Fish oil might stop schizophrenia

Swallowing a daily dose of fish oil may stop young people vulnerable to schizophrenia from ever developing the condition, a landmark study has found.An international psychiatry conference in Melbourne will be told that omega-3 fatty acids, believed to be beneficial for conditions from heart disease to ADHD, could also help delay or prevent the onset of severe mental illness.The findings could offer a safe way to treat a crippling condition and potentially prevent schizophrenia, without the drastic side-effects of anti-psychotic medications, say experts from the Orygen Research Centre in Melbourne. "This is an amazing result in a natural product that really puts it out as a serious treatment for people seen most likely to develop psychotic illness," said lead researcher Professor Paul Amminger. "It performed even better than the traditional medications in this particularly vulnerable group so this really shouldn't be overlooked."The researchers enlisted 81 'high risk' young people aged 13 to 24 who had previously suffered brief hallucinations or delusions.Typically, if left untreated one-third of these individuals will go on to develop a sustained psychotic disorder.Half were treated with capsules of fish oil, a rich source of omega-3 fats for three months, while the rest took a fishy-tasting dummy substitute.

One year on, three per cent of those who had taken fish oil supplements had developed schizophrenia. This compared with 28 per cent of those who had swallowed the placebo.Previous studies have suggested that anti-psychotic drugs when used early in illness reduce the rate to about 12 per cent.

Conspiracy and superstition

Conspiracy theories can be like the more malign aspects of cults. The success of such a process is that it can invoke so many beliefs in demonic forces out to get us that we flock to the guru for protection and salvation. This is the defining point of the success of the good -or bad - of a religious creed. Frighten enough people into believing in the Devil and they’ll buy anything you say. Conspiracy theories do this exact process, but in reverse. Scaring kiddies to death: They tell you the good guys are really demons and the only person to trust is yourself. Hence, instead of creating strength through meaning, they produce paranoia of unimaginable degrees. And by the time they’ve finished, there is absolutely nothing in the world to trust, for evil is all around, and you should be fearful. We’re conditioned for conspiracy from childhood. At school, kids form into gangs. The gangs have a secret, an initiation, and become a closed club. People outside the gang are suspect and cannot be trusted. At home, parents threaten the bogeyman. You want to go out? Well be careful of the pervert. Watch he doesn't get you. Don't take sweets from strangers. Don't talk to anyone you don’t know. There's a chance: We live in a mad world, made madder by the reality of chance. Things happen in the world that suggest order. Forever, the coincidence will come along and slap you down. When you least expect it you’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and wham! Coincidences produce just as many fortuitous events, but we forget them.

Pain is easier to remember than pleasure, and the fates are out to get you. The result of childhood, of coincidence, the after spill of religion, is a mind-set of insecurity, where the worst is expected, and we’re unlikely to be disappointed. And in this world the conspiracy theorist is king. He weaves his ink-filled wand, wraps his fears about your spine, and chills. You are his; you are the conspirator’s apprentice and live in a house of cards upon a foundation of sand.

Taser firing flying saucers now in production

Antoine di zazzo, identified by AFP as "one of the biggest Taser representatives" is developing a small airborne drone version of a weapon that can administer electrical jolts of 50,000 volts. The mini-flying saucer like drone will fire Taser stun rounds on criminal suspects or rioting crowds. He expects it to be launched next year and to be sold internationally by Taser. Taser stun guns are already in use world-wide, mainly in North America, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand. Additionally, and besides military use, we've also seen police departments around the world testing drone technology, such as the recent and controversial discovery that police in Houston had been secretly testing spy drones carrying high-powered cameras. It's not too hard to imagine the two technologies merged. The AFP reports that TASER could soon be big in France. French President Nicolas Sarkozy's "no-nonsense law and order tactics are one reason why the engineer businessman is confident of huge demand for the gun, despite controversy over its use in North America and being declared a form of torture by a UN committee." The UN committee delivered it's verdict last week after examining Portuguese police force's adoption of the TaserX26, described as a weapon with "proven risks of harm or death" by an expert. The committee's statement said: "The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use.

" Amnesty International even stated that there have been about 300 new deaths around the world after Taser use and has called for it to be suspended while a full investigation into the impact is conducted. Despite this, di Zazzo says that no death has been attributed to the use of the tasers and that the controversy is caused by misunderstanding the technology. He's been 'tasered' himself, more than 50 times and states he's never felt the worse for the ordeal.

Melting the ice in search of ancient microbes

Researchers from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica. The scientists will now examine the eons-old water for microorganisms, and then through novel genomic techniques, try to figure out how these tiny, living “time capsules” survived the ages in total darkness, in freezing cold and without food and energy from the sun. The research, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and is part of the International Polar Year, is designed to provide insight into how organisms adapted to live in extreme environments. “It's some of the coolest stuff I have ever worked on,” said Craig Cary, professor of marine biosciences at UD. “We are going to gain access to the genetics of organisms isolated for possibly as long as 15 million years.” The collaborative research team includes Cary and doctoral student Julie Smith from UD's College of Marine and Earth Studies; project leader Brian Lanoil, assistant professor of environmental sciences at the University of California at Riverside, and doctoral student James Gosses; and Philip Hugenholtz and postdoctoral fellows Victor Kunin and Brian Rabkin at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute. Last week in Lanoil's laboratory in California, segments of a tube-like ice core were thawed under meticulous, “clean lab” conditions to prevent accidental contamination, a process that required nearly a year of preparation. “It was very exciting to see the Vostok ice, knowing how old it is and how much it took to get that ice to the lab,” Smith said.

“The ice core itself was incredibly clear and glasslike, reflecting the light like a prism.” The segments of ice were cut from an 11,866-foot ice core drilled in 1998 through a joint effort involving Russia, France and the United States. The core was taken from approximately two miles below the surface of Antarctica and 656 feet (200 meters) above the surface of Lake Vostok and has since been stored at -35 degrees C at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver.

Keepers of the lost ark?

"They shall make an ark of acacia wood," God commanded Moses in the Book of Exodus, after delivering the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. And so the Israelites built an ark, or chest, gilding it inside and out. And into this chest Moses placed stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, as given to him on Mount Sinai. Thus Jews came to revere the ark as an earthly manifestation of God. The Old Testament describes its enormous powers—blazing with fire and light, halting rivers, blasting away armies and bringing down the fabled walls of Jericho. (Steven Spielberg's 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark provides a special-effects approximation.) According to the First Book of Kings, King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem to house the ark. It was venerated there during Solomon's reign (c. 970-930 B.C.) and beyond. Then it vanished. Much of Jewish tradition holds that it disappeared before or while the Babylonians sacked the temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C. But through the centuries, Ethiopian Christians have claimed that the ark rests in a chapel in the small town of Aksum, in their country's northern highlands. It arrived nearly 3,000 years ago, they say, and has been guarded by a succession of virgin monks who, once anointed, are forbidden to set foot outside the chapel grounds until they die. One of the first things that caught my eye in Addis Ababa, the country's capital, was an enormous concrete pillar topped by a giant red star—the sort of monument to communism still visible in Pyongyang.

