TWN - The Weirding News

TODAY'S TOP ALTNEWS HEADLINES

2013-07-03T15:09:00.002-04:00

FOR FUGITIVES, NOT HEARTTHROBS

Where To Flee When You're Wanted

guardian.co.uk
Here's everything you need to know about extradition treaties.

THE SR-71 BLACKBIRD

How To Fly The World's Fastest Plane

bbc.com
It was a plane which flew at the edge of space; so high that most other jet engines would seize because of the lack of air. A plane that flew so fast that its airframe heated it actually grew during flight. A plane that, if needed, could outrun missiles launched to bring it down.

APPS

How To Never Lose Your Photos

picturelife.com
Picturelife makes backing up and accessing your most important photos almost as easy as taking them. Even Edward Snowden would have trouble getting them.

ELECTRICITY IS FOR N00BS

The Surprising, Ingenious Amish Gadget Culture

buzzfeed.com
Amish tradition disallows electricity, cars, and television. It shuns modern lifestyle, culture, and values. But they aren’t total Luddites — in fact, the Amish community has developed a tech gadget culture all its own.

CATCH YOUR DEATH

The Worst Meal In America

foxnews.com
Forget the burger and fries clogging your arteries. The "Big Catch" fish platter at Long John Silver's is being called the "Worst Restaurant Meal in America."

TODAY'S TOP ALTNEWS HEADLINES

2012-12-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

Meet the weeds that Monsanto can't beat

Instead of the supposed revolution in agriculture that Monsato's GM seeds were meant to bring, the opposite effect has occurred – a rise in herbicide use

When Monsanto revolutionised agriculture with a line of genetically engineered seeds, the promise was that the technology would lower herbicide use – because farmers would have to spray less. In fact, as Washington State University researcher Chuch Benbrook has shown, just the opposite happened.

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Mayan apocalypse: songs and a shrug at French village in media glare

As the village bells struck noon, the moment at which the Mayans had supposedly predicted the world would end, Sylvain Durif was calmly playing the panpipes for a vast crowd of jostling camera crews. "I am Oriana, I embody the energy of cosmic Christ," he said. "When I was five I was abducted by a flying saucer belonging to the Virgin Mary. I'm here to get my message to the world, that there will be a regeneration.".

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Mysterious Attacks Leave Livestock Earless in Kentucky

An unknown animal is attacking, but not eating, livestock in Kentucky, leaving many of the victims with gnawed or detached ears.

According to WAVE News, the attacks have been ongoing for several weeks in Shelby County, Ky. At least five goats have had to be put to sleep due to their injuries, and a goat named Polka-dot has been left with just one ear.

Kevin Cox, the local farmer who owns Polka-dot, has also had several of his bulls attacked, he told the news organization.

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Hacking the Human Brain: The Next Domain of Warfare

It’s been fashionable in military circles to talk about cyberspace as a “fifth domain” for warfare, along with land, space, air and sea. But there’s a sixth and arguably more important warfighting domain emerging: the human brain.

This new battlespace is not just about influencing hearts and minds with people seeking information. It’s about involuntarily penetrating, shaping, and coercing the mind in the ultimate realization of Clausewitz’s definition of war: compelling an adversary to submit to one’s will. And the most powerful tool in this war is brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies, which connect the human brain to devices.

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Seeing God in the Third Millennium

There are many carefully documented accounts in the medical literature of intense, life-altering religious experience in epileptic seizures. Hallucinations of overwhelming intensity, sometimes accompanied by a sense of bliss and a strong feeling of the numinous, can occur especially with the so-called "ecstatic" seizures that may occur in temporal lobe epilepsy. Though such seizures may be brief, they can lead to a fundamental reorientation, a metanoia, in one's life.

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Your Alarm Clock May Be Hazardous to Your Health

One overlooked culprit in the world’s obesity epidemic may be the alarm clock, according to Till Roenneberg, a professor at the University of Munich’s Institute of Medical Psychology.

He studies “social jet lag,” a term he coined, perhaps not surprisingly, on an airplane. But unlike the jet lag you get from shifting time zones, social jet lag is the chronic clash between what our bodies need (more sleep) and what our lives demand (being on time). And his research suggests that it’s playing havoc with our biological clocks.

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Do Humans Have a Biological Stopwatch?

When we witness the passage of time, according to noted physicist Paul Davies, we are actually observing how the “later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember.” In that sense time is like a movie: We are seeing slightly altered images playing in rapid succession.

That might explain why we perceive time as moving forward, but it fails to account for why we often perceive time moving at varying speeds. Why does it speed up when we’re having fun, but slow down when we’re bored? Most of us are fairly good at measuring short time intervals—seconds, minutes—but neuroscientists aren’t sure how we do it.

