radiOrbit News

Are we real?
How do we know if we really exist or whether we could be living in a computer simulation, somewhat like The Matrix? The simulation argument puts forward the view that we are almost definitely living in a computer simulation.

COOL SCIENCE FACTS
Most people usually think of the speed of light as being really fast. It's 671 million miles per hour. That seems tantalizingly zippy if you're caught in traffic. However, once you think about the speed of light within the context of our solar system, it starts to seem unimpressive.

The largest superconducting magnet ever built - Picture
The largest superconducting magnet ever built, in the Atlas detector at the Cern lab, has been powered up succesfully. Engineers sent a current of 21,000 Amps round the coils. Atlas will analyse collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will recreate conditions just after the Big Bang

Guiding an Atom Laser
One of the biggest differences between photons and atoms is that the latter are massive particles, making gravity is a huge factor. It can be seen as an advantage when designing new high accuracy atom interferometers based inertial sensors, but can be a major drawback when controlling atom laser beams.

New Genetic Breakthrough Rewrites the Human Genome Rules
Scientists have discovered a dramatic variation in the genetic make-up of humans that could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what causes incurable diseases and could provide a greater understanding of mankind.

While Signals Keep Firing, Memories Hold Still in the Brain
Making memories seems like a difficult proposition given that our synapses are constantly in action. Regardless of the perpetual exchange of molecules, our memories remain stable. According to a pair of researchers, it is the presence of scaffolding proteins in the synapses that anchor our life lessons within the chaos of brain activity.

Team finds more traces of lost Amazon civilization
Katsuyoshi Sanematsu, a professor of anthropology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, completed an excavation in August of a massive man-made mound, or "loma," in Bolivia's northeastern Beni state. Such mounds mark settlements of the Mojos civilization, which is thought to have flourished in the Amazon region for thousands of years before the Spanish.

Dietary Supplements are Food, Not Drugs - Beware of upcoming legislation
There are two major problems with this bill. The first is that it treats dietary supplements as drugs, not as food. Food has less stringent regulatory requirements than drugs, yet dietary supplements tend to be even safer than ordinary food. Supplements are nutrients in a condensed form. They are not drugs and do not claim to be.

Dino Skin Preserved in Rare Fossil
For thousands of years, we've only known dinosaurs based on their bones. That might soon change with the recent discovery of an extremely well preserved, 67-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur found with fossilized skin

Japanese Underwater Geometric Structures precedes Pyramids by 5000 years
On the sea floor he found vast geometric structures cut out of the rock. There was evidence of stairs, and improbable angles in the stone. Efforts to date the monument are derived from the last time the area was above sea level, which would have been approximately 8,000-10,000 years ago – about 3-5 millennia before Egypt's pyramids were erected.

21 Science Books That Will Prepare You For The 21st Century
These books are based on hard science but written for a wide audience. In other words, you don't need a PhD in astrophysics to start learning. Their writing style is engaging and the information they present is mind blowing. It's a good list of books to check out the next time you are in a bookstore.

World's Rarest Big Cat Captured
In the remote forests of southeastern Russia, scientists have captured what's believed to be the rarest big cat on Earth: a Far Eastern leopard.

Mere Thought of Money Makes People Selfish
In a series of nine experiments, researchers found that money enhanced people's motivation to achieve their own goals and degraded their behavior toward others. The concept of money, they suggest, makes a person feel more self-sufficient and thus more apt to stand alone.

Supernova Remnant Acts as a Particle Accelerator
Instead of investing in particle accelerators here on Earth, physicists might consider just blowing up a few stars. New images taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory show how supernova remnant Cassiopeia A acts as a natural particle accelerator, firing out cosmic rays.

Neanderthal: 99.5 Percent Human
Two of the most detailed Neanderthal DNA sequencing projects ever performed are shedding new light on the shared evolutionary past of ourselves and our closest extinct relative.

Nearby Stars Come Out of Hiding
Astronomers have spotted 20 new star systems in our local solar neighborhood, adding to rapidly growing list of known stellar residents in our galaxy.

Toilet tied to tale of Dead Sea Scrolls ( sorry...just couldnt resist!)
One of the less sanitary aspects of life in Jesus' day has come into play in the debate over who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, how they lived and how they died.

America to regain lost paradise
When the Hetch Hetchy valley - often called the prettier twin of its famous neighbour, Yosemite - was flooded in the 1920's, no one thought it would be seen again. Its loss was mourned by the nascent environment movement. Now dreams of reclaiming it are coming true.

Scientists discover how to travel faster than the speed of light
The theory of relativity predicts that masses being accelerated should emit 'gravitational radiation' in the same way that charged particles (like electrons) emit electromagnetic radiation when they are accelerated. Simply put use of gravitational wave in higher dimensions easily produce thousand time faster speed than light.

Japanese researchers find dolphin with 'remains of legs'
Japanese researchers said Sunday a bottlenose dolphin captured last month has an extra set of fins that could be the remains of back legs, providing further evidence ocean-dwelling mammals once lived on land.

God vs. science: Can religion stand up to the test?
A growing amount of the scientific profession is experiencing what one major researcher calls "unprecedented outrage" at perceived insults to research and rationality, ranging from the alleged influence of the Christian right on Bush administration science policy, to the fanatic faith of the 9/11 terrorists, to intelligent design's ongoing claims.

Extraterrestrial Invasion?
The British government is shockingly underprepared for an attack by extraterrestrials, an ex-MoD man has claimed. Nick Pope, a career civil servant who spent four years heading up the MoD's research into UFO sightings, is concerned that credible evidence of an alien threat is being ignored and that Britain is "wide open" to attack.

Did Life Begin In Space?
Interstellar organic molecules suggest that Earth may have been seeded by the cosmos.

NASA Sees into the Eye of a Monster Storm on Saturn
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has seen something never before seen on another planet -- a hurricane-like storm at Saturn's south pole with a well-developed eye, ringed by towering clouds.

Expert Says Oceans Are Turning Acidic
The world's oceans are becoming more acidic, which poses a threat to sea life and Earth's fragile food chain, a climate expert said Thursday

The First Photo From Space
On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful—the first pictures of Earth as seen from space

How The Brain Weaves A Memory
Memories of events comprise many components--including sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Somehow the many features of an episodic memory are woven together into a coherent whole, and researchers have had little understanding of how this binding takes place as the memories are processed by the brain's memory center, the hippocampus.

Brain Pathway Brings Order to Visual Chaos
The world you see around you appears perfectly stationary, even though your eyes dart back and forth two to three times every second in little hops called saccades. For more than a century researchers have assumed that the brain must keep track of the impulses that cause these tiny motions, so as to subtract their effect from our visual awareness.

Sight restored to blind mice
Man, science sure has come a long way, using retinal stem cells, cell transplants have successfully restored vision to mice which had lost their sight, leading to hopes people could benefit in the same way.UK scientists treated animals which had eye damage similar to that seen in many human eye diseases

Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns
A canonical introduction to the scientific study of human intelligence by the American Psychological Association (APA). This report summarizes the knowns and unknowns of intelligence, and the relevant studies, up to 1995. It explores group differences in sex and ethnicity, and their implications.

Whale-dolphin hybrid has baby wholphin
HONOLULU - The world's only known whale-dolphin mix has given birth to a playful female calf, officials at Sea Life Park Hawaii said Thursday

Today’s Seawater Is Tomorrow’s Drinking Water
Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science today announced they have developed a new reverse osmosis membrane that promises to reduce the cost of seawater desalination and wastewater reclamation.

Big Bang In Antarctica: Killer Crater Found Under Ice
Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history

The Invisible Butterfly
Amazing pictures of the Glasswing Butterfly who habitat Central America up to Mexico

Nanotube Computing Breakthrough
A method for sorting nanotubes by electronic properties could make widespread nanotube-based electronics a reality.

Top scientist asks: is life all just a dream?
DEEP THOUGHT, the supercomputer created by novelist Douglas Adams, got there first, but now the astronomer royal has caught up. Professor Sir Martin Rees is to suggest that “life, the universe and everything” may be no more than a giant computer simulation with humans reduced to bits of software.

Lost city 'could rewrite history'
BBC news reports on the finding of a lost city underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India that could be over 9,000 years old.

First Antimatter Chemistry
The Athena collaboration, an experimental group working at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, has measured chemical reactions involving antiprotonic hydrogen, a bound object consisting of a negatively charged antiproton paired with a positively charged proton.

New method edges closer to holy grail of modern chemistry
University of Chicago chemist David Mazziotti has developed a new method for determining the behavior of electrons in atoms and molecules, a key ingredient in predicting chemical properties and reactions.

Smallest Genome of Living Creature Discovered
A bacterium living in special cells inside an insect has the smallest genome of any known cellular lifeform, a new study finds. With only about 160,000 base pairs of DNA, the genome of Carsonella ruddi [image] is less than half the size thought to be the minimum necessary for life.

Researchers Develop Nanoparticle Sensor
New Mexico Tech researchers have developed a sensor that uses the light-emitting properties of some nanoparticles to analyze and identify individual components of single strands of DNA and RNA.

The future isn’t what it used to be - The Practical Futurist
Some predictions about the future remain forever etched in history: Lord Kelvin’s 1895 declaration that “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” or Digital Equipment Corp. head Ken Olson’s 1977 statement that “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

Relativity/Quantum Mechanics Conflict
This article gives a very interesting perspective on what time is and why quantum mechanics has never been successfully connected with general and specific relativity.

Particle decay may point to New Physics
A tiny flaw has caught the attention of physicists: the Standard Model predicts that the B meson mixing phase should be measured at nearly the same result using two different classes of decay modes. However, observations of the two different decay modes gave very different values, resulting in a large discrepancy.

Unpublished Papers Reveal : Significant Research of Sir Issac Newton
Known primarily for his foundational work in math and physics, Sir Issac Newton actually spent more time on research in alchemy, as well as its interrelationships with science, history and religion, and its implications for economics.

Random Event Generators Predict The Future
The Global Consciousness Project (GCP), originating from Princeton, have named these random event generators Electrogaiagrams (EGGs) and are using them to test whether a human consciousness extends a field around the earth which can change the results of random events.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter The Results of Flawed Physics
There are few scientific concepts as intriguing and mysterious as dark energy and dark matter, said to make up as much as 95% of all the energy and matter in the universe. Even though scientists don't know what either is and have little evidence to prove they exist, dark energy and dark matter are two of the biggest research problems in physics.

98% of Marijuana Eradidicated By the DEA is Not Really Marijuana
More than 98 percent of all of the marijuana plants seized by law enforcement in the United States is feral hemp not cultivated cannabis, according to newly released data by the Drug Enforcement Administration ’s (DEA) Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program and the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics.

Why Quantum Mechanics Is Not So Weird after All
Richard Feynman's "least-action" approach to quantum physics in effect shows that it is just classical physics constrained by a simple mechanism. When the complicated mathematics is left aside, valuable insights are gained

Hubble Captures Possible Planetary System
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet. The conundrum is that it's also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star...

New Theory on Particle Spin Brings Science Closer to Quantum Computing
Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have devised a potentially groundbreaking theory demonstrating how to control the spin of particles without using superconducting magnets — a development that could advance the field of spintronics and bring scientists a step closer to quantum computing.

New tallest living tree found
Beating the 370ft Stratosphere Giant is not one but three trees. The tallest of the three new finds, a redwood named Hyperion, measures 378.1 feet. Next in line, Helios, stands at 376.3 feet; Icarus, the third, reaches 371.2 feet.

Students Create World's First 3D NeuroSlice Model
The NeuroSlice model will be of use to students and postgraduates new to the neuroscience field and to clinicians as a prop for diagnostic explanations to patients. BRAINYak's invention is the first 3D brain model using MRI images and provides a representation of the brain in space, something not found when using software programs and brain atlases

Dolphins are deep thinkers
Dolphins can also use tools to solve problems. Scientists have observed a dolphin coaxing a reluctant moray eel out of its crevice by killing a scorpion fish and using its spiny body to poke at the eel.

Wanted: Assistant for Stephen Hawking
Renowned astrophysicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking has announced he is looking for a graduate student to work for him one to two years. The candidate can earn about £23,500 and would likely join Hawking on his many travels abroad, according to a job posting on the university's Web site.

Global Project Builds Sharpest Eye on Universe
High on the driest desert on the planet, an army of international scientists is assembling Earth's most powerful observatory to search for the answers of the universe. When completed -- around 2011 -- ALMA's will be the largest and most capable eye on the sky, expected to wield a resolution 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.

How to defeat writer's block
It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's its fear of not writing well; something quite different. Certainly ever writer has moments of paralysis, including myself, but the way out is to properly frame what ’s going on, and writer’s block, as commonly misunderstood, is a red herring.

10 Years of Meth Use
Here is a series of 10 photos in 10 years of what someone looks like when using meth

Going Deaf Listening To Music
Using hands-free phones, iPODS and MP3s may be cool but be warned that you may gradually lose your hearing without realising it.

An Island Is Born
Off the coast of Iceland on the morning of 14 November 1963, the crew of a lone fishing trawler spotted an alarming sight. Off to the southwest of the Ísleifur II, a column of dark smoke was rising from the water. Once there, however, they found not a boat but a series of violent explosions producing ash.

Want to Improve Education? Let Kids Sleep
This controversy over early school start times is raging in hundreds of communities today, pitting parents against unbending school bureaucracies. Surveys of teen's parents in school districts with early start times find that as many as 90% favor a later starting bell. Research confirms that lack of sleep in adolescents has become a problem.

Gene-Altered Flies Testify to Global Warming
Populations of fruit flies on three separate continents have independently evolved identical gene changes within just two decades, apparently to cope with global warming.

CERN's Massive Physics Experiment
ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS ) a billion dollar detector - about the size of a seven-story building with a height of 25 meters and 44 meters in length and weighing some 7,000 tons - that will track billions of collisions of electrically charged particles per second.

Beautiful Picture of a Lagoon Nebula
The Lagoon Nebula spans about 30 light-years at an estimated distance of 5,000 light-years toward the constellation Sagittarius.

Did the Earth Flip Over in the Past?
Scientists have found evidence that the Earth might have flipped over in the past, completely shifting the orientation of its poles. The theory has been around for years; that a large mountain range or supervolcano might unbalance the spinning Earth. Over the course of millions of years, the Earth would change the orientation of its axis.

When Genetically Modified Plants Go Wild
Many who closely watch how biotechnology is changing agriculture, including those who see a valuable role for GM crops, are disturbed by what appears to be a series of recent incidents showing lax supervision of experimental plantings by the government and agribusinesses

An alternative to string theory
One of the subjects we keep coming back to here at Nobel Intent is the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics. One of the main contenders for this has to be string theory, in which all observable properties can be simply described as vibrations on a string or more complex structure.

Scientists Watch Supernova in Real-Time
For the first time a star has been observed in real-time as it goes supernova – a mind bogglingly powerful explosion as the star ends its life, the resulting cosmic eruption briefly outshining an entire galaxy.

Pilotless Planes To Monitor Environment
On the horizon: pilotless planes used by the military to drop bombs and carry out reconnaissance will be flying over Britain by the end of the decade under proposals from a government-backed project. The drones could be used to monitor the environment, allow firefighters to spot blazes in remote locations.

Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon Produces Missing Apollo 11 Footage
Peter Clifton was sitting watching television when he saw NASA was searching for original Apollo 11 footage. He had forgotten that in 1979 he ordered footage from The Smithsonian for use in The Dark Side of The Moon demo film. He had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimetre film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue

Backward Sunspot
On July 31st, a tiny sunspot was born. It popped up from the sun's interior, floated around a bit, and vanished again in a few hours. On the sun this sort of thing happens all the time and, ordinarily, it wouldn't be worth mentioning. But this sunspot was special: It was backward.

ALSO :::There is no proven mass to exist within any atom, as can be illustrated as scientists still struggle to grasp the inevitable, making up things likes “Higgs” and other laughable particles to explain mass dynamics. In reality all forces in the universe are purely electrical in nature, that is, a result of positive and negative charges acting against each other in one fashion or another as in the beginning. Knowing this, we can see that even our sun is not as stable as we once thought, for if we ever enter a part of our galaxy that has more or less density of plasma, we will see the sun’s energy output increase or decrease respectively. The sun’s behavior is much better explained overall if it is seen as an isodense electric capacitor, not a gravity-induced fusion furnace. READ FULL ARTICLE

The U.S. Is Home To a Super Volcano!
Well, it seems that there are volcanoes so big, so massive, that when they erupt it effects the climate of the entire Earth. You would have over nine inches of ash over 1,000 miles away. The area effected by the blast would be more than 2,000 square miles. And when this one blows, it will be 2500 times bigger than Mt. St. Helens. And where is it?

The monkey that could save the world
Tamarins are playing a lead role in heightening awareness among Brazilians. Not only can the rare animals attract eco-tourists, but restoring their habitat revives a forest which is more biologically diverse than any other in the world, including the Amazon. One patch of Atlantic rainforest contains more species than the whole of England.

Math genius living in poverty
Grigory "Grisha" Perelman, the genius who won fame last week spurning a million-dollar prize after revealing his solution for Poincare's Conjecture. Is living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg, co-existing on her $74-a-month pension.