The North Koreans built this one as a gift for the Derg, the Marxist regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991 (the country is now governed by an elected parliament and prime minister). In a campaign that Derg officials named the Red Terror, they slaughtered their political enemies—estimates range from several thousand to more than a million people. The most prominent of their victims was Emperor Haile Selassie, whose death, under circumstances that remain contested, was announced in 1975.

Mankind 'shortening the universe's life'

Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our very ability to study the heavens may have shortened the inferred lifetime of the cosmos. That does not mean the field of astronomy does direct harm. A universe with a truncated lifespan may come hand in hand with the ability of astronomers to make cosmological measurements, according to two American scientists who have studied the strange, subtle and cosmic implications of quantum mechanics, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang. But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that quantum systems can exist in many different physical configurations at the same time. By observing the system, however, we may pick out one single 'quantum state', and therefore force the system to change its configuration.They often illustrate their concerns about what the theory means in this respect with mind-boggling experiments, notably Schrodinger's cat in which, thanks to a fancy experimental set up, the moggy is both alive and dead until someone decides to look, when it either carries on living, or dies.

That is, by one interpretation (by another, the universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead one.)

Hamilton man may have 3 extra kidneys

A Hamilton man has just found out he could have five kidneys, instead of the usual two. Brigham Nordstrom, 28, a law student, made the discovery on Monday when he was admitted to Waikato Hospital with a kidney infection. "The doctors took a scan. Then I had to get a second one done, they wanted to have another look." Doctors had found one duplex kidney and one triplex kidney. Instead of having one tube or ureter joining each kidney to the bladder, Mr Nordstrom had two tubes on the left and three on the right. Accordingly, the duplex kidney has two parts and the triplex has three parts, meaning it is quite likely Mr Nordstrom has five kidneys altogether. Despite his highly unusual innards, Mr Nordstrom said that for 27 years he never knew any difference. He is now awaiting an MRI scan to confirm the multiple kidneys, but doctors have told him there is nothing wong with having extra ureters. He and his wife, who have a seven-month-old daughter, said urology doctors told them there was nothing to worry about and his health would be unaffected. "They just said he was a bit more interesting than the normal man," wife Leianne said. Her husband would not be donating any of the extra parts.

"He's a generous guy but he wouldn't have contemplated that and neither has it been asked of him. [Doctors] said any type of surgery has complications." Mr Nordstrom said he was preparing for "a bit of ribbing" from his family and friends about the discovery. "One of my brothers has such a big appetite that he's been joking about having three stomachs."

1963: an enduring mystery

1963: President Kennedy is assassinated as his motorcade passes through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Texas Gov. John Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy, is seriously wounded. The Warren Commission, set up by order of President Johnson to investigate the assassination, concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, firing from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Although the report was widely accepted at first, skepticism grew as more information concerning possible conspiracies leaked out. Oswald denied having anything to do with the shooting at all, let alone being part of any conspiracy, but he was killed -- and silenced -- two days after the assassination while in the custody of Dallas police. That, coupled with the FBI's miserable handling of the initial investigation, did nothing to quell the suspicions of those who believed Kennedy's assassination was the work of (pick one, or more than one): the CIA, Johnson, the mob, Fidel Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, J. Edgar Hoover. Whether the shooter was acting alone or as part of a bigger conspiracy may never be known. Most of the available evidence, such as the Warren Commission Report, is inconclusive. But the other big assertion -- that Oswald (or whoever the Book Depository gunman was) had help from shooters on the ground -- has never been adequately supported by hard evidence, either. The so-called "grassy knoll" theory maintains that there was one, and possibly two, gunmen at ground level in Dealey Plaza.

A number of eyewitnesses claimed to have heard gunfire coming from the grassy knoll, but nobody actually saw a gunman and no shells were ever recovered. The Warren Report, basing its findings on the autopsy and forensics reports, concluded that two bullets struck Kennedy. They came from the same weapon, a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano military rifle of Italian manufacture that was later recovered at the Book Depository. Three shots were fired, all from above and behind the target.

Expert tries to identify mystery bird

More sightings of a huge flying creature, originally reported by KENS, have prompted an investigation to determine if it is a monster or myth. "Even though it was dark, the thing itself was black. The blackest I'd ever seen," said Frank Ramirez. Years ago, Ramirez thought he was after a prowler in the back of his mother's Southwest Side home. But what greeted him on the garage rooftop still gives him goosebumps now. "That's when the thing up there turned to me, and it was in a perched state, and it started to turn," he said. "It started to move its arms and this giant blackness was just coming out. At that point, I dropped the stick and I ran." Ramirez sketched a drawing of the large, bird-like creature. The image is disturbing, and similar to dozens of sightings across San Antonio and South Texas. "If you were to take a man's face and pull his chin down, just like a stretched face," said Ramirez. "I was just terrified and as I was running. I just thought it was going to carry me off or something." An earlier KENS story about a large, prehistoric-like bird drew more than 100,000 hits on MySanAntonio.com. More than a few people in San Antonio came forward to say they'd seen the creature, too. One woman contacted KENS by e-mail, saying that because of our story, she now knows she's not crazy. KENS caught up with cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.

Gerhard recently wrote a book, called "Modern Sightings of Flying Monsters" on the large, dark birds. "When investigating mystery animals, it's important to point out that there are vast areas of land, even here in South Texas, that remain uninhabited," said Gerhard. "If an animal like big bird does exist, it certainly needs some habitat, somewhere to hide.

What space telescopes of tomorrow will see

Giant-sized telescopes such as Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra offer unprecedented views of the cosmos, but astronomers are eager to put more powerful tools into orbit around the Earth. Without the extra help, said Rachel Somerville, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, it may be impossible to resolve some of the universe's greatest mysteries. "We need better observations to make our models better," Somerville said, noting her search to understand galaxy formation and mysterious quasars. "... If you just put theorists in a room for the next 15 years with the biggest supercomputer you can find, it will never happen." NASA expects the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to launch in 2013, and many scientists are already pondering their future observations of tiny extrasolar planets, elusive black holes and distant galactic arms. Somerville and other astronomers laid bare their sky-watching hopes—including telescopes beyond JWST—at the recent Astrophysics 2020 conference, sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and held at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. JWST will boast a segmented mirror nearly 21 feet (6.4 meters) in diameter, which has seven times the light-collecting area of Hubble. Somerville thinks the sensitive infrared observatory will be crucial for understanding galaxy formation. "If you don't have a high enough resolution, galaxies you're trying to observe are going look like fuzzy blobs," Somerville said.

