappeared from his meditating site in the jungle of Bara," said Raju Shah, a member of the committee set up after the boy became a local media sensation."He told his priest Indra Lama that he would meditate somewhere in other undisclosed locations."Local media dubbed Bomjan "Buddha Boy" after supporters said he had been meditating for months without food, water or sleep, and tens of thousands of people flocked to see him.He first disappeared in March 2006, telling his supporters the site had become too crowded.

Nine months later he reappeared and was set up at a new site by the committee, but this time visitors have been sparse.Scepticism about the teenager's claims increased after his reappearance late last year, and local authorities froze bank accounts containing money collected from visitors.Gautama Siddhartha, who later became known as Buddha or the Enlightened One, is believed to have been born in southern Nepal in around 500 BC.

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What if the asteroid had missed ?

The extinction of the dinosaurs was most probably caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth - but what would have happened if the giant space rock had missed? For a long time it was thought that dinosaurs were a lumbering, cold-blooded extinction just waiting to happen. Even the word dinosaur has come to mean something that has outlived its time. The scientific argument was that as cold-blooded creatures, dinosaurs would not have stood a chance of surviving an ice age. "According to the first imaginings of palaeontologists and the general public about dinosaurs, we thought of them as reptiles," says Kristi Curry-Rogers, from the Science Museum of Minnesota. "'Reptile' is a word which comes with a lot of other connotations, like cold-blooded, slow-moving, sprawling, scaly skins, kind of stupid." But more recent discoveries, such as dinosaur fossils in both polar regions, reveal that these animals were far more adaptable than previously thought. Dr Curry-Rogers has analysed fossilised bones from Late Cretaceous (65-99 million years ago) dinosaurs and found them to have more in common with mammals and birds than reptiles. The evidence points to them being fast-growing and, crucially, that at least some of them were warm-blooded to some degree.

"They were perfectly well-adapted to deal with the problems of maintaining a body temperature," Dr Curry-Rogers told the BBC's Horizon programme. In other words, some of the dinosaurs were more than equipped to survive almost anything that the evolving planet had to throw at them. "They were the superlatives; they were the biggest, the heaviest, the meanest, the longest. You name it, dinosaurs were it," says fellow palaeontologist Phil Currie, from the University of Alberta in Canada, who has access to one of the richest areas of dinosaur research in the world.

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Key error claimed in Jesus documentary

A scholar looking into the factual basis of a popular but widely criticized documentary that claims to have located the tomb of Jesus said Tuesday that a crucial piece of evidence filmmakers used to support their claim is a mistake. Stephen Pfann, a textual scholar and paleographer at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said he has released a paper claiming the makers of "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" were mistaken when they identified an ancient ossuary from the cave as belonging to the New Testament's Mary Magdalene. The film's director, Simcha Jacobovici, responded that other researchers agreed with the documentary's conclusions. Produced by Oscar-winning director James Cameron, the documentary has drawn intense media coverage for its claims challenging accepted Christian dogma. Despite widespread ridicule from scholars, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew more than 4 million viewers when it aired on the Discovery Channel on March 4. A companion book, "The Jesus Family Tomb," has rocketed to sixth place on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.

The film and book suggest that a first-century ossuary found in a south Jerusalem cave in 1980 contained the remains of Jesus, contradicting the Christian belief that he was resurrected and ascended to heaven. Ossuaries are stone boxes used at the time to store the bones of the dead. The filmmakers also suggest that Mary Magdalene was buried in the tomb, that she and Jesus were married, and that an ossuary labeled "Judah son of Jesus" belonged to their son. The scholars who analyzed the Greek inscription on one of the ossuaries after its discovery read it as "Mariamene e Mara," meaning "Mary the teacher" or "Mary the master."