Science Special News

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Did the Soviets build German UFOs ?

On the summer morning of July 16, 1951 part of the La-11 1619-Northern Fleet out of Murmansk was on a routine patrol in the coastal territory. The first 30 minutes of the flight proceeded normally, and then lead Captain Peter Vusov, flying at an altitude of about 4000 meters above the sea, spotted a slowly moving object. "But, by getter closer, I saw a strange object-dark disc 20 meters in diameter and unmarked, but armed with powerful cannons below. I have never seen such a machine and immediately contacted the base and reported the craft. At that point the pilot of the unknown probably noticed our planes and dramatically changed course." The fighters on this patrol were armed and Vusov decided to attack the strange object. They fired 23mm shells, which apparently caused no damage so he went around for a second attack, but the results were the same. The commander then radio them, Vusov and lieutenant Ivanchenko who was piloting a second plane, were ordered to cease-fire and immediately return to base. The pilots waited to be debriefed and to their surprise a stranger not in military uniform accompanied the senior officers.

This man was obviously an important person who worked for the government. "I was scared", recalls Vusov. The pilots were told not to tell anyone about what they saw and that the matter was of national security. After the debriefing both pilots were transferred: Vusov to the Pacific fleet, and Ivanchenko to Khabarovsk. Both pilots were also promoted.In the early 1930s, a young German, Oregon Irman Mayer designed an aircraft with an inverted shape with ringbolts in the center. Such a design would protect vital engineering components from possible enemy fire and the area was of sufficient size to accommodate the onboard weapons.

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[Rasputin]

Giant crystals enjoyed perfection

With lengths over 11m, the giant gypsum crystals found in Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales are a great natural wonder. Now, a Spanish-Mexican team thinks it can explain how these marvels acquired their immense form. The scientists studied tiny pockets of fluid trapped in the crystals and conducted back-up lab experiments. They report in the journal Geology that the solution from which the crystals grew must have been kept in a very narrow, stable temperature range. The researchers' analysis leads them to believe there are other dramatic caves waiting to be discovered in the Naica mine complex south-east of Chihuahua city. "If the theory we propose for the 'genetic' mechanisms of the crystals is right, then I would not be surprised if miners find more of these caves in the next few years," Juan Manuel Garcia-Ruiz, from the University of Granada, Spain, told BBC News. Already two remarkable caves are known at Naica, which has yielded some of the world's most significant deposits of silver and lead.

The 120m-deep Cueva de las Espadas (Cave of Swords), discovered in 1912, is named for its metre-long shafts of gypsum (a calcium sulphate mineral that incorporates water molecules into its chemical formula). And although individually there are fewer crystals in the 290m-deep Cueva de los Cristales, its beams are considerably bigger. Professor Garcia-Ruiz and colleagues believe they can now show how these differences emerged.

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Titanic letter resurfaces survivor's horror

The darkness and terror on the night the Titanic sank are described in a letter, released yesterday, written by survivor Laura Mabel Francatelli shortly after the disaster. The letter, along with her official affidavit during a subsequent legal inquiry and her life preserver, will be sold at a Christie's auction on May 16. The life preserver was signed by men and women aboard the lifeboat.Francatelli's nephew inherited the objects in 1967 upon her death. They have been with the family ever since. Francatelli, born in London in 1882, was a secretary who sailed on the Titanic with her employer, Lady Duff-Gordon, the owner of a well-known dress salon called Madame Lucille. The designer's husband, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, traveled with them. The letter recounts how, close to midnight on April 15, 1912, Francatelli opened the door to her E-36 cabin and saw passengers leaving their rooms in their night attire. Officers repeatedly assured her "everything was alright." She and the Duff-Gordons went to the top deck where she noted that the "sea was nearer to us...we are sinking." The two women refused to enter the last lifeboat on their side of the ship, preferring to stay with Sir Cosmo. At this point, most of the other passengers had run to the opposite part of the ship, which remained higher above water.

According to Francatelli, officers then let all three enter an emergency boat. They were joined by two American men and seven crewmembers. She wrote, "...we went down into the blackness of the water. Which never shall I forget. There wasn't a light, or a lamp in the boat...We rowed away from the ship, which was sinking fast so to get away from the swell or suction. Then all the rest is too terrible for me to write. The screams of the hundreds of dear women, children and the bravest of men fighting in the icy cold waves, I still hear."

