New telescope may find alien life: square kilometre array SKA

It will revolutionise our understanding of the universe and might help us make contact with alien life.

The square kilometre array is one of the most ambitious science projects ever conceived and when completed will be the world’s most powerful radio telescope, thousands of times more capable than anything currently available.

It could explain the origin of dark matter, which makes up about 90 per cent of the universe and reveal how galaxies and stars were formed.

Advertisement: Story continues below

But what has scientists most excited is its potential to reveal things not yet dreamed of.

“What’s really exciting is the unknown, unknowns that the SKA will discover,” said Brian Boyle, who is leading the bid to have the array centred in Australia.

“If we could predict what the SKA was going to discover we weren’t being ambitious enough.

“It’s going to revolutionise our understanding of the universe.

“When we use the word transformational, we literally mean that because it transforms our thinking from our present paradigm to something that we can’t even contemplate today.”

Australia and New Zealand are jointly bidding against South Africa for the right to build the square kilometre array, with a final decision to be made by the international science community in February.

The 1.5 billion euro project involves the construction of about 3000 dishes which, when linked together, have a total collecting surface of about one square kilometre.

via New WA telescope | alien life | square kilometre array | SKA.

New Bigfoot Evidence Filmed in Kansas (Video)

A new Bigfoot movie popped up on YouTube Monday, this time from Kansas, not normally a hotbed of Sasquatch activity. The video is, as usual, very shaky. Why can’t people learn how to use a camera when they shoot these things? Maybe they’re truly scared?

The one-minute video shows a loping “creature” passing from tree to tree as a family shoots from the other side of a fenced-in area. The quick glimpses of the mystery cryptid recall the film that started it all, the Roger Patterson movie.

Comments from the family making the video sound authentically surprised, with a mom, pop and child. Dad sounds like a cartoon character himself, but the kid sounds pretty scared. Mom becomes a true believer…

Truthfully, the thing looks like somebody walking by in a monkey suit, but the unusual feature of actual daylight, as opposed to a night-vision view or grainy 16mm footage lends a bit of credence.

There’s only one way to find out. Calling all crypto-zoologists! Get your video processing tools out and weigh in on this one, please… since the series finale of Finding Bigfoot left the world with a big, fat zilcho …

via New Bigfoot Evidence Filmed in Kansas (Video) | Gather.

Boy regrets selling his kidney to buy iPad

A 17-year-old student in Anhui Province sold one of his kidneys for 20,000 yuan only to buy an iPad 2. Now, with his health getting worse, the boy is feeling regret but it is too late, the Global Times reported today.

“I wanted to buy an iPad 2 but could not afford it,” said the boy surnamed Zheng in Huaishan City. “A broker contacted me on the Internet and said he could help me sell one kidney for 20,000 yuan.”

On April 28 Zheng went to Chenzhou City in neighboring Hunan Province for the kidney removal surgery arranged by the broker. His parents knew nothing about it, Zheng said. He was paid 22,000 yuan after his right kidney was taken out at the Chenzhou No. 198 Hospital.

When he returned home, his mother found out and reported to the police immediately. But they could not locate the broker whose cell phone was always powered off, the report said.

It turned out that the Chenzhou No. 198 Hospital was not qualified to perform organ transplant. The hospital claimed they had no idea about Zheng’s surgery because the department that did the surgery had been contracted to a Fujian businessman.

The case is still under investigation, the report said.

via Boy regrets selling his kidney to buy iPad — Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 — English Window to China New.

So disgusting. This is cannibalism if you ask me.

Thousands of gas leaks under Boston and San Francisco

IF YOU are reading this in the US, the chances are there is a natural gas leak on your street. The US Energy Information Administration estimates that more than 8 billion cubic metres of gas are lost each year somewhere between the point of production and reaching homes across the nation. Some of this “unaccounted-for gas”, as the EIA has dubbed it, is probably down to faulty meters and accounting errors. But not all.

Thousands of unreported leaks are turning up under Boston and San Francisco, according to Nathan Phillips of Boston University. Together with documents from the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, it suggests that some of the gas is leaking into the atmosphere from ageing pipelines beneath urban centres.

The leaked gas represents 1.4 per cent of the nation’s total distribution but the methane it contains could scupper one of the best hopes for clean energy.