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Fit for Flight? Space Tourism Lacks Medical Standards

The rise of space tourism is going to bring a new headache to doctors' doors: whether or not to approve their patients for spaceflight. Worse, a new paper cautions, there is no established protocol in place to judge a person fit for making the trip.

The new study stops short of suggesting rigid regulation, saying that too much of it would hurt the space tourism industry before it even gets off the ground. Rather, the researchers encourage doctors to "consider developing a resource file for future reference.".

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California meteorite called rare, speedy

DAVIS, Calif., Dec. 20 (UPI) -- A meteorite that lit up the sky over California last spring was fast, rare and traveled a highly eccentric orbital route to get to Earth, scientists say.

A 70-member international team has published its findings in the journal Science about the cosmic object that created a fireball over the Sierra foothills in Northern California.

The meteorite that fell April 21 was a carbonaceous chondrite, the rarest type known to hit Earth, and was made up of of cosmic dust and presolar materials that helped form the planets in the earliest age of the solar system, they said.

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Mexico's war on cartels made drug crisis worse, says new government

The fracturing of Mexico's organised crime syndicates by a government-led crackdown on drug cartels has created between 60 and 80 new trafficking gangs, according to the nation's attorney general – far more than were active six years ago.

Speaking on Mexican radio on Tuesday, the attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, said former president Felipe Calderón's efforts to stamp out drug trafficking by going after the kingpins had only succeeded in splintering the gangs, spawning many smaller and more dangerous criminal syndicates.

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TODAY'S TOP ALTNEWS HEADLINES

2012-12-22T00:00:00.000-05:00

Prescription drugs 'orphan' children in eastern Kentucky

This area of eastern Kentucky is known for lush, green hillsides and white picket fences. It is a place where bluegrass music may be heard trailing off when a car passes by, where "downtown" is a two-block stretch of quaint shops.

Life here may seem simple, but a darkness has been quietly nestling itself into the community.

"Rockcastle County is averaging one drug-related death per week," said Nancy Hale, an anti-drug activist and educator. "When your county is a little over 16,000 people and you're losing a person a week ... you're losing a whole generation."

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December 21 2012

Government seeks to shut down NSA wiretapping lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO, California—Warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency began as a Bush-era program in October 2001; in 2008, the government essentially allowed the practice in the FISA Amendments Act. The same year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed lawsuits challenging the surveillance.

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December 21 2012

9/11 trial: Any mention of torture is classified, military judge rules

The military judge in the 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others granted a government request to make all mention of alleged torture in the court classified. The defense called the ruling 'shameful.'

In a significant victory for government prosecutors, the military judge presiding over the trial of accused 911 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has granted a government request to treat as classified any testimony or discussion about the alleged torture of Mr. Mohammed and others during CIA interrogations.

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Hunting Down Poachers with War on Terror Tech, Funded by Google

With $5 million from the search giant, the World Wildlife Fund is deploying unarmed drones to track and hunt down wildlife poachers.

When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) wanted to fight animal poachers--illegal hunters of wildlife--they decided to bring in an unorthodox weapon: Drones. But these drones were different from the killer Predators of public imagination. Instead, they were unarmed, superlightweight, and users launch them by throwing them into the air--in fact, they are heavily modified model aircraft. After negotiations, Nepal was chosen as a pilot site for the wildlife drones. First launched in mid-2012, the WWF drones offered a new, experimental method of stopping poachers.

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Click, print, shoot: Downloadable guns possible (Update)

Downloading a gun's design plans to your computer, building it on a three-dimensional printer and firing it minutes later. No background checks, no questions asked.

Sound far-fetched? It's not. And that is disquieting for U.S. gun control advocates.

At least one group, called Defense Distributed, is claiming to have created downloadable weapon parts that can be built using the increasingly popular new generation of printer that uses plastics and other materials to create 3-D objects with moving parts.

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China researchers link obesity to bacteria

Chinese researchers have identified a bacteria which may cause obesity, according to a new paper suggesting diets that alter the presence of microbes in humans could combat the condition.

Researchers in Shanghai found that mice bred to be resistant to obesity even when fed high-fat foods became excessively overweight when injected with a kind of human bacteria and subjected to a rich diet.

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Wallace's century-old map of natural world updated

Until today, Alfred Russell Wallace's century old map from 1876 has been the backbone for our understanding of global biodiversity. Thanks to advances in modern technology and data on more than 20,000 species, scientists from University of Copenhagen have now produced a next generation map depicting the organisation of life on Earth. Published online in Science Express today, the new map provides fundamental information regarding the diversity of life on our planet and is of major significance for future biodiversity research.

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Hawaiian Islands are dissolving, study says

Someday, Oahu's Koolau and Waianae mountains will be reduced to nothing more than a flat, low-lying island like Midway.