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Holocaust being dropped in schools

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Governmentbacked study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques. The findings have prompted claims that some schools are using history 'as a vehicle for promoting political correctness'. The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, looked into 'emotive and controversial' history teaching in primary and secondary schools. It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework. The report said teachers feared confronting 'anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'. It added: "In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

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Global warming hits Mars too

Global warming could be heating Mars four times faster than Earth due to a mutually reinforcing interplay of wind-swept dust and changes in reflected heat from the Sun, according a study released Wednesday. Scientists have long observed a correlation on Mars between its fluctuating temperatures -- which range from -87 C to - 5 C (-125 F to 23 F) depending on the season and the location -- and the darkening or lightening of swathes of the planet's surface. The explanation is in the dirt. Glistening Martian dust lying on the ground reflects the Sun's light -- and its heat -- back into space, a phenomenon called albedo. But when this reddish dust is churned up by violent winds, the storm-ravaged surface loses its reflective qualities and more of the Sun's heat is absorbed into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise. The study, published on Thursday by the British journal Nature, shows for the first time that these variations not only result from the storms but help cause them too. It also suggests that short-term climate change is currently occurring on Mars and at a much faster rate than on Earth.

Its authors, led by Lori Fenton, a planetary scientist at NASA, describe the phenomenon as a "positive feedback" system -- in other words, a vicious circle, in which changes in albedo strengthen the winds which in turn kicks up more dust, in turn adding to the warming. In the same way, if a snow-covered area on Earth warms and the snow melts, the reflected light decreases and more solar radiation is absorbed, causing local temperatures to increase. If new snow falls, a cooling cycle starts. For Earth, global warming is mainly associated with human activities -- notably the burning of fossil fuels -- that release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, trapping more of the Sun's heat.

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$20k needed for time travel experiment

The Seattle scientist who wants to test a controversial prediction from quantum theory that says light particles can go backward in time is, himself, running out of time. It's not a wormhole or warp in the space-time continuum. The problem is more mundane -- a black hole in the time-and-money continuum spawned by today's increasingly risk-averse, "performance-based" approach to funding research. "I guess you could say we're now living on borrowed time," wryly joked John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington. "All we need to keep going is maybe $20,000, but nobody seems that interested in funding this project." It's a project that aims to do a conceptually simple bench-top test for evidence of something Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." The test involves using a crystal to split a photon, a light particle, into two reduced-energy photons that -- through careful manipulation -- Cramer thinks could reveal a flash of time traveling backward. The UW physicist has applied for funds from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Both agencies have, in the past, funded far-fetched ideas and, on occasion, had big hits -- such as the Internet. DARPA recently sent out requests for proposals from researchers interested in developing shape-shifting, liquid robots (think Terminator 2) as well as cyborg insects (half robot, half normal bug). NIAC has funded similar projects and first took seriously science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's idea of a geosynchronous elevator into space. "I've heard that NASA is closing down NIAC so I don't expect to get any funding from them," Cramer said. "And the guy from DARPA decided what I was trying to do was too weird even for DARPA."

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Stonehenge amulets worn by elite

Forget dressing for success: Clothing ornaments thought to confer supernatural power were all the rage among chiefs and other important people in England 4,000 years ago, say scholars. A recent find indicates some of these fashion trends might have originally been designed by Stonehenge leaders.While working two months ago in South Lowestoft, Suffolk, British archaeologist Clare Good excavated a four-sided object made of the mineral jet. It closely matches a geometrically designed gold object found far away at a burial site called Bush Barrow near Stonehenge in Wiltshire. The match is so close that experts believe the black artifact is a skeuomorph, or a copy in a different material.Good, who is with the Suffolk County Archaeology Service, told Discovery News that she made the discovery while investigating the remains of a probable funeral pyre dating to 1900-1700 B.C. The funeral pyre, she said, is "a normal sort of feature we come across every day while out digging." She thinks someone placed goods, including a flint knife, pottery and the jet object, inside the pit after the body was burned.

The findings are documented in the current issue of British Archaeology. Editor Mike Pitts describes the jet object as having "two parallel lines around the edge, supporting 12 pendant semi-circles inside with a double circle and dot in the center. Small floating lines of rocker decoration, some on the side facets, complete the design.""Rocker" refers to the rocking motion that the artist likely used when carving, drawing or chiseling out the design.

[Rasputin]

Frogs rain down on Serbia

Traffic came to a halt and locals fled inside after thousands of frogs fell from the sky onto a Serbian village. Residents in Odzaci told local daily Blic they thought the world was coming to an end.Aleksandar Ciric said: "I saw all these small frogs just start raining down. There were thousands of them."Another villager, Caja Jovanovic, added: "This huge 'cloud' seemed to come out of nowhere and its shape and colour looked very strange."We were all wondering what it was when suddenly frogs started to fall from the sky. I thought maybe a plane carrying frogs had exploded in midair."But climatology expert Slavisa Ignjatovic said there was a simple scientific explanation for the incident.He said: "A whirlwind has sucked up the frogs from a lake, the sea or some other body of water somewhere else and carried them along to Odzaci where they have fallen to the ground. It is a recognised scientific phenomenon."

