Science Special News

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Acropolis, Chichen Itza lead new 7 wonders

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: The Acropolis in Athens and Mexico's Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza are among the leaders in a competition, ending in one month, to choose the New Seven Wonders of the World, the organizers said on Thursday. The winners will be chosen through a global online and phone vote, organizers of the New 7 Wonders of the World competition said, a far cry from the methods used by the Greeks who chose the original Seven Wonders more than 2,000 years ago.Some 50 million people have voted so far in the competition designed to produce a 21st century list of the world's greatest man-made heritage sites, but Tia Viering, a spokeswoman for the organization, said the result is wide open.The winning list will be announced in Lisbon on July 7.Many countries are carrying out special events to encourage people to vote for their sites, Viering said. "There are some really creative, phenomenal things going on in the last four weeks that will influence the final result."

These include an Indian singer dedicating a song to the Taj Mahal and Brazil's soccer team urging Brazilians to vote for Christ Redeemer, the statue that adorns Rio de Janeiro's skyline.The most popular 10 sites so far include both the Taj Mahal and Christ Redeemer, along with the Colosseum in Rome, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, Peru's Machu Picchu, Petra in Jordan, and the statues of Easter Island.Viering said the number of votes so far for each site will not be divulged as it could influence the final result.

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Mystery skeleton spotted on iceberg

Marine scientists in Canada and abroad are puzzled by bizarre photographs that appear to show the skeleton of a large mammal jutting out of an iceberg that recently drifted past Newfoundland's east coast. The six pictures show what looks like a brown rib cage and spinal column, slightly bent, sticking out of a crust of ice. But researchers throughout Canada, Greenland and Norway are unable to determine the origin of the skeleton, said Garry Stenson, a marine mammal scientist with the federal Fisheries Department. "It's definitely unusual," Stenson said Monday. "It's not something that I've encountered before." His colleagues have been debating whether the carcass belongs to a bearded seal, a walrus or a beluga whale. But without the actual specimen in his hands, Stenson said he can't resolve the mystery. "It would be really nice to get a copy, a sample, a hold of it, but at this point we're not quite sure what it is," he said. The photos were taken near Newtown, in Bonavista Bay, by Eli and Donna Norris on the weekend of May 26, said Ruth Knee, a friend who forwarded them to the Fisheries Department in hopes of identifying the bones. The Norris family couldn't be reached for comment Monday. Knee said the retired couple didn't want to be interviewed, but said she could vouch for the authenticity of the photos. "Not everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame," Knee said.

Stenson said he is fairly certain the pictures aren't a hoax. "If it was Photoshopped, it's a damn good job," he said. "The way that it's laying there, with what looks to be part of it underwater, looks authentic." Stenson said he was told the backbone was roughly 2.4 metres out of the ice, leading him to believe the spine belonged to a large mammalian creature. But he is uncertain whether the animal would have fallen into a crevasse in an iceberg and then got stuck, or if it simply died on an ice floe and later became embedded by other pans of ice. "It could be a walrus, for example, that died and is laying on its back and the pressure of the snow and the ice has flattened those ribs," he said. The bones don't appear very weathered, and it looks like there may be tissue still attached to them. Stenson wouldn't speculate on how old they are because the ice may have preserved them for years. The iceberg's location, or if it was still intact, weren't known Monday.

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Patient bleeds dark green blood

A team of Canadian surgeons got a shock when the patient they were operating on began shedding dark greenish-black blood, the Lancet reports. The man emulated Star Trek's Mr Spock - the Enterprise's science officer who supposedly had green Vulcan blood. In this case, the unusual colour of the 42-year-old's blood was down to the migraine medication he was taking. The man's leg surgery went ahead successfully and his blood returned to normal once he had eased off the drug. The patient had been taking large doses of sumatriptan - 200 milligrams a day. This had caused a rare condition called sulfhaemoglobinaemia, where sulphur is incorporated into the oxygen-carrying compound haemoglobin in red blood cells. Describing the case in the Lancet, the doctors, led by Dr Alana Flexman from St Paul's Hospital, Vancouver, wrote: "The patient recovered uneventfully, and stopped taking sumatriptan after discharge.

