Mystery surrounds ‘horse-boy’ on Google Street View

Mystery surrounds a man wearing a horse’s head who has been captured on Google’s Street View in Aberdeen.

The man – who has become known as ‘horse-boy’ – can be seen in the Hardgate area of the city.

The sighting has become a popular attraction on Google’s service, which offers a photographic map of streets.

The man is wearing dark trousers, a purple shirt – and a brown and white horse’s head.

Dozens of BBC news website users have e-mailed from across Europe to say they know who horse boy is.

Others have sent in images of the mystery horse-head wearer and some have claimed to be him.

Stefan Kleen from Germany said he and a friend met horse-boy at a German festival last weekend.

He added: “He only spoke English so we didn’t really talk a lot to him.”

Anders Hauge reckons he has been shopping in Haugesund in Norway; John Hammond was convinced he was playing the fairways and relaxing in the bars of Marbella and Julian Sykes said he had been sighted in Cardiff.

John Ainsworth insisted he saw horse-boy in Norwich earlier in the year walking through Wensum Park.

He said: “I thought I was hallucinating at first but then realised it was real.”

Other readers have not been impressed with the story and some have told the website that it is not newsworthy and is a prank to generate further publicity.

And Gareth Remblance pointed out: “Horse boy isn’t a person, it’s a cheap mask – for example I saw at least three people wearing similar heads at this years Download Festival in Donington.”

A number of contributors have said that horse-boy features in other parts of Google’s street view service.

Mark Coates said: “If you go down the road and turn back you can see him putting on the horse head and on the shot back up the road again he has white hair.”

The BBC story has had more than 500,000 hits.

via BBC News – Mystery surrounds ‘horse-boy’ on Google Street View.

Perhaps aliens can shape shift into different animals and this one was caught in the act. Here is the cover story: “it was just a mask”.

UFO Traffic Report: June 19, 2010

A New Hampshire witness is not sure what is making a late-night “whooshing” sound overhead, but with no engine noise in MUFON Case # 23807. This latest fly-by was June 18, 2010.

On June 17, 2010, in Danielson, CT, a witness watched an object that appeared to be coming in for a landing, but then it stopped and hovered in MUFON Case # 23804. The witness and his father watched the object for 15 minutes before leaving as it “glowed differened colors.” When the witness returned later that evening, the object was gone.

A Texas woman was watching a plane cross the sky on June 17, 2010, when she also noticed a “shiney, oval, silver object” moving slowly near the it in MUFON Case # 23803. Her husband also came outside to witness the event. She also snapped a photo – see image at top of this page. The witness photo was cropped and enlarged.

A California man is recounting an alien abduction experience from 1996 in MUFON Case # 23802 after a frightening encounter in his bedroom. A hypnosis session revealed more of the story.

A California witness at Hacienda Heights recounts a August 10, 1968 event in MUFON Case # 23801, where a “cone of light” struck a nearby barren hillside when there was no visible craft above it or other explanation for why the light was there.

Another California witness is giving up very little information in the public portion of MUFON Case # 23798 where it’s reported that two “triangle ships” where hovering over a house for one hour on June 16, 2010. One photo was uploaded with the report – attached here – although cropped and reduced in size. No city was named, or any other information about the event.

A Texas couple report a sighting from November 14, 2008, while traveling down Farm to Market Road just after sunset in McAllen, in MUFON Case # 23822. They observed a stationary object in the sky that was grey-silver in color and oval shaped. The object then shot off to the southeast at “great speed.”

via UFO Traffic Report: June 19, 2010.

Researchers create self-assembling nanodevices that move and change shape on demand

By emulating nature’s design principles, a team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has created nanodevices made of DNA that self-assemble and can be programmed to move and change shape on demand. In contrast to existing nanotechnologies, these programmable nanodevices are highly suitable for medical applications because DNA is both biocompatible and biodegradable.

The work appears in the June 20 advance online Nature Nanotechnology.