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Signs of water found on extrasolar planet

Evidence of water has been detected for the first time in a planet outside our solar system, an astronomer said on Tuesday, a tantalizing find for scientists eager to know whether life exists beyond Earth. Travis Barman, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said water vapor has been found in the atmosphere of a large, Jupiter-like gaseous planet located 150 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. The planet is known as HD 209458b.Other scientists reported in February that they were unable to find evidence of water in this planet's atmosphere, as well as another Jupiter-like planet."I'm very confident," Barman said in an interview. "It's definitely good news because water has been predicted to be present in the atmosphere of this planet and many of the other ones for some time."Lowell Observatory, a privately owned astronomical research institution, announced the finding, which has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The research was backed by NASA, it said.

The detection of the presence of water vapor was possible because this planet, from the vantage point of Earth, orbits directly in front of its star every 3-1/2 days, allowing crucial measurements to be made. It is what is known as a transiting planet.Scientists searching for signs of life beyond Earth are keen to learn about the presence of water on other planets -- both in and beyond our solar system -- because water is thought to be fundamental to the existence of life.

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Invisibility cloak finally within reach ?

Top of Form 1Bottom of Form 1Harry Potter fans take note: scientists have finally come up with a workable design for an invisibility cloak. Physicists figured out the complex mathematical equations for making objects invisible by bending light around them last year.A group of engineers at Purdue University in Indiana have now used those calculations to design a relatively simple device that ought to be able to - one day soon - make objects as big as an airplane simply disappear.The design calls for tiny metal needles to be fitted into a hairbrush-shaped cone at angles and lengths that would force light to pass around the cloak. This would make everything inside the cone appear to vanish because the light would no longer reflect off it."It looks pretty much like fiction, I do realize, but it's completely in agreement with the laws of physics," said lead researcher Vladimir Shalaev, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue."Ideally, if we make it real it would work exactly like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak," he said.

"It's not going to be heavy because there's going to be very little metal in it."The still-theoretical design will be published this month in the journal Nature Photonics.Shaleav said he needs to secure funding to build the device and expects it would take two to three years to come up with a working prototype.The major limitation is that the current design can only bend the light of a single wave-length at a time, and does not work with the entire frequency range of the visible spectrum.

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Half of French UFOs remain unexplained

For three decades, an arms length branch of France's national space agency quietly gathered reports of strange apparitions in the skies over the republic, from bright lights zig-zagging in the dark night to calls about flying saucers. A small team of investigators dutifully probed each sighting, and either reached a logical conclusion, or consigned it to enigma.Now, after decades under lock and key in dusty filing cabinets, France went public with its "X-Files" late last month. The Centre national d'etudes spatiales decided not only to declassify more than 1,600 cases, but to scan each official page and post it online for all to see."When the site went live, it was hit by so much traffic it went down almost immediately," said Chris Rutkowski, a co-ordinator for the Winnipeg-based Ufology Research Centre, noting the popularity of the project. With more than 100,000 documents the archives of GEIPAN, the Groupement pour l'etude et l'information sur les phenomenes aerospatiaux non indentifier, contains official police reports, statements by witnesses to bizarre scenes -- even colourful hand-drawn diagrams resembling children's artwork.

Each incident has been slotted into one of four categories: definitely solved, likely solved, unsolved for lack of sufficient information or unsolved mystery. More than half -- 58% -- of the phenomena investigated by the experts remain unexplained while just 9% have been definitely figured out.

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Dreamed up phone number leads man to bride

A British man has met and married a 22-year-old woman after, by his own account, dreaming of her phone number and then sending her a text message. David Brown, 24, says he woke up one morning after a night out with friends with a telephone number constantly running through his head. He decided to contact it, sending a message saying "Did I meet you last night?."Random recipient Michelle Kitson was confused and wary at first but decided to reply and the two began exchanging messages. Eventually they met and fell in love."It was really weird but I was absolutely hooked," Kitson told the Daily Mail newspaper. "My mum and dad kept saying 'But he could be an axe murderer', but I knew there was something special about it."After a long courtship, the oddly matched couple -- he's six foot seven inches tall and she's five foot four -- have just returned from their honeymoon in the Indian resort of Goa.A love-struck Brown said: "I've no idea how I ended up with her number in my head -- it's only a few digits different from mine."