McGill University was unaware that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was funding the 1950s psychological experiments for which former patient Janine Huard is hoping to sue the federal government, say members of the school’s psychology department.
Huard, a 79-year-old Montreal woman, is waiting to hear whether she will be allowed to launch a lawsuit against the Canadian government for co-funding the research of Dr. Ewen Cameron, who used Huard as a guinea pig after she was admitted for treatment of postpartum depression.
“They did everything to me - insulin injections, lie detector tests, psychic driving, electroshock therapy - they ruined my life,” said Huard, who found herself subject to shaking and memory lapses, and also unable to care for her children, after the therapy.
According to Don Donderi, a psychology professor who investigated the matter in 1977, McGill’s administration was not aware of CIA funding at the time, and though Cameron’s research received funding from the CIA, it was not directed by the intelligence agency.
“Cameron probably thought what he was doing was within professional ethics,” Donderi said. “Whether it was bad research ( . . . ) is a different matter.”
He said that because the funding went through a CIA-funded institution at Cornell University called the Human Ecology Fund, Cameron was not aware of where the money was coming from.
“Because the funding went through the Ecology Fund, Cameron’s research had covert support from the CIA,” said Donderi.
A memorandum by the 1963 CIA Inspector General stated, “The annual grants and funds to these specialists were made under ostensible research foundation auspices, thereby concealing the CIA’s interest from the specialist’s institution.”
Cameron’s published work outlined his use of sedatives, insulin injections, sensory isolation and electroshock therapy, a treatment still used today.
His most controversial studies concerned “psychic driving,” a technique that involved sedating mentally-ill patients and playing them recordings of negative or positive statements to transform their self-images.
His report, The Effect of Long-Term Repetition of Verbal Signals, stated, “all (patient) changes could be brought about more readily if the repetition of verbal signals followed either prolonged sleep or ECT.”
Cameron’s research was brought to the attention of the CIA by the Human Ecology Fund, Donderi said. In the late 1940s, the CIA was interested in brainwashing, first as a tactic used by Communist bloc countries and then as a tactic that could be used against them, explained Donderi.
In 1994, 77 patients received $100,000 each from the Canadian federal government as compensation for being subjected to Cameron’s experiments. Patients were subject to psychic driving, funded by the CIA as an investigation into the possibilities of brainwashing.
Huard was one of more than 100 patients who were refused compensation because they were only “partially depatterned” rather than “fully depatterned.” According to her laywer Alan Stein, Huard is hoping to represent all of the rejected claimants in court, on the basis of a 2004 federal appeal court ruling that it was enough to be “substantially depatterned.”
Stein said more than 50 rejected claimants have contacted him to express their interest in compensation. [link]
Wednesday 31 January 2007
Former Patient Prepares To Sue For 1950s Brainwashing Experiments
Archaeologists Find Stonehenge Houses
Archaeologists say they have found a huge ancient settlement used by the people who built Stonehenge.
Excavations at Durrington Walls, near the legendary Salisbury Plain monument, uncovered remains of ancient houses.
People seem to have occupied the sites seasonally, using them for ritual feasting and funeral ceremonies.
In ancient times, this settlement would have housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain.
“In what were houses, we have excavated the outlines on the floors of box beds and wooden dressers or cupboards,” said archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University.
He said he based this on the fact that these abodes had exactly the same layout as Neolithic houses at Skara Brae in Orkney, which have survived intact because - unlike these dwellings - they were made of stone.
The researchers have excavated eight houses in total that belonged to the Durrington settlement. But they have identified many other probable dwellings using geophysical surveying equipment.
The archaeologists think there could have been at least one hundred houses.
Each one would have measured about 5m (16ft) square: “fairly pokey”, according to Professor Parker Pearson.
The dwellings were made of wood, with a clay floor and central hearth. The archaeologists found 4,600-year-old rubbish covering the floors of the houses.
“It is the richest - by that I mean the filthiest - site of this period known in Britain,” Professor Parker Pearson told BBC News.
The Sheffield University researcher thinks the settlement was probably not lived in all year round. Instead, he believes, Stonehenge and Durrington formed a religious complex used for funerary rituals.
