INFLUENZA: A Real Threat

H5N1: Humanity's second greatest threat

I call it the second greatest threat because I believe george W. bush currently holds first place in the "threat to human life" category.






As I post this in October 2007 the bird flu virus is making a couple of significant mutations that will allow it to transfer more easily from birds to humans. While this is a scary development, it also is a hopeful one. Meaning, we are one step closer in figuring out how the "jump" from birds to humans is made. Maybe knowing how it happens will allow our scientists to find a way for preventing it.

The last killer pandemic was in 1918. I've read numbers ranging between 20 MILLION and 50 MILLION deaths in that year. My paternal and maternal grandparents were all approximately five years old during this tragedy. I'm thankful they lived. If any one of the four of them had died I would either not exist today or be a different person (which is the same as saying I (this I) would not exist. That scenario is the same for anyone reading this, regardless of how many lines of progeny you go back, whether it's one, two or three.

Pandemic test undertaken by financial services paints dire scenario Patrick Thibodeau October 24, 2007 (Computerworld) If a pandemic strikes the U.S., it will kill about 1.7 million people, hospitalize 9 million, exhaust antiviral medications and reduce basic food supplies, according to a planning scenario developed by financial service firms preparing for such a catastrophe. This particular disaster occurred only on paper. But those grim numbers are some of the pandemic planning assumptions used by nearly 3,000 banks, insurance companies and security firms in a just-concluded, three-week, paper-based exercise that may have been the largest pandemic test of its kind. In each week of this drill, participants -- some 10,000 people were involved -- received an updated scenario and were asked to assess their capability to deliver services as the pandemic deepened and then abated. "We wanted to look at the impact a pandemic can have on our sector," said George Hender, chairman of the Financial Services Coordinating Council, in a teleconference Wednesday. "One of the things that we tried to do is put some real stress on the firms." During the height of the pandemic, which was estimated to occur midway through the scenario, participants were asked to consider operating with an absentee rate of nearly 50% -- above the 35% to 40% rate federal officials believe may actually happen, said Hender. "We deliberately took the rate up much higher to see where their stress points were," he said. The financial services groups are now sharing the pandemic flu exercise information, and all the scenarios are available for download. The U.S. Department of Treasury is also a sponsor of the test, and Valerie Abend, deputy assistant secretary for critical infrastructure protection and compliance at the department, said the financial services industry has been "thinking long and hard about a pandemic." "We are one of the most prepared, I would argue, if not the most prepared of the critical infrastructures that are out there," said Abend. But the financial services firms won't really know how prepared they are until the end of the year. The thousands of pages of data collected during the test, which began in the last week of September, are still being analyzed and a final report is due at year's end. But based on some preliminary feedback from participants, the financial service firms weren't handing out too many gold stars for readiness. When asked "based on the lessons learned from the exercise, how effective are your organization's business continuity plans for a pandemic," 56% answered "moderately," the next highest group was "minimally," at 28%. Only 12% said their business continuity planning was very effective. The three-week scenario compresses the 12-week period a pandemic wave would likely last. Among the other things that may happen in an actual pandemic are school closings, as well as blackouts or brownouts in major metro areas because of degraded service as a result of absenteeism. Internet service throughput could be reduced by 50% due to congestion, and Web browsing timeouts would become common. Airlines would cut schedules, and garbage would pile up on streets. Many frustrations would arise. Working ATMs might be scarce, and call centers may not have enough staff to help. Health insurance claim volume would rise 20%. Auto claims are expected to fall 10%, since there would be less traffic on the road. But for those who are driving, gas prices would be high and fuel supplies reduced.

HERE is some interesting reading about the 1918 PANDEMIC.

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I knew it all along. Really.

Study Reveals Why Flu Thrives in Winter Dave Mosher LiveScience Staff Writer LiveScience.com For the first time, scientist have solid evidence suggesting exactly why the flu is so common in winter. A new animal study suggests that the influenza virus' success hinges on low relative humidity and cold temperatures. Such conditions keep the virus more stable and in the air longer than warm, humid conditions, scientists said. And apparently, the frosty weather's role is more important than that of the human body in helping the virus thrive. "We've always thought the immune system wasn't as active during the winter, but that doesn't really seem to be the case," said study coauthor Peter Palese, a virologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. When we cough or sneeze, tiny droplets of water enter the air and hang around until they drop to the ground—or an unsuspecting passerby breathes them in. Once inside our airways, any flu viruses that have hitched a ride on the droplets can launch an attack. "We found that the flu's transmission period is much, much longer when temperatures and humidity levels are low," Palese told LiveScience. He thinks that the conditions not only suck away the droplet's water weight, allowing them to float in the air longer, but also dry out virus-blocking mucous and cells in our airways. Bigger viral doses combined with the body's disabled means to flush them out, Palese said, gives the flu a better fighting chance to infect a person, regardless of their immune system's strength. This correlation has been obvious, Palese acknowledged, but solid explanations for wintertime viral success have eluded scientists because modeling human-like disease transmission in animals is difficult. Many animals, such as mice, fail to transmit the viruses that make humans sick. "The only animals that can model virus transmission are ferrets, but they're very expensive, big and hard to work with," he said. "They also like to bite a lot." By reading an 88-year-old medical study, however, Palese's team discovered that guinea pigs simulate human coughing and sneezing extremely well. "I never believed what my grandmother told me about getting sick when it's cold, but it turns out she was right," Palese said. "Guinea pigs aren't humans, but this is some of the best evidence yet to explain the seasonality of the flu." Although the flu spreads primarily through the air, the viruses can survive on doorknobs, handrails and other surfaces. Medical experts report that frequent hand washing, especially before meals, can lower the risk of picking up as well as transmitting diseases such as the flu. Palese and his colleagues' complete findings are detailed in the October issue of the online journal PLoS Pathogens. SOURCE

Also see some really interesting facts, answered questions and a video on the potential for a BIRD FLU PANDEMIC.

DIFFERENT DINOSAUR SPECIES

A previously, unknown to man, species of dinosaur has been discovered AND IT'S A GIANT!

Dinosaur skeleton unearthed in Argentina By MICHAEL ASTOR, Associated Press Writer The skeleton of what is believed to be a new dinosaur species — a 105-foot plant-eater that is among the largest dinosaurs ever found — has been uncovered in Argentina, scientists said Monday. Scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the Patagonian dinosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species of Titanosaur because of the unique structure of its neck. They named it Futalognkosaurus dukei after the Mapuche Indian words for "giant" and "chief," and for Duke Energy Argentina, which helped fund the skeleton's excavation. "This is one of the biggest in the world and one of the most complete of these giants that exist," said Jorge Calvo, director of the paleontology center at the National University of Comahue, Argentina. He was lead author of a study on the dinosaur published in the peer-reviewed Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Scientists said the giant herbivore walked the Earth some 88 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period. Since the first bones were found on the banks of Lake Barreales in the Argentine province of Neuquen in 2000, paleontologists have dug up the dinosaur's neck, back region, hips and the first vertebra of its tail. "I'm pretty certain it's a new species," agreed Peter Mackovicky, associate curator for dinosaurs at Chicago's Field Museum, who was not involved with the discovery. "I've seen some of the remains of Futalognkosaurus and it is truly gigantic." Alexander Kellner, left, a researcher with the Brazilian National Museum, and Argentine paleontologists Jorge Calvo, center, and Juan Porfiri, display parts of a skeleton of what could be a new dinosaur species, a 105-foot plant-eater, Futalognkosaurus dukei dinosaur, during a news conference in Rio de Janeiro, Monday, Oct. 15, 2007. The Patagonian dinosaur was uncovered on the banks of Lake Barreales in the Argentine province of Neuquen and according with the scientists the giant herbivore walked the Earth some 88 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period. (AP Photo/Ricardo Morales) Calvo said the neck alone must have been 56 feet long, and by studying the vertebrae, they figured the tail probably measured 49 feet. The dinosaur reached over 43 feet tall, and the excavated spinal column weighed about 9 tons when excavated. One neck vertebra alone measured more than 3 feet high. Jeff Wilson, an assistant professor of paleontology at the University of Michigan, who was asked to review the finding, said he was impressed by the sheer amount of skeleton recovered. "I should really try to underscore how incredible it is to have partial skeleton of something this size," Wilson said in telephone interview. "With these kind of bones you can't study them by moving them around on the table; you have to move around them yourself." "It shows us the upper limit for dinosaur size," Wilson added. "There are some that are bigger but they all top out around this size." Patagonia also was home to the other two largest dinosaur skeletons found to date — Argentinosaurus, at around 115 feet long, and Puertasaurus reuili, 115 feet to 131 feet long. Comparison between the three herbivores, however, is difficult because scientists have only found few vertebrae of Puertasaurus, and while the skeleton of Futalognkosaurus (FOO-ta-long-koh-SOHR-us) is fairly complete, scientists have not uncovered any bones from its limbs. North America's dinosaurs don't even compare in size, Mackovicky added in a phone interview. "Dinosaurs do get big here, but nothing near the proportions we see in South America." The site where Futalognkosaurus was found has been a bonanza for paleontologists, yielding more than 1,000 specimens, including 240 fossil plants, 300 teeth and the remains of several other dinosaurs. "As far as I know, there is no other place in the world where there is such a large and diverse quantity of fossils in such small area. That is truly unique," said Alexander Kellner, a researcher with the Brazilian National Museum and co-author of the dinosaur's scientific description. SOURCE

MISHANDLING OF GERMS

If you read through this article you'll soon come to realize that our fate; our possible exposure to deadly viral/bacterial toxins is in the hands of people who have a large number of idiots in their midst. Sure there are lots of accidents, but there's also lots of carelessness which causes "accidents". In the future, an extinction level action could be caused by one of these idiots. Maybe it has always been this way. Maybe we've been "within an inch of going out" for the last thirty years. Who knows? Remember, this is only one article and these are only a few incidents that have been reported or discovered. And this is only one country. If humanity doesn't fall victim to itself, it may to ever strengthening, ever mutating strains of the deadly toys of idiots.

Mishandling of germs on rise at US labs By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer American laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing as more labs do the work. No one died, and regulators said the public was never at risk during these incidents. But the documented cases reflect poorly on procedures and oversight at high-security labs, some of which work with organisms and poisons that can cause illnesses with no cure. In some cases, labs have failed to report accidents as required by law. The mishaps include workers bitten or scratched by infected animals, skin cuts, needle sticks and more, according to a review by The Associated Press of confidential reports submitted to federal regulators. They describe accidents involving anthrax, bird flu virus, monkeypox and plague-causing bacteria at 44 labs in 24 states. More than two-dozen incidents were still under investigation. The number of accidents has risen steadily. Through August, the most recent period covered in the reports obtained by the AP, labs reported 36 accidents and lost shipments during 2007 — nearly double the number reported during all of 2004. Likewise, the number of labs approved by the government to handle the deadliest substances has nearly doubled to 409 since 2004, and there are now 15 of the highest-security labs. Labs are routinely inspected by federal regulators just once every three years, but accidents trigger interim inspections. In a new report by congressional investigators, the Government Accountability Office said little is known about labs that aren't federally funded or don't work with any of 72 dangerous substances the government monitors most closely. "No single federal agency ... has the mission to track the overall number of these labs in the United States," said the GAO's report, expected to be released later this week. "Consequently, no agency is responsible for determining the risks associated with the proliferation of these labs." The House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee plans hearings Thursday on the issue. The lab incidents have sparked bipartisan concern. "It may be only a matter of time before our nation has a public health incident with potentially catastrophic results," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., the panel's chairman. The subcommittee's senior Republican, Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, added: "Currently, there is a hodgepodge system of federal oversight regulating the ... laboratories responsible for researching the deadliest germs and diseases. At Thursdays hearing, I expect to probe witnesses about how to improve oversight of these laboratories in a post 9-11 world." Lab accidents have affected the outside world: Britain's health and safety agency concluded there was a "strong probability" a leaking pipe at a British lab manufacturing vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease was the source of an outbreak of the illness in livestock earlier this year. Britain was forced to suspend exports of livestock, meat and milk products and destroy livestock. The disease does not infect humans. Accidents aren't the only concern. While medical experts consider it unlikely that a lab employee will become sick and infect others, these labs have strict rules to prevent anyone from stealing organisms or toxins and using them for bioterrorism. The reports were so sensitive the Bush administration refused to release them under the Freedom of Information Act, citing an anti-bioterrorism law aimed at preventing terrorists from locating stockpiles of poisons and learning who handles them. ILC Dover technician William Ayrey is seen in a self-contained biosuit in Frederica, Del., Monday Oct. 1, 2007. Suits made by ILC Dover, and other manufacturers, are worn in the highest security level laboratories that work with dangerous germs and toxins. Suits such as these protect workers from organisms and poisons so dangerous that illnesses they cause have no cure. (AP Photo/Gary Emeigh) Among the previously undisclosed accidents: _In Rockville, Md., ferret No. 992, inoculated with bird flu virus, bit a technician at Bioqual Inc. on the right thumb in July. The worker was placed on home quarantine for five days and directed to wear a mask to protect others. _An Oklahoma State University lab in Stillwater in December could not account for a dead mouse inoculated with bacteria that causes joint pain, weakness, lymph node swelling and pneumonia. The rodent — one of 30 to be incinerated — was never found, but the lab said an employee "must have forgotten to remove the dead mouse from the cage" before the cage was sterilized. _In Albuquerque, N.M., an employee at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute was bitten on the left hand by an infected monkey in September 2006. The animal was ill from an infection of bacteria that causes plague. "When the gloves were removed, the skin appeared to be broken in 2 or 3 places," the report said. The worker was referred to a doctor, but nothing more was disclosed. _In Fort Collins, Colo., a worker at a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facility found, in January 2004, three broken vials of Russian spring-summer encephalitis virus. Wearing only a laboratory coat and gloves, he used tweezers to remove broken glass and moved the materials to a special container. The virus, a potential bio-warfare agent, could cause brain inflammation and is supposed to be handled in a lab requiring pressure suits that resemble space suits. The report did not say whether the worker became ill. Other reports describe leaks of contaminated waste, dropped containers with cultures of bacteria and viruses, and defective seals on airtight containers. Some recount missing or lost shipments, including plague bacteria that was supposed to be delivered to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in 2003. The wayward plague shipment was discovered eventually in Belgium and incinerated safely. The reports must be submitted to regulators whenever a lab suffers a theft, loss or release of any of 72 substances known as "select agents" — a government list of germs and toxins that represent the horror stories of the world's worst medical tragedies for humans and animals. A senior CDC official, Dr. Richard Besser, said his agency is committed to ensuring that U.S. labs are safe and that all such incidents are disclosed to the government. He said he was unaware of any risk to the public resulting from infections among workers at the high-security labs, but he acknowledged that regulators are worried about accidents that could go unreported. "If you're asking if it's possible for someone to not report an infection, and have it missed, that clearly is a concern that we have," Besser said. Texas A&M's laboratory failed to report, until this year, one case of a lab worker's infection from Brucella bacteria last year and three others' previous infection with Q fever — missteps documented in news reports earlier this year. The illnesses are characterized by high fevers and flu-like symptoms that sometimes cause more serious complications. "The major problems at Texas A&M went undetected and unreported, and we don't think that it was an isolated event," critic Edward Hammond said. He runs the Sunshine Project, which has tracked incidents at other labs for years and first revealed the Texas A&M illnesses that the school failed to report. Rules for working in the labs are tough and are getting more restrictive as the bio-safety levels rise. The highest is Level 4, where labs study substances that pose a "high risk of life-threatening disease for which no vaccine or therapy is available." Besides wearing wear full-body, air-supplied suits, workers undergo extensive background checks and carry special identification cards. "The risk that a killer agent could be set loose in the general population is real," Hammond said. In other lab accidents recounted in the reports, the Public Health Research Institute in Newark, N.J., was investigated by the FBI in 2005 when it couldn't account for three of 24 mice infected with plague bacteria. The lab and the CDC concluded the mice were cannibalized by other plague-infested mice or buried under bedding when the cage was sterilized with high temperatures. The lab's director, Dr. David Perlin, told the AP it would be impossible for mice to escape from the building and said a worker failed to record their deaths. "I feel 99 percent comfortable that was the case," Perlin said. "The animals become badly cannibalized. You only see bits and pieces. They're in cages with shredded newspaper. You really have to search hard with gloves and masks." A worker at the Army's biological facility in Fort Detrick, Md., was grazed by a needle in February 2004 and exposed to the deadly Ebola virus after a mouse kicked a syringe. She was placed in an isolation ward called "The Slammer," but the Army said she did not become ill. In other previously undisclosed accidents: In Decatur, Ga., a worker at the Georgia Public Health Laboratory handled a Brucella culture in April 2004 without high-level precautions. She became feverish months later and tested positive for exposure at a hospital emergency room in July. She eventually returned to work. The lab's confidential report defended her: "The technologist is a good laboratorian and has good technique." In April this year at the Lovelace facility in Albuquerque, an African green monkey infected intentionally with plague-causing bacteria reached with its free hand and scratched at a Velcro restraining strap, cutting into the gloved hand of a lab worker. The injured worker at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute received medical treatment, including an antibiotic. The National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa, reported leaks of contaminated waste three times in November and December 2006. While one worker was preparing a pipe for repairs, he cut his middle finger, possibly exposing him to Brucella, according to the confidential reports. A researcher at the CDC's lab in Fort Collins, Colo., dropped two containers on the floor last November, including one with plague bacteria. A worker at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research-Naval Medical Research Center in Silver Spring, Md., sliced through two pair of gloves while handling a rat carcass infected with plague bacteria. The May 2005 report said she was sent to an emergency room, which released her and asked her to return for a follow-up visit. SOURCE (this is a yahoo link which won't have much of a "shelf life" - it could disappear any day)

The Yucatan Peninsula / The Chicx­u­lub Crat­er

Here are two articles on the same subject - a very interesting subject to me.
Just so you know, we're WAY overdue for another hit. I mean like in any day now. And all we have watching the near Earth objects are a handful of private people working their asses off watching 1-3% of the sky. We're JUST NOW at the end of the asteroid shower that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs By Will Dunham A collision 160 million years ago of two asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter sent many big rock chunks hurtling toward Earth, including the one that zapped the dinosaurs, scientists said on Wednesday. Their research offered an explanation for the cause of one of the most momentous events in the history of life on Earth -- a six-mile-wide (10-km-wide) meteorite striking Mexico's Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago. That catastrophe eliminated the dinosaurs, which had flourished for about 165 million years, and many other life forms, and paved the way for mammals to dominate the Earth and the eventual rise of humankind, many scientists believe. The impact is thought to have triggered a worldwide environmental cataclysm, expelling vast quantities of rock and dust into the sky, unleashing giant tsunamis, sparking global wildfires and leaving Earth shrouded in darkness for years. U.S. and Czech researchers used computer simulations to calculate that there was a 90 percent probability that the collision of two asteroids -- one about 105 miles wide and one about 40 miles wide -- was the event that precipitated the Earthly disaster. The collision occurred in the asteroid belt, a collection of big and small rocks orbiting the sun about 100 million miles from Earth, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The asteroid Baptistina and rubble associated with it are thought to be leftovers, the scientists said. Some of the debris from the collision escaped the asteroid belt, tumbled toward the inner solar system and whacked Earth and our moon, along with probably Mars and Venus, said William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, one of the researchers. DEADLY COLLISION The collision is believed to have doubled for a while the number of impacts occurring in this part of the solar system. In fact, while the bombardment of this region of the solar system due to this shower of debris peaked about 100 million years ago, the scientists said the tail end of the shower continues to this day. Bottke said many existing near-Earth asteroids can be traced back to this collision. "Imagine breaking up a big, big boulder on top of a hill and all the fragments rolling down the hill. And somewhere at the bottom is a village called Earth," Bottke said in a telephone interview. The dinosaur-destroying meteorite, thought to have measured 6 miles across, plunged into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and blasted out the Chicxulub (pronounced CHIK-shu-loob) crater measuring about 110 miles wide. The researchers looked at evidence on the composition of this meteorite and found it consistent with the stony Baptistina. The researchers estimated that there also was about a 70 percent probability that the prominent Tycho crater on the Moon, formed 108 million years ago and measuring about 55 miles across, also was carved out by a remnant of the earlier asteroid collision. Philippe Claeys of Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, who was not involved in the research, said by e-mail the findings were "clear evidence that the solar system is a violent environment and that collisions taking place in the asteroid belt can have major repercussions for the evolution of life on Earth." Bottke emphasized that point. "Dinosaurs were around for a very long time. So the likelihood is they would still be around if that event had never taken place," Bottke said. "Was humanity inevitable? Or is humanity just something that happened to arise because of this sequence of events that took place at just the right time. It's hard to say." Asteroid “crime family” blamed in dinosaur wipeout Sept. 5, 2007 Courtesy Southwest Research Institute and World Science staff As­tro­no­mers have long be­lieved that some sort of as­ter­oid or com­et im­pact killed the di­no­saurs about 65 mil­lion years ago. Now they say they have likely iden­ti­fied what the ob­ject was—or at least, which fam­i­ly it came from. The di­no­saurs fell vic­tim to one of many broken-up chunks of a once-bigger as­ter­oid, a group known as Bap­tis­tina family as­ter­oids, re­search­ers say. In fact, they add, frag­ments of that same rock have been pelt­ing Earth for eons, and we’re only about now at the bom­bard­ment’s end. The U.S.-Czech re­search team com­bined ob­serva­t­ions with com­put­er sim­ula­t­ions to reach the con­clu­sions. They es­ti­mat­ed that the par­ent body of the di­no­saur-killer was some 170 kilo­me­ters (106 miles) wide. Around 100 mil­lion years be­fore the di­no­saurs’ cat­a­stroph­ic end, this co­los­sus was float­ing through space deep in­side the So­lar Sys­tem’s main as­ter­oid belt be­tween Mars and Ju­pi­ter, the sci­en­tists said. That’s when it slammed in­to an­oth­er as­ter­oid about a third as wide, cre­at­ing thou­sands of large chunks. One of those even­tu­ally found its way here and wiped out the great rep­tiles, the sci­en­tists con­tin­ued. With 90 per­cent cer­tain­ty it left the gi­ant pock­mark now called Chicx­u­lub crat­er on Mex­i­co’s Yu­ca­tan Pen­in­su­la, they said. But that frag­ment was­n’t the only one to dis­rupt Earth or its neigh­bor­hood, the sci­en­tists added: a huge Moon crat­er called Ty­cho al­so has 70 per­cent like­li­hood of be­ing caused a Bap­tis­tina fa­mily mem­ber. When the par­ent body broke up, its off­spring con­tin­ued mov­ing in si­m­i­lar or­bits to its own, the re­search­ers ex­plained. But these or­bits grad­u­ally changed due to forc­es pro­duced when they ab­sorbed sun­light and re-emitted the en­er­gy as heat. The family spread out, and some mem­bers drifted in­to a near­by “dy­nam­i­cal su­per­high­way,” a zone from which they could es­cape the main as­ter­oid belt and slip in­to or­bits that cross Earth’s path. The com­puta­t­ions sug­gest that about 20 per­cent of sur­viv­ing mul­ti­-kilometer- sized frag­ments in the Bap­tis­tina family were lost in this way, with some 2 per­cent of those go­ing on to strike Earth. The re­sult: a pro­nounced in­crease in the num­ber of large as­ter­oids hit­ting our pla­net, the re­search team said. Both Earth and Moon show ev­i­dence of a two-fold in­crease in the forma­t­ion rate of large crat­ers over the last 100 to 150 mil­lion years, they con­tin­ued. “The Bap­tis­tina bom­bard­ment pro­duced a pro­longed surge in the im­pact [rate] that peak­ed roughly 100 mil­lion years ago,” said Da­vid Nes­vorny of the South­west Re­search In­sti­tute in San An­to­nio, Tex­as, one of the re­search­ers. “We are in the tail end of this show­er now. Our sim­ula­t­ions sug­gest that about 20 per­cent of the pre­s­ent-day, near-Earth as­ter­oid popula­t­ion can be traced back to the Bap­tis­tina fam­i­ly,” said the in­sti­tute’s Wil­liam Bot­tke, an­oth­er col­la­bo­ra­tor. Fur­ther ev­i­dence im­pli­cat­ing the Bap­tis­ti­nas comes from the 180-kilometer wide Chicx­u­lub crat­er, long thought to be as­so­ci­at­ed with the di­no­saurs’ mis­for­tune, re­search­ers added. Sam­ples from the crat­er re­veal a chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion con­sist­ent with that of the Bap­tis­tina as­ter­oids, which are of a type known as car­bo­na­ceous chon­drites. These are of great in­ter­est to sci­en­tists be­cause of their prim­i­tive make­up: they’re be­lieved to con­sist of pris­tine ma­te­ri­al si­m­i­lar to that of the cloud from which the So­lar Sys­tem formed. SOURCE

Living Forever? Is Immortality Even Possible?

Nanotechnology is coming. I posted about it before HERE. The old saying, "It takes money to make money", is still true, and there's still time to become very wealthy with the right investments. That is, if the bush/cheney fiasco doesn't collapse our entire monetary system. If that happens, none of this will matter because we'll all be on all fours wrestling stale candy bars from rat's mouths and fresh water will make a wealthy "barterer".

Anyway, this is a good article. It may be considered "fringe" by the status quo, but what revolutionary idea/invention wasn't? And if it is "fringe", it's intelligent "fringe".

Ray Kurzweil Aims to Live Forever By Jay Lindsay, Associated Press WELLESLEY, Mass. (AP) -- Ray Kurzweil doesn't tailgate. A man who plans to live forever doesn't take chances with his health on the highway, or anywhere else. As part of his daily routine, Kurzweil ingests 250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea. He also periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, down to his "tactile sensitivity.'' Adjustments are made as needed. "I do actually fine-tune my programming,'' he said. The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away. It's a blink of an eye in history, but long enough for the 56-year-old Kurzweil to pay close heed to his fitness. He urges others to do the same in "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.'' The book is partly a health guide so people can live to benefit from a coming explosion in technology he predicts will make infinite life spans possible. Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls "nanobots,'' that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded via the Internet. We won't even need a heart. The claims are fantastic, but Kurzweil is no crank. He's a recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize, which is billed as a sort of Academy Award for inventors, and he won the 1999 National Medal of Technology Award. He has written on the emergence of intelligent machines in publications ranging from Wired to Time magazine. The Christian Science Monitor has called him a "modern Edison.'' He was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. Perhaps the MIT graduate's most famous inventions is the first reading machine for the blind that could read any typeface. During a recent interview in his company offices, Kurzweil sipped green tea and spoke of humanity's coming immortality as if it's as good as done. He sees human intelligence not only conquering its biological limits, including death, but completely mastering the natural world. "In my view, we are not another animal, subject to nature's whim,'' he said. Critics say Kurzweil's predictions of immortality are wild fantasies based on unjustifiable leaps from current technology. "I'm not calling Ray a quack, but I am calling his message about immortality in line with the claims of other quacks that are out there.'' said Thomas Perls, a Boston University aging specialist who studies the genetics of centenarians. Sherwin Nuland, a bioethics professor at Yale University's School of Medicine, calls Kurzweil a "genius'' but also says he's a product of a narcissistic age when brilliant people are becoming obsessed with their longevity. "They've forgotten they're acting on the basic biological fear of death and extinction, and it distorts their rational approach to the human condition,'' Nuland said. Kurzweil says his critics often fail to appreciate the exponential nature of technological advance, with knowledge doubling year by year so that amazing progress eventually occurs in short periods. His predictions, Kurzweil said, are based on carefully constructed scientific models that have proven accurate. For instance, in his 1990 book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines,'' Kurzweil predicted the development of a worldwide computer network and of a computer that could beat a chess champion. "It's not just guesses,'' he said. "There's a methodology to this.'' Kurzweil's been thinking big ever since he was little. At age 8, he developed a miniature theater in which a robotic device moved the scenery. By 16, the Queens, N.Y., native built his own computer and programmed it to compose original melodies. His interest in health developed out of concern about his own future. Kurzweil's grandfather and father suffered from heart disease, his father dying when Kurzweil was 22. Kurzweil was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in his mid-30s. After insulin treatments were ineffective, Kurzweil devised his own solution, including a drastic cut in fat consumption, allowing him to control his diabetes without insulin. His rigorous health regimen is not excessive, just effective, he says, adding that his worst sickness in the last several years has been mild nasal congestion. In the past decade, Kurzweil's interests in technology and health sciences have merged as scientists have discovered similarities. "All the genes we have, the 20,000 to 30,000 genes, are little software programs,'' Kurzweil said. In his latest book, Kurzweil defines what he calls his three bridges to immortality. The "First Bridge'' is the health regimen he describes with co-author Dr. Terry Grossman to keep people fit enough to cross the "Second Bridge,'' a biotechnological revolution. Kurzweil writes that humanity is on the verge of controlling how genes express themselves and ultimately changing the genes. With such technology, humanity could block disease-causing genes and introduce new ones that would slow or stop the aging process. The "Third Bridge'' is the nanotechnology and artificial intelligence revolution, which Kurzweil predicts will deliver the nanobots that work like repaving crews in our bloodstreams and brains. These intelligent machines will destroy disease, rebuild organs and obliterate known limits on human intelligence, he believes. Immortality would leave little standing in current society, in which the inevitability of death is foundational to everything from religion to retirement planning. The planet's natural resources would be greatly stressed, and the social order shaken. Kurzweil says he believes new technology will emerge to meet increasing human needs. And he said society will be able to control the advances he predicts as long as it makes decisions openly and democratically, without excessive government interference. But there are no guarantees, he adds. Meanwhile, Kurzweil refuses to concede the inevitably of his own death, even if science doesn't advance as quickly as he predicts. "Death is a tragedy,'' a process of suffering that rids the world of its most tested, experienced members -- people whose contributions to science and the arts could only multiply with agelessness, he said. Kurzweil said he's no "cheerleader'' for unlimited scientific progress and added he knows science can't answer questions about why eternal lives are worth living. That's left for philosophers and theologians, he said. But to him there's no question of huge advances in things that make life worth living, such as art, cultural, music and science. "Biological evolution passed the baton of progress to human cultural and technological development,'' he said. Lee Silver, a Princeton biologist, said he'd love to believe in the future as Kurzweil sees it, but the problem is, humans are involved. The instinct to preserve individuality, and to gain advantage for yourself and children, would survive any breakthrough into biological immortality -- which Silver doesn't think is possible. The gap between the haves and have-nots would widen and Kurzweil's vision of a united humanity would become ever more elusive, he said. "I think it would require a change in human nature,'' Silver said, "and I don't think people want to do that.'' SOURCE

