World’s first computer may be even older than thought

From Swiss Army knives to iPhones, it seems we just love fancy gadgets with as many different functions as possible. And judging from the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, the desire to impress with the latest multipurpose must-have item goes back at least 2000 years.This mysterious box of tricks was a portable clockwork computer, dating from the first or second century BC. Operated by turning a handle on the side, it modelled the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets through the sky, sported a local calendar, star calendar and Moon-phase display, and could even predict eclipses and track the timing of the Olympic games.I gave a talk on the device at London’s Royal Institution last night. One new clue I mentioned to the origin of the mechanism comes from the Olympiad dial – there are six sets of games named on the dial, five of which have been deciphered so far. Four of them, including the Olympics, were major games known across the Greek world. But the fifth, Naa, was much smaller, and would only have been of local interest.

The Naa games were held in Dodona in northwestern Greece, so Alexander Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York has suggested that the mechanism must have been made by or for someone from that area.

Intriguingly, this could mean the device is even older than thought. The inscriptions have been dated to around 100 BC, but according to Jones the device may have been made at latest in the early second century BC, because after that the Romans devastated or took over the Greek colonies in the region, so it’s unlikely that people would still have been using the Greek calendar there.

But the highlight for most of the audience – judging from the spontaneous round of applause it received – was this breathtaking new animation (below) of the gearing inside the mechanism. It has been made by Mogi Vicentini, an Italian astronomer and computer scientist, and it brings the device to life brilliantly.

-via newsci (visit for the video!)

Is this why Bank of America will not modify my home loan and is instead foreclosing?

This week, the Obama administration summoned mortgage company executives to Washington to demand they move faster to lower payments for homeowners sliding toward foreclosure. Treasury officials called on the companies to hire and train more people quickly to field applications for relief.But industry insiders and legal experts say the limited capacity of mortgage companies is not the primary factor impeding the government’s $75 billion program to prevent foreclosures. Instead, it is that many mortgage companies are reluctant to give strapped homeowners a break because the companies collect lucrative fees on delinquent loans.

Even when borrowers stop paying, mortgage companies that service the loans collect fees out of the proceeds when homes are ultimately sold in foreclosure. So the longer borrowers remain delinquent, the greater the opportunities for these mortgage companies to extract revenue — fees for insurance, appraisals, title searches and legal services. …

Legal experts say the opportunities for additional revenue in delinquency are considerable, confronting mortgage companies with a conflict between their own financial interest in collecting fees and their responsibility to recoup money for investors who own most mortgages.“The rules by which servicers are reimbursed for expenses may provide a perverse incentive to foreclose rather than modify,” concluded a recent paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. …

“If they do a loan modification, they get a few shekels from the government,” said David Dickey, who led a mortgage sales team at Countrywide and Bank of America, leaving in March to start his own mortgage advisory firm, National Home Loan Advocates. By contrast, he said, the road to foreclosure is lined with fees, especially if it is prolonged. “There’s all sorts of things behind the scenes,” he said.When borrowers fall behind, mortgage companies typically collect late fees reaching 6 percent of the monthly payments.

“For many subprime servicers, late fees alone constitute a significant fraction of their total income and profit,” said Diane E. Thompson, a lawyer for the National Consumer Law Center, in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee this month. “Servicers thus have an incentive to push homeowners into late payments and keep them there: if the loan pays late, the servicer is more likely to profit.” …

Data on delinquencies reinforces the notion that servicers are inclined to let problem loans float in purgatory — neither taking control of houses and selling them, nor modifying loans to give homeowners a break.From June 2008 to June 2009, the number of American mortgages that were 90 days or more delinquent soared from 1.8 million to nearly 3 million, according to the realty research company First American Core Logic. During that period, the number of loans that resulted in the bank taking ownership of the home declined to 245,000, from 333,000.

As a home slides toward foreclosure, mortgage companies pay for many services required to take control of the property and resell it. They typically funnel orders for title searches, insurance policies, appraisals and legal filings to companies they own or share revenue with. …

Ultimately, the benefits of delinquency erode incentives for mortgage companies to dispose of troubled loans quickly, say experts, allowing distressed houses to decay and fall in value — a fact of little interest to the servicer.“At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the house sells for, because they don’t take that loss,” said Ms. Golant. “Meanwhile, they are collecting all these fees.”