"Seeing the star-filled arms of galaxies in detail, for example, can tell us how some galaxies evolved." And the higher the resolution, the further a telescope can see back in time, as light can take millions or billions of years to reach Earth. While Somerville said NASA's next "great observatory" will deliver unprecedented views of galactic arms, she thinks the telescope could use some help to speed along other cosmic discoveries.

'Dark energy' may mean the end of the universe

Astronomers may have unwittingly hastened the end of the Universe by simply looking at it, according to a theory reported in next Saturday's New Scientist. The novel idea is being aired by two US physicists, who attack the notion that the Universe, believed to have been created in the "Big Bang" some 13.7 billion years ago, will go on, well, forever. In fact, the poor old cosmos is in a rather delicate state, they say. Until recently, a common idea was that the energy unleashed in the Big Bang happened when a "false vacuum" - a bubble of high energy with repulsive gravity - broke down into a safe, zero-energy "ordinary" vacuum. But recent evidence has emerged that places a cosmic question-mark over this cosy thought. For one thing, cosmologists have discovered that the Universe is still expanding. And, they believe, a strange, yet-to-be-detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the Universe, which would explain why the sum of all the visible sources of energy fall way short of what should be out there. Dark energy, goes the thinking, is a result of the Big Bang and is accelerating the Universe's expansion. If so, the Universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another "false vacuum" state that may abruptly decay again - and with cataclysmic consequences. The energy shift from the decay would destroy everything in the Universe, "wiping the slate clean," says Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The good news is: the longer the Universe survives, the better the chance that it will mature into a stable state. We are just beyond the crucial switching point, believes Krauss.

The bad news is: the quantum effect, a truly weird aspect of physics that says whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock. Krauss and colleague James Dent point to measurements of light from supernovae in 1998 that provided the first evidence of dark energy. These measurements may have reset the decay clock of the "false vacuum" back to zero, back before the switching point and to a time when the risk of catastrophic decay was greater than now, say Dent and Krauss.

Shadow world - dimensions in space

In a school of thought that teaches the existence of extra dimensions, Juan Maldacena may at first sound a little out of place. String theory is physicists' still-tentative strategy for reconciling Einstein's theory of gravitation with quantum physics. Its premise is that the subatomic particles that roam our three-dimensional world are really infinitesimally thin strings vibrating in nine dimensions. According to Maldacena, however, the key to understanding string theory is not to add more dimensions but to cut their number down. In his vision, the mathematical machinery of strings completely translates into a more ordinary quantum theory of particles, but one whose particles would live in a universe without gravity. Gravity would be replaced by forces similar to the nuclear forces that prevailed in the universe's first instants. And this would be a universe with fewer dimensions than the realm inhabited by strings. Just as a hologram creates the illusion of the third dimension by scattering light off a 2-D surface, gravity and the however many dimensions of space could be a higher-dimensional projection of a drama playing out in a flatter world. In physics parlance, the two theories would be dual to each other—two mathematically equivalent languages for describing the same reality. Physicists could study each phenomenon using whichever language that makes it easier to understand. Maldacena first presented his conjecture in November 1997, and it quickly became a leading theme in string theory research.

Ten years later, physicists still don't have proof of it, though many have tried and thousands of papers have been written. But hints have been accumulating, and recently experts have found "very strong evidence" that the conjecture is true, says Maldacena, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Meanwhile, the work by Maldacena and others has helped clarify a nagging paradox about black holes, gravity's most extreme phenomena, by translating the problem into ordinary quantum theory.

Man-sized sea scorpion claw found

The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers. The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports. The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp. The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says. The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human. Overall, it exceeds the record for any other sea scorpion (eurypterid) find by nearly 50cm. The eurypterids are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of modern land scorpions and possibly all arachnids (the class of animals that also includes spiders). "The biggest scorpion today is nearly 30cm so that shows you how big this creature was," said Dr Simon Braddy from the University of Bristol, UK. It was one of Dr Braddy's co-authors, Markus Poschmann, who made the discovery in the quarry near Prum in south-west Germany. "I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realised there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab," he recalled. "After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw. Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out. "The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together.

It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilise it." Super-sized meals: The species existed during a period in Earth history when oxygen levels in the atmosphere were much higher than today. The fossil was locked in a siltstone from the Carboniferous Period And it was those elevated levels, some palaeo-scientists believe, that may have helped drive the super-sized bodies of many of the invertebrates that existed at that time - monster millipedes, *spam filter*roaches, and jumbo dragonflies.

Long-lost cave of Rome's founders discovered

Italian archaeologists believe they have found the cave where, according to legend, a wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome. An underground cavity decorated with seashells, mosaics and pumice stones was discovered near the ruins of the palace of Emperor Augustus on the Palatine hill. Experts say they are "reasonably certain" it is the long-lost place of worship sacred to ancient Romans and known as Lupercale, from the Latin word for wolf. "This could reasonably be the place bearing witness to the myth of Rome, one of the most well-known in the world, the legendary cave where the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, saving them from death," said Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, presenting the discovery. The cave was found several metres underground in a previously unexplored area during restoration work on the palace of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Archaeologists investigating Renaissance descriptions of the sanctuary used a camera probe and the images suggest the vault, which has a white eagle at the centre, is well-preserved. "You can imagine our amazement, we almost screamed," said Professor Giorgio Croci, the head of the archaeological team working on the restoration of the Palatine hill overlooking the Roman forum, told a news conference. According to the myth, Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the god Mars, were abandoned by the banks of the river Tiber where a wolf found them and fed them with her milk. The brothers are said to have founded Rome at the site on April 21, 753 BC and ended up fighting over who should be in charge.

Romulus killed Remus and became the first king of Rome. Archaeologists said the location of the cave reinforced their belief that it was the Lupercale. "It is clear that Augustus... wanted his residence to be built in a place which was sacred for the city of Rome," said Croci. The emperor had

Is the answer 2,397,207,667,966,701 ?

