Science Special News

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Did Portugal discover Australia ?

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: A 16th century maritime map in a Los Angeles library vault proves that Portuguese adventurers, not British or Dutch, were the first Europeans to discover Australia, says a new book which details the secret discovery of Australia. The book "Beyond Capricorn" says the map, which accurately marks geographical sites along Australia's east coast in Portuguese, proves that Portuguese seafarer Christopher de Mendonca lead a fleet of four ships into Botany Bay in 1522 -- almost 250 years before Britain's Captain James Cook.Australian author Peter Trickett said that when he enlarged the small map he could recognize all the headlands and bays in Botany Bay in Sydney -- the site where Cook claimed Australia for Britain in 1770."It was even so accurate that I found I could draw in the modern airport runways, to scale in the right place, without any problem at all," Trickett told Reuters on Wednesday.Trickett said he stumbled across a copy of the map while browsing through a Canberra book shop eight years ago.He said the shop had a reproduction of the Vallard Atlas, a collection of 15 hand drawn maps completed no later than 1545 in France. The maps represented the known world at the time.Two of the maps called "Terra Java" had a striking similarity to Australia's east coast except at one point the coastline jutted out at right angles for 1,500 km (932 miles)."There was something familiar about them but they were not quite right -- that was the puzzle. How did they come to have all these Portuguese place names?," Trickett said.

Trickett believed the cartographers who drew the Vallard maps had wrongly aligned two Portuguese charts they were copying from.It is commonly accepted that the French cartographers used maps and "portolan" charts acquired illegally from Portugal and Portuguese vessels that had been captured, Trickett said."The original portolan maps would have been drawn on animal hide parchments, usually sheep or goat skin, of limited size," he explained. "For a coastline the length of eastern Australia, some 3,500 kms, they would have been 3 to 4 charts.""The Vallard cartographer has put these individual charts together like a jigsaw puzzle. Without clear compass markings its possible to join the southern chart in two different ways. My theory is it had been wrongly joined."Using a computer Trickett rotated the southern part of the Vallard map 90 degrees to produce a map which accurately depicts Australia's east coast.

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Do monkeys have 'culture' ?

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: Research in Brazil has produced fresh evidence that primates may have something approaching human "culture". A scientist has observed capuchin monkeys banging stones together, apparently as a signalling device to ward off potential predators. The researcher says the animals appear to be learning this skill from each other - and even teaching incomers to the group how it should be done. The research is reported in the scientific journal Folia Primatologica. Dr Antonio Moura from the University of Cambridge, UK carried out his work in the Serra da Capivara National Park, in the Piaui state of north-east Brazil. The use of stone technology in foraging for food is well known in non-human primates; monkeys will use rocks to crack open nuts. But this may be the first time they have been seen using stones to create a noise to keep predators away, and warn one another of potential danger. Dr Moura describes how the monkeys, as he approached several groups of them, would first search for a suitable loose stone, then hit it on a rock surface several times in an aggressive manner.

Only as they became more used to his visits over time did the stone-banging decrease. The scientist said he saw adults and juveniles hitting the stones together without paying him any attention at all - suggesting that the younger monkeys were learning the skill from their elders.

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France opens secret UFO files

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades. The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists."It is a world first," said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of "non-identified aerospatial phenomena."Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption."Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like a flying roll of toilet paper" are clearly not worth investigating, said Patenet.But many others involving multiple sightings -- in at least one case involving thousands of people across France -- and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.A phalanx of beefy security guards formed a barrier in front of the space agency (CNES) headquarters where the announcement was made, "to screen out uninvited UFOlogists," an official explained.Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly 25 percent are classified as "type D", meaning that "despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can't explain," Patenet said.

On January 8, 1981 outside the town of Trans-en-Provence in southern France, for example, a man working in a field reported hearing a strange whistling sound and seeing a saucer-like object about 2.5 meters (eight feet) in diameter land in his field about 50 meters (yards) away.A dull-zinc grey, the saucer took off, he told police, almost immediately, leaving burn marks. Investigators took photos, and then collected and analyzed samples, and to this day no satisfactory explanation has been made.The nearly 1,000 witness who said they saw flashing lights in the sky on November 5, 1990, by contrast, had simply seen a rocket fragment falling back into earth's atmosphere.Patenet's answer to questions about evidence of life beyond Earth was sure to inflame the suspicions of those convinced the government is holding back: "We do not have the least proof that extra-terrestrials are behind the unexplained phenomena."But then he added: "Nor do we have the least proof that they aren't."The CNES fields between 50 and 100 UFO reports ever year, usually written up by police. Of these, 10 percent are the object of on-site investigations, Patenet said.