- via MSNBC

Scientists discover Amazon river is 11 million years old

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have discovered that the Amazon river, and its transcontinental drainage, is around 11 million years old and took its present shape about 2.4 million years ago.

University of Liverpool researchers, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, analysed sedimentary material taken from two boreholes near the mouth of the river to calculate the age of the Amazon river and the Amazon deep sea fan.

Prior to this study the exact age of the Amazon, one of the two largest rivers in the world, was not known.

via Scientists discover Amazon river is 11 million years old.

Race is on for space-junk alarm system

A WORLDWIDE network of radar stations could tackle the ever-growing problem of space debris – the remains of old rockets and satellites that pose an increasing threat to spacecraft.

The US government is launching a competition, which will run until the end of 2010, to find the best way of tracking pieces of junk down to the size of a pool ball. Three aerospace companies – Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon – have each been awarded $30 million by US Air Force Space Command to design a “space fence” that will constantly report the motion of all objects 5 centimetres wide and larger in medium and low-Earth orbits.

“It’s basically going to be an electronic tripwire,” says Rich Davis, Northrop’s special projects director in Linthicum, Maryland. “It will give you the orbit angle and time of day that every satellite or piece of debris passes any point you choose.” Once you know that, he says, it is easy to calculate potential collision risks.

It will give the orbit angle and time of day that every piece of debris passes any point in space you choose

The fence will be a significant improvement on the US’s current system – the Air Force Space Surveillance System – which was built in 1961. This covers space above the continental US and can only resolve and track objects that are at least 50 centimetres across, using VHF signals in the megahertz range. To track smaller objects requires S-band radar, in the gigahertz range.

The contenders will have to work out how best to construct a global network of S-band radars that will allow them to continually feed data to the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. JSpOC will in turn make data that is not militarily sensitive publicly available on http://www.space-track.org.

There are now some 16,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimetres wide in orbit – and recent events highlight the need for an effective monitoring system. On 13 February, a communications satellite called Iridium 33, used chiefly by the US Department of Defense, smashed into a defunct Soviet-era satellite, Cosmos 2251. By June, the collision’s leftovers had fragmented into at least 1500 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimetres, according to Nicholas Johnson of NASA. And in 2007, China created about 2700 pieces of debris when it blew up a redundant weather satellite using a ballistic missile.

via Race is on for space-junk alarm system – space – 26 July 2009 – New Scientist.

Cattle Mutilations Strike In Alabama

Colorado is not alone in witnessing the resumption of cattle mutilations. Officials in Alabama say 32 mutilations have occurred since October in two northeastern counties.

“The cow’s udder had been cut off cleaner than you could cut it with a razor. I’ve been ranching most of my life and I’ve seen animals that predators hot a hold of. I’d be willing to bet my life it was no predator,” said Jimmy Pope, a Geraldine, Ala., rancher whose cow was found in a pasture 500 feet from his house.

“The cow had an oval-shaped cut on her shoulder where skin and hair had been removed, there was no blood nowhere, and the mouth had been cut in an oval shape and the teeth had been removed surgically,” he said.

While removal of specific organs in DeKalb and Marshall counties cases is similar to two incidents last November in Costilla and Las Animas counties in southern Colorado, the Alabama cases have produced some new twists.

Tissue samples from one Alabama cow, examined under microscope by Denver pathologist Dr. John Altshuler, showed that the blood around the cut tissue had been “cooked,” indicating temperatures of at least 300 degrees had been used to make or cauterize the cuts.

Also, traces of a chemical substance were found at the scene of a mutilation, according to Fyffe, Ala., police Officer Ted Oliphant.

“We found a white substance on a cow’s right rib cage and on the ground next to it. I put it into a plastic wrapper, and back at the office, when I touched some of it with the metal tip of my pen, it turned to liquid within one second. I put the rest on a piece of paper. We sent it to a molecular biologist for analysis and found it was composed of aluminum, titanium, oxygen and silicon. This is not a substance that occurs in nature,” said Oliphant.

via Cattle Mutilations Strike In Alabama, page 1.

