Space ball: UFO shocks Brazilians

An unidentified metal sphere has plunged from the sky on unsuspecting villagers in northern Brazil, causing an uproar. According to eyewitnesses, the UFO weighs about 50 kilograms and measures roughly one meter in diameter.

The sphere fell on Wednesday in a village of Riacho dos Poços in Brazilian Maranhão state. No casualties were reported apart from an unfortunate cashew tree that was severed by the object as it plunged to the ground, according to MR Notícias, a Mata Roma news site.

Valdir José Mendes, 46, told police the sphere landed several meters from his house leaving a one-meter-deep hole in the yard.

“I heard the noise and I went out to see what caused it. I thought it was a plane that had fallen, or an earthquake,” he said.

The noise was such that Mendes was too scared to go outside. However, curiosity got the better of him and he headed outside to find the cashew tree’s trunk snapped in half by a mysterious metal sphere lying in a hole nearby.

Some 20 villagers joined Mendes to help him extract the object from the ground and examine it. Mendes says the sphere is hollow and if shaken some sort of liquid can be felt swishing inside. Locals quickly spread the news, as they reached the town of Mata Roma over 2,000 people flocked to see the “UFO”.

“It was a huge uproar here. Some feared it was the beginning of the 2012 end of the world, others said it was ‘alien’, but I think it is a piece of satellite,” said Max Garreto Mauro, 25, a resident of Mata Roma.

Peter Costa, the meteorologist at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), agrees with Garetto, saying the object would probably be part of a satellite. “I’m sure this is not a weather balloon or part of it,” he said as quoted by O Imparcia.

Military police confiscated the sphere and took it to the barracks in the nearby Mata Roma. They have not specified what the UFO’s possible future will be. In a statement the Air Force Command said it “does not have specialized structures to perform scientific research on this type of aerial phenomena, which prevents the institution to submit an opinion on these events.”

via Space ball: UFO shocks Brazilians (VIDEO, PHOTOS) — RT.

Space junk. Similar to this:

A large metallic ball has fallen from the heavens and landed in a remote region of Namibia, spurring a lot of speculation about its origins and spurring local authorities to get NASA and the European Space Agency on the horn. No one is sure where the hollow metallic object came from, but it definitely came down hard–it was found 60 feet away from its landing site, a hole more than a foot deep and 12 feet across.

Made of a “metal alloy known to man,” the 13-pound ball is about 43 inches in circumference and landed roughly 480 miles from the Namibian capital of Windhoek. And it turns out it’s not alone. Apparently several similar objects have fallen across the southern hemisphere (in Australia and Latin America as well as elsewhere in Africa) over the past couple of decades.

So far, it has not exploded, hatched, or started to glow with a faint, eerie white light. Nor has anyone descended from the sky looking for it. …

 

Cost to Build the Great Pyramid Today: $5 billion

Even with cranes, helicopters, tractors and trucks at our disposal, it would be tough to construct the Great Pyramid of Giza today. Its construction 4,500 years ago is so astounding in some people’s eyes that they invoke mystical or even alien involvement. But the current theory of the building of the Great Pyramid — the notion that it was assembled from the inside out, via a spiraling internal ramp — is probably still the best construction plan.

Following that plan, we could replicate the Wonder of the Ancient World for a cool $5 billion.

… While the pyramid was originally built by 4,000 workers over the course of 20 years using strength, sleds and ropes, building the pyramid today using stone-carrying vehicles, cranes and helicopters would probably take 1,500 to 2,000 workers around five years, and it would cost on the order of $5 billion, Houdin said, based on manpower and cost of constructing the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River during the Great Depression. The dam contains a volume of concrete roughly equal to the stone in the pyramid. By comparison, the 1,776-foot-tall One World Trade Center being constructed in downtown Manhattan will cost an estimated $4 billion. …

via How Much Would It Cost to Build the Great Pyramid Today? | LiveScience.