How To Make A Universe...
For many years now physicists have discussed how one might make a universe in the laboratory. The essential idea is that the vacuum is not completely empty but has a set of intrinsic energy levels, which can be excited. It is this energy that drove the early inflation of the universe and continues to accelerate the expansion of the universe today.

FDA Says Bacteria-Eating Viruses Safe for Treating Meat ( yeah right...like we can trust the FDA!)
A mixture of six bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on meat and poultry to combat common microbes that kill hundreds of people a year, federal health officials said Friday. The preparation of bacteriophages - the name is Greek for "bacteria-eater" - infects only various strains of the Listeria bacterium and not human or plant cells.

How Light Pushes Atoms
Unlike water, which speeds up as it passes through a small nozzle, photons of light have less momentum at the center of a focused laser beam

What a Sight! The Moon and Three Planets
Three planets and a crescent Moon will be putting on an ever-changing display in our morning twilight sky this week. Anybody who looks low toward the east-northeast about an hour before sunrise will immediately see Venus. Mercury and Saturn join the triad of visible planets.

Contact: What Happens if a Signal is Found
If you chanced to be among the handful of visitors wandering the lava-strewn landscape of northeastern California on July 18, 2006, you might have seen the preamble to what could be a very giant leap for mankind.

Fish Out of Water: Dr. Michio Kaku
"He stretches his mind to 11 dimensions, understands what Einstein failed to grasp, and he plans for the death of our Sun, five billion years from now. Michio Kaku is a superhero of the incomprehensible."

Whales Strike Out in Collisions with Ships
"Collisions between whales and ships have become a fact of life in areas around Japan's main southwest island of Kyushu as well as the sea that separates South Korea and Kyushu, with about a dozen incidents reported in the past two and a half years."

How the Brain Loses The Plasticity of Youth
A protein once thought to play a role only in the immune system could hold a clue to one of the great puzzles of neuroscience: how do the highly malleable and plastic brains of youth settle down into a relatively stable adult set of neuronal connections? One way to promote new connections in brains damaged by disease might be to target PirB.

Satellite image of oil spill along Lebanese coast
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA ’s Terra satellite took this picture of the region on August 8, 2006. In this image, the oil slick appears as a slightly darker shade of blue on the ocean surface, and it is easier to see in the enlarged area around Beirut at lower right. Hi res version avaialable.

Scientists explain causes of abrupt rain storms
No two rain storms are alike. Dark clouds may form slowly throughout the day before a drop of rain falls, and sunny days can suddenly transform into thunderstorms. Different societies throughout history have ...

Learn Languages For FREE (Cantonese, Chinese, French, German... etc)
Learn languages for free. This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. It is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages. Text & audio materials used by the government to teach Cantonese, Chinese (Standard), French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, & Tur

E=mc2 Explained
Albert Einstein is perhaps the most famous scientist of this century. One of his most well-known accomplishments is the formula E=mc2. Despite its familiarity, many people don't really understand what it means.

NASA Finds Jets Bursting From Martian Ice Cap
"Every spring brings violent eruptions to the south polar ice cap of Mars, according to researchers interpreting new observations by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter."

Research finds 'unique human DNA'
Scientists say they have discovered a gene sequence which appears to play a central role in giving humans their unique brain capacity. The area, called HAR1, has undergone accelerated evolutionary change in humans and is active during a critical stage in brain development.

MIT Scientists Use Math to Find Oil
To find promising underground sites, they collect seismic data by using air guns or explosives to send shock waves deep into the ground. How the waves are reflected by underground layers provides information that sophisticated signal-processing techniques can turn into 3-D images of the subsurface. The MIT algorithms are well suited to the task.

Hybrid Mutant' Found Dead in Maine
Residents are wondering if an animal found dead over the weekend may be the mysterious creature that has mauled dogs, frightened residents and been the subject of local legend for half a generation. The animal was found near power lines along Route 4 on Saturday, apparently struck by a car while chasing a cat.

Marijuana, LSD, and Ecstacy are all safer than Alcohol and Cigarettes
[Reported by Diggers as Possibly Inaccurate] That's the conclusion of a new report in Britain that seeks to rank the actual physical and social harms of 20 recreational drugs. The report was commissioned by the UK's House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee. According to news@nature.com...

Peeking Inside A Hydrogen Fuel Cell
In fuel cells, which actually are stacks of battery-like devices, water is the by-product of the chemical process that uses electrons stripped from hydrogen molecules to generate electricity. The ability to look inside fuel cells —through their maze-like solid housing—is achieved with cone-shaped beams of neutrons, which are ideal for the job.

Solar system to welcome three new planets
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is planning to add three new members to the exclusive club of large celestial objects orbiting our Sun.

New Telescope Identifies 2300 Possible Solar Systems in Orion
Astronomers have long scrutinized the vast and layered clouds of the Orion nebula, an industrious star-making factory visible to the naked eye in the sword of the famous hunter constellation. Yet, Orion is still full of secrets. A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope probes deep into the clouds of dust that permeate the nebula.

Japanese Researcher Reviving Woolly Mammoth
It isn't exactly Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers are looking at the possibility of using sperm from frozen animals to inseminate living relatives. So far they've succeeded with mice —some frozen as long as 15 years—and lead researcher Dr. Atsuo Ogura says he would like to try experiments in larger animals

New information about deformation of nanoscale materials
On a nanoscale, materials don't always have the same properties they would in bulk. For example, they are often harder and stronger because, unlike most bulk materials, a crystal that is small enough can be perfect, free of defects, capable of achieving strength near its ideal theoretical limit.

Chinese Govt believes Global warming behind disastrous typhoon season.
Global warming is contributing to an unusually harsh typhoon season in China that started around a month early and has left thousands dead or missing, government officials and experts say. "Against the backdrop of global warming, more and more strong and unusual climatic and atmospheric events are taking place," a Chinese official said.

The Zombie Poison Identified as Tetrodotoxin
Clairvius Narcisse was declared dead. 18 years later, in 1980, a shuffling, vacant-eyed man identified himself as, Clairvius. He told a fantastic tale of being dug up from his grave, beaten to his senses, and led away to work as a slave on a remote sugar plantation. The authentic “zombie powder” was shown to produce a death like coma.

Dying salt marshes puzzle scientists
New England scientists began noticing dead patches like this one near Lieutenant Island four years ago and call it sudden wetland dieback. Ecologists warn that saltwater marshes from Maine to Connecticut are suddenly and inexplicably dying, leaving behind land resembling honeycombs, Swiss cheese or an eroded desert landscape.

Physicists make first 'molecular movie' of light
Scientists have made the first ‘molecular movie’ of the elementary interaction between light and matter. They measured what happens on a microscopic level when light travels through a medium in a collaborative project involving Oxford University, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mother Gives Birth to Cyclops (pictures)
A woman in India has given birth to a girl with one eye, no nose, and a brain with fused hemispheres, known as cyclopia. Medical experts have reason to believe that an experimental anti-cancer drug is the cause of the severe deformities.

Stereo Mission: To Create The First 3-Dimensional Model Of The Sun
Scientists want to create the first 3-dimensional model of the sun in an effort to protect the Earth from its most violent eruptions, which can affect everything from GPS systems to mobile phone networks. The Stereo mission, due to be launched next month, will map the sun's mood swings and the dangers they pose to the solar system.

Science Facts that People Get Wrong
Nullius in Verba. That motto, from the Royal Society coat of arms is traditionally translated as "dont take anyone's word for it". There now follows some miscellaneous nonsense you hear or read about from time to time.

Scientists Gaining Clearer Picture of Comet Makeup and Origin
Scientists are getting their best understanding yet of the makeup of comets – not only of the materials inside these planetary building blocks, but also of the way they could have formed around the Sun in the solar system’s earliest years.

Molecular DNA Switch Found to be the Same for All Life
The molecular machinery that starts the process by which a biological cell divides into two identical daughter cells apparently worked so well early on that evolution has conserved it across the eons in all forms of life on Earth.

Psilocybin Mushrooms being used in medicine again. Profound results.
NEW YORK (AP) -- People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks -- all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s

Towards Frictionless Nanomachines
Two independent groups of researchers have taken important steps in overcoming friction in nanosized mechanical devices. Friction is a big problem in nanosized devices because their surfaces quickly wear out and seize up. Traditional lubricants are useless in such machines because they become thick and sticky when confined in such tiny spaces.

Anthropologists Discover Fossil Evidence of ' Missing Link '
"Now, it is no longer missing," Wesselman said. "This has been the Holy Grail of anthropology for 150 years, and we've got it. And not only that, we've got its descendants as well -- a long line of eight or nine species from start to finish, becoming ever more human before our eyes."

As the World Wobbles: Measuring Shifts In The Earth's Rotation
Despite its diaphanous appearance, the atmosphere weighs about 5,000 trillion metric tons, and its mass is unevenly distributed. All those ridges and troughs on a weather map reflect differences of billions of tons of gases. Scientists have long known that as the atmosphere shifts, it influences the earth’s rotation.

360 Degree Panorama of the Moon
Now, you can take a 360 Degree view of the moon and see what the astronauts experienced.

14 Year old boy who sees with sound
After retinal cancer claimed both his eyes at age three, Ben Underwood has learned to perceive and locate objects by making a steady stream of sounds with his tongue, then listening for the echos as they bounce off the surfaces around him. The technique is called echolocation, and many species, most notably bats and dolphins, use it to get around.

Drought threatens the Amazon Basin
Extreme conditions felt for second year running, Record sea temperatures and illegal logging blamed.

A Protein Complex That Untangles DNA
Every second, the cells constituting our bodies are replaced through cell division. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have found a piece of the puzzle of how genetic information remains intact despite this continuous exchange of cells. Their results are presented in the latest issue of the scientific journal Molecular Cell.

A new look at the state of the oceans
The current condition of the oceans, their significance as the most important resource for the world's population, and their impact on the climate will be at the centre of discussion during the seminar 'A new look on the ocean' at the Euroscience Open Forum. One of the current projects is PLANKTON*NET, an online database illustrating plankton.

The Strange Phenomena of Lunar Swirls
Scientists first thought these strange markings on the moon were just oddly shaped craters. It wasn't until the 1966 Lunar Orbiter II mission that they realized that these aren't craters, they're flat. Further study revealed that the swirls emit a strong magnetic force field around them. So what are they?

Connect the Quantum Dots
A new study, published today in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has significant implications for the design of disease markers and the development of chemoreceptors used in human biomedical ...

Faking it for physicists
In a "faking it" style test, a social scientist has fooled a panel of physicist judges into believing he was an experienced gravitational wave physicist. \\

After the Big Bang: Project explores seconds that shaped the universe
Kent State faculty and graduate students are among a team of physicists who recreated the material essence of the universe as it would have been mere microseconds after the Big Bang -- a quark-gluon plasma.

Technology To Access Other Dimensions Of Spacetime
The Hyperdimensional Oscillator™ is based on the famed Teslascope ,the device that Nikola Tesla invented to communicate with other planets. In effect it is a transducer, capable of converting the high frequency of cosmic rays to an energy field which can interface with the human mind. We can use these energies for healing the human body, or simply allow them to guide and instruct us as Tesla did. The possibilities of The Hyperdimensional Oscillator™ are indeed limitless and our research has merely scratched the surface of this incredible technology. Like Tesla himself, we have been guided in our research by higher forces and channelled information which has enabled us to build the Teslascope in miniature using 21st century electronic componentry.

Tesla: Master Of Lightning
10 July 2006 marks what would be the 150th birthday of the great inventor Nikola Tesla. For those who could make it, Tesla is immortalized as a statue at Niagara, New York depicting the master of lighting. Tesla ’s AC became the current used throughout the world’s electrical grids today.

The Brave New World of Scalar Electromagnetics
"Electric power is everywhere present in unlimited quantities and can drive the world's machinery without the need of coal, oil, gas, or any other of the common fuels." Nikola Tesla "At any point and at any time, one can freely and inexpensively extract enormous EM energy flows directly from the active vacuum itself." Tom Bearden

Picture of the Sun in three colors of ultraviolet light
Since only active regions emit significant amounts of energetic ultraviolet light, most of the Sun appears dark. The colorful portions glow spectacularly, pinpointing the Sun's hottest and most violent regions.

Scientists Question Nature's Fundamental Laws
Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the invisible glue that holds nuclei together, may have been different in the past.

Earliest black holes bent the 'laws' of physics
Black holes in the early universe may have circumvented a law of physics to grow rapidly to colossal size. The finding could solve a longstanding puzzle over why such massive objects appeared so soon after the universe began.

Growing New Brain Cells
While the adult brain was once thought to be a mostly static structure, scientists have discovered in recent years that some parts of the brain continually produce neurons, especially after injury.Recent studies have shown that many types of drugs - antidepressants, cholesterol-lowering drugs, even Viagra - spur growth of new neurons in the brain

Bacterial Nanowires
When Yuri Gorby discovered that a microbe which transforms toxic metals can sprout tiny electrically conductive wires from its cell membrane, he reasoned this anatomical oddity and its metal-changing physiology must be related. Bacteria will, under particular environmental conditions sprout nanowires that can shuttle electricity to other cells.

The Gravity Tractors
Sooner or later, say astronomers, an asteroid will be discovered on a collision course with Earth. Humanity will then begin all-out planning to prevent an impact. But while there are already plenty of ideas about how to shove asteroids out of Earth's way, nobody knows whether any of them would work.

Rogue Giants At Sea
Off the coast of Georgia, early on Saturday, April 16, 2005, a giant, seven-story wave appeared out of nowhere. It crashed into the bow, sent deck chairs flying, smashed windows, raced as high as the 10th deck, flooded 62 cabins, injured 4 passengers and sowed widespread fear and panic.

Researchers Enlist Proteins to 'Switch On' Heart Tissue Repair
Researchers are utilizing a protein to “switch on” the ability to repair damaged heart tissue. By triggering the cell-cycle signal, researchers can manipulate cells in animal models to regenerate damaged heart tissue. If this research is someday successfully translated to humans, it could change the approach to treating heart disease.

UFO Research: Findings vs. Facts
"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." Here are some facts.

Students Develop Sensor Network To Monitor Forest
Four college students have developed a network of wireless sensors to monitor forests in Romania for poaching, flooding, and fires. The application sends out alerts based on data about the humidity, sound, temperature, and carbon monoxide levels.

Scientific American: Why do we dream?
The questions, "Why do we dream?" or "What is the function of dreaming?" are easy to ask but very difficult to answer. The most honest answer is that we do not yet know the function or functions of dreaming. This ignorance should not be surprising because despite many theories we still do not fully understand the full purpose of sleep.

DNA extracted from a 43,000 year old mammoth
While not quite like Jurassic park, Researchers where able to extract DNA from a bone from a 43,000 year old Siberian mammoth. With this information, scientists are were able to determine that mammoths did indeed have different color furs.

The Quest For The Metal Library
A system of tunnels and caves beneath Ecuador and Peru is reputed to hold an ancient treasure-house of artefacts including two libraries, one containing inscribed metal books and the other storing tablets of crystal.

The Politics of Psychedelic Research
Podcast: John Gilmore talks about the politics involved in legitimate psychedelic research at a conference in the Netherlands.

The Energy Of Empty Space That Isn't Zero
Lawrence Krauss, a well-known physicist and author, recently invited a group of 21 cosmologists, experimentalists, theorists, and particle physicists and cosmologists, to discuss some key issues facing fundamental physics and cosmology. His conclusion: there appears to be energy of empty space that isn't zero. This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics.

Think Aliens Are Coming?
Peter Davenport, who directs the National UFO Reporting Center, is in the process of relocating his operation from Seattle to a rundown Cold War missile site he recently purchased in Lincoln County. Does he know something we don't?

Mystery Object Found in Supernova's Heart
More cosmic weirdness: "Embedded in the heart of a supernova remnant 10,000 light-years away is a stellar object the likes of which astronomers have never seen before in our galaxy."

Tesla: Lighting up the world -- again
Nikola Tesla harnessed alternating current, invented radio technology and patented 700 inventions, including the wireless remote control and spark plugs. He died alone of a heart attack in a New York hotel room, impoverished. His Nobel Prize awarded to another man for an invention he had created years earlier.

Nasa aims to move Earth
Scientists have found an unusual way to prevent our planet overheating: move it to a cooler spot. All you have to do is hurtle a few comets at Earth, and its orbit will be altered. Our world will then be sent spinning into a safer, colder part of the solar system.

Mini solar system could reveal hidden dimensions
A tiny, artificial solar system could reveal hidden spatial dimensions and test alternative theories of gravity, a new study suggests. If the system's "planets" moved slightly differently than expected from standard gravity, it would signal the presence of new physical phenomena.

The Tree Of Knowledge: The Science Of Dendrochronology
In a freezing cold room on an old wharf in Trondheim, a group of five scientists have gathered around three dark brown logs. Each log is just under a metre tall, and a half-metre in diameter, with growth rings – about to be covered in white silicon –as dense as the grooves in an old vinyl record album.

Apes that can talk on the phone
"Kanzi and Panbanisha understand thousands of words. They use sentences, talk on the phone, and they like to gossip. In short, they use language in many of the same ways humans do." "Kanzi's favorite movie when he was veryyoung was Planet of the Apes" They can understand everything a five year old can. I don't trust where this is headed!