NOT SOON ENOUGH

Take a leap into hyperspace Haiko Lietz EVERY year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year's winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious? The AIAA is certainly not embarrassed. What's more, the US military has begun to cast its eyes over the hyperdrive concept, and a space propulsion researcher at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has said he would be interested in putting the idea to the test. And despite the bafflement of most physicists at the theory that supposedly underpins it, Pavlos Mikellides, an aerospace engineer at the Arizona State University in Tempe who reviewed the winning paper, stands by the committee's choice. "Even though such features have been explored before, this particular approach is quite unique," he says. Unique it certainly is. If the experiment gets the go-ahead and works, it could reveal new interactions between the fundamental forces of nature that would change the future of space travel. Forget spending six months or more holed up in a rocket on the way to Mars, a round trip on the hyperdrive could take as little as 5 hours. All our worries about astronauts' muscles wasting away or their DNA being irreparably damaged by cosmic radiation would disappear overnight. What's more the device would put travel to the stars within reach for the first time. But can the hyperdrive really get off the ground? “A hyperdrive craft would put the stars within reach for the first time” The answer to that question hinges on the work of a little-known German physicist. Burkhard Heim began to explore the hyperdrive propulsion concept in the 1950s as a spin-off from his attempts to heal the biggest divide in physics: the rift between quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity. Quantum theory describes the realm of the very small - atoms, electrons and elementary particles - while general relativity deals with gravity. The two theories are immensely successful in their separate spheres. The clash arises when it comes to describing the basic structure of space. In general relativity, space-time is an active, malleable fabric. It has four dimensions - three of space and one of time - that deform when masses are placed in them. In Einstein's formulation, the force of gravity is a result of the deformation of these dimensions. Quantum theory, on the other hand, demands that space is a fixed and passive stage, something simply there for particles to exist on. It also suggests that space itself must somehow be made up of discrete, quantum elements. In the early 1950s, Heim began to rewrite the equations of general relativity in a quantum framework. He drew on Einstein's idea that the gravitational force emerges from the dimensions of space and time, but suggested that all fundamental forces, including electromagnetism, might emerge from a new, different set of dimensions. Originally he had four extra dimensions, but he discarded two of them believing that they did not produce any forces, and settled for adding a new two-dimensional "sub-space" onto Einstein's four-dimensional space-time. In Heim's six-dimensional world, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are coupled together. Even in our familiar four-dimensional world, we can see a link between the two forces through the behaviour of fundamental particles such as the electron. An electron has both mass and charge. When an electron falls under the pull of gravity its moving electric charge creates a magnetic field. And if you use an electromagnetic field to accelerate an electron you move the gravitational field associated with its mass. But in the four dimensions we know, you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the electromagnetic field. In Heim's view of space and time, this limitation disappears. He claimed it is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off. When he presented his idea in public in 1957, he became an instant celebrity. Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who at the time was leading the Saturn rocket programme that later launched astronauts to the moon, approached Heim about his work and asked whether the expensive Saturn rockets were worthwhile. And in a letter in 1964, the German relativity theorist Pascual Jordan, who had worked with the distinguished physicists Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and was a member of the Nobel committee, told Heim that his plan was so important "that its successful experimental treatment would without doubt make the researcher a candidate for the Nobel prize". But all this attention only led Heim to retreat from the public eye. This was partly because of his severe multiple disabilities, caused by a lab accident when he was still in his teens. But Heim was also reluctant to disclose his theory without an experiment to prove it. He never learned English because he did not want his work to leave the country. As a result, very few people knew about his work and no one came up with the necessary research funding. In 1958 the aerospace company Bölkow did offer some money, but not enough to do the proposed experiment. While Heim waited for more money to come in, the company's director, Ludwig Bölkow, encouraged him to develop his theory further. Heim took his advice, and one of the results was a theorem that led to a series of formulae for calculating the masses of the fundamental particles - something conventional theories have conspicuously failed to achieve. He outlined this work in 1977 in the Max Planck Institute's journal Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, his only peer-reviewed paper. In an abstruse way that few physicists even claim to understand, the formulae work out a particle's mass starting from physical characteristics, such as its charge and angular momentum. Yet the theorem has proved surprisingly powerful. The standard model of physics, which is generally accepted as the best available theory of elementary particles, is incapable of predicting a particle's mass. Even the accepted means of estimating mass theoretically, known as lattice quantum chromodynamics, only gets to between 1 and 10 per cent of the experimental values. Gravity reduction But in 1982, when researchers at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg implemented Heim's mass theorem in a computer program, it predicted masses of fundamental particles that matched the measured values to within the accuracy of experimental error. If they are let down by anything, it is the precision to which we know the values of the fundamental constants. Two years after Heim's death in 2001, his long-term collaborator Illobrand von Ludwiger calculated the mass formula using a more accurate gravitational constant. "The masses came out even more precise," he says. After publishing the mass formulae, Heim never really looked at hyperspace propulsion again. Instead, in response to requests for more information about the theory behind the mass predictions, he spent all his time detailing his ideas in three books published in German. It was only in 1980, when the first of his books came to the attention of a retired Austrian patent officer called Walter Dröscher, that the hyperspace propulsion idea came back to life. Dröscher looked again at Heim's ideas and produced an "extended" version, resurrecting the dimensions that Heim originally discarded. The result is "Heim-Dröscher space", a mathematical description of an eight-dimensional universe. From this, Dröscher claims, you can derive the four forces known in physics: the gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But there's more to it than that. "If Heim's picture is to make sense," Dröscher says, "we are forced to postulate two more fundamental forces." These are, Dröscher claims, related to the familiar gravitational force: one is a repulsive anti-gravity similar to the dark energy that appears to be causing the universe's expansion to accelerate. And the other might be used to accelerate a spacecraft without any rocket fuel. This force is a result of the interaction of Heim's fifth and sixth dimensions and the extra dimensions that Dröscher introduced. It produces pairs of "gravitophotons", particles that mediate the interconversion of electromagnetic and gravitational energy. Dröscher teamed up with Jochem Häuser, a physicist and professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzgitter, Germany, to turn the theoretical framework into a proposal for an experimental test. The paper they produced, "Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim's quantum theory", is what won the AIAA's award last year. Claims of the possibility of "gravity reduction" or "anti-gravity" induced by magnetic fields have been investigated by NASA before (New Scientist, 12 January 2002, p 24). But this one, Dröscher insists, is different. "Our theory is not about anti-gravity. It's about completely new fields with new properties," he says. And he and Häuser have suggested an experiment to prove it. This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil to create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and a large enough magnetic field, Dröscher claims the electromagnetic force can reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free. Dröscher and Häuser say that to completely counter Earth's pull on a 150-tonne spacecraft a magnetic field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that's 500,000 times the strength of Earth's magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly reach field strengths up to 80 tesla. And Dröscher and Häuser go further. With a faster-spinning ring and an even stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons would interact with conventional gravity to produce a repulsive anti-gravity force, they suggest. “A spinning ring and a strong magnetic field could produce a repulsive anti-gravity force” Dröscher is hazy about the details, but he suggests that a spacecraft fitted with a coil and ring could be propelled into a multidimensional hyperspace. Here the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light could be several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say. So is this all fanciful nonsense, or a revolution in the making? The majority of physicists have never heard of Heim theory, and most of those contacted by New Scientist said they couldn't make sense of Dröscher and Häuser's description of the theory behind their proposed experiment. Following Heim theory is hard work even without Dröscher's extension, says Markus Pössel, a theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. Several years ago, while an undergraduate at the University of Hamburg, he took a careful look at Heim theory. He says he finds it "largely incomprehensible", and difficult to tie in with today's physics. "What is needed is a step-by-step introduction, beginning at modern physical concepts," he says. The general consensus seems to be that Dröscher and Häuser's theory is incomplete at best, and certainly extremely difficult to follow. And it has not passed any normal form of peer review, a fact that surprised the AIAA prize reviewers when they made their decision. "It seemed to be quite developed and ready for such publication," Mikellides told New Scientist. At the moment, the main reason for taking the proposal seriously must be Heim theory's uncannily successful prediction of particle masses. Maybe, just maybe, Heim theory really does have something to contribute to modern physics. "As far as I understand it, Heim theory is ingenious," says Hans Theodor Auerbach, a theoretical physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who worked with Heim. "I think that physics will take this direction in the future." It may be a long while before we find out if he's right. In its present design, Dröscher and Häuser's experiment requires a magnetic coil several metres in diameter capable of sustaining an enormous current density. Most engineers say that this is not feasible with existing materials and technology, but Roger Lenard, a space propulsion researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico thinks it might just be possible. Sandia runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine which "could probably generate the necessary field intensities and gradients". For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my mind, is a successful experiment." From issue 2533 of New Scientist magazine, 05 January 2006, page 24 Who was Burkhard Heim? Burkhard Heim had a remarkable life. Born in 1925 in Potsdam, Germany, he decided at the age of 6 that he wanted to become a rocket scientist. He disguised his designs in code so that no one could discover his secret. And in the cellar of his parents' house, he experimented with high explosives. But this was to lead to disaster. Towards the end of the second world war, he worked as an explosives developer, and an accident in 1944 in which a device exploded in his hands left him permanently disabled. He lost both his forearms, along with 90 per cent of his hearing and eyesight. After the war, he attended university in Göttingen to study physics. The idea of propelling a spacecraft using quantum mechanics rather than rocket fuel led him to study general relativity and quantum mechanics. It took an enormous effort. From 1948, his father and wife replaced his senses, spending hours reading papers and transcribing his calculations onto paper. And he developed a photographic memory. Supporters of Heim theory claim that it is a panacea for the troubles in modern physics. They say it unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, can predict the masses of the building blocks of matter from first principles, and can even explain the state of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

ABELL 2218

Since I was a child I have had an extraordinary interest in space and time. Spacetime. Our telescopes allow us to look back in time. The more distant the object we see, the further back in time we see it. On a smaller scale you can do this right now. Anything you look at- a tree on the horizon, the Moon, even yourself in a mirror is really a past version. You are seeing the object of your current vision as it was at the time the light left it. The determining factor is the amount of time it takes for light reflecting from that object to reach your retina. In most cases, it is unnoticeable to you. In all cases, it is not really considered. Light from the Sun in the sky takes 8 minutes to "reach" us here on Earth, hence the Sun is said to be 8 light minutes away. If it were to go supernova, we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes. Of course, the knowledge at that point wouldn't do us any good because we'd be dead.

Although none of us living on this tiny little insignificant "speck of dust" can comprehend the vastness of space, it certainly fascinates us. It is our true larger environment and it has been in existence for over 15 BILLION years and will exist BILLIONS of years after our species has succumbed to a natural or self-made disaster. We have only existed for an instant and will be gone "in the blink of an eye". To us, the Universe is eternal.

Abell 2218: A Galaxy Cluster Lens

Credit: W. Couch (University of New South Wales), R. Ellis (Cambridge University), NASA
Explanation: Gravity can bend light. Almost all of the bright objects in this Hubble Space Telescope image are galaxies in the cluster known as Abell 2218. The cluster is so massive and so compact that its gravity bends and focuses the light from galaxies that lie behind it. As a result, multiple images of these background galaxies are distorted into faint stretched out arcs - a simple lensing effect analogous to viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. The Abell 2218 cluster itself is about 3 billion light-years away in the northern constellation Draco.
Courtesy NASA, January 11, 1998 Hubble photograph)
MUCH MORE AT DISCOVER THE COSMOS!

POSSIBLE LINK

Here's another blow to those silly and ignorant bush lovin' creationists:

Possible Link to Lucy's Ancestors Found Robin Lloyd LiveScience Senior Editor LiveScience.com New jaw fossils might suggest a direct line of descent between two species of early humans, including the one to which "Lucy" belongs. The 3.2 million-year-old Lucy, the earliest known hominid, was found in Ethiopia in 1974 by U.S. paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray. Lucy and her kind, Australopithecus afarensis, stood upright and walked on two feet, though they might also have been agile tree-climbers. Anthropologists have suspected an ancestor-descendant relationship between the Lucy species and a predecessor--Australopithecus anamensis--based on their similarities but lacked fossils from an intervening period. Now, Australopithecus fossils found in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar Region, Ethiopia, fill the date gap between A. anamensis (4.2 to 3.9 million years ago)—and the Lucy species (3.0 to 3.6 million years ago). The species identifications for all the bones remain uncertain, though it appears that some are A. afarensis. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, says his team's 2007 field season in the Woranso-Mille region uncovered the key evidence. "We recovered fossil hominids that date to between 3.5 and 3.8 million years ago," Haile-Selassie said in a prepared statement. "These specimens sample the right time to look into the relationship between Australopithecus anamensis and Australopithecus afarensis and will play a major role in testing the ancestor-descendant hypothesis." The team had found teeth from this time frame at the site over the past few years, but the new material includes more complete jaws that will enable better comparisons, he said. At least 40 hominid specimens have been recovered from the site so far, including the complete jaws and a partial skeleton found in 2005. Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania have yielded many of the earliest hominid and ape fossils that have allowed anthropologists to piece together the history of human evolution.

SOURCE

HYPERION

Key to Giant Space Sponge Revealed Ker Than Staff Writer SPACE.com One of the strangest moons in our solar system is Hyperion, a Saturnian satellite so pockmarked by deep craters that it looks like a giant, rotating bath sponge adrift in space. New image analyses suggest the moon's odd appearance is the result of a highly porous surface that preserves craters, allowing them to remain nearly as pristine as the day they were created. The finding is just one of several new details about the quirky moon revealed in two studies published in the July 5 issue of the journal Nature. Scientists determined that Hyperion is composed mostly of water ice and that the bottoms of its craters are covered in a dark red gunk that could be the key to resolving some of the moon's other strange properties. One odd moon Hyperion is all kinds of weird. It is one of the largest non-spherical bodies in the solar system. The moon is oval shaped and about 250 miles (400 km) at its widest point. Unlike most of Saturn's other satellites, it is not tidally locked to the ringed-planet. Earth's moon is tidally locked, which is why we always see the same face of it. Instead, Hyperion undergoes "chaotic rotation," meaning its axis of rotation shifts so much that scientists can't reliably predict its orientation in space. Perhaps the most striking thing about Hyperion, however, is its extremely pitted appearance. Hundreds of craters cover the surface, with most averaging 1 to 6 miles (2 to 10 kilometers) wide. The latest analyses of data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during its flybys of Hyperion in 2005 and 2006 show that about 40 percent of the moon is empty space. Hyperion's high porosity could explain its sponge-like appearance, scientists say. A large meteor striking Earth's moon will gouge a deep hole on the surface and send up a giant spray of rock and dust. The excavated material rains back down onto the lunar surface and into other craters, partially filling them in. In contrast, the surface of Hyperion is so brittle that an object striking it will create a hole but not send any material flying. Surrounding craters remain as deep as when they first formed. "Theoretical work suggests that if you have a porous target, craters may be more compressional instead of being explosive and tossing stuff out," said Peter Thomas of Cornell University, who led one of the studies. Mystery gunk The new analyses also confirmed that Hyperion is composed mostly of water ice with very little rock. "We find that water ice is the main constituent of the surface, but it's dirty water ice," said Dale Cruickshank, a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center who led the second study. "Fresh water ice would look very bright in reflected sunlight, but this is definitely dingy." Cruickshank's team attributes the moon's dinginess to contamination by a dark, organic material that litters Hyperion's surface and is concentrated in several of its craters. The reddish gunk contains long chains of carbon and hydrogen and appears very similar to material found on other Saturnian satellites, most notably Iaeptus. The third-largest moon of Saturn, Iaeptus is an unusual two-toned world with one half covered in gleaming ice and the other half coated in the same mysterious dark material that covers Hyperion. A smashing idea This link has some scientists speculating that Hyperion's strange shape and Iaeptus' odd paint job share a common origin. "Maybe Hyperion got hit and is the origin of this dark stuff which then got spewed out and got swept up by Iapetus," Cruickshank told SPACE.com. According to this idea, a giant object collided with a still-round Hyperion in the distant past. The impact sent Hyperion into a cosmic spin that it is still reeling from today and caused a shower of dust-like particles to fly outwards through space, where it struck an unaware Iapetus full in the face. "That's not completely implausible," Cruickshank said. If Iapetus "ran into a dust storm as it orbited around Saturn, the dust would be distributed the way we see it." As to what the object might have been that struck Hyperion, Cruickshank notes that the same reddish gunk can also be found on other icy objects in the outer solar system, including other moons, Kuiper belt objects and comets.

INTUITIVE EATING

Here's an interesting idea practice/implementation:

Professor Loses Weight With No-Diet Diet By BROCK VERGAKIS, Associated Press Writer When Steven Hawks is tempted by ice cream bars, M&Ms and toffee-covered almonds at the grocery store, he doesn't pass them by. He fills up his shopping cart. It's the no-diet diet, an approach the Brigham Young University health science professor used to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off for more than five years. Hawks calls his plan "intuitive eating" and thinks the rest of the country would be better off if people stopped counting calories, started paying attention to hunger pangs and ate whatever they wanted. As part of intuitive eating, Hawks surrounds himself with unhealthy foods he especially craves. He says having an overabundance of what's taboo helps him lose his desire to gorge. There is a catch to this no-diet diet, however: Intuitive eaters only eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full. That means not eating a box of chocolates when you're feeling blue or digging into a big plate of nachos just because everyone else at the table is. The trade-off is the opportunity to eat whatever your heart desires when you are actually hungry. "One of the advantages of intuitive eating is you're always eating things that are most appealing to you, not out of emotional reasons, not because it's there and tastes good," he said. "Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it. The cravings tend to subside. I don't have anywhere near the cravings I would as a 'restrained eater.'" Hawks should know. In 1989, the Utah native had a job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and wanted to return to his home state. But at 210 pounds, he didn't think a fat person could get a job teaching students how to be healthy, so his calorie-counting began. He lost weight and got the job at Utah State University. But the pounds soon came back. For several years his weight fluctuated, until he eventually gave up on being a restrained eater and the weight stayed on. "You definitely lose weight on a diet, but resisting biological pressures is ultimately doomed," Hawks said. Several years later and still overweight at a new job at BYU, Hawks decided it was time for a lifestyle change. He stopped feeling guilty about eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips. He also stopped eating when he wasn't hungry. Slowly and steadily his weight began to drop. Exercise helped. His friends and co-workers soon took notice of the slimmer Hawks. "It astonished me, actually," said his friend, Steven Peck. "We were both very heavy. It was hard not to be struck." After watching Hawks lose and keep the weight off for a year and a half, Peck tried intuitive eating in January. "I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until you didn't feel like it. It struck me as odd," said Peck, who is an assistant professor at BYU. But 11 months later, Peck sometimes eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating. "There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving," Peck said. "That's one thing about Steve's ideas, they're sort of forgiving. On other diets if you slip up, you feel you've blown it and it takes a couple weeks get back into it. ... This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor." The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food, said Michael Goran, an obesity expert at the University of Southern California. Ultimately, that's why they usually fail, he said. "At some point you want what you can't have," Goran said. Still, he said intuitive eating makes sense as a concept "if you know what you're doing." Intuitive eating alone won't give anyone six-pack abs, Hawks said, but it will lead to a healthier lifestyle. He still eats junk food and keeps a jar of honey in his office, but only indulges occasionally. "My diet is actually quite healthy. ... I'm as likely to eat broccoli as eat a steak," he said. "It's a misconception that all of a sudden a diet is going to become all junk food and high fat," he said. In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Hawks and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students. He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study across different cultures. Ultimately, he'd like intuitive eating to catch on as a way for people to normalize their relationship with food and fight eating disorders. "Most of what the government is telling us is, we need to count calories, restrict fat grams, etc. I feel like that's a harmful message," he said. "I think encouraging dietary restraint creates more problems. I hope intuitive eating will be adopted at a national level."

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On the Net:
National Institute for Intuitive Eating http://www.intuitiveeating.com

Mice and an ANTI-FAT PROTEIN

Humans share 99% of genes with mice (how about that for proof of evolution?). In fact, 81% of those genes are identical. In other words, we share a common ancestor. Its not a stretch to expect numerous breakthroughs for human physiology since both genomes have been mapped out. As technology expands exponentially and discoveries are made everyday, this one could be working any day. The slowdown will be in the government's approval. Europe always has the latest "goodies" long before the United States. Anyway, in this case, if its offered I'm sure there will be plenty of "guinea pig" volunteers. But hey, as the article states, there's always a sensible diet with a combination of the proper exercising.

Anti-Fat Protein Keeps Overeating Mice Slim By E.J. Mundell HealthDay Reporter Mice gorging on high-calorie, high-fat diets for two weeks stayed slender, thanks to an "anti-obesity" protein injected into their brains, Italian researchers report. Eating all you want and never getting fat does seem like a dream come true. And experts cautioned that it might stay a dream -- at least for humans -- for the foreseeable future. "Whether this translates to humans and whether it translates to humans without tremendous side effects is another story," said Cathy Nonas, director of the obesity and diabetes programs at North General Hospital in New York City, and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. The study was published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to Nonas, a "wonder drug" that wards off obesity while allowing people to eat all they want has long been the goal of pharmaceutical companies worldwide. So far, most research efforts have focused on agents that "rev up" metabolism to burn off excess calories. "People have been working on the idea of looking at molecules, peptides, to see whether they could increase energy expenditure without major side effects," Nonas said. This latest research, led by Alessandro Bartolomucci of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, in Rome, focused on a protein byproduct of the Vgf gene, which has long been linked to metabolism. Bartolomucci's group first identified this protein, a peptide called TLQP-21, in the brains of rats. "It was an unproved assumption that VGF-derived peptides could regulate metabolism," the Italian team noted. Exploring further, the researchers isolated TLQP-21 and injected it into the brains of lab mice every day for 14 days. At the same time, the mice were given high-fat diets that would normally trigger weight gain. In this case, however, that didn't happen. According to the researchers, the mice stayed slim because the peptide boosted their metabolic rate. "When TLQP-21 is chronically injected into the cerebral ventricles, it increases [the mice's] energy expenditure and rectal temperature," Bartolomucci explained. Both of these changes signified a sped-up metabolism. The peptide also affected key factors in metabolism and calorie-burning, he said. These included a rise in blood levels of the hormone epinephrine, as well as changes in locomotor and thyroid function. Furthermore, in treated mice placed on a standard diet, "adipose [fat] tissue slightly decreased," Bartolomucci said. At the same time, the number of cellular receptors linked to fat-burning and energy expenditure rose. All of this could explain why mice fed the high-fat diet kept their skinny physiques when they were given TLQP-21, Bartolomucci said. The Italian researcher believes TLQP-21 has potential as an anti-obesity agent for use in humans. But he stressed that, "we are in an early stage of research. Indeed, this is the first study where the peptide is identified and the first study where its role in metabolic function has been tested." Nonas agreed that it is a very big leap to assume that safety and efficacy in mice will translate to humans. First of all is the problem of drug-delivery. "You can only do brain injections to a rat and a mouse," she pointed out. "You'd have to go a long way before you could take that and turn it into something that would work in a pill form or be injected into fat tissue." The potential side effects of revving up the metabolism are also daunting. "You can have cardiac side effects, things like irregular heartbeat," Nonas said. "Then, there are headaches, heat and temperature-control things." And even if people could eat high-fat diets without gaining weight, that doesn't mean they'd stay healthy. "We know plenty of people who are lean all their lives and still have clogged arteries from eating unhealthy foods," Nonas pointed out. Any anti-obesity pill would only offer people a boost in fighting weight gain -- it would probably never be the total solution, she said. In the meantime, people do have a proven, effective way of fighting or reducing obesity -- sensible diets and regular exercise. "I'm not saying that that isn't really hard to do," Nonas said. "It will never be easy. But there will never be any magic bullet."

LAKES...of Methane on TITAN

Lost lakes of Titan are found at last Lakes of methane have been spotted on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, boosting the theory that this strange, distant world bears beguiling similarities to Earth, according to a new study. Titan has long intrigued space scientists, as it is the only moon in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere -- and its atmosphere, like Earth's, mainly comprises nitrogen. Titan's atmosphere is also rich in methane, although the source for this vast store of hydrocarbons is unclear. Methane, on the geological scale, has a relatively limited life. A molecule of the compound lasts several tens of millions of years before it is broken up by sunlight. Given that Titan is billions of years old, the question is how this atmospheric methane gets to be renewed. Without replenishment, it should have disappeared long ago. A popular hypothesis is that it comes from a vast ocean of hydrocarbons. But when the US spacecraft Cassini sent down a European lander, Huygens, to Titan in 2005, the images sent back were of a rugged landscape veiled in an orange haze. There were indeed signs of methane flows and methane precipitation, but nothing at all that pointed to any sea of the stuff. But a flyby by Cassini on July 22 last year has revealed, thanks to a radar scan, 75 large, smooth, dark patches between three and 70 kilometers across (two and 42 miles) across that appear to be lakes of liquid methane, scientists report on Thursday. They believe the lakes prove that Titan has a "methane cycle" -- a system that is like the water cycle on Earth, in which the liquid evaporates, cools and condenses and then falls as rain, replenishing the surface liquid. As on Earth, Titan's surface methane may well be supplemented by a "table" of liquid methane that seeps through the rock, the paper suggests. Some of the methane lakes seem only partly filled, and other depressions are dry, which suggests that, given the high northerly latitudes where they were spotted, the methane cycle follows Titan's seasons. In winter, the lakes expand, while in summer, they shrink or dry up completely -- again, another parallel with Earth's hydrological cycle. The study, which appears on Thursday in the British weekly journal Nature, is headed by Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research in Virginia and University College London. Titan and Earth are of course very different, especially in their potential for nurturing life. Titan is frigid, dark and, as far as is known, waterless, where as Earth is warm, light and has lots of liquid water. But French astrophysicist Christophe Sotin says both our planet and Titan have been sculpted by processes that, fundamentally, are quite similar. The findings "add to the weight of evidence that Titan is a complex world in which the interaction between the inner and outer layers is controlled by processes similar to those that must have dominated the evolution of any Earth-like planet," Sotin said in a commentary. "Indeed, as far as we know," Sotin added, "there is only one planetary body that displays more dynamism than Titan. Its name is Earth."

HABITABLE PLANET FOUND

Our SCIENTISTS have discovered this. And its promising WHY? We haven't even been to the Moon since the early 70s. Our "space program" with all of its unmanned missions is weak at best. Maybe someday it will matter that there are possibly TENS OF BILLIONS of "Class M" planets out there, but unfortunately I'll never live to see those pioneering days. I still can't help being excited to hear about this though.

Potentially habitable planet found By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe." The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun. There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards. "It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions." The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business." The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds. What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life. The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs. The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger. Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said. However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers. Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter. The new planet seems just right — or at least that's what scientists think. "This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability." Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one — simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves — will go down in cosmic history as No. 1. Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said. "Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X." Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water. "You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back." The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere. Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days. Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds. But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark. Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said. Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system. The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers. Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said. A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates. "Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.

UFOs and their occupants

What the hell are these things? I used to think that the UFOs were extraterrestrial in nature. Now...I just don't know what to think. I do believe that Travis Walton, Whit Strieber, Betty Andreasson, Karla Turner and thousands of other "abductees"- famous and not so famous ARE TELLING THE TRUTH. I believe there are greys and other humanoids. Maybe they're from "shadow worlds/existences with abilities that seem extraordinary and magical to us. I, like many others, would like to know the truth in my lifetime.