When burned, natural gas emits roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal, making it a promising “bridge fuel” until cleaner renewable energy sources come online. Germany is poised to use it as a substitute for the nuclear plants it will shut down by 2022 (see “Germany will use coal and gas to plug nuclear power gap”). But natural gas is made mostly of methane, which has more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year period. So gas that leaks from the system instead of being burned has a significant environmental impact.

via Thousands of gas leaks under Boston and San Francisco – environment – 06 July 2011 – New Scientist.

 

Drive to Fisherman’s Warf along the Embarcadero with your car windows down and you can smell the methane.

 

Army Uses Radar to Spot Suicide Bombers From 100 Yards

The security at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel wasn’t nearly enough to stop nine suicide bombers from setting the place ablaze and killing 12 people last month. But the U.S. military thinks it can do better – by spotting treacherous individuals before they get close enough to cause serious harm. Meet the CounterBomber.

The Army just awarded Science, Engineering and Technology Corporation (SET) an up to $48.2 million contract for a machine that could spot bomb-toting individuals from afar. The Virginia-based company, owed by SAIC, has already sent the CounterBomber to over 40 locations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So just how does this $300,000 device catch would-be human explosions at a distance? Two video cameras automatically detect and track individuals walking anywhere near the system, within the range of a soccer field. Low-level radar beams are aimed at them and then reflected back to a computer, which analyzes the signals in a series of algorithms.

“We call it our ’secret sauce,’” says Rick Thornton, the director of business development at SAIC. That sauce is apparently so potent it can spot signs of bombs or weapons hidden under someone’s clothing.

It does this by comparing the radar return signal (which emits less than a cell phone) to an extensive library of “normal responses.” Those responses are modeled after people of all different shapes and sizes (SET got around to adding females in 2009). It then compares the signal to another set of “anomalous responses” – any anomaly, and horns go off. Literally.

When the computer detects a threat, it shows a red symbol and sounds a horn. No threat and the symbol turns green, greeting the operators with a pleasant piano riff. Seem pretty self-explanatory? It’s meant to be.

“We built a system so anyone coming out of chow hall can operate it.” Thornton says. “As long as you’re not color blind, you can do it.”

For those worried that those piercing radar eyes might be seeing a little too much, the system doesn’t produce any quasi-nude images, à la TSA (privacy is apparently more of a priority for SET). And while Thornton won’t reveal any numbers, he claims the accuracy is much higher than the 40% false alarm rates of airport scanners. …

via Army Uses Radar to Spot Suicide Bombers From 100 Yards | Danger Room | Wired.com.

This is the first ever photo of a fish using tools

This blackspot tuskfish, found in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, held a clam in its mouth and smashed it against a rock to reach the food inside. This photo is the first incontrovertible proof that fish are capable of tool use.

While tool use was once seen as a uniquely human behavior, decades of animal observation has proven just how wrong that really was. We’ve seen primates, crows, and maybe even octopuses show signs of tool use. But outside of mammals, birds, and octopuses, tool use is close to unknown. There were reports of fish tool use, but no hard evidence to back it up.

That changed when diver Scott Gardner snapped this photo, and there are more like it about to be published in a new paper from Macquarie University researchers. Ecologist Culum Brown explains that the fish hit the clam against the rock with unmistakable precision, suggesting this was an activity it had long experience with. That contention is backed up by the presence of the presence of crushed shells around the rock, and Gardner found plenty more shell remains around the nearby rocks.

There’s potentially a slight hitch with calling this tool use, though. As you might have noticed, the fish never actually touches the tool in question, which is the rock. Since the fish only ever handles the clam, can it really be said to be using a tool? That’s the issue that primatologist Elisabetta Visalberghi raises to Science NOW:

“The form of tool use described [in tuskfish] is cognitively little demanding and present in a variety of species. Often it has been labeled as proto-tool use because the object used to open the shell is still, fixated to the sea bottom, and not portable as stone tools used to crack open nuts by chimpanzees or capuchin monkeys are.

Of course, there’s a pretty clear counterargument to this, and it’s one that Brown himself makes. That definition of tool use seemingly restricts the behavior only to organisms with a human-like anatomy. The fish doesn’t have the same options primates do, considering it doesn’t have hands to swing the rock. …

via This is the first ever photo of a fish using tools.

Defending Earth from asteroids: Plan now!

… on June 27, [2011] this asteroid — which was not discovered until June 22 — just missed the only home we have in the universe by a miniscule 7,500 miles. …Even if they had been wrong and the asteroid did enter our atmosphere, they said it “likely wouldn’t reach the surface.”

By their own admission, NASA initially got the calculations on asteroid 2011 MD’s closet approach to Earth wrong, so “likely” is not always that comforting.

