Science Special News

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Boeing's psychic lab

Boeing researchers don't just spend their days designing killer drones and networked tanks. They also investigate unexplained powers of the mind, sometimes. Especially if those times are the late '60s. This study, New Correlation Between a Human Subject and a Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator, conducted in 1967, "tentatively conclude[s]" that people can basically will particular numbers to appear. According to the Boeing-ites, there "exists a weak but significant correlation" between the experiment's "statistical processes" (that would be the generation of random numbers, "connected to four lamps and four corresponding pushbuttons") and "the experimenter who initiates the processes" ("the human subjects, asked to press the buttons... with the objective in mind of obtaining a high number of coincidences").

There's no mention of follow-up studies. But this Boeing experiment is one of a number of fringe and alternative science projects we found after a quick dig through the online archives of the Defense Technical Information Center. You'll get a kick out of the others. So keep reading...

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Dinosaur bones 'used as medicine'

Villagers in central China have been using dinosaur bones as medicine - thinking they were from dragons. These bones have been dug up, then boiled in soup or ground down to make traditional medicines for decades. The news emerged this week when scientists displayed some excavated bones at a museum in Henan Province. "[People] believed that the 'dragon bones' were from dragons flying in the sky," one Chinese scientist told AP news agency. These 'dragon bones', found in Henan's Ruyang County, were sold for about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram. "Local people used the bones as medicine to treat conditions such as dizziness and leg cramps," said Zhang Xinliao from Henan Geology Museum. They were also made into a paste and applied to fractures and other injuries. "Some locals even made a business out of collecting the bones. One had collected up to 8,000 kg," Mr Zhang added. Bones displayed this week at the museum were from an 18m-long plant-eating dinosaur.

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The perpetual myth of free energy

Irish company Steorn made headlines around the world when it took out a full page advert in The Economist claiming to have developed a device that produced "free energy". Throughout early July, the company planned to display the device to the public for the first time. Professor Sir Eric Ash, electrical engineer and former rector of Imperial College London, visited the demonstration for the BBC News website. "Marvellous things can happen in this world. As an engineer, whenever I look at a new baby I say categorically that there can be no such thing - it's far too complicated to work. Yet we know this lack of faith in the marvellous is misplaced. So, the fact that a device or an invention looks too marvellous to be true is not conclusive evidence that it isn't. I believe that it is thinking on such lines that encourages inventors - and there have been many since the 12th Century - to pursue what would be a true marvel: a perpetual motion machine.

The most recent attempt is from Mr Sean McCarthy, the Chief Executive Officer of an Irish company called Steorn. His invention, known as the "Orbo", is a mechanical device which uses powerful magnets on the rim of a rotor and further magnets on an outer shell. Mr McCarthy is convinced that it is working. He took a full page advertisement in the Economist last year to say so, and to attract volunteer scientists to check the authenticity of his claims. They are still in the process of doing so. In the meantime Mr McCarthy was hoping to demonstrate the machine to the public at the London Kinetica Museum, which is devoted to displaying dynamic art, particularly of artefacts at the interface of science and art.

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Hope for the alien hunters

Nasa this week unveils a new emissary in the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which launches next month, marks just the latest instalment in a quest that has exercised the imaginations of writers and scientists since long before the adventures of Jules Verne. In the 17th century Johannes Kepler, the architect of our modern understanding of the solar system, imagined a journey to a moon inhabited by serpent-like creatures called Prevlovans who endured the lunar night "bristling with ice and snow under the raging, icy winds". Regrettably, however, here is no reliable account of a real encounter with alien life-forms. Many doubt whether they exist at all. The Phoenix mission to Mars is very much in pursuit of liquid water, the key to life. Every watery place on our own planet, from the depths of the ocean to the tips of the highest mountains, supports life. The hardiest organisms, bacteria called extremophiles, can endure more or less anything the terrestrial environment can muster, from boiling acid baths to cold briny seas. But take away water, or freeze it or boil it to steam, and nothing grows.

Life requires water and the water has to be in the liquid state for it to be useful. Water is common in the universe, but is liquid only within a narrow window of temperatures and pressures. In our own solar system, temperatures range from 480C on the surface of Venus to -230C on Pluto. The habitable or "Goldilocks zone", as it is sometimes called, because it's neither too hot nor too cold, occupies a narrow band of our own solar system of less than 1% of the distance from the sun to the outer edges. This is precisely where the Earth orbits.

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Giant squid washed up in Tasmania

A giant squid has washed up near Strahan on Tasmania's west coast. The squid, measuring about six metres long, was found last night on Ocean Beach by a member of the public.Zoology experts from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are hoping to examine the squid to find how old it was and how it died.The museum's senior curator of Antarctic and Southern Oceans, David Pemberton, says it is known that squid live off the west coast and feed on blue grenadier."The only strandings on beaches we ever had were in the east and south-east of Tassie and to me this one's intriguing because it's turned up on our west coast," he said."We must bear in mind that all of this is to do with the Southern Ocean and perhaps to a giant squid, there's not much difference."It's the first record that I know of one on a beach off the west coast."