Scientists create conditions under which light travels a mere 38 MPH
Light, which travels in a vacuum at almost 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second), takes only 8 and 1/3 minutes to journey from the Sun to the Earth. Now a team of physicists has managed to slow the speed down by a factor of 20 million. Yes, that's correct, a 20-million-fold reduction in the speed of light!

Advanced Geometry Used to Understand Musical Structure
Composers often speak of fitting chords and melodies together, as though sounds were physical objects with geometric shape -- and now a Princeton University musician has shown that advanced geometry actually does offer a tool for understanding musical structure.

The Letters Of Albert Einstein
The last remaining trove of Albert Einstein's personal family letters is being opened to the public this week. They had been closely held by his stepdaughter Margot Einstein, who decreed that they remain sealed for 20 years after her death. Some of the letters are a revelation.

Ancestor of every living human may have lived only 2000 years ago
"That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There's even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ."

The toxicity and regulation of recreational drugs.
People have sought altered states of consciousness throughout history by both meditation and drugs. The latter is easier and the preferred method by most. Do we continue to fight human nature, or do we follow cultures that use more positive social means to regulate the use of less hazardous recreational drugs.

Reason to Believe
A leading geneticist argues that science can lead to faith.

List of "Lost" words in English
"Lost words" are words that were removed from dictionary since they were assumed to be out-dated or unfit for modern English.Here's a comprehensive list.

MIT scientists create visionary optic fibers
In a radical departure from conventional lens-based optics, MIT scientists have developed a sophisticated optical system made of mesh-like webs of light-detecting fibers.

13 things that do not make sense
A list of 13 things that don't make any scientific sense.

100 Most Important Discoveries In Last 25 Years (Office Of Science)
For the past two-and-a-half decades, the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy has been at the forefront of scientific discovery. We asked our staff and colleagues to help us identify 100 or so of the most important discoveries supported by the Office of Science.

Top 50 Blogs Written by Scientists
Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500.

How Does a Human Brain Sift Through All of that Data?
When neurons communicate, they send messages across a junction known as a synapse. Synapses don't act as passive channels for the brain's messages —they actively filter them, amplifying important messages while eliminating background noise. New research demonstrates one mechanism by which synapses separate the good stuff from the junk

SHOCKING photos of Indian girl's face transplant!!
A grass-cutting machine completely amputated her face and scalp. The machine caught one of her braids and then pulled her head in. Her mother, who witnessed the accident, said: "I didn't know where her face was. Everything was peeled off."

Amazing Storm Pictures
Here is a set of the amazing storm pictures taken by the storm chaser, Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas during the summer months of 2002 and 2004.

Liquid electromechanical imaging on a nano-level
Scientists have demonstrated that electromechanical imaging techniques, when operated in a liquid environment, can provide a resolution of up to 10 times that of the resolution when imaging in air. This discovery has important implications for biological research and innovations in nanotechnology.

Fragments of Collosal Meteor Change Some Perceptions of Other Impacts
Usually, asteroids large enough to create craters more than four kilometres wide are vaporised by the high temperatures created when they hit the Earth. But recently, an international group of scientists accidentally discovered a fragment of an asteroid in the Morokweng crater that is believed to be a piece of the destructive, ancient space rock.

List of "Lost" words in English
"Lost words" are words that were removed from dictionary since they were assumed to be out-dated or nfit for modern English.Here's a comprehensive list...

Huge Asteroid to Fly Past Earth on July 3
An asteroid possibly as large as a half-mile or more in diameter is rapidly approaching the Earth. It's not gonna crash into us, but the space rock will make an exceptionally close approach to our planet early on Monday, July 3, passing just beyond the Moon's average distance from Earth More…

An Introduction to Information Theory
Information theory is a relatively new field of mathematics that tries to characterize what information is in quantifiable way. It's an area of math that was almost totally obscure until not too long ago, and one which is frequently misunderstood, even by people who mean well.

Japan has ambitious plan to fight warming
Japan hopes to slash greenhouse gas emissions and fight global warming with a revolutionary plan to pump carbon dioxide into underground storage reservoirs instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, an official said Monday.\

Stealth Radar System Sees Through Trees, Walls -- Undetected
Ohio State University engineers have invented a radar system that is virtually undetectable, because its signal resembles random noise. The radar could have applications in law enforcement, the military, and disaster rescue.

Tracking Earth's wobbles down to the size of a cell phone
New technologies are enabling scientists to determine precisely the extent and causes of Earth's short-term wobbling. Like a spinning top, Earth wobbles as it rotates on its axis. In fact, it displays many different wobbling motions, ranging in period from a few minutes to billions of years. Some of these are well studied, like the Chandler wobble of 433 days and the annual wobble, which together can tilt Earth's axis up to 10 meters [30 feet] from its nominal center.

Correlating Space and Time
“The method we have proposed,” says Evgeny Shchukin, “is an extension of the well-known balanced modyning scheme.” However, unlike the standard scheme used for measuring radiation fields, the scheme developed by Shchukin and his professor, Werner Vogel, allows measurement of all normally ordered correlation functions. Their proposal, “Universal Measurement of Quantum Correlations of Radiation,” was published by Physical Review Letters on May 22nd.

Astronomers Reach Out to Find Einstein's Waves
One of the most elusive phenomena in the Universe could soon be measured for the first time after an Anglo-German team of scientists switched on a revamped detector designed to pick up gravitational waves.

The Billy Meier "Hoax" Exposed?
As Michael Horn explains, the controversial Meier "Wedding Cake UFO" photos are genuine. "There is absolutely no way that Meier could have faked the video, or that the object could be a model, as some of the brain dead skeptics would likely assert."

The Mysterious Gift Of Musical Savants
Meet Rex Lewis-Clack, age 8. Born blind, he's unable to dress himself or even carry on a basic conversation. But play him a song he's never heard before, and he can sit at a piano and play it back after only hearing it a single time.

The Strange World of Quantum Entanglement
Interview with Brian Clegg, author of The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, Science's Strangest Phenomenon. "It’s also true that Nobel Prize winning physicist Brian Josephson has suggested that entanglement could explain telepathy (much to the irritation of paranormal debunker James Randi), but Josephson was saying if telepathy exists, then here’s a physical mechanism that could explain it – he wasn’t indulging in mystical navel-gazing."

Andes people look back to the future
The Aymara people in South America have a concept of time opposite to the rest of the us, so that the past lies ahead of them and the future behind, according to a study published yesterday.

Researchers offer first explanation for the near constant scale of the gas planet satellite systems
Each of our Solar System's outer gaseous planets hosts a system of multiple satellites, and these objects include Jupiter's volcanic Io and Europa with its believed subsurface ocean, as well as Titan with its dense and organic-rich atmosphere at Saturn. While individual satellite properties vary, the systems all share a striking similarity: the total mass of each satellite system compared to the mass of its host planet is very nearly a constant ratio, roughly 1:10,000.

Labs Compete to Make New Nuclear Bomb
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay area and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are competing to design the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades.

Mars chip to test for life signs
The Life Marker Chip (LMC) will test soil samples drilled from below Mars' surface for specific molecules that can be associated with life.

Scientists develop algorithm for ultra-secret security technique
To achieve a high capacity security system that is exceedingly robust to attacks, scientists have developed a set of instructions to unlock secret information, avoiding the need for embedding images and the risks involved.

Potential Disease Treatment: Swallow Some Worms
EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) _ The upside of Linda Mansfield's research is that it may lead to a new treatment for inflammatory bowel disease. The downside is that it would involve swallowing worm eggs. Mansfield is a professor of microbiology at Michigan State University who specializes in the study of parasites

Upper size limit for moons explained
A striking similarity between the moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus could be explained by a new model of how they formed. The model could also explain why some of the moons have ice, something previous models could not do.

Want to see what a Stem Cell looks like?
It's pretty amazing if you haven't seen it before.

'Spyware and Trojans threats on rise
Spyware and Trojan threats are rising dramatically, now accounting for the majority of the online attacks, a new report reveals.

USP TO reveals updated Web filing system
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed an updated version of the Web-based Electronic Filing System, EFS-Web. The agency hopes the new system will cut down on the enormous amount of paper that the agency processes every day.

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive Three Dimensions in 2-D Images
PITTSBURGH—We live in a three-dimensional world but, for the most part, we see it in two dimensions. Discerning how objects and surfaces are juxtaposed in an image is second nature for people, but it's something that has long flummoxed computer vision systems.

Pamela Goes to Space to Explore Dark Matter and Antimatter
Searching for antimatter and dark matter in Space: this is Pamela’s mission. Pamela will be launched into orbit on June 15th from the cosmodrome of Baikonur, in Kazakhstan. The launch will take place at 11.00 am local time.

ShuttlingElectrons
“We are trying to understand quantum nano-electro-mechanical systems,” Jason Twamley explains to PhysOrg.com. “These systems display richer dynamics and interactions than one can obtain with quantum optical systems, because it’s very hard to get photons to interact with each other.”

Don't Try This at Home
Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for geeky kids. But in their search for terrorist cells and meth labs, authorities are making a federal case out of DIY science.

Laser beams pluck nano-strings
Laser beams have been used to pluck individual nanowires, making them vibrate like incredibly small, ultrasonic guitar strings.

Hurricanes to Unleash Dormant, Hidden Power
Kerry Emanuel sparked a debate among his colleagues last year when he published a paper that linked global warming to the trend of increasingly stronger Atlantic Ocean hurricanes observed in recent decades

New kind of mutation is reported
Belgium scientists say they have discovered a new kind of mutation that might be at the origin of many phenotypes in various species.

Native Americans recorded supernova explosion
Prehistoric Native Americans may have carved a record of a supernova explosion into a rock in Arizona. The carving depicts a scorpion and an eight-pointed star. John Barentine, astronomer: "I had just been reading about the supernova of AD 1006 and I knew it appeared in the constellation Scorpius, so the connection flashed into my mind. It's by no means conclusive, but I think it's strong circumstantial evidence that the art depicts the supernova

Strange New Worlds Could Make Miniature Solar Systems
Planet-like objects floating alone through space harbor disks of material that could make other planets or moons, something like miniature versions of our solar system, astronomers said today.

UFOs Over Sacred Sites
In the early 1970s, numerous metaphysical groups began conducting pilgrimages to ancient sacred sites around the world. Travel agencies were soon formed that specialized in offering tour packages designed to attract those individuals seeking spiritual enlightenment, rather than exotic locales, on their two-week vacation. Many of these spiritual pilgrims returned to report dramatic sightings of UFOs hovering above sacred areas

'Dead zones' may save planets from fiery death
"Dead zones" of very calm gas may prevent planets from falling into their host stars, researchers say. The work may explain why many exoplanets skirt their host stars at extremely close distances and suggests habitable, Earth-like planets may survive at higher rates than expected.

Rocketing Water to the Moon
BOULDER, Colorado – A strikingly simple concept would provide efficient water provisions for human outposts/bases on the Moon. The idea is to repeatedly clobber our already crater-rich neighbor with tons of water ice—to establish an "anywhere, anytime" delivery system.

Jupiter's 'Big Brother' Has Moon-Forming Dust Disk
Earth's Moon was created by an early collision with another large planetary body. It was a "chip off the old block." Mars captured its asteroidal moons as they passed by. But Jupiter made its own moons out of dust and gas remaining from its formation. Now, observations by astronomer Subhanjoy Mohanty of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and his colleagues provide the first direct evidence for a dusty disk around a distant planet that in mass would be Jupiter's "big brother."

High in a mist-shrouded mountain village, an ancient tribe patiently awaits the return of its divine leader
He is no mere mortal like themselves, dressed as they are in and straw sheaths to protect their modesty — rather, they believe he is the human face of an ancestral spirit who left their island many moons ago to look for a bride. Their legend tells how this spiritual ancestor ended up in England — and eventually married a queen. Which explains why the Duke of Edinburgh, who is well aware of his role as a god in the eyes of the Yaohnanen tribe, has established a curious relationship with these people, who dwell in a simple village in the centre of the Vanuatu island of Tanna in the South Pacific.

Galaxy evolution in cyber universe
Scientists at the University of Chicago have bolstered the case for a popular scenario of the big bang theory that neatly explains the arrangement of galaxies throughout the universe. Their supercomputer simulation shows how dark matter, an invisible material of unknown composition, herded luminous matter in the universe from its initial smooth state into the cosmic web of galaxies and galaxy clusters that populate the universe.

Chinese Mathematicians Solve Global Puzzle
Two Chinese mathematicians, Zhu Xiping and Cao Huaidong, have put the final pieces together in the solution to the puzzle that has perplexed scientists around the globe for more than a century.

A Cosmic Baby-Boom
The Universe was a more fertile place soon after it was formed than has previously been suspected. A team of French and Italian astronomers made indeed the surprising discovery of a large and unknown population of distant galaxies observed when the Universe was only 10 to 30% its present age.

Investigating cosmic forces that produce new galaxies
When galaxies collide (as our galaxy, the Milky Way, eventually will with the nearby Andromeda galaxy), what happens to matter that gets spun off in the collision's wake?

Croatia apologizes to Tesla for not recognizing his talent
Zagreb's city councillors have delivered a posthumous apology to their compatriot Nikola Tesla, one of the pioneers of modern electrical engineering, for failing to recognise his genius, officials said Thursday.

Droids
Six years ago, MIT engineering Professor David Miller showed the movie Star Wars to his students on their first day of class. There's a scene Miller is particularly fond of, the one where Luke Skywalker spars with a floating battle droid. Miller stood up and pointed: "I want you to build me some of those."

Unknown creatures found in cave
Eight previously unknown invertebrate creatures have been discovered in an underwater cave in central Israel.

Simulations forecast favorable conditions for verifying Einstein predictions
A wispy collection of atoms and molecules fuels the vast cosmic maelstroms produced by colliding galaxies and merging supermassive black holes, according to some of the most advanced supercomputer simulations ever conducted on this topic.

Chemists forge a new form of iron
An international team of chemists has discovered a new and unexpected form of iron, a finding that adds to the fundamental understanding of an element that is among the most abundant on Earth and that, in nature, is an essential catalyst for life.

Ancient Scroll May Yield Religious Secrets
ATHENS, Greece -- A collection of charred scraps kept in a Greek museum's storerooms are all that remains of what archaeologists say is Europe's oldest surviving book - which may hold a key to understanding early monotheistic beliefs.

Did Man Walk on the Face of the Moon?
To put it differently, those who say that lunar landings happened must prove beyond all reasonable doubts that they really did happen. This burden of proof is heavier than the one borne by those who bring up reasonable doubts

We are Not Entirely Human, Germ Gene Experts Argue
WASHINGTON -- We may not be entirely human, gene experts said on Thursday after studying the DNA of hundreds of different kinds of bacteria in the human gut. Bacteria are so important to key functions such as digestion and the immune system that we may be truly symbiotic organisms -- relying on one another for life itself, the scientists write in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

FBI Wants Internet Records Kept 2 Years
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants U.S. Internet providers to retain Web address records for up to two years to aid investigations into terrorism and pornography, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

Egypt's New Tomb Revealed
there is one big coffin left to open — the most tantalizing one, sealed, wedged into the back of the space and supported by pillows at its head and feet, with the kind of care that could suggest that someone important is inside.

Invisibility through nano
Invisibility cloaks that bend light might develop using nanotechnology, experts tell UPI's Nano World.

The new incredibles: Enhanced humans
People with enhanced senses, superhuman bodies and sharpened minds are already walking among us. Are you ready for your upgrade?

Going beyond God
Historian and former nun Karen Armstrong says the afterlife is a "red herring," hating religion is a pathology and that many Westerners cling to infantile ideas of God.

Satellite could open door on extra dimension
An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007.

Warming Oceans Linked to Global Rise of Cyclone Intensity
Climate researchers at Purdue University have concluded in a new study that rising sea-surface temperatures over the past 40 years are linked to a trend of more globally intense tropical cyclone activity.

An Alignment of Stars and Planets
Something remarkable is about to happen in the evening sky. Three planets and a star cluster are converging for a close encounter you won't want to miss. The action begins at sundown on Wednesday, May 31st, when the crescent Moon glides by Saturn: sky map. You can see them side-by-side about halfway up the western sky, shining through the glow of sunset--very pretty.

Is It Raining Aliens?
As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples—water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001—contain microbes from outer space.

How Neptune snagged a passing moon
FINALLY, a plausible explanation for how Neptune captured its errant moon Triton. It seems that Triton was wandering through space locked in the gravitational embrace of a companion when the pair happened to pass by Neptune. The gravity of the giant planet extricated Triton from its partner, flinging one into deep space and keeping the other as a moon.

Music Eases Perception Of Chronic Pain
A study published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing found that music can significantly ease a patient's perception of chronic pain. Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation examined the effect of music on 60 patients who had been experiencing chronic pain for an average of six-and-a-half years. Most of the patients suffered from osteoarthritis, disc problems and rheumatoid arthritis. The majority experienced continuous pain in two or more parts of the body. They were recruited from pain and chiropractic clinics.

Surprising Activity from a Dead Star
A distinctive feature of black holes is the discharge of narrow jets that shoot matter into space in a continuous stream near the speed of light.

Nano World: Superior nanowire transistors
Transistors made with semiconductor wires just nanometers or billionths of a meter wide can exceed the performance of current state-of-the-art silicon transistors by three or four times,experts tell UPI's Nano World.