How many neurons make a human brain? Billions fewer than we thought

How many neurons are there in the human brain? It was a question that scientists thought they had nailed – and the answer was 100bn (give or take). If you went looking you would find that figure repeated widely in the neuroscience literature and beyond.

But when a researcher in Brazil called Dr Suzana Herculano-Houzel started digging, she discovered that no one in the field could actually remember where the 100bn figure had come from – let alone how it had been arrived at. So she set about discovering the true figure (HT to the excellent Nature neuroscience podcast NeuroPod).

This involved a remarkable – and to some I suspect unsettling – piece of research. Her team took the brains of four adult men, aged 50, 51, 54 and 71, and turned them into what she describes as “brain soup”. All of the men had died of non-neurological diseases and had donated their brains for research.

“It took me a couple of months to make peace with this idea that I was going to take somebody’s brain or an animal’s brain and turn it into soup,” she told Nature. “But the thing is we have been learning so much by this method we’ve been getting numbers that people had not been able to get … It’s really just one more method that’s not any worse than just chopping your brain into little pieces.”

She told me that so far, she has only looked at four brains, all of them from men.

The method involves dissolving the cell membranes of cells within the brain and creating a homogeneous mixture of the whole lot. You then take a sample of the soup, count the number of cell nuclei belonging to neurons (as opposed to other cells in the brain such as glia) and then scale up to get the overall number. The great advantage of this method is that unlike counting the number of neurons in one part of the brain and then extrapolating from that, it gets over the problem that different brain regions may have more or less densely packed neurons.

So what is the number?

“We found that on average the human brain has 86bn neurons. And not one [of the brains] that we looked at so far has the 100bn. Even though it may sound like a small difference the 14bn neurons amount to pretty much the number of neurons that a baboon brain has or almost half the number of neurons in the gorilla brain. So that’s a pretty large difference actually.”

This leads to the bigger question of what makes human brains special.

Herculano-Houzel says our brains are rather standard primate models, except for the fact that we have a massive number of brain cells compared to other species. That is energetically very expensive to maintain. She estimates that 20% to 25% of our total energy budget goes on running our brains, a figure which she describes as “extraordinary”. …

via How many neurons make a human brain? Billions fewer than we thought | James Randerson | Science | guardian.co.uk.

DNA reveals Neanderthal extinction clues

Neanderthals were already on the verge of extinction in Europe by the time modern humans arrived on the scene, a study suggests.

DNA analysis suggests most Neanderthals in western Europe died out as early as 50,000 years ago – thousands of years before our own species appeared.

A small group of Neanderthals then recolonised parts of Europe, surviving for 10,000 years before vanishing.

The work is published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

An international team of researchers studied the variation, or diversity, in mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones of 13 Neanderthals.

This type of genetic information is passed down on the maternal line; because cells contain multiple copies of the mitochondrial genome, this DNA is easier to extract from ancient remains than the DNA found in the nuclei of cells.

The fossil specimens came from Europe and Asia and span a time period ranging from 100,000 years ago to about 35,000 years ago.

The scientists found that west European fossils with ages older than 48,000 years, along with Neanderthal specimens from Asia, showed considerable genetic variation.

But specimens from western Europe younger than 48,000 years showed much less genetic diversity (variation in the older remains and the Asian Neanderthals was six-fold greater than in the western examples).

In their scientific paper, the scientists propose that some event – possibly changes in the climate – caused Neanderthal populations in the West to crash around 50,000 years ago. But populations may have survived in warmer southern refuges, allowing the later re-expansion.

Low genetic variation can make a species less resilient to changes in its environment, and place it at increased risk of extinction.

“The fact that Neanderthals in Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered, and that all this took place long before they came into contact with modern humans, came as a complete surprise,” said lead author Love Dalen, from the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. …

via BBC News – DNA reveals Neanderthal extinction clues.

Dolphins at Sea Greet Each Other, Exchange Names?

Bottlenose dolphins swap signature whistles with each other when they meet in the open sea, a new study reports, suggesting that these marine mammals engage in something akin to a human conversation.

