Science Special News

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Pentagon sought to develop "gay bomb"

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon."The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

"The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay," explained Hammond. The Pentagon told CBS 5 that the proposal was made by the Air Force in 1994."The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform," said a DOD spokesperson, who indicated that the "gay bomb" idea was quickly dismissed.

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Volunteers sought for Mars test

The European Space Agency (Esa) is seeking volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crew spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow. Once the hatches are closed, the crew's only contact with the outside world is a radio link to "Earth" with a realistic delay of many minutes. It sounds like Big Brother, but there are no plans to televise the test. The modular "spacecraft" measures some 550 cubic metres (19,250 cubic feet), the equivalent of nine truck containers. It is based at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems in the Russian capital. The goal is to gain insight into human behaviour and group dynamics under the kinds of conditions astronauts would experience on a journey to Mars. With the exception of weightlessness and radiation, the crew will experience most other aspects of long-haul space travel, such as cramped conditions, a high workload, lack of privacy, and limited supplies. The volunteers will be put through a number of scenarios, such as a simulated launch, outward journey of up to 250 days, an excursion on the Martian surface, followed by the return home.

The 500-day duration is close to the minimum estimated timescale needed for a human trip to the Red Planet. The Earthbound astronauts will have to deal with simulated emergencies and perhaps even real ones. But, while Esa says it will do nothing that puts the lives of the simulation crew at unnecessary risk, officials running the experiment have made it clear they would need a convincing reason to let someone out of the modules once the experiment had begun. "The idea behind this experiment is simply to put six people in a very close environment and see how they behave," Bruno Gardini, project manager for Esa's Aurora space exploration programme, told BBC News.

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Large lake in southern Chile goes missing

Submitted by Jon Williams & Pandora: A lake in southern Chile has mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole. The lake was situated in the Magallanes region in Patagonia and was fed by water, mostly from melting glaciers.It had a surface area of between 4 and 5 hectares (10-12 acres) -- about the size of 10 soccer pitches."In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal ... we went again in May and to our surprise we found the lake had completely disappeared," said Juan Jose Romero, regional director of Chile's National Forestry Corporation CONAF. "The only things left were chunks of ice on the dry lake-bed and an enormous fissure," he told Reuters.CONAF is investigating the disappearance.One theory is that the area was hit by an earth tremor that opened a crack in the ground which acted like a drain.Southern Chile has been shaken by thousands of minor earth tremors this year.

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Skull of giant panda's ancestor found

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: The first skull of the earliest known ancestor of the giant panda was been discovered in China, researchers report. Discovery of the skull, estimated to be at least 2 million years old, is reported by Russell L. Ciochon in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Ciochon, an anthropologist at the University of Iowa, and a team of U.S. and Chinese researchers, made the find in a limestone cave in south China.The animal, formally known as Ailuropoda microta, or "pygmy giant panda," would have been about three feet long, compared to the modern giant panda, which averages in excess of five feet.Previously this animal had been known only by a few teeth and bones, but a skull had never been found.

Judging by the wear patterns on its teeth it also lived on a diet of bamboo, the main food of the current giant panda, the researchers said.Other than size, the animal was anatomically similar to today's giant panda, said Ciochon, pronounced, pronounced schuh-HON.The work was funded by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation and University of Iowa.

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'Find of century' for Egyptology

Egyptologists say they have identified the 3,000-year-old mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's most powerful female ruler. Egypt's antiquities chief Zahi Hawass made the official announcement at a packed news conference in Cairo. It is being billed as the biggest archaeological find in Egypt since the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. Archaeologists hope the mummy, which has lain unrecognised for decades, will yield clues about the mystery of her death and subsequent disappearance. Mr Hawass has set up a DNA lab near the museum with an international team of scientists to verify the identification. The study was funded by the US television channel Discovery which is to broadcast a documentary on the subject in July. An important piece of the evidence is said to be that the mummy has a missing tooth, and the gap matches exactly an existing relic, a preserved tooth engraved with Hatshepsut's name.