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New images reveal the 'impossible' on the Sun

The restless bubbling and frothing of the Sun's chaotic surface is astonishing astronomers who have been treated to detailed new images from a Japanese space telescope called Hinode. The observatory will have as dramatic an impact on our understanding of the Sun as the Hubble Space Telescope has had on our view of the universe beyond, scientists told a NASA press conference in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday."Everything we thought we knew about X-ray images of the Sun is now out of date," says Leon Golub from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. "We've seen many new and unexpected things. For that reason alone, the mission is already a success."Hinode (Japanese for "sunrise") was launched in September 2006 to study the solar magnetic field and how magnetic energy is released as the field rises into the Sun's outer atmosphere. The mission was formerly known as Solar-B.The spacecraft carries an optical solar telescope (SOT), an X-ray telescope (XRT) and an ultraviolet spectrometer.

It orbits the Earth in a permanent twilight zone between night and day, which gives it a continuous view of the Sun.Hinode has sent back startling images of the Sun's outer limb. Where astronomers expected to see a calm region called the chromosphere, they saw a seething mass of swaying spikes."These structures are 8000 kilometres long and some extend twice that high," says SOT science team member Alan Title from Lockheed Martin Advance Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, US. "Their speed is such that if you sat on the end of one, which I don't recommend, you could travel from Washington, DC, to San Francisco in about four minutes. These things are really moving."

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Hidden fossil, flying dragon

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: Around 120m years ago, as the dinosaurs neared the climax of their dominion, high above their heads an extraordinary creature flitted from tree to tree. The bizarre lizard, named the "flying dragon" by its Chinese discoverers, glided using a flap of skin spread over eight ribs. The find is remarkable because almost all gliding species, such as "flying" frogs and squirrels, use a membrane spread between their toes or between their body and legs to generate lift. Only two other species evolved the rib-gliding tactic. Xianglong zhaoi is also the first lizard fossil with gliding ribs to be found.Li Pipeng and colleagues at the Shenyang Normal University in north-eastern China say: "Gliding is an energetically efficient mode of locomotion that has evolved independently, and in different ways, in several tetrapod groups."

The fossil lizard, which was found in Liaoning, north-eastern China, is 15.5cm (6in) long, including a 9.5cm tail. But its strangest feature is eight elongated ribs around 4cm long, covered in a skin flap. The fossil's extraordinary preservation meant scientists could see details of the flap as well as the bones.

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Dinosaur den diggers discovered

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: The fossil remains of small dinosaurs that burrowed into the ground have been found by scientists in Montana, US. The 95-million-year-old bones are from an adult and two juveniles and were unearthed in a chamber at the end of a 2.1m-long sediment-filled tunnel. The researchers say the discovery is the first definitive evidence that some dinosaurs dug dens and cared for their young in such structures. Details are reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Burrowing also represents a mechanism by which small dinosaurs may have exploited the extreme environments of polar latitudes, deserts and high mountain areas," Dr David Varricchio and colleagues tell the publication. The Montana dinosaurs have not been seen by palaeontologists before and have been given the scientific name Oryctodromeus cubicularis, meaning "digging runner of the lair". The team says the species' snout, shoulder girdle and pelvis have features one would expect to see in an animal that dug into the ground. Judging from the preserved vertebrae, the adult would have been about 2.1m (6.8ft) from nose to tail, with the major part of that (about 1.2m; 3.9ft) being the tail itself.

The estimated width of the animal fits neatly with the size of the tube it was digging (about 30cm;1ft in diameter). What is left of the tunnel structure is sloping and has two sharp turns before ending in a chamber. The team says its architecture is similar to the dens of modern burrowers, such as the striped hyena, puffin and some rodents. The dinosaur remains were covered in the coarse-grained sediment from an ancient flood; but Dr Varricchio, of Montana State University, said this did not explain the animals' deaths. "The bones are disarticulated; they are not in life position," he told BBC News.