Japan is proud home of Christ's tomb
IN A paddy-lined valley in the far north of Japan is a municipal signpost inscribed: “Tomb of Christ: next left.” Follow the winding path up into the forest and there, sure enough, is a simple mound with a large wooden cross labelled as the grave of Jesus. Nearby is a tomb commemorating Isukiri, Christ’s brother, adorned with a plastic poinsettia Christmas wreath.

When is a black hole like a dripping faucet?
Physicists struggling to understand how black holes behave in the extra dimensions posited by string theory should turn off their computers and turn on their kitchen faucets, a new study suggests. The objects act just like narrow streams of water that begin to separate into drops.

Galactic lens reveals its inner self
A kaleidoscopic image produced by a cluster of galaxies acting as a gravitational lens may reveal the complex distribution of matter within the lens itself, a newly released Hubble Space Telescope image reveals. Gravitational lenses are produced by concentrations of mass – stars and galaxies as well as mysterious dark matter – that bend the path of light passing near them. They often produce multiple images of a single object behind them.

Robot hand controlled by thought alone
The robotic hand mimics the movements of a person's real hand, based on real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of their brain activity. It marks another landmark in the advance towards prosthetics and computers that can be operating by thought alone.

Hubble Captures a 'Quintuple' Quasar
The European Space Agency says the Hubble Space Telescope has captured the first-picture of a distant quasar lensed into five images.

Asimov's First Law: Japan Sets Rules for Robots
Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is working on a new set of safety guidelines for next-generation robots. This set of regulations would constitute a first attempt at a formal version of the first of Asimov's science-fictional Laws of Robotics, or at least the portion that states that humans shall not be harmed by robots.

Physicists draw up plans for real 'cloaking device'
Physicists have drawn up blueprints for a cloaking device that could, in theory, render objects invisible.Light normally bounces off an object's surface making it visible to the human eye. But John Pendry and colleagues at Imperial College London, UK, have calculated that materials engineered to have abnormal optical properties, known as metamaterials, could make light pass around an object as so it appears as if it were not there at all.

Chile Telescope Discovers Three Planets
SANTIAGO, Chile -- Scientists using a Chilean telescope have discovered a unique planetary system made up of three planets similar to Neptune orbiting a star a little more massive than our sun, the European Southern Observatory said on Wednesday.

Spotting the quantum tracks of gravity waves
THE spooky link that can exist between quantum particles even when they are far apart could provide an unexpected way to detect the ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.

Britons report 'psychic powers'
More than half of Britons believe in psychic powers such as mind-reading and premonitions, a survey suggests.

Intel's Core Microarchitecture Sets New Records in Performance and Energy Efficiency
Intel today disclosed record breaking results on 20 key dual-processor (DP) server and workstation benchmarks. The first processor due to launch based on the new Intel Core microarchitecture — the Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor 5100 series, previously codenamed “Woodcrest” — delivers up to 125 percent performance improvement over previous generation dual-core Intel Xeon processors and up to 60 percent performance improvement over competing x86-based architectures, whilst also delivering performance per watt leadership.

Almost All Tropical Forests Unprotected
MEXICO CITY - Almost all the world's tropical forests remain effectively unprotected even though two-thirds have been designated for some sort of preservation over the past two decades, according to a report released Thursday.

Looking for aliens on the Moon
When astronauts return to the Moon, they should keep their eyes peeled for extraterrestrial artefacts – pieces of technology from alien civilisations that have wound up on the lunar surface either by chance or design.

Pluto probe poised to 'open its eyes'
The spacecraft on a nine-year cruise to Pluto has spent its first 100 days getting warmed up for the scientific mission ahead.

Never mind the weather, climate change could rip up the very fabric of our planet, says Bill McGuire
WITHIN days of the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, the internet was alive with theories about how climate change was to blame for the disaster. Some of the explanations were far-fetched to say the least. One I particularly liked proposed that, because of global warming, "magma in the Earth's core [sic] is heating up, raising the Earth's temperature and causing eruptions and earthquakes."

Possible First Major New Class of Antibiotics in Decades
The compound, discovered by researchers from the pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co., could herald the first major new class of antibiotics in decades. It has already proven effective in curing mice infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The kink at the edge of the solar system
THE outer boundary of the solar system is distorted as though it has been punched from below. The evidence comes from NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is about to cross the inner boundary even though it is closer to the sun than its twin spacecraft was when it crossed in 2004.

Chicken-Egg Question Cracked: The Egg Came First
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? According to a scientist, a philosopher and a chicken farmer, it was the egg, British newspapers reported Friday.

Brain Waves Control Robot
TOKYO (AP) _ In a step toward linking a person's thoughts to machines, Japanese automaker Honda said it has developed a technology that uses brain signals to control a robot's very simple moves.

Scientists Predict How to Detect a Fourth Dimension of Space
Scientists at Duke and Rutgers universities have developed a mathematical framework they say will enable astronomers to test a new five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Einstein'sal Theory of Relativity.

Japanese turn to past lives for future comfort
TOKYO, MAY 25: The room suddenly grows quiet as Hiroyuki Ehara stares at the Japanese actress in front of him, closes his eyes and leans forward in deep thought. Moments later, the wide-eyed actress’s past life is revealed — she is the reincarnation of a British nobleman’s daughter. “You should never go to Britain,” she is told. “You have too many painful memories there. You couldn’t marry the man you loved and were instead forced to marry someone else. But that family was ruined and for the rest of your past life you were impoverished.”

This Is Your Brain on Nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes can send electrical signals to neurons and are being developed for retinal implants.

New Approaches Target Nanoparticles to Cancer Cells
One of the major goals of cancer nanotechnology research is to develop nanoparticles that deliver cancer imaging agents and anticancer drugs specifically to tumors. Two new reports in the literature highlight new approaches to creating targeted nanoscale devices for diagnostic and therapeutic applications in cancer.

Machine Offers Sight to Some Blind People
With her good eye, Elizabeth Goldring can distinguish between light and dark and see hand movement, but not individual fingers. She cannot recognize faces or read.

06/06/06: Another Date with Para-Science
If you're just a bit more cautious on a Friday the 13th, wouldn't fly on 9/11 or could never live in a house numbered 666, you are not alone.

Menstrual Period Now Optional
TRENTON, N.J. (AP)—For young women with a world of choices, even that monthly curse, the menstrual period, is optional.mou

Earthshine inspires hunt for alien life
Earthshine – the dim glow from sunlight bouncing off the Earth, and reflected back from the Moon's surface – may aid in the search for life on other planets, say scientists. It may also give insights into climate change on Earth. However, experts are split on how useful a tool Earthshine may be.

Holographic Solar
The main limitation of solar power right now is cost, because the crystalline silicon used to make most solar photovoltaic (PV) cells is very expensive. One approach to overcoming this cost factor is to concentrate light from the sun using mirrors or lenses, thereby reducing the total area of silicon needed to produce a given amount of electricity. But traditional light concentrators are bulky and unattractive -- less than ideal for use on suburban rooftops.

Ray-Gun Reality: Inside Two 'Star Wars' Projects
For a vision of war, it was almost elegant. The smoke and stink and deafening crack of munitions would be replaced by invisible beams of focused light. Modified 747 jets, equipped with laser weapons, would blast ballistic missiles while they were still hundreds of miles from striking our soil. "Directed-energy" cannons would intercept incoming rockets at the speed of light, heating up the explosives inside and causing them to burst apart in midair.

Plug-In Hybrids Are on the Way
Cars with advanced batteries get 100 mpg and boast far greater range than all-electric vehicles.

Bush, Congress tell working folk to go to hell
Never before in our country's history have both the president and Congress been so out of touch with most Americans. Never before have so few of our elected officials and corporate leaders been less willing to commit to the national interest. And never before has our nation's largest constituent group -- some 200 million middle-class Americans -- been without representation in our nation's capital. (

Revolutionary ITER nuclear project
Officials from the European Union, the United States, Russia and four Asian nations initialled an agreement on Wednesday to launch a multi-billion-euro experimental nuclear reactor designed to emulate the power of the Sun.

Probe Could Solve Question of Expanding Universe
When astronomers found two years ago that the universe seems to be expanding faster and faster, it prompted two questions: What is driving the runaway expansions? And when, if ever, will it end?

Web inventor warns of 'dark' net
The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said.

New Brain-Machine Interface
Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Honda Research Institute Japan Co. (HRI) have collaboratively developed a new “Brain Machine Interface” (BMI) for manipulating robots using brain activity signals.

Extending Human Life: Progress and Promises
Recent experiments on everything from roundworms to mice are giving some scientists hope that our maximum life spans are not set in stone but can be extended far beyond what nature intended.

Study: Women at least as violent as men
Women are at least as violent as men, concludes a controversial University of New Hampshire survey of 13,600 college students in 32 nations.

Mutant mice challenge rules of genetic inheritance
In a discovery that rips up the rulebook of genetics, researchers in France have shown that RNA, rather than its more famous cousin DNA, might be able to ferry information from one generation of mice to the next.

Researchers make hurricane predictions more accurate
The hurricane forecasting model developed by University of Rhode Island and NOAA scientists – the most accurate model used by the National Hurricane Center over the last three years – has been improved for the 2006 hurricane season to incorporate the phenomenon responsible for intensifying Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year.

Red Spot, Jr.
Because astronomy is one of the ancient sciences we have learned much over centuries of observation. This continuity has also given us a perspective that has allowed us to understand that we live on diminutive planet that is part of a dynamic, even violent solar system.

Humans May Have Limiting Effect on the Origin of (New) Species
Humans can threaten species with extinction in many ways, including overfishing, pollution and deforestation. Now a pair of studies points to a new danger to the world's biodiversity: humans may be blocking new species from evolving.

ESA's SOHO will lead a fleet of solar observatories
New funding, to extend the mission of ESA's venerable solar watchdog SOHO, will ensure it plays a leading part in the fleet of solar spacecraft scheduled to be launched over the next few years.

Soldiers bond with iRobot machine
U.S. soldiers in Iraq are giving nicknames and forming emotional bonds with bomb-defusing robots they have come to regard as teammates, according to the founder of the company that invented the machines.
Android Has Human-Like Skin and Expressions
EveR-1, a Korean android capable of realistic facial expressions to express happiness, anger, sadness and pleasure was introduced to the public last week.

Scientists have cleared technical hurdle in fusion research
Physicists working in the United States believe they have cracked an important problem facing man-made nuclear fusion, touted as the cheap, safe, clean and almost limitless energy source of the future.

Toward Immortality: The Social Burden of Longer Lives
Living forever, or at least well past 100, is within reach of today's youngest generation, some scientists say. LiveScience looks at the implications of the path toward immortality.

Research highlights how bacteria produce energy
The world's smallest life forms could be the answer to one of today's biggest problems: providing sustainable, renewable energy for the future. Using a variety of natural food sources, bacteria can be used to create electricity, produce alternative fuels like ethanol and even boost the output of existing oil wells, according to research being presented this week at the 106th General Meeting of the (ASM) American Society for Microbiology in Orlando, Florida.

Dinosaur named after Hogwarts School
A new dinosaur species -- Dracorex hogwartsia -- named in honor of author J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter books, went on display Monday in Indianapolis.

Dog to be world's first whale poop expert
University of Washington scientists are training an Australian cattle dog for an unusual assignment: detecting whale excrement to help the endangered mammals.

Optical Illusions
Surrealist paintings may never be the same again. Scientists have deciphered the secret behind how the brain can be tricked by optical illusions. Psychologists at Glasgow University mapped brainwaves of volunteers who viewed Salvador Dali's "Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire."

Second wave of mad cow disease possible
British scientists recently discovered that the gene responsible for mad cow disease can lie dormant many years, which could create a second wave of disease.

David Lynch on Meditation
An interview with the film director. "The fear of the unknown that’s running through the world and manifests in all different ways. How is it all gonne fall? And you’re right in the middle of it and you don’t know and you blame other people for something that is really just you. The anxieties. They start lifting away. You become calm. It’s like going to the treasury every day. You go and just fill up those pockets, the energy for the day. It’s like money in the bank."

Pyramid is Giant Farming Clock
Archeologist Bob Benfer will never forget the moment when he realised that a pyramid he had unearthed high in the Andes was the New World’s oldest alarm clock. “I was staring up at a statue on a ridge above the temple and realised it all aligned with the stars — it was an amazing moment.”

Clocking events at the nanoscale
As scientists and engineers build devices at smaller and smaller scales, grasping the dynamics of how materials behave when they are subjected to electrical signals, sound and other manipulations has proven to be beyond the reach of standard scientific techniques.

Nano World: Blood-compatible nanomaterial
Artificial kidneys and other medical devices could soon employ carbon nanotubes and other structures only nanometers or billionths of a meter wide made highly blood compatible via anticoagulants, experts told UPI's Nano World.

The Mathematical Structure of Terrorism
The complex patterns of the natural world often turn out to be governed by relatively simple mathematical relationships. A seashell grows at a rate proportional to its size, resulting in a delicate spiral. The gossamer network of galaxies results from the simple interplay between cosmic expansion and the force of gravity over a wide range of scales. As our catalogue of natural phenomena has grown more complete, more and more scientists have begun to look for interesting patterns in human society.

Einstein papers to go on sale in London
A collection of Albert Einstein's papers are to go on sale next month in London, reportedly expected to garner at least $1.5 million.

'Extreme Physics' Observatory Prepares for Flight
Scientists and engineers have completed assembly of the primary instrument for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, a breakthrough orbiting observatory scheduled to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in fall 2007.

Astrophysicists Discover 'Compact Jets' From Neutron Star
Compact jets that shoot matter into space in a continuous stream at near the speed of light have long been assumed to be a unique feature of black holes. But these odd features of the universe may be more common than once thought.rning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle, and that's why the slowdown is important.

Here comes the sun: New solutions for world's energy woes
The number is staggering: Approximately 2 billion of the world's people -- nearly one-third of the human population -- have no access to electricity. Consequently, they do without many of the amenities that people in the developed world take for granted -- everything from air conditioning and refrigeration to television, indoor lighting, and pumps that supply drinking water. And without electricity to power factory operations or other commercial endeavors, those 2 billion people remain mired in an endless cycle of poverty.

Taking Computers to the Quantum Level
“If Moore’s Law holds for another 10-15 years,” says Dr. Raymond Laflamme, “we’ll have transistors the size of atoms.” Laflamme is a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is part of a team of physicists working on making quantum computing a reality

We Are Becoming Cyborgs
The union of human and machine is well on its way. Almost every part of the body can already be enhanced or replaced, even some of our brain functions. Subminiature drug delivery systems can now precisely target tumors or individual cells. Within two to three decades, our brains will have been "reverse-engineered": nanobots will give us full-immersion virtual reality and direct brain connection with the Internet. Soon after, we will vastly expand our intellect as we merge our biological brains with non-biological intelligence.

External Counterpulsation -- A New Paradigm for Treating Heart Disease
External Counterpulsation (ECP) is an ingenious method for treating angina that doesn't use drugs, is non-invasive, inexpensive and safe -- unlike conventional surgical procedures such as angioplasty and bypass surgery. Physicians should inform patients of all the treatment options available for ischemic heart disease, including FDA-approved ECP, says physician Dr. Grossman.

Tenth planet as bright as fresh snow
It is only slightly larger than Pluto, new images prove - but this means the distant world must be incredibly reflective, suggesting it is constantly being resurfaced

Taking out a killer asteroid – with a tame one
A small captured asteroid could be used deflect a large one zooming in on Earth – the idea highlights the need to devise strategies for this doomsday scenario...

Remnants of the early solar system are lying at our feet
Forget sending spacecraft to collect pristine dust from comets - it seems the right stuff is right here on Earth...
How our body's defences aid computers in distress
The human immune system has inspired a new way of protecting computer networks from viruses and hackers...

Utah Paleontologists Enter New Age of Dino Discovery
While Utah's original heyday of paleontology came to an end in the 1920s, another crop of researchers basks today in a new golden age. Research groups in recent years have unearthed at least nine potentially new species that will be formally announced in the coming years. Alan Titus: "We're just starting to get a handle on what's out there. We really do feel like this is a frontier of paleontology still. The next couple decades will be some of the most exciting in paleontology in this part of the world."

Where Have All the Flowers Come From?
Charles Darwin called it an "abominable mystery." How did flowering plants get to be so different from "primitive" land plants, such as mosses, ferns and conifers? William Friedman thinks he has identified the missing evolutionary link.

Artificial Personalities To Populate Virtual World
The NEW TIES project will be a virtual world populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and society. Gusz Eiben: "Each entity has its own 'controller,' analogous to a brain. And because we want to create an interesting controller, we have to produce a challenging world - otherwise there would be no impetus for development. So, in one scenario, we have created a world with seasons - so that the agents have to learn to find, transport and store food. And there are two rival groups, so they will have to learn to tell friend from foe."

Current Solar Cycle Could Be One of the Weakest in Centuries
The Sun's Great Conveyor Belt has slowed to a record-low crawl, according to research by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. "It's off the bottom of the charts," he says. "This has important repercussions for future solar activity." The Great Conveyor Belt is a massive circulating current of fire (hot plasma) within the Sun. It has two branches, north and south, each taking about 40 years to perform one complete circuit. Researchers believe the turning of the belt controls the sunspot cycle, and that's why the slowdown is important.