Professor Parker Pearson believes it drew Neolithic people from all over the region, who came for massive feasts in the midwinter, where prodigious quantities of food were consumed. The bones were then tossed on the floors of the houses.
“The rubbish isn’t your average domestic debris. There’s a lack of craft-working equipment for cleaning animal hides and no evidence for crop-processing,” he said.
“The animal bones are being thrown away half-eaten. It’s what we call a feasting assemblage. This is where they went to party - you could say it was the first free festival.”
UFO over Honolulu...
"It's hard to draw a surfer's attention away from the next wave, but whatever was in the southwest sky Friday evening around 6:20 p.m. drew a crowd along Kewalo Basin and Ala Moana Beach Park.
Honolulu resident Peter Hollingworth described it as two lights circling in the sky, about 45 degrees above the horizon.
Video of one of the lights was recorded from the KHON 2 SkyCam.
“These two little fireballs with a stream behind it,” said Hollingworth. “Looked kind of like a shooting start but it just kept going. They changed directions a few times, at first it was coming in then it turned, then it went out then it came back in again"
Hollingworth was surfing with his 12 year old son when the unexpected show began.
“I was a little concerned. I told him come over and sit with me - this might be the last surf session we ever have together because this thing's coming straight for Honolulu. It looked deadly to me it was kind of spooky.”
So what was it?
The National Weather Service says nothing showed up on their radar at the time of the sighting and the Federal Aviation Administration didn't report anything unusual.
The U.S. military conducted a missile defense test off of Kauai Friday evening but the test didn't begin until 7:20 p.m.
“This in a sense is an unidentified flying object,” said University of Hawaii astronomy professor Gareth Wynn-Williams. “It's something in the sky that's moving that we haven't identified.”
Wynn-Williams believes there's a simple explanation behind the UFO’s.
“It's probably a contrail of some kind,” he said while watching video of one of the lights at his Kailua home.
The professor says contrails are caused by high flying airplanes burning hydrogen based fuels. One of the byproducts of the fuel exhaust is water.
“The air is very cold so the water condenses and forms like drops very quickly and then these drops stay behind the plane until eventually they warm up and they evaporate.”
Wynn-Williams doubts little green men from Mars are behind the UFO’s.
“Some people just think differently than scientists and they like to look for the fanciest most exciting explanation. Those people would like to think it's little green men, I think that's very unlikely."
According to published reports this is not the first time a UFO has grabbed the attention of Hawaii residents.
In December of 2004 an unexplained streak of light was captured by a camera on Haleakala moving southwest to northeast. No official explanation has been given for that UFO either."
Martians ‘Hiding’ On Red Planet?
Martians maybe hiding underground on Mars to stay alive, new research suggests. Aliens could have burrowed below the red planet's surface to avoid deadly radiation above.
Now scientists led by the University College London say probes need to drill deeper into the planet if they want to find signs of life.
Lewis Dartnell, lead author of UCL report, said: "Finding hints that life once existed - proteins, DNA fragments or fossils - would be a major discovery in itself.
"But the Holy Grail for astrobiologists is finding a living cell that we can warm up, feed nutrients and reawaken for studying.
"It just isn't plausible that dormant life is still surviving in the near-subsurface of Mars - within the first couple of metres below the surface - in the face of the ionizing radiation field."
Survival times near the surface reach only a few million years. This means that the chance of finding life with the current probes is slim.
Scientists will need to dig deeper and target very specific, hard-to-reach areas such as recent craters or areas where water has recently surfaced.
The team found that the best places to look for living cells on Mars would be within the ice at Elysium because the frozen sea is relatively recent - it is believed to have surfaced in the last FIVE million years.
Mr Dartnell said: "We have found that this suspected frozen sea in Elysium represents one of the most exciting targets for landing a probe, as the long-term survival of cells here is better than underground in icy rock.
"This could be crucial for the scientists and engineers planning future Mars missions to find life."
Unlike Earth, Mars is not protected by a global magnetic field or thick atmosphere and for billions of years it has been laid bare to radiation from space.