Speaking of cows and aliens, remember this strange thing from a few years ago?

While it is unclear from the photos what is lying on the table but the local residents of this small town in Thailand claim that this “creature” was born by a cow! – funtasticus

Out on a limb: Arm-swinging riddle is answered

Biomedical researchers on Wednesday said they could explain why we swing our arms when we walk, a practice that has long piqued scientific curiosity.

Swinging one’s arms comes at a cost. We need muscles to do it, and we need to provide energy in the form of food for those muscles. So what’s the advantage?

Little or none, some experts have said, contending that arm-swinging, like our appendix, is an evolutionary relic from when we used to go about on all fours.

But a trio of specialists from the United States and the Netherlands have put the question to rigorous tests.

They built a mechanical model to get an idea of the dynamics of arm-swinging and then recruited 10 volunteers, who were asked to walk with a normal swing, an opposite-to-normal swing, with their arms folded or held by their sides.

The metabolic cost of this activity was derived from oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) production as the human guinea pigs breathed in and out.

Arm-swinging turned out to be a plus, rather than a negative, the investigators found.

For one thing, it is surprisingly, er, “‘armless” in energy costs, requiring little torque, or rotational twist, from the shoulder muscles.

Holding one’s arms as one walks requires 12 percent more metabolic energy, compared with swinging them.

The arms’ pendulum swing also helps dampen the bobbly up-and-down motion of walking, which is itself an energy drain for the muscles of the lower legs.

If you hold your arms while walking, this movement, called vertical ground reaction moment, rises by a whopping 63 percent.

Should you prefer to walk with an opposite-to-normal swing — meaning that your right arm moves in sync with your right leg and your left arm is matched to the motion of your left leg — the energy cost of using your shoulder muscles will fall.

The downside, though, is that opposite-to-normal swing forces up the metabolic rate by a quarter.

The study, headed by Steven Collins at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, says we should give the thumb’s-up to arm swinging.

“Rather than a facultative relic of the locomotion needs of our quadrupedal ancestors, arm swinging is an integral part of the energy economy of human gait,” says the paper.

via Out on a limb: Arm-swinging riddle is answered – Yahoo! News.

Fossil is ‘earliest tree-dweller’

A 260-million-year-old fossil is the oldest known tree-dwelling creature, according to researchers.

Scientists described the finding as the earliest evidence in the fossil record of an “opposable thumb”.

In the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, they described how the animal’s elongated hands and fingers would have helped it to grip and climb.

This, they say, shows an evolutionary change that allowed animals to live in trees, away from terrestrial predators.

The fossilised creature, named Suminia getmanovi, has been dated to late Permian period, 100 million years earlier than the first known tree-dwelling mammal.

It was first discovered in Russia in 1994.

But for lead author Jorg Frobisch, from the Field Museum in Chicago, US, said this study was the first opportunity to examine its whole skeleton.

He told BBC News that he and his colleagues looked in most detail at the fossil’s hands – comparing them to other, living terrestrial and tree-dwelling animals.

Suminia, he explained, was a small animal – about 50cm (20 inches) from its nose to the tip of its tail. “But for the size of its body, it had relatively long limbs, and very long hands and feet,” said Dr Frobisch.

“The hands and feet made up almost half of the length of its whole limb,” he continued. “That’s humungous, if you compare it to your own arm.”

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Fossil is ‘earliest tree-dweller’.

Michael Jackson ‘slept with child-sized porcelain doll in dress’

Michael Jackson slept with a child-sized porcelain doll that had a dress on, according to a report that said he spent his final days in a messy bedroom with the heating turned up.

The toy was found on the bed where the singer collapsed minutes before his death, the reports said as detectives searched the Las Vegas home and office of his doctor, Conrad Murray.

It has emerged Jackson was given a powerful, surgical anaesthetic called properol through a drip-feed to help him sleep. Authorities believe this was the ultimate cause of the singer’s death on June 25 even though his body contained a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs, including OxyContin and Demerol.