French "mathlete" Alexis lemaire showed off his rare mental agility Thursday, claiming a new world record after working out in his head the 13th root of a random 200-digit number in just 72.4 seconds. Lemaire, a 27-year-old doctoral student in artificial intelligence from Reims, near Paris, sat at a laptop computer that randomly selected the figure and displayed it on the screen. The number was so long it ran over 17 lines. Lemaire, who says he doesn't consider himself a nerd or a geek, then took just over a minute to identify two quadrillion, 397 trillion, 207 billion, 667 million, 966 thousand, 701 as the 13th root. In other words, the number multiplied by itself 13 times produces the 200 digit number originally generated by the computer. Complex numbers: "The first digit is very easy, the last digit is very easy, but the inside numbers are extremely difficult," said the mental gymnast after the performance at the New York Hall of Science a hands-on science centre in New York City, US. Lemaire, who sports a beard and glasses under thickly-matted eyebrows and a furrowed brow, previously performed the feat in 77 seconds and has been working at the 13th root problem for years, repeatedly eroding his best time. "I use an artificial intelligence system which I use on my own brain instead of on a computer," he explained, matter-of-factly. "Personally, I believe most people can do it but I have also a high-speed mind. My brain works sometimes very, very fast." Lemaire said he first realised he had a knack for numbers when he was around 11 years old, but perhaps surprisingly he did not do well in maths at school.

"I was not top of the class. I was an autodidact, mostly by books," he said. He practices regularly and jogs every day, doesn't drink coffee or alcohol and avoids foods that are high in sugar or fat -to help him think faster. "I use a process to improve my skills, to behave like a computer. When I do something wrong, I learn from that," he says. "It's like running a program in my head."

Paranormal researchers create new device

The Association for the Study of Unexplained Phenomenon (ASUP, Inc) a non-profit 501©(3) research and educational corporation dealing with the paranormal and dedicated to the study of theories concerning the survival of the human consciousness after death, has announced today that their research and development staff has completed work on a prototype device similar to what is commonly called FRANK’s BOX, after its original inventor, Frank Sumption, that has been claimed to be a working, “telephone to the dead.” The ASUP began fabricating their device after they learned that the original “box” would not be made available for serious research by groups like their own.Almost a year in the making, the R&D team at ASUP now say that their box outperforms the original devices; preliminary testing suggests that the new box does appear to create coherent words and phrases, in fact team engineer Ron Ricketts has reported that while still working on the device on a work bench with the system running, the speaker said his own name very clearly on three separate occasions. The group however is making no advanced claims for what they now call the Mini Box, except to say they will begin field testing of the unit and that it will be made available to anyone seriously interested in studying it.

The Mini Box has a U.S. patent pending.The ASUP’s Director of Operations, April Slaughter has explained that the group is not in the business of selling technology, but that the Mini Box will be made available to anyone interested by the first of the year, through a separate company that specializes in high tech gear for paranormal investigators. She indicated that the units will be sold at as close to the cost of manufacturing them as possible.Slaughter will be introducing the box at this year’s TAPS outing to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado on the weekend of November 16th, where she will allow investigators to use a prototype unit. She again cautioned that the ASUP is making no wild claims about the device, except to say that it functions perfectly and that they have had great results from limited testing in the lab.Anyone wishing to learn more about the Mini Box may contact ASUP Coordinator, Rick Moran, who will be more than happy to set up interviews to discuss the device for interested media. Mr. Moran can be reached toll free at 866-396-9132 or via e-mail at rick-moran@asup-inc.org.

Wormholes on Earth?

According to a group of mathematicians, it may be possible to create devices with internal tunnels that are invisible to detection by electromagnetic waves—wormholes, in a sense. The group discusses the idea in a paper published in the October 29 online edition of Physical Review Letters. The scientists say that by custom designing the values of two parameters that describe electromagnetic (EM) materials, the electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability, around and inside a cylinder, a novel optical device could be produced. Essentially, most of the device would be invisible to detection by external EM radiation of a certain frequency, with only the ends of the cylinder being visible and accessible to the EM waves. “The chosen values for the permittivity and permeability would cause the coating to manipulate EM waves in a way that is not seen in nature,” explained University of Rochester mathematician Allan Greenleaf, one of the paper's authors, to PhysOrg.com. Permittivity is a measure of a material's readiness to become electrically polarized in response to an applied electric field (how well it “permits” the field). Permeability describes how magnetized a material becomes when a magnetic field is applied. Modern EM materials known as metamaterials allow theoretical designs, such as a wormhole, to be physically constructed, at least in principle. Greenleaf and his colleagues, Yaroslav Kurylev of University College in London, Matti Lassas of the Helsinki University of Technology, and Gunther Uhlmann of the University of Washington, use the word “wormhole” in more of a mathematical sense than physical.

That is, the devices would act as wormholes from the viewpoint of Maxwell's equations, the four fundamental equations that describe the relationship between electric fields, magnetic fields, electric charge, and electric current. For any other frequencies than those for which the permittivity and permeability were designed, the tunnel region would look roughly like a solid cylinder.

Incredible comet bigger than the Sun

A comet that has delighted backyard astronomers in recent weeks after an unexpected eruption has now grown larger than the sun. The sun remains by far the most massive object in the solar system, with an extended influence of particles that reaches all the planets. But the comparatively tiny Comet Holmes has released so much gas and dust that its extended atmosphere, or coma, is larger than the diameter of the sun. The comparison is clear in a new image. "It continues to expand and is now the largest single object in the solar system," according to astronomers at the University of Hawaii. The coma's diameter on Nov. 9 was 869,900 miles (1.4 million kilometers), based on measurements by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. They used observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The sun's diameter, stated differently by various sources and usually rounded to the nearest 100, is about 864,900 miles (1.392 million kilometers). Separately, a new Hubble Space Telescope photo of the comet reveals an intriguing bow-tie structure around its nucleus. The comet's coma—mostly microscopic particles—shines by reflecting sunlight. See for yourself Holmes is still visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy star anytime after dark, high in the northeast sky. You can find it by using this sky map. It is faintly visible from cities, and from dark country locations is truly remarkable. "Right now, in a dark sky it appears as a very noticeable circular cloud," said Joe Rao, SPACE.com's Skywatching Columnist.

Rao advises looking for the comet this weekend, before the moon becomes more of a factor. The comet will likely diminish in brightness yet remain visible for the next two to three weeks, he said. "Over the next few weeks and months, the coma and tail are expected to expand even more while the comet will fade as the dust disperses," Stevenson and her colleagues write.

Explanation of mysterious 'Tianchi monster'

A senior researcher from the National Academy of Science of The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said the "Tianchi monster" a Chinese photographer caught on film last month is probably the mutated offspring of trout stocked by the North Korea 40 years ago. 77-year-old Kim Li-tae said during an interview with the Choson Shinbo, a newspaper published by the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, that he was one of the North Korean researchers who released nine trout into Tianchi Lake, located on Changbai Mountain, on July 30, 1960. At a later date they released other species of fish such as carp and mosquito fish into the lake. Generally fish cannot survive in a lake created by volcanic activity, but the Korean researchers have proven through experiments that fish can be transplanted live into the lake. Fish stocked by the researchers could survive by eating insects and other creatures blown to the lake by strong winds. The fish mutate during growth and form new varieties, so the trout they stocked might now be called "Tianchi trout," Kim said. In 2000, the Korean researchers did experimental tests on "Tianchi trout" found in shoal waters that measured 85 centimeters in length and weighed 7.