Built at the scale of one billionth of a meter, each device is made of a circular, single-stranded DNA molecule that, once it has been mixed together with many short pieces of complementary DNA, self-assembles into a predetermined 3D structure. Double helices fold up into larger, rigid linear struts that connect by intervening single-stranded DNA. These single strands of DNA pull the struts up into a 3D form — much like tethers pull tent poles up to form a tent. The structure’s strength and stability result from the way it distributes and balances the counteracting forces of tension and compression.

This architectural principle — known as tensegrity — has been the focus of artists and architects for many years, but it also exists throughout nature. In the human body, for example, bones serve as compression struts, with muscles, tendons and ligaments acting as tension bearers that enable us to stand up against gravity. The same principle governs how cells control their shape at the microscale.

“This new self-assembly based nanofabrication technology could lead to nanoscale medical devices and drug delivery systems, such as virus mimics that introduce drugs directly into diseased cells,” said co-investigator and Wyss Institute director Don Ingber. A nanodevice that can spring open in response to a chemical or mechanical signal could ensure that drugs not only arrive at the intended target but are also released when and where desired.

Further, nanoscopic tensegrity devices could one day reprogram human stem cells to regenerate injured organs.

via Researchers create self-assembling nanodevices that move and change shape on demand.

World’s Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death

Scientists have revealed what may be the world’s largest dinosaur graveyard.

The dinosaurs may have been part of a mass die-off resulting from a monster storm, comparable to today’s hurricanes, which struck what was then a coastal area.

The findings could help solve a mystery concerning why the badlands of western Canada are so rich in dinosaur fossils.

The roughly 76-million-year-old fossil beds apparently hold thousands of bones over an area of at least 568 acres (2.3 square km), skeletons that belonged to a roughly cow-sized, plant-eating horned dinosaur known as Centrosaurus. This treasure trove provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers easily in the high hundreds to low thousands, said senior research scientist David Eberth, a paleontologist and geologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta.

The “mega-bonebed,” which consists of 14 smaller bonebeds, lies in northern Alberta near Hilda, Canada, right by the border with Saskatchewan. The graveyard was actually discovered in 1997, but confirmation of the discovery’s size was detailed this month in the book “New Perspectives On Horned Dinosaurs” (Indiana University Press, 2010). [Illustration of centrosaur herd]

Alberta is extraordinarily rich in fossils, such as those of duck-billed dinosaurs, horned dinosaurs including Triceratops, ankylosaurs, raptors related to Velociraptor, and tyrannosaurids such as Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex. The area was home to a remarkable diversity of other animals as well, including birds, pterosaurs, alligators, turtles, lizards and mammals – in fact, scientists recently found mammal tooth marks on dinosaur bones in Alberta.

Thousands die in flood

Back when these centrosaurs lived, Alberta was warm and lush, and encompassed lowlands on the western coast of the Western Interior Seaway, a vast inland sea that divided what is now North America in half. The way the fossils are linked together in the same layers of earth within these bonebeds suggests all these centrosaurs were wiped out simultaneously.

The likely culprit in this scenario was a catastrophic storm, which could quickly have routinely made the waters flood up as high as 12 to 15 feet (3.6 to 4.6 meters), if experiences with modern floodplains are any guide.

“The flooding could have reached more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the shoreline,” Eberth told LiveScience. “The landscape basically just drowns.”

The flat area would have provided no high ground for escape, leading to thousands of animals drowning in the rising waters.

via World’s Largest Dinosaur Graveyard Linked to Mass Death – Yahoo! News.

Wimbledon’s longest match: Isner v Mahut continues as Queen visits SW19

Nicolas Mahut and John Isner – unknown to the wider sporting world yesterday, household names this morning – will drag their weary bodies back on to court at Wimbledon this evening to resume the longest match in tennis history as the Queen makes her first visit since 1977.