UFO Research: Findings vs. Facts

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer

For decades now, eyes and sky have met to witness the buzzing of our world by Unidentified Flying Objects, termed UFOs or simply flying saucers. Extraterrestrials have come a long way to purportedly share the friendly skies with us. UFOs and alien visitors are part of our culture—a far-out phenomenon when judged against those "low life" wonders Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. And after all those years, as the saying goes, UFOs remain a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Why so? For one, the field is fraught with hucksterism. It's also replete with blurry photos and awful video. But then there are also well-intentioned and puzzled witnesses [See Top 10 Alien Encounters Debunked]. Unusual properties There have been advances in the field of UFO research, said Ted Roe, Executive Director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), based in Vallejo, California. "The capture of optical spectra from mobile, unpredictable luminosities is one of those innovations. More work to be done here but [there are] some good results already." NARCAP was established in 2000 and is dedicated to the advancement of aviation safety issues as they apply to, what they term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Roe said that a decade from now, researchers should have even better instrumentation at their disposal and better data on UAP of several varieties. His forecast is that scientific rigor will prevail, demonstrating that there are "stable, mobile, unusual, poorly documented phenomena with quite unusual properties manifesting within our atmosphere," he told SPACE.com. Paradigm shifting NARCAP has made the case that some of these phenomena have unusual electromagnetic properties. Therefore, they could disrupt microprocessors and adversely effect avionic systems, Roe explained, and that for those reasons and others UAP should be considered a hazard to safe aviation. "It is likely that either conclusion will fly in the face of the general assertion that UAP are not real and that there are no undocumented phenomena in our atmosphere," Roe continued. That should open the door, he said, to the realization that there's no good reason to discard outright the possibility that extraterrestrial visitation has occurred and may be occurring. "Physics is leading to new and potentially paradigm shifting understandings about the nature of our universe and its physical properties," Roe said. "These understandings may point the way towards an acceptance of the probability of interstellar travel and communication by spacefaring races." Sacred cows to the slaughter As UFO debunker Robert Sheaffer's web site proclaims, he's "skeptical to the max." He is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and a well-known writer on the UFO scene. Being an equal-opportunity debunker, Sheaffer notes that he refutes whatever nonsense, in his judgment, "stands in the greatest need of refuting, no matter from what source it may come, no matter how privileged, esteemed, or sacrosanct … sacred cows, after all, make the best hamburger." Sheaffer told SPACE.com, in regards to the cottage industry of UFO promoters, there's a reason there are still so many snake-oil sellers. "It's because nobody, anywhere, has any actual facts concerning alleged UFOs, just claims. That allows con-men to thrive peddling their yarns," Sheaffer said. "UFO believers are convinced that the existence of UFOs will be revealed 'any day now'. But it's like Charlie Brown and the football: No matter how many times Lucy pulls the football away—or the promised 'disclosure' fails to happen—they're dead-certain that the next time will be their moment of glory." Trash from the past "I would have to say that we're stuck in neutral," said Kevin Randle, a leading expert and writer on UFOs and is known as a dogged researcher of the phenomena. There's no real new research, he said, and that's "because we have to revisit the trash of the past." Randle points to yesteryear stories, one stretching back in time to a supposed 1897 airship crash in Aurora, Texas, long proven to be a hoax by two con men—yet continues to surface in UFO circles. Then there's the celebrated Thomas Mantell saga, a pilot that lost his life chasing a UFO in 1948. There are those that contend he was killed by a blue beam from a UFO, Randle said "even though we have known for years that the UFO was a balloon and he violated regulations by climbing above 14,000 feet without oxygen equipment. I mean, we know this, and yet there are those who believe that Mantell was killed by aliens." Randle's advice is to the point: "We need to begin to apply rigorous standards of research … stop accepting what we wish to believe even when the evidence is poor, and begin thinking ahead." Paucity of physical evidence "I've no doubt that UFOs are here to stay," said Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "I'm just not convinced that alien craft are here to stay … or for that matter, even here for brief visits. "First, despite a torrent of sightings for more than a half-century, I can't think of a single, major science museum that has alien artifacts on display," Shostak said. "Contrast this paucity of physical evidence with what the American Indians could have shown you fifty years after Christopher Columbus first violated their sea-space. They could have shown you all sorts of stuff—including lots of smallpox-infested brethren—as proof that they were being 'visited,'" he said. When it comes to extraterrestrial visitors in the 21st century, the evidence is anecdotal, ambiguous, or, in some cases, artifice, Shostak suggested. Calling it "argument from ignorance", Shostak pointed to the claim that aliens must have careened out of control above the New Mexico desert simply because some classified government documents sport a bunch of blacked-out text. "How does the latter prove the former?" Sure, the missing verbiage is consistent with a government cover-up of an alien crash landing, Shostak said. "But it's also consistent with an infinitude of other scenarios…not all of them involving sloppy alien pilots," he added. Shostak said that it is not impossible that we could be visited. It doesn't violate physics to travel between the stars, although that's not easy to do. "But really, if you're going to claim—or for that matter, believe—that extraterrestrials are strafing the cities, or occasionally assaulting the neighbors with an aggression inappropriate for a first date, then I urge you to find evidence that leaves little doubt among the professionally skeptical community known as the world of science." Residue of sightings Why is there precious little to show that world of science that UFOs merit attention? "Obviously there is not a simple answer, but part of it is reluctance of the scientific community to support such research," explained Bruce Maccabee, regarded as a meticulous researcher and an optical physicist using those talents to study photographs and video of unexplained phenomena. Why this reluctance? "In my humble opinion it is largely a result of 'tradition'…tradition set by the U.S. Air Force in the early years when they publicly stated that everything was under control, they were investigating…and finding nothing that couldn't be explained," Maccabee said. Nevertheless, Maccabee observed, work on the phenomenon will carry on. "UFO studies will continue until all the old cases have either been explained or admitted to being unexplainable—meaning a residue of sightings that could be ET related—and/or until people stop seeing unexplainable UFO-like events throughout the world," Maccabee concluded.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE SPLIT

Keep in mind that this is an objective consideration of theory. I'm on a "different side" of a lot of this article. You may want to read my site on TIMETRAVEL (TIME TRAVEL) which can be accessed at the sidebar on the right.

My So-Called Universe Our cozy world is probably much bigger—and stranger—than we know. By Jim Holt One morning last April, the New York Times op-ed page ran a piece by the Australian physicist Paul Davies warning readers not to be so gullible as to believe there could be more than one universe. The next month, Scientific American published a long article by the physicist Max Tegmark asserting that, to the contrary, parallel universes almost certainly do exist. Around the same time, bookstores received Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, wherein Martin Gardner dismisses theories of multiple universes as "frivolous fantasies." If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion? Before getting to why you should or should not believe in multiple universes, there's a semantic point we ought to deal with. If the universe is, as the dictionary has it, "all existing things ... regarded as a whole," then isn't it true by definition that there is only one such thing? (After all, uni- is built right into the word itself.) Well, yes. But when physicists and philosophers talk about different space-time domains being "two universes," what they generally mean is that those regions are 1) very, very large; 2) "causally isolated" from each other (meaning that an event in one cannot have an effect in another); and hence 3) mutually unknowable by direct observation (since observing something means causally interacting with it). The case for saying the two domains are separate universes is further strengthened if 4) they have very different characters: if, say, one of them has three spatial dimensions (like ours), whereas the other has 17 dimensions. Finally—and here is the existentially titillating possibility—two domains might be called separate universes if 5) they are "parallel," meaning that they contain somewhat different versions of the same entities, like your own alter ego. Thinkers who entertain the possibility that there are lots of universes have invented a new term for the entire ensemble: "the multiverse." Why believe in the multiverse? The "pro" camp has essentially two kinds of arguments. One—the good kind—is that the existence of other universes is logically implied by the theories that best explain features of our own universe. For instance, measurements of the cosmic background radiation (the echo left over from the big bang) indicate that the space we live in is infinite and that matter is spread randomly throughout it. Therefore, all possible arrangements of matter must exist out there somewhere—including exact and inexact replicas of our own world and the beings in it. The idea is a bit like that of monkeys in front of typewriters eventually typing out all of Shakespeare: Quantum theory says that nature is discrete, so the visible universe we inhabit is characterized by a finite amount of information; if space is infinite, this informational pattern is bound to repeat at vast enough distances. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there should be an exact copy of you around 10 to the 10 to the 28th light-years away. A more extravagant kind of multiverse is entailed by the theory of "chaotic inflation." Proposed by Andrei Linde to explain why our universe looks the way it does—big, uniform, and flat—inflation theory also predicts that big bangs should be a fairly routine occurrence, giving rise to an eternal network of universes tied together by impassable "wormholes." These universes, according to the theory, would have different physical characteristics. This kind of multiverse has become the bane of natural theologians. Here's why. One reason for believing in God is that our own universe seems improbably fine-tuned for life. It's as though a cosmic designer had carefully adjusted the physical laws to ensure that beings like us would eventually shimmer onto the scene. But if our universe is one among a vast ensemble of universes with randomly varying physical constants, then it is only to be expected that a few of these universes should be life-fostering. Add to this the fact that if we exist at all, we are bound to find ourselves in a universe that is congenial to us—the so-called "anthropic principle"—and the presumed fine-tuning of our universe seems wholly unremarkable. No need to invoke the God hypothesis to answer the question, why are we here? But some thinkers want to turn this reasoning around. They insist that other universes must exist precisely to make certain conceptual mysteries go away. This is the second kind of argument for the multiverse—the bad kind, since it has nothing to do with empirical observation. One version of this argument derives from attempts to make sense of quantum theory. Take the famous paradox of Schrödinger's Cat—the unfortunate feline, who, because of the quantum superposition of possibilities, is simultaneously alive and dead. According to the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, Schrödinger's experiment splits the universe into two parallel copies, one with a live cat, the other with a dead one (and each with a version of you). Physicists who buy into this interpretation—and many distinguished ones do—claim that each universe splits into something like 10 to the 100th copies every second, all of them equally real. Yet, since quantum theory forbids these parallel worlds from interacting, there is no experimental way to confirm their reality. Another version of this backward argument for multiple universes was championed by the late Princeton philosopher David K. Lewis. Lewis believed (or at least pretended to) that all logically possible universes are as real as the one we call the "actual" one. Why? Because their existence would neatly solve a wide range of philosophical problems. Take the problem of counterfactuals. What does it mean to say, "If JFK hadn't gone to Dallas, the Vietnam War would have ended earlier"? According to Lewis, the counterfactual statement is true only if there is an alternative universe in which JFK didn't go to Dallas and the Vietnam War did end earlier. His "modal realism" entails that there is even a universe containing the Greek gods and is primarily a linguistic philosophical argument rather than a scientific one. As for the arguments against the multiverse, they boil down to these three. 1) It's not science. Both Paul Davies and Martin Gardner claim that the proposition "the multiverse exists" has no empirical content and hence amounts to empty metaphysics. But the hypotheses that imply it do lead to testable predictions, some of which jibe with the evidence collected so far. In the next decade, as Max Tegmark points out, improved measurements of the microwave background radiation and of the large-scale distribution of matter may fortify or knock down two pillars of the multiverse: the infinitude of space and the theory of chaotic inflation. 2) Alternative universes should be shaved away by Occam's Razor. Both Davies and Gardner complain that the multiverse notion is too extravagant. "Surely the conjecture that there is just one universe and its Creator is infinitely simpler and easier to believe than that there are countless billions upon billions of worlds," Gardner writes. Is it? Our universe came into being with the big bang, and (as the Canadian philosopher John Leslie has observed) it would be exceedingly odd if the mechanism behind this event bore the label "THIS MECHANISM OPERATED ONLY ONCE." A computer program that prints out the entire sequence of numbers is much simpler than one that prints out only a single number of any length. And besides, why should simple theories be more probable than extravagant ones? 3) The multiverse, if real, would reduce our own world to a Matrix-like simulation. This objection, voiced by Davies, is surely the most bizarre of the lot. If there really were myriad universes, Davies argues, then some would contain advanced technological civilizations that could use computers to simulate consciousness and create endless virtual worlds. So, he continues, taking the multiverse theory at face value means "there is no reason to expect our world—the one in which you are reading this right now—to be real as opposed to a simulation." This is a terrible argument for at least two reasons. If it were valid, it would rule out technologically advanced civilizations in this universe since they, too, would presumably create such simulations. And the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation itself has no empirical content. We cannot even talk about it coherently, as Hilary Putnam has pointed out, since our words could refer only to things "inside" the alleged simulation. How seriously should you take multiple universes? That depends on how scrupulous you are about your ontological commitments. I know people who still regard atoms as theoretical fictions. I have friends who claim to doubt the reality of the past, of the future, of other minds. I have heard of academics—though I cannot believe they actually exist—who think that the cosmos is a social construction. But I am a robust scientific realist. If an empirically sound theory entails that unobservable entities exist, then I take them at face value. After all, reality has over and over again turned out to be much more inclusive than we've given it credit for being. Just a century ago, our puny Milky Way was thought to comprise the entire cosmos. If the choices we make in our everyday lives seem a little absurd from the viewpoint of a single vast and eternal universe, then, from the viewpoint of an infinite ensemble of universes containing infinite copies of ourselves, all making every possible choice, they are absolutely absurd. Thankfully, in our own little world, those choices remain terribly meaningful and important.

Déjà Vu

Patients Suffer Deja Vu ... Over and Over Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor LiveScience.com Imagine suffering from chronic déjà vu. You don't even go to the doctor because you feel like you've already been there. "We had a peculiar referral from a man who said there was no point visiting the clinic because he'd already been there, although this would have been impossible," said psychologist Chris Moulin, who runs a memory clinic at the University of Leeds in the UK. So Moulin has started the first known study of the condition. Déjà vu hits most of us now and then. We're struck by the sensation that we have experienced an event before, even though we can't fully remember it or perhaps know it didn't really happen. The sensation is fleeting, so researchers can't study it. But Moulin figures chronic déjà vu sufferers offer an opportunity to do research that might unlock the secrets of the everyday variety. The man who thinks he's been to Moulin's clinic even gave details of the visit that never occurred. He has déjà vu so bad that he doesn't watch TV news because he feels like he's seen it all before, Moulin said. Things get tricky when the man is asked to predict what's ahead, however. "When this particular patient's wife asked what was going to happen next on a TV program he'd claimed to have already seen, he said, 'How should I know? I have a memory problem!'" Moulin and colleagues have since found other patients, now that they know what to look for. The condition can cause depression and is sometimes diagnosed as a state of delusion. But Moulin's team believes it to be a dysfunction of memory. "The exciting thing about these people is that they can 'recall' specific details about an event or meeting that never actually occurred," Moulin said. "It suggests that the sensations associated with remembering are separate to the contents of memory, that there are two different systems in the brain at work."

ST. PARIS OHIO: 1932

The description for this one reads:

"The unidentified flying object in the picture could not have been a street lamp, simply because there were no street lamps there at the time. There are no power poles or power lines visible anywhere in this picture. Summer 1932, Mid-day, St. Paris, Ohio. This picture of George Sutton of St. Paris, Ohio, taken near mid-day (as may be seen from the shadows on the ground) shows a vintage automobile with a 1932 license plate on the front bumper. The owner of the photo album says there were no electric street lights along this road in those days. Nobody has been able to account for the dark object seen over Sutton's left shoulder in this photograph."

EINSTEIN

A brief biography of a very intelligent man that has advanced our Science and motivated more Scientific minds than probably anyone else in our history...

Saturday April 14, 2005 12:04 PM By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer He stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue like the Beatles or Marilyn Monroe. He could've been president of Israel or played violin at Carnegie Hall, but he was too busy thinking. His musings on God, love and the meaning of life grace our greeting cards and day-timers. Fifty years after his death, his shock of white hair and droopy mustache still symbolize genius. Who else could it be but Albert Einstein? Einstein remains the foremost scientist of the modern era. Looking back 2,400 years, only Newton, Galileo and Aristotle were his equals. Around the world, universities and academies are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miracle year" when he published five scientific papers in 1905 that fundamentally changed our grasp of space, time, light and matter. Only he could top himself about a decade later with his theory of general relativity. Born in the era of horse-drawn carriages, his ideas launched a dazzling technological revolution that has generated more change in a century than in the previous two millennia. Computers, satellites, telecommunication, lasers, television and nuclear power all owe their invention to ways in which Einstein peeled back the veneer of the observable world to expose a stranger and more complicated reality underneath. And, he launched an intellectual quest for a single coherent law that governs the universe. Einstein said such a unified super-theory of everything, still unwritten, would enable us to "read the mind of God." "We are a different race of people than we were a century ago," says astrophysicist Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, "utterly and completely different, because of Einstein." Yet there is more, and it is why Einstein transcends mere genius and has become our culture's grandfatherly icon. He escaped Hitler's Germany and devoted the rest of his life to humanitarian and pacifist causes with an authority unmatched by any scientist today, or even most politicians and religious leaders. He used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice and the McCarthy hearings. His FBI file ran 1,400 pages. His letters reveal a tumultuous personal life — married twice and indifferent toward his children while obsessed with physics. Yet he charmed lovers and admirers with poetry and sailboat outings. Friends and neighbors fiercely protected his privacy. And, yes, he was eccentric. With hair like that, how could he not be? He famously stuck his tongue out at photographers — that is, when he wasn't wearing a Native American war bonnet or some other get-up. Cartoonists loved him. He never learned to drive. He would walk home from his office at Princeton University, sockless and submerged in the pursuit of the "eternal riddle," letting his umbrella rattle against the bars of an iron fence. If his umbrella skipped a bar, he would go back to the beginning of the fence and start over. In those solitary moments, he unconsciously demonstrated the traits — intense concentration, disregard for fashion and innate playfulness — that would rescue him when, inevitably, he would be interrupted by both presidents and passers-by to explain the universe. "Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something," Einstein once said, "wearing stripes with plaid comes easy." ___ Today, there are curiously few statues of the man. The most notable is a 12-foot bronze at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington depicting the wrinkled old sage gazing at his famous Emc2 formula. Tourists climb into his lap for snapshots. Rolf Sinclair despises it. "It's one of the worst pieces of public sculpture," says the retired National Science Foundation physics program officer. "It makes him look like one of the Three Stooges reading his horoscope." The Einstein that Sinclair and others would prefer immortalized is circa 1905, when he was 26 and about to rock the world. By day, he worked in the Swiss patent office in Bern. He called it his "cobbler's job," but for seven years he analyzed a stream of inventions dealing with railroad timekeeping and other matters of precision that raised cosmic possibilities in his fertile mind. After hours, he would work furiously on his "thought experiments," that smashed through the limits of established physics. "Imagination is more important than knowledge," Einstein said. "The important thing is to not stop questioning." In 1905, he published five landmark papers without footnotes or citations. It marked the beginning of an unrivaled, two-decade intellectual burst. Here is a brief chronology of his miracle year: March, 1905: Conventional physics described light as a wave and could not explain how light can knock electrons off metal. Einstein showed that light is made of tiny packets of energy, or quanta, that can behave like individual particles, too. This duality is the basis of quantum theory, a pillar of modern physics so paradoxical that even Einstein didn't entirely buy into it. His explanation of this "photoelectric effect" won him the Nobel prize in 1921. April: Based on cafe conversations over tea, Einstein submits a paper that determined the size of sugar molecules by calculating their diffusion in the liquid. May: He shows how particles (like pollen) that appear to be independently moving in water are being jostled by atoms in water that are moving chaotically. Known as Brownian motion, Einstein's calculations confirmed the atom's existence and by extension, the makeup of chemical elements. June: Einstein's paper on "special relativity" separates him from the mainstream physics crowd. Newton considered gravity to be absolute — mass attracts mass. It's what makes gas and dust form stars and debris form planets. But Einstein sought to explain anomalies in this rule. Scientists had concluded that light was just one of many kinds of electromagnetic waves moving through an unseen medium they called ether, and the speed of light is always the same. Einstein recalled a teenage daydream of racing a light beam. According to the physics of his day, if he moved as fast as the light, then the beam would be stationary in space. Einstein said the speed of light is constant at 186,282 miles per second. But it will appear different depending on where you are and how fast you are traveling. For example, clocks on orbiting satellites run a bit slower because the satellites are orbiting at 17,000 mph. They have programs that help them align with clocks on Earth. Or, suppose you were to "witness" a star exploding into a supernova. The explosion occurred thousands of years ago, but it has taken that long for the light to reach you here. November: Einstein publishes an extension of special relativity regarding the conversion of mass into energy, noting that the "mass of a body is a measure of its energy content." In 1907, he abbreviated it to what would become science's most famous equation: The amount of energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, or Emc2. C2 is such a huge number that even small amounts of mass pack big power. This became the theoretical basis for both atomic explosions and atomic energy. "Each of these papers is a landmark in physics," said University of Maryland physicist S. James Gates. "And yet all of his work in 1905 is a prelude to his greatest composition — the theory of general relativity." Special relativity was incomplete because it did not deal with gravity. To Newton, gravity was a constant, absolute force. Drop an apple and it hits the ground. A planet traces a curved orbit because the sun's gravity tugs at the planet. In Einstein's relative world, matter warps the time and space around it. So, the sun's mass dents and distorts the space-time fabric, curving the planet's trajectory. He reasoned that even particles of light, which have very tiny mass, should be affected in this way. In 1919, astronomers watching a solar eclipse observed the light from a distant star being deflected by the darkening sun's mass — by a few hundredths of a millimeter. General relativity laid the foundation for all kinds of discoveries, such as the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe and black holes. Yet relativity is both so profound and confounding that even other physicists have trouble grasping its nuances. Einstein described relativity this way: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." ___ In a lifetime that coincided with Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable, it's hard to imagine Einstein as a lady's man. With that hair? And those rumpled clothes? He had a passionate personality that drew admirers. But physics always was his first love and that was the trouble. The young Einstein's indifferent, even ruthless, nature is evident in his dealings with his first wife, Mileva Maric. She and Einstein were students at the renowned Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich. In effusive letters and poetry, he called her Dollie and himself Johnny. She gave birth to an out-of-wedlock daughter at her parents' home in Hungary. The baby either died or was adopted. Einstein never saw the child. The episode ended Mileva's career before it began. She appears to have been a sounding board for his ideas, but historians doubt she was a true collaborator. They married in 1902 and Mileva bore two sons, but their passion soured as Einstein's reputation grew. He complained that he had no time for marital "chatter." He and Mileva separated in 1914. "You make sure ... that I receive my three meals regularly in my room," he wrote in his cold list of conditions. "You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way." But eight years later, he gave her the $32,000 purse from his Nobel Prize for physics. Einstein had an affair with his German cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, and she nursed him back to health when he collapsed from nervous exhaustion in 1917. They married two years later, but she soon found herself tolerating his girlfriends. They emigrated to Princeton, where she died in 1936. Until his own death from heart disease on April 18, 1955, relatives and his secretary kept house for Einstein at 112 Mercer Street. He also developed attachments to several women who shared his love of music, sailing and world affairs. One was an alleged Soviet spy, Margarita Konenkova, a Russian emigre married to a Greenwich Village sculptor. Another was Johanna Fantova. She and her husband had met the scientist in Prague's intellectual circles that included the novelist Franz Kafka. She emigrated to Princeton alone in 1939. She cut Einstein's hair and he telephoned several times a week. In her diary, she included this charming line of verse from the physicist: "Exhausted from a silence long/ This is to show you clear how strong/ The thoughts of you will always sit/ Up in my brain's little attic." As an old man, he revealed to Fantova a melancholy side. "The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist," he said. "I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me."

Scientists Create Robot Controlled By Human Thought

Then I guess its just advanced remote control. HA!HA!

Human Thoughts Control New Robot Sara Goudarzi LiveScience Staff Writer LiveScience.com Fri Dec 15, 4:55 PM ET Scientists have created a way to control a robot with signals from a human brain. By generating the proper brainwaves—picked up by a cap with electrodes that sense the signals and reflect a person's instructions—scientists can instruct a humanoid robot to moves to specific locations and pick us certain objects [video]. The commands are limited to moving forward, picking up one of two objects and bringing it to one of two locations. The researchers have achieved 94 percent accuracy between the thought commands and the robot's movements. "This is really a proof-of-concept demonstration," said Rajesh Rao, a researcher from the University of Washington who leads the project. "It suggests that one day we might be able to use semi-autonomous robots for such jobs as helping disabled people or performing routine tasks in a person's home." The person wearing the electrode cap watches the robot's movement on a computer screen through two cameras installed on and above the robot. When the robot's camera sees the objects that are to be picked up it passes on the information to the user's computer screen. Each object lights up randomly on the computer screen. When a person wants something picked up and it happens to light up, the brain registers surprise and sends this brain activity to the computer and then to the robot as the choice object. The robot then proceeds to pick up the object. A similar algorithm is used to decide where the robot will go. "One of the important things about this demonstration is that we're using a 'noisy' brain signal to control the robot," Rao said. "The technique for picking up brain signals is non-invasive, but that means we can only obtain brain signals indirectly from sensors on the surface of the head, and not where they are generated deep in the brain. As a result, the user can only generate high-level commands such as indicating which object to pick up or which location to go to, and the robot needs to be autonomous enough to be able to execute such commands." In the future, the researchers hope to make the robot more adaptive to the environment by having them carry out more complex commands. "We want to get to the point of using actual objects that people might want the robot to gather, as well as having the robot move through multiple rooms," Rao said. The results of this research were presented last week at the Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing meeting in Whistler, B.C. Video: See the Robot in Action Teenager Plays Video Game Just By Thinking Brain Power: Mind Control of External Devices Real Robots: Vote for Your Favorite Monkey's Brain Runs Robotic Arm The Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind Original Story: Human Thoughts Control New Robot

ASTRONOMERS FIND INFANT VERSION OF SOLAR SYSTEM

By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer New observations of a young star and its surroundings are like a snapshot of our own solar system when it was forming, astronomers announced Friday. The star, just a million years old, is surrounded by a disk of dust, the sort of "protoplanetary" disk from which planets formed around our Sun, according to theory. In the disk is a gap that astronomers say likely was formed by one or more giant gas planets, something similar to Jupiter and the other planets we're familiar with. The planets have not been imaged. Rather, the dust and the gap have been seen. The thinking is that when giant planets develop, they gather the dust from their orbital path, sweeping clean a region of space around the star. Similar setups have been seen around other stars, but few have been so young. This is the first evidence for a planet around a star so young that is also Sun-like. The star, GM Aurigae, is about 420 light-years away. It is 1.05 times as massive as the Sun. If the system were overlaid onto our own solar system, the newly discovered gap would extend roughly from the orbit of Jupiter to the orbit of Uranus. "GM Aurigae is essentially a much younger version of our Sun, and the gap in its disk is about the same size as the space occupied by our own giant planets," said Dan Watson, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. "Looking at it is like looking at baby pictures of our Sun and outer solar system." The observations were made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The finding, along with a similar one last year, has astronomers puzzled that large planets could form so quickly. Conventional theory holds that all planets form first as a rocky core. Earth and the other three terrestrial planets stopped there. But the gas giants then use an ever-building core to begin to attract an vast envelope of gas and dust. An alternative theory goes like this: Rocky planets form in the conventional way, but gas giants don't. Instead, they collapse, over a few thousand years, out of a knot in the ring of gas and dust. "The results pose a challenge to existing theories of giant-planet formation, especially those in which planets build up gradually over millions of years," said Nuria Calvet, professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan and lead author of a paper on the results in the Sept. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Studies like this one will ultimately help us better understand how our outer planets, as well as others in the universe, form." Oldest Planet Hottest Planet Farthest Planet

SOURCE

TRIPINDICULAR

I'm not scared of anything...except maybe this stuff. I've known about it for years. I've read a lot about it. I don't ever want to be within ten feet of it, let alone ingest it. I'm pretty sure that I'd never live through the experience- or worse yet, live the rest of my life like that. Remember, the mind is the most powerful thing there is.

From: Scotto Subject: Terence on Psychedelics and DMT (2) Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 20:53:34 EDT Terence McKenna Excerpted w/o Permission from 'A Weekend With Terence McKenna,' Feb 1992 DMT is the strongest hallucinogen there is. If it's possible to get more loaded than that, I don't want to know about it, and I say so when I'm there. I say, 'My God, if you can get more loaded than this, keep it away from me.' So that's it, it's the strongest. It's also the shortest acting. DMT when smoked in most people is, return you to normal in under ten minutes. Under ten minutes! Now, this is interesting because people who think there's nothing to this should actually invest the ten minutes to find out what's, you know... A ten minute DMT trip is worth twenty years of academic pharmacology, art history, psychology and all this other malarky. Because then you just say, 'Okay, I got it, I got it...' Another very interesting thing about DMT is, it occurs naturally in the human brain. Well, now what's going on here? He's saying the strongest drug, the fastest drug, is the most natural drug? It means that, you know, you don't have to sail off into 3-hydroxy-4-peridal- enmethylmarubyshtick or something like that to get into the exotic realms. No -- a human metabolite, which takes only ten minutes to undergo its entire exfoliation and quenching, is the strongest of all. Well, then, what is it? What does 'strong' mean? What is a strong psychedelic? You know, it's highly personal. Every psychedelic trip is. But what happens on DMT for a large number of people -- I mean, we don't have any statistics, but -- it is a completely confounding experience. I mean, you may have had the expectation, you might think if you had never had a psychedelic experience that it sort of begins like the Bach B minor fugue, and goes from there as you rise into the realms of light and union with the deity or something like that. That's not what happens on DMT. What happens on DMT I referred to this morning: a troop of elves smashes down your front door, and rotates and balances the wheels on the afterdeath vehicle, present you with the bill and then depart. (laughter) And it's completely paradigm shattering. I mean, you know, union with the white light you could handle. (laughter) An invasion of your apartment by jewelled self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace that are speaking demotic Greek is *not* something that you anticipated and could handle. Sometimes people say, 'Is DMT dangerous? It sounds so crazy. Is it dangerous?' The answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment. (laughter) Remember how you laughed when this possibility was raised. And a moment will come that will wipe the smile right off your face. (laughter) One thing that endears DMT to me is, I like to say, it doesn't affect your mind. It doesn't seem to affect your mind. In other words, you don't change under the influence of DMT. You don't become a kinder, gentler person. YOu don't sink into, you know, a line of drool from one corner of your mouth as you sit there twitching. *You* don't change. What happens is, the world is completely replaced, instantly, 100 percent, it's all gone. And what is put in its place, not one iota of what is put in its place was taken from this world. So its a 100% reality channel switch. They don't even retain three dimensional space and linear time. It's not like you go to an exotic place, Morroco or New Guinea. It's like reality is swapped out for something else, and when you try to say what it is, you realize that language has evolved in this world, and it can serve no other, or it takes years of practice. So what you're looking at is literally the unspeakable. The indescribably falls into your lap. And when you try -- you're loaded, right, you're there, and you're trying to explain to yourself what's happening, and so this is like you try to pour water over the transdimensional objects in front of you, the water of language. And it just beads up and flows off like water off a duck's back. You cannot say what's there. And I've spent, I don't know, twenty-five years fiddling with this. It's become the compass of my inspiration, trying to say what is on the other side of that boundary. Just two large tokes away at any given time is this non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian, irrational, un-Englishable place, but it's not smooth and empty and clear. That's not what gives it its indescribability. What gives it is indescribability is its utter weridness, its alienness, its power to astonish. What happens to me when I smoke DMT is, there's a kind of going toward it. There's a sequella of events which lead to the antechamber of the mystery. I mean, you take a toke, you feel strange. Your whole body feels odd. You take a second toke, all the oxygen seems to have been pumped out of the room. Everything jumps into clarity. It's that visual acuity thing. You take a third toke if you're able, and then you lay back, and you see this thing which looks like a rose or a chyrsanthemum, this orange spinning flowerlike thing. It takes about fifteen seconds to form, and it's like a membrane. And then, you break through it. You break through it, and then you're in this place, and there's an enormous cheer which goes up as you pass through this membrane. Some of you may know the Pink Floyd song about how the gnomes have learned a new way to say hoo-ray? They're waiting. And you burst into this place, and you're saying, you know, 'Geez, you know, this stuff is really speedy.' (laughter) That's like describing a Space Shuttle launching as noisy, you know? (laughter) And you say, 'Am I all right? Am I all right?' That's the first question, and so then you run your mind around the track, and you say, 'Hmm. Heartbeat normal? Yeah, normal, heartbeat normal. Pulse normal? Breathing? Breathe breathe breathe, yes.' But what's right here, right here and from here out is this thing which, no matter how much science fiction you've done, no matter how much William Burroughs you've read, no matter how much time you've spent in the company of the weird, the bizarre, the autre, and the peculiar, you weren't ready. (laughter) And it's completely real. It's in a way more real than the contents of ordinary reality, because, see how the shadows here are muted and there's a lot of transitional zones from one color to another and so forth? This isn't like that. This is crystalline, clear, solid, you can see the light reflected in the depths of these objects, and everything is very brightly colored, and everything is moving very, very rapidly. And there are entities there. It's not about calling them up or the whisperings of them. No, they're IN YOUR FACE. (laughter) And they're right here, and they're worse than in your face, because what they do is, they jump into your chest and then they jump out. And you have to keep saying, 'Keep breathing, keep breathing, don't freak out, pay attention.' And the entities speak to you, and they speak both in English and another way which we'll get to in a minute. But in English what they say is, 'Do not give way to wonder. Hang on. Don't just go gaga with disbelief. Pay attention. Pay attention.' And what they're trying to do is they're trying to show you something. They are very aware of the fleeting nature of this encounter. And they say, you know, 'Don't spiral off into amazement, and start raving about God and all that. Forget that. Pay attention to what we're doing.' And then, what they're doing is they're dancing around, they're jumping around, they're emerging explicitly out of the background, bounding toward you, jumping into your chest, bounding away, and they offer, they make offerings. And they love you, that's the other thing. They say this. They say, 'We love you. You come so rarely. And, you know, here you are. Welcome, welcome.' And they make these offerings. And the offerings are objects of some sort. And now remember, you are not changed. You're exactly the person you were a few minutes before. So you're not exalted or depressed. You're just trying to make sense of this. And the objects which they offer are like, Faberge eggs, or exquisitely tooled and enamelled pieces of machinery, but they don't have rigid outlines. They objects are themselves somehow alive, and transforming and changing. So when these creatures -- I call them 'tykes' -- when these tykes offer you these objects, you like, you grok it, you look it and immediately, because you are yourself, you have this realization: my God, if I could get this thing back into my world, history would never be the same. A single one of these objects is somehow, you can tell by looking at it, this would confound my world beyond hope of recovery. It cannot exist. What I'm being shown is a tiny area where miracles are transformed. And the creatures, the tykes, are singing. They are speaking in a kind of translinguistic glossil alia. They are actually making these objects with their voices. They are singing these things into existence. And what the message is, is 'Do what we're doing. You can do what we're doing. DO IT.' And they get quite pushy about this. They say, you know, 'Damn it, DO IT!' And you're saying, 'Bu...bu...bu...bu...' And they say, 'No, DO IT! Do it NOW! DO IT!' And you say, 'I can't handle this,' you know, and then this kind of reaction goes on for awhile. Well, then, I actually...I don't take credit for it, it was not willed, but like something comes up from inside of you. Something comes out of you, and you discover you can do it, that you can use language to condense objects into existence in this space. It's the dream of all magic, but here it is, folks, happening in real time. And then they're just delighted. They just go mad with delight and turn somersaults and turn themselves inside out and they all jump into your chest at once. And after many encounters of this sort...I mean, when I first did DMT, I couldn't bring anything out of it. I mean, I just said, you know, 'It's the damndest thing I've ever encountered and I can't say anything about it and I don't think I ever will be able to say anything about it.' But by going back repeatedly and working at it, I think I've gotten a pretty coherent -- well, let's not go that far. (laughter) I think I've got a pretty clear metaphor anyway for what's happening in there, and I think a lot of people have this experience. When you talk to shamans, they say, 'Oh, well, yes, the helping spirits. Those are the helping spirits. They can help you cure, find lost objects, you didn't know about the helping spirits?' And you say, 'Well, I knew, but I, I had no idea that it was so literal.' And they say, 'Oh, no, that's the helping spirits.' But then, the other thing they say, if you press a shaman, if you say, 'Well, what exactly is a helping spirit?' They say, 'Well, a helping spirit is an ancestor.' You say, 'You mean to tell me that those are dead people in there?' They say, 'Well, yes, ancestor, dead person. You didn't know about ancestors apparently. This is what happens to people who die.' And you say, 'My God, is it possible that what we're breaking into here is an ecology of souls?' That these are not extraterrestrials from Zenebelganooby or Zeta Reticula Beta. These are the dear departed. And they exist in a realm which, for want of a better word, let's call eternity. And somehow this drug, or whatever it is, is allowing me to see across the veil. This is the lifting -- you want to talk about boundary dissolution. It's one thing to get tight to your partner, it's quite another to get tight to the dear departed of centuries past. That's a serious boundary dissolution when that happens. What these creatures want, according to them, is they want us to transform our language somehow. And I don't know what this means. I mean, at this point in the weekend and in my life, we all are on the cutting edge, and nobody is ahead of anybody else. Clearly we need to transform our language, because our culture is created by our language, and our culture is toxic, murderous, and on a downhill bummer. Somehow we need to transform our language, but is this what they mean? That we're supposed to condense machines out of the air in front of us? How does this relate to the persistent idea, promulgated by Robert Graves and other people, that there is a primal language of poetry? That poetry as we know it is a pale, pale thing, and that at some time in the human past, people were in command of languages which literally compel belief. They *compel* belief, because they don't make an appeal through argument or metaphor. They compel belief because they are able to present themselves as imagery. You know, William Blake said, 'If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it WILL be believed.' And it's very confusing, because you wonder, have people been doing this for thousands of years? And if so, have they always encountered this tremendous urgency on the other side? If people have been doing it for thousands of years, why is there this urgency on the part of these entities? And who exactly and what exactly are they? It appalls me, you can probably tell, that I have to talk about this, because I am not, this is not my baliwick. I mean, I'm a rationalist who's just had a very weird set of experiences, but I am a rationalist. I mean, I have no patience with channelling, you know, the lords of the many rays, the divas and, you know, there's this whole thing going around about disincarnate intelligence, mostly under the control of fairly, shall we say, non-rigorous thinkers. (laughter) But I like to think that I am a rigorous thinker, and yet, here I am, telling you that, you know, elf legions await in hyperspace one toke away. The difference between my rap and, you know, the finned horned folks or somebody like that is that we have an operational method for testing my assertion. We can all smoke DMT, or you can make it your business to now find out about this, and see for yourself. And not everybody agrees with me. I mean, some people say it wasn't anything like that. But some people agree, and I think if you get two out of ten agreeing with a rap like this, then you'd better pay attention. (laughter)