But erosion isn't the biggest culprit. Instead, scientists say, the mountains of Oahu are actually dissolving from within.

"We tried to figure out how fast the island is going away and what the influence of climate is on that rate," said Brigham Young University geologist Steve Nelson. "More material is dissolving from those islands than what is being carried off through erosion.".

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Human cloning 'within 50 years'

Sir John Gurdon, whose work cloning frogs in the 1950s and 60s led to the later creation of Dolly the sheep by Edinburgh scientists in 1996, said that progression to human cloning could happen within half a century.

Although any attempt to clone an entire human would raise a host of complex ethical issues, the biologist claimed people would soon overcome their concerns if the technique became medically useful.

In-vitro fertilisation was regarded with extreme suspicion when it was first developed but became widely accepted after the birth of Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby", in 1978, he explained.

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Teeth reveal migration patterns of ancient humans

A team of dental physical scientists have been using x-ray diffraction to study the development of children's teeth in order to track migration patterns of our ancestors.

The team has been using the festively-named XMaS facility (X-ray Magnetic Scattering) at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble to perform detailed analysis of tooth structure and composition. The work will make it possible to re-interpret archaeological records of ancient human migrations and may also help scientists to regrow human teeth lost due to disease or age.

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Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion

While it is a painful truism that brutality and violence are at least as old as humanity, so, it seems, is caring for the sick and disabled.

And some archaeologists are suggesting a closer, more systematic look at how prehistoric people — who may have left only their bones — treated illness, injury and incapacitation. Call it the archaeology of health care.

The case that led Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham of Australian National University in Canberra to this idea is that of a profoundly ill young man who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now northern Vietnam and was buried, as were others in his culture, at a site known as Man Bac.

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Saudi Arabia Stakes a Claim on the Nile

After draining four-fifths of its massive underground aquifer for unsustainable agriculture, the Saudi Kingdom turns to verdant Ethiopia.

The cows appear on the horizon like a mirage. Drive about a hundred miles (160 kilometers) through the Arabian Desert southeast from Riyadh, and you will come across one of the world's largest herds of dairy cattle. Some 40,000 Friesian cows survive in one of the driest places on the planet, with temperatures regularly reaching 110°F (43°C).

The cows live in six giant air-conditioned sheds, shrouded in a mist that keeps them cool. They churn out 53 million gallons (200 million liters) of milk a year, which heads off down the highway in a constant stream of tankers.

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How Will the Wetlands Respond to Climate Change?

In a tidal marsh on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, dozens of transparent enclosures jut above the reeds and grasses, looking like high-tech pods seeded by an alien spacecraft. Barely audible over the buzz of insects, motors power whirring fans, bathing the plants inside the chambers with carbon dioxide gas.

To scientists at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Maryland, it’s the marsh of the future, a series of unusual experiments to simulate the effects of climate change and water pollution on a vital ecosystem. “What we’re doing out here is studying plant processes to predict the conditions of wetlands like this one—and tidal wetlands everywhere—in about 100 years,” Patrick Megonigal, a scientist at the center, says as he strides a boardwalk stretching into the 166-acre marsh.

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We and the ancient Mayans share the same environmental concerns

We can (probably) ignore the Mayans' prediction of the end of the world, but the way their society collapsed must be a lesson

According to the ancient Mayan calendar, on 21 December, 2012, the 13th baktun – a calendrical measure equivalent to 144,000 days – will conclude as the next one commences. Many have interpreted this epochal transition from one era of human civilisation to another as a harbinger of apocalypse. Others believe that the turning of the Mayan calendar will mark a qualitative shift in the human relationship with the cosmos.

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When the Air Force Wanted to Nuke the Moon

The American reaction to Sputnik was diverse. Laymen and aerospace professionals alike were divided; some were unthreatened by the Soviet feat while others were fearful, eager to see national programs fast tracked to match the adversary in the new realm of space.

United States Air Force Physicist Leonard Reiffel had a more drastic reaction. In 1958, he published a report that proposed nuking the moon.

The motivation for detonating a nuclear device, Reiffel wrote, "is clearly threefold: scientific, military and political." The report, innocuously titled A Study of Lunar Research Flights, focuses almost exclusively on the scientific benefits from such a mission.

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TODAY'S TOP ALTNEWS HEADLINES

2012-12-21T00:00:00.000-05:00

Humans Changing Saltiness of the Seas

When you hear about climate change it's most often about melting glaciers and sea ice, increasing frequency of heatwaves and powerful storms. Maybe, just maybe, you'll hear about the acidification of the oceans too. What you don't hear about is the saltiness of the seas. But that's changing too, according to a new piece of research just published in Geophysical Research Letters (see the abstract and figures).

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Why are the world's older trees disappearing?