What if they had been even more wrong and it was a certainty that it was about to strike earth?

What if, instead of the approximately 100 feet across, it had been 500 or 1,000 feet across? With five days notice or less, what could we do to avert a collision that would have the potential to wreck havoc on humanity?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Laugh, if you will. File this incident and remarkably close call in with the reports of UFOs over the swamp and Sasquatch in the neighbor’s backyard.

But you do so at all of our peril.

In 1908, an asteroid — much smaller than originally believed — exploded over Siberia and flattened more than 800 square miles of forest, killing everything in its path.

The truth is that the vast majority of politicians in our country — Republican or Democrat — are loath to discuss this subject out of fear of being labeled eccentric or because they have (rightfully) determined that it’s not considered tangible and is not a vote-getter.

Fine. Except I would argue that asteroid 2011 MD just demonstrated that if leaders such as President Obama, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and others are not talking about the horrific and unimaginable consequences of an asteroid strike, they are in dereliction of duty….

via Defending Earth from asteroids: Plan now to avoid “Deep Impact” later – OrlandoSentinel.com.

 

CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA

The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family, a Guardian investigation has found.

As part of extensive preparations for the raid that killed Bin Laden in May, CIA agents recruited a senior Pakistani doctor to organise the vaccine drive in Abbottabad, even starting the “project” in a poorer part of town to make it look more authentic, according to Pakistani and US officials and local residents.

The doctor, Shakil Afridi, has since been arrested by the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) for co-operating with American intelligence agents.

Relations between Washington and Islamabad, already severely strained by the Bin Laden operation, have deteriorated considerably since then. The doctor’s arrest has exacerbated these tensions. The US is understood to be concerned for the doctor’s safety, and is thought to have intervened on his behalf.

The vaccination plan was conceived after American intelligence officers tracked an al-Qaida courier, known as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, to what turned out to be Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound last summer. The agency monitored the compound by satellite and surveillance from a local CIA safe house in Abbottabad, but wanted confirmation that Bin Laden was there before mounting a risky operation inside another country.

DNA from any of the Bin Laden children in the compound could be compared with a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010, to provide evidence that the family was present.

So agents approached Afridi, the health official in charge of Khyber, part of the tribal area that runs along the Afghan border. …

via CIA organised fake vaccination drive to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA | World news | The Guardian.

Low dose naltrexone LDN: Harnessing the body’s own chemistry to treat human ovarian cancer

Researchers at The Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania have discovered that a low dose of the opioid antagonist naltrexone LDN has an extraordinarily potent antitumor effect on human ovarian cancer in tissue culture and xenografts established in nude mice. When LDN is combined with chemotherapy, there is an additive inhibitory action on tumorigenesis. This discovery, reported in the July 2011 issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, provides new insights into the pathogenesis and treatment of ovarian neoplasia, the 4th leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women in the United States.The strategy of LDN therapy in repressing cancer was first reported over 30 years ago by Drs. Zagon and McLaughlin Science 221:671-673. Naltrexone NTX is a general opioid receptor antagonist devoid of intrinsic activity that results in a compensatory elevation in endogenous opioids and opioid receptors. Blockade of opioid peptides from opioid receptors for a short time each day 4 to 6 hr with LDN provides a sufficient window of time 18-20 hr for the elevated levels of endogenous opioids and opioid receptors to interact and elicit a response: inhibition of cell proliferation. Thus, LDN acts as a decoy to upregulate native opioids and opioid receptors. When NTX is metabolized and no longer present, an enhanced opioid-receptor effect is permitted to occur. The endogenous opioid peptide, opioid growth factor OGF chemical term = [Met5]-enkephalin and its receptor OGFr is related to LDN action, and constitutes a tonically active inhibitory axis that suppresses cell proliferation through a depression in DNA synthesis by way of cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitory pathways. In the case of human ovarian cancer, this laboratory Amer. J. Physiol. 296:R1716-1725, 2009 previously found that the OGF-OGFr axis is present and functional in human ovarian cancer.