Video File: Former U.S. Navy Chief Saw UFO Pics
This is a brief video excerpt from an upcoming 90-minute Earthfiles.com Vodcast about an aerial disc technology described by government documents as "interplanetary," military attacks and UFO retaliations, and the strict American policy of denial about the UFO intelligences in the interest of national security. In the video clip, retired U.S. Navy Chief Yeoman, Thomas Colman Sheppard, describes the experience of seeing photographs and documents in a TOP SECRET/MAJIC file about extraterrestrial biological entities. Sheppard, who entered the U.S. Navy in September 1975, says he saw these files on Thanksgiving night in 1976 while visiting a classified vault at White Beach Naval Facility in Okinawa, Japan. He described the documents as old, probably from the 1930s or 1940s, and possibly the original Majestic-12 records of the Roswell UFO Incident investigations. Watch the Video.
Tuesday 30 January 2007
Skull Of ‘Hobbit’ Proves It Was A Different Species
The three-foot human "hobbit" who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores more than 13,000 years ago had a sophisticated brain which was rewired internally to compensate for its small size, a study has found.
An internal cast of the brain case shows that the hobbit possessed rare cranial features that would probably have conferred unusual intelligence on such a small creature, scientists said.
The findings pour cold water on the idea that the hobbit was not a new species of human but an ordinary person suffering from microcephaly, a disease that causes stunted growth and small brain size.
Ever since scientists announced in 2004 that they had discovered the skull and partial skeleton of a tiny human female on Flores, experts have argued about whether she belonged to new species of human or was just someone born with microcephaly.
The latest study confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that the Flores skull belongs to a new species who was probably intelligent enough to make and use the tiny stone tools found alongside the bones, said Professor Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee. "It's as definitive as it can be. We feel that we've answered the questions raised by the people who contend that the hobbit is a microcephalic," Professor Falk said. "People refused to believe that someone with a brain that small could make the tools. How could it be a sophisticated new species?"
The volume of the hobbit's brain is only 417 cubic centimetres, about a third of the size of a normal adult. Some scientists said that such a small brain would not be able to carry out the tasks of tool making and tool using associated with being human.
Monday 29 January 2007
Does our Sun have a dimmer switch ?
There's a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years - exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. So says a physicist who has created a computer model of our star's core.Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, modelled the effect of temperature fluctuations in the sun's interior. According to the standard view, the temperature of the sun's core is held constant by the opposing pressures of gravity and nuclear fusion. However, Ehrlich believed that slight variations should be possible.He took as his starting point the work of Attila Grandpierre of the Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, Grandpierre and a collaborator, G�bor �goston, calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce lo*spam filter*ed oscillations in temperature.Ehrlich's model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations. The favoured frequencies allow the sun's core temperature to oscillate around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years.
Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.These two timescales are instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with Earth's ice ages: for the past million years, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years. Before that, they occurred roughly every 41,000 years.Most scientists believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. One such cycle describes the way Earth's orbit gradually changes shape from a circle to a slight ellipse and back again roughly every 100,000 years. The theory says this alters the amount of solar radiation that Earth receives, triggering the ice ages. However, a persistent problem with this theory has been its inability to explain why the ice ages changed frequency a million years ago."In Milankovitch, there is certainly no good idea why the frequency should change from one to another," says Neil Edwards, a climatologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. Nor is the transition problem the only one the Milankovitch theory faces. Ehrlich and other critics claim that the temperature variations caused by Milankovitch cycles are simply not big enough to drive ice ages.
View: Full Article | Source: New Scientist
Carvings of ancient gladiators found
talian police have recovered ancient Roman marble reliefs depicting stunningly lifelike gladiators locked in mortal combat after unearthing the hidden cache of grave robbers, officials said Wednesday. The 12 panels were found buried in the garden of a private home near Fiano Romano, about 25 miles north of Rome, and officials hailed the find as a major archaeological discovery and a blow to the illegal antiquities market. The reliefs date to the late first century B.C. and are believed to have decorated a tomb, yet to be located, in the Roman settlement of Lucus Feroniae, said Anna Maria Moretti, the superintendent for antiquities in the area north of Rome. The pieces, made of high-quality Carrara marble, are notable for their size and age and are among the finest examples from their period depicting one of Rome's favorite blood sports, Moretti said. The panels show bare-chested fighters, armed with swords and shields, engaged in duels while surrounded by trumpet and horn players who accompanied the phases of combat in the bloodied arena.