A string of tennis records were blown away as Mahut and Isner came off court on at Wimbledon on Wednesday at 59-59 in the final set, having slugged it out for 10 hours when play was suspended as they ran out of daylight.

Later today they will try and close out the most remarkable game in tennis history when they will be the third game of the day on Court 18.

The only true comparison anybody can think of was the famous “Timeless Test” between South Africa and England in Durban in 1939 when both teams decided to play the game out to a conclusion but had to halt that process after ten days when the England boat left for home.

Tennis fans packed out the 782-capacity Court 18 yesterday with people lining the roof of the Wimbledon broadcasting centre several deep, and straining to peer through any gaps they could to catch a glimpse of the epic match. Today both the proceeding games will be played to full houses as fans try and “bag” a seat for the Mahut-Isner shoot out later.

The unfinished fifth set itself was longer than the previous longest match ever played. That match took six hours and 33 minutes. The shattered record was set at the 2004 French Open, when Fabrice Santoro beat fellow Frenchman Arnaud Clement 6-4, 6-3, 6-7, 3-6, 16-14.

“Nothing like this will ever happen again, ever,” said an exhausted Isner, while Mahut added: “We played for too long.”

The conclusion of the historic encounter will take the spotlight later on Thursday, but earlier attention will be fixed firmly on Centre Court when British number one Andy Murray is set to play in front of the Queen.

Murray, the world No 4 takes on Finland’s Jarkko Nieminen in a second-round match due to start at 1pm with the Queen expected to watch from the Royal Box.

The Queen, after than, may then also watch women’s third seed Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark play Taiwan’s Chang Kai-Chen, before French Open champion Rafael Nadal plays his second-round match against Holland’s Robin Haase.

Records that fell

* There were unconfirmed suggestions from the International Tennis Federation that this is the “longest official tennis match in history”.

* It is definitely the longest Grand Slam match, surpassing the previous record of six hours and 33 minutes at the 2004 French Open (Fabrice Santoro bt Arnaud Clement).

* According to the BBC, the fifth set is the longest ever to have been played in a tennis match.

* It has seen the most number of games ever played in a match, beating the previous highest of 112 (singles) and 122 (doubles).

* It is the longest match at Wimbledon, beating six hours and nine minutes, set in the 2006 men’s doubles quarter-finals.

* It has featured the longest set at Wimbledon. The previous longest was 62 games, set in a men’s doubles match in 1968.

* It has seen the record number of aces served in a match at Wimbledon, with both players beating Ivo Karlovic’s 51 in 2005. …

via Wimbledon’s longest match: Isner v Mahut continues as Queen visits SW19 – Telegraph.

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

via Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com.

the ummo-case, history and life on “planet ummo”.

Are there extra-terrestrial beings living among us on Earth? Events surrounding two spectacular Spanish UFO sightings suggest that this case is a fact.
The UMMO-case is a mystery with plenty of clues along the trail. Whatever the truth, this is in every way a refreshing change from the more usual alleged encounters with people from other worlds; as the Ummites themselves explained:
“We have not come to bring you a new doctrine, as prophets descending from the skies to teach a new physics or mathematics or preach a new religion, or offering you panaceas for your social or patho-psychological ills.”

Apparently, in 1950, inhabitants of the planet Ummo (14 light years away) landed on Earth. They lived among us for 15 years undetected, establishing their bases and acclimating themselves to our way of life. Then, in 1965, they started to make contact. Initially they compiled a list of 20 carefully selected individuals, most of ‘them were Spanish. They included a playwright, a police officer, an employee in the American embassy in Madrid, an engineer, an official of the Telegraph Office, a lawyer and two of Spain’s best-known UFOLOGISTS, Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols. … – galactic

Sesma (picture) received, in 1967, masses of reports and read them loudly in his club. They were describing the everyday’s life on this strange planet, the habits of its inhabitants, their social behaviour, their political organisation and their history. All that was mixed with information about the propulsion of their machines, the way of travelling over many light years, biology, their theory of evolution, and even their metaphysics.