Gloriously grand, gnarly and twisted, big old trees are the kings of the forest, providing food and shelter for humans and animals since the dawn of time.

And they make pretty nifty places to build treehouses too!

But now scientists say these ancient giants are under threat. According to a report published recently in the journal Science, death rates have increased alarmingly among trees between 100 and 300 years old.

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Sneering at those who believe in the Mayan apocalypse while counting down to End Times

Today, the Guardian guffaws in the faces of those "very silly people" who believe that, according to Mayan prophecy, the world will end this Friday.

You know what? The Guardian's mocking of dumb foreigners for believing the world is about to curl up and die would be way more convincing if the Guardian itself hadn't for the past four years been publishing a countdown to the end of the world. Yes, that's right, the same paper that sniffily sneers at the "idiocy" of Mayan-obsessed Ruskies and Chinese is doing its very own, supposedly scientific (ha ha) countdown to when there will be "irreversible climate change" leading to a "disaster" that will "clearly threaten human civilisation". That's a fancy way of saying "when the world will end".

Where the Mayan prophecy (which doesn't actually exist) at least gave us a few thousand years to prepare for the end of the world, the Guardian has given us a mere 100 months.

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Mayan apocalypse: End of the world, or a new beginning?

One in 10 of us is said to be anxious that 21 December marks the end of the world. The Ancient Mayans predicted this doomsday, and the press is eating it up. But where are all the believers?

That the world will end in 2012 is the most widely-disseminated doomsday tale in human history, thanks to the internet, Hollywood and an ever-eager press corps.

Recent hurricanes, unrest in the Middle East, solar flares, mystery planets about to collide with us - all "proof" of what the ancient Mayans knew would come to pass on 21 December 2012.

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MIT researchers discover a new kind of magnetism

Following up on earlier theoretical predictions, MIT researchers have now demonstrated experimentally the existence of a fundamentally new kind of magnetic behavior, adding to the two previously known states of magnetism.

Ferromagnetism — the simple magnetism of a bar magnet or compass needle — has been known for centuries. In a second type of magnetism, antiferromagnetism, the magnetic fields of the ions within a metal or alloy cancel each other out. In both cases, the materials become magnetic only when cooled below a certain critical temperature. The prediction and discovery of antiferromagnetism — the basis for the read heads in today’s computer hard disks — won Nobel Prizes in physics for Louis Neel in 1970 and for MIT professor emeritus Clifford Shull in 1994.

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'The idea we live in a simulation isn't science fiction'

The idea that we live in a simulation is just science fiction, isn't it?

There is a famous argument that we probably do live in a simulation. The idea is that in future, humans will be able to simulate entire universes quite easily. And given the vastness of time ahead, the number of these simulations is likely to be huge. So if you ask the question: 'do we live in the one true reality or in one of the many simulations?', the answer, statistically speaking, is that we're more likely to be living in a simulation.

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The astonishing maps that reveal how our brain organises everything we see

Scientists have put together the first ever map of how the brain organises the thousands of images that come flooding in through our eyes every day.

A team at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see.

To illustrate their findings, they have created the first map of how the brain organises these categories across the cortex.

The result — achieved through computational models of brain imaging data collected while test subjects watched hours of video clips — is what researchers call 'a continuous semantic space'.

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Curators discover first recordings of Christmas Day

Curators at the National Museum of London have discovered what they believe to be the first ever recordings of a family Christmas.

They were made 110 years ago by the Wall family who lived in New Southgate in North London.

There are 24 clear recordings on wax cylinders which were made using a phonograph machine between 1902 and 1917.

Music curators say the sound quality of the music recorded is outstanding.

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Revealed: Rudolph Really Did Have a Red Nose

Most people know Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose — but why? Medical researchers say they've now found the answer.

The secret to Rudolph's rosy schnozzle is the dense network of blood vessels in his nose. Reindeer, it seems, have 25 percent more capillaries carrying red, oxygen-rich blood in their nasal architecture than humans, say the scientists from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the University of Rochester in New York.

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The record-breaking bite of Megapiranha

There’s a terrible B-movie from 2010 called Megapiranha, about giant, genetically modified piranhas that wreak havoc upon Floridian tourists. One of them leaps out of the water and bites a helicopter. It’s all rather silly, but if you look on Wikipedia’s entry for the film, you’ll see these words at the top: “For the prehistoric creature, see Megapiranha.”

Yes, Megapiranha existed. At around 71 centimetres long, it wasn’t big enough to attack a chopper, but it was still three times the size of its modern meat-eating cousins.

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Ancient Sea Monster Found—First Freshwater Species Known

It's not quite Nessie, but it's close.

Fossils belonging to an 84-million-year-old freshwater sea monster have been found in Hungary, according to a new study.

