Moon landing anniversary: UFOs photographed by Apollo

This anomaly shot by Neil Armstrong’s crew has never been clearly identified

Apollo 12, 1969 – Video footage taken on the second Apollo mission to land on the moon appeared to show a bright disc about 100 miles above the lunar surface

Apollo 14, 1971 – Were these lights photographed from the Apollo 11 lander reflections from the Nasa craft or something that came to the moon from somewhere else?

Apollo 15, 1971 – Film fault or flying saucer? A strange blue disc is captured over the surface of the moon

Apollo 15, 1971 – A bright object is pictured over astronaut David Scott on the slope of Hadley Delta

Apollo 16, 1972 - This object on the Apollo 16 approach to the moon has subsequently been dismissed as part of a probe on the moon lander by Nasa

Apollo 16, 1972 – A bright disc-shaped object is seen over astronaut Charles Duke during a walk on the lunar surface

Apollo 16, 1969 – What are these blue points of light (top and right in the picture) taken in this high quality shot of a moon walk?

via Moon landing anniversary: UFOs photographed by Apollo – Telegraph.

Pagan police allowed to take Hallowe’en and summer solstice off work

Pagan police officers in Britain have been given the right to take eight days off work a year to celebrate “religious holidays” including Hallowe’en and the summer solstice.

It follows the setting up of a Pagan Police Association to represent officers who worship nature and believe in many gods.

Pc Andy Pardy, a leading Pagan officer from Hertfordshire Police, met with Home Office officials this week to push for more recognition for pagan officers.

The neighbourhood beat manager, who has been an officer for the past seven years, is a heathen which means he worships Norse gods, including the hammer-wielding Thor, the one-eyed Odin and Freyr, the god of fertility.

Pc Pardy told Police Review magazine: “Paganism is not the new age, tree hugging fad that some people think it is. It is not the clandestine, horrible, evil thing that people think it is. A lot of people think it is about dancing naked around a fire but the rituals are not like that.

“It involves chanting, music, meditation, reading passages and for pagans the practices are seen to have the same power as prayer does for Christians. Most pagans practice some kind of conservation work as well to give something back to the planet.”

Hertfordshire Police allows Pc Pardy the eight pagan holidays off each year, including Hallowe’en, which signifies the Pagan new year, and the summer solstice in June.

The days are deducted from his annual leave but because of his religion the days off are set in stone.

Superintendent Simon Hawkins, of Hertfordshire Police, said: “While balancing operational needs, the force’s religion and beliefs policy gives all staff the choice of re-allocating the traditional Christian bank-holiday festivals to suit their personal faith.

“This has been very well received from a number of faith groups, including Muslim and Jewish.”

via Pagan police allowed to take Hallowe’en and summer solstice off work – Telegraph.

Tiger moths can thwart bats by jamming sonar

Tiger moths can thwart attacks from bats by effectively jamming the bats’ sonar, doing so by emitting sudden bursts of ultrasound, scientists now find.

Past research had revealed that many night-flying moths have evolved the ability to hear bat sonar. A number were even seen responding with clicks of ultrasound.

Other studies revealed that moth ultrasound could startle bats off. Research also showed the outbursts could warn bats that such moths had a nasty taste, just as flashy colors on some animals can serve to ward off potential predators. Still, there was the enticing possibility that some moths used ultrasound to actually foil bat sonar.

To look for a case of sonar jamming, investigators employed ultrasonic recordings and high-speed infrared video to analyze how big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) interacted with one particular species of ultrasound-emitting tiger moth (Bertholdia trigona) over the course of nine nights in enclosed rooms.

If the moth sounds were just meant to startle bats, bats would eventually get used to the outbursts and go on to catch the moths. If the insect clicks were just meant to warn bats they were unpalatable, the bats would have stopped attacking the moths after trying one first.

However, the researchers saw that bats neither increased nor decreased their odds of catching these moths, and instead their ability to catch the moths remained consistently poor over time. This suggested the ultrasound bursts were not meant to startle the bats nor warn of bad taste. As such, the insects might have evolved a genuine sonar-jamming defense mechanism to save them from bats.

via Tiger moths can thwart bats by jamming sonar – LiveScience- msnbc.com.

Police fine taxi driver $100 over short running socks

“PAYBACK” and “an abuse of power” are how taxi drivers are describing the extraordinary actions of a police officer who fined a cabbie $100 for not pulling up his socks.