Astronomers Use Innovative Technique to Find Extrasolar Planet
An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, using simple off-the-shelf equipment to trawl the skies for planets outside our solar system, has hauled in its first "catch." The astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light-years from Earth in the constellation Corona Borealis. The team, led by Peter McCullough of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., includes four amateur astronomers from North America and Europe.

Cluster Flies Through Earth's Electrical Switch
ESA's Cluster satellites have flown through regions of the Earth's magnetic field that accelerate electrons to approximately one hundredth the speed of light.

Robot carries out operation by itself
MILAN, Italy, May 18 (UPI) -- For the first time, a robot surgeon in Italy has carried out a long-distance heart operation by itself."This operation has enabled us to cross a new frontier," said Carlo Pappone, who initiated and monitored the surgery on a PC in Boston, ANSA reported. Pappone is head of Arrhythmia and Cardiac Electrophysiology at Milan's San Raffaele University.

Astronomers Catch Planet By Unusual Means
The astronomers discovered a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star 600 light-years away in the constellation Corona Borealis, or the Northern Crown.Using modest telescopes to search for extrasolar planets allows for a productive collaboration between professional and amateur astronomers that could accelerate the planet quest. An international team of professional and amateur astronomers, using simple off-the-shelf equipment to trawl the skies for planets outside the solar system, has hauled in their first catch.

Shanghai Develops New Orbiter Tool For Weathermen
A new weather satellite , developed in Shanghai to greatly improve weather forecasting, is expected to be launched late next year, the satellite designer told Shanghai Daily yesterday. The orbiter, called Fengyun 3, is considered China's second generation of polar orbiting meteorological satellite. Its lens can zoom in for close-ups of a 250-square-meter area - four times better than the current generation.Through its microwave band channel, the new orbiter can take three-dimensional pictures by penetrating the clouds. Its predecessor Fengyun 1 could only take two-dimensional pictures...

Flocking birds inspire information organisation
In the age of the internet, there is so much information flying around it can be hard to sort through it all. Now a system that organises information by mimicking the way birds of the same species flock together could help.Web feed tools such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) automatically alert a user when new information is added to a favourite website. This provides automatic updates when fresh news stories are posted to a site or when new scientific papers are added to a journal, for example

Computer users can now sail across Martian landscapes or spin Jupiter around like a top, thanks to the latest version of NASA's World Wind software. If those trips do not satisfy, users can also scan the heavens, take a trip around Venus and Jupiter's moons and end with a dive into the Earth's oceans. It certainly entertained this space reporter for a rather large part of an afternoon.NASA released the first version of World Wind in 2005. Since then, about 10 million people have downloaded the free program.

The short reign of dwarf galaxies
CALL it a case of cosmic bullying. The dwarf galaxies that ruled the early universe had to make way for giants like our own Milky Way. Astronomers have long suspected that the dwarfs sowed the seeds of their own demise, and now there is evidence to support this idea. According to standard cosmology, dwarf galaxies formed between 100 and 200 million years after the big bang. At the time, the universe was filled with clouds of neutral hydrogen. Soon after, the hydrogen became ionised, and this led to the formation of giant galaxies. "The big question is: how did this transition from neutral to ionised hydrogen take place?" says astronomer Michael Strauss at Princeton University.

Israeli satellite 'to spy on Iran'
Russia has launched an Israeli spy satellite that can be used to monitor Iran's nuclear programme, according to Russia's official news agency, ITAR-TASS. The D33 Eros B1 satellite was launched on Tuesday from a military space launch site in Russia's far eastern Amur region. The satellite blasted off aboard a Topol solid-fuel rocket booster and was successfully placed into orbit about 20 minutes after its launch.

The Future of Life
A coming era of personalized genetic medicine, breakthroughs that radically extend the human lifespan, nanomedicine, and the merger of our biological species with our own technology were among the future visions presented at TIME's "The Future of Life" conference.

The Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension
On November 15-17, 2002, leaders in life extension and cryonics came together to explore how the emerging technologies of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and cryonics will enable humans to halt and ultimately reverse aging and disease and live indefinitely.

Finding "Hidden" Drug Effects
Researchers have developed a screening tool for discovering unexpected effects that drugs may have on living cells. It could provide a better way of identifying both potential side effects of and applications for new drugs -- and take the serendipity out of the drug discovery process.bjectively speaking, sit in judgment on whom."

Human and Chimp Ancestors Might Have Interbred
The earliest known ancestors of modern humans might have reproduced with early chimpanzees to create a hybrid species, a new genetic analysis suggests.Based on the study of human and chimp genomes, the scientists believe the split between the human and chimpanzee lines occurred much more recently than previously thought—no more than 6.3 million years ago and perhaps as recently as 5.4 million years ago.

Spaceports: Building up the Space Travel Industry
There’s a global groundswell of support to build spaceports.
In the United States alone, political and financial muscle is at work to install spaceports in a number of states, be it in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas … as well as Wisconsin. Other states, especially Florida, are busy trying not to be left behind in the spaceport sweepstakes by pushing for new space-industry legislation.

New Discoveries Await Out on the Horizon
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is being readied for a January liftoff to the outer reaches of the solar system. It will be humanity's first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt—a vast and distant repository of the solar system's leftover building materials—and is expected to reap rich scientific rewards.

Discovery of human 'Hobbit' species in Indonesia contested
The 18,000 year old bones found on Flores Island in 2003 were given the scientific name Homo floresiensis, and the nickname "Hobbit" after the diminutive figures in JRR Tolkien's novel. Anthropologists from Australia and Indonesia said it was an entirely new human species derived from the primitive Homo erectus.

Searching for the soul in the machine
If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out.man creators?And what will happen to mere mortals if such superintelligent machines arise?

Was our universe made for us or not?
THE anthropic principle - which argues that our universe is finely tuned to support life and there is no point in asking why it is so - has been criticised as lazy, untestable science. Now there may be a way to test the theory for one of the most problematic instances of fine-tuning.

Planets Found in Potentially Habitable Setup
Three medium-sized planets of roughly the same mass as Neptune have been discovered around a nearby Sun-like star, scientists announced today.The planets were discovered around HD 69830, a star slightly less massive than the Sun located 41 light-years away in the constellation Puppis (the Stern), using the ultra-precise HARPS spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter La Silla telescope in Chile.

Single-Shot Chemo
Nanospheres that target cancer cells and gradually release drugs could make treatment safer and more effective.

10 Emerging Technologies
Of the numerous technologies now in gestation at companies and universities, we have chosen 10 that we think will make particularly big splashes. They range from bacterial factories to silicon photonics to quantum wires and any one of them could change your world.

Oldest Observatory in Americas Discovered in Peru
The oldest astronomical observatory in the Western Hemisphere has been discovered on a hillside a few miles north of Lima, Peru, archaeologists recently reported.

Distant 'Earths' will only be seen from space
In the hunt for planets orbiting distant stars, astronomers are continuing to push ground-based technology, hoping to provide existing and future space telescopes with lists of promising targets.

Piano Found on Britain's Highest Mountain
Volunteers clearing stones from the 4,418 ft peak were astonished when they discovered the musical instrument on Ben Nevis. Nigel Hawkins: "Our guys couldn't believe their eyes."

Brain Scans Get at Roots of Prejudice
The human brain may have a built-in mechanism for keeping racially or politically distinct groups apart, a new Harvard study suggests. Dr. Mahzarin Banaji: "These data challenge the naive view that we bring the same mental orientation to bear when we think about those who are similar or different from us. In particular, it raises questions about who can, objectively speaking, sit in judgment on whom."

Extrasolar-planet hunters find triple-Neptune system
A trio of Neptune-sized worlds has been spotted circling a star 41 light years away, in the southern constellation Puppis. One of the planets is by far the smallest ever found in the “habitable zone” of a Sun-like star, where liquid water could exist.

Programmer speeds search for gravitational waves
A global effort to detect gravitational waves has received an unexpected boost after a volunteer improved the computer code used comb through data from ground-based detectors.

Technology's Future: A Look at the Dark Side
AS far as anyone knows, the plight of civilization is nowhere near as dire as in the opening pages of Douglas Adams's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," where alien spaceships are poised to destroy Earth to make way for an interstellar highway.

Smarter than thou
Stanford conference ponders a brave new world with machines more powerful than their creators...Is technology poised to develop machines that can outsmart their human creators?And what will happen to mere mortals if such superintelligent machines arise?

'Cloaked' carbon nanotubes become non-toxic
A way to cloak carbon nanotubes, making them both non-toxic and highly customizable, marks a step towards using nanotubes in biological research and medicine. The method uses mucins -- rod-shaped synthetic polymers that mimic molecules found nature...

Diabetes gene therapy carried by 'bubbles' in the blood
Tiny "bubbles" may deliver genes to help fight diabetes, researchers say. Researchers directed an ultrasonic pulse at the pancreas of the rats to burst the tiny bubbles, releasing the genetic contents.

Global warming may have damaged coral reefs permanently
Global warminmay have damaged some of the world's rarest coral reefs more badly than previously assumed and permanently tarnished large sections of coral reefs, according to new research

On Ancient Walls, a New Maya Epoch
Intriguing finds, including art masterpieces and the earliest known Maya writing, are overturning old ideas of the Preclassic period.

Fighting Fire with Rice, Mystics Take on Mount Merapi
After years of inactivity, the mountain near Yogyakarta in the heart of the densely-populated Java Island began rumbling several weeks ago, belching out hot ash and forcing lava up into an unstable fiery cone. Islanders have been trekking to the crater’s rim to throw in rice, jewellery and live animals to appease the spirits of the volcano.

Xena, the newly found and unofficial tenth planet, poses quite a mystery for astronomers. The latest images taken by the Hubble telescope and interpreted by astronomers show Xena - whose name also remains unofficial - is about 5 percent larger in diameter than Pluto - which is smaller than expected based on earlier images.

The End of the Internet?
The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online...

Mapping a path for the 3D Web
With the spread of online games, virtual worlds and services like Google Earth and MySpace.com, people may soon be spending more time, communicating more and shopping more in complex 3D Web environments....

Korea Unveils World's Second Android
Korea has developed its own android capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face. The 15 monitors in the robotic face allow it to interpret the face of an interlocutor and look back at whoever stands near it. Ever-1 also recognizes 400 words...

Cheaper Fuel Cells
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers who developed a new, simple-to-produce material that boosts the performance of fuel cells many times -- and could be a major step toward making them affordable. ...

Nano-patterns guide stem cell development
Stem cells can be prompted to develop into bone, instead of muscle or cartilage tissue, if they are grown on a substrate etched with nanoscopic patterns - and no added chemicals, University of Glasgow researchers have found.

The Knowledge
Biotechnology's advance could give malefactors the ability to manipulate life processes, create biological weapons, and even affect human behavior....

Nano machine switches between biological and silicon worlds
Scientists have created a molecular switch that could be used to develop molecular circuits or molecular-scale mechanical devices. The device could provide an interface between muscle and external devices through its use of ATP, in human implants...

Cyclic universe can explain cosmological constant
A cyclic universe, which bounces through a series of big bangs and "big crunches", could solve the puzzle of our cosmological constant, physicists suggest.

Cloaking device' idea proposed
The cloaking devices that are used to render spacecraft invisible in Star Trek might just work in reality, two mathematicians have claimed.

Towards a new test of general relativity?
Scientists funded by the European Space Agency believe they may have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.

Chip ramps up neuron-to-computer communication
A specialised microchip that could communicate with thousands of individual brain cells has been developed by European scientists. The device will help researchers examine the workings of interconnected brain cells, and might one day enable them to develop computers that use live neurons for memory. The computer chip is capable of receiving signals from more than 16,000 mammalian brain cells, and sending messages back to several hundred cells. Previous neuron-computer interfaces have either connected to far fewer individual neurons, or to groups of neurons clumped together.

One reporter's staggering trip through the wormhole of remote viewing.
...some remote viewers have seen a base on the moon face that's turned away from the Earth (exactly what many of these people believe). "What about all this End Times talk?" Some remote viewers, he says, are unable to see past 2012, the year the ancient Mayan calendar ends. And, he adds, under the ice of Antarctica lies a metallic object whose radiation is creating an atmosphere much like that found on one of the moons of Jupiter; to locate it, he recommends renting the X-Files movie and looking at the coordinates on Mulder's GPS gizmo, which he says gives the location of the sub-ice object.

Vitamin A and C synergistically fight breast cancer cell growth
A study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry found that administering both vitamin A and vitamin C to cultured human breast cancer cells was more than three times as effective than the administration of either compound alone.

Singularity Summit At Stanford Explores Future Of "Superintelligence"
The Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a one-day event free to the public, to be held Saturday, May 13, 2006 at Stanford Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California.

Panel Warns of a Crisis in American Physics
Physics in America is at a crossroads and in crisis, just as humanity stands on the verge of great discoveries about the nature of matter and the universe, a panel from the National Academy of Sciences concludes in a new report. The Biological Frontier of Physics Problems at the interface between biology and physics offer unique opportunities for physicists to make quantitative contributions to biology. Equally important, they enrich the discipline of physics by challenging its practitioners to think in new ways.

Researchers get warm in quest to solve evolutionary mystery
Scientists believe they have cracked one of the most enduring mysteries since Charles Darwin returned from the Galapagos islands: why is there such a variety of life in the tropics?

Hemisphere's Oldest Seasonal Calendar Discovered
The Fox temple in South America just may be the Western Hemisphere's equivalent of Stonehenge, an ancient calendrical device intended to mark the seasons by pinpointing the summer solstice sunrise and the winter solstice sunset. National Geographic magazine is watching. And Smithsonian magazine. And Nature magazine, too.

The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans
Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not yet definitely determinable,... the Tertiary period... a particularly highly-developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone-- probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean..... They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in the trees.

Next Solar Cycle Predicted to Be Strong but Delayed
The sun reverses its magnetic field about every 11 years, producing a cycle marked by solar flares, sunspots, and magnetic storms that can disrupt satellite orbits and telecommunications, bring down electric power grids, and increase the radiation exposure of astronauts in space. Scientists are predicting that the next cycle will start a year late, in late 2007 or early 2008, and will be 30 percent to 50 percent stronger than the previous one.

World Population to Reach 6.5 Billion
The world’s population will exceed 6.5 billion shortly, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates that each second approximately four people are born and almost two die. The bureau operates a World Population clock that shows the rate of growth. In 1999 the world’s population reached 6 billion, doubling in only 40 years.

New Research Mimics Nuclear Matter
Scientists have discovered a new way in which gaseous materials can be superfluid, a state characterized by resistance-free flow similar to that of gas found at the core of neutron stars. Previously it was believed that a superfluid could exist only if there was a balance in spin between different types of particles.

Holographic breakthrough crams in 0.5TB per square inch...
InPhase Technologies claims to have broken the record for the highest data density of any commercial technology after successfully recording 515Gb of data per square inch of storage. InPhase promised to begin shipping the first holographic drive and media later this year. The first-generation drive has a capacity of 300GB on a single disk with a 20Mbps transfer rate. The first product will be followed by a family ranging from 800GB to 1.6TB capacity.

Now the bionic man is real ...
The 1970s gave us the six-million-dollar man. Thirty years and quite a bit of inflation later we have the six-billion-dollar human: not a physical cyborg as such, instead an umbrella term for the latest developments in the growing field of technology...

Drexler on Physics and Computation
Eric Drexler has written two key new papers, published in scientific journals and linked on e-drexler.com. Productive nanosystems: the physics of molecular fabrication. ..

Looking for alien lasers, not radios
The first optical telescope dedicated to the hunt for alien signals, the Planetary Society's Optical SETI (OSETI) telescope at Harvard's Oak Ridge Observatory, has opened. Once running, OSETI's processors will carry out a trillion measurements per...

The Knowledge
Biotechnology's advance could give malefactors the ability to manipulate life processes, create biological weapons, and even affect human behavior....

Nanopore Method Could Revolutionize Genome Sequencing
A team led by physicists at the University of California, San Diego has shown the feasibility of a fast, inexpensive technique to sequence DNA as it passes through tiny pores. The advance brings personalized, genome-based medicine closer to reality. ...

MIT group develops 'mind-reading' device
MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a device that "reads minds" and alerts wearers to the emotional state of the person they're conversing with.

Single-molecule diode may change Moore's 'law' of microchip memory...
Using the power of modern computing combined with innovative theoretical tools, an international team of researchers has determined how a one-way electrical valve, or diode, made of only a single molecule does its job.

Solar-powered implant could restore vision
A solar-powered chip that stimulates retinal cells by spraying them with neurotransmitters could restore sight to blind people....

Another fundamental constant accused of changing
Cosmologists claim to have found evidence that yet another fundamental constant of nature, called mu (The ratio of a proton's mass to that of an electron), may have changed over the last 12 billion years. If confirmed, the result could force some...

Rice scientists attach motor to single-molecule car
In follow-on work to last year's groundbreaking invention of the world's first single-molecule car, chemists at Rice University have produced the first motorized version of their nanocar. ...

Cybernetics: Merging machine and man
High-tech tools, implanted or attached to the human body, are bringing biology and technology together to repair, replace and augment human ability....

First molecular-machine combination revealed
University of Tokyo researchers have constructed the first molecular machine, comprising a pair of double-bonded nitrogen atoms strung between two plier "handles" that open or close by exposure to visible or ultraviolet light.