In one of the most dramatic scenes, a gladiator steps on the wrist of a downed opponent who raises a finger in a traditional plea for mercy. The reliefs will undergo restoration before being shown to the public at Rome's Villa Giulia Museum, officials said. Archaeologists have unearthed many similar representations, but interest in the new discovery goes beyond its craftsmanship, Moretti said.
View: Full Article | Source: Azstarnet.com
UFO Crash in Central Iran
Reliable sources indicate An Unidentified Flying Object crashed in Barez Mounts in the central province of Kerman early January 2007. Deputy Governor General of Kerman province Abulghassem Nasrollahi told that the crash which was followed by an explosion and a thick spiral of smoke has caused no casualties or damage to properties.
He further denied earlier reports that the explosion has been the result of a plane or chopper crash, reminding that all the passing aircrafts have been reported as sound and safe.
The official further stated that investigations are underway by police and other relevant authorities in this regard.
While other reports spoke of meteors, Nasrollahi said there were no conclusive witnesses in this regard but he did not dismiss the possibility that the crash has been caused by a meteor.
Eye-witnesses assure that the explosion has been caused as a result of the crash of a radiant unidentified flying object onto the ground.
Meantime, an informed source told that the object has been on fire and there has been thick smoke coming out of it prior to the crash, concluding that the object couldn’t have been a meteor as meteors do not smoke.
The source also said that the crash has been witnessed by people in several cities, and mentioned that the rendezvous point is located 100 kilometers from the provincial capital city of Kerman.
Sunday 28 January 2007
Mars' missing air might just be hiding
Rather than having had its air knocked out into space, Mars might just be holding its breath. New findings suggests the missing atmosphere of Mars might be locked up in hidden reservoirs on the planet, rather than having been chafed away by billions of years' worth of solar winds as previously thought.Combining two years of observations by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20 grams of air per second into space.Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe. (A bar is a unit for measuring pressure; Earth’s atmospheric pressure is about 1 bar.)According to the "warm and wet early Mars" model, liquid water once flowed on the red planet’s surface.
Evidence from channels and gullies recently spotted on Mars suggest the water layer might have been more than half a mile deep in places. For Mars to keep that much water in liquid form, the planet must have had a much higher atmospheric temperature, which scientists think was made possible by a strong greenhouse effect in the planet’s past.Mars' atmosphere must have been between 1 to 5 bars to maintain that kind of greenhouse effect, scientists think. But Mars’ atmospheric pressure today is only a small fraction of that—about 0.008 bars, or about 0.7 percent of the average surface pressure at sea level on Earth.
View: Full Article | Source: Space.com
Archaeologist digs for proof of Sasquatch
By day she's the Stanislaus National Forest's archaeologist. With a master's degree in anthropology, she makes sure prehistoric Native American sites in the woods are protected. She's also the forest's liaison with the Me-Wuk tribe. But it's what Kathy Strain does in her spare time that separates her from Forest Service colleagues. She's a Bigfooter. A student of Sasquatch. A yearner for Yeti. A true believer. "A strong case can be made that Bigfoot exists," said Strain, whose Jamestown-area home includes a room full of books, videos, cast footprints, notes and reports on the creature. "I've seen things I have no other explanation for." Not only that, but she says Tuolumne County and the forest she works on are among the huge creature's favorite haunts. She has catalogued scores of eyewitness accounts, has discovered a Sasquatch "nest" near Twain Harte and swears she was once close enough to the creature that dirt was still falling from the sides of deep,14-inch footprints it left behind. And get this: Strain is not crazy. In fact, her scientific credentials and employment by a huge, dead-serious and not terribly imaginative federal agency boost her stock as a guest speaker at Bigfoot conferences. But when she walks into the forest's Greenley Road headquarters, Strain leaves Sasquatch at the door. She doesn't demand that wide swaths of timberland be set aside as Bigfoot habitat.