(End of Part Two of Three)
Faithfully keyed in by Scotto the Incongruous

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FUTURE HI CHIMES IN

30 BILLION EARTHS?

30 Billion Earths?
New Estimate of Exoplanets in Our Galaxy
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
29 January 2002

Chances are you haven't spent a whole lot of time wondering how many Jupiter-like planets exist in our galaxy. But Charley Lineweaver has, because it bears on a more important question: How many potentially habitable planets are there?

New calculations by Lineweaver and Daniel Grether, both of the University of New South Wales in Australia, provide an encouraging answer to this question. The researchers expect a flood of Jupiters will be found, perhaps 50 percent more than currently expected.

Each such discovery would be significant in the hunt for planets that could harbor life.

Why? Because much of the evolution of our own solar system, including the formation of Earth, was orchestrated or affected by Jupiter, the largest planet with by far the bulk of the solar system's mass, excepting the Sun, of course.

"Our solar system is Jupiter and a bunch of junk," as Lineweaver puts it.

Our protector

When Jupiter developed, it simply bullied other objects into position or out of existence. Then the mighty gas giant became Earth's protector.

Though the fledgling Earth was pummeled by asteroids and comets, making it difficult for life to take hold, it could have been much worse. Jupiter shielded Earth from an even heavier bombardment of debris that made its way from the outskirts of the new system toward its central star.

That protective role continues. In 1994, Jupiter used its immense gravity to lure comet Shoemaker-Levy into a death plunge. Had the comet hit Earth, it would have sterilized much or all of the planet.

For now, no one knows whether our solar system represents a common method of formation and evolution. In fact, discoveries over the past six years seem to indicate otherwise. Most of the roughly 80 planets discovered outside our solar system are much more massive than Jupiter. They also orbit perilously close to their host stars, locations that would likely prevent rocky planets from forming in so-called habitable orbits.

But experts attribute these findings to the limitations of technology. Smaller planets in more comfortable orbits around other stars simply can't be detected. Yet.

How many Jupiters?

All this in mind, Lineweaver and Grether worked out some new calculations for the prevalence of planets that are about Jupiter's size at about the same distance from their host stars. The calculations are based on some of the most recent extrasolar planet discoveries, in which ever-smaller objects are being detected at ever-greater distances from their host stars.

So how many Jupiters are out there orbiting Sun-like stars in the Milky Way Galaxy?
"At least a billion, but probably more like 30 billion," Lineweaver told SPACE.com.
And the math behind that?

"There are about 300 billion stars in our galaxy. About 10 percent (or 30 billion) are roughly Sun-like," he explained. "At least 5 percent (1.5 billion) but possibly as many as 90 percent or 100 percent (about 30 billion) of these have Jupiter-like planets."

These estimates would vary based on exactly what you call Jupiter-like or Sun-like, Lineweaver said.

What about Earths?

The calculations, which are part of a paper that has been submitted to the journal Astrobiology, don't bear directly on worlds like our own. But with what's known of planet formation, some speculation is possible.

"A reasonable guess is the same number of Earths as Jupiters," Lineweaver said.
That, however, depends heavily on how one defines Earth-like. If one includes rocky planets in general, like Mercury, Venus and Mars, "then they are probably more common than Jupiters," he said. If, however, you mean rocky planets with liquid water at the surface, "then we really can't answer that very well. They may be as common as Jupiters, or they may be much less common."

Alan Boss, an expert in planetary system formation at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the new calculations for Jovian twins seem reasonable. Trying then to estimate the number of Earth-like planets requires "a leap of faith, but one which appears to be plausible," he said.

"As the veil covering the unseen portions of discovery space is lowered in the next decade, I expect we will find that Jupiter-like planets are commonplace," said Boss, who was not involved in the new study. "Whether or not that also means Earth-like planets are common can only be proven by NASA's Kepler mission."

Kepler, recently approved to launch in 2006, will monitor 100,000 stars for telltale dips in light indicating an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit has crossed in front of the star. While it would not take photographs, Kepler could provide the first census of planets that have the potential to support life.

SOURCE

NANOSCIENTISTS

Scientists Find Flaw In Quantum Dot Construction

Science Daily — ATHENS, Ohio Nanoscientists dream of developing a quantum computer, a device the size of a grain of sand that could be faster and more powerful than today's PCs. They've identified tiny artificial atoms called "quantum dots" as the most likely materials to build these machines, but have been puzzled by the dots' unpredictable behavior at the nanoscale.

This illustration shows a quantum dot (blue central bulge) bombarded from the top with laser light. The laser produces excitations (called excitons) inside the dot, and the electric fields generated by the top and bottom gold contacts pull the electrons (yellow) and holes (red) away. Other electrons/holes are undesirably produced instead on the wetting layer, causing interference. The semiconductor compounds used in these experiments are Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) and Indium Gallium Arsenide (InGaAs). (Courtesy of Jose Villas-Boas, Ohio University postdoctoral fellow)

Now a team of Ohio University physicists thinks it's found the problem and has proposed a blueprint for building a better quantum dot. The researchers, who published their findings in this week's issue of Physical Review Letters, argue that defects formed during creation of the quantum dots operate as a barrier to scientific experimentation.

Experimental scientists in Germany had blasted the quantum dots with light to create the quantum mechanical state needed to run a quantum computer. But they couldn't consistently control that state, explained Sergio Ulloa, an Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy. Jose Villas-Boas, a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio University, Ulloa and Associate Professor Alexander Govorov developed theoretical models to learn what went wrong.

The problem, they argued, happens during the creation of the type of quantum dots under study. Using a molecular beam epitaxy chamber, scientists spray paint a surface with atoms under high temperatures, creating an atomic coating. As more layers are added, the quantum dots bead up on the surface like droplets of water, Ulloa said. But a fine residue left behind on the surface that Ulloa calls the "wetting layer" can cause problems during experiments. When experimental scientists blasted the quantum dots with a beam of light in previous studies, the wetting layer caused interference, instead of allowing the light to enter the dot and trigger the quantum state, he explained.

The study suggests that scientists could tweak the process by re-focusing the beam of light or changing the duration of the light pulses to negate the effects of the wetting layer, Villas-Boas said. One experimental physicist already has used the theoretical finding to successfully manipulate a quantum dot in the lab, he added. "Now that they know the problem, they realize there are a few ways to avoid it," Villas-Boas said.

The new finding ultimately could lead to the creation of a better quantum dot and can help scientists understand more about quantum states, Ulloa added. "It's one more step towards the holy grail of finding a better quantum bit, which hopefully will lead to a quantum computer," he said.

Nanoscientists are creating quantum dots in many different ways, Ulloa noted, for use in various applications. The self-assembled type under study could be used in optical electronics and quantum computers. Other types, such as dots grown in a solution, might be used for solar energy applications.

The study also will help the Ohio University team better understand how to control the spin of electrons a property that could be the underlying mechanism behind faster, more efficient future electronic devices, he added.

###

The research was supported by grants from the Department of Energy, the Indiana 21st Century Fund, the Ohio University Postdoctoral Fellow Program, and the FAPESP fellowship. The researchers are members of Ohio University's Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute, http://www.ounqpi.org/.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Ohio University.

ET Visitors

ET Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar.

Fermi’s brooding on the topic was later labeled "Fermi’s paradox". It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950’s when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there", and interstellar travel -- these remain fodder for trying to respond to Fermi’s paradox even today.

Now a team of American scientists note that recent astrophysical discoveries suggest that we should find ourselves in the midst of one or more extraterrestrial civilizations. Moreover, they argue it is a mistake to reject all UFO reports since some evidence for the theoretically-predicted extraterrestrial visitors might just be found there.

The researchers make their proposal in the January/February 2005 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS).

Curious situation
Pick up any good science magazine and you’re sure to see the latest in head-scratching ideas about superstring theory, wormholes, or the stretching of spacetime itself. Meanwhile, extrasolar planetary detection is on the verge of becoming mundane.

"We are in the curious situation today that our best modern physics and astrophysics theories predict that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial visitation, yet any possible evidence of such lurking in the UFO phenomenon is scoffed at within our scientific community," contends astrophysicist Bernard Haisch.

Haisch along with physicists James Deardorff, Bruce Maccabee and Harold Puthoff make their case in the JBIS article: "Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation".

The scientists point to two key discoveries made by Australian astronomers and reported last year that there is a "galactic habitable zone" in our Milky Way Galaxy. And more importantly that Earth’s own star, the Sun, is relatively young in comparison to the average star in this zone -- by as much as a billion years.

Therefore, the researchers explain in their JBIS article that an average alien civilization would be far more advanced and have long since discovered Earth. Additionally, other research work on the supposition underlying the Big Bang -- known as the theory of inflation -- shores up the prospect, they advise, that our world is immersed in a much larger extraterrestrial civilization.

Point-to-point distances
Given billion-year advanced physics, might not buzzing around the galaxy be possible?

Even today superstring theory hypothesizes other dimensions... which could be habitable Universes adjacent to our own, the researchers speculate. It might even be possible to get around the speed of light limit by moving in and out of these dimensions.

"What we have done is somewhat of a breakthrough," Haisch told SPACE.com. "We have pulled together various recent discoveries and theoretical issues that collectively point to the strong probability that we should be in the midst of one or more huge extraterrestrial civilizations," he said.

Haisch said that superstring dimensions and wormhole and spacetime stretching possibilities address the "can't get here from there" objection often argued in view of the interstellar, point-to-point distances involved. Also, diffusion models predict that even a single civilization could spread across the Galaxy in a tiny fraction of the age of the Galaxy - even at sub-light speeds, he said.

ET signature in the data
Can the scientific community bring itself to consider any evidence coming from mysterious sightings of strange things by the public?

In large measure, the scientific community seemingly has eyed ET visitation as far from being serious stuff to cogitate over. Why so?

"The dismissal has several causes, all reinforcing each other," Haisch responded. "Most of
the observations are probably misinterpretations, delusions and hoaxes. I have seen people get confused by Venus or even Sirius when it is flashing colors low in the sky under the right conditions. Having been turned off by this, most scientists never bother to look any further, and so are simply blissfully ignorant that there may be more to it," he said.

Deardorff, the lead author of the JBIS article, points out in a press statement: "It would take some humility for the scientific community to suspend its judgment and take at least some of the high quality reports seriously enough to investigate…but I hope we can bring ourselves to do that."

According to Haisch, there is a motivation not just for scientific tolerance of the UFO issue, but a strong scientific prediction that there ought to be some genuine ET signature in the data.

"This potentially changes the relationship of the UFO phenomenon to science in a significant way. It takes away the ‘not invented here’ prejudice, pointing out that a ‘yes’ to ET visitation is exactly what side our current physics and astrophysics theories would come down on as the most likely situation," Haisch concluded.

KARLA TURNER, PH.D.

KARLA TURNER, A Life Intruded Upon

Dr. Karla Turner: Abduction Investigator And Human Rights Activist A Posthumous Tribute by John Chambers, Reprinted by Permission of UFO Magazine If you wanted to find four words to describe the life of alien abduction investigator Karla Turner, Ph.D., those words might be "intrepid human rights activist." A former college instructor who held a doctorate in Old English Studies from the University of North Texas, Turner had authored three books on the abduction phenomenon, Into the Fringe (1992), Taken (1994), and, with psychic Ted Rice, Masquerade of Angels (1994). She was convinced that the aliens were here not to help us out, but to steal from us the sovereignty of our souls. She wanted us to fight back--with the same courage that she herself showed when, after a period of struggle, she succumbed to a particularly virulent form of breast cancer, on Jan. 9, 1996. The diminutive scholar, author and activist, who was born in 1947 and made her home in Roland, Arkansas, had been involved in alien abduction work since 1988. Two traits, she had come to conclude, characterized alien behavior above all: deceitfulness and cruelty. In *Into the Fringe, published by Berkley, she recounted the abduction experiences of herself, her husband Casey (an assumed name), and several other members of her family. The family had first became aware of their experiences in 1988. Later, they were able to recall abduction events going back to their childhoods; the experiences were uniformly disturbing. In er second book, *Taken (published, like Masquerade of Angels, by her own press, Kelt Works, in Roland), Turner told the stories of eight female abductees who had contacted her after the publication of her first book. *Masquerade of Angels was the biography of Louisiana psychic Ted Rice, who, used to channeling benevolent entities, then becoming aware of his alien abduction experiences, first believed the aliens were benign, then came to the conclusion that they were no more than remorseless predators. From beginning to end, Turner had been struck by how contradictory the stories of the aliens were. They would, she averred, say anything they wanted to attain their ends. As the abductees in *Taken reported it, the aliens insisted variously that they had come to help us cope with upcoming ecological disaster, interbreed for our good and theirs, help us evolve, take our genetic material to revivify their dying race. Sometimes they claimed they had outright created us; other times, that they were genetically altering us for our own good. In one of the most moving accounts in the annals of alien abductions, Turner tells Ted Rice's story, in *Masquerade of Angels, of how, as an 8-year-old boy, Rice found himself along with his much-beloved grandmother inside a UFO and surrounded by a variety of aliens, including a tall reptoid. The aliens brought out the grandmother's husband, who had been dead for six years, and insisted she have sex with him. Partway through the act, the grandfather metamorphosed into the tall reptoid. Now the reptoid demanded to have sex with Rice. The boy's grandmother refused to allow this, even though the aliens insisted she would be dead in two days if she did not renege. Two days later, the grandmother was indeed dead of a massive heart attack. The blatant deceit of this incident shaded over into Turner's other area of contention with the aliens: often, they were cruel, inflicting physical and mental pain on the abductees. One of the *Taken interviewees was so traumatized by her experience of impregnation on a UFO that she could not resume normal sex. Another suffered a bloody, painful miscarriage in her own bathroom. On account of a pulling action by the aliens, a third victim sustained a spinal injury so severe that her doctor warned her it could prove permanent. And these physical problems were accompanied by the usual emotional trauma of the abductee: confusion, terror, paranoia and ambivalence. If abductees often came to believe that the aliens must somehow have some lofty purpose, this was because, insisted Turner, they have total control over our minds. Turner cited many cases pointing to a psychic technology that enabled the aliens to make us see whatever they wanted us to see. They could create virtual reality scenarios at will, she was certain. The abductees took home from their abduction experiences as memories whatever the aliens wanted them to remember. Even what was revived under hypnosis might only be a screen memory. Turner was profoundly at variance with those who claimed we would see the alien abduction phenomenon as benign, if only we could understand it--but we were not capable of understanding it. The author spelled out in Taken what became her credo: "In spite of what some prominent abduction theorists tell us about avoiding thinking in terms of 'good and evil' or 'positive and negative' when it comes to the aliens, this cannot be done, nor should it be. For these women, for my husband and myself, for all abductees, knowing that we have been made a part of this agenda and that we have been implanted, trained, and programmed to participate in some future scenario, how can we not ask to what purpose our minds, bodies, and souls will be used?" Turner entertained at least one comprehensive theory about why the alien abductions took place. At least one group, she suspected, the reptoids, needed to eat our bodies. Rice had provided her with a chilling account (similar to accounts in *Taken) of an alien abduction during which reptoid aliens actually murdered the psychic (Rice watched this, as if disembodied, from a distance), then sucked the soul out of his body into a black box. In a short time, they re-released the soul back into a clone of his body, which they had manufactured apparently using organic materials reaped from cattle mutilations. Turner believed the reptoids then ate Rice's original body--and in general need to ingest human bodies--because it was saturated with the emotional and/or the soul vibrations of the human; the reptoids did not eat cloned bodies, she speculated, because they had not become imbued with soul/emotion substance in the course of living. (Turner also wondered if the oft-mentioned hybrids might not simply be organic fodder used to manufacture the bodies of the zombie-like, carefully-regimented 'greys.') What Turner perceived as the deceit and cruelty of the aliens-- along with the total lack of reciprocity in their actions--made her into a human rights activist who insisted that we must stand up for ourselves and seize back our souls from this rapacious, non-human species (she speculated that the aliens had developed parallel to us, on this Earth, then become transdimensional). "To accept a spiritual explanation for the abduction process and the abducting entities," she told an interviewer for *Contact Forum in May/June, 1995, "is foolhardy and potentially dangerous to our souls." To another interviewer she reiterated that, if we do not rouse ourselves, "we may come to the point where we cede the sovereignty of our souls. We should stand up for our souls. I think there is a possibility of finding out how to change the situation." Until shortly before her death, Turner regularly issued veritable calls to arms from the podiums of UFO conferences across the U.S. and abroad. The aliens, she said time and again, used their powers to control our perceptions and practice disinformation in order to break down our resistance and deceive us into believing they were interested in our well-being--when they were not. All the evidence, she said, suggested their purposes were totally self-serving and without regard for the needs of homo sapiens. Now was the time, she insisted, "to work at getting back control." How could this be done? Turner contended the best defense against alien intrusions was not "abduction therapy"--though that could be helpful--but abduction research itself. To audiences around the country she listed what she considered to be the only "facts" that might be construed about the alien invaders: * We do not know with any certainty what they are. * At least some of the aliens lie. * During encounters, they control our perceptions. * They can implant false memories. * What we report about them is what they want us to report. * The alien agenda has physical aims and procedures that have nothing to do with reproduction. * From childhood, they manipulate us physically, spiritually, and sexually. * They create virtual reality scenarios that are absolutely real to the abductees. * They show an extraordinary interest in human souls and in our thoughts. * There is some element of human involvement in UFO phenomenon. Turner suspected the military sometimes harassed abductees after they had been harassed by the aliens; but the Arkansas researcher did not reveal facts for fear of endangering friends. The abductee/author insisted the aliens were engaged in a propaganda war to convince us that their designs were more benevolent than they were. They might be creating virtual reality scenarios of cross-breeding, she thought, to suggest that we share commonalities with them and that they need us. But, she said, there are just as many accounts of, for example, brain operations as there are of fetal transplants. In a propaganda campaign that included demonstrating their superiority and their proprietary relationship to us--and in consistently painting a benevolent picture of themselves--they were basically concerned, she had become certain, to "debase and lower our self-view, and to break down our resistances." Articulately, always with sensitivity, the former college lecturer maintained there were a number of steps abductees could take in the face of alien provocation: * Educate themselves about the phenomenon; there is some control in knowledge. * Let go of fear; it is through fear that negative entities maintain control. Anger is a more effective defense than fear. * Abductees should be aware of how they're reacting; they should learn to step out of themselves, and to maintain perspective. * Maintain a good quality of life. * Be realistic about what can and cannot be done. * Stay close to their families. * Confide. "The hell with the results," says Turner. "You don't need the burden of carrying this around [without being able to talk about it]." If the terrors of the abduction experience made us grow stronger, concluded Turner, it was not because the aliens wanted us to have this strength, but because we willed it ourselves. Similarly, she insisted, we should take into our own hands this appalling violation of our rights as human beings, and fight it with all the resources which we could muster out of the richness of human creativity and experience. This brave and defiant refusal, in the name of humanity, to countenance suffering from an alien tyrant masquerading as a benefactor, is Karla Turner's final legacy.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL

Many More Dimensions Than We See 07-Nov-2005 Quantum physics tells us that the world is much different than we have been taught in school or perceive it to be. We are aware of 3 spatial dimensions. But physicists say there are at least nine spatial dimensions, six of them hidden from us, perhaps curled up in some way so they are tiny and undetectable. Researchers Andreas Karch and Lisa Randall are searching for the answer to the question of why we cannot perceive these extra 6 spatial dimensions. They believe the way our universe started and then diluted as it expanded favored the formation of three- and seven-dimensional realities. It's just chance that the one we experience has three dimensions. They say, "That's what comes out when you do the math." Karch and Randall used a computer to model how the universe was arranged right after it began in the big bang, and then watch how the cosmos evolved as it expanded and diluted. Their only assumption was that it started with a generally smooth configuration, with numerous structures, called membranes, or "branes," that existed in various spatial dimensions from one to nine, all of them large and none of them curled up. The researchers allowed the cosmos to evolve on the computer naturally, without making any additional assumptions. They found that as the branes diluted, the ones that survived displayed either three dimensions or seven dimensions. In our universe, everything we see and experience is stuck to one of those branes, and for it to result in a three-dimensional universe the brane must be three-dimensional. Other realities, most of which which are seven-dimensional, are be hidden from our perception in the universe. Karch says, "There are regions that feel 3D. There are regions that feel 5D. There are regions that feel 9D. These extra dimensions are infinitely large. We just happen to be in a place that feels 3D to us. "We know there are people in our three-brane existence. In this case we will assume there are people somewhere nearby in a seven-brane existence. The people in the three-brane would have a far more interesting world, with more complex structures." Could contact with these 7 D beings be what's happening when people have ET encounters? Karch thinks that a seven-dimensional existence would not have planets with stable orbits around their sun. He says, "I am not precisely sure what a universe with such a short- range gravity would look like, mostly because it is always difficult to imagine how life would develop under completely different circumstances."

OUR GALAXY SHOULD BE TEEMING WITH LIFE

Our Galaxy Should Be Teeming With Civilizations, But Where Are They?

By Seth Shostak

Astronomer, Project Phoenix

Is there obvious proof that we could be alone in the Galaxy? Enrico Fermi thought so -- and he was a pretty smart guy. Might he have been right?

It's been a hundred years since Fermi, an icon of physics, was born (and nearly a half-century since he died). He's best remembered for building a working atomic reactor in a squash court. But in 1950, Fermi made a seemingly innocuous lunchtime remark that has caught and held the attention of every SETI researcher since. (How many luncheon quips have you made with similar consequence?)

The remark came while Fermi was discussing with his mealtime mates the possibility that many sophisticated societies populate the Galaxy. They thought it reasonable to assume that we have a lot of cosmic company. But somewhere between one sentence and the next, Fermi's supple brain realized that if this was true, it implied something profound. If there are really a lot of alien societies, then some of them might have spread out.

Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Galaxy. Within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the Galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise.able -->

So what Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had more than enough time to pepper the Galaxy with their presence. But looking around, he didn't see any clear indication that they're out and about. This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: "where is everybody?"

This sounds a bit silly at first. The fact that aliens don't seem to be walking our planet apparently implies that there are no extraterrestrials anywhere among the vast tracts of the Galaxy. Many researchers consider this to be a radical conclusion to draw from such a simple observation. Surely there is a straightforward explanation for what has become known as the Fermi Paradox. There must be some way to account for our apparent loneliness in a galaxy that we assume is filled with other clever beings.

A lot of folks have given this thought. The first thing they note is that the Fermi Paradox is a remarkably strong argument. You can quibble about the speed of alien spacecraft, and whether they can move at 1 percent of the speed of light or 10 percent of the speed of light. It doesn't matter. You can argue about how long it would take for a new star colony to spawn colonies of its own. It still doesn't matter. Any halfway reasonable assumption about how fast colonization could take place still ends up with time scales that are profoundly shorter than the age of the Galaxy. It's like having a heated discussion about whether Spanish ships of the 16th century could heave along at two knots or twenty. Either way they could speedily colonize the Americas.

Consequently, scientists in and out of the SETI community have conjured up other arguments to deal with the conflict between the idea that aliens should be everywhere and our failure (so far) to find them. In the 1980s, dozens of papers were published to address the Fermi Paradox. They considered technical and sociological arguments for why the aliens weren't hanging out nearby. Some even insisted that there was no paradox at all: the reason we don't see evidence of extraterrestrials is because there aren't any.

TALL MOUNTAIN RANGE FOUND ON TITAN

Tall mountain range found on Titan Tue Dec 12, 6:49 PM ET The international Cassini spacecraft spotted a nearly mile-high mountain range shrouded in hazy clouds on Saturn's giant moon Titan, scientists reported Tuesday. The mountains, which stretch for nearly 100 miles, surprised researchers who re-analyzed the images to double-check that they were real and not shadows of other surface features. Robert Brown, a Cassini scientist from the University of Arizona, said the mountains reminded him of California's Sierra Nevada range. "You can call this the Titan Sierra," said Brown, who unveiled the new infrared images at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. The mountains are the tallest ever seen on Titan and probably formed from the same process that occurs in the Earth's mid-ocean ridge. Scientists speculated that hot material beneath Titan's surface gushed up when tectonic plates pulled apart, creating the mountain range. Cassini found the summit of the range capped with brilliant white layers that are likely deposits of methane or another organic material. Cassini flew by Titan on Oct. 25 and snapped images of the mountains. It also found new evidence of sand dunes and a circular feature resembling the remnant of a volcano. Launched in 1997, Cassini is funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies.

LOOK EAST-SOUTHEAST 30 MINUTES BEFORE SUNRISE

Planetary triple play on deck Sunday

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Stargazers will get a rare triple planetary treat this weekend with Jupiter, Mercury and Mars appearing to nestle together in the predawn skies. About 45 minutes before dawn on Sunday those three planets will be so close that the average person's thumb can obscure all three from view.

They will be almost as close together on Saturday and Monday, but Sunday they will be within one degree of each other in the sky. Three planets haven't been that close since 1925, said Miami Space Transit Planetarium director Jack Horkheimer.
And it won't happen again until 2053, he said.

"Jupiter will be very bright and it will look like it has two bright lights next to it, and they won't twinkle because they're planets," said Horkheimer, host of the television show "Star Gazer. "This is the kind of an event that turns young children into Carl Sagans."