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UFO case data crashes French servers

On an August day in 1967, two children tending a herd of cows outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and trail of sulfuric odors.The alleged extraterrestrial sighting, described by the French government as "one of the most astonishing observed in France," is among 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half century that the country's space agency opened to the public for the first time Thursday.The voluntary decision by France's National Center for Space Studies to dump more than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audiotapes from its secret UFO archives onto its Internet site for worldwide viewing is an unprecedented move among Western countries. Most of them, the United States included, consider such records classified.Within three hours of posting the first cases Thursday morning, the French space agency's Web server crashed, overwhelmed by the flood of viewers seeking the first glimpses of official evidence on a subject long a target of both fascination and ridicule."The data that we are releasing doesn't demonstrate the presence of extraterrestrial beings," said Jacques Patenet, who heads the Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, the space agency's UFO investigative team.

"But, it doesn't demonstrate the impossibility of such presence either. The questions remain open."In one of the cases considered most credible, a 13-year-old boy and his 9-year-old sister were tending their family's cows near the village of Cussac on Aug. 29, 1967, when the boy spotted "four small black beings" about 47 inches tall, according to the documents.As they watched, the four beings became agitated and rose into the air, entering the top of what appeared to be a round spaceship, about 15 feet in diameter, which hovered over the field. Just as the sphere rose, one of the passengers emerged from the top, returned to the ground to grab something, then flew back. The sphere rose silently in a spiral pattern, then "became increasingly brilliant" before disappearing with a loud whistling sound. It left "a strong sulfur odor after departure," the report said.

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How long is a day on Saturn ?

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: Strangely, astronomers don't know how long a day is on Saturn, because they can't get a firm footing on the problem given the giant planet's gaseous nature. So they have long relied on radio measurements of the ringed planet's magnetic field to help estimate the length of the day. But that doesn't really work either, they realized, so estimates have remained loose. Now the scientists at least have a better handle on this aspect of the problem.Geyser activity from Saturn's small moon Enceladus weighs down the big planet's magnetic field so much that the field rotates more slowly than Saturn itself, new observations reveal. The moon is a mere 310 miles (500 kilometers) wide. "No one could have predicted that the little moon Enceladus would have such an influence on the radio technique that has been used for years to determine the length of the Saturn day," said Don Gurnett of the University of Iowa. Gurnett is the principal investigator on a radio and plasma wave science experiment on NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The idea has been to measure Saturn's rotation by taking its radio pulse.

The technique works pretty well on the other giant planets.But the new observations, reported online this week by the journal Science, show that the invisible magnetic field lines, which emanate from Saturn's poles and radiate out like a giant, skeletal pumpkin, slip in relation to the planet's rotation. The slip owes to the collective weight of electrically charged particles that originate in Enceladus' remarkable geysers of water vapor and ice. Particles in the geysers encircle Saturn and become electrically charged, forming a disk around the equator of hot gas called plasma.Meanwhile, measurements revealed last year that Saturn's day has gotten about six or eight minutes longer-now roughly 10 hours and 47 minutes-since the 1980s when measured by the Voyager missions. Nobody suspects the trend to continue forever (meaning the days would just get longer and longer at such a rapid rate), but they also don't know what's going on.

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Examining the Antikythera mechanism

There may be nothing new under the sun after all. It's been more than two millennia since a large ship went down off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera, and more than a century since a sponge diver discovered the ship's valuable cargo, which included bronze and marble statues, pottery, and glass and silver vases. But only now have researchers deciphered one of the wreck's--and classical archaeology's--most enigmatic artifacts: a corroded collection of bronze and wood fragments known as the Antikythera Mechanism. From early on, archaeologists identified pieces of inscribed gear wheels within the corroded lump, which led to the consensus that it was some sort of astronomical device. Throughout the twentieth century, from its home in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Antikythera Mechanism attracted sporadic visits from archaeologists and historians who marveled at its highly complex, precise, hand-cut gear system and the undeciphered inscriptions on both the gears and wooden casing.

The mechanism attracted sporadic scientific interest, including X-ray studies in the 1970s and '90s, but no one could completely understand its nature. How exactly did it work, and for what had it been used? Could such a sophisticated device have been created more than 1,400 years before similar objects were known to exist anywhere else in the world?