The Ummits indicated to Sesma that they were not typing the texts themselves, but were helped by a stenotypist, paid by them, and living in the Spanish capital. He was mailing the letters to different persons, to addresses given by his unconventional “employers”.

In the fifties, the Ummits took contact with the Earth, in circumstances we will describe later because they are very funny. They would have then traveled all over the Earth, in different countries ( including the United States, of course). After becoming familiar to our languages, they wished to communicate with us, first by phone, then through writings, which was less dangerous for them. To do so, a group located in Australia, near the town of Adelaide, would have modify a terrestrial type-writer machine to be able to command it by voice.

The Ummits are very clumsy, as they admitted shameless. As one of them wanted to drive a car, in Australia, he had an accident and died, they said. You may ask how these lubberly people could have develop such a technology on their planet. That has not been reached in one day.

We already mentioned that they are hemeralopic, living essentially during the night. The day, they simply sleep, like owls.

At the beginning of their history, they would have live in burrows, like rabbits. After, they would have build a complex underground architecture. On UMMO, the visible buildings, constructed on the floor, have essentially industrial or scientific functions.

As they arrive on Earth, what we will describe precisely later, they choose quite rapidly a semi-wild region, to avoid being discovered too fast. They found a little hill near the small town of Digne, situated in south of France. Naively, seeing all this constructions they thought to have landed near a scientific complex. They said to have been very amazed as they discovered that people were just living in these constructions.

One must read, in this report called “the first days on Earth”, the anxiousness of these people, getting in touch with our floor, expecting immediate attack from Earth’s inhabitants, rushing out from underground habitations.

The Ummits say to have built contacts with lots of other extraterrestrial groups. We may deduce that this way of living, like moles, is usual and that we may represent an exception on this point. We will see later why.

via the ummo-case, history and life on “planet ummo”.

This hieroglyphics do remind me of Roswell. Some specifics given by the Ummits that we may one day be able to verify are below. Fishy, however, that they would not know exactly which star in our sky is their own sun. 

Duration of the year 365 days 212 days

Diameter of the planet 12,756,776 km 14,503,215 km

Eccentricity of orbit 0.0167 0.007833

SUN IUMMA
Mass 1.991x1033g 1.48 1033g
Temperature 5,7850Ke1vin 4 ,580.30Kelvir
Magnitude 4.73 7.4
Spectrum G.2 K

According to the visitors from UMMO, their star IUMMA might be the one now registered by terrestrial scientists as WOLF 424 in the Con stellation of VIRGO. Its characteristics are:

Right ascension 12 hours, 31 minutes, 14 seconds

Declination +9degr. 18′ 7”
Absolute visual magnitude 14.3
Apparent visual magnitude: Between 12 and 13
Spectrum type M

UMMO is a water planet with a molten core, a relatively thin crust and a secondary atmosphere very much like that of Earth. It has most of the kinds of life on its surface though considerably less variety in species. Its humanity is similar to that of Earth.

Oil Rain In Louisiana?

This shocking video shows what appears to be the aftermath of oily rain, filmed in River Ridge — just outside New Orleans. The filmmaker captures the clearly visible sheen in the gathering puddles, and describes the remaining substance as “thick” and “foamy,” noting that it not only looks but also smells like the oil they witnessed the day before on Gulf beaches from the spill.

According to Tampa Bay’s 10Connects.com,

National Weather Service Science and Operations Officer Charlie Paxton says while it’s always possible a water spout could pick up some oil and carry it a short distance, the notion of black rain is just not possible. Paxton says that’s because oil does not evaporate. As a result, talk of black rain is just a myth.YouTube – Oil Rain In Louisiana?.