The planets are actually hundreds of millions of miles apart, but the way the planets orbit the sun make it appear they are neighbors in the east-southeastern skies. They'll be visible in most parts of the world — in the Western Hemisphere, as far south as Buenos Aires and as far north as Juneau, Alaska, Horkheimer said.

The experts differ on just how to look at the planets. Horkheimer said naked-eye viewing is fine, but binoculars or a telescope are even better.

But if you are going to use a telescope, be careful because the planets are so close to where the sun will soon rise, if you linger you might gaze at the sun through the telescope and damage your eyesight, said Michelle Nichols, master educator at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

Ed Krupp, director of Los Angeles' Griffith Observatory, cautioned it will be hard to see the event "with an unaided eye, particularly in an area that is highly urbanized."

The way to find the planets, which will be low on the east-southeast horizon, is to hold your arm straight out, with your hand in a fist and the pinky at the bottom. Halfway up your fist is how high the planets will appear above the horizon, Nichols said.

Jupiter will be white, Mercury pinkish and Mars butterscotch-colored.
"It is a lovely demonstration of the celestial ballet that goes on around us, day after day, year after year, millennium after millennium," said Horkheimer. "When I look at something like this, I realize that all the powers on Earth, all the emperors, all the money, cannot change it one iota. We are observers, but the wonderful part of that is that we are the only species on this planet that can observe it and understand it."

In ancient times, people thought the close groupings of planets had deep meaning, said Krupp. Now, he said, "it's absolutely something fun to look for."

EARTH CORE

Earth's Core Spinning Faster Than Crust By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer Thu Aug 25, 2:40 PM ET The giant iron ball at the center of the Earth appears to be spinning a bit faster than the rest of the planet. The solid core that measures about 1,500 miles in diameter is spinning about one-quarter to one-half degree faster, per year, than the rest of the world, scientists from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The spin of the Earth's core is an important part of the dynamo that created the planet's magnetic field, and researcher Xiaodong Song said he believes magnetic interaction is responsible for the different rates of spin. The faster spin of the core was proposed in 1996 by two of the current study's authors, Paul Richards of Lamont-Doherty and Song, now an associate professor at Illinois. The researchers studied the travel times of earthquake waves through the Earth, analyzing what are called couplets. Those are earthquakes that originate within a half-mile or so of one another but at different times. They analyzed 30 quakes occurring in the South Atlantic and measured at 58 seismic stations in Alaska and found differences in the travel times and shape of the waves, indicating differences in the core as the waves passed through the center of the Earth. Analyzing those differences, they calculated that the core is spinning slightly faster than the rest of the planet and is a bit lumpy. That solid inner core is surrounded by a fluid outer core about 4,200 miles across. Since the planet is divided into 360 degrees of longitude, a core spinning one-quarter to one-half degree faster than the outer surface could take between 700 and 1,400 years to get one full revolution ahead. But Song said in a telephone interview that he expected that rate to vary over time and sometimes the core might be spinning slower than the rest of the planet. "What we see right now is a snapshot of a long time process between the magnetic field and the inner core," he said. "I do expect to see this rate change with time." "What is surprising for us is that we could actually see it in such a short time scale," he said, noting the measurements had been made over less than a decade. Geologists are used to thinking in terms of thousands or millions of years for geological processes, he said. The work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Natural Science Foundation of China.

First Extrasolar Planet

First Planet Outside Solar System Observed By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer Sat Apr 30,10:59 AM ET LOS ANGELES - New images taken of an object five times the mass of Jupiter confirm that it is a giant planet closely orbiting a distant star, an international team of astronomers reported. The team of European and American astronomers said this is the first time a planet outside of our solar system has been directly observed — a claim other scientists have also made. The team first spotted the object last year as a faint reddish speck of light circling a dim brown dwarf — or failed star — 225 light-years away from Earth near the constellation Hydra. At the time, scientists guessed the faint light was a planet, but said further observation was needed. The discovery touched off a debate over whether the object was actually a planet or a background star. Since the mid-1990s, scientists have discovered more than 130 of these so-called extrasolar planets by indirect means, but observing them directly has proved difficult. Refined images taken earlier this year by the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile show two separate objects bound by gravity moving together according to Gael Chauvin, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, who led the team. "Our new images show convincingly that this really is a planet, the first planet that has ever been imaged outside of our solar system," Chauvin said in a statement. Added Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was part of the team: "I'm more than 99 percent confident." Chauvin's team estimated the mass of the object, called 2M1207b, by measuring its brightness. They found that it was five times the mass of Jupiter and orbited a brown dwarf, known as 2M1207A, at a distance nearly twice as far as Neptune is from the sun. Their observations will be published in a future issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the scientists said. Lynne Hillenbrand, an assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, said the findings were intriguing, but cautioned against calling the object a planet. "The claim of an object being a planet is subject to one's definition of planet and there are different camps on what that definition is," Hillenbrand said. In recent months, different groups of astronomers have published competing claims about directly observing extrasolar planets. Earlier this month, German astronomers published a photograph of an object 450 light-years from Earth that they claimed was the first direct image of an extrasolar planet. But astronomers sparred over the photo, saying that it was possible that it could be a brown dwarf based on the object's mass. Last month, scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope said they directly measured light from two known Jupiter-sized gas planets orbiting distant stars, but did not get images of the planets separate from their stars.

MALARIA

Inventor develops anti-malaria wristwatch

By Rebecca Harrison Wed Jan 18, 2:00 AM ET

A South African inventor has developed an anti-malaria wristwatch to help combat one of Africa's biggest killers by monitoring the blood of those who wear it and sounding an alarm when the parasite is detected.

Gervan Lubbe said his "Malaria Monitor" wristwatch, due to launch next month, could save lives and keep millions out of hospital by heading off the disease before patients even feel ill.

"It picks up the parasite and destroys it so early that the possibility of dying is absolutely zero and you don't even feel the early cold symptoms," Lubbe told Reuters in a telephone interview this week.

Malaria, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, kills more than a million people every year and makes 300 million seriously ill, according to the World Health Organization. Ninety percent of deaths are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The sturdy digital timepiece pricks the wrist with a tiny needle four times a day and tests the blood for malaria parasites.

If the parasite count tops 50 an alarm sounds and a brightly-colored picture of a mosquito flashes on the watch face. The wearer must take three tablets that kill all traces of the disease within 48 hours.

Lubbe was approached by a major mining company to develop the device after it found high levels of malaria among workers in Africa was hurting productivity.

"If you wait until you get symptoms and a malaria diagnosis you can be in bed for six months and have to take huge quantities of quinine which can be dangerous," Lubbe said.

His company Gervans Trading has already received 1.5 million orders for the wristwatch from companies, governments and aid organization working in Africa, he said.

The watch will cost around 1,700 rand ($280), which Lubbe says is cheaper than treating a patient with severe malaria.

It also means people working or traveling in malarial areas can avoid taking expensive anti-malaria tablets which can come with nasty side effects.

Mining companies can monitor miners by making them walk through a scanner each day. The watch's radio frequency will transmit the wearer's information to a central computer so health departments can ensure people at risk take tablets.

Lubbe said several African governments and the World Health Organization had expressed interest in distributing the watch in rural Africa where access to treatment is scarce.

Lubbe, 38, won a gold medal for the world's best medical invention at the International Inventions Show in Geneva in 1998 for a pain relief device.

Scientists Find Brain Evolution Gene

Scientists find brain evolution gene

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer 7:30 PM August 16, 2006

Scientists believe they have found a key gene that helped the human brain evolve from our chimp-like ancestors. In just a few million years, one area of the human genome seems to have evolved about 70 times faster than the rest of our genetic code. It appears to have a role in a rapid tripling of the size of the brain's crucial cerebral cortex, according to an article published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Study co-author David Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said his team found strong but still circumstantial evidence that a certain gene, called HAR1F, may provide an important answer to the question: "What makes humans brainier than other primates?" Human brains are triple the size of chimp brains.

Looking at 49 areas that have changed the most between the human and chimpanzee genomes, Haussler zeroed in on an area with "a very dramatic change in a relatively short period of time."

That one gene didn't exist until 300 million years ago and is present only in mammals and birds, not fish or animals without backbones. But then it didn't change much at all. There are only two differences in that one gene between a chimp and a chicken, Haussler said.

But there are 18 differences in that one gene between human and chimp and they all seemed to occur in the development of man, he said.

Andrew Clark, a Cornell University professor molecular biology who was not part of Haussler's team, said that if true, the change in genes would be fastest and most dramatic in humans and would be "terrifically exciting."

However, the gene changed so fast that Clark said that he has a hard time believing it unless something unusual happened in a mutation. It's not part of normal evolution, he said. Haussler attributed the dramatic change to the stress of man getting out of trees and walking on two feet.

And it's not just that this gene changed a lot. There is also its involvement with the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for some of the more complex brain functions, including language and information processing.

"It looks like in fact it is important in the development of brain," said co-author Sofie Salama, a research biologist at Santa Cruz who led the efforts to identify where the gene is active in the body.

The scientists still don't know specifically what the gene does. But they know that this same gene turns on in human fetuses at seven weeks after conception and then shuts down at 19 weeks, Haussler said.

MULTIVERSE DONUT

NYTimes.com Article:

Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Some scientists say new data hint that space is like a hall of mirrors in which light travels around a small universe, creating an apparently endless chain of images.


Image by Dr. Max Tegmark, University of Pennsylvania

Long ago in the dawn of the computer age, college students often whiled away the nights playing a computer game called Spacewar. It consisted of two rocket ships attempting to blast each other out of the sky with torpedoes while trying to avoid falling into a star at the center of the screen.
Although cartoonish in appearance, the game was amazingly faithful to the laws of physics, complete with a gravitational field that affected both the torpedoes and the rockets. Only one feature seemed outlandish: a ship that drifted off the edge of the screen would reappear on the opposite side.

Real space couldn't work that way.

Or could it?
Imagine that the Spacewar screen is wrapped around to form a cylinder or a section of a doughnut so that the two edges meet.

That is the picture of space, some cosmologists say, that has been suggested by a new detailed map of the early universe. Their analysis of this map has now provided a series of hints - though only hints - that the universe may have a more complicated shape than astronomers presumed.

Rather than being infinite in all directions, as the most fashionable theory suggests, the universe could be radically smaller in one direction than the others. As a result it may be even be shaped like a doughnut.

"There's a hint in the data that if you traveled far and fast in the direction of the constellation Virgo, you'd return to Earth from the opposite direction," said Dr. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

The new data have generated both buzz and skepticism among cosmologists in recent weeks. Dr. Tegmark and other astronomers agree that the measurements are far from conclusive, or even persuasive about the shape of the universe.

But if true, the doughnut universe would force cosmologists to reconsider their theories about what happened in the
earliest moments after the universe was born in the Big Bang; those theories predict an infinite cosmos.

The new findings have brought to center stage the hope that astronomers may be able to test speculations about the shape, or topology, of the universe that until recently have been relegated to the abstract mathematical margins of cosmology.

The results are part of the bounty of data produced by a NASA satellite known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, built and operated by an international collaboration led by Dr. Charles L. Bennett of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The satellite recorded the pattern of heat, in the form of faint microwave radiation, that fills the sky.

This radiation is believed to be the afterglow of the Big Bang itself, and thus constitutes a portrait of the universe when it was only 380,000 years old.

As the COBE satellite first confirmed in 1992, the microwave cloud is laced with ripples and splotches - lumps in the cosmic gravy - from which galaxies and other cosmic structures would ultimately form.

According to theory, these lumps are born as microscopic fluctuations during the first instant of time and then amplified into sound waves as the universe expands and matter and energy slosh around.

Now the new satellite has illuminated the findings of COBE (pronounced KOE-bee, for Cosmic Background Explorer) in exquisite detail.

By analyzing these waves cosmologists can determine many of the characteristics of the universe, which scientists have long debated, like its age and density. To their delight, the first results from the Wilkinson satellite, released last month, confirmed many of the strange ideas that cosmologists entertained in the last decade, including the notion that most of the universe consists of something called dark energy, which is pushing space apart at an accelerating rate.

"Cosmologists have built a house of cards and it stands," said Dr. James Peebles, a cosmologist at Princeton.

But to their even greater delight, perhaps, as they dig into the trove released last month, cosmologists are finding hints of even more strangeness.

In principle, in an infinite universe, the waves in the cosmic fireball should appear randomly around the sky at all sizes. But, according to the new map, there seems to be a limit to the size of the waves, with none extending more than 60 degrees across the sky.

The effect was first noted as a puzzle in the COBE data, according to Dr. Gary Hinshaw, an astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center and a member of the Wilkinson probe team, and now seems confirmed.

If the universe were a guitar string, it would be missing its deepest notes, the ones with the longest wavelengths, perhaps because it is not big enough to sustain them.

"The fact that there appears to be an angular cutoff hints at a special distance scale in the universe," Dr. Hinshaw said.

Another analysis of the new map suggests that there is a special direction, as well as a special scale in the universe. While reanalyzing the Wilkinson data to eliminate radio noise from stars and our own galaxy, Dr. Tegmark, Dr. AngM-ilica de Oliveira-Costa, also at Pennsylvania and married to Dr. Tegmark, and Dr. Andrew J. S. Hamilton of the University of Colorado have discovered that the universe appears lumpier in one direction through space than it does in another. When they combed finer variations out of the map, the remaining large-scale variations formed a line across the sky.

It could be a chance alignment, a statistical fluke, Dr. Tegmark said, or contamination from radio noise from the galaxy.

But in a paper posted on the physics Web site (at arXiv.org/pdf /astro-ph/0302496) late last month, the three cosmologists wrote that it was "difficult not to be intrigued" that their results bore all the earmarks of what are variously called small, compact, finite or periodic universes.

If the universe is finite in one dimension, like a cylinder or a doughnut, Dr. Tegmark said in an interview, there is a limit to the size of clumps that can fit in that direction. They couldn't be bigger than the universe in that direction, just as a guitar string can only play a note so low, depending on its length. So the biggest blobs would have to squish out in a plane in other directions. The way home around the doughnut would be perpendicular to that plane.

Nobody is yet claiming that this is a revolution. The notion of a special direction is on less firm ground than the discovery of a cutoff of large structures. "More detailed work in needed to clarify what's going on," Dr. Tegmark said.

Dr. Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University," said he didn't think there was evidence for "anything crazy" in the data.

Even aficionados of finite universes are guarded. Dr. David Spergel, a Princeton cosmologist and Wilkinson satellite team member, called the results "intriguing," but cautioned
that they could also be due to chance.

Dr. Hinshaw called the findings of Dr. Tegmark's team "surprisingly robust," but added, "I'm not sure it says something profound about the universe."

Dr. Alexei Starobinski, a theorist at the Landau Institute in Moscow, proposed in 1984 with his mentor, Dr. Yakov B. Zeldovich, that the universe could have been born as a doughnut. Dr. Starobinski emphasized that an infinite universe with ordinary Euclidean geometry was the most natural universe and still favored by theory.



"However, theory is theory, but observations might tell us something different," he said in an e-mail message.

The Science of Shapes
A Compact Universe
Like Mirrored Halls

The new work involves topology, the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes. Topologists are often accused of not knowing the difference between a coffee mug and a doughnut; because each object has one hole, the two can be deformed into each other and are thus topologically equivalent. In a similar vein, a figure 8 and a pair of eyeglass frames are also the same to a topologist. The more holes, the more complicated the topology.

The simplest topology is just the infinite space of the Euclidean geometry taught in high school. But some cosmologists have a hard time calculating how an infinite universe could have appeared in that kind of space. Nature, they contend, might have had an easier time making a small "compact" universe than an infinite one, and they assume Nature would take the easy way out.

"The basic idea is that God's on a budget," said Dr. George Smoot, a physicist at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and a leader on the COBE team.


The simplest of these compact universes is something called a 3-torus, a doughnut wrapped in three different dimensions. This object is essentially impossible to visualize: it is the equivalent, in a way, of a cube whose opposite sides are somehow glued together. In two dimensions it works just like the Spacewar screen.

Living in such a universe would be like being inside a hall of mirrors, Dr. Tegmark said. Instead of seeing new stars deeper and deeper in space, you see the same things over and over again as light travels out one side of your cube and back in the other.

This mirror game is not limited to cubes and doughnuts. Over the years mathematicians, particularly Dr. William Paul Thurston, now at the University of California at Davis, and Dr. Jeffrey Weeks, an independent mathematician, have speculated about universes composed of various polyhedrons glued together in various ways.

In 1996 the French astronomer Dr. Jean-Pierre Luminet of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues Dr. Roland Lehoucq and Dr. Marc Lachieze-Rey, both of the Center for Astrophysical Studies in Saclay, France, developed a method called "cosmic crystallography," using galaxy statistics to detect and diagnose the repeating periodic patterns that would be created in the sky by light going around and around in differently shaped universe.

Finite or Infinite?
Problems Are Posed
For Favored Theory

Why would the universe want to do this to us? Partly to avoid the difficulties of the infinite, said Dr. Glenn Starkman, an astronomer at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Besides being difficult to create, an infinite universe is philosophically unattractive. In an infinite volume, he pointed out, anything that can happen will happen.

"Somewhere there are two guys having this same conversation," Dr. Starkman said in a telephone interview, "except that one of them has a purple phone."

Moreover, the idea that dimensions could be curled in loops occurs naturally in theories that try to unite gravity and particle physics, several physicists pointed out. For example, according to string theory, the leading candidate for a theory of everything, the universe actually has 10 dimensions - 9 of space and 1 of time - rather than the 4 we are familiar with. The extra dimensions are curled up into submicroscopic loops, like the threads in an uncut carpet pile, so that we don't notice them in ordinary life.


"This is the same idea on a very large scale," Dr. Smoot said.

Knowing that all nine of the spatial dimensions predicted by string theory are finite and thus on the same footing could help string theorists decide among the nearly endless possibilities allowed by the theory, scientists say.

But a finite universe would create big problems for the reigning theory of the Big Bang, inflation theory. It posits that the universe underwent a burst of hyperexpansion in its earliest moments. Among other things, it implies that the observable universe today, a bubble 28 billion light-years in diameter, is only a speck on the surface of a vastly greater realm trillions upon trillions of light-years across.

"There's no natural way yet proposed to get the inflation to stop and give a space that's big enough to house all the galaxies but small enough to see within the observable horizon," said Dr. Janna Levin, a Cambridge University cosmologist who wrote about finite universes in her 1992 book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots, Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space."

Dr. Spergel added, "If the universe were finite, then this would rule out inflation and require something new."

The Search for Patterns
One Convincing Sign
Of the Doughnut

So far, sporadic searches for repeating patterns of quasars or distant galaxy clusters that would occur in a hall of mirrors universe have been unsuccessful.

For finite universe aficionados, the first encouragement of note was COBE's discovery that the universe appeared to be deficient in large-scale fluctuations. There were no structures extending more than about 60 degrees across the sky. But the finding was subject to large statistical uncertainties, astronomers said.

There are other possible explanations for the cutoff in fluctuation size, Dr. Starkman explained. According to inflation the biggest longest waves are created first, and thus the missing notes are the earliest ones that would have been strummed by inflation's guitar. Perhaps, he said, this is telling us something about the beginning of inflation.

Dr. George Efstathiou of Cambridge University has pointed out in a recent paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the Wilkinson satellite data are also marginally consistent with yet another finite shape, namely a sphere. In that case, fluctuations larger than the radius of the sphere might be dampened, he said, producing the observed cutoff.

The most convincing sign of a doughnut universe, if it exists, astronomers say, could come from a search of the satellite data now being performed by Dr. Spergel, Dr. Starkman and Dr. Neil J. Cornish of Montana State University. "We're looking for circles in the sky," Dr. Starkman said.

In a 1998 paper they point out that if the universe is small enough, part of the cosmic background radiation, which essentially fills the sky surrounding us, will hit the sides of the "box" or the space war screen we are in and appear on the other side. The result, in the simplest case, would be identical circles on opposite sides of the sky with the same patterns of hot and cold running around them.

In the simplest case, the size of the circles would depend on the distance between the "walls" of the universe: the smaller the universe, the bigger the circles.

Success or even a definitive failure is not guaranteed. "It would be fantastic if something like that was found," Dr. Hinshaw said of the circles.

But success or even a definitive failure is not guaranteed. If the universe is finite but still much larger than today's observable universe - 28 billion light-years in diameter - the circles will not show. "Usually in science when we see an intriguing pattern that appears to contradict existing theory we do a better experiment," Dr. Spergel wrote in an e-mail message, but in this case, "Ultimately we will be limited by the fact that we can only observe the `visible' universe."

Dr. Levin was doubtful, "I suspect every last one of us would be flabbergasted if the universe was so small," she said in an e-mail message. When she first heard about the new satellite data, she reported, "I tried on the idea that we were really and truly seeing the finite extent of space and I was filled with dread.

"But I'm enjoying it too."

SOURCE

NEAR EARTH OBJECTS

Astronomers look for near-Earth objects By WILLIAM J. KOLE, Associated Press Writer They're out there, hidden among a haze of stars — killer asteroids. Now the world's astronomers are keeping a wary eye to the skies for giant objects on a collison course with Earth. Experts say there are about 1,100 comets and asteroids in the inner solar system that are at least a half-mile across, and that any one of them could unleash a global cataclysm capable of killing millions in a single blinding flash. On Thursday, the International Astronomical Union said it has set up a special task force to sharpen its focus on threats from such "near-Earth objects." "The goal is to discover these killer asteroids before they discover us," said Nick Kaiser of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy, which hopes to train four powerful digital cameras on the heavens to watch for would-be intruders. There are no asteroid busters to stop one right now, but scientists believe that one day a defense could be devised, such as using spacecraft to divert a killer comet. Congress has asked NASA for a plan to comb the cosmos for even smaller, more distant objects, including asteroids just 1 1/2 football fields across. The space agency is to catalog their position, speed and course by 2020. Already, there are 103 objects on an "impact risk" watch list. Scientists warn there are as many as 100,000 of these "smaller" heavenly bodies with the potential to take out entire cities or set off a tsunami like the killer wave that swept through the Indian Ocean in December 2004. Earth's craters bear silent witness to what can happen even when a smallish asteroid slams home. In 1908, one struck remote central Siberia, unleashing as much energy as a 15-megaton nuclear bomb. Fortunately, it wiped out 60 million trees, not people. Had it hit a populated area, the loss of life would have been staggering. There's some recent good news too: Earth's most pressing threat — the asteroid 99942 Apophis — appears to have eased. Scientists initially gave it a 1-in-5,500 chance of hitting the planet in 2036, with enough power to wipe out the New York City metro area. But experts said Thursday the latest observations suggest those odds have dwindled to 1-in-30,000. They won't be sure until it makes an earlier pass in 2029, when it's expected to come within 18,640 miles of Earth. If that sounds comfortably distant, consider this: It's closer than many commercial satellites and a good deal nearer than the moon. Although close encounters are unnerving, they give astronomers a unique opportunity to get a better glimpse of asteroids and comets — the leftover building materials of the universe — and gain a better understanding of the origins of the solar system. Scientists say expanding their database of the objects crowding Earth's neighborhood could help produce a permanent warning system like those that now monitor the Pacific for tsunamis or keep tabs on volcanoes and earthquake zones. Give the world a decade or so of lead time to deal with a specific threat, they say, and it stands a chance of getting out of harm's way — perhaps by sending up a spacecraft to nudge an asteroid off-course. "Right now, unfortunately, there are no 'asteroid busters' or hot lines. Who ya gonna call?" said Andrea Milani Comparetti, a professor of mathematics at Italy's University of Pisa. To be on the safe side, astronomers trying to determine the odds of one hitting Earth work with computer models that surround it with thousands of "virtual asteroids." Experts then map out the likely orbits for each one and factor those in to come up with the probability of an impact. But widening the search for threatening objects creates a problem: Discoveries could become commonplace, either creating unnecessary panic and confusion or lulling the public into a false sense of complacency. "We're now going to be finding such objects once a week instead of once a year," said David Morrison, a NASA scientist who will chair the new task force. "Only in Hollywood do asteroids arbitrarily change orbits," he said. "But there is great potential for misunderstanding. Dealing with probability and risk is a problem for all of us, whether we're dealing with asteroid impacts or terrorist attacks." Bottom line: Mankind may not be able to dodge every cosmic bullet. "It's through collisions that planets are born," said Giovanni Valsecchi of Italy's National Institute of Astrophysics. "And it's through collisions that planets die."

EARTH'S OLDEST OBJECT

Earth's Oldest Known Object on Display April 8, 2005 By RYAN J. FOLEY, Associated Press Writer MADISON, Wis. - A tiny speck of zircon crystal that is barely visible to the eye is believed to be the oldest known piece of Earth at about 4.4 billion years old. For the first time ever, the public will have a chance to see the particle Saturday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where researchers in 2001 made the breakthrough discovery that the early Earth was much cooler than previously believed based on analysis of the crystal. To create buzz about an otherwise arcane subject, the university is planning a daylong celebration of the ancient stone — capped with "The Rock Concert" by jazz musicians who composed music to try to answer the question: What does 4.4 billion years old sound like? "This is it — the oldest thing ever. One day only," said Joe Skulan, director of the UW-Madison Geology Museum, where the object will be displayed — under police guard — from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. "The idea of having a big celebration of something that's so tiny — we're playing with the obvious absurdity of it." With the aid of a microscope, anyone will be able to check out the tiny grain, which measures less than two human hairs in diameter. A concert by Jazz Passengers, a six-piece group from New York hired to compose music for the event, will follow on Saturday evening. In posters hanging on campus, the concert is advertised as "a loving musical tribute to the oldest known object on Earth." Composer Roy Nathanson said the concert will mix humor, jazz music, computer-generated beats, and the occasional rocks being banged together to "follow the geological history of how this zircon came about." "It's an amazing story. The whole thing is something that captures your imagination," said Nathanson, 53, a saxophonist who spent one year composing the performance. Analysis of the object in 2001 by John Valley, a UW-Madison professor of geology and geophysics, startled researchers around the world by concluding that the early Earth, instead of being a roiling ocean of magma, was cool enough to have oceans and continents — key conditions for life. "It's not very much to look at because it's so very small. But to me, the miraculous thing about the crystal is that we've been able to make such wide-ranging inferences about the early Earth," Valley said. "This is our first glimpse into the earliest history of the Earth." Valley found that the planet had cooled to about 100-degrees Centigrade less than 200 million years after it was formed. Before the research, the oldest evidence for liquid water on the planet was from a rock estimated to be much younger — 3.8 billion years old. As part of Saturday's event, Valley will display a brand new, $3 million ion microprobe that he and other researchers will use to analyze tiny samples such as the zircon crystal. The hand-built instrument weighs 11 tons and takes up an entire laboratory. Valley, who has tried to obtain the equipment for 22 years, had to travel to Scotland and Australia while he analyzed the zircon to use equipment there. A federal grant is paying for most of the new instrument. After the festivities the object will return to its native Australia with Simon Wilde, professor at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, who made its discovery in 1984. The sample will eventually be put on display at a natural history museum in that country.

NASA Pluto Mission

NASA Launches First Mission to Pluto

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press Writer 2:45 PM Thursday January 19, 2006>

A piano-sized spacecraft blasted off Thursday on a 3-billion mile journey to study Pluto, the solar system's last unexplored planet, and examine a mysterious zone of icy objects at the outer edges of the planetary system.

The New Horizons probe lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 2 p.m., quickly reaching speeds of 36,000 mph, nearly 100 times faster than a jetliner.
"We have ignition and liftoff of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft on a decade long voyage to visit the planet Pluto and then beyond," said NASA commentator Bruce Buckingham.

It was the swiftest spacecraft ever launched and was expected to reach Earth's moon in nine hours and Jupiter in just over a year.

The distance involved means scientists won't be able to receive data on Pluto until at least July 2015, the earliest the mission is expected to arrive.

After two delays — first because of strong winds Tuesday at the launch pad, and then because of a power outage Wednesday at the spacecraft's control center in Maryland — New Horizons got off the ground.

"It looked beautiful," said Ralph McNutt Jr. of the Johns Hopkins University of Applied Physics Laboratory, one of the mission scientists. "I was getting a little bit antsy."

The launch drew attention from opponents of nuclear power because the spacecraft is powered by 24 pounds of plutonium, whose natural radioactive decay will generate electricity for the probe's instruments.

NASA and the Department of Energy had estimated the probability of a launch accident that could release plutonium at 1 in 350. As a precaution, the agencies brought in 16 mobile field teams that can detect radiation and 33 air samplers and monitors.
A successful journey to Pluto would complete an exploration of the planets started by NASA in the early 1960s with unmanned missions to observe Mars, Mercury and Venus.
Pluto is the only planet discovered by a U.S. citizen, though some astronomers dispute Pluto's right to be called a planet. It is an oddball icy dwarf unlike the rocky planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars and the gaseous planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Pluto is the brightest body in a zone of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt, which is made up of thousands of icy, rocky objects including tiny planets whose development was stunted by unknown causes. Scientists believe studying those "planetary embryos" can help them understand how planets were formed.
The New Horizons spacecraft was launched on an Atlas V rocket, NASA's most powerful launch vehicle. Some NASA safety managers had raised concerns about the rocket's fuel tank since a similar test tank failed a factory pressure evaluation. The decision was made to fly since the flight tank was in pristine condition and had no signs of any defects like the ones found on the test tank.