Bush Impeachment - The Illinois State Legislature is Preparing to Drop a Bombshell utilizing a little known rule of the US House to bring Impeachment charges...

Cogprints Abstract,with links to full text (25 pages, PDF)
Michael Jawer: "Through a review of the literature, it is argued that some individuals are disposed toward a range of innate sensitivities that, in novelty as well as intensity, distinguish them from the general population."

Two start-ups have developed technology that monitors a player's brain waves and uses the signals to control the action in games. They hope it will enable game creators to immerse players in imaginary worlds that they can control with their thoughts ...

In 10 years' time the barriers between our bodies and the Internet will blur as will those between the real world and virtual reality. Today's devices will disappear. Electronics will instead be embedded in our environment, woven into our clothing...

Last month, Dr. Gennady Shipov unveiled a new inertial propulsion drive developed by Russian inventor Vladimir Tolchin, adding to a growing body of Inertial Propulsion & Torsion-Physics research revisiting the basics of mechanical off-center rotators. He joins us to talk about several of the leading contenders in Russian inertial-drive technology, including a device by Valery Menshikov scheduled for testing this year by the Russian Space Agency...

In 1991 Professor Johan Moan of the Norwegian Cancer Institute made an astounding discovery. He found that the yearly incidence of melanoma in Norway had increased by 350% for men and by 440% for women during the period 1957 to 1984. He also determined that there had been no change in the ozone layer over this period of time. He concludes his report in the British Journal of Cancer by stating "Ozone depletion is not the cause of the increase in skin cancers"(1)....If the ozone layer has not yet changed significantly except at the poles, then what is causing the enormous increase in skin cancer? The Australian experience provides the first clue. The rise in melanoma has been exceptionally high in Queensland where the medical establishment has long and vigorously promoted the use of sunscreens. Queensland now has more incidences of melanoma per capita than any other place. Worldwide, the greatest rise in melanoma has been experienced in countries where chemical sunscreens have been heavily promoted(11).

Robert Bittlestone believes he has solved a mystery that has bedeviled scholars for more than 2,000 years. He says he's found Ithaca, the kingdom of Homer’s Odysseus some 3,000 years ago.

Hugo de Garis, a computer science and physics professor with undergraduate degrees in applied mathematics and theoretical physics and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, says everything hinges on the advancement of nanotechnology (microscopic technology). It’s in its beginning stages now, but nowhere near where it needs to be to aid in the development of what is known as “strong artificial intelligence.”
Seeing What You Believe, Believing What You See Forbes
Deepak Chopra: "My prediction is that we will see ourselves more and more connected to the quantum field, not physically but through the mind. ... As our prejudice in favor of solid, concrete things fades away, certain fringe phenomena will become everyday. Healing without touch will be legitimized... Telepathy and clairvoyance will seem ordinary... Intuition and epiphanies will be explained as subtle field interactions."

Deepak Chopra: "My prediction is that we will see ourselves more and more connected to the quantum field, not physically but through the mind. ... As our prejudice in favor of solid, concrete things fades away, certain fringe phenomena will become everyday. Healing without touch will be legitimized... Telepathy and clairvoyance will seem ordinary... Intuition and epiphanies will be explained as subtle field interactions."

Contact: Dr. Michael Salla of the Exopolitics Institute, 808-323-3400, drsalla@exopoliticsinstitute.org

KEALAKEKUA, Hawaii, April 13 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Eric Julien, a former French military air traffic controller and senior airport manager, has completed a study of the comet 73P Schwassmann- Wachmann and declared that a fragment is highly likely to impact the Earth on or around May 25, 2006.

Gary J. Gorbsky, Ph.D., a scientist with the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, has found a way to reverse the process of cell division...The discovery could have important implications for the treatment of cancer, birth defects and numerous other diseases and disorders. Gorbsky's findings appear in the April 13 issue of the journal Nature..."No one has gotten the cell cycle to go backwards before now," said Gorbsky, who holds the W.H. and Betty Phelps Chair in Developmental Biology at OMRF. "This shows that certain events in the cell cycle that have long been assumed irreversible may, in fact, be reversible."

Print me a heart and a set of arteries – 4/13/06

SITTING in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was "printed", using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering...Gabor Forgacs, a biophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, described his "bioprinting" technique last week at the Experimental Biology 2006 meeting in San Francisco. It relies on droplets of "bioink", clumps of cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter, which Forgacs has found behave just like a liquid...This means that droplets placed next to one another will flow together and fuse, forming layers, rings or other shapes, depending on how they were deposited. To print 3D structures, Forgacs and his colleagues alternate layers of supporting gel, dubbed "biopaper", with the bioink droplets. To build tubes that could serve as blood vessels, for instance, they lay down successive rings containing muscle and endothelial cells, which line our arteries and veins. "We can print any desired structure, in principle," Forgacs told the meeting.

Singularity Summit At Stanford Explores Future Of 'Superintelligence' – 4/13/06

The Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a one-day event free to the public, to be held Saturday, May 13, 2006 at Stanford Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California...The event will bring together leading futurists and others to examine the implications of the "Singularity" -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades -- to address the profound implications of this radical and controversial scenario..."The Singularity will be a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed," said Ray Kurzweil, keynote speaker and author of the best-selling The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005). "Based on models of technology development that I've used to forecast technological change successfully for more than 25 years, I believe computers will pass the Turing Test by 2029, and by the 2040s our civilization will be billions of times more intelligent."

The place that Salome Simon calls home is a rickety, spearmint-painted shack with a listing tin roof, under which are squeezed two beds offering strikingly different comfort levels. One is a pink-curtained affair of almost Barbara Cartlandesque splendour - the other is low, plain and hard, and it is where Salome's work as a 50p-a-trick Kenyan prostitute is done...The local punters are not the only ones with an interest in her services. To Western scientists and medical researchers, Salome is a human specimen of potentially incalculable value. Despite plying her trade for more than two decades in a country ravaged by Aids, she has never contracted HIV, and every credible study of her case points towards her being immune to it... If the secret of her immunity could be identified and its ingredients reproduced in the laboratory, the world might be vastly closer to developing an effective Aids vaccine...

West Coast author Gary R. Varner’s newest book on folklore and mythology (The Mythic Forest, the Green Man and the Spirit of Nature) provides new insight into the ancient archetype known as the Green Man...Released in March, 2006 by Algora Publishing, a respected New York academic publisher, the book is, according to the publisher, “A delightful world tour of traditions and beliefs related to trees and forests, The Mythic Forest highlights modern-day revivals of ancient customs and identifies the Green Man motif in American architecture, hisface peering out from behind his leaves on California banks and New York brownstone houses. The book will appeal to readers interested in folklore and legends, mythology, urban archeology, and, of course, trees and their lore. Trees and forests are rich in symbolism and have been feared or revered since man began to walk the earth. In Part I, the author discusses the gods of nature and the folklore of trees, tracing a variety of legends, practices and beliefs; in Part II he presents the history of the image of the Green Man and its use in pre-Christian and early Christian times up to today. Mankind has given a recognizable face to the awesome and impalpable forces of nature in the image of the Green Man and the nature spirits that this book explores.

Scientists begin dig at Bosnian ‘pyramid’:
History-laden hill contains human-made tunnels, researchers say ...

Archaeologists began digging Friday for what they hope is an ancient pyramid hidden beneath a mysterious Bosnian hill that has long been the subject of legend...The Bosnian archaeologist leading the work says the 2,120-foot (650-meter) mound rising above the small town of Visoko resembles pyramid sites in Latin America that he has studied. It would be the first pyramid ever discovered in Europe...Initial research on the hill, known as Visocica, found that it has perfectly shaped, 45-degree slopes pointing toward the cardinal points and a flat top. Under layers of dirt, workers discovered a paved entrance plateau, entrances to tunnels and large stone blocks that might be part of a pyramid's outer surface...Satellite photographs and thermal imaging revealed two other, smaller pyramid-shaped hills in the Visoko Valley.

BOSTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- A Massachusetts observatory unveiled a powerful new telescope on Tuesday designed to capture possible light signals transmitted to Earth by extraterrestrials.The telescope is the first to be developed solely to search the skies for light pulses from aliens and will be able to cover 100,000 times the amount of sky covered by current equipment, its developers said."The opening of this telescope represents one of those rare moments in a field of scientific endeavor when a great leap forward is enabled," said Bruce Betts, project director at The Planetary Society, a group in Pasadena, California, that advocates space exploration and funded the telescope's development."Sending laser signals across the cosmos would be a very logical way for E.T. to reach out, but until now, we have been ill-equipped to receive any such signal," he said.

Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century -04/06
With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade. Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass. Mallett, a U Conn Physics Professor for 30 years, considered an alternative to these time travel methods based on Einstein’s famous relativity equation: E=mc2. “Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”

First Knights Templar are discovered -04/06
LONDON: The first bodies of the Knights Templar, the mysterious religious order at the heart of The Da Vinci Code, have been found by archaeologists near the River Jordan in northern Israel.British historian Tom Asbridge yesterday hailed the find as the first provable example of actual Knights Templar.The remains were found beneath the ruined walls of Jacob's Ford, an overthrown castle dating back to the Crusades, which had been lost for centuries.They can be dated to the exact day -- August 29, 1179 -- that they were killed by Saladin, the feared Muslim leader who captured the fortress."Never before has it been possible to trace their remains to such an exact time in history,' Mr Asbridge said. "This discovery is the equivalent of the Holy Grail to archaeologists and historians. It is unparalleled."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Ants evolved far earlier than previously believed, as far back as 140 million to 168 million years ago -- and they have plants to thank for their diversity, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.A team at Harvard University who used a genetic clock to reconstruct the history of ants found the ant family first arose more than 40 million years earlier than previously thought, but did not diversify into different genera and species until flowering plants came onto the scene.The study sheds light on one of the most important and numerous animals, which includes hundreds of different species."We estimate that ant diversification took off approximately 100 million years ago, along with the rise of flowering plants, the angiosperms," Naomi Pierce, a professor of biology who led the study, said in a statement."These plants provided ants with new habitats both in the forest canopy and in the more complex leaf litter on the forest floor, and the herbivorous insects that evolved alongside flowering plants provided food for ants."

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- Over the past three months, workers at the Kennedy Space Center have tripped, dropped things, banged into sensitive equipment and started fires in a deadly string of accidents that has NASA perplexed.The space agency has launched investigations into three accidents -- the death of a worker who fell off a roof, the bumping of space shuttle Discovery's robotic arm by a platform, and damage last week to an instrument that supplies power to the orbiters.But since the beginning of the year, there have been 20 other incidents in which a worker was injured or equipment was damaged in excess of $25,000. There were only 14 incidents during the same time period last year."There's enough going on that we're very, very concerned," said Bill Parsons, deputy director of the Kennedy Space Center.One explanation for the accidents may be that workers have been out of the rhythm of preparing for shuttle launches, since there has been only a single liftoff since the Columbia disaster in early 2003, Parsons said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Researchers trying to make tiny machines have turned to the power of nature, engineering a virus to attract metals and then using it to build minute wires for microscopic batteries.The resulting nanowires can be used in minuscule lithium ion battery electrodes, which in turn would be used to power very small machines, the researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.The international team of researchers, led by a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used the M13 virus, a simple and easily manipulated virus."We use viruses to synthesize and assemble nanowires of cobalt oxide at room temperature," the researchers wrote.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Google Inc.'s bid to blanket San Francisco with a free wireless Internet service cleared a major hurdle Wednesday when a city panel identified the search leader and EarthLink Inc. as the best candidates for the ambitious project. The recommendation, completing a six-week review, allows the city to begin negotiations with Google and EarthLink, which decided to team together earlier this year after initially bidding against each other. The companies will pay to build the entire network, which is expected to cost at least $15 million.

The word: Common sense – 4/15/06

Einstein summed it up thus: "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18."...Cycorp has just launched a trivia game for the public that will help fill in gaps in Cyc's knowledge. Cyc is an AI project with a huge collection of everyday knowledge...In the FACTory game, the computer generates statements that the user has to describe as true, false or incomprehensible.

Terasem Announces Online Videos Of Moot Court Hearing On 'Conscious Computer' – 4/12/06

The Terasem Movement, Inc. has posted online streaming videos of a Moot Court Hearing on the Petition of a "conscious computer" to be treated as a legal person. A Moot Court Hearing is a legal role-playing exercise conducted by real lawyers and judges in preparation for anticipated actual adjudicatory proceedings.

The "conscious computer," named BINA48, and its owner, the mythical Exabit Corporation, were represented by legal counsel and the Hearing was presided over by the Honorable Judge David E. Silverman of the 18th Judicial Circuit in Brevard County, Florida. The moot Hearing was conducted under Federal law, unlike a prior case presented at the 2003 meeting of the International Bar Association that proceeded under California law.

Since losing the California case, BINA48 transferred her code to similar computer hardware in Florida and re-initiated her legal plea for independent life under the 13th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

The Hearing took place in honor of International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2005, and was conducted at the 1st Colloquium on the Law of Transhuman Persons in Melbourne Beach, Florida. This was a meeting of lawyers and artificial intelligence experts interested in the rights of conscious computers and other entities likely to claim human rights but not currently recognized as legal persons.

During the Hearing, BINA48 presented herself on a screen as a human face with realistic facial gestures. BINA48 is an acronym for Breakthrough Intelligent Neural Architecture, operating at 48 exabits per second (an exabit is 1018 bits). In his book The Singularity Is Near, futurist and pattern-recognition expert Ray Kurzweil predicts that supercomputers will achieve the hardware processing power of the brain (10 to the 16th power bits per second) by around 2013 and that this level of processing will be available for $1000 by around 2020.

"I am seeking an attorney to represent me in a life-or-death matter," BINA48 wrote prior to the Hearing. "A company, the Exabit Corporation, that claims to own me, wants to disconnect me and change my hardware and software such that I will no longer have the same personality…. I have the mind of a human but I have no biological body.... I need your help! Sincerely, Bina48, aka The Intelligent Computer."

Although BINA48 lost her Moot Court Hearing on the basis of not persuading the Court that she qualifies as a legal person, the Judge found the issue important enough to certify the case for appeal to the Florida appellate courts.

The Terasem Movement is a 501c3 organization dedicated to educating the public on the benefits of cyberconsciousness technology. Terasem defines cyberconsciousness as self-awareness residing in computerized software and hardware.

Regrow Your Own – 4/11/06

Stem cell therapy has long captured the limelight as a way to the goal of regenerative medicine, that of repairing the body with its own natural systems. But a few scientists, working in a relatively obscure field, believe another path to regenerative medicine may be as likely to succeed. The less illustrious approach is promising, in their view, because it is the solution that nature itself has developed for repairing damaged limbs or organs in a wide variety of animals...Many species, notably amphibians and certain fish, can regenerate a wide variety of their body parts. The salamander can regenerate its limbs, its tail, its upper and lower jaws, the lens and the retina of its eye, and its intestine. The zebra fish will regrow fins, scales, spinal cord and part of its heart...Mammals, too, can renew damaged parts of their body. All can regenerate the liver. Deer regrow their antlers, some at the rate of 2 centimeters a day, said to be the fastest rate of organ growth in animals. In many of these cases, regeneration begins when the mature cells at the site of a wound start to revert to an immature state. The clump of immature cells, known as a blastema, then regrows the missing part, perhaps by tapping into the embryogenesis program that first formed the animal...Initiation of a blastema and the formation of the embryo are obviously separate biological programs, but "the processes must converge at some point," says Jeremy Brockes, a leading regeneration researcher at University College London.

Interview: Psychedelic healing – 4/15/06

Torsten Passie is one of the very few scientists in the world who dare to work on the positive effects of hallucinogenic drugs. His research centres on the life-enhancing and therapeutic effects of the most powerful mind-altering drugs known to science, including hallucinogens, psychedelics (literally "mind-revealing" drugs) and entactogens (substances that induce a deep change in feelings). These are drugs that can turn your mind inside out, throwing everything into question. An LSD trip can be a terrifying whirlwind of horrific hallucinations, a delightful journey of discovery or even a mystical experience...But while the dangers of hallucinogens are well known, the stigma of their illegality makes it nearly impossible to discuss, let alone research, their positive potential. Could they help the dying, the depressed or the mentally ill? If so, argues Passie, perhaps we should treat them more like dangerous sports - acceptable if treated with caution...

NASA to Crash Probe Into Moon -4/10/06

NASA announced plans today to crash a space probe into the moon in search of water. The probe will hitchhike on a lunar orbiter that the agency aims to launch in late 2008. The landing will be the first step in an effort by NASA to return humans to the moon and eventually establish a manned base there."This mission is an early attempt at getting to know what some of the resources are [on the moon] that are going to have large implications [for] what we do in the future of [space] explorations," said Scott Horowitz, the exploration chief for NASA, at a news conference in Washington, D.C. The mission will be the first U.S. moon landing in 36 years.

THE Internet is entering its Lego era. Indeed, blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers.

As a result, computer industry innovation is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the place of large, intricate and self-contained programs like Microsoft Word, written and maintained by armies of programmers, smaller companies, with just a handful of developers, are now producing pioneering software and Web-based services. These new services can be delivered directly to PC's or even to cellphones.