The recently unearthed creature belongs to a family of ancient aquatic reptiles known as mosasaurs, which looked like crosses between crocodiles and whales. Mosasaurs lacked the superlong necks found in plesiosaurs, which the legendary inhabitant of Loch Ness is alleged to be.

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Extinct elephant 'survived late' in North China

Wild elephants living in North China 3,000 years ago belonged to the extinct genus Palaeoloxodon, scientists say.

They had previously been identified as Elephas maximus, the Asian elephant that still inhabits southern China.

The findings suggest that Palaeoloxodon survived a further 7,000 years than was thought.

The team from China examined fossilised elephant teeth and ancient elephant-shaped bronzes for the study.

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Vodka 'saved' elephants in Siberian freeze

Two elephants have been saved from the deadly Siberian cold by drinking vodka, Russian officials say.

They say the animals had to be taken out into the bitter cold after the wooden trailer they were travelling in caught fire in the Novosibirsk region.

The elephants, aged 45 and 48, suffered frostbite to the tips of their ears amid temperatures of -40C (-40F)

But they were warmed up by two cases of vodka mixed with warm water, one official was quoted as saying.

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Researchers debunk the IQ myth

After conducting the largest online intelligence study on record, a Western University-led research team has concluded that the notion of measuring one's intelligence quotient or IQ by a singular, standardized test is highly misleading.

The findings from the landmark study, which included more than 100,000 participants, were published today in the journal Neuron. The article, "Fractionating human intelligence," was written by Adrian M. Owen and Adam Hampshire from Western's Brain and Mind Institute (London, Canada) and Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs, Science Museum Group (London, U.K).

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Human hands evolved so we could punch each other

Forget toolmaking, think fisticuffs. Did evolution shape our hands not for dexterity but to form fists so we could punch other people? That idea emerges from a new study, although it runs counter to conventional wisdom.

About the same time as we stopped hanging from trees and started walking upright, our hands become short and square, with opposable thumbs. These anatomical changes are thought to have evolved for tool manipulation, but David Carrier at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has an alternative explanation.

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Tool-Using Orangutans Learn Like Humans

Even when they are very young, orangutans may start to form ideas about their world—specifically, how and when to use certain tools. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which indicates that ape cultural traditions may not be that different from our own.

Like humans, orangutans have behavioral traditions that vary by region. Orangutans in one area use tools, for example, whereas others don’t. Take the island of Sumatra, in western Indonesia. By the age of 6 or 7, orangutans from swampy regions west of Sumatra’s Alas River use sticks to probe logs for honey. Yet researchers have never observed this “honey-dipping” among orangutans in coastal areas east of the water.

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Ancient city of Troy rebranded itself after war

EVEN ancient cities knew about rebranding. Troy was destroyed by war about 3200 years ago - an event that may have inspired Homer to write the Iliad, 400 years later. But the famous city rose again, reinventing itself to fit a new political landscape.

Troy lies in north-west Turkey and has been studied for decades. Pottery made before the war has a distinct Trojan style but after the war its style is typical of the Balkans. This led archaeologists to believe that the locals had been forced out and replaced by populations from overseas.

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'Raiders of the Lost Ark' Package Mystery Solved

First, there was "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Now, there's "Mailers of the Lost Package."

Days after the University of Chicago announced it had received a replica of the journal from the film "Raiders of the Lost Ark," the school says it has solved an international mystery with its roots in Guam.

A few weeks ago, a journal addressed to one Henry Walton Jones, Jr. — the given name of Hollywood's Indiana Jones — was placed inside another package and mailed from Guam to Italy, where someone had bought it on eBay.

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TODAY'S TOP ALTNEWS HEADLINES

2012-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00

The incredible 'alien' skull discovered in a Mexican cemetery

It is an astonishing image that could have come straight from the plot of a Ridley Scott movie.

Archaeologists in Mexico today revealed the astonishing skull of a person suffering from a cranial disfiguration.

Believed to be 1,000 years old, the find was made near the small Mexican village of Onavas.

The find is believed to be the first in the region showing the practice of binding a skull to change its shape.

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The Bloody Truth About Serbia's Vampire

Garlic sales are up. Wooden crosses are a hot commodity. That can only mean one thing: Vampire on the loose!

But this isn't part of a movie script or book. It's a real-life event in the Serbian town of Zarozje (map), where last month the local council issued a public health warning that the resident vampire, Sava Savanovic, may be on the prowl.

The vampire scare was sparked by reports that an old mill where the vampire allegedly lived has collapsed. According to ABC News, the town's mayor, Miodrag Vujetic, said: "People are worried, everybody knows the legend of this vampire and the thought that he is now homeless and looking for somewhere else [to live] and possibly other victims is terrifying..."

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Can Birds Make Us Happy?