Earlier research found that signature whistles are unique for each dolphin, with the marine mammals essentially naming themselves and communicating other basic information.

A signature dolphin whistle in human speak, might be comparable to, “Hi, I’m George, a large, three-year-old dolphin in good health who means you no harm.”

The latest study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is the first to show how free-ranging dolphins in the wild use these whistles at sea. The findings add to the growing body of evidence that dolphins possess one of the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom, perhaps even surpassing that of humans.”In my mind, the term ‘language’ describes the human communication system; it is specific to us,” co-author Vincent Janik of the University of St. Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit, told Discovery News. “It is more fruitful to ask whether there are communication systems with similar complexity. I think the dolphin system is probably as complex as it gets among animals.”

Janik and colleague Nicola Quick studied how bottlenose dolphins in St. Andrews Bay, off the coast of northeast Scotland, communicate with each other. While in a small, quiet boat, the researchers followed the wild dolphins and recorded their vocalizations.

Analysis of the observations and recordings found that the dolphins usually swam together in a group moving slowly and relatively quietly.

“When another group approaches, usually one or more animals start to produce their signature whistles,” Janik said. “We then hear dolphins from the other group calling back with their own signatures, and after or during this counter-calling the animals get together as one group and continue swimming together. Shortly after the union of the groups, they become much more quiet again.”

via Dolphins at Sea Greet Each Other : Discovery News.

Man Drinks Gasoline From Jar, Lights Up, Dies

Police say a North Carolina man is dead after he accidentally drank from a jar of gasoline and then smoked a cigarette.

Havelock police received a 911 call about 9:55 p.m. Monday after 43-year-old Gary Allen Banning set himself on fire. Banning was transported to UNC Burn Center in Chapel Hill, where he died early Tuesday morning.

City spokeswoman Diane Miller said investigators believe Banning was at a friend’s apartment when he apparently mistook a jar of gasoline sitting by the kitchen sink for a beverage. After taking a gulp, he spit the gas out and got some on his clothes.

Sometime later, investigators say Banning went outside to smoke a cigarette and burst into flame.

Havelock police and the city fire marshal are continuing their investigation.

via Man Drinks Gasoline From Jar, Lights Up, Dies: Gary Allen Banning Dead.

How squid hear

Marine biologists are starting to get a good idea now of how squid hear and how they react to sounds in the ocean.

It is only recently that scientists have come to accept that cephalopods have any auditory capability at all.

But new experiments show noises of varying loudness and frequency will elicit a range of behaviours in the animals – such as jetting or inking, and even a change of colour.

The research has been featured at the biennial Ocean Sciences Meeting.

It was presented by Aran Mooney from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) of Massachusetts, US.

He is interested in squid because they represent something of a keystone species in the ocean, sitting right at the heart of many food webs. If they are not the predator in those webs, they will almost certainly be the prey.

And that makes it important to know whether anything we may be doing in the oceans could be unsettling them.

“We produce a lot of noise through exploration of the oceans, scientific research, oil drilling, gas exploration and commercial shipping,” Dr Mooney tells BBC News.

“A lot of that is low-frequency noise, which is what squid detect. And if we’re influencing these animals then presumably we could change their behaviour.”

Previous work at WHOI’s Sensory Physiology and Sensory Ecology Lab had established that squid could hear sounds in the range of 50Hz to 500Hz; but they are best below 300Hz. It is the same sort of range as fish.

The squid use two closely spaced organs called statocysts to sense sound.

“I think of a statocyst as an inside-out tennis ball,” explains Dr Mooney.

“It’s got hairs on the inside and this little dense calcium stone that sits on those hair cells.

“What happens is that the sound wave actually moves the squid back and forth, and this dense object stays relatively still. It bends the hair cells and generates a nerve response to the brain.”

The latest research has attempted to gauge exactly what sound means to the squid, and how they might use it.

In a tank in his lab, Dr Mooney plays noises of varying loudness and frequency to the animals