"When seen five weeks after his last dose, he was found to have no sulfhaemoglobin in his blood." The man had needed urgent surgery because he had developed a dangerous condition in his legs after falling asleep in a sitting position. The surgeons performed urgent fasciotomies - limb-saving procedures which involve making surgical incisions to relieve pressure and swelling caused by the man's condition, known as compartment syndrome. In compartment syndrome, the swelling and pressure in a restricted space limits blood flow and causes localised tissue and nerve damage. It is commonly caused by trauma, internal bleeding or a wound dressing or cast being too tight.

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Plants raise chemical alarm

Planets send out SOS signals when they are under attack. If insects are feeding on them, some plants emit volatile chemicals that attract enemies of the insects. What is surprising, though, is that neighbouring plants not being eaten also send out distress signals to call in these bodyguards.Why so-called secondary signallers do it has been a mystery, but now Yutaka Kobayashi and Norio Yamamura of Kyoto University, Japan, think they have solved it.The answer is family values, or in evolutionary parlance, kin selection. "My hypothesis views secondary signallers as crying for help to save their family," says Kobayashi. The pair used an evolutionary model to show that if the cost of making the SOS signal was low and there was a high likelihood of having relatives growing nearby - both conditions which are often true in real life - then secondary signalling would evolve."Neighbouring undamaged plants emit the secondary signal probably to help the damaged plants," says Kobayashi.

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Alien life to be discovered within 10 years ?

Intelligent extra-terrestrials almost certainly exist on distant planets beyond our solar system, leading British astronomers told the government yesterday. The scientists expect that the first evidence of primitive alien life, such as microbes and vegetation, will emerge within 10 years, with more substantial finds following future space missions. The experts, from high-ranking UK universities and research institutes, were gathered in London by the science minister, Malcolm Wicks, to describe the latest advances in the search for distant, habitable planets capable of harbouring life. A recent revolution in technology means astronomers can now spot Earth-like planets orbiting faraway stars, raising the chances of alien life being found. By analysing reflected light, it is becoming possible to find any that may host vegetation and breathable atmospheres. "Twenty years ago we only had one solar system to study and that's the one we live in. But since then, there's been an explosion in the number of planets outside our solar system that we've been able to detect," said Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council and former head of space physics at University College London.

Some 200 planets have been detected orbiting stars other than the sun. Scientists this year announced the discovery of a warm, rocky "second Earth" circling a distant star called Gliese 581, about 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra. Crucial measurements of the planet's surface temperature range revealed it was able to hold liquid water, believed to be a prerequisite for life. In 2015, the European Space Agency will launch a mission called Darwin, a cluster of four orbiting telescopes that will scour the heavens for life-bearing planets. For five years, the telescopes will peer at 500 stars and conduct spectral analyses of the 50 most promising planets it detects.

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Neanderthals 'were ahead of their time'

Big, brutish and stupid - it's a commonly held view that our prehistoric predecessors were as wild and unsophisticated as the animals they hunted. But Neanderthal man was not as slow-witted as he looked and was in reality as smart as we are, an archaeologist claims.They were actually innovators who used different forms of tools to adapt to the ecological challenges posed by harsh habitats as they spread through Europe. Although our ancestors have become the butt of jokes about people who are stupid or unenlightened, they were years ahead of their time.Dr Terry Hopkinson, of Leicester University, said Neanderthals were far from behaviourally static and incorporated different forms of tool construction into a single technique.

He said: "There has been a consensus that the modern human mind turned on like a light switch about 50,000 years ago, only in Africa."But the modern traits accompanying the change such as abstract art, the use of grindstones and elongated stone blades, and big-game hunting began to accumulate in Africa from 300,000 years ago.