As millions of us post our Christmas cards -- many of which star a robin red breast -- ecologists are investigating whether birds make us happy. Speaking at this week's British Ecological Society Annual Meeting, researchers will reveal how they are investigating the links between birds and our well-being, and explain how their results -- due out next year -- could have a major impact on UK bird conservation.

There has been an increasing amount of research on the health benefits of green spaces such as parks and nature reserves, but we know far less about how the wildlife within these habitats contributes towards well-being benefits.

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Found: Whale Thought Extinct for 2 Million Years

The pygmy right whale, a mysterious and elusive creature that rarely comes to shore, is the last living relative of an ancient group of whales long believed to be extinct, a new study suggests.

The findings, published today (Dec. 18) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, may help to explain why the enigmatic marine mammals look so different from any other living whale.

"The living pygmy right whale is, if you like, a remnant, almost like a living fossil," said Felix Marx, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. "It's the last survivor of quite an ancient lineage that until now no one thought was around.".

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Lake Ellsworth: Drilling effort runs into trouble

A British attempt to search for life in an ancient lake beneath the Antarctic ice-sheet has run into trouble.

The team has reported "a serious problem" with the main boiler used to heat the water that powers a drill.

Work was halted on Saturday in what could prove to be a major blow to the project to investigate sub-glacial Lake Ellsworth.

The aim is to use 90C water to blast a hole through the two-mile-thick ice-sheet to reach the lake waters below.

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Another Earth Just 12 Light-Years Away?

Astronomers have discovered what may be five planets orbiting Tau Ceti, the closest single star beyond our solar system whose temperature and luminosity nearly match the sun's. If the planets are there, one of them is about the right distance from the star to sport mild temperatures, oceans of liquid water, and even life. Don't pack your bags just yet, though: The discovery still needs to be confirmed.

Tau Ceti is only 12 light-years from Earth, just three times as far as our sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri.

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Scientists 'Surprised' to Discover Very Early Ancestors Survived On Tropical Plants

Researchers involved in a new study led by Oxford University have found that between three million and 3.5 million years ago, the diet of our very early ancestors in central Africa is likely to have consisted mainly of tropical grasses and sedges. The findings are published in the early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

An international research team extracted information from the fossilised teeth of three Australopithecus bahrelghazali individuals -- the first early hominins excavated at two sites in Chad. Professor Julia Lee-Thorp from Oxford University with researchers from Chad, France and the US analysed the carbon isotope ratios in the teeth and found the signature of a diet rich in foods derived from C4 plants.

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Maori stones hold magnetic clues

Scientists are studying the Earth's magnetic field using the stones that line Maori steam ovens.

The cooking process generates so much heat that the magnetic minerals in these stones will realign themselves with the current field direction.

An archaeological search is under way in New Zealand to find sites containing old ovens, or hangi as they are known.

Abandoned stones at these locations could shed light on Earth's magnetic behaviour going back hundreds of years.

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Study revisits mystery of Egyptian King Ramesses III's killing

Forget old conspiracy theories about snake bites and fatal poisons. Egyptian King Ramesses III died after a brutal throat slashing, a new study says.

The study provides the latest twist in a mystery that has long perplexed researchers.

Did a venomous viper take him out? Poison? An assassination plot in a reign tainted by war?

And if it were the latter, who did it?

Researches say he died at the hands of a killer in a plot planned by one of his wives and a son who wanted to succeed him.

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Paranormal presence haunts home of Iowa baseball players

Every night when he got ready to go to bed, Hawkeye baseball player Trevor Kenyon usually left his TV on the Big Ten Network. One night, he decided to fall asleep to FX.

When he returned to his room after brushing his teeth, he discovered his TV had been changed to BTN. Kenyon turned the TV off and put the remote on the floor next to his bed. When he rolled over, he discovered the remote next to him on the pillow. After that, Kenyon turned the TV back on to BTN and let “Tim” watch sports as he fell asleep.

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Sasquatch in New Jersey?

It was a crisp November morning in 1980 when Richard Biggins came face-to-face with what he believes was a Sasquatch. He was deer hunting with his father by the Walpack Inn in Sussex County.

“It had snowed pretty good the past few days, so there were six to 10 inches on the ground,” Biggins recalled. “My father dropped me off and told me to walk into the woods almost to the base of the hill, wait 15 minutes, and then start walking to him to help push any deer toward him to shoot.”

The hill being steep, Biggins slid down it. Five minutes into his wait, he could hardly believe his eyes.

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UNLV Researchers Find First Evidence of Ice Age Wolves in Nevada

A UNLV research team recently unearthed fossil remains from an extinct wolf species in a wash northwest of Las Vegas, revealing the first evidence that the ice age mammal once lived in Nevada.