7 kilos, but they've never been able to test trout from the deeper waters of Tianchi Lake. The "Tianchi monster" that Chinese photographer Zhuo Yongsheng, who works for a local TV station run by the administration office of the nature reserve at Mount Changbaishan, Jilin Province captured on film last month, might be a "Tianchi trout" from the deep of the lake, Kim said.

Did NSA put a secret backdoor in encryption ?

Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry about a new random-number standard that includes an algorithm that is slow, badly designed and just might contain a backdoor for the National Security Agency. Generating random numbers isn't easy, and researchers have discovered lots of problems and attacks over the years. A recent paper found a flaw in the Windows 2000 random-number generator. Another paper found flaws in the Linux random-number generator. Back in 1996, an early version of SSL was broken because of flaws in its random-number generator. With John Kelsey and Niels Ferguson in 1999, I co-authored Yarrow, a random-number generator based on our own cryptanalysis work. I improved this design four years later -- and renamed it Fortuna -- in the book Practical Cryptography, which I co-authored with Ferguson. The U.S. government released a new official standard for random-number generators this year, and it will likely be followed by software and hardware developers around the world. Called NIST Special Publication 800-90 (.pdf), the 130-page document contains four different approved techniques, called DRBGs, or "Deterministic Random Bit Generators." All four are based on existing cryptographic primitives. One is based on hash functions, one on HMAC, one on block ciphers and one on elliptic curves. It's smart cryptographic design to use only a few well-trusted cryptographic primitives, so building a random-number generator out of existing parts is a good thing.

But one of those generators -- the one based on elliptic curves -- is not like the others. Called Dual_EC_DRBG, not only is it a mouthful to say, it's also three orders of magnitude slower than its peers. It's in the standard only because it's been championed by the NSA, which first proposed it years ago in a related standardization project at the American National Standards Institute.

Dinosaur found with vacuum mouth

Perhaps it was one of those eureka moments, when the scientists realized they had discovered a new dinosaur with mouth parts designed to vacuum up food. The 110 million-year-old plant eater, discovered in the Sahara Desert, was to be unveiled Thursday by the National Geographic Society.Discoverer Paul Sereno named the elephant-sized animal Nigersaurus taqueti, an acknowledgment of the African country Niger and a French paleontologist, Philippe Taquet. Sereno, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence and paleontologist at the University of Chicago, said the first evidence of Nigersaurus was found in the 1990s and now researchers have been able to reconstruct its skull and skeleton.While Nigersaurus' mouth is shaped like the wide intake slot of a vacuum, it has something lacking in most cleaners -- hundreds of tiny, sharp teeth to grind up its food.The 30-foot-long Nigersaurus had a feather-light skull held close to the ground to graze like an ancient cow. Sereno described it as a younger cousin of the North American dinosaur Diplodicus.Its broad muzzle contained more than 50 columns of teeth lined up tightly along the front edge of its jaw. Behind each tooth more were lined up as replacements when one broke off.Using CT scans the researchers were able study the inside of the animal's skull where the orientation of canals in the organ that helps keep balance disclosed the habitual low pose of the head, they reported. More science newsAncient, legless crab discovered Big waddling dinosaur discovered Tiny dinosaur was ready to fly Nigersaurus also had a backbone consisting of more air than bone."The vertebrae are so paper-thin that it is difficult to imagine them coping with the stresses of everyday use — but we know they did it, and they did it well," Jeffrey Wilson, assistant professor at the University of Michigan and an expedition team member, said in a statement.

The dinosaur's anatomy and lifestyle were to be detailed in the Nov. 21 issue of journal PLoS ONE, the online journal from the Public Library of Science, and in the December of National Geographic magazine.The first bones of Nigersaurus were picked up in the 1950s by French paleontologists, but the species was not named at that time.

What's in your genes?

You may not know it, but you're part virus. At least, some of your genes come from viruses that slipped their DNA into the genes of our primate ancestors millions of years ago. The DNA remnants of these ancient "retroviruses," distant relatives of today's HIV, account for an estimated 8 percent of the human genetic code and may have enabled master genes that account for some of the differences between us and our chimpanzee relatives. Master genes: Not all genes are created equal; the master genes can turn the others on and off, thus gaining control over genes related to cell division, DNA repair and programmed cell death. (This regulation of genes allows for tighter control of gene expression (i.e. which genes are turned on or off), which can account for the wide differences between humans and other apes, despite our very similar genetic codes. One such gene, called p53, has the job of coordinating the surveillance system that monitors the well-being of cells. It is so important in this job that when it fails, cancer is often the result—biologists even call it the "guardian of the genome.

" Scientists had long wondered how genes such as p53 built their powerful empire over other genes. A new study detailed this week in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences implicates the ancient retroviruses as the force behind p53's rise to power.

Eco-ruin 'felled early society'

One of Western Europe's earliest known urban societies may have sown the seeds of its own downfall, a study suggests. Mystery surrounded the fall of the Bronze Age Argaric people in south-east Spain - Europe's driest area. Data suggests the early civilisation exhausted precious natural resources, helping bring about its own ruin. The study provides early evidence for cultural collapse caused - at least in part - by humans meddling with the environment, say researchers. It could also provide lessons for modern populations living in water-stressed regions. The findings were based on pollen preserved in a peat deposit located in the mountains of eastern Andalucia, Spain. The researchers drilled a sediment core from the Canada del Gitano basin high up in Andalucia's Sierra de Baza region. Sediment cores were drilled from peat deposits By studying the abundances of different pollen types - along with other indicators - preserved in sedimentary deposits, researchers can reconstruct what kind of vegetation covered the area in ancient times. They can compile a pollen sequence, which shows how vegetation changed over thousands of years. This can give them clues to how human settlement and climate affected ecosystems. Copper objects like this axe were common until the Argaric era The Argaric culture emerged in south-eastern Spain 4,300 years ago. This civilisation, which inhabited small fortified towns, was one of the first in Western Europe to adopt bronze working.

But about 3,600 years ago, the culture mysteriously vanished from the archaeological record. "Archaeologists are convinced that something happened in the ecological structure of the area just prior to the collapse of the Argaric culture," said Jose Carrion, from the University of Murcia, Spain. "But we previously lacked a high-resolution record to support this.