No Sleep ‘Til Fusion

With every thing Mark Suppes fixes, another thing breaks. We’re in his workshop, and he’s hunched over, tightening the bolts on a squat tubular machine. This is the fusion reactor Suppes built, and it’s not working.Suppes never slows down, moving from one problem to the next with an irrepressible smile. The workshop is a few hundred square feet sub-let from a roboticist friend in a warehouse one floor above a hassidic clothing factory near Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. “I’m starting from nothing, I mean nothing,” says Suppes, “There’s no reason I should be doing this. It’s ridiculous on all levels.” What he’s doing is building a Bussard Polywell fusion reactor.Dr. Robert W. Bussard was a a physicist at Los Alamos, a rocket builder in the age of rockets. His proposed hydrogen-compressing ramjet became the stuff of sci-fi legend. There’s one of the front of the U.S.S. Enterprise. He was a classic scientist of the 20th century retro-future, when it was all going to be clean atomic energy, spaceflight, and freckled white people living on the moon. It didn’t happen that way, and in the end he died an old man at the bottom of the same polluted and overheating gravity well he was born on.But in the few weeks before his last lab shuttered from lack of funding, he’d had a breakthrough, and Bussard believed that he might have solved the most difficult physics problems of fusion energy.

Fusion reactors work by creating very high energy plasma inside of a vacuum, and then getting small atoms close enough for the attractive force of their nuclei to overcome the repelling force of the atoms’ natural electrostatic repulsion, causing the two atoms to fuse into a new element. A lot of energy is released when this happens.

The problem with fusion has always been that we don’t know how to get more energy out of it than we put into it. We know the energy is there. We know effective fusion is likely to take a lot of energy to jumpstart, but we don’t know how (or if) we can ever get fusion going well enough to capture as much energy out as we put into it—the elusive break even point. We can’t control how the energy likes to leave the reaction, and it’s in forms we can’t use. We can’t keep the reaction self-sustaining like it is in the sun, since we don’t have gravity on our side. Also, we’re talking about plasma, the star-hot fourth state of matter. It tends to destroy the equipment.

Dr. Bussard was one of the many government scientists trying to make a workable fusion reactor. He’d been one of the forces behind the tokamak, the main ongoing avenue of fusion research in the U.S. But Bussard eventually wrote a letter blasting the U.S. fusion program as expensive, impractical, and doomed in the 1990s, testifying to Congress against much of what he’d once advocated.

In the last decades of his life Bussard left the government and founded a fusion company called EMC2. “He tended to jump from project to project. Today he might be diagnosed as A.D.D.” said Tom Ligon, who worked with Bussard for years as his “hands in the lab.”

Bussard was frustrated by a string of failures and funding problems. EMC2 was mainly supported by the Navy, and by their rules he couldn’t publish his research. Eventually EMC2 lost out in a round of budget cuts. Bussard’s team worked right to the end, building a 6th version of his “Polywell” reactor design. In the last weeks WB-6 looked promising, but the reaction burned through the insulation and destroyed it. After the lab closed Bussard analyzed the last of his data. He came to believe what they saw in the few runs before the WB-6 self-destructed was what he’d looked for all along: a clean fusion reactor, which, if scaled up to about 3 meters, would change absolutely everything. But he couldn’t know for sure until someone built it. “From an outsider’s perspective there were still some physics questions to be answered,” says Ligon. “I will guarantee you he squeezed everything he could from those neutrons!” (The presence of neutrons is used to detect fusion.)

Bussard began a crusade, telling everyone who would listen about his results, looking for anyone, governments, corporations, schools, that would finish the Polywell. He did a Google Tech Talk, and challenged Google to take it on. “He told me he was starting to feel a little ill the day of the Google video talk,” says Ligon. “He discovered he had a second cancer the day after the Google video. He really was desperate to get the thing funded again.”

Dr Bussard died not long after, at 79, his life’s work yet unfinished. But the Navy did step in and fund EMC2 for two more years with stimulus funds. “Dr. Bussard died knowing the project had been picked up,” says Ligon. But the work is back under the Navy embargo.