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Study explains rainforest similarities

Celebrated in Buddhist temples and cultivated for its wood and cottony fibers, the kapok tree now is upsetting an idea that biologists have clung to for decades: the notion that African and South American rainforests are similar because the continents were connected 96 million years ago. Research by University of Michigan evolutionary ecologist Christopher Dick and colleagues shows that kapok---and perhaps other rainforest--trees colonized Africa after the continents split when the trees' seeds traveled across the ocean. The findings, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), appear online this week in the journal Molecular Ecology. "This research provides vital information for one of the most highly threatened areas of the planet, tropical rainforests," said Sam Scheiner, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. "In order to plan for and mitigate global climate change, we need to understand the history of life on Earth through studies like this one."

Oceanic dispersal links the world's rainforests, said Dick, "and this study is one of the first to catch that process in action at the species level. Although single seeds are very unlikely to survive an oceanic voyage and then successfully become established elsewhere, such improbable events become probable over 10 to 15 million years." Dick studied the rainforest form of Ceiba pentandra, a species of kapok that grows taller than a 16-story building, its head poking above the forest canopy. Its flowers produce more than 50 gallons of nectar per tree in a season, attracting bats that travel as far as 12 miles between trees and transfer pollen in the process. When the seed pods ripen, they break open to reveal fluffy fibers that are used to stuff pillows and mattresses. The seeds, which are about the size of a sunflower seed, are buoyant and able to float down rivers along which the colossal trees grow.

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Image of minotaur labyrinth discovered

Bulgarian archaeologists have found an image of the legendary labyrinth of King Minos, the Bulgarian National Radio reported. The exclusive find was unearthed near the village of Golyam Derven last week. The team of Professor Daniela Agre, who are doing excavation works in the area, stumbled upon the unique artefact while researching a an ancient Thracian tomb's entrance stone. The labyrinth image, which is carved on the slate, is perfectly preserved. The legendary labyrinth was considered a just a myth from the Greek mythology until the exclusive finding. According to the legends, King Minos ordered the construction of the labyrinth to keep inside the monstrous Minotaur. The Greek mythology tells about a dispute over the sovereignty of Crete that led Minos to ask Poseidon for help. He asked the god to send an offering as a sign of his true kingship. The god of the sea sent a gleaming pure white bull, which emerged miraculously from the waves.

This confirmed that Minos was a true king. However, as soon as King Minos saw the beast he refused to sacrifice it to Poseidon, and replaced it with another. Poseidon in retaliation sent Pasiphae into uncontrollable lust for this huge beast. So much so that she had the urge to mate with this huge animal. The result was the beast Minotaur. King Minos ordered Daedalus to construct a palace to hide the Minotaur, and Daedalus built Labyrinth.

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What is the Starchild skull ?

Around 1930, the parents of a young American girl of Mexican heritage took her to visit relatives in a small rural village in the mountains southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico. While there, the girl disobeyed a local taboo and went exploring in caves and mineshafts dotting the area. In a mineshaft she made a startling discovery: lying on the ground at the rear of the tunnel was a complete human skeleton. Coming up out of the dirt beside it was a misshapen hand, entwined in one of the human skeleton's upper arm bones. Gathering her courage, the young girl began to dig away the dirt the hand was rising from. She uncovered a shallow grave containing a being smaller than the human, with a body and skull as misshapen as the hand. She then removed both skulls from the mineshaft and brought them back into the U.S., where she kept them as souvenirs until her death in the early 1990's. They were then passed on to an American man who held them for five years, not knowing what to do with them but assuming, as the previous owner had assumed, that the "weird" skull was merely a natural human deformity.That man and his wife passed the skulls to a younger couple, Ray and Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas.

Melanie had been a neonatal nurse for several years and was quite familiar with all kinds of human deformity. She quickly realized the "deformed" skull defied all the rules of normal deformity. Most significantly, it was entirely too symmetrical, even more symmetrical than typical humans; and it was entirely too light relative to what any typically deformed skull should weigh.In addition to her neonatal experience, Melanie and husband Ray were members of El Paso's MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) chapter. They both knew that their new skull exhibited all the classic features of a skull that might fit into the head of a Grey alien. Realizing that, they determined to have the skull scientifically tested to determine its genetic heritage. They undertook that task with serious doubts, feeling certain it was probably a deformity, but they wanted to be certain.