“That’s just ridiculous, just crazy,” Cab Drivers’ Association of Queensland member Paul Henderson said.

“In 18 years that’s the first time I’ve heard of it . . . it creates animosity between drivers and police even further.”

CDAC secretary Lee Sims slammed the fine as “an intimidation just to get even” and “an abuse of power”.

Mr Sims, who has been critical of Queensland Transport’s management of the taxi industry, questioned whether police had the authority to issue the fine and its permissibility in court.

He said it was the first time he had heard of such a “petty” notice but conceded drivers by law had to be “neatly dressed” – an area open to interpretation.

The driver advocate said a recent government blitz on Brisbane drivers resulted in cabbies copping $400 fines for not having a 2009 version of a street directory, or for allowing a car’s window tinting to peel.

The Courier-Mail yesterday obtained the ticket issued last month to taxi driver Kidd Moors in which the officer claimed the offence was: “Failed to dress neatly”. He identified the evidence as “WHT/runners, short running socks”.

Queensland Police Service yesterday was unable to respond in time to this newspaper’s questions about the harshness of the fine or the frequency such fines were handed out.

via Police fine taxi driver $100 over short running socks | The Courier-Mail.

Spliced-in gene lays dogs low

An extra gene may explain why dachshunds, corgis and basset hounds have short, stubby legs, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a finding that may also lend new clues about human dwarfism.

They said while most dogs have only one copy of a growth-related gene, nearly 20 different breeds of short-legged dogs have a second, slightly altered copy of the gene called fibroblast growth factor 4 or FGF4.

This so-called retrogene appears to be copy of a wolf gene that got spliced back into the dog genome some time after modern dog breeds diverged from wolves.

“We were surprised to find that just one retrogene inserted at one point during the evolution of a species could yield such a dramatic physical trait,” Heidi Parker of the National Human Genome Research Institute, whose study appears in the journal Science, said in a statement.

via Spliced-in gene lays dogs low | Oddly Enough | STV News.

Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits

The original recordings of the first humans landing on the moon 40 years ago were erased and re-used, but newly restored copies of the original broadcast look even better, NASA officials said on Thursday.

NASA released the first glimpses of a complete digital make-over of the original landing footage that clarifies the blurry and grainy images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the surface of the moon.

The full set of recordings, being cleaned up by Burbank, California-based Lowry Digital, will be released in September. The preview is available at www.nasa.gov.

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking for them.

The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed

– magnetically erased — and re-used to save money.

“The goal was live TV,” Nafzger told a news conference.

“We should have had a historian running around saying ‘I don’t care if you are ever going to use them — we are going to keep them’,” he said.

They found good copies in the archives of CBS news and some recordings called kinescopes found in film vaults at Johnson Space Centre.

Lowry, best known for restoring old Hollywood films, has been digitizing these along with some other bits and pieces to make a new rendering of the original landing.

Nafzger does not worry that using a Hollywood-based company might fuel the fire of conspiracy theorists who believe the entire lunar program that landed people on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972 was staged on a movie set or secret military base.

“This company is restoring historic video. It mattered not to me where the company was from,” Nafzger said.

“The conspiracy theorists are going to believe what they are going to believe,” added Lowry Digital Chief Operating Officer Mike Inchalik.

And there may be some unofficial copies of the original broadcast out there somewhere that were taken from a NASA video switching centre in Sydney, Australia, the space agency said. Nafzger said someone else in Sydney made recordings too.

“These tapes are not in the system,” Nafzger said. “We are certainly open to finding them.”

via Moon landing tapes got erased, NASA admits | Oddly Enough | Reuters.

In search of silence: Tinnitus Causes, Distress and Attention.

The high pitched ringing in my ears (tinnitus) is increasing.  I previously noticed it only right before going to sleep and only in my left ear. Now it is  in both ears, morning and night and throughout the day. This morning I did something with my attention to greatly reduce the noise. I  purposefully forced it to become like a dream that fades. This reduced the sound from a “10″ to about a “3″.  It came back and I was able to repeat the experience, but it returned again and is currently extremely loud.

Many thanks to the person who described being cured by antibiotics and that late stage Lyme disease was the cause. I’ll definitely get checked for that soon, just in case.