SETI Message

ASTROBIOLOGY: ON THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE Over 30 years ago, Carl Sagan (1934-1996) wrote the following: "Civilizations hundreds or thousands or millions of years beyond us should have sciences and technologies so far beyond our present capabilities as to be indistinguishable from magic. It is not that what they can do violates the laws of physics; it is that we will not understand how they are able to use the laws of physics to do what they do. It is possible that we are so backward and so uninteresting to such civilizations as not to be worthy of contact, or at least of much contact. There may be a few specialists in primitive planetary societies who receive master's or doctor's degrees in studying Earth or listening to our raspy radio and television traffic. There may be amateurs -- Boy Scouts, radio hams, and the equivalent -- who may be interested in developments on Earth. But a civilization a million years in our future is unlikely, I believe, to be very interested in us. There are all those other civilizations a million years in our future for them to talk to." [*Note #1] ... ... T.L. Wilson (Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Bonn, DE) presents a review of some current considerations concerning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the author making the following points: 1) The author points out that N.S. Kardashev, in 1964, classified possible extraterrestrial civilizations according to the energy at their disposal, the scheme permitting a determination of whether, in a context of communication, we would be dealing with a civilization like our own (type I), a rather advanced civilization (type II), or a vastly more advanced civilization (type III). The transmission power of a type I civilization is equal to the power expendable by all the technological activity on Earth. For a specific direction, this can be achieved by coupling the output of a 1 megawatt transmitter operating at 10 centimeters to a 100-meter-diameter telescope. The transmission power of a type II civilization is the entire output of the Sun, which is equal to 10^(14) times a type I transmission. The transmission power of a type III civilization is equal to the power from our entire Galaxy, or 10^(11) times a type II signal. 2) The author points out that humanity has sufficient resources at present to broadcast messages comparable to a type I civilization in a specific direction, although in practice the types of transmission are based on isotropic radiators. A type II transmission might be transmitted by an extraterrestrial civilization that had captured all of the power from its central star. Such extraterrestrial civilizations are often referred to as "Dyson civilizations". Type III civilizations have captured the power of an entire galaxy. 3) The author points out that F.D. Drake, in 1965, proposed what is now called the "Drake equation" as an attempt to quantify estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations. The equation takes the form N = RanbcdL, where (N) is the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in a galaxy communicating at any given time, (R) is the average rate of galactic star formation, (a) is the fraction of stars accompanied by planets, (n) is the number of planets per star system with conditions needed to support life, (b) is the fraction of habitable planets on which life actually arises, (c) is the fraction of the life-bearing planets that develop intelligent life, ( d) is the fraction of intelligent species that develop communication technologies, and (L) is the "life-span" of the communicating technological culture. 4) The author points out that stars are concentrated in galaxies, and there are more than 20 galaxies within 3 million light years of our own Galaxy. In principle, we should be able to receive a message from type II or type III extraterrestrial civilizations in any of these galaxies with technology currently available. With an average of 10^(10) Sun-like stars per galaxy, we could detect messages from extraterrestrial civilizations even if the product of the last 5 terms in the Drake equation were less than 1 part in 10^(8). The author suggests these considerations provide a rationale for all-sky untargeted searches: With the possibility of at least modest numbers of perhaps readily detectable extraterrestrial civilizations (especially of type II or type III), the extra sensitivity conferred by targeted searches would not be an absolute requirement for success. However, the fact remains that no confirmed transmissions in the centimeter-wavelength range have been received, from which it has been claimed that type II and type III extraterrestrial civilizations do not exist at the present epoch. The author suggests this claim is overstated: it may be valid for a sizeable part of our Galaxy, but only if the extraterrestrial civilizations are broadcasting in the centimeter-wavelength range without interruption -- and if they wish their signals to be detectable. 5) The author points out that there is an advantage in transmitting signals at short wavelengths, and this explains the interest in optical searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. The author suggests the following example illustrates the advantages of optical searches in regard to effective radiated power: An extraterrestrial civilization orbiting a Sun-like star could use a laser to illuminate a 1-meter optical telescope through narrow-band optical filters. The extraterrestrial civilization could then produce a short pulse lasting 1 microsecond or less, and this would produce a flash 300,000 times as bright as their Sun. Even without optical filtering, the flash would still be 30 times as bright as their Sun, and this factor would rise to 3000 if the diameter of the telescope were increased to 10 meters (the diameter of our current Keck telescopes). Because of the short pulse length, such optical signals would not be found in conventional optical astronomical surveys. 6) The author points out that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, they are not making their presence obvious. This in itself suggests that type III and perhaps type II civilizations are at best extremely rare. There are, however, many possible reasons why we have not made contact with extraterrestrial civilizations: a) They may simply be very few. b) There may be a number of extraterrestrial civilizations, but these may be sending messages in optical or near-infrared ranges that we have to explore comprehensively. c) There may be extraterrestrial civilizations, but these may not be interested in communicating and choose to keep themselves hidden. This is more speculative, since it depends on the cultural aspects of extraterrestrial civilizations. From searches so far, the lack of contact demonstrates that transmissions, if any, involve weak or intermittent signals (or both). 7) The author suggests there seems to be no hope for faster-than-light travel, so actual visits from extraterrestrial civilization are unlikely. Even with the most efficient propulsion systems, the energy needed to reach stars at 10 light years in 20 years would be the equivalent of the present world consumption for 1000 years. Such expenditure of energy would hardly deter a type III extraterrestrial civilization, but even then, broadcasts make more energetic sense than personal appearances. There have been suggestions that extraterrestrial civilizations might populate space with self-replicating machines in space probes. This would allow colonization of large regions of space in relatively short intervals of time, but it seems vastly more complex than communicating by means of electromagnetic radiation.

-----------
T.L. Wilson: The search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
(Nature 22 Feb 01 409:1110)
QY: T.L. Wilson: twilson@as.arizona.edu
-----------
Text Notes:
... ... *Note #1: Carl Sagan: _The Cosmic Connection: An
Extraterrestrial Perspective_, Doubleday, New York 1973, Dell,
New York 1975, p.222.
-------------------

A Hurricane On Saturn

Colossal hurricane-like storm seen on Saturn By Will Dunham A colossal, swirling storm with a well-developed eye is churning at Saturn's south pole, the first time a truly hurricane-like storm has been detected on a planet other than Earth, NASA images showed on Thursday. The storm on the giant, ringed planet is about 5,000 miles wide, measuring roughly two thirds the diameter of Earth, with winds howling clockwise at 350 mph (550 kph). Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which swirls counterclockwise, is far bigger, but is less like a hurricane because it lacks the typical eye and eye wall. The images -- essentially a 14-frame movie -- were captured over a period of three hours on October 11 by the U.S. space agency's Cassini spacecraft as it passed about 210,000 miles from the planet as part of its exploration of Saturn and its moons. Michael Flasar, an astrophysicist involved in the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said the storm looks just like water swirling down the drain in a bath tub, only on a gigantic scale. "We've never seen anything like this before," Flasar said in an interview. "It's a spectacular-looking storm." Saturn, the second-biggest planet in the solar system with an equatorial diameter of 74,000 miles and the sixth from the sun, is about 746 million miles from Earth. Its south pole storm is much bigger than Earth hurricanes. It has a well-developed eye ringed by towering clouds that soar 20-45 miles above those in the dark center, two to five times higher than clouds in our thunderstorms and hurricanes, NASA said. A distinguishing feature of hurricanes on Earth are the eye-wall clouds that form when moist air flows inward across an ocean surface, rising vertically and releasing a heavy rain around a circular region of descending air that represents the eye. Scientists said it was unclear whether Saturn's storm was a water-driven system. It differs from Earth hurricanes in part because it remains stuck at the pole rather than drifting as such storms do on this planet and because it did not form over a liquid water ocean, with Saturn being a gaseous planet, NASA said. "It looks like a hurricane, but it doesn't behave like a hurricane," Andrew Ingersoll, a member of Cassini's imaging team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in a statement. "Whatever it is, we're going to focus on the eye of this storm and find out why it's there." Flasar said scientists have more work ahead to understand the Saturn storm. "I'm hoping that as we puzzle over it, it will become even more exciting as we start to connect the dots in our brains. But right now, the wheels are a little creaky," Flasar said. "We're all arguing with each other about what it might or might not be."

IS OUR WORLD REAL?

Is Our World Real? Maybe Not... The question of whether or not our world is real has been debated since the time of the ancient Greeks. Recently, films like the Matrix have suggested that 'reality' could be an entirely artificial construction. Now two scientists are saying that it might just be true. Physicist Martin Rees and mathematician John Barrow speculate that the world that we know might be the creation of a gigantic computer located, perhaps, outside of the universe. In fact, the universe itself could be a simulation, and, as Dr. Rees speculates, it would not be necessary to create the entire thing, but only the appearance of it. Our reality, in other words, could look enormous but actually be quite small, easily manageable by the sort of supercomputer that might be available in just a matter of years. John Barrow, also a Cambridge teacher, suggests that a civilization just slightly ahead of our own could create a universe in which self-conscious entities could exist and interact with each other. But Seth Lloyd of MIT says that such a simulation would require a computer so large that it would be virtually unimaginable. Nevertheless, Barrow and Rees are being taken seriously in scholarly and scientific circles. If they're right, then the question must be asked: was famed anomalist Charles Fort right? IS this a barnyard? Scientists see us in a virtual reality By Christophe Schmidt in London IS it all just a dream? Speculation that reality is nothing but an illusion, or simulation, or controlled environment, has been with us for thousands of years, most recently doled out as pop culture brain candy with the likes of the US film The Matrix. But now two respected British scientists, physicist Martin Rees and mathematician John Barrow, are questioning whether all matter and mind we know is not the creation of some mega-supercomputer somewhere. "A few decades ago, computers were only able to simulate very simple patterns. They can now create virtual worlds with a lot of detail," Rees told AFP. "In the future, we could imagine computers able to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as the one we think we're living in." Martin, an astronomer at Cambridge University, dares a thought that could have been deemed far-fetched among serious scientists only a while back: "The question is : Could we be in such a simulation?" In this case, the universe would not be all-encompassing but only part of an ensemble Rees and Barrow call the "multiverse". Barrow, who also teaches as Cambridge, described in an academic article that it was long known that a civilization slightly more advanced than our own could simulate "universes in which self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another". In a much more computer-savvy society with vastly more advanced technology, "instead of merely simulating their weather or the formation of galaxies, like we do, they would be able to go further and watch the appearance of stars and planetary systems," he said. "Then, having coupled the rules of biochemistry into their astronomical simulations, they would be able to watch the evolution of life and consciousness." With the same ease that we humans watch the "life cycle of fruit flies", Barrow said, the machine masters of the universe could "watch the civilizations grow and communicate with each other, argue about whether there existed a Great Programmer in the Sky who could intervene at will in defiance of the laws of Nature they habitually observed". However, the theory of the Cambridge pair of scientists has not met widespread approval among peers. Seth Lloyd, professor of quantum mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), pointed out such a simulation would require an "unimaginably large" computer. Lloyd, in comments published last week in The Sunday Times, gave a jab to the duo, comparing them to a science fiction book with a cult following - Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which stars a supercomputer named Deep Thought. "The Hitchhiker's Guide is a great book but it remains fiction," Lloyd said.

TOP CANDIDATES FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

Astronomers offer list of top candidates for extraterrestrial life US astronomers have come up with a short list of five stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are most likely to support extraterrestrial life. The stars were chosen based on a number of criteria, including size, composition, age and color, that would make them similar to the sun and enable planets resembling Earth to orbit them, said Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Turnbull's list would enable astronomers to point telescopes towards the stars with the most potential of sending radio signals from extraterrestrial life. "These are places I would want to live if God were to put our planet around another star," Turnbull said on Saturday at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis, Missouri. The list was developed to guide the use of NASA's new powerful orbiting observatories, or the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which will search for Earth-like planets. "There are 400 billion stars in the galaxy, and obviously we are not going to point the Terrestrial Planet Finder at every one of them," Turnbull said. Among the most promising sun-like stars was beta CVn, about 26 light years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. One light year is equivalent to 9.5 billion kilometers. Turnbull and her colleagues initially set out to select a dozen stars that were the most promising and sufficiently close to the Earth's solar system. In 2003, after a painstaking study of close to 120,000 stars, the team of astronomers came up with a catalogue of 129 "habitable stellar systems." Another star on the short list, Pegasus 51, was made famous in 1995 when Swiss astronomers discovered the first planet outside the solar system. The giant planet resembling Jupiter orbits Pegasus 51. A star named 16 sco, a popular target for planet searches, also made the list. The star is located in the Scorpion constellation near the center of the Milky Way and is virtually a twin of the sun, according to Turnbull. To be considered as potential homes for intelligent life to evolve, stars had to be at least three billion years old. Turnbull said the list was merely a starting point and it remained difficult to rank stars as more or less likely to shelter life. "There are inevitable uncertainties in how we understand these stars," she said. "If I took the top 100, it would be very difficult for me to tell which is the best." The list will provide potential targets for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which was originally set to be launched in 2016 but has been postponed due to federal budget constraints. Research for the list was sponsored by NASA and the privately funded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization. The institute was created in 1984 by the renown astronomer Carl Sagan, who died in 1996.

ALIEN MESSAGES IN OUR DNA?

Alien message 'may be in our DNA' Sydney Forget waiting for ET to call -- the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia. Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell. The coded message would only be discovered once the human race had the technology to read and understand it. Writing in New Scientist magazine, Davies said the idea should be considered seriously. For more than 40 years astronomers have been sweeping the skies with radio telescopes hoping to catch a signal from an alien civilisation. So far the search has been in vain. But Davies believes it is wrong to assume that extraterrestrials who may be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us technologically will have chosen to communicate by radio. Leaving artefacts for humans to find once they are sufficiently evolved -- like the obelisk in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey -- might be a more attractive strategy, he said. But ensuring the survival of such an artefact over possibly millions of years would be difficult. A better solution would be to incorporate information into the human genome, allowing it to be copied and maintained over immense periods of time. One way to do this might be to deliver alien viruses which could infect cells with message-laden DNA, said Davies. Scientists have recently discovered large sequences of "junk" DNA that contain no genes and appears to be very stable. "If ET has put a message into terrestrial organisms, this is surely where to look," said Davies. A computer could be used to find obvious attention-grabbing patterns within these stretches of DNA, he said. If a sequence of junk units of DNA were displayed as an array of pixels on a screen and produced a simple image "the presumption of tampering would be inescapable". The DNA code was easily big enough to contain a decent-sized novel or a potted history of the rise and fall of an alien civilisation. Davies added: "Trying to second-guess alien communication strategies is fraught with uncertainty, so we should try everything we can afford. The truth may be out there somewhere. Or it could be a lot closer to home." SOURCE

COMET TEMPEL 1

Water Ice Detected on Comet's Surface Ker Than Staff Writer SPACE.com Scientists have long known that a major ingredient in comets is water ice, but they were unsure whether the ice was contained mainly inside or if it could be found on the surface as well. A new analysis of data from NASA's Deep Impact mission last year provides the first evidence that water ice can indeed exist on a comet's exterior. In a new study released today in an online edition of the journal Science, researchers report that the surface of Tempel 1, the comet targeted by Deep Impact, has three small pockets of water ice. Tempel 1 has a surface area of roughly 45 square miles, or 1.2 billion square feet. The area taken up by the water ice, however, is only 300,000 square feet. The rest of the comet surface is dust. "It's like a seven-acre skating rink of snowy dirt," said study co-author Peter Schultz of Brown University. On July 4, 2005, NASA slammed a heavy copper probe called Impactor into Tempel 1's surface while it was 83 million miles from Earth. The resulting collision created a stadium-sized crater and flung tons of debris into space. Impactor was one of two Deep Impact spacecrafts; the mothership, responsible for recording and analyzing the blast, was called Flyby. The researchers believe Tempel 1's surface ice used to reside inside the comet and became exposed over time. It's also thought that occasional geyser-like blasts of dust and vapor, called jets, send the ice outward. Once ejected, the ice crystals can become incorporated into the luminous coma, a cloud of material surrounding the main body of the comet, or the ice can become part of its tail. The same team previously reported that Tempel 1's interior also contained an abundance of organic material and suggested the comet may have originated in a region of the solar system now occupied by Uranus and Neptune.

COPPERFIELD: Fountain Of Youth?

David Copperfield says he's found Fountain of Youth

By Jane Sutton

The man who made the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish may soon claim to do the same for unsightly bags and wrinkles.

Master illusionist David Copperfield says he has found the "Fountain of Youth" in the southern Bahamas, amid a cluster of four tiny islands he recently bought for $50 million (26.4 million pounds).

One of his islands in the Exuma chain, Musha Cay, is a private resort that rents for up to $300,000 a week and the other islands serve as buffers to keep prying eyes away from celebrity guests on the white sand beaches.

Copperfield is coy about his reasons for the Fountain of Youth claim, but the man best known for entertaining with grand deception insists his archipelago also contains the legendary waters that bestow perpetual youth. Seriously.

"I've discovered a true phenomenon," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. "You can take dead leaves, they come in contact with the water, they become full of life again. ... Bugs or insects that are near death, come in contact with the water, they'll fly away. It's an amazing thing, very, very exciting."

Copperfield, who turns 50 next month, said he had hired biologists and geologists to examine its potential effect on humans but he's not inviting visitors to swim in or drink from it just yet.

Life On EUROPA?

Jupiter Moon May Have Life -- Experts Urge a Mission

John Roach
for National Geographic News

Scientists say Jupiter's moon Europa rivals Mars as a potential refuge for life. Some of them are now urging NASA to explore the ice-covered satellite. "It takes longer to get there [than to get to Mars], it's more expensive, and a bigger deal to plan a mission. But if I had a choice, I'd go for Europa," said Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist with the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Rothschild studies the origins of life on Earth and other planets. She's intrigued by Europa because it appears to contain likely key ingredients for life—water, an energy source, organic compounds, and billions of years of development. Taken together, these ingredients are sufficient to support life, scientists say. To answer the question of whether life actually exists on Europa, however, requires further exploration with orbiters and landers like those currently exploring Mars. (See picture of and news about Mars's newfound "frozen sea.") "The big unknown is what's needed for life to originate," said Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist and expert on Europa at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Life Ingredients Europa is roughly the size of Earth's moon but is otherwise markedly different. To begin with, at 490 million miles (790 million kilometers) from the sun, Europa's surface is a bone-chilling –230° Fahrenheit (–145° Celsius). That's much too cold to support life as we know it. But scientists believe the interior of Europa is heated by tidal flexing, a process that results from the gravitational tug-of-war among Jupiter and its moons. The heating may be sufficient to keep the inner layers liquid. The Galileo spacecraft beamed close-up images of Europa's surface to Earth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The images revealed patterns of ridges and cracks in the crust that are suggestive of an icy shell moving over a liquid ocean, scientists say. Scientists are uncertain if Europa has organic compounds. Galileo, though, did detect carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, cyanogens (colorless, poisonous, flammable gases), and hydrocarbons (hydrogen-carbon compounds often found in natural gas and petroleum) on neighboring moons Callisto and Ganymede. "It all suggests there is energy, water, and possibly organics, and so it starts to get very exciting," Rothschild, the NASA astrobiologist, said. Another possibility is that hydrothermal vents, like those at the bottom of the Earth's oceans, are spewing energy and chemicals into Europa's ocean. If so, such vents could be a refuge for life, Pappalardo said. Europa Missions In September 2003, after eight years in orbit, the Galileo spacecraft was purposely sent into Jupiter's atmosphere, where it would burn up. The maneuver prevented the spacecraft from crashing into Europa and potentially contaminating the icy moon with microbes that might have hitchhiked from Earth. "I'm delighted I'm a biologist and not a planetary scientist," Rothschild said. "There's not a whole lot of new data since Galileo. People are combing over the past data, but what we need is a mission." Pappalardo said he and his colleagues have recently used Galileo's data to build better models of Europa. These models demonstrate the evidence for a salty ocean, the active surface geology, and even the estimated maximum thickness of the icy surface—about 12 miles (20 kilometers). But Pappalardo is yearning for new data. He was one of 80 U.S. planetary scientists who signed a report in January urging NASA to make a mission to Europa a priority. The U.S. space agency has tentative plans to launch the nuclear-powered Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter in 2015, four years later than originally planned. Technical challenges may further delay or entirely scrap the mission. "Europa is such a high priority for exploration that it shouldn't wait," Pappalardo said. Putting off a mission to Europa, he said, would be as if NASA had ruled out all Mars exploration until the agency had developed the perfect technology for bringing back a Martian soil sample—instead of proceeding with other types of Mars exploration in the meantime, as the space agency has done. "It's the same with Europa. It's a high priority, and it doesn't seem prudent to wait for the ultimate mission when we should be doing that reconnaissance exploration in the shorter term," the planetary scientist said. As a first step, Pappalardo said, NASA should send an orbiter to Europa to determine the characteristics of its ice shell, confirm the existence of an ocean, and analyze the chemistry of what appears to be dark organic matter on the moon's surface. Later missions could include landers to search for life and potentially an underwater robot that could melt through surface ice to sample water below. "But that's hard to do, and it's a long time off," he said.

SOURCE

ORION To The Moon In 2020

Lockheed Martin wins NASA moon contract

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer August 31, 2006

NASA on Thursday gave a multibillion dollar contract to build a manned lunar spaceship to Lockheed Martin Corp., the aerospace leader that usually builds unmanned rockets. The nation's space agency plans to use the Orion crew exploration vehicle to replace the space shuttle fleet, take astronauts to the moon and perhaps to Mars. Reusable and like Apollo and earlier spacecraft, it is perched atop the rocket. NASA estimated the cost at $7.5 billion through 2019. The last time NASA awarded a manned spaceship contract to Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, Md., was in 1996 for a spaceplane that was supposed to replace the space shuttle. NASA spent $912 million and the ship, called X-33, never got built because of technical problems. The only other competitor for the contract was a team made up of Northrop Grumman Corp., the world's largest shipbuilder and third-largest military contractor, and Boeing Co. "We feel we have an achievable design," said Doug Cooke, a deputy associate administrator when asked why Lockheed Martin was chosen over the competing team. "This is a design that is based on known capabilities. We know that this can be built so there are some differences there, perhaps." Although all of NASA's 10 centers will provide engineering support on Orion, the majority of the work will be at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and final assembly will be completed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In picking Lockheed Martin for Orion, described by NASA's chief as "Apollo on steroids," NASA bypassed Apollo throwbacks Northrop Grumman of Los Angeles and its chief subcontractor Boeing of Chicago. Northrop Grumman predecessor built the Apollo lunar lander. Companies bought by Boeing built the Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury capsules, Skylab and the space shuttle. "NASA decided to do something different and go with a company that has not been in manned space before, sort of spreading the wealth and making sure they've got two contractors that know the manned space business," said aerospace industry analyst Paul Nisbet, president of JSA Research. Lockheed Martin built several unmanned probes, including: 1998's Lunar Prospector; 1976 Viking probes of Mars; Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which entered the red planet's orbit earlier this year; and the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed because of a Lockheed Martin/NASA mismatching of metric and English measurement units. Before the announcement Lockheed Martin released few details about its proposal. Their plan was heavily open-ended, allowing NASA the ultimate decision on reusability of Orion and landing sites. Lockheed Martin's initial proposal was vastly different from what NASA wanted. Its first submission looked more like the since-abandoned X-33 spaceplane and less like a capsule. NASA told Lockheed Martin it wanted an Apollo-like capsule, so the company changed its proposal. If all goes well, the first test flight of Orion will be September 2014 and astronauts could return to the moon by late 2019 or 2020, NASA estimates. Lockheed Martin vice president John Karas said, if asked, his company could make the first flight in 2013. Orion will be the Apollo capsule-like replacement for the 25-year-old space shuttle fleet that is supposed to retire in four years, after completion of the international space station. "Space is no longer going to be a destination that we visit briefly," NASA associate administrator Scott Horowitz said Thursday. "We're going to learn to live off the land like the pioneers did." This is hardly the first time NASA has made a big deal over a next-generation spaceship. Since the 1980s, NASA has spent about $4.8 billion on shuttle follow-up ships that never were built, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the independent auditing arm of Congress. This time it's different, NASA claims. That's because after the Columbia accident in 2003, President Bush proposed a massive exploration plan. It would put astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972, with plans for a home base. The plan also would ultimately send people to Mars. Orion is just part of an exploration program called Constellation that includes the Ares I and V rockets that will power the Orion capsule and a cargo vehicle into orbit and beyond. The program will reduce the risk of a fatal accident to astronauts from 1-in-200 currently for the shuttle to 1-in-2000 for the new Constellation program, Orion project manager Skip Hatfield said last week. In July, the GAO warned that NASA was heading down the wrong path in choosing an Orion-builder by late August or early September. The auditors said the space agency would be choosing a contractor before it had "well-defined requirements, a preliminary design, mature technology and firm cost estimates for the project." "This approach increases the risk that the project will encounter significant cost overruns, schedule delays and decreased capability," the GAO warned. The competition involved the three largest aerospace companies in the United States. Northrop Grumman's proposal to NASA appeared to be far more detailed in technical choices than the Lockheed Martin version, which left key decisions such as reusability and landing sites up to NASA. But others see no difference between the two. "It's between tweedledum and tweedledee," said American University public policy professor Howard McCurdy, author of several books about the American space program. "They're both using the same management systems and the same technical systems that got us to the moon the first time." "None of these companies know how to cost innovate," McCurdy said. "They're basically aerospace divisions that depend on government contracts. Their whole incentive, based on the international space station, is to drive up costs." The Orion spaceship will look familiar to the baby boomer set. It is deliberately designed to be, in the words of NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, "Apollo on steroids." NASA told the contractors to build a capsule that looks just like Apollo and can carry four astronauts to the moon and six to the international space station orbiting Earth. It should have a service module that brings it to the moon.

SOURCE

IT HAPPENED 440 MILLION YEARS AGO!

Supernova caught in its exploding act

August 30, 2006

Teams of international scientists have used observations from NASA's Swift satellite and other telescopes to witness the evolution of a cosmic blast into a stellar explosion or supernova. The blast is thought to be a milder type of gamma-ray burst (GRB) -- the most powerful type of explosion known to astronomers -- called an X-ray flash. It is known as GRB060218 after the February 18 date it began in the constellation of Aries about 440 million light years away. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. "This extends the GRB-supernova connection to X-ray flashes and fainter supernovae, implying a common origin," said Elena Pian of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics in Trieste and the lead author of one of four research papers about the event in the journal Nature on Wednesday. It is the second-closest gamma-ray burst ever detected and the first view of a supernova in the act of exploding, according to the astronomers. Pian and her group confirmed that the explosion was tied to a supernova called SN2006aj a few days after the outburst, which lasted 100 times longer than a typical gamma-ray burst but was much dimmer. Alicia Soderberg and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used radio and X-ray wavelengths to calculate that GRB060218 was about 100 times less energetic than ordinary GRBs but similar events are probably more common. In another report in the journal, Sergio Campana and scientists at the National Institute for Astrophysics observatory in Merate, Italy also said the collapsing star was associated with a supernova. X-ray flashes appear to signal an explosion that leaves behind a neutron star while gamma-ray bursts are thought to mark the birth of a black hole, a region of space from which nothing can escape. Scientists led by Paolo Mazzali, of the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics in Garching, Germany found that the star had a smaller mass than those estimated for the normal GRB-supernova. "The properties of GRB060218 suggest the existence of a population of events less luminous than classical GRBs, but possibly more numerous," Mazzali said in a statement. In a commentary in the journal, Timothy Young of the University of North Dakota in the United States said the research has shown that at least some GRBs are warnings of the imminent explosion of massive stars. "All four papers make clear that the exploding object sent out both a slightly aspherical shockwave, typical of a supernova, and a jet-like stream of material characteristic of a GRB," he said.

SOURCE

Cassini Hits Paydirt!

Lakes Found on Saturn's Moon Titan Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer SPACE.com Fri Jul 28, 12:30 PM ET One of the major goals of NASA's Cassini mission was to find lakes or seas on Saturn's moon Titan. Now scientist say they've found lakes. These are not bodies of water like those on Earth, but rather dark lakes of methane and possibly ethane. They are likely the source of the hydrocarbon smog in the moon's atmosphere that has long made it impossible to even see the surface. Several dark patches, some with channels running out of them, were spotted near Titan's north pole during a July 22 Cassini flyby, NASA said in a statement yesterday. "This is a big deal," said Steve Wall, deputy radar team leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We've now seen a place other than Earth where lakes are present." This was Cassini's first look at the region. It's radar, which penetrates the smog, was used to find several dozen lakes ranging from less than a mile wide to one that is about 62 miles long. "What we see is darker than anything we've ever seen elsewhere on Titan. It was almost as though someone laid a bull's-eye around the whole north pole of Titan, and Cassini sees these regions of lakes just like those we see on Earth," said Larry Soderblom, Cassini interdisciplinary scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Ariz. On radar, dark areas indicate smoother terrain. These apparent lakes are so dark that the scientists assume they must be liquid. Any water on Titan would be constantly frozen, however, so the assumption is these lakes are made of hydrocarbons, which can stay liquid at much colder temperatures. The shapes of outflow channels strongly suggest liquid carved them, the researchers say. "We've always believed Titan's methane had to be maintained by liquid lakes or extensive underground 'methanofers,' the methane equivalent of aquifers," said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini scientist at the University of Arizona. "We can't see methanofers but we can now say we've seen lakes." Lakes should change shape slightly with the seasons, and winds ought to roughen their surfaces, so future passes by Cassini will look for these effects. Other Cassini observations have revealed apparent river channels elsewhere on the moon, as well as shorelines that might represent lakes or seas. Scientists say the moon likely experiences methane rains. But most observations, until now, have not shown conclusively that the methane exists in large quantities in liquid form now. Cassini has been observing Saturn and its moons and rings since it arrived there two years ago. It is a cooperative project between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

I Don't Recall It Being Called "MOTHMAN"

This is from our hometown newspaper when we were all of 4 and 9 years old...My picture was on the front page of one of these newspapers along with my brothers and a couple of neighborhood friends. We had built a "scarecrow" of sorts to scare off the creature if it happened into our neighborhood.

The Athens Messenger Athens, OH Thursday, November 17, 1966 By Mary Hyre Point Pleasant Correspondent Point Pleasant - What stands six feet tall, has wings, two big red eyes six inches apart and glides along behind an auto at 100 miles an hour? Don't know? Well, neither do four Point Pleasant residents who were chased by a weird "man-like thing" Tuesday night. Two young Mason County married couples today told of being chased by the "strange creature" around midnight Tuesday. Mr. and Mrs. Steve Mallette, 3505 Jackson Ave., and Mr. and Mrs. Roger Scarberry, 809-1/2 30th St., described their hair-raising experiences, which began in the TNT area. The two couples were riding in a car and as the auto crested a hill, an object loomed in front of them. The object was in the form of a man, about six feet tall with wings on its back. Becoming frightened, the couples drove away. As they approached a traffic circle near Route 62, they said the thing loomed in front of the car again. Mallette, 20, said they drove toward Point Pleasant on Route 62 at 100 miles an hour, with the strange creature drifting along behind the car. The couples said the thing seemed to avoid lights. When they turned into the C. C. Lewis farm, the creature was again in front of the car. What appeared to be a large dead dog was lying on the road. Later, the couples and police returned to the farm, but the dog had vanished. Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead searched the TNT area. The deputy said the "thing" was gone, but he found "a strange pile of dust." Scarberry, 18, said, "Believe me if you ever saw it, you'd be a believer." The men said they might go looking for the thing tonight, but indicated they were afraid they might find it.