The metapodial, or foot bone, was uncovered late last year by UNLV geologist Josh Bonde during a survey of the Upper Las Vegas Wash. They have now confirmed that the bone comes from a dire wolf.

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National Geographic Unveils New Phase of Genographic Project

The National Geographic Society has announced the next phase of its Genographic Project -- the multiyear global research initiative that uses DNA to map the history of human migration. Building on seven years of global data collection, Genographic shines new light on humanity's collective past, yielding tantalizing clues about humankind's journey across the planet over the past 60,000 years.

"Our first phase drew participation from more than 500,000 participants from over 130 countries," said Project Director Spencer Wells, a population geneticist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. "The second phase creates an even greater citizen science opportunity -- and the more people who participate, the more our scientific knowledge will grow.".

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Manhattan Project Sites Part Of Proposed Park

Congress is considering whether to turn three top-secret sites involved with creating the atomic bomb into one of the country's most unusual national parks.

The Manhattan Project — the U.S. program to design and build the first atomic bomb during World War II — largely took place at three sites: Los Alamos, N.M.; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; and Hanford, Wash. On July 16, 1945, the first test of an atomic bomb took place at a site in the southern New Mexico desert. Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, Japan, were bombed less than a month after the test.

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Grave Obstacle to Chinese Construction Boom

A grave teetering above a construction project is one family’s symbol of defiance against China’s relentless tide of development. The family refused payment to move a relative’s grave.

China's construction boom waits for no one, dead or alive. In the city of Taiyuan that means a multistory residential complex is taking shape around a lone grave, which now sits atop a tower of mud about 30 feet (10 meters) above the building's excavated foundations

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Scientists turn to genetics to help protect pygmy elephants

To help protect a diminutive elephant, researchers are taking an innovative look at the pachyderm's genome.

The goal is to understand the genetic diversity of pygmy elephants on the island of Borneo. Numbering about 2,000, these babyish-looking elephants are the most endangered subspecies of Asian elephant. They live primarily in the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo, where they are threatened by the loss and fragmentation of their forest, often by development associated with palm oil, a widely used, edible plant oil.

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Guess what dolphins and crickets have in common

Dolphins and crickets might have more in common than you think.

A large group of insects that includes crickets and katydids is believed to share a hearing feature with toothed whales like dolphins, according to a new study.

"We don't know why animals who are so far apart in evolutionary terms have this similarity, but it opens up the possibility that others may use the same system component," Windmill added.

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Spider That Builds Its Own Arachnid Decoys Discovered

A spider that builds elaborate, fake spiders and hangs them in its web has been discovered in the Peruvian Amazon.

Believed to be a new species in the genus Cyclosa, the arachnid crafts the larger spider from leaves, debris and dead insects. Though Cyclosa includes other sculpting arachnids, this is the first one observed to build a replica with multiple, spidery legs.

Scientists suspect the fake spiders serve as decoys, part of a defense mechanism meant to confuse or distract predators. “It seems like a really well evolved and very specialized behavior,” said Phil Torres, who described the find in a blog entry written for Rainforest Expeditions. Torres, a biologist and science educator, divides his time between Southern California and Peru, where he’s involved in research and education projects.

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2012-12-19T10:17:00.001-05:00

Brazil Expands Mines to Drive Future, but Cost Is a Treasured Link to Its Past

CARAJÁS NATIONAL FOREST, Brazil — Archaeologists must climb tiers of orchid-encrusted rain forest, where jaguars roam and anacondas slither, to arrive at one of the Amazon’s most stunning sights: a series of caves and rock shelters guarding the secrets of human beings who lived here more than 8,000 years ago.

Almost anywhere else, these caves would be preserved as an invaluable source of knowledge into prehistoric human history. But not in this remote corner of the Amazon, where Vale, the Brazilian mining giant, is pushing forward with the expansion of one of the world’s largest iron-ore mining complexes, a project that will destroy dozens of the caves treasured by scholars.

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Yakama Nation: Gas pipeline damages historic site

The Yakama Nation has asked the federal government to halt the planned replacement of a natural gas pipeline over southwest Washington's White Salmon River.

The tribe claims the pipeline will hurt a known archaeological site that is of cultural significance to the Yakama people. Tribal chairman Harry Smiskin says the tribe was never consulted about replacement plans and asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to immediately halt construction plans.

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Major climate change report leaks online

The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been leaked to the web by a climate skeptic named Alec Rawls.

Rawls, who is based in the United States and was chosen as one of the report's 800 expert reviewers, admitted leaking the document and justified his actions by pointing to a sentence that he says "undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole."

The sentence in question deals with the effect of cosmic rays on the climate, and skeptics have interpreted it as meaning that cosmic rays have a greater warming effect than the actions of humans.