Nor does she hector forest wildlife biologists with evidence or accounts she has collected. "Kathy has been an excellent archaeologist and employee," confirmed her boss, Forest Supervisor Tom Quinn. "And, at least in my four and a half years here, I have had no reports of Yeti conversations in the workplace." For the record, Quinn added, the forest has "no position" on Bigfoot. Which, less restrained Bigfooters might say, is like Australia having no position on kangaroos. NEXT TO THE deep woods near the Oregon border, Strain says, the Stanislaus Forest area is the nation's hottest Bigfoot spot. In the past six years she has documented more than 200 sightings and witness accounts. A few have come from co-workers looking to unburden themselves — after quitting time, of course — of long-held Bigfoot tales. Take the wildlife biologist who never forgot his 1993 trip to Bloomer Lake, above Pinecrest.
View: Full Article | Source: Union Democrat
Humans in America 45,000 Years Before Pyramids
Offering more evidence that our assumptions about history are completely off, an archaeologist in South Carolina is saying that radiocarbon tests on artifacts he's found along the Savannah River suggest that humans existed in North America as many as 50,000 years ago. The bold statement shatters the long-held notion that the earliest settlers arrived here about 13,000 years ago in Alaska via a lost land bridge. By comparison, the Egyptian pyramids at Giza are thought to have been built less than 5,000 years ago. Human beings in America 45,000 years before the Pyramids! That's pretty amazing and begs the question of lost civilizations in America possibly undiscovered. Considering that America up until a few centuries ago was largely covered with dense vegetation, there may be a great many things still buried deep in the soil waiting to be unearthed. Full Story
Passengers Vanish From Cruise Ships
The Bermuda Triangle is a pretty mysterious paranormal phenomenon. Airplanes disappearing, ships disappearing - all with no real explanation. Equally mysterious, if not more, is the disappearance of dozens of passengers in recent years from cruise ships themselves. They simply vanish without a trace. There's been no evidence of the dumping of murdered bodies overboard. According to friends and family, suicide is an unlikely explanation. Still, the cruise industry says that more than 30 passengers have disappeared from ships in the past five years – and these figures exclude those known to have been suicides or drunken accidents. In each case, the ship was searched from top to bottom and all passengers checked as they disembarked. No explanation can be determined as to where these missing people could have gone. It's also unknown how long these passengers have been coming up missing. An investigation into the unexplained disappearances only began after a US Congressional subcommittee found itself the task of examining the threat posed to citizens by booking a cruise holiday. Foul play and suicides are the most common explanation, but authorities say this is purely speculative and is unlikely to be the explanation for most of the disappearances. Full Story
Saturday 27 January 2007
Hot new mystery surrounds Saturn
For years astronomers have known that the upper atmospheres of Saturn and other giant planets are hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight. Today the mystery deepened. The phenomenon has long been blamed on a mechanism similar to what creates the aurora, or Northern Lights on Earth. On Earth, magnetic energy in the magnetosphere drives the aurora and heats the upper atmosphere. The giant planets are known for spectacular auroras at their polar regions. Scientists figured that heat generated by the auroras was blown toward the equator by some unknown process. But a new calculation reported in today's issue of the journal Nature finds that this mechanism, if at work on Saturn, would actually cool the upper atmosphere at the lower latitudes (closer to the equator). Scientists will have to go back to the drawing board to figure out what's really heating things up."This unexplained 'energy crisis' represents a major gap in our understanding of these planets' atmospheres," the scientists write.
"We need to re-examine our basic assumptions about planetary atmospheres and what causes the observed heating," said study team member Alan Aylward of the University College London.Some as-yet-unknown direct heating mechanism is possibly at work, the scientists speculate. One possibility: the breaking of "buoyancy waves" generated in the lower atmosphere.Figuring it all out could help researchers model the future of Earth's atmosphere.
View: Full Article | Source: Yahoo! News
Mega-Marsupials Once Roamed Australia
Marsupial lions, kangaroos as tall as trucks and wombats the size of a rhinoceros roamed Australia’s outback before being killed off by fires lit by arriving humans, scientists said on Thursday.The giant animals lived in the arid Nullarbor desert around 400,000 years ago, but died out around 50,000 years ago, relatively shortly after the arrival of human settlers, according to new fossil skeletons found in caves.
Fossilized remains were uncovered almost intact in a series of three deep caves in the center of the Nullarbor desert — east of the west coast city of Perth — in October 2002.