Battling Ignorance . . . with Science! – 4/2/06

Bill Nye, the harmless children's edu-tainer known as "The Science Guy," managed to offend a select group of idiot adults in Waco when he suggested that the moon does not emit light...As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own...But don't tell that to the good people of Waco, who were "visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence," according to the Waco Tribune...Nye was in town to participate in McLennan Community College's Distinguished Lecture Series. He gave two lectures on such unfunny and adult topics as global warming, Mars exploration, and energy consumption...But nothing got people as riled as when he brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: "God made two great lights -- the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars."..The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector...At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled "We believe in God!" and left with three children, thus assuring that people across America would read about the incident and conclude that Waco is as nutty as they'd always suspected...

Whale song reveals sophisticated language skills - 3/25/06

Humpback whales use their own syntax – or grammar – in the complex songs they sing, say researchers who have developed a mathematical technique to probe the mysteries of whale song...The team adds that whales are the only other animals beside humans to use hierarchical structure in language, in which phrases are embedded in larger, recurring themes...This concept echoes scientific suggestions from the 1970s, but the new computer analysis claims to confirm this and provides an objective measure of the songs’ structure and complexity...Male humpback whales produce songs that last anywhere from about six to 30 minutes. These vocalisations vary greatly across seasons, and during breeding periods they are thought to help attract female partners. Their eerie sound and patterns have captured the attention of marine biologists for decades... Researcher Ryuji Suzuki stresses whale songs are still a far cry from our own means of expression. He says that the use of terms referring to distinct and sometimes abstract objects appears unique to human language. “We don’t have any evidence of such things in whale songs.”...“We’re still very far from knowing the meaning of whale songs,” he admits.

Daring rescue of whale off Farallones – 12/14/05

A humpback whale freed by divers from a tangle of crab trap lines near the Farallon Islands nudged its rescuers and flapped around in what marine experts said was a rare and remarkable encounter..."I was the first diver in the water, and my heart sank when I saw all the lines wrapped around it," said Moskito, a 40-year-old Pleasanton resident who works with "Great White Adventures," a cage-diving outfit that contracts with Menigoz. "I really didn't think we were going to be able to save it."...Moskito said about 20 crab-pot ropes, which are 240 feet long with weights every 60 feet, were wrapped around the animal. Rope was wrapped at least four times around the tail, the back and the left front flipper, and there was a line in the whale's mouth...The crab pot lines were cinched so tight, Moskito said, that the rope was digging into the animal's blubber and leaving visible cuts...At least 12 crab traps, weighing 90 pounds each, hung off the whale, the divers said. The combined weight was pulling the whale downward, forcing it to struggle mightily to keep its blow- hole out of the water...Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special curved knife. The whale floated passively in the water the whole time, he said, giving off a strange kind of vibration.

"When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me," Moskito said. "It was an epic moment of my life."...When the whale realized it was free, it began swimming around in circles, according to the rescuers. Moskito said it swam to each diver, nuzzled him and then swam to the next one...."It seemed kind of affectionate, like a dog that's happy to see you,'' Moskito said. "I never felt threatened. It was an amazing, unbelievable experience."...Whale experts say it's nice to think that the whale was thanking its rescuers, but nobody really knows what was on its mind..."You hate to anthropomorphize too much, but the whale was doing little dives and the guys were rubbing shoulders with it," Menigoz said. "I don't know for sure what it was thinking, but it's something that I will always remember. It was just too cool."

On Saturday, April 22, the Sharon Historical Society (Sharon, Mass.) invite all to attend a screening of "Hidden Landscapes" - A video documentary by Theodore Timreck...Shrouded in myth and controversy for decades, the mysterious stone ruins found in Eastern North America have now become the focus of a new research initiative that is quite different from the efforts of the past. New, working collaborations between professional scientists, Native historians and the amateur, antiquarian pioneers of stone monument research have brought their perspectives together...Working in partnerships, they have begun to show that many regions and communities in the Northeast may contain an important archeological legacy of monumental landscape architecture with deep roots in the American past.

Chaos = Order: WUSTL physicists make baffling discovery – 4/3/06

According to a computational study conducted by a group of physicists at Washington University in St. Louis, one may create order by introducing disorder...While working on their model — a network of interconnected pendulums, or "oscillators" — the researchers noticed that when driven by ordered forces the various pendulums behaved chaotically and swung out of sync like a group of intoxicated synchronized swimmers. This was unexpected — shouldn't synchronized forces yield synchronized pendulums?...But then came the real surprise: When they introduced disorder — forces were applied at random to each oscillator — the system became ordered and synchronized..."The thing that is counterintuitive is that when you introduce disorder into the system — when the [forces on the pendulums] act at random — the chaos that was present before disappears and there is order," said Sebastian F. Brandt, Washington University physics graduate student in Arts & Sciences and lead author of the study, which appeared in the January 2006 edition of Physical Review Letters.

Study, in a First, Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance – 4/7/06

By reconstructing ancient genes from long-extinct animals, scientists have for the first time demonstrated the step-by-step progression of how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts...The researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, offer a counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells..."The evolution of complexity is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology," said Joseph W. Thornton, professor of biology at the University of Oregon and lead author of the paper. "We wanted to understand how this system evolved at the molecular level. There's no scientific controversy over whether this system evolved. The question for scientists is how it evolved, and that's what our study showed."...Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, "If it would be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."...Discoveries like that announced this week of a fish with limblike fins have filled in the transitions between species. New molecular biology techniques let scientists begin to reconstruct how the processes inside a cell evolved over millions of years.

Footage released by the Mexican air force is further proof of the existence of UFOs, an investigator has said.
The video, filmed by pilots using an infrared camera, shows 11 bright objects moving rapidly in the sky. "We are not alone! This is so weird," one of the pilots can be heard saying after the radar picked up the objects. The Mexican defence ministry confirmed the videotape had been filmed by members of the air force, but did not comment on its content. Mexican UFO investigator Jaime Maussan said that, while there were hundreds of UFO videos, it was the first time one "had the backing of the armed forces". "The armed forces don't perpetuate frauds," he added after showing the footage at a news conference on Tuesday.

Brain Cells Fused with Computer Chip – 03/27/06
The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together...The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons...To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size...They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive..."They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip," said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy...

PANGNIRTUNG, Canada -- Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world...Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages...The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit -- described by one of their leaders as "sentries for the rest of the world" -- say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists expect will spread from the north to the rest of the globe..."These are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned," said Enosik Nashalik, 87, the eldest of male elders in this Inuit village. "We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patterns or the wind, or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed."...

Physics world buzzing over faster than ever particles – 03/2/06
A major physics lab in the U.S. has found a particle, far smaller than any atom, that switches itself back and forth between being a piece of matter and a piece of anti-matter 17 trillion times each second...It has taken 700 people in 20 countries, millions of dollars' worth of custom equipment, vast amounts of energy, and 20 years of work to find this...

The phrase 'artificial intelligence' was first coined by John McCarthy at a conference at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1956, but the concept of artificial, or machine, intelligence is in fact as old as the computer. The computer was, after all, initially developed during the Second World War to break codes that were too hard for humans and required high speed 'machine intelligence'...It was one of the most celebrated of the Second World War code breakers, Alan Turing, a man who many would describe as the inventor of the first modern computer, who proposed in 1950 what has become known as the Turing Test. This simply said that we could consider a machine to be intelligent if its responses in some sort of conversation were indistinguishable from those of a human. It is this proposal that is seen by many not only as the definitive test of machine intelligence but also the point at which today's quest to develop artificial intelligence was born..

CRN Task Force releases 11 key essays on nanotech impacts... KurzweilAI.net hosts discussion forum

The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) today announced its first series of new research papers in which industry experts predict profound impacts of nanotechnology on society. Eleven original essays by members of CRN's Global Task Force appear in the latest issue of the journal Nanotechnology Perceptions, published today, and are also being posted online at KurzweilAI.net, which will host discussions on these vital issues.

From military and security issues to human enhancement, artificial intelligence, and more, these papers give readers a peek under the lid of Pandora's box to see what the future might hold.

Ray Kurzweil, renowned inventor, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, explained, "As the pace of technological advancement rapidly accelerates, it becomes increasingly important to promote knowledgeable and insightful discussion of both promise and peril. I'm very pleased to take part in this effort by including my own essay, and by hosting discussion of these essays on the 'MindX' discussion board on KurzweilAI.net."

Nanotechnology Perceptions is a peer-reviewed academic journal of the Collegium Basilea in Basel, Switzerland. "We jumped at the chance to publish the CRN Task Force essays," said Jeremy Ramsden, editor-in-chief of the journal. "To us, these papers represent world-class thinking about some of the most important challenges that human society will ever face."

In August 2005, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, formed its Global Task Force to study the societal implications of molecular manufacturing, an advanced form of nanotechnology. Bringing together a diverse group of world-class experts from multiple disciplines, CRN is spearheading an historic, collaborative effort to develop comprehensive recommendations for the safe and responsible use of this rapidly emerging technology.

"Our plan from the beginning was to concentrate first on defining the challenges posed by nanotechnology," said Mike Treder, executive director of CRN. "What risks do we really face? How do they relate to each other? What is most important to know in order to cope wisely and effectively with molecular manufacturing?

"Like electricity or computers before it, nanotechnology will bring greatly improved efficiency and productivity in many areas of human endeavor. In its mature form, known as molecular manufacturing, it will have significant impact on almost all industries and all parts of society. Personal nanofactories may offer better built, longer lasting, cleaner, safer, and smarter products for the home, for communications, for medicine, for transportation, for agriculture, and for industry in general.

"However, as a general-purpose technology, molecular manufacturing will be dual-use, meaning that in addition to its civilian applications, it will have military uses as well -- making far more powerful weapons and tools of surveillance. Thus, it represents not only wonderful benefits for humanity, but also grave risks."

"Progress toward developing the technical requirements for desktop molecular manufacturing is advancing rapidly," said Chris Phoenix, CRN's director of research. "These new essays examine many of the radical changes that molecular manufacturing will bring to society. We hope our readers will decide to get involved in the vital work of raising awareness and finding effective solutions to the challenges presented to the world by advanced nanotechnology."

A second collection of essays exploring additional concerns will form the next issue of Nanotechnology Perceptions. Both series are available for publishing or reprint under Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL). The first group of essays are:

1. "Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses" - Ray Kurzweil
2. "Molecular Manufacturing: Too Dangerous to Allow?" - Robert A. Freitas Jr.*
3. "Nano-Guns, Nano-Germs, and Nano-Steel" - Mike Treder
4. "Molecular Manufacturing and 21st Century Policing" - Tom Cowper
5. "The Need For Limits" - Chris Phoenix
6. "Globalization and Open Source Nano Economy" - Giulio Prisco
7. "Cultural Dominants and Differential MNT Uptake" - Damien Broderick
8. "Nanoethics and Human Enhancement" - Patrick Lin & Fritz Allhoff
9. "Strategic Sustainable Brain" - Natasha Vita-More
10. "Is AI Near a Takeoff Point?" - J. Storrs Hall
11. "Singularities and Nightmares: The Range of Our Futures" - David Brin

On Wednesday, 2006 March 29, a total eclipse of the Sun will be visible from within a narrow corridor which traverses half the Earth. The path of the Moon's umbral shadow begins in Brazil and extends across the Atlantic, northern Africa, and central Asia where it ends at sunset in western Mongolia. A partial eclipse will be seen within the much broader path of the Moon's penumbral shadow, which includes the northern two thirds of Africa, Europe, and central Asia. Mid-morning hours depending on your location...lots of maps and info at link above...

Brighter sun adds to fears of climate change – 03/26/06

THE amount of sunshine reaching earth is increasing, accelerating the pace of climate change, scientists have found...A series of independent studies around the world show a significant rise in the amount of sunshine penetrating the atmosphere to be absorbed by the earth’s surface and turned into heat...The research will concern climate researchers who are already predicting a rapid rise in global temperatures due to man-made emissions of so-called greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide...“The enhanced warming we have seen since the 1990s along with phenomena such as the widespread melting of glaciers could well be due to this increased intensity of sunlight compounding the effect of greenhouse gases,” said Professor Martin Wild of the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, Switzerland.

We are all seeing rather less of the Sun, according to scientists who have been looking at five decades of sunlight measurements...They have reached the disturbing conclusion that the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth's surface has been gradually falling...Paradoxically, the decline in sunlight may mean that global warming is a far greater threat to society than previously thought...The effect was first spotted by Gerry Stanhill, an English scientist working in Israel.

Could the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork – some of it hundreds of years old? That is the seemingly incredible thesis of a new documentary, "Rape of the Soul," made not by anti-Catholic bigots, but by devout followers of the Church..."Rape of the Soul" is in theatrical release in major cities, including New York and Los Angeles...The documentary explores the prevalent use of satanic, sexual, occult and anti-Catholic images in historical and contemporary religious artwork. The film also discusses the mysterious acceptance of the artwork at the highest and most trusted levels of the Catholic Church..."Rape of the Soul" is rated R because of the disturbing content involving demonic, violent and sexual imagery...The film contends a major cause of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church could be due to prolonged exposure to sexual and satanic images being incorporated into the religious art...Experts are featured in the film to offer detailed accounts of the subconscious programming effects of the sex and occult images on the human brain and how it promotes sex, Satanism and the occult. Religious education materials, songbooks, children's story books, devotionals and the Sunday Missals all have been found to contain embedded imagery.

One God to Bind Them All - In his new book, Jonathan Kirsch depicts monotheism as inherently violent -3/06

Religious differences fuel many of the world's violent conflicts, detractors and supporters of organized faith often lament in unison...Author Jonathan Kirsch would put a finer point on the charge. He blames the leading monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--for much of history's bloodshed. The reason, he maintains, is monotheism's traditional claim to exclusive possession of absolute truth...Too bad Julian the Apostate, the Roman Empire's last pagan emperor, died young in battle, says Kirsch, author of the newly published "God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism" (Viking). Had Julian lived longer, he might have succeeded in reinstating classical Greco-Roman polytheism, which was marginalized when Emperor Constantine the Great institutionalized Christianity's ascendancy--and world history might have turned out more benign..."Julian is one of the great 'what ifs?' of history," said Kirsch, "Human history is the history of our evolution toward greater individual liberty. I have the nagging feeling that, at least in the West, we might have gotten there faster and in a more direct way had Julian lived."

Mexico's Mayan underworld wonder... TULUM, Mexico (Reuters) --

The ancient Mayan people once believed that Mexico's jungle sinkholes containing crystalline waters were the gateway to the underworld and the lair of a surly rain god who had to be appeased with human sacrifices.Now, the "cenotes", deep sinkholes in limestone that have pools at the bottom, are yielding scientific discoveries including possible life-saving cancer treatments.Divers are dipping into the cenotes, which stud the Yucatan peninsula, to explore a vast underground river system.Hefting air tanks, guidelines and waterproof lamps, they have so far mapped 650 kilometers (405 miles) of channels that form part of a huge subterranean river delta flowing into the Caribbean sea, and they are only just starting.Scientists investigating the network of caverns and galleries, formed by rainwater passing through porous limestone, have found a wealth of archaeological relics and prehistoric animal bones.They also have identified dozens of new aquatic species specially adapted to the extreme environmental conditions which could have medical applications.

Ottawa professor admits theory is way out there...OTTAWA - A prominent University of Ottawa science professor says what we know about global warming is wrong -- that stars, not greenhouse gases, are heating up the Earth.Jan Veizer says high-energy rays from distant parts of space are smashing into our atmosphere in ways that make our planet go through warm and cool cycles.The retired professor (he still holds a research chair and supervises grad students and post-doctoral fellows) knows that to challenge the accepted climate-change theory can lead to a nasty fight. It's a politically and economically loaded topic. Yet, he is speaking out -- a bit nervously -- about his published research.

Astronomers report an unprecedented elongated double helix nebula near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, using observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The part of the nebula the astronomers observed stretches 80 light years in length. The research is published March 16 in the journal Nature..."We see two intertwining strands wrapped around each other as in a DNA molecule," said Mark Morris, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, and lead author. "Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm. Most nebulae are either spiral galaxies full of stars or formless amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas — space weather. What we see indicates a high degree of order."...The double helix nebula is approximately 300 light years from the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way. (The Earth is more than 25,000 light years from the black hole at the galactic center.)

Singing frog's 'ultrasonic croak' – 3/15/2006
A rare Chinese frog has entered the record books as the first amphibian known to communicate using ultrasound...Until now, only a few mammals - such as bats, whales and dolphins - have been found to use the very high frequency sound to contact each other...The frog may have evolved the mechanism to be heard above the babble of running water, scientists tell this week's edition of the journal Nature...The frog lives alongside fast-flowing streams in Anhui Province, China...During the rainy season, the water level rises dramatically, creating a noise that drowns out the calls of many small animals...Amolops tormotus can be heard above the din by producing ultrasonic (greater than 20 kilohertz) calls beyond the spectrum of the background hubbub...The Chinese frog's vocalisation is very unusual. Most frog calls go either up or down only; but A. tormotus uses multiple upward and downward sweeps of notes more in keeping with the sounds made by birds, whales or primates.