A senior police officer who went into Jackson’s rented house in Beverly Hills said clothes and other items were strewn about the singer’s bedroom, according to the Daily Star, and that handwritten notes found on the walls pointed to his troubled mental state as he prepared for 50 concerts at London’s O2 Arena.

One read: “Children are sweet,” while another said: “Children are innocent.”

The officer also claimed the singer’s staff had not been allowed upstairs to clean up his mess.

The policeman told the newspaper: “The temperature upstairs was stiflingly hot, with gas fireplaces and the heating system on high because Jackson always complained of feeling cold.

“The singer’s bedroom was a mess, with items seemingly thrown about and some 20 handwritten notes stuck on the walls. A porcelain girl doll wearing a dress was found on top of the covers of the bed where he slept.”

Dr Murray, 56, a cardiologist with practices in Las Vegas and Houston, had his Texas office and a storage unit searched last week by Drug Enforcement Agency agents. Officers in Las Vegas carried out a similar search at his home and office there on Tuesday.

Court records show the agents were investigating a possible case of manslaughter.

Police say Dr Murray is cooperating and have not labelled him a suspect….

via Michael Jackson ‘slept with child-sized porcelain doll in dress’ – Telegraph.

Bigfoot creature photographed in Sierra National Forest

The Bigfoot creature may have been captured on a remote trail camera placed in the Sierra National Forest, based on photography evidence released by Sanger Paranormal Society.

Investigator Jeffrey Gonzalez said Tuesday night that multiple cameras were put in place in this remote area on Memorial Day weekend, and retreived on June 7, 2009.

Gonzalez said they did not immediately see the evidence, but upon closer inspection, noticed what appears to be the Bigfoot creature.

Gonzalez said a group returned to the site to review the exact capture spot after many theories surfaced once the original image was released in early July.

The tree stump theory was ruled out, he said, because the “dark object” is not there. Gonzalez said the bear theory does not stand up either, because the image does not have a snout on the head.

“You can see features of a human face such as the nose, mouth and chin,” Gonzalez reports.

Photo: Original image was reduced in size for this page.

“The arms on a bear, when standing, do not hang that far down. We also took measures on how high this thing was. According to the leaves and the branches that were covering the object’s face, the tape measure said it was between 8 and 9 feet tall. The same camera that took the picture of the object also took pictures of other objects such as black bear and deer, which does not resemble the object in any way.”

via Bigfoot creature photographed in Sierra National Forest.

My Take: The two photos are from slightly different angles.  In the clearest photo, there are two dark trees on either side of the man and from a view a little to the right, they may merge to make up the bigfoot shape.  Too bad the original isn’t of the same quality as the photo with the man in it. I did a quick adjustment to show the photo with the man at the same scale as the bigfoot photo:

I may be wrong about this. Is the bigfoot obscuring the lighter tree on the side of the man where his arm is out? Too bad they can’t get a shot of the guy from the exact angle at the exact time of day so the shadows are the same.

Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes, Not Oceans

Image: One of the earliest multicellular organisms of the Precambrian period. This flat worm is called Dickinsonia and was found in sandstones nearly 600 million years old near Ediacara in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. Source: Long 1995, p.15.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.

Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.

These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.

For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.

The oldest known animal fossils in the world are preserved in South China’s Doushantuo Formation. These fossil beds have no adult specimens — instead, many of the fossils appear to be microscopic embryos.

“Our first unusual finding in this region was the abundance of a clay mineral called smectite,” said researcher Tom Bristow, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water — conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes.”

The researchers collected hundreds of rock samples from several locations in South China. All their analyses suggest these rocks were not marine sediments.

… It remains possible, Kennedy noted, that animal fossils of similar or older age exist that remain to be found that are marine in origin. However, at the very least, this work suggests “that animals had already taken on the ability to deal with the environmental fluctuations one sees in lake environments,” he said. “That suggests that their evolutionary response is much more rapid that I would have supposed, and that the earliest animals were far more diverse than imagined.”

via Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes, Not Oceans | LiveScience.

Because time travelers visiting Earth in the future who landed on the Earth in the past landed in a lake and they contaminated it, thus starting the evolutionary process and paradoxically creating themselves.