* * *By day Mark Suppes is a Ruby on Rails developer for Gucci, and a serial startup guy. He saw Bussard’s Google tech talk on Youtube, and decided to take up the project himself. He was undaunted by being one guy, not a physicist or even an electrical engineer. He understood just enough to decide this would be a good way to spend a big chunk of his life. He publishes everything he does as open source and blogs his progress.

“The stakes are just unbelievably high … you [would be] basically the progenitor of a new era of humankind,” says Suppes. “If this works, the price of electricity will drop to 10 cents on the dollar. Maybe even better than that. It will be the end of oil and coal as an energy source.”

Bussard created a magnetic grid, or magrid, out of a box constructed of electromagnetic loops. The magnetic field repels the fusion material, but there’s a patten in the center where the fields from the various magnets cancel out. This creates a virtual magnetic container for the reaction to happen in.

Suppes has built his first test magrid out of Teflon and copper, though he hasn’t run it yet. He’s started designing a 3D printable magrid with space for superconducting magnets, which potentially could take less energy to run and get the reaction closer to self-sustaining. He’s using a high temperature superconducting magnetic tape, but even high temperature means liquid nitrogen cooled, instead of liquid helium. It has to sit next to plasma.

“It’s the McDonalds problem. How do you keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool?” says Suppes “It’s going to have to be a multilevel cooling system… Multiple layers of vacuum mirrored insulation.”

“It would be hard to believe you could advance on what Dr. Nebel and Dr. Park (of EMC2) are putting into it,” says Ligon. But their funding only goes to next year. Suppes doesn’t have institutional support, but he also doesn’t have institutional constraint. “I expect to be working on this project for the next ten years, and that’s what it will take at least. I have a long term commitment to this,” says Suppes, “I would rather really go for something amazing. Even if it doesn’t work, I’m learning everything I’ve always wanted to know about physics, and electrical engineering.” …

via No Sleep ‘Til Fusion.

Can Petraeus deliver in Afghanistan?

David Petraeus, one of America’s most senior and best-known generals, is preparing to take over in Afghanistan. What effect will switching the top job have on the current counter-insurgency strategy?

The nomination of General David Petraeus to take over as commander of Nato’s international security assistance Force (ISAF) in place of the sacked General Stanley McChrystal, was the only sensible option available to President Barack Obama.

As commanding general of the multinational force in Iraq from 2007 to 2008, he is widely credited with having led the successful military surge that allowed real progress in stabilising the country, and a phased withdrawal of foreign troops.

As commander of US Central Command (CentCom), he has been in the chain of command between Gen McChrystal and the White House for US national operations in Afghanistan, which are distinct from Nato operations and are directed more specifically at ousting terrorism through the use of special forces and other discreet capabilities.

International standing

He has the international stature and profile to allow Mr Obama to repair a situation that is quite dreadful in its timing. Afghan and allied forces are on the brink of an operation to tackle the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, the second city of Afghanistan. This is seen globally as the next stage of the campaign that began with Operation Moshtarak in Helmand, and which could be defining in confirming progress towards the handover of security to Afghan forces and eventual withdrawal of foreign troops.

For Gen Petraeus, 57, this is a demotion of post if not of rank. As head of CentCom, he is in charge of all US military operations from Afghanistan through the Gulf and Saudi Arabia to Somalia and Egypt in the West.

Gen Petraeus is a masterful political general. He is highly articulate and adept at judging and communicating with an international audience. In this respect, he is very different from Gen McChrystal who majors on the rough, tough and blunt as the Rolling Stone article captures.

With his own experience of Iraq and his association with Afghanistan, he is likely to run with the McChrystal plan as Mr Obama intends. It will be important, however, for the plan to develop to cope with outcomes that are unlikely to conform to expectations. Gen Petraeus is known to be uncomfortable with the July 2011 deadline that President Obama presented as the beginning of withdrawal. …

via BBC News – Can Petraeus deliver in Afghanistan?.