New african ape fossil discovered

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: The fossil of an ape that lived 10 million years ago could hold clues to the dawn of human evolution. The ancient ape appears to be a close relative of the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimps and humans, according to a Kenyan-Japanese team. The lower jaw bone and 11 teeth, found in volcanic mud deposits in northern Kenya, are unveiled in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fossils from this critical time period in primate evolution are very rare. Genetic studies suggest that the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees went along their separate pathways of evolution about five million to seven million years ago. But until now there has been very little fossil evidence unearthed in Africa from the middle-to-late Miocene Epoch (12 to 7 million years ago), when gorillas, chimps and humans shared a common ancestor. This has led some experts to propose that apes migrated out of Africa to Europe and Asia, only returning much later. Study leader Yutaka Kunimatsu of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute said the latest findings contradicted the so-called "out of Europe" theory. "Now, we have a good candidate in Africa," he said. "We do not need to think the common ancestor came back from Eurasia to Africa. I think it is more likely the common ancestor evolved from the apes in the Miocene in Africa." Hard diet: The team plans to return to the eastern edge of the Rift valley in Kenya next year to search for more fossils. Two of the fossil teeth From the evidence available - a partial lower jaw and 11 teeth - they have pieced together clues to the ape's dentition and diet.

"The teeth were covered in thick enamel and the caps were low and voluminous, suggesting that the diet of this ape consisted of a considerable amount of hard objects, like nuts or seeds, and fruit," said Dr Kunimatsu. "We only have some jaw fragments and some teeth... but we hope to find other body parts in our future research," he added.

Mystery growths plague "tree man"

An Indonesian man whose body is covered with extraordinary tree-like growths has spoken of his hope that an American doctor will cure his unique condition and help him rebuild his family life. Dede, now 35, baffled medical experts when warty "roots" began growing out of his arms and feet after he cut his knee in a teenage accident. Sacked from his job and deserted by his wife, Dede has been unable to look after his two children Entang and Utis, who are now aged 16 and 18. They have been brought up apart from their farther by his extended family on the other side of their remote village south of the capital Jakarta. With Dede's condition considered life threatening, he had resigned himself to missing out on the remaining joys of fatherhood.But now a dermatology expert who flew out from the United States to examine his rare condition says that a course of synthetic Vitamin A should clear up most of the warts, and Dede is contemplating a transformed life. "I can't work, I can't provide money," Dede said. "I want to be able to take care of them [his children].

I hope to live long enough to see my grandchildren." After testing samples of the lesions and Dede's blood, Dr Gaspari of the University of Maryland concluded that his affliction is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a fairly common infection that usually causes small warts to develop on sufferers.

Science and the paranormal

We are all aware of science and what it means to the modern world, but how many really know the central reasons behind science, its overall methodology, or how it came about? In this post, I'll attempt to offer a glimmer of light. But in doing so, I want to highlight something else. Namely, science, today, is arriving at concepts that seem to invalidate the very processes of science itself. The discipline remains uneasy with this -perhaps because it would open up ‘truths' about the paranormal. Early ideas : The first awareness of science in a modern, western sense came from the ancient Greeks. Imbued with a curiosity about the world separate from the machinations of gods, a methodolgy was finally devised by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. To him, we should understand the world by a process of experience and observation separate to the old accepted ways of belief. Europe was to lose touch with Classical knowledge, with Christianity rising as the only, belief-based, system. Science proper was carried on by the Islamic world. However, the 11th century Reconquest of Spain caused a rediscovery of Classical texts as western minds began to study the libraries left behind as Islam retreated. Such alternative knowledge to the Bible put pressure on Christian intellectuals. Hence, when it was realised that Aristotelian cosmology agreed with the Bible on certain factors - a stationary Earth at the centre of the universe, for instance - some theologians attempted to place Classical knowledge within a Christian system.

Such intellectualism came to a head with St Thomas Aquinas, who theorised that there were two ways to understand God's Creation. We can work with revealed or natural theology. The former was our belief in God; the latter became the first official acceptance that man’s mind could work alongside God to understand the world. Philosophy: This attempt to allow a degree of science into the Medieval world was to prove a can of worms. For once an idea is out, it is hard to put back or hold at bay.

Ancient Peru temple, mural excavated

Carbon dating tests and excavation of a colorful pre-Incan temple indicate that it was built thousands of years ago by an advanced civilization, a prominent archaeologist said in comments published Sunday by a Peruvian newspaper. Unearthed in Peru's archeologically rich northern coastal desert, the temple has a staircase leading to an altar that was used for worshipping fire and making offerings to deities, Walter Alva, who headed the three-month excavation, told El Comercio. Some of the walls of the 27,000-square-foot site — almost half the size of a football field — were painted, and a white and red mural depicts a deer being hunted with a net. Alva said the temple was apparently constructed by an "advanced civilization" because it was built with mud bricks made from sediment found in local rivers, instead of rocks. "This discovery shows an architectural and iconographic tradition different from what has been known until now," said Alva, who discovered and is the museum director for another important pre-Incan find, the nearby Lords of Sipan Moche Tombs.

The carbon dating tests, conducted in the United States, indicate that the site is 4,000 years old, he claimed. The oldest known city in the Americas is Caral, also near the Peruvian coast, which researchers dated to 2627 B.C.

"I touched a UFO": ex-air force pilot

A group of former pilots who have recounted seeing strange phenomena in the sky has demanded the US government reopen an investigation into UFOs. Several pilots offered dramatic accounts of witnessing UFOs - including a transparent flying disc and a triangular craft with mysterious markings - as they insisted their questions needed to be taken seriously more than 30 years after the US file was closed. "We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms," said Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona and air force pilot who says he saw a UFO in 1997. "Instead our country needs to reopen its official investigation that it shut down in 1969," Symington said. "We believe that for reasons of both national security and flight safety, every country should make an effort to identify any object in its airspace," said a statement from the 19 former pilots and government officials from around the world. The subject of UFOs came up in a recent debate among US presidential candidates, with Democrat Dennis Kucinich saying he once saw a UFO - making him the object of ridicule and jokes by late night television comedians. Sceptics say UFO sightings are merely aircraft, satellites or meteors re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. But the retired pilots spoke to a sympathetic audience of UFO "believers" who heard them recall their encounters with seemingly other-worldly objects appearing out of the sky. "Nothing in my training prepared me for what we were witnessing," said James Penniston, a retired US Air Force pilot, as he described seeing and touching a UFO when he was stationed at a British air base in Woodbridge.

He said he saw an inexplicable triangular craft in a clearing in the woods with "blue and yellow lights swirling around the exterior". The UFO was "warm to the touch and felt like metal," Penniston said. One side of the craft had pictorial symbols and "the largest symbol was a triangle, which was centred in the middle of the others," he said.