“Three subsequent expeditions produced hundreds of fossils so well-preserved that they constitute a veritable “Rosetta Stone for Ice-Age Australia”, expedition leader Gavin Prideaux said of the find, detailed in the latest edition of the journal Nature.
The team discovered 69 species of mammals, birds and reptiles, including eight new species of kangaroo, some standing up to 9 feet tall.
Protected from wind and rain, and undisturbed due to their remote location, the remains of the mega-beasts are in near-perfect condition, including the first-ever complete skeleton of a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex.
“Unwary animals bounding around in the case of kangaroos, or running around in the case of marsupial lions and wombats, fell down these holes, as presumably most were nocturnal. It’s very difficult to see a small opening on a flat surface at night,” Prideaux said.
Research into the fossils challenges recent claims that Australia’s megafauna were killed off by climate change, pointing the finger instead at fires, probably lit by the first human settlers who transformed the fragile landscape.
The lands inhabited by the megafauna once supported flowers, tall trees and shrubs. But isotopes extracted from skeletal enamels show the climate was hot and arid, similar to today.
The plants, the scientists said, were highly sensitive to so-called fire-stick farming, where lands were deliberately cleared by fires to encourage re-growth.
“Australian megafauna could take all that nature could throw at them for half-a-million years, without succumbing,” said Richard Roberts, a geochronologist at the University of Wollongong.
“It was only when people arrived that they vanished.” [link]
Human Beings As Extraterrestrial Software Code
http://www.paranormalmagazine.com/
Birds Dropping Dead All Over The World
New Evidence For Extraterrestrial Origins of Life
According to recent research by an international team of scientists, there's new evidence that life may have arrived on this planet from elsewhere in the universe. They have shown that at least some primitive organisms could have survived a meteor ride and impact, possibly from Mars. To test the idea, scientists gathered colonies of micro-organisms including cyanobacteria, which live in rocky fissures, lichen, which smother their surfaces, and spores of the hardy bacterium Bacillus subtilis, and sandwiched them between slices of gabbro, a coarse-grained rock similar to that known to make up Martian meteorites. The researchers then used high explosives to fire a steel plate at the sandwiched organisms and after each shot transferred the microbes to a dish to see if any had survived. The shocks were equivalent to those suffered by Martian meteorites that have been found on Earth. To their surprise, the scientists found the lichen and bacterial spores survived all but the most cataclysmic impacts, proving at least that life could have arrived on this planet via a meteorite. Full Story
Friday 26 January 2007
Hints of huge water reservoirs on Mars
Mars is losing little water to space, according to new research, so much of its ancient abundance may still be hidden beneath the surface. Dried up riverbeds and other evidence imply that Mars once had enough water to fill a global ocean more than 600 metres deep, together with a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that kept the planet warm enough for the water to be liquid. But the planet is now very dry and has a thin atmosphere.Some scientists have proposed that the Red Planet lost its water and CO2 to space as the solar wind stripped molecules from the top of the planet's atmosphere. Measurements by Russia's Phobos-2 probe to Mars in 1989 hinted that the loss was quite rapid.Now the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has revealed that the rate of loss is much lower. Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna led a team that used data from Mars Express's ASPERA-3 instrument (Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms).
Its measurements suggest the whole planet loses only about 20 grams per second of oxygen and CO2 to space, only about 1% of the rate inferred from Phobos-2 data.If this rate has held steady over Mars's history, it would have removed just a few centimetres of water, and a thousandth of the original CO2.Either some other process removed the water and CO2 or they are still present and hidden somewhere on Mars, probably underground, Barabash says. "We are talking about huge amounts of water," he told New Scientist. "To store it somewhere requires a really big, huge reservoir."
View: Full Article | Source: New Scientist
France to reveal UFO secrets
UFO sightings in France are set to be revealed - exciting paranormal enthusiasts in the UK. The archive of over 1,600 incidents will be released by France's National Space Studies Centre (CNES) and has led to calls for the UK to publish all its sightings.The highly-anticipated online archive was due to go live this month but has now been delayed until at least March, said the space agency.Nick Pope, former head of the Ministry of Defence�s UFO projects division, said the France archive could track the paths of unidentified flying objects across the Channel.Nick said: �I really welcome the French move. There is a huge interest in UFO sightings. It will be great to see if there are reports in there which relate to classic UFO sightings.�Nick believes an online archive should be published here and claims that many reports gathered by the Ministry of Defence are still kept under wraps.He said: �There is a lot of files which have not seen the light of day. If the MoD published them, it would be a huge step forward.�I don�t believe there is a cover up but the MoD leaves itself open to that accusation.�However the MoD said it has released information on sightings on a annual basis.