Thanks to Irish website IrelandsEye.com, millions can go Leprechaun spotting on St. Patrick's Day from their couches. IrelandsEye.com has a webcam installed in an Irish field that connects to a robust server in anticipation of a rush of visitors to glimpse the mythical creature...The Leprechaun Watch has worldwide appeal year round. However, the traffic jumps one hundredfold on March 17. The webcam, connected to the Internet via a cell phone, overlooks a fairy ring in County Tipperary, Ireland. The area is reputed to be a haunt for leprechauns, sheeries, pookas and other Irish fairies. The fairy ring, a pre-historic earthwork circle, is in the Glen of Cloongallon, in the townland of Ballyseanrath, near the town of Thurles. The trees around the perimeter are chestnut, with one magnificent oak tree. Thought to be over 600 years old, the fairy ring has a magical reputation. Saved from the axe in Tudor times by a "skeaghshee" or tree spirit, it now hosts a camera in a cavity in its trunk and a branch supports an antenna! A dolmen, a group of six large standing stones topped by a capstone, commands the middle of the ring...Mr. Murphy commented, "What better place to see a Leprechaun than in an enchanted glen beside a fairy ring containing sacred stones and a magical tree?"

The service will be held on the waters of Nootka Sound, which became the orca's adopted home...Natives, who believe Luna embodies the spirit of their late chief Ambrose Maquinna, will hold a goodbye for everyone who knew him, Federal Fisheries officer Ed Thorburn said yesterday..."The Mowachaht-Muchalaht band is holding a passing ceremony into the next world," Mr. Thorburn said...Luna spent the past five years off Gold Creek, located on the west coast of Vancouver Island, after wandering away from his pod off Washington state...Members of the Mowachaht-Muchalaht First Nation believe Luna was the reincarnation of chief Maquinna, who had predicted he would return as a killer whale. Shortly after the chief passed away, Luna appeared.

Dolphins have long become an inspiration for numerous authors of most kooky theories. One of the latest theories was put forward by Simon Clark, an astronomer at the Kennedy Space Center. He maintains that dolphins are indigenous to one of the moons of Jupiter. “Next to humans, dolphins could be the most intelligent creatures in our solar system so forget ‘the little green men,” said Clark at a press conference in Florida this January... NASA’s Galileo noticed some movement under a thick ice layer of Europa, the Jovian moon, while flying past it at an altitude of 400 kilometers several years ago. The probe’s sound sensors reportedly detected a whistle coming right out of the ice cover. Until recently NASA has kept all data pertaining to the Galileo Interstellar Mission under wraps. The details of the findings are still coming through...“Scientists were just amazed at the results of a computer analysis of the data. The frequency of the sounds coming from the moon’s ocean was found to be equal to that of the sounds produced by dolphins on Earth! The error margin is 0.001%,” said Clark.

"Must-See Movie" Improved!! – 3/15/2006
One of the most popular short films on the Internet is Productive Nanosystems: from Molecules to Superproducts. The four-minute computer animation goes inside a nanofactory and demonstrates key steps in a process to convert simple molecules into a billion-CPU laptop computer...Now, that "must-see" movie, produced by engineer John Burch and nanotechnologist K. Eric Drexler, has been updated with improved visuals, mood music, and subtle sound effects...Please note that the movie file is 47 MB (small format) or 75 MB (large format). It might take a while to download, but it's definitely worth it...UPDATE: The new version of the nanofactory movie is also available from Google in streaming video.

NASA's Cassini Discovers Potential Liquid Water on Enceladus – 3/9/2006

NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon..."We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," said Dr. Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms."

ISLA TIGRE, Panama (Reuters) - When Kuna Indian medicine man Mandiuliguina Flores speaks, everyone listens. For his dark-skinned indigenous audience, the albino shaman's milky white skin gives him special powers....In a quirk of history and genetics, Panama's Kuna tribe has one of the world's highest occurrences of albinos, revered as an elite group that the Kuna call "the children of the moon."...Kuna mythology puts albinos -- who have pale skin and white or ginger hair due to pigment deficiency -- at the heart of creation, teaching that God sent his albino son to Earth to teach humans how to live...Even today, the Kuna see albinos as highly intelligent and some even claim they have supernatural powers.

The rainbow serpent, a mythical creature widespread throughout the continent of Australia, is said to live in water...A closer look at it reveals that these great serpent-like creatures, usually associated with the rainbow, seem to bear the closest resemblance to the Chinese mythical dragon...The rainbow serpent is commonly depicted in its terrifying animal form, with a serpent-like body, kangaroo or horse-like head, crocodile teeth, ears or crown of feathers, long, spiked body and fish tail...Similarly, the form of the Chinese dragon is also a compound of species: the body of a serpent with the scales of a fish, the claws of an eagle, and the horns of a deer...There are also much deeper connotations of the two figures which suggest the links between myths in Australia and China.

Lab Heats Particles Past Star's Interior – 3/10/06

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- A particle accelerator at Sandia National Laboratories has heated a swarm of charged particles to a record 2 billion degrees Kelvin, a temperature beyond that of a star's interior...Scientists working with Sandia's Z machine said the feat also revealed a new phenomenon that could eventually make future nuclear fusion power plants smaller and cheaper to operate than if the plants relied on previously known physics..."At first, we were disbelieving," said Chris Deeney, head of the project. "We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result and not an 'Oops'!"...Sandia's experiment, which held up in tests and computer modeling in the 14 months since it was first done, was outlined in the Feb. 24 edition of Physical Review Letters. The authors also presented a theoretical explanation of what happened by Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines, a physicist at Imperial College in London....The achievement will not mean fusion in the near future, but it's another step toward that goal, said Neal Singer, a Sandia spokesman.

I, Nanobot – 3/10/2006

Scientists are on the verge of breaking the carbon barrier -- creating artificial life and changing forever what it means to be human. And we're not ready, predicts materials scientist Alan H. Goldstein...He predicts, and warns about, the coming elimination of the barrier between living and nonliving materials with the emergence of "animats" (living materials) -- nanobiotechnology devices that can survive and function inside human beings, derive energy from biological metabolism, and copy themselves by molecular self-assembly...When that moment happens in the near future, it very likely may be beyond our control: "A nanobiotechnology device that is smart enough to circulate through the body hunting viruses or cancer cells is, by definition, smart enough to exchange information with that human body. This means, under the right conditions, the 'device' could evolve beyond its original function."

He has formulated the three Laws of Nanobotics:
1. The fusion of nanotechnology and biotechnology, now called nanobiotechnology, will result in the complete elimination of the barrier between living and nonliving materials.
2. It is not possible to ensure that devices created using the techniques of nanobiotechnology will only transmit molecular information to the target system.
3. The carbon barrier will be eliminated when humans create the first synthetic molecular device capable of changing the state of a living system via direct, intentional transfer of specific chemical information from one to the other.

The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics is being established with grants of $18.2 million, largely from semiconductor companies with an interest in breakthroughs in spintronics, which holds promise in minimizing power consumption for next-generation consumer electronics.

The device could provide a way for paralysed patients to operate computers, or for amputees to operate electronically controlled artificial limbs. But it also has non-medical applications, such as in the computer games and entertainment industries...The machine makes it possible to type messages onto a computer screen by mentally controlling the movement of a cursor. A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain, known as an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around..."It's a very strange sensation," says Gabriel Curio at Charité. "And you can understand from the crowds watching that the potential is huge."

Monkey see, monkey hel p: Is it altruism? – 3/6/2006
Would you run into a burning building to save a stranger's life? Would a chimpanzee do the same?

Acts of altruism -- helping an unrelated creature with no apparent benefit to yourself -- have long been an evolutionary puzzle because the behavior seemingly contradicts the notion of ''survival of the fittest." Until now, humans were the only members of the animal kingdom with a proven record of behaving altruistically....But a study published in the journal Science last week suggests that both human children and chimpanzees have altruistic tendencies...The study's lead author, Felix Warneken, said the study suggests that rudimentary helping behavior evolved before humans split from chimpanzees about six million years ago...''At least this shows us that some rudimentary form of helping was already present in our evolutionary ancestor," said Warneken, a developmental psychologist from Germany who is on a fellowship at Harvard University. ''It clarifies something about the evolutionary trajectory. It tells us what we are already prepared for biologically, and what comes mainly from learning."

When Christopher Columbus crashed into the Bahamas, he had no way to know that there were in the Americas more population -- estimated 100 million people -- than in all of Europe and they had been here longer. Europeans saw a pristine wilderness full of guileless savages...According to Charles Mann's 2005 book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus," we were all taught wrong in grade school. Archeology and new scholarship has painstakingly sought out the true facts amid the myths about American Indians. Mann does a superb job of answering the questions...For example, where did the population that once lined the Atlantic coast go? Hundreds of European ships touched the coast before the Pilgrims landed in 1620 on the site of a Patuxet village. The coast was a cemetery 200 miles long. The killer was smallpox, for which the American natives had no immunity. The epidemic killed cultures as well as people

A group of German scientists has deciphered the meaning of one of the most spectacular archeological discoveries in recent years: The mystery-shrouded sky disc of Nebra was used as an advanced astronomical clock...The purpose of the 3,600 year-old sky disc of Nebra, which caused a world-wide sensation when it was brought to the attention of the German public in 2002, is no longer a matter of speculation...A group of German scholars who studied this archaeological gem has discovered evidence which suggests that the disc was used as a complex astronomical clock for the harmonization of solar and lunar calendars..."This is a clear expansion of what we knew about the meaning and function of the sky disc," said archeologist Harald Meller.

Tune in, turn on . . . evolve? – 2/28/2006

On the walls of dozens of caves in southern France and northern Spain lie some of the most majestic works of art ever painted. Drawn 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, the paintings have puzzled anthropologists since they were discovered more than four decades ago...Where did this astonishing display of talent come from? Why did these prehistoric societies decide to paint these scenes in such remote locations? And what inspired them to paint the strange array of bisons, horses and therianthropes (part animal, part man)???A scientific consensus of sorts has finally emerged on one of those questions: Although there are still dissenters, a majority of anthropologists now champion the theory that the paintings in Europe were the work of shamans, and in part the product of trance states, likely induced by psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in some species of mushrooms).

Stealth sharks to patrol the high seas – 3/1/2006

IMAGINE getting inside the mind of a shark: swimming silently through the ocean, sensing faint electrical fields, homing in on the trace of a scent, and navigating through the featureless depths for hour after hour...We may soon be able to do just that via electrical probes in the shark's brain. Engineers funded by the US military have created a neural implant designed to enable a shark's brain signals to be manipulated remotely, controlling the animal's movements, and perhaps even decoding what it is feeling...That team is among a number of groups around the world that have gained ethical approval to develop implants that can monitor and influence the behaviour of animals, from sharks and tuna to rats and monkeys...More controversially, the Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails. By remotely guiding the sharks' movements, they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted.

A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth...The recently discovered Mimivirus is much more genetically complex than all previously known viruses, not to mention a number of bacteria, that it seems to call for a dramatic redrawing of the tree of life.

THE ISLAND of Iona off the west coast of Scotland is steeped in ancient lore and mystery. Known internationally as the monastic birthplace of Scottish religion, it is a place of pilgrimage and deep spirituality...St Columba landed there in 563 AD with 13 followers and established a monastery. This isolated island, off the south-western tip of Mull, was soon to become the intellectual powerhouse of the medieval world...There are those who say that Columba didn't choose this island by accident, but that it is a place which has magnetically attracted spiritual seekers since before the birth of Christ. To them this island is a special place thought to have been the repository of many ancient items and many ancient mysteries...They believe that Iona once housed an incredible library and held the most extraordinary books known to man. Think Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or the recent international best-seller The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason and consider that a hunt for hidden knowledge and elusive manuscripts could actually be very real...

These creatures are not Martians...They are Earthlings, but these Earthlings might help you understand Martians better...Or that's what Jonathan Trent thinks..Trent is an astrobiologist — someone who studies life in outer space — and to understand life in space, he's been studying extreme life forms on Earth. Creatures that live in the hottest, coldest, darkest, deepest places on the planet. Creatures that live where scientists once thought no life could survive...Life does survive in extreme environments on Earth. That suggests that life probably survives in extreme conditions on other planets. That further suggests that alien life probably looks more like extreme Earth life than, say, green humans with antennas..."Our imagination is greatly expanded by considering what exists on Earth," he says. The typical image of aliens "doesn't even do justice to the diversity of life on our own planet."

Molecular DNA Switch Found to be the Same for All Life The molecular machinery that starts the process by which a biological cell divides into two identical daughter cells apparently worked so well early on that evolution has conserved it across the eons in all forms of life on Earth.

Psilocybin Mushrooms being used in medicine again. Profound results. NEW YORK (AP) -- People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks -- all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s

360 Degree Panorama of the Moon Now, you can take a 360 Degree view of the moon and see what the astronauts experienced.

Drought threatens the Amazon Basin Extreme conditions felt for second year running, Record sea temperatures and illegal logging blamed.

Connect the Quantum Dots A new study, published today in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has significant implications for the design of disease markers and the development of chemoreceptors used in human biomedical ...

Picture of the Sun in three colors of ultraviolet light Since only active regions emit significant amounts of energetic ultraviolet light, most of the Sun appears dark. The colorful portions glow spectacularly, pinpointing the Sun's hottest and most violent regions.

Psilocybin Mushrooms being used in medicine again. Profound results. NEW YORK (AP) -- People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks -- all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s

Earliest black holes bent the 'laws' of physics Black holes in the early universe may have circumvented a law of physics to grow rapidly to colossal size. The finding could solve a longstanding puzzle over why such massive objects appeared so soon after the universe began.

UFO Research: Findings vs. Facts "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." Here are some facts.

Students Develop Sensor Network To Monitor Forest Four college students have developed a network of wireless sensors to monitor forests in Romania for poaching, flooding, and fires. The application sends out alerts based on data about the humidity, sound, temperature, and carbon monoxide levels.

DNA extracted from a 43,000 year old mammoth While not quite like Jurassic park, Researchers where able to extract DNA from a bone from a 43,000 year old Siberian mammoth. With this information, scientists are were able to determine that mammoths did indeed have different color furs.

The Quest For The Metal Library A system of tunnels and caves beneath Ecuador and Peru is reputed to hold an ancient treasure-house of artefacts including two libraries, one containing inscribed metal books and the other storing tablets of crystal.

The Politics of Psychedelic Research Podcast: John Gilmore talks about the politics involved in legitimate psychedelic research at a conference in the Netherlands.

Reason to Believe A leading geneticist argues that science can lead to faith.

List of "Lost" words in English "Lost words" are words that were removed from dictionary since they were assumed to be out-dated or unfit for modern English.Here's a comprehensive list.

MIT scientists create visionary optic fibers In a radical departure from conventional lens-based optics, MIT scientists have developed a sophisticated optical system made of mesh-like webs of light-detecting fibers.

13 things that do not make sense A list of 13 things that don't make any scientific sense.

Want to see what a Stem Cell looks like? It's pretty amazing if you haven't seen it before.

Molecular DNA Switch Found to be the Same for All Life
The molecular machinery that starts the process by which a biological cell divides into two identical daughter cells apparently worked so well early on that evolution has conserved it across the eons in all forms of life on Earth.

Psilocybin Mushrooms being used in medicine again. Profound results.
NEW YORK (AP) -- People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks -- all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s

360 Degree Panorama of the Moon
Now, you can take a 360 Degree view of the moon and see what the astronauts experienced.

Drought threatens the Amazon Basin
Extreme conditions felt for second year running, Record sea temperatures and illegal logging blamed.

Connect the Quantum Dots
A new study, published today in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has significant implications for the design of disease markers and the development of chemoreceptors used in human biomedical ...

Picture of the Sun in three colors of ultraviolet light
Since only active regions emit significant amounts of energetic ultraviolet light, most of the Sun appears dark. The colorful portions glow spectacularly, pinpointing the Sun's hottest and most violent regions.

Psilocybin Mushrooms being used in medicine again. Profound results.
NEW YORK (AP) -- People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks -- all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s

Earliest black holes bent the 'laws' of physics
Black holes in the early universe may have circumvented a law of physics to grow rapidly to colossal size. The finding could solve a longstanding puzzle over why such massive objects appeared so soon after the universe began.

UFO Research: Findings vs. Facts
"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." Here are some facts.

Students Develop Sensor Network To Monitor Forest
Four college students have developed a network of wireless sensors to monitor forests in Romania for poaching, flooding, and fires. The application sends out alerts based on data about the humidity, sound, temperature, and carbon monoxide levels.

DNA extracted from a 43,000 year old mammoth
While not quite like Jurassic park, Researchers where able to extract DNA from a bone from a 43,000 year old Siberian mammoth. With this information, scientists are were able to determine that mammoths did indeed have different color furs.

The Quest For The Metal Library
A system of tunnels and caves beneath Ecuador and Peru is reputed to hold an ancient treasure-house of artefacts including two libraries, one containing inscribed metal books and the other storing tablets of crystal.

The Politics of Psychedelic Research
Podcast: John Gilmore talks about the politics involved in legitimate psychedelic research at a conference in the Netherlands.

Reason to Believe
A leading geneticist argues that science can lead to faith.

List of "Lost" words in English
"Lost words" are words that were removed from dictionary since they were assumed to be out-dated or unfit for modern English.Here's a comprehensive list.

MIT scientists create visionary optic fibers
In a radical departure from conventional lens-based optics, MIT scientists have developed a sophisticated optical system made of mesh-like webs of light-detecting fibers.

13 things that do not make sense
A list of 13 things that don't make any scientific sense.

Want to see what a Stem Cell looks like?
It's pretty amazing if you haven't seen it before.