Nasa told to solve 'UFO crash' x-file

For four decades, residents of the tiny Pennsylvania town of Kecksburg have told their story of strange blue lights in the sky one winter's evening and a fireball crashing into woods.On 9 December, 1965, they say, they saw armed soldiers cordoning off the area and a large metallic acorn-shaped object bearing strange hieroglyphics driven off at speed on the back of a lorry. They talk of menacing plain-clothes officials visiting homes and warning local people not to tell anyone of what they saw. Article continues Until now the US government has denied that anything sinister took place. It has maintained that a thorough search of the woods by the air force, the only federal agency to have acknowledged it was there, found nothing. But now Nasa has been ordered to examine its X-Files to solve the mystery.Steve McConnell, Nasa's public liaison officer, has admitted two boxes of papers from the time of the Kecksburg incident are missing. The episode has parallels to the 1947 Roswell incident, when a UFO was said to have landed in New Mexico.'For so many years, a lot of good people in Pennsylvania were told by their government that what they had to say was a lie or that they were hallucinating,' said Leslie Kean, a journalist who launched a lawsuit four years ago to force Nasa to open its archives.Washington judge Emmett Sullivan refused to accept Nasa's claim that the papers had been lost. He gave it until the end of the year to examine its records. 'Something came down that night,' said Kean.'Nasa has been stonewalling and now it's required to do the search it didn't do in the first place.

It's a victory for those patriotic people who didn't like being told that they were making things up.'Stan Gordon, a UFO investigator living close to the site, interviewed several witnesses. He said: 'It's interesting that [witnesses say] it was made of one solid piece of metal with no panels or rivets, and that it was moving relatively slowly and made almost a controlled landing.'I have no doubt the government knows a lot more about this than it has revealed to the public.

UN report: human cloning ban needed

The international community faces a stark choice: outlaw human cloning or prepare for the creation of cloned humans, U.N. researchers said Saturday. Previous attempts to reach a binding worldwide treaty foundered over divisions on whether to outlaw all cloning or permit cloning of cells for research. The best solution may be to ban human cloning, but to allow countries to conduct strictly controlled therapeutic research, including stem cell research, according to the report from the Japan-based United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies. Almost all countries oppose human cloning and more than 50 nations have introduced laws banning it. But lack of binding global legislation gives scientists an opening to create human clones in countries where bans do not exist. "Failure to outlaw reproductive cloning means it is just a matter of time until cloned individuals share the planet," said Brendan Tobin, a human rights lawyer who co-authored the report. "If failure to compromise continues, the world community must accept responsibility and ensure that any cloned individual receives full human rights protection," he said. Cloning research proponents argue it offers great hope for producing replacement tissue and the potential for a cure for diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes.

The report recommends permitting cloning cells for research - but not cloning aimed at duplicating a person or animal . It also calls for strict controls to prevent the uncontrolled production and destruction of embryos.

Inside the world's only plant-intelligence lab

Professor stefano Mancuso knows it isn't easy being green: He runs the world's only laboratory dedicated to plant intelligence. At the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV), about seven miles outside Florence, Italy, Mancuso and his team of nine work to debunk the myth that plants are low-life. Research at the modern building combines physiology, ecology and molecular biology. "If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us," says Mancuso, dressed in harmonizing shades of his favorite color: green. "Not only are they 'smart' in how they grow, adapt and thrive, they do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain." Plants have never been given their due in the order of things; they've usually been dismissed as mere vegetables. But there's a growing body of research showing that plants have a lot to contribute in fields as disparate as robotics and telecommunications. For instance, current projects at the LINV include a plant-inspired robot in development for the European Space Agency. The "plantoid" might be used to explore the Martian soil by dropping mechanical "pods" capable of communicating with a central "stem," which would send data back to Earth. The idea that plants are more than hanging decor at the dentist's office is not new. Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants -- on phototropism and vine behavior -- in 1880, but the concept of plant intelligence has been slow to creep into the general consciousness.

At the root of the problem: assuming that plants have, or should have, human-like feelings in order to be considered intelligent life forms, Mancuso says. Professor Mancuso blends in with the greenery. He touches a formerly neglected office plant. Photo: Nicole Martinelli After the folksy 1970s hit book and stop-motion film The Secret Life of Plants, which maintained, sans serious research, that greenery had feelings and emotions, the scientific community has avoided talking about smarty plants.

Clinton library releases files on UFOs

Under fire for its sluggish processing of files from President Clinton's White House, the National Archives released files and photographs yesterday responding to 14 Freedom of Information Act requests from members of the public. The records appear unlikely to contain any political bombshells, though there could be fodder for the tabloids. Many of the requests sought information about the Clinton White House's records on unidentified flying objects or UFOs. The files detail the predilection of one of Mr. Clinton's chiefs of staff, John Podesta, for the extraterrestrial-laden television series, "the X-Files." A listing of the newly-released files is available on the Web at - this link. In a recent court filing, the Clinton Library's acting director, Emily Robison, said it had 287 pending requests for information from the Clinton Library's archives. The responsive records could total 10.5 million pages, she said. So far, the library has released records in response to just 18 Freedom of Information Act requests, according to the library's Web site.

At a debate for Democratic presidential candidates last week, one of the moderators, Timothy Russert of NBC News, questioned Senator Clinton about her husband's decision to ask the library to consider for withholding certain records about Mrs. Clinton, as well as other files.

Mysterious grave robbery puzzles town

After she died in 1824 at the age of 30, Sarah Symonds rested in an out-of-the-way cemetery in the small town of Hillsborough, N.H., for nearly 200 years. But sometime around Halloween her sleep was disturbed. Someone dug up her coffin and her remains, leaving behind only a few shards of wood, a meticulously dug hole -- and a mystery for the local police. "It was dug in a very strange manner. It's perfect," said Hillsborough Police Chief Brian Brown. "You'd have to see it. The sides are all squared. The bottom's level." "We just don't have any answers right now," he said. Brown said the grave robbers had hit the Bible Hill Cemetery sometime between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. He said police were considering a number of possible theories in the case, including the possibility that the body was dug up by members of a satanic cult. Gilman Shattuck, 80, a resident who is active in the local historical society, said he had researched Symonds since the incident had hit the news and learned she was born on March 29, 1794. Her headstone listed June 18, 1824 as her date of death. She was never married. He said the small cemetery was in an isolated area of town with a stone wall around it and with probably 40 graves in it. The oldest grave goes back to the late 18th century.

Most are from the first or second decade of the 19th century, and a few are from the late 19th century. Chief Brown said grave robbers simply looking for valuables or a body wouldn't have had any reason to dig so neatly and would likely try to fill up the grave to avoid detection. "You're not going to waste time to square the corners," he said. "Why leave it open? Why dig it so meticulously? .