The Athens Messenger Athens, OH Friday, November 18, 1966 By Roger Bennett Assistant News Editor "They think it's a big joke. they think we can go out there and it'll come out for us.: "It" is the red-eyed, winged-back, six-foot manlike thing which has turned a remote section of Mason County, W. Va., into a dusty, car-packed thrill show. "They" are the hundreds of curious sightseers, who have jammed a 10,000-acre (sic) east of Point of Pleasant each night since the creature was sighted by two young married couples last Tuesday. The sightseers know there isn't such a thing, but they aren't about to miss a chance seeing it. The people who've seen it so far, especially Mr. and Mrs. Roger Scarberry and Mr. and Mrs. Steve Mallett (sic), are afraid they'll see it again. But they keep looking. "I hope others do see it. I hope it scares them as much as it did us. Maybe then they'll believe the thing exists and we're not dreaming," Mrs. Mallette said. The two couples first spotted the creature Tuesday in the sprawling - marshy area which contains the McClintic Wildlife Sanctuary and a huge abandoned TNT plant. Most of the property is government owned. Thursday night the area was ablaze from the lights of cars and flashlights as the curious traveled up and down the maze of dirt roads. Police officials estimate more than 1,000 persons were searching the area prior to midnight. Every intersection was jammed with parked cars and small clumps of laughing, jostling young adults. Huge abandoned powder plant buildings rang with the shrieks of youngsters, scaring themselves more in the pitch-black plants than the people standing in the narrow roadways. Volunteer police officers and firemen - creeping through the crowds - have one major fear. They estimated that each car in the area had at least on gun. One officer hear and automatic rifle bark several times Thursday night behind one of the many buildings. Early sightings - besides that of the two couples - have several things in common. The description includes two red eyes about six inches apart, wings with 10-foot span and always manlike, with stocky legs. These sightings came from Cheshire, Rutland, several persons at an isolated home near the TNT plant and one in Doddridge County, W. Va., east of Parkersburg. The Scarberrys and the Mallettes said they believe the thing "didn't mean to harm us," even though Mrs. Scarberry had to be treated for shock, only to chase them away. At one time the creature came within 100 feet of their car. In all they spotted it five times the first night. They've seen it twice since. The first night it chased their car at speeds up to 100, gliding above and behind the vehicle. It emitted a sound similar to a "record played at a high speed or squeak of a mouse." What is it? They don't know but they're sure it _____. One thing that b_____lette is the pigeons. _____ disappeared from t_____ed power plant bui_____ where the creature_____ spotted. Pigeons can be s_____ other buildin_____ throughout the a_____ the huge double_____ power plant.

The Athens Messenger Athens, OH Friday, November 18, 1966 By Mary Hyre Point Pleasant Correspondent POINT PLEASANT - Six - or maybe seven - more people became believers in the Mason County Monster Wednesday night. What is it they saw? They don't know, but they have managed to convince a raft of people they saw something. The latest observers of the red-eyed, wing-backed six-foot thing are Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Wamsley; Ricky, Connie and Vickie Thomas and Marcella Bennett. They spotted the monster around 9 p.m. Wednesday outside the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Thomas, in the TNT area, where the thing was sighted Tuesday night. Observer number seven is reported to be a Cheshire area youth who allegedly was chased by a thing matching the description of the Mason County Monster. The chase took place on Route 7 in Ohio. Wednesday night's sighting took place as the Wamsley's and the Thomas children were leaving the Thomas home. They said the red-eyed creature was lying on the road behind a car. (missing some text) the house and called police. Later they ventured outside and spotted the creature watching them while partially hidden behind a pile of bricks. They said the creature then flew away. At the time of the spotting, officers and fire department volunteers were searching near an old power plant in the TNT area, where the monster was first spotted Tuesday night by two young couples. Mr. and Mrs. Steve Mallette and Mr. and Mrs. Roger Scarberry said the thing chased their car at speeds up to 100 miles an hour around midnight Tuesday. Officers said the TNT area was flooded with curious sightseers Wednesday night. One motorist reported his children "wanted to see it right now." Several people reported they had to take their children out because "they about drove us mad wanting to see it." One man contended it was something caused by the U.S. space program. He said, "You see, it's that talk of going to the moon and that stuff. It's hard to tell what they've caused to come back to earth." Mrs. Thomas, who was at church during Wednesday night's sighting, said she had a vision Monday night that a creature would appear. In the vision, she said, the creature would frighten people, but not harm anyone.

The Athens Messenger Athens, OH Sunday, November 26, 1966 Point Pleasant - Rumors are flying through Mason County faster than the "thing," which has been spoted by several people in various locations. The "thing" is described as being six feet tall, soars with a pair of wings with a 10-foot span, has red eyes six inches apart and leaves a print like a hoof mark. Two young married couples first spotted the "thing" Tuesday night in a 10,000-acre section east of Point Pleasant. The sector contains the McClintic Wildlife Sanctuary and and abandoned government TNT plant. Since that time the flying creature has been seen in various parts of West Virginia and Ohio. Each description contains the phrase "red eyes, six inches apart." The thing has caused a sudden interest in the remote TNT plant area and nightly motorists plow bumper-to-bumper over the dusty, dirt roads in hopes of spotting the creature. Monday morning quarterbacks have taken three approaches to the sightings. They either laugh at the sighters, give theories about the creature or they contend they've seen it themselves. The latest theory about the creature was advanced by Dr. Robert Smith, associate professor of biology at West Virginia University. Smith said the descriptions of the creature fit that of the huge sandhill crane. Smith said the crane stands six feet or better, has a huge wing span and has red forehead feathers. However, Ohio University Zoology department officials gave a different view concerning the sandhill crane theory. Ohio U. officials said there has never been a known sighting of a sandhill crane in this part of the country. In his book, "The Sandhill Cranes," Lawrence H. Walkinshaw, says the crane normally inhabits the plains of _____ and the flat country o_____ Michigan, Minnesota, _____sin and the Dakotas. The birds migrate e_____ to the Gulf Coast, bu_____ grate down the Missippii Valley. Like some other birds, the crane migrates at night. The sandhill drane is grey-brown in color and has a red forehead. Members of the Proctorville-Fairland High School Science Interest Club have another theory. Students of the Lawrence County school say the creature could be one of the two gas filled balloons they've released to study air currents. The 4 x 7 balloons were released about 30 miles west of (missing approximately 25 words) poke," a member of the heron family. Others contend the creature could be one of the wild geese, which live on the ponds of the wildlife sanctuary. The geese stand about two and a half to three feet tall. One man said the description fit his "mother-in-law exactly, especially the red eyes, six-inches apart." Another Point Pleasant man said the creature is something from the moon, chased down to earth by recent moon launch-_____ _____es who first _____Mr. and Mrs. _____nd Mr. and _____e, disagreed _____ theory about the sandhill crane. After viewing a picture of the bird, one of them commented, "My God, that's not the thing we saw. This thing could never chase us as it did." Mrs. Mallette said, "I just wish Dr. Smith could see the thing." The "thing" appeared in a road near an abandoned power plant at the TNT facility. The four spotted the "thing" five different times as it chased them at speeds of 100 miles an hour toward Point Pleasant. One thing for certain, the remote, lonely roads in the TNT area aren't suited for late night astronomy studies now and the sweethearts of the area are up in arms.

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Mothman

MYSTERIOUS SIGNAL

Mysterious signals from light years away

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
Eugenie Samuel Reich

In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.
The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.
This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.
But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

Absorb and emit

“It’s the most interesting signal from SETI@home,” says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. “We’re not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it.”
Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak.
“We are looking for something that screams out ‘artificial’,” says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. “This just doesn’t do that, but it could be because it is distant.”

Unknown signature

The telescope has only observed the signal for about a minute in total, which is not long enough for astronomers to analyse it thoroughly. But, Korpela thinks it unlikely SHGb02+14a is the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and it does not bear the signature of any known astronomical object.
That does not mean that only aliens could have produced it. “It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind like I stumbled over,” says Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath, UK.
It was Bell Burnell who in 1967 noticed a pulsed radio signal which the research team at the time thought was from extraterrestrials but which turned out to be the first ever sighting of a pulsar.
There are other oddities. For instance, the signal’s frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. “The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that’s rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet,” Korpela says.
This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.

Fishy and puzzling

The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is “fishy”, he says. “If [the aliens] are so smart, they’ll adjust their signal for their planet’s motion.”
The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second.
What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. “It just boggles my mind,” Korpela says.
The signal could be an artefact that, for some reason, always appears to be coming from the same point in the sky. The Arecibo telescope has a fixed dish reflector and scans the skies by changing the position of its receiver relative to the dish.
When the receiver reaches a certain position, it might just be able to reflect waves from the ground onto the dish and then back to itself, making it seem as if the signal was coming from space.
“Perhaps there is an object on the ground near the telescope emitting at about this frequency,” Korpela says. This could be confirmed by using a different telescope to listen for SHGb02+14a.

Possible fraud

There is also the possibility of fraud by someone hacking the SETI@home software to make it return evidence for an extraterrestrial transmission. However, SHGb02+14a was seen on two different occasions by different SETI@home users, and those calculations were confirmed by others.
Then the signal was seen a third time by the SETI@home researchers. The unusual characteristics of the signal also make it unlikely that someone is playing a prank, Korpela says. “As I can’t think of any way to make a signal like this, I can’t think of any way to fake it.”
David Anderson, director of SETI@home, remains sceptical but curious about the signal. ”It’s unlikely to be real but we will definitely be re-observing it.” Bell Burnell agrees that it is worth persisting with. “If they can see it four, five or six times it really begins to get exciting,” she says.
It is already exciting for IT engineers Oliver Voelker of Logpoint in Nuremberg, Germany and Nate Collins of Farin and Associates in Madison, Wisconsin, who found the signal.
Collins wonders how his bosses will react to company computers finding aliens. “I might have to explain a little further about just how much I was using [the computers],” he says.

A Genius Explains

Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds. But unlike other savants, who can perform similar feats, Tammet can describe how he does it. He speaks seven languages and is even devising his own language. Now scientists are asking whether his exceptional abilities are the key to unlock the secrets of autism.

Interview by Richard Johnson

Saturday February 12, 2005
The Guardian

Daniel Tammet is talking. As he talks, he studies my shirt and counts the stitches. Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places. He also happens to be autistic, which is why he can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left. He lives with extraordinary ability and disability.
Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't "calculating": there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think."
Tammet is a "savant", an individual with an astonishing, extraordinary mental ability. An estimated 10% of the autistic population - and an estimated 1% of the non-autistic population - have savant abilities, but no one knows exactly why. A number of scientists now hope that Tammet might help us to understand better. Professor Allan Snyder, from the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in Canberra, explains why Tammet is of particular, and international, scientific interest. "Savants can't usually tell us how they do what they do," says Snyder. "It just comes to them. Daniel can. He describes what he sees in his head. That's why he's exciting. He could be the Rosetta Stone."
There are many theories about savants. Snyder, for instance, believes that we all possess the savant's extraordinary abilities - it is just a question of us learning how to access them. "Savants have usually had some kind of brain damage. Whether it's an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head or, in the case of Daniel, an epileptic fit. And it's that brain damage which creates the savant. I think that it's possible for a perfectly normal person to have access to these abilities, so working with Daniel could be very instructive."
Scans of the brains of autistic savants suggest that the right hemisphere might be compensating for damage in the left hemisphere. While many savants struggle with language and comprehension (skills associated primarily with the left hemisphere), they often have amazing skills in mathematics and memory (primarily right hemisphere skills). Typically, savants have a limited vocabulary, but there is nothing limited about Tammet's vocabulary.
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day". Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at Cambridge University, is interested in what Mänti might teach us about savant ability. "I know of other savants who also speak a lot of languages," says Baron-Cohen. "But it's rare for them to be able to reflect on how they do it - let alone create a language of their own." The ARC team has started scanning Tammet's brain to find out if there are modules (for number, for example, or for colour, or for texture) that are connected in a way that is different from most of us. "It's too early to tell, but we hope it might throw some light on why we don't all have savant abilities."
Last year Tammet broke the European record for recalling pi, the mathematical constant, to the furthest decimal point. He found it easy, he says, because he didn't even have to "think". To him, pi isn't an abstract set of digits; it's a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes. He learnt the number forwards and backwards and, last year, spent five hours recalling it in front of an adjudicator. He wanted to prove a point. "I memorised pi to 22,514 decimal places, and I am technically disabled. I just wanted to show people that disability needn't get in the way."
Tammet is softly spoken, and shy about making eye contact, which makes him seem younger than he is. He lives on the Kent coast, but never goes near the beach - there are too many pebbles to count. The thought of a mathematical problem with no solution makes him feel uncomfortable. Trips to the supermarket are always a chore. "There's too much mental stimulus. I have to look at every shape and texture. Every price, and every arrangement of fruit and vegetables. So instead of thinking,'What cheese do I want this week?', I'm just really uncomfortable."
Tammet has never been able to work 9 to 5. It would be too difficult to fit around his daily routine. For instance, he has to drink his cups of tea at exactly the same time every day. Things have to happen in the same order: he always brushes his teeth before he has his shower. "I have tried to be more flexible, but I always end up feeling more uncomfortable. Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work."
Instead, he has set up a business on his own, at home, writing email courses in language learning, numeracy and literacy for private clients. It has had the fringe benefit of keeping human interaction to a minimum. It also gives him time to work on the verb structures of Mänti.
Few people on the streets have recognised Tammet since his pi record attempt. But, when a documentary about his life is broadcast on Channel 5 later this year, all that will change. "The highlight of filming was to meet Kim Peek, the real-life character who inspired the film Rain Man. Before I watched Rain Man, I was frightened. As a nine-year-old schoolboy, you don't want people to point at the screen and say, 'That's you.' But I watched it, and felt a real connection. Getting to meet the real-life Rain Man was inspirational."
Peek was shy and introspective, but he sat and held Tammet's hand for hours. "We shared so much - our love of key dates from history, for instance. And our love of books. As a child, I regularly took over a room in the house and started my own lending library. I would separate out fiction and non-fiction, and then alphabetise them all. I even introduced a ticketing system. I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know. So I was delighted when Kim wanted to meet in a library." Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye. He can also recall, in exact detail, the 7,600 books he has read. When he is at home in Utah, he spends afternoons at the Salt Lake City public library, memorising phone books and address directories."He is such a lovely man," says Tammet. "Kim says, 'You don't have to be handicapped to be different - everybody's different'. And he's right."
Like Peek, Tammet will read anything and everything, but his favourite book is a good dictionary, or the works of GK Chesterton. "With all those aphorisms," he says, "Chesterton was the Groucho Marx of his day." Tammet is also a Christian, and likes the fact that Chesterton addressed some complex religious ideas. "The other thing I like is that, judging by the descriptions of his home life, I reckon Chesterton was a savant. He couldn't dress himself, and would always forget where he was going. His poor wife."
Autistic savants have displayed a wide range of talents, from reciting all nine volumes of Grove's Dictionary Of Music to measuring exact distances with the naked eye. The blind American savant Leslie Lemke played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No1, after he heard it for the first time, and he never had so much as a piano lesson. And the British savant Stephen Wiltshire was able to draw a highly accurate map of the London skyline from memory after a single helicopter trip over the city. Even so, Tammet could still turn out to be the more significant.
He was born on January 31 1979. He smiles as he points out that 31, 19, 79 and 1979 are all prime numbers - it's a kind of sign. He was actually born with another surname, which he prefers to keep private, but decided to change it by deed poll. It didn't fit with the way he saw himself. "I first saw 'Tammet' online. It means oak tree in Estonian, and I liked that association. Besides, I've always had a love of Estonian. Such a vowel rich language."
As a baby, he banged his head against the wall and cried constantly. Nobody knew what was wrong. His mother was anxious, and would swing him to sleep in a blanket. She breastfed him for two years. The only thing the doctors could say was that perhaps he was understimulated. Then, one afternoon when he was playing with his brother in the living room, he had an epileptic fit.
"I was given medication - round blue tablets - to control my seizures, and told not to go out in direct sunlight. I had to visit the hospital every month for regular blood tests. I hated those tests, but I knew they were necessary. To make up for it, my father would always buy me a cup of squash to drink while we sat in the waiting room. It was a worrying time because my Dad's father had epilepsy, and actually died of it, in the end. They were thinking, 'This is the end of Daniel's life'."
Tammet's mother was a secretarial assistant, and his father a steelplate worker. "They both left school without qualifications, but they made us feel special - all nine of us. As the oldest of nine, I suppose it's fair to say I've always felt special." Even if his younger brothers and sisters could throw and catch better than him, swim better, kick a ball better, Daniel was always the oldest. "They loved me because I was their big brother and I could read them stories."
He remembers being given a Ladybird book called Counting when he was four. "When I looked at the numbers I 'saw' images. It felt like a place I could go where I really belonged. That was great. I went to this other country whenever I could. I would sit on the floor in my bedroom and just count. I didn't notice that time was passing. It was only when my Mum shouted up for dinner, or someone knocked at my door, that I would snap out of it."
One day his brother asked him a sum. "He asked me to multiply something in my head - like 'What is 82 x 82 x 82 x 82?' I just looked at the floor and closed my eyes. My back went very straight and I made my hands into fists. But after five or 10 seconds, the answer just flowed out of my mouth. He asked me several others, and I got every one right. My parents didn't seem surprised. And they never put pressure on me to perform for the neighbours. They knew I was different, but wanted me to have a normal life as far as possible."
Tammet could see the car park of his infant school from his bedroom window, which made him feel safe. "I loved assembly because we got to sing hymns. The notes formed a pattern in my head, just like the numbers did." The other children didn't know what to make of him, and would tease him. The minute the bell went for playtime he would rush off. "I went to the playground, but not to play. The place was surrounded by trees. While the other children were playing football, I would just stand and count the leaves."
As Tammet grew older, he developed an obsessive need to collect - everything from conkers to newspapers. "I remember seeing a ladybird for the first time," he says. "I loved it so much, I went round searching every hedge and every leaf for more. I collected hundreds, and took them to show the teacher. He was amazed, and asked me to get on with some assignment. While I was busy he instructed a classmate to take the tub outside and let the ladybirds go. I was so upset that I cried when I found out. He didn't understand my world."
Tammet may have been teased at school, but his teachers were always protective. "I think my parents must have had a word with them, so I was pretty much left alone." He found it hard to socialise with anyone outside the family, and, with the advent of adolesence, his shyness got worse.
After leaving school with three A-levels (History, French and German, all grade Bs), he decided he wanted to teach - only not the predictable, learn-by-rote type of teaching. For a start, he went to teach in Lithuania, and he worked as a volunteer. "Because I was there of my own free will, I was given a lot of leeway. The times of the classes weren't set in stone, and the structures were all of my own making. It was also the first time I was introduced as 'Daniel' rather than 'the guy who can do weird stuff in his head'. It was such a pleasant relief." Later, he returned home to live with his parents, and found work as a maths tutor.
He met the great love of his life, a software engineer called Neil, online. It began, as these things do, with emailed pictures, but ended up with a face-to-face meeting. "Because I can't drive, Neil offered to pick me up at my parents' house, and drive me back to his house in Kent. He was silent all the way back. I thought, 'Oh dear, this isn't going well'. Just before we got to his house, he stopped the car. He reached over and pulled out a bouquet of flowers. I only found out later that he was quiet because he likes to concentrate when he's driving."
Neil is shy, like Tammet. They live, happily, on a quiet cul-de-sac. The only aspect of Tammet's autism that causes them problems is his lack of empathy. "There's a saying in Judaism, if somebody has a relative who has hanged themselves, don't ask them where you should hang your coat. I need to remember that. Like the time I kept quizzing a friend of Neil's who had just lost her mother. I was asking her all these questions about faith and death. But that's down to my condition - no taboos."
When he isn't working, Tammet likes to hang out with his friends on the church quiz team. His knowledge of popular culture lets him down, but he's a shoo-in when it comes to the maths questions. "I do love numbers," he says. "It isn't only an intellectual or aloof thing that I do. I really feel that there is an emotional attachment, a caring for numbers. I think this is a human thing - in the same way that a poet humanises a river or a tree through metaphor, my world gives me a sense of numbers as personal. It sounds silly, but numbers are my friends."

Triple Star System

Triple Sunset: Planet Discovered in 3-Star System

Michael Schirber
Staff Writer

SPACE.COM Wed Jul 13, 2:07 PM ET



A newly discovered planet has bountiful sunshine, with not one, not two, but three suns glowing in its sky.


It is the first extrasolar planet found in a system with three stars. How a planet was born amidst these competing gravitational forces will be a challenge for planet formation theories.

"The environment in which this planet exists is quite spectacular," said Maciej Konacki from the California Institute of Technology. "With three suns, the sky view must be out of this world -- literally and figuratively."

The triple-star system, HD 188753, is located 149 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The primary star is like our Sun, weighing 1.06 solar masses. The other two stars form a tightly bound pair, which is separated from the primary by approximately the Sun-Saturn distance.

"The pair more or less acts as one star," Konacki told SPACE.com.
The combined mass of the close pair is 1.63 solar masses.

Using the 10-meter Keck I telescope in Hawaii, Konacki noticed evidence for a planet orbiting the primary star. This newfound gas giant is slightly larger than Jupiter and whirls around its central star in a 3.5-day orbit. A planet so close to its star would be very hot.

Although other so-called hot Jupiters have been found in such close-in orbits, the nearby stellar pair in HD 188753 likely sheared off much of the planet making material in the disk that would likely have existed around the primary star in its youth. Since this proto-planetary disk holds the construction materials for planets, there does not appear to be any safe place for this far-off world to have been assembled.

Snow line and migration

The heat coming from a nearby star frustrates the initial stages of giant planet formation -- the gluing together of planetary seeds, called cores. Therefore, the typical hot Jupiter is thought to form farther out -- beyond a theoretical limit called the snow line.

"Past about 3 AU, it is cold enough to form ices and other solid material for building cores," Konacki said. An AU is the distance between the Sun and the Earth -- about 93 million miles.

Once a sufficiently large core is built outside the snow line, the planet can start accreting gas and -- if the conditions are right -- migrate toward its sun.
Although this scenario appears to work in most stellar systems, it has difficulty explaining the newly-discovered planet in HD 188753. Of all the planet-harboring stars known, this is the closest that a stellar companion has ever been found.
"The problem is that the pair is a massive perturber to the system," Konacki said. "Together, these two stars are more massive than the main star."

Moreover, the pair goes around the primary along an oblong orbit that stretches from 6 AU out to 18 AU over a 26 year period. This eccentricity increases the instability of the disk around the primary. Konacki estimates that due to the gravitational perturbations from the pair, the proto-planetary disk was truncated down to 1.3 AU, far within the snow line.

"How that planet formed in such a complicated setting is very puzzling. I believe there is yet much to be learned about how giant planets are formed," Konacki said.

Targeting multiple stars

Konacki hopes to find more planets around stars with companions. About 30 extrasolar planets have been found around double-star systems, or binaries. This is a small percentage of the total number of extrasolar planets, even though multi-star systems outnumber single star systems.

The reason for this disparity is that the main technique for locating planets -- the radial velocity method -- is not well-suited for finding planets with more than one star.

"Single stars are much easier to work with, since the shape of the spectrum stays the same," Konacki explained.

By watching for wobbles in a star's spectrum, astronomers can infer the gravitational tug from a nearby planet. But when there is a companion star, its light competes with that of the main star. Konacki has developed a method to extract the planet wobbles from this messy, combined spectrum.

He found this triple-sun planet in the first 20 stars he looked at. He plans to survey about 450 stars in the future.

HOW A THREE STAR SYSTEM WORKS

PLANET WITH TWO SUNS LIKELY COMMON

ECCENTRIC WORLDS: STRANGE ORBITS PUZZLE SCIENTISTS

10 YEARS OF PLANET HUNTING: AMAZING VARIETY OUT THERE

MELANOMA In Children

Rise of Melanoma in Kids Alarming Doctors By LINDSEY TANNER, AP Medical Writer CHICAGO - Doctors used to think that it took years for the deadliest skin cancer to develop — that is, until melanoma started appearing in teenagers and children even younger. Corey Halpin of Hanover Park was one of them. At age 10, he noticed a dark bump on his upper left arm, thinking during a Boy Scout camping trip that it might even be a tick. "I pushed it but it didn't move, but it bled," Corey, now 13, recalled. It wasn't until a few months later, during a spring 2002 visit to his pediatrician, that Corey casually asked his dad if he should mention the odd mole. That led to a referral to a specialist and alarming test results that caught even his doctors by surprise. Melanoma was until recently almost unheard of in children, and it was a diagnosis that his family wasn't prepared for. "My husband and I were scared to death" and so was Corey, said his mother, Marge Halpin. Pediatric melanoma is still uncommon in children, affecting only 7 per million, or about 500, according to 2002 statistics from the National Cancer Institute. But that number has risen from 3 per million in 1982. Dr. Charles Balch of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, who has specialized in melanoma for 30 years, saw his first pediatric case five years ago. Since then, Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he works, has treated about 20 youngsters, the youngest just 8. Dr. Anthony Mancini, dermatology chief at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, diagnosed Corey Halpin's melanoma and said he and his colleagues have treated eight cases in the past nine years, about double the number seen in the previous two decades. Recent studies also report increases in England, Sweden and Australia. "There's an appropriate level of alarm here," Mancini said. "Clearly it's happening and it's deadly, and it's missed." Some pediatricians who see unusual moles in children "would ordinarily dismiss this as nothing because melanoma is not supposed to happen in this age group," Balch said. "We all should be aware that this can occur and biopsy suspicious or changing moles in children." Balch said reasons for the increase are uncertain. Some doctors think it might be from depletion of the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from some of the sun's damaging ultraviolet radiation. Others attribute it to excessive sun exposure and blistering sunburns in early childhood, though some experts had thought it took much longer for skin damage from repeated sun exposure to develop into cancer. Melanoma prevalence has risen in adults, too — more than doubling in the past 30 years, according to the cancer institute. And the American Cancer Society estimates that this year about 60,000 U.S. adults will be diagnosed with melanoma and that 7,700 will die from it. Melanoma develops in skin cells called melanocytes, which produce the pigment that colors the skin's surface and protects deeper layers from sun damage. It is much more invasive and likely to spread to other parts of the body than other skin cancers. Research from Italian doctors published in the March edition of Pediatrics found that melanoma lesions in children sometimes look different from those in adults and may be misdiagnosed. In adults, melanoma often looks like a black or very dark brown mole, or one with irregular borders. But half the Italian children studied had lighter-colored lesions, and most had well-defined borders. Also unlike adults, most children with melanoma have no family history of the disease, and they may lack other risk factors including moles present since birth, Balch said. Freckle-faced Corey has no relatives with melanoma or any other kind of cancer. But he does have other risk factors — fair skin, red hair and green eyes. Mancini, his doctor, says the traditional A-B-C-D signs of melanoma — asymmetry, border irregularities, colors of mixed black and brown, and diameters larger than a pencil eraser — sometimes occur in children. But a child's lesion also can be smaller and pinkish. Mancini recommends the "ugly duckling" detection method — watching for a mole that looks completely different from the child's other moles. In Corey's case, the mole was tiny but much darker than his other freckles, and it bled — another warning sign. Three years since his surgery, Corey is cancer-free. He still has tests every few months, but doctors say his long-term survival chances are excellent. The angry scar on his arm has shrunk as he's grown but it will always be a reminder. His pediatrician told him that it would be like a battle scar he could use to impress girls. Now 13, Corey smiles at that thought.

MASSIVE STAR CLUSTER

Call it the Bermuda Triangle of our Milky Way Galaxy: a tiny patch of sky that has been known for years to be the source of the mysterious blasts of X-rays and gamma rays. Now, a team of astronomers, led by Don Figer of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., has solved the mystery by identifying one of the most massive star clusters in the galaxy. The little-known cluster, which has not been catalogued, is about 20 times more massive than typical star clusters in our galaxy, and appears to be the source of the powerful outbursts. Supporting evidence for the hefty weight of this cluster is the presence of 14 red supergiants, hefty stars that have reached the end of their lives. They bloat up to about 100 times their normal size before exploding as supernovae. In fact, Figer's team believes that the blasts of X-rays and gamma rays were released in supernova explosions. Sightings of red supergiants are rare. Astronomers have spotted only about 200 such stars in the Milky Way. The lack of sightings is because the red supergiant phase is very short in astronomical terms, lasting about half a million to a million years. "Only the most massive clusters can have lots of red supergiants, because they are the only clusters capable of making behemoth stars," Figer explained. "They are good signposts that allow astronomers to predict the mass of the cluster. This observation also is a rare chance to study huge stars just before they explode. Normally, we don't get to see stars before they pop off." Figer will present his results on Jan. 9 at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C. The 14 red supergiants in this cluster represent almost three times as many as in any other star cluster in our galaxy. The runner-up, NGC 7419, has five. Stars that become red supergiants weigh between 8 to 25 times our Sun's mass and are 6 to 15 million years old. The team identified the star cluster as a potential behemoth from the newly found clusters compiled in the Two Micron All Sky Survey catalogue. Astronomer John MacKenty, also of STScI, performed follow-up observations of the cluster in Sept. and Oct. 2005 with a unique ground-based infrared spectrograph at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Called the Infrared Multi-object Spectrograph, "the instrument has about 500,000 movable microscopic mirrors in its focal plane which allow astronomers to take infrared spectra of up to 100 stars at once," said MacKenty, the instrument's lead investigator. Spectra display stars' energy output as a series of individual wavelengths of light for study. The resulting patterns are akin to sets of fingerprints for stars, revealing characteristics such as composition, temperature, mass, and age. Astronomers plan to use similar technology on the Near Infrared Spectrograph aboard the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. Figer relied on data from a variety of telescopes, including the Spitzer Space Telescope, to confirm that the infrared colors of the suspected red supergiants are consistent with those of known red supergiants. The red supergiants discovered by Figer's team are very bright, indicating that the cluster is a youngster of about 8 to 10 million years old. The cluster has to be young enough for astronomers to see these short-lived stars before they explode, yet old enough to have stars that have evolved to the red supergiant stage. The cluster's mass equals 20,000 times the mass of our Sun. An estimated 20,000 stars reside in the cluster. The cluster is the first of 130 massive star cluster candidates that Figer and his team will study over the next five years using a variety of telescopes, including the Spitzer and Hubble Space telescopes. "We can only see a small part of our galaxy in visible light because a dusty veil covers most of our galaxy," Figer said. "I know there are other massive clusters in the Milky Way that we can't see because of the dust. My goal is to find them using infrared light, which penetrates the dusty veil." The monster cluster's location, nearly two-thirds of the way to our galaxy's center and 18,900 light-years from Earth, is in an area known for energetic activity. Several observatories — the High Energy Stereoscopic System, the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory and the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics — detected very high-energy X-rays and gamma rays from that region. Astronomers knew that something powerful was occurring there, but they couldn't identify the source.