A spokesman told the Sun online: �We regularly receive Freedom of Information requests on UFOs and these are published in full over time.The MoD said that based it remained �open-minded� about the existence of extraterrestrial life-forms.But added: �To date we know of no evidence that substantiates the existence of these alleged phenomena�.Yesterday CNES told the Sun online the launch of its archive, dating back 30 years, would be delayed.A spokeswoman said: "The archive is not online yet. It will be in mid-March."
View: Full Article | Source: The Sun
White beetle dazzles scientists
A dazzling insect could help the development of brilliant white, ultra-thin materials, a study suggests. The finger-tip sized Cyphochilus beetle, found in south-east Asia, had a shell whiter than most other materials found in nature, UK researchers said. Close inspection reveals a unique surface structure covered with scales 10 times thinner than human hair. A report in Science magazine claims mimicking these scales could provide a range of applications for industry."Such pure bright whiteness is uncommon in insects," explained lead scientist Dr Pete Vukusic of Exeter University. "You do see the odd bit of whiteness here and there, mainly in butterflies, but the whiteness is really incomparable with this little beetle." In the study of the insect, Vukusic's team used a number of techniques such as optical microscopy, laser analysis and spectrometry. The researchers found, according to the International Organization for Standardization measurements, the beetle was much brighter and whiter than milk and the average human tooth. 'Another world' But, said Dr Vukusic, the group also wanted to find out the sort of system that would physically create such dazzling whiteness. "And when I put them under the electron microscope, it was like another world had opened up; it was totally remarkable."
The researchers found the beetle's shell was covered with ultra-thin scales, measuring just five micrometres (millionths of a metre), with highly random internal 3D structures. This irregular structure, explained Dr Vukusic, was the cause of the beetle's whiteness. While colour, he explained, could be created through highly ordered structures, whiteness is achieved through very random features that scatter all colours simultaneously.
View: Full Article | Source: BBC News
Caverns give up huge fossil haul
Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: An astonishing collection of fossil animals from southern Australia is reported by scientists. The creatures were found in limestone caves under Nullarbor Plain and date from about 400,000-800,000 years ago. The palaeontological "treasure trove" includes 23 kangaroo species, eight of which are entirely new to science. Researchers tell Nature magazine that the caves also yielded a complete specimen of Thylacoleo carnifex, an extinct marsupial lion. It appears the unsuspecting creatures fell to their deaths through pipes in the dusty plain surface that periodically opened and closed over millennia. Most of the animals were killed instantly but others initially survived the 20m drop only to crawl off into rock piles to die from their injuries or from thirst and starvation. The preservation of many of the specimens was remarkable, said the Nature paper's lead author, Dr Gavin Prideaux.
"To drop down into these caves and see the Thylacoleo lying there just as it had died really took my breath away," the Western Australian Museum researcher told the BBC's Science In Action Programme. "Sitting in the darkness next to this skeleton, you really got the sense of the animal collapsing in a heap and taking its last breath. It was quite poignant.
View: Full Article | Source: BBC News
Flying dinos had bi-plane design
| The first flying dinosaurs took to the air in a similar way to a World War I bi-plane, a study shows. A fresh analysis of an early feathered fossil dinosaur suggests that it dropped its hind legs below its body, adopting a bi-plane-like form. This contrasts with earlier reconstructions showing the dinosaur maintaining its wings in a tandem pattern, a bit like a dragonfly. Details appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. The ancestors of modern birds are thought to have been small, feathered, dinosaurs. Microraptor gui, which lived 125 million years ago, was one of the earliest gliders. It appears to have utilised four wings, as it had long and asymmetric flight feathers on both its hands and feet. An initial assessment of Microraptor fossils from China suggested the animal spread its legs out laterally and maintained its wings in a tandem pattern, in a similar manner to dragonflies. |