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Tipping Point: Research Shows That Emission Reductions Must Occur by 2020

For years, most of us have envisioned climate change as a long-term problem that requires a long-term solution. But as the years pass—and with the calendar soon to flip over to 2013—without any substantial attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, this impression needs to change in a hurry.

According to a new paper published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, there’s a startlingly small number we need to keep in mind when dealing with climate change: 8. That’s as in 8 more years until 2020, a crucial deadline for reducing global carbon emissions if we intend to limit warming to 2°C, according to a team of researchers from a trio of research institutions—the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and ETH Zurich in Switzerland, along with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado—who authored the paper.

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Doomsday 2012: Watch the 'End of the World' Live Online

Anyone worried that the world will come to an end Friday (Dec. 21) can scan the heavens online this week for any signs of death from above.

The online Slooh Space Camera will broadcast a series of live cosmic views all week, beginning today (Dec. 17). The free webcasts will help the public keep watch for any monster solar storms, impending asteroid strikes or other potential agents of the so-called "Mayan apocalypse" that doomsayers claim is set for Friday.

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Mayan apocalypse mania grips Russia

The apocalypse is surely near when Ramzan Kadyrov emerges as the voice of reason.

The ruthless leader of Chechnya is among dozens of Russians officials, priests, doctors and psychiatrists aiming to calm an anxious populace frantically preparing for the end of the world later this week.

"People are buying candles saying the end of the world is coming," Kadyrov said in comments published on his official website last week. "Does no one realise that once the end of the world comes, candles won't help them?"

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Chinese authorities arrest dozens for spreading Mayan apocalypse rumours

It's the end of the world – unless you're in the Chinese Communist party. Over the past few weeks, Chinese authorities have detained over 93 people across seven provinces for spreading rumours that the end is nigh, laying bare the party's obsession with social stability and maintaining its tight grip on power.

Many people in China believe in the so-called "Mayan apocalypse" – slated to take place on 21 December, the last day on the Mayan long count calendar – because it was the central premise of the disaster film 2012, a box office sensation in China when it was released three years ago.

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Revisiting Britain's Biggest Hoax: Who Faked The Bones Of The Piltdown Man?

On December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson told The Geological Society of London that a workman had uncovered the remains of one of the earliest humans in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England. The skull fragments and lower jaw bone of the "Piltdown Man" showed that it had a brain two-thirds the size of a modern human's and a jaw remarkably similar to that of a young chimpanzee.

The Piltdown Man became a starring figure in the human evolutionary tree over the next 40 years. (Popular Science even published a feature in 1931 about the "man-ape.")

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A New Leash on Infections: Dog that Sniffs Out a Deadly Superbug

Beagles are known as good hunters. So why not send them in search of deadly bacteria?

That’s what Dutch doctors are hoping to do by training the dogs’ famously sensitive sense of smell to sniff out deadly pathogens that plague hospitals and put patients at risk.

Doctors spent two months training a two-year-old beagle named Cliff to learn to lie down or sit whenever he smelled the presence of Clostridium difficile, stubborn bacteria that cause severe, hard-to-treat diarrhea and sometimes life-threatening colitis.

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Has World War II carrier pigeon message been cracked?

An encrypted World War II message found in a fire place strapped to the remains of a dead carrier pigeon may have been cracked by a Canadian enthusiast.

Gord Young, from Peterborough, in Ontario, says it took him 17 minutes to decypher the message after realising a code book he inherited was the key.

Mr Young says the 1944 note uses a simple World War I code to detail German troop positions in Normandy.

GCHQ says it would be interested to see his findings.

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Hackers Steal Data from Pentagon, NASA, Federal Reserve

Members of the Anonymous-affiliated Team GhostShell hacking collective have published what they claim is stolen information for 1.6 million accounts linked to government agencies, including the Pentagon, NASA and the Federal Reserve.

The hackers appear to have breached the database with a malicious SQL code injection, ZDNet reported, stealing passwords and corresponding email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses and notes from defense tests.

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Nasa to test space-sleep colour-changing lights

Nasa is to test colour-changing lights on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of efforts to help astronauts on board sleep.

The US space agency will initially swap a fluorescent panel with a solid-state lighting module (SSLM) containing LEDs which produces a blue, whitish or red-coloured light depending on the time.

It says the move may help combat insomnia which can make depression, sickness and mistakes more likely.

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2012-12-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

What are the health risks of space travel?

Astronauts are limited to spending six months on the International Space Station, around 200 miles above Earth, for a good reason.

The loss of bone and muscle mass they experience in space is so profound that they cannot stay any longer.

But what about the health impact of forthcoming suborbital flights for space tourists who are not fit, highly-trained individuals?

According to North American scientists writing in the British Medical Journal article, GPs should be prepared to answer patients' queries about their suitability for space travel in the near future.

TWN - The Weirding News

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Sasquatch in New Jersey?

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