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UFOs and Roswell, 60 years on

Nick Pope: 60 years ago a pilot saw something he couldn't explain and the term "flying saucer" was born. Then, just a few weeks later, something unidentified crashed in a place called Roswell. But what exactly happened all those years ago? And why, 60 years later, does the subject still fascinate us?On 24 June 1947 a light aircraft pilot called Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, at a height of around 10,000 feet. Suddenly, a brilliant flash of light illuminated his aircraft. Visibility was good and as he scanned the sky to locate the source of the light, he saw a formation of nine shiny metallic objects flying in formation. He estimated their speed as being around 1600 miles per hour - nearly three times faster than the top speed of any jet aircraft at the time. He described the craft as delta-shaped and said they moved in a jerky motion. When describing this motion to a reporter, he said the objects moved "liked a saucer would if you skipped it across the water".The reporter seized on this phrase and in his story described the objects as "flying saucers". The label stuck. Once the story appeared in the newspapers, similar reports began to come in from all over America. Flying saucer fever swept the country and the story became national, then international news. This wasn't just the world's first UFO sighting - this was the birth of a phenomenon.

Just two weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting, something happened that was to eclipse his story and lead to arguably the biggest conspiracy theory of all time. On or around 2 July 1947, something crashed in the desert near a military base at Roswell, New Mexico. Military authorities at the base issued an extraordinary press release, which began "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc". "Flying Disc captured by Air Force", screamed the headlines. Yet, just 24 hours later, the military changed their story and claimed that the object they'd first thought was a "flying disc" was just a weather balloon that had crashed on a nearby ranch, before being discovered by a puzzled local.

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Giant chimps of the magic forest

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla. Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the shifting fortunes of warring rebel factions, and the heart of the animals' range is deep in impenetrable forest.But despite the difficulties, a handful of scientists have succeeded in studying the animals. Early speculation that the apes may be some yeti-like new species or a chimp/gorilla hybrid proved unfounded, but the truth has turned out to be in many ways even more fascinating. They are actually a population of super-sized chimps with a unique culture - and it seems, a taste for big cat flesh. The most detailed and recent data comes from Cleve Hicks, at the University of Amsterdam, who has spent 18 months in the field watching the Bili apes - named after a local town - since 2004. His team's most striking find came after one of his trackers heard chimps calling for several days from the same spot. When he investigated he came across a chimp feasting on the carcass of a leopard. Mr Hicks cannot be sure the animal was killed by the chimp, but the find lends credence to the apes' lion-eating reputation.

"What we have found is this completely new chimpanzee culture," said Mr Hicks. Previously, researchers had only managed to snatch glimpses of the animals or take photos of them using camera traps. But Mr Hicks used local knowledge to get closer to them and photograph them. "We were told of this sort of fabled land out west by one of our trackers who goes out there to fish," said Mr Hicks whose project is supported by the Wasmoeth Wildlife Foundation. "I call it the magic forest. It is a very special place." Getting there means a gruelling 40km (25-mile) trek through the jungle, from the nearest road, not to mention navigating croc-infested rivers. But when he arrived he found apes without their normal fear of humans. Chimps near the road flee immediately at the sight of people because they know the consequences of a hunter's rifle, but these animals were happy to approach him. "The further away from the road the more fearless the chimps got," he added.

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New hope over 'extinct' echidna

A species of egg-laying mammal, named after TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough, is not extinct as was previously thought, say scientists. On a recent visit to Papua's Cyclops Mountains, researchers uncovered burrows and tracks made by the Attenborough's long-beaked echidna. The species is only known to biologists through a specimen from 1961, which is housed in a museum in the Netherlands. The team will return to Papua next year to find and photograph the creature. The month-long expedition by scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) involved travelling to parts of the mountain range, covered by thick jungle, which had remained unexplored for more than 45 years. Jonathan Baillie, ZSL's Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (Edge) programme manager, said: "We hope that Sir David Attenborough will be delighted to hear that his namesake species is still surviving in the wilds of the Papaun jungle."

The creature had not been recorded since a Dutch botanist collected the only known specimen in the cloud forest of the Cyclops Mountains in 1961. As a result, it was widely assumed that the shoe box-sized species (Zaglossus attenboroughi) was extinct. But while the Edge team were in the area, they spoke to local tribespeople who said that they had seen the creature as recently as 2005. The scientists also discovered "nose pokes", holes in the ground made by the echidnas as they stuck their long noses into soil to feed. In the programme's blog, Dr Baillie wrote: "Attenborough's echidna is one of five monotremes (egg-laying mammals) that first inhabited the Earth around the time of the dinosaurs.

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