The present study addressed the question of whether modulation of the OGF-OGFr axis by LDN could alter the progression of established ovarian tumors. Moreover, the authors asked whether LDN can be combined with standard chemotherapy to invokean even greater effect on ovarian cancer. A model of LDN in tissue culture was established that exposed human ovarian cancer cells to NTX for 6 hr every two days, resulting in reduced DNA synthesis and cell replication from vehicle subjected controls. When a short term exposure to NTX was combined with standard of care chemotherapeutic agents, taxol or cisplatin, an enhanced anticancer action relative to either drug was observed. The effects of LDN, but not taxol or cisplatin, could be reversed, indicating the non-toxic nature of LDN. Although favorable results with LDN alone and in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs were recorded in a tissue culture setting, this begged the question of whether LDN was effective on tumors transplanted into mice. Using nude mice with established xenografts of human ovarian cancer, LDN was found to repress tumor progression, reducing DNA synthesis and angiogenesis but not altering cell survival. LDN’s repression of cancer progression was comparable to that of cisplatin or taxol. However, the combination of LDN with cisplatin, but not taxol, had an even greater antitumor effect than LDN or taxol alone. Moreover, cisplatin was toxic to the mice, as detected by weight loss. However, LDN in combination with cisplatin attenuated the toxicity of this chemotherapeutic agent, indicating that LDN was protective of the adverse events elicited by a chemotherapeutic drug. Finally, LDN was discovered to upregulate the expression of both OGF and OGFr, indicating that this endogenous opioid system, which inhibits cell proliferation, was activated by LDN.

via Low dose naltrexone LDN: Harnessing the body’s own chemistry to treat human ovarian cancer.

Related:

A previous article discussed a novel drug treatment called low dose naltrexone, useful in treatment of Multiple Sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease and a variety of other problems.  This article takes an in-depth look at LDN as a treatment for cancer.  In addition, we review a new book, The Promise of Low Dose Naltrexone Therapy by Elaine Moore and Samantha Wilkinson….

Paradoxically, LDN’s ability to benefit so many seemingly unrelated medical conditions has been the greatest criticism from conventional mainstream medicine.  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  However, since LDN is an FDA approved drug, off label use is perfectly legal, and is a common practice in mainstream medicine.   LDN has virtually no adverse side effects, and based on my own short clinical experience prescribing LDN for Multiple Sclerosis, Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis, I can report that it is amazingly effective.  Even though it may sound too good to be true, in the case of LDN, I can assure you that, yes,  it is all true. …

The medical system’s domination by the Pharmaceutical industry is clearly apparent by the scandalous and outrageous manner in which LDN has been ignored.  Mainstream neurologists refuse to prescribe LDN for multiple sclerosis, instead using prednisone, and other useless medications.  Mainstream gastero-enterologists refuse to prescribe LDN for Crohn’s and Ulcerative colitis, instead using prednisone, methotrexate and newer drugs like Remicade to inhibit the immune system, all with horrendous adverse side effects.  Conventional oncologist refuse to prescribe LDN for cancer patients, preferring the more traditional chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, modalities which have changed very little over the past 60 years and although effective for a few selected cancers, largely ineffective for the vast majority of cancers and their relentless spread as metastatic disease.

- link

UC Riverside physicists discover new way to produce antimatter-containing atom

Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe, why nature favored matter over antimatter at the universe’s creation.

Positronium is made up of an electron and its antimatter twin, the positron. It has applications in developing more accurate Positron Emission Tomography or PET scans and in fundamental physics research.

Recently, antimatter made headlines when scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, trapped antihydrogen atoms for more than 15 minutes. Until then, the presence of antiatoms was recorded for only fractions of a second.

In the lab at UC Riverside, the physicists first irradiated samples of silicon with laser light. Next they implanted positrons on the surface of the silicon. They found that the laser light frees up silicon electrons that then bind with the positrons to make positronium.

“With this method, a substantial amount of positronium can be produced in a wide temperature range and in a very controllable way,” said David Cassidy, an assistant project scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, who performed the research along with colleagues. “Other methods of producing positronium from surfaces require heating the samples to very high temperatures. Our method, on the other hand, works at almost any temperature – including very low temperatures.”

Cassidy explained that when positrons are implanted into materials, they can sometimes get stuck on the surface, where they will quickly find electrons and annihilate.

“In this work, we show that irradiating the surface with a laser just before the positrons arrive produces electrons that, ironically, help the positrons to leave the surface and avoid annihilation,” said Allen Mills, a professor of physics and astronomy, in whose lab Cassidy works. “They do this by forming positronium, which is spontaneously emitted from the surface. The free positronium lives more than 200 times longer than the surface positrons, so it is easy to detect.”

via UC Riverside physicists discover new way to produce antimatter-containing atom.

Positronium is great. A dash in your morning shake gives you extra energy all day. Hey, wait a minute… that’s not Tom Hanks…