Some archaeologists have expressed scepticism about the possibility of using DNA technology to identify the queen."It's a very difficult process to obtain DNA from a mummy," US molecular biologist Scott Woodward was quoted as saying by AP news agency. "To make a claim as to a relationship, you need other individuals from which you have obtained DNA, to make a comparison between the DNA sequences." DNA is the molecule that contains genetic information in all organisms and can be used to establish family relationships.

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Operation Stargate, the CIA and psychic spies

Judyth Piazza: Long before Mrs. Cleo and her Psychic Friends Network sprang onto the American scene there was another group dabbling deep into psychic phenomena. In the early 1970s, the CIA created the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to begin a study of controlled clairvoyance under the direction of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff. Under the rubric "Project Scanate" which stood for "scanning by coordinates," thousands of people were recruited, placed in dark rooms, and asked to describe what they saw at given longitudes and latitudes. Edwin May, a former director of Stargate, which was the remote viewing project that was spawned of the cold war as a result of the fear that the Soviet Union might already have established a psychic warfare program, has gone on record as saying, "we are exactly correct 50% of the time.""Russell Targ is a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of early laser technologies, as well as being the co-founder of the Stanford Research Institute's investigation into psychic abilities during the 1970s and 1980s.

He is a co-author of Mind Reach; Scientists Look at Psychic Abilities and The Mind Race, as well as Understanding and Using Psychic Abilities. Targ recently retired from Lockheed Martin which is a major defense contractor of the U.S. Government, working as a senior staff scientist, where he developed laser technology for peaceful applications."" Dr. Puthoff is currently the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, a position held for more than 10 years. He is considered one of the premier theoretical physicists in the field of vacuum zero point energy and has published several of the most respected papers in the field. A graduate of Stanford University, he has been a research associate and lecturer at the University in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Dr. Puthoff also served for several years as the Director of the Cognitive Sciences Program at SRI International. As a theoretical and experimental physicist, he has worked in the areas of fundamental electrodynamics, quantum vacuum states, gravitation, cosmology, and high power microelectronics. He has authored more than 30 technical papers and is co-author of the textbook Fundamentals of Quantum Electronics, which is used in numerous Universities around the world. He is also listed in the publications, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in the World, and is also a Fellow of the Fetzer Institute."

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Buried 'aliens' are really tree trunks

Malaysians in a northern village were alarmed by rumors that space aliens had been laid to rest in their neighborhood cemetery, but authorities learned the graves had merely been filled with banana tree trunks for a superstitious ritual, police said Tuesday. Residents feared a local witch doctor had instructed grave diggers to bury extraterrestrials in the rural district of Pasir Mas on Sunday, causing police to detain the man for investigation, said district police chief Haliludin Rahim.The man was freed after he explained that banana tree trunks, not aliens, had been buried in a ceremony for "medicinal purposes," Haliludin told The Associated Press.The New Straits Times newspaper said the rumor started because of a misunderstanding after some of the grave diggers claimed to other people that they had been told they were burying aliens.Witch doctors and spiritual healers are common in rural parts of Malaysia where superstitious beliefs have long been entrenched.

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Team makes Tunguska crater claim

Scientists have identified a possible crater left by the biggest space impact in modern times - the Tunguska event. The blast levelled more than 2,000 sq km of forest near the Tunguska River in Siberia on 30 June 1908. A comet or asteroid is thought to have exploded in the Earth's atmosphere with a force equal to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Now, a University of Bologna team says a lake near the epicentre of the blast may be occupying a crater hollowed out by a chunk of rock that hit the ground. Lake Cheko - though shallow - fits the proportions of a small, bowl-shaped impact crater, say the Italy-based scientists. Their investigation of the lake bottom's geology reveals a funnel-like shape not seen in neighbouring lakes. In addition, a geophysics survey of the lake bed has turned up an unusual feature about 10m down which could either be compacted lake sediments or a buried fragment of space rock.

Other features suggest a recent origin for the lake.Luca Gasparini, Giuseppe Longo and colleagues from Bologna argue that the lake feature, about 8km north-north-west of the airburst epicentre, may have been gouged out by remnant material that made it to the ground. "We have no positive proof this is an impact crater, but we were able to exclude some other hypotheses, and this led us to our conclusion," Professor Longo, the research team leader, told BBC News.

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