Here is something about Tinnitus and attention:

Abstract Tinnitus related distress corresponds to different degrees of attention paid to the tinnitus. Shifting attention to a signal other than the tinnitus is therefore particularly difficult for patients with high tinnitus related distress. As attention effects on Event Related Potentials (ERP) have been shown this should be reflected in ERP measurements (N100, phase locking). In order to prove this hypothesis single sweep ERP recordings were obtained in 41 tinnitus patients as well as 10 control subjects during a period of time when attention was shifted to a tone (attended) and during a second phase (unattended) when they did not focus attention to the tone. Whereas tinnitus patients with low distress showed a significant reduction in both N100 amplitude and phase locking when comparing the attended and unattended measurement condition a group of patients with high tinnitus related distress did not show such ERP alterations. Using single sweep ERP measurements the results of our study show, that attention in high tinnitus related distress patients is captured by their tinnitus significantly more than in low distress patients. Furthermore our results provide the basis for future neurofeedback based tinnitus therapies aiming at maximizing the ability to shift attention away from the tinnitus.

via CiteULike: Alterations in Event Related Potentials (ERP) Associated with Tinnitus Distress and Attention.

More info:

Tinnitus (pronounced “tin-it-tus”) is an abnormal noise in the ear (note that it is not an “itis” — or inflammation). Tinnitus is common — nearly 36 million Americans have constant tinnitus and more than half of the normal population has intermittent tinnitus.

About six percent of the general population has what they consider to be “severe” tinnitus. That is a gigantic number of people ! In a large study of more than 2000 adults aged 50 and above, 30.3% reported having experienced tinnitus, with 48% reporting symptoms in both ears. Tinnitus had been present for at least 6 years in 50% of cases, and most (55%) reported a gradual onset. Tinnitus was described as mildly to extremely annoying by 67%.(Sindhusake et al. 2003)

Tinnitus can come and go, or be continuous. It can sound like a low roar, or a high pitched ring. Tinnitus may be in both ears or just in one ear. Seven million Americans are so severely affected that they cannot lead normal lives.

The most common types of tinnitus are ringing or hissing ringing, whistling (high pitched hissing) and roaring (low-pitched hissing). Some persons hear chirping, screeching, or even musical sounds.

Note however that tinnitus nearly always consists of fairly simple sounds — for example, hearing someone talking that no one else can hear would not ordinarily be called tinnitus — this would be called an auditory hallucination. Musical hallucinations in patients without psychiatric disturbance is most often described in older persons, years after hearing loss, but they have also been reported in lesions of the dorsal pons (Schielke et al, 2000).

I had a burst ear drum in the ear where the sound started.  I was also read-ended in a car accident several years ago. I’m thinking this physical damage lead to a viral infection (before the sound started I was sick for an entire month and had too two full courses of Zithromax antibiotics). I’ve also been in contact potentially with tics and mosquitos outdoors and possibly with water containing mercury.  Read about Ototoix drugs.

If I have, as I suspect, damage to the 8th nerve from one or more of these causes, there is hope:

The results suggest that the mammalian auditory nerve has the capability for self-renewal and replacement. Transplantation of progenitor cells together with established means to induce neural differentiation and fiber growth may facilitate strategies for better repair and treatment of auditory neuronal damage. – sciencedirect

Unfortunately, I have also had a few episodes (although not recently) of dizziness, so I may have an acoustic neuroma.

An acoustic neuroma is a tumor that grows from the sheath (covering) of the eighth cranial nerve. The eighth cranial nerve, also known as the vestibulocochlear nerve, is a bundle of nerves responsible for hearing and balance. This bundle consists of the cochlear nerve (responsible for hearing) and the superior vestibular and inferior vestibular nerves (responsible for balance).

Ugh. Time for a brain scan perhaps.

Zac Sunderland completes solo sail around the world

Zac Sunderland, who left Marina del Rey 13 months ago with a bold ambition to become the youngest person to sail around the world alone, returned to complete that quest today at 10:30 a.m.

Sunderland, 17, who was greeted offshore and escorted in by an armada of well-wishers aboard dozens of sailboats and fancy yachts, cleared the breakwater beneath a clearing sky and stepped ashore at Fisherman’s Village in bright sunshine.

via Zac Sunderland completes solo sail around the world – Los Angeles Times.