In Remembrance: The Crew Of Challenger

They are fallen heroes in the advancement of SCIENCE. 20 YEARS. How could it have been 20 years ago already???

LEFT TO RIGHT: Mission Specialist, Ellison S. Onizuka, Teacher in Space Participant Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Payload Specialist, Greg Jarvis and Mission Specialist, Judy Resnik. In the front row from left to right: Pilot Mike Smith, Commander, Dick Scobee and Mission Specialist, Ron McNair.

ET Signal

Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away

19:00 01 September 04

Exclusive from New Scientist

In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.
The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.
This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.
But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

Absorb and emit
“It’s the most interesting signal from SETI@home,” says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. “We’re not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it.”
Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak.
“We are looking for something that screams out ‘artificial’,” says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. “This just doesn’t do that, but it could be because it is distant.”

Unknown signature
The telescope has only observed the signal for about a minute in total, which is not long enough for astronomers to analyse it thoroughly. But, Korpela thinks it unlikely SHGb02+14a is the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and it does not bear the signature of any known astronomical object.
That does not mean that only aliens could have produced it. “It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind like I stumbled over,” says Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath, UK.
It was Bell Burnell who in 1967 noticed a pulsed radio signal which the research team at the time thought was from extraterrestrials but which turned out to be the first ever sighting of a pulsar.
There are other oddities. For instance, the signal’s frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. “The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that’s rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet,” Korpela says.
This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.

Fishy and puzzling
The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is “fishy”, he says. “If [the aliens] are so smart, they’ll adjust their signal for their planet’s motion.”
The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second.
What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. “It just boggles my mind,” Korpela says.
The signal could be an artefact that, for some reason, always appears to be coming from the same point in the sky. The Arecibo telescope has a fixed dish reflector and scans the skies by changing the position of its receiver relative to the dish.
When the receiver reaches a certain position, it might just be able to reflect waves from the ground onto the dish and then back to itself, making it seem as if the signal was coming from space.
“Perhaps there is an object on the ground near the telescope emitting at about this frequency,” Korpela says. This could be confirmed by using a different telescope to listen for SHGb02+14a.

Possible fraud
There is also the possibility of fraud by someone hacking the SETI@home software to make it return evidence for an extraterrestrial transmission. However, SHGb02+14a was seen on two different occasions by different SETI@home users, and those calculations were confirmed by others.
Then the signal was seen a third time by the SETI@home researchers. The unusual characteristics of the signal also make it unlikely that someone is playing a prank, Korpela says. “As I can’t think of any way to make a signal like this, I can’t think of any way to fake it.”
David Anderson, director of SETI@home, remains sceptical but curious about the signal. ”It’s unlikely to be real but we will definitely be re-observing it.” Bell Burnell agrees that it is worth persisting with. “If they can see it four, five or six times it really begins to get exciting,” she says.
It is already exciting for IT engineers Oliver Voelker of Logpoint in Nuremberg, Germany and Nate Collins of Farin and Associates in Madison, Wisconsin, who found the signal.
Collins wonders how his bosses will react to company computers finding aliens. “I might have to explain a little further about just how much I was using [the computers],” he says.

Eugenie Samuel Reich

© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

BLACK HOLE JOURNEY

The one-way journey from the heart of a galaxy into the oblivion of a black hole probably takes about 200,000 years, astronomers said on Monday. By tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 110,000 miles an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole. Black holes are drains in space that have gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Huge ones are believed to lurk at the centers of many galaxies including the Milky Way, which contains the sun. "It would take 200,000 years for gas to travel the last leg of its one-way journey," Kambiz Fathi of Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. No one has ever seen a black hole, but astronomers study the way matter and energy behave around them. An international team led by Fathi studied the black hole at the middle of NGC1097, a behemoth with 100 million times the mass of the sun. The team managed to observe behavior 10 times closer to the black hole than ever before, Fathi said, seeing clouds of material within 10 light-years of the galactic core, where the black hole is believed to reside. Previous research has detected gas clouds from 100 to 1,000 light-years from the galaxy's heart. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. The galaxy is about 47 million light-years away from Earth, relatively close in cosmic terms.

Asteroid Collision Plan

Astronauts Want Asteroid Collision Plan By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer Imagine last year's tsunami, last month's earthquake in Pakistan, and Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma all rolled into one — and then some. If nations can't handle those calamities, what's going to happen when an asteroid collides with Earth? In 30 years, there is a 1-in-5,500 chance that a smallish asteroid will land a bull's eye on our planet. At 360 yards wide, it could take out New York City and much of the surrounding area. Fortunately, experts believe further observations of the asteroid, 99942 Apophis, will almost certainly rule out an impact in 2036. Nevertheless, it's precisely that kind of predictable and preventable threat — and the thought of being ill-prepared for it — that alarms the world's normally intrepid spacefarers who are calling for action. They issued an open letter at the Association of Space Explorers' annual congress last month in Salt Lake City, making a rare, united push for strategies and spacecraft to prevent a cosmic pileup. Two of the astronauts — Apollo 9's Rusty Schweickart and shuttle and space station veteran Ed Lu — have even helped establish a foundation to spotlight the issue. "There are always natural disasters and it always seems as though the preparation is somewhat less than adequate. But we have had a series of quite substantial ones here in the last year," Schweickart said in an interview with The Associated Press. Hollywood's depiction of cosmic collisions — think "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" — has heightened public awareness, "but regrettably with the wrong solutions and overdramatization," Schweickart said. "You don't want to send up Bruce Willis and others to save us. That's Hollywood silliness," he said, chuckling. Instead, technology is far enough along that an asteroid could be deflected before hitting Earth, he said. For now, the astronauts are being cautious — some say too cautious — in their approach. "A lot of the folks working in this area are really attuned to not being Chicken Little, saying, 'Hey, this is going to kill us, it's going to kill us,' " Lu said. "That's not what we're saying. We're saying that you need to start thinking about it ahead of time because afterward is way too late. "The possible consequences are way worse than your run-of-the-mill natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes. As bad as they may be, this can dwarf them." Astronauts know better than most just how small and fragile and vulnerable the planet is. "When you go around it in an hour and a half, again and again and again and again, day after day, in some cases now, month after month after month, the Earth becomes a pretty small place," Schweickart said. "And then, of course ... most astronauts tend to be aware of things like asteroids and their impacts. I mean, we romped around the moon after spending years in preparation by looking at every impact crater and volcano here on the Earth." It's time, the space explorers say, for NASA to step up to the plate. The association wants NASA to expand its Spaceguard Survey, a program that discovers and tracks near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets — that are at least two-thirds of a mile across. So far, 807 of an estimated 1,100 of these big rocky asteroids have been discovered in the inner solar system along with 57 comets; California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is plotting their future tracks. An asteroid two-thirds of a mile wide, at impact, would be enough to easily take out a good-sized European country. By comparison, an asteroid or comet believed to be six to seven miles across wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The space explorers want the many smaller, but still dangerous asteroids tracked as well. Altogether, 3,611 near-Earth asteroids of all sizes have been discovered, with an estimated 100,000 more capable of setting off a tsunami the size of the one that shook the Indian Ocean last December. Scientists are carefully watching Apophis, which will whiz by Earth in 2029, passing within an unnerving 18,640 miles. That's a few thousand miles closer than many communications satellites and 220,000 miles closer than the moon. In 2036, the concern is that it will move in even closer, leading to the 1-in-5,500 chance it will strike. For a few hundred million dollars, the astronauts say, NASA could launch a scouting mission to Apophis in the next decade or two to place a radio transponder on the surface and thereby plot its course. But Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's near-Earth object program, contends that mostly likely, radar and telescope observations will ultimately rule out any risk of impact. Schweickart agrees that based on the current odds, a deflection mission for Apophis would be a waste of money. "But the question is, do I agree with it when it's 1-in-100, when it's 1-in-50, if it's 1-in-20. That is a policy question. At what probability do you begin to spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in order to do something?" That's not the only sticky policy question. Are some places on the planet more dispensable than others? The point of impact, for instance, could be inadvertently shifted from one part of the world to another by an intervening spacecraft, jeopardizing one country instead of another. Who's liable if an asteroid-deflecting mission goes awry? Indeed, who decides if such a mission is needed and how far in advance should that decision be made? Nuclear electric propulsion would be ideal for quickly getting spacecraft to potential killer asteroids and nudging them out of Earth's way, the astronauts say. But the technology for such an "asteroid tugboat" is on hold, a recent casualty of budget cuts. Rep. John Culberson (news, bio, voting record), R-Texas, is sympathetic to the astronauts' concerns and has asked NASA to see what might be needed to protect Earth from asteroid impacts. Nuclear-powered spacecraft could either land on the asteroid and apply a small but continuous force over months in order to alter its Earth-smashing course, or hover above the asteroid and use its gravity to push it aside. Forget about any sensational last-minute asteroid crackups, "Armageddon" style; the pieces could wind up on a collision course with Earth. Schweickart and Lu's B612 Foundation — named after the home asteroid of the Earth-visiting prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's "Le Petit Prince" — is pushing for an orbit-altering demonstration by 2015 on a harmless, way-out-of-the-way asteroid. The European Space Agency also is proposing a practice mission called Don Quixote to alter an asteroid's course, but it's yet to be formally approved. NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft smashed into a comet for scientific reasons in July; by design, it barely altered the comet's path. "We're sitting in a shooting gallery, with hundreds of thousands of these things whizzing around in the inner solar system. So it's just a matter of time," said Schweickart, board chairman of the B612 Foundation. Fortunately, the technology to protect us is ready for the task, he said, and that's "the beauty of it."

QUANTUM Communications Breakthrough

Major Quantum Communications Breakthrough For the first time physicists have achieved quantum entanglement between two large clouds of gas. This achievement means we may live in a future that contains super-fast quantum computers, instant communication over unlimited distance, and even a sort of teleportation. Among other things, quantum computers will be able to function far more efficiently than the human brain, and to be much, much larger. It's possible that these experiments are the forerunners of the first genuinely intelligent machines. Eugene Polzik and his co-workers at the University of Aarhus in Denmark have entangled particles from clouds of gases separated by a long distance, by transferring information from one to another by laser. They managed to entangle about a million million caesium atoms, while the previous record was just four atoms. “This work should pave the way for a new generation of experiments to teleport states of matter,” says Ignacio Cirac, a quantum physicist at Austria’s University of Innsbruck. Teleportation will not involve the deconstruction and reconstruction of humans, Star Trek-style. But it will allow the condtion of one set of quantum particles to reproduce more or less instantly in a similar collection of distant particles. In this way a message encoded in photons of light could be transmitted from one place to another instantly. Entanglement will also enable scientists to invent high-speed quantum computing. Quantum particles such as atoms or photons can exist in distinct states, like the head or tail of a coin. These two states are actually defined by the directions of the atoms’ magnetic fields. Such particles can also exist in both states at once in superposition, which is comparable to a coin spinning in the air before it lands. If we toss two coins at once, their outcomes are independent of each other--if one is heads, the other could be either heads or tails. But two entangled quantum particles have interdependent fates: if one is in a ‘heads’ state, for instance, the other must be in a ‘tails’ state. Maintaining this kind of superposition is very difficult, and for any practical applications, entanglement has to include thousands, or even millions, of particles. Polzik and his team solved this problem by not using full entanglement, where the state of each particle depends on the state of every other particle. Instead, they generated two loosely entangled clouds of caesium gas, one with slightly more atoms in a ‘heads’ state and the other with slightly more of them in a ‘tails’ state. The interdependence of these clouds makes them much easier to maintain and use than just the altered quantum states of a few atoms. It’s impossible, however, to maintain full entanglement of this many atoms for longer than a million- billionth of a second. Polzik’s team can keep their two clouds in a loose entanglement for half a millisecond, but they hope to maintain it for longer in the future. If this can be done, they will have discovered the basis for the quantum computers of the future. Opinion: This experiment suggests, like others have in the recent past, that faster-than-light communication must be possible. It could very easily explain the radio silence of the universe. Why communicate at low velocities like light speed, when instantaneous communication over unlimited distances is easy? Quantum Weirdness in Real Life Scientists used to think that the ideas of quantum physics— for instance, that everything is in "superposition" (both everywhere and nowhere) until observed and that particles can be "entangled" and affect each other at great distances— applied only on the atomic level, but now they're using quantum weirdness to create incredible new inventions. In Business Week, John Carey quotes physicist William D. Phillips as saying, "To common sense, quantum mechanics is nonsensical." But it's already been used to create lasers and MRI machines. Phillips is clumping together groups of atoms that are both "everywhere" and "nowhere" at the same time. He says, "Every atom is everywhere—that's what makes it so wonderful…It can do some amazing things." Physicist John Preskill says, "Physicists relish the weirdness, but now we're starting to ask if we can put the weirdness to work." Quantum weirdness makes unbreakable codes possible and could enable us to transmit electricity over long distances with no loss of power. One of the most important quantum inventions being worked on is a computer that can solve problems in 30 seconds that would take 10 billion years using today's supercomputers. "We have not yet begun to figure out what the applications are," says physicist Carl J. Williams. "But the risk is underestimating the impact." Mark Peplow writes in nature.com that scientists have evidence that an atom and a photon (the smallest particle of light) can share the same information, an important step in creating a quantum computer, which would process information using atoms instead of transistors and circuit boards. This new discovery means that light can carry the atom's information from one place to another—at the speed of light! Computers store information as a series of bits, which are switches that can be "on" or "off." In the cadmium atom, the tiny magnetic fields of the nucleus and an outer electron can either point in the same direction (on) or opposite directions (off). Once the atom is in one of these states it will stay that way for thousands of years, says researcher Chris Monroe. But in the quantum world, the cadmium atom can be both on and off at the same time, since it's in "superposition" and the atoms are "entangled." "Einstein called this 'spooky action at a distance,'" says Monroe. "It is as if there are hidden wires connecting the two. We do not know how they got there, but they are essential for quantum computing." "The goal is the control of quantum matter," says physicist Immanuel Bloch. "It's a great challenge, but there are great rewards." The physicist Erwin Schrödinger said that quantum theory would allow the existence of a cat that was both living and dead at the same time. Physicists can't do this with a cat yet, but they may be able to do it with a tiny mirror the size of a red blood cell. Previously, it was thought that nothing larger than an atom could retain quantum properties. A blood cell may be small, but it's millions of times larger than an atom, and in the world of quantum effects, this is huge. Philip Ball writes in Nature.com that the mini-mirror, pasted on the end of a tiny arm, is attached to a single photon of light in a quantum superposition, meaning it's nowhere and everywhere—or two places at once. While the conditions necessary to create this effect are highly restrictive, involving a perfect vacuum and temperatures approaching absolute zero, but this may not remain the case forever. Before this experiment, researcher William Marshall, along with other quantum physicists, always assumed that items larger than an atom were subject to decoherence, which prevents what they call "quantum weirdness," the ability of particles to be two places at once and for a change in one particle to influence the other, no matter how far apart they are. Is this a case of today's scientific miracle becoming tomorrow's ordinary technology? One of the strangest sights a human being can behold is that of one unidentified flying object becoming two. And yet it happens frequently enough to have been reported by dozens of witnesses. When we see UFOs, we could be looking at an advanced version of this technology, which is just beginning to be explored here on earth.

NEW YOUNG STAR With Planets?

Astronomers Find Nearest, Youngest Star With Dusty Debris Disk.

But Are There Planets?



Berkeley - Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered the nearest and youngest star with a visible disk of dust that may be a nursery for planets.

The dust disk surrounding the red dwarf star AU Mic, seen in optical scattered light. The central dark region is produced by an occulting spot suspended by four wires, masking the star. The dust disk observed near the boundary with the black mask approximately corresponds to the Kuiper Belt of asteroids in our solar system. (Credit: Paul Kalas/UC Berkeley, courtesy of Science Magazine)

The dim red dwarf star is a mere 33 light years away, close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics to sharpen the image should be able to see whether the dust disk contains clumps of matter that might turn into planets.

"Circumstellar disks are signposts for planet formation, and this is the nearest and youngest star where we directly observe light reflected from the dust produced by extrasolar comets and asteroids - i.e., the objects that could possibly form planets by accretion," said Paul Kalas, assistant research astronomer at UC Berkeley and lead author of a paper reporting the discovery.

"We're waiting for the summer and fall observing season to go back to the telescopes and study the properties of the disk in greater detail. But we expect everyone else to do the same thing - there will be lots of follow-up."

A paper announcing the discovery will be published online in Science Express this week, and will appear in the printed edition of the journal in March. Coauthors with Kalas are Brenda C. Matthews, a post-doctoral researcher with UC Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory, and astronomer Michael C. Liu of the University of Hawaii. Kalas also is affiliated with the Center for Adaptive Optics at UC Santa Cruz.

The young M-type star, AU Microscopium (AU Mic), is about half the mass of the sun but only about 12 million years old, compared to the 4.6 billion year age of the sun. The team of astronomers found the star while searching for dust disks around stars emitting more than expected amounts of infrared radiation, indicative of a warm, glowing dust cloud.

The image of AU Mic, obtained last October with the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter telescope atop Mauna Kea, shows an edge-on disk of dust stretching about 210 astronomical units from the central star - about seven times farther from the star than Neptune is from the sun. One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles.

"When we see scattered infrared light around a star, the inference is that this is caused by dust grains replenished by comets and asteroid collisions," Kalas said. Because 85 percent of all stars are M-type red dwarfs, the star provides clues to how the majority of planetary systems form and evolve.

Other nearby stars, such as Gliese 876 at 16 light years and epsilon-Eridani at 10 light years, wobble, providing indirect evidence for planets. But images of debris disks around stars are rare. AU Mic is the closest dust disk directly imaged since the discovery 20 years ago of a dust disk around beta-Pictoris, a star about 2.5 times the mass of the sun and 65 light years away. Though the two stars are in opposite regions of the sky, they appear to have been formed at the same time and to be traveling together through the galaxy, Kalas said.

"These sister stars probably formed together in the same region of space in a moving group containing about 20 stars," Kalas said. This represents an unprecedented opportunity to study stars formed under the same conditions, but of masses slightly larger and slightly smaller than the sun.

"Theorists are excited, too, at the opportunity to understand how planetary systems evolve differently around high-mass stars like beta-Pictoris and low-mass stars like AU Mic," he said.

The pictures of AU Mic were obtained by blocking glare from the star with a coronagraph like that used to view the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. The eclipsing disk on the University of Hawaii's 2.2-metertelescope blocked view of everything around the star out to about 50 AU. At this distance in our solar system, only the Kuiper Belt of asteroids and the more distant Oort cloud, the source of comets, would be visible.

Kalas said that sharper images from the ground or space should show structures as close as 5 AU, which means a Jupiter-like planet or lump in the dusty disk would be visible, if present.

"With the adaptive optics on the Lick 120-inch telescope or the Keck 10-meter telescopes, or with the Hubble Space Telescope, we can improve the sharpness by 10 to 100 times," Kalas said.

In a companion paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, the Berkeley-Hawaii team reports indirect evidence for a relatively dust-free hole within about 17 AU of the star. This would be slightly inside the orbit of Uranus in our own solar system.

"Potential evidence for the existence of planets comes from the infrared spectrum, where we notice an absence of warm dust grains," he said. "That means that grains are depleted within about 17 AU radius from the star. One mechanism to clear out the dust disk within 17 AU radius is by planet-grain encounters, where the planet removes the grains from the system."

"The dust missing from the inner regions of AU Mic is the telltale sign of an orbiting planet. The planet sweeps away any dust in the inner regions, keeping the dust in the outer region at bay," said Liu. Aside from further observations with the 2.2-meter telescope in Hawaii, Kalas and his colleagues plan to use the Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared observatory launched last August by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to conduct a more sensitive search for gas.


The research was supported by the NASA Origins Program and the National Science Foundation's Center for Adaptive Optics.

WORLD'S HOTTEST SAUCE

By HEATHER BROWNE
A NEW chilli sauce [DEL] that is so hot it could KILL.
Ultra-concentrated “16 Million Reserve” is the hottest science can make.
The sauce is 30 times hotter than the spiciest pepper and 8,000 times more fiery than Tabasco.
Diners must sign a disclaimer recommending “protective gloves and eye wear” — but even sweating testers in safety gear were blinded by tears for 30 minutes.
Just 999 bottles of it are on sale at £105 each.
Medical experts fear it could kill asthmatics or hospitalise a user who touches a sensitive part of the body afterwards.
It is made of pure capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers “hot”. It takes tons of peppers to make 1lb of capsaicin.
Creator Blair Lazar, 35, specialises in “extreme food” in New Jersey, US.
After trying it, he said: “It’s like having your tongue hit with a hammer. Man, it hurt.”
The sauce is named after its score on the chilli heat measure, the Scoville Unit.

Reserve scores 16 million units, while a Red Savina, the world’s spiciest pepper, measures just 570,000.

ELECTRONIC PAPER

Electronic paper moves from sci-fi to marketplace

By Niclas Mika
In Neal Stephenson's sci-fi novel "The Diamond Age," a young girl's companion is a book with amazing qualities -- it talks, and the words magically change with the story.
A decade after Stephenson's book was published, what was once labeled science fiction is finding its way to the real-world market.



"Electronic paper" is a display technology that makes possible flexible or even rollable displays which, unlike current computer screens, can be read in bright sunlight.
But, much like when LCD displays came to the market, consumers are first likely to see the technology in clocks and watches. The popular example of an electronic newspaper that automatically updates itself wirelessly is still years away.
A number of companies are currently working on such displays -- LG.Philips LCD (034220.KS) and Massachusetts-based E Ink announced last month that they have developed a protype 10-inch display, and Fujitsu (6702.T) showed a color display in July.
Philips' (PHG.AS) Polymer Vision unit aims to mass-produce a rollable 5-inch display by the end of 2006, and among the first consumer products is a watch with a curved electronic paper display from Seiko Epson (6724.T), due to hit the Japanese market next year.
Electronic paper was invented in the 1970s at Xerox' (NYSE:XRX - news) Palo Alto Research Center by Nick Sheridon, who now works as research director at Xerox subsidiary Gyricon, which makes electronic paper signs.
"If you remember the green-screen monitors -- it drove him crazy and he was looking for something that was easier on the eyes," Gyricon spokesman Jim Welch said.
ELECTRONIC OR PAPER?
The technology at the heart of electronic paper? Tiny black and white particles that are suspended in capsules about the diameter of a human hair.
The particles respond to electrical charges -- a negative field pushes the negatively charged black particles away to the surface, where they create a black dot. Positively charged white particles create the opposite effect.
At a 10th of a millimeter, the thickness of an ordinary sheet of paper, electronic paper is much thinner than the liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) used in today's computers and mobile phones.
It also consumes 100 times less power because it does not require a back light and only needs electricity to change the image, not to hold it.
Like ordinary paper, it reflects light, making it readable even in difficult conditions such as direct sunlight.
Michigan-based Gyricon is already selling e-paper signs and message boards that can be updated wirelessly -- allowing, for example, to centrally update room signs throughout a building.
MOBILE INTERNET
But it is the potential for boosting mobile Internet use that makes electronic paper displays particularly attractive, said Karl McGoldrick, Chief Executive of Polymer Vision.
Displays that can be rolled up mean that while the screen gets bigger, the actual device can stay small.
"Beyond smart phones, beyond PDAs, displays are simply too small to have any value from a mobile Internet perspective," McGoldrick said.
"This year, there will be something like 700 million mobile phones sold and, out of those, just 5 percent will be smart phones. If you want to bring the mobile Internet to the mainstream, you need to attack the other 670 million phones."
In the first step, McGoldrick envisions a pocket-size standalone device that can download content directly from a PC, via the mobile network or wireless Internet. He said Polymer Vision was currently talking to manufacturers and content providers alike to put such a device together.
The firm says its 5-inch display will be priced comparably with LCD displays of the same size.
Ted Schadler, an analyst at market research group Forrester, cautioned that manufacturers needed to make sure their devices did not end up being a "solution looking for a problem."
"It's not enough to build a product. You have to build an end-to-end solution. Of course Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) has done that brilliantly with the iPod, and they're continuing to push the envelope there, but they're about the only ones," Schadler said.
An electronic newspaper, when the technology is finally available to produce one, still may not be the device to rescue newspaper publishers from an aging readership and dwindling circulation numbers.
Such a device could well be sold by newspaper publishers who would subsidize it in order to sell subscriptions, but it would have to offer other sources to be attractive, Schadler said.
"If you would lock consumers into just one news service, they will not find it interesting. Users might want to read a blog, a competitor, a magazine, a book -- not just the Financial Times, the Herald Tribune, the New York Times," he said.
"They have to be really careful how they open the access to make it more valuable," Schadler said.

SEDNA: The First New Find

IS SEDNA THE 10TH PLANET?
IS XENA THE 11TH PLANET?
AND WHAT ABOUT QUAOAR?
DOES THE RIGHT HAND KNOW WHAT THE LEFT HAND IS DOING?

Here are two earlier news releases about Sedna:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A newly discovered dark and frigid world, a bit smaller than Pluto and three times farther away, has emerged as the most distant object in the solar system, astronomers said on Monday.

The new "planetoid," named Sedna after an Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic, is by far the coldest and most distant object known to orbit the sun, a team of researchers announced.

At more than 8 billion miles from the sun, the temperature on Sedna never gets above minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

"The sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Mike Brown, an astronomer at California Institute of Technology, who led the research team.

First detected on Nov. 14 with the Samuel Oschin Telescope near San Diego, California, Sedna was observed within days on telescopes from Chile to Spain, Arizona and Hawaii.

NASA's new orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, which looks at the universe with infrared detectors that peer through cosmic dust, was also trained on the distant object.

The Spitzer scope found that Sedna probably has about three-fourths the diameter of Pluto, which would make it the biggest object found in the solar system since Pluto's discovery in 1930.

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Astronomers to Detail Aspects of Sedna
Mon Mar 15, 9:37 AM ET Add Science - AP to My Yahoo!


By ANDREW BRIDGES, AP Science Writer

LOS ANGELES - It is a frozen world more than 8 billion miles from Earth and believed to be the farthest known object within our solar system.

NASA planned a Monday press conference to offer more details about Sedna, a planetoid between 800 miles and 1,100 miles in diameter, or about three-quarters the size of Pluto.

Named for the Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic, Sedna lies more than three times farther from the sun than Pluto. It was discovered in November.

"The sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who led the NASA-funded team that found Sedna.

That makes Sedna the largest object found orbiting the sun since the discovery of Pluto, the ninth planet, in 1930. It trumps in size another world, called Quaoar, discovered by the same team in 2002.

Brown and his colleagues estimate the temperature on Sedna never rises above 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, making it the coldest known body in the solar system.

Sedna follows a highly elliptical path around the sun, a circuit that it takes 10,500 years to complete. Its orbit loops out as far as 84 billion miles from the sun, or 900 times the distance between the Earth and our star.

Brown and Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, discovered Sedna on Nov. 14, 2003, using a 48-inch telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory east of San Diego.

Within days, other astronomers around the world trained their telescopes, including the recently launched Spitzer Space Telescope, on the object.

The team also have indirect evidence a tiny moon may trail Sedna, which is redder than all other known solar system bodies except Mars.

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Here is a recent news release about Xena:

Scientists Discover 10th Planet's Moon
By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer October 1, 2005
The astronomers who claim to have discovered the 10th planet in the solar system have another intriguing announcement: It has a moon.
While observing the new, so-called planet from Hawaii last month, a team of astronomers led by Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology spotted a faint object trailing next to it. Because it was moving, astronomers ruled it was a moon and not a background star, which is stationary.
The moon discovery is important because it can help scientists determine the new planet's mass. In July, Brown announced the discovery of an icy, rocky object larger than Pluto in the Kuiper Belt, a disc of icy bodies beyond Neptune. Brown labeled the object a planet and nicknamed it Xena after the lead character in the former TV series "Xena: Warrior Princess." The moon was nicknamed Gabrielle, after Xena's faithful traveling sidekick.
By determining the moon's distance and orbit around Xena, scientists can calculate how heavy Xena is. For example, the faster a moon goes around a planet, the more massive a planet is.
But the discovery of the moon is not likely to quell debate about what exactly makes a planet. The problem is there is no official definition for a planet and setting standards like size limits potentially invites other objects to take the "planet" label.
Possessing a moon is not a criteria of planethood since Mercury and Venus are moonless planets. Brown said he expected to find a moon orbiting Xena because many Kuiper Belt objects are paired with moons.
The newly discovered moon is about 155 miles wide and 60 times fainter than Xena, the farthest-known object in the solar system. It is currently 9 billion miles away from the sun, or about three times Pluto's current distance from the sun.
Scientists believe Xena's moon was formed when Kuiper Belt objects collided with one another. The Earth's moon formed in a similar way when Earth crashed into an object the size of Mars.
The moon was first spotted by a 10-meter telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii on Sept. 10. Scientists expect to learn more about the moon's composition during further observations with the Hubble Space Telescope in November.
Brown planned to submit a paper describing the moon discovery to the Astrophysical Journal next week. The International Astronomical Union, a group of scientists responsible for naming planets, is deciding on formal names for Xena and Gabrielle.

MINIATURE SOLAR SYSTEM

Possible Miniature Solar System Discovered

Astronomers have discovered what they believe is the birth of the smallest known solar system. Peering through ground- and space-based telescopes, scientists observed a brown dwarf — or failed star — less than one hundredth the mass of the sun surrounded by what appears to be a disk of dust and gas.
The brown dwarf — located 500 light years away in the constellation Chamaeleon — appears to be undergoing a planet-forming process that could one day yield a solar system, said Kevin Luhman of Pennsylvania State University, who led the discovery.
It's long been believed that our own solar system came into existence when a huge cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form the sun and planets about 4.5 billion years ago.
The new finding is the smallest brown dwarf to be discovered with planet-forming properties. If the disk forms planets, the resulting solar system will be about 100 times smaller than our own, scientists said.
Brown dwarfs, which are bigger than a planet but much smaller than a star, are thought to be balls of gas that failed to collect enough mass to start shining.
The discovery was made using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope as well as ground observatories. Results will be published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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