Peering into the heart of a black hole

Quantum mechanics might be capable of stripping bare a black hole to reveal the mysterious and unseeable 'singularity' that exists at its heart, say George Matsas and André da Silva of the São Paulo State University in Brazil. It has long been suspected that these singularities "where the known laws of physics break down" are always decorously veiled behind the 'event horizon', a boundary beyond which light cannot escape from the fearsome gravitational pull of a black hole. Theoretically, nothing within an event horizon can ever be perceived or investigated by an outside observer, because no light can escape. So the singularities remain insulated from the rest of the Universe. This amounts to what in 1969 physicist Roger Penrose called 'cosmic censorship', whereby the laws of physics conspire to save us from having to gaze on the unthinkable. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, in the middle of a black hole, its mass collapses in on itself to form an infinitely small, infinitely dense point, where space-time itself is punctured. Even causality " the relation of a cause and its effect " breaks down, which seems to defy not only physics but logic. "Penrose's motivation seemed to be to preserve the decorum of physics," Matsas says. But physicists have wondered whether event horizons are ever stripped away, leaving these absurdist singularities naked. One possibility, for example, is that the event horizon might vanish if a black hole spins very fast. Light and matter might then be flung out by centrifugal force.

"It is widely believed that quantum gravity will unveil the structure of the singularities."In September, physicists Arlie Petters of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Marcus Werner of the University of Cambridge, UK, proposed that singularities stripped naked by fast rotation should be detectable by astronomers because they act as very strong 'gravitational lenses', bending the light coming from stars behind them by their distortion of space-time.

Crater From 1908 Tunguska Blast Found

A team of scientists from the Marine Science Institute in Bologna claims to have found the crater left by the aerial blast of a comet or asteroid in 1908 in the Tunguska region of Siberia. The blast flattened 770 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of forest, but to date no remains or crater have been found. This has left open the question of what kind of object made the impact. The team believes that, contrary to previous studies, nearby Lake Cheko is only one century old and 'If the body was an asteroid, a surviving fragment may be buried beneath the lake. If it was a comet, its chemical signature should be found in the deepest layers of sediments.' The team's findings are based on a 1999 expedition to Tunguska and appeared in the August issue of the journal Terra Nova."

Largest extrasolar system discovered

A fifth planet has been discovered around a nearby star, making it the largest planetary system known outside our own. The planet appears to be a gas giant like Saturn, but scientists say any large moons it may have could potentially host life, since the planet lies in the "habitable" zone around its star, where liquid water can exist. The planet was discovered around a star called 55 Cancri that is about 41 light years away from Earth and is slightly cooler and dimmer than our own Sun. The 55 Cancri system was already known to include four other planets, including three giant planets that orbit the star closer than Mercury orbits the Sun. The fourth is four times as massive as Jupiter and orbits at about Jupiter's distance from the Sun. All of those planets were discovered by the way their gravity tugs on the parent star, a technique called the radial-velocity method. Now, astronomers have used the same method to discover a fifth planet that lies between the hot, close-in planets and the frigid distant one. The discovery was made by researchers led by Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University in California and Geoff Marcy of the University of California in Berkeley, both in the US. The new planet, called 55 Cancri f, orbits the star at a distance of 117 million kilometres, about 8% farther than Venus is from our Sun, putting it in the right zone for liquid water to exist. Watch an animation of an imaginary journey from our solar system to 55 Cancri, with a tour of the five-planet system that ends at the newly discovered planet in the star's habitable zone.

Beefy Neptune? But the planet itself probably does not boast the right conditions for life. That is because its mass is between that of Neptune and Saturn (or 45 times that of Earth), suggesting it has a gas-rich composition that is unfavourable for life as we know it. "We can only imagine that it might look something like a beefy Neptune-like planet or perhaps a Saturn-like planet with rings and moons around it," Fischer says.

Area 51's robotic spy bird

Those robo-dragonflies may not be the only creatures keeping an eye on you. For many years now intelligence agencies have been looking at drones disguised as birds. These days flapping-wing 'ornithopters' are not easy to tell apart from birds -take a look at this video of a robo-peregrine and some seagulls and see how long it takes you to spot the impostor. But even back in the 1970's you could build something that did a pretty good impression of a soaring bird seen from a distance. This was the CIA's 1970 Project Aquiline, one of those top-secret program carried out at Area 51. That's the only known model of it in the photo. The plane's mission was to intercept signals from deep inside enemy territory, hence the need for the bird camouflage. The project was headed by Lt Col John H. "Hank" Meierdierck, who tells the story in his online autobiography. The relationship with contractors McDonnell Douglas was the problem: The vehicle was a six foot long plane that had a small pusher prop and actually looked like an eagle or buzzard when it was in the air. It was designed to fly at very low levels along communications lines and intercept their messages. It also had a small television in the nose as an aid to navigation and to photograph targets of opportunity. There were several successful flights and some crashes [reason unknown] and some lousy landings. This small vehicle was launched from inclined rails and was recovered in a large net strung between two poles. Progress was passable, but then came budget time. The contractor predicts the amount of money needed since I did not have the intimate knowledge of the development expenses.

I had $11 million for the following year and I advised McDonnell of this fact and asked for the next years operating budget. They came back to me with a $110 million forecast. Ridiculous! I returned to HDQ and discussed it with the bosses and they suggested that I give them two weeks to adjust the amount and then to come to DC with the result and have Macdonald Douglas present their budget.

Ancient technology

In the early years of the 20th century an artifact was recovered from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. Dated to about 80BC, it was considered a mere artifact. However in 1971 research on the Antikythera Mechanism showed it to have an intricate arrangement of gears, dials and graded plates. One theory is that it was a computing device to work out the movement of the Sun and planets. If this idea is true, then the ancients had a degree of technology way above previously imagined. Mysterious mechanisms: This is further shown by a crystal skull found in 1927 belonging to the Maya civilisation of ancient Mexico. The skull is carved from a single block of quartz crystal. So perfect is the skull that it would have taken some 300 years to carve by known means of the time. If a light is placed below it, a prism in the mouth directs the light through the eyes, lighting up the skull. A further hint of advanced technology used by the ancients comes from the Baghdad Battery found in 1936. Said to be at least 2,000 years old, fruit juice was added to a replica and it produced half a volt of electricity. Archaeologist Flinders Petrie added to the controversy with his words on certain elements of ancient engineering. A most systematic and exacting man, he wasn’t prone to flights of fancy, but he noted grooves and inscriptions on pottery and other artifacts that could not have been produced by modern precision engineering techniques. Sounds good: Modern toolmaker Christopher Dunn suggested a possible explanation for such precision engineering.

He puts forward the possibility of the ancients using the vibrations produced by ultrasound. Just how sound could have been used is unknown, but as to its power, the singer Caruso was said to have shattered a wineglass by singing a certain note at the correct resonance. Could the ancients have had technology such as ultrasound that we know nothing about? Modern technology is based on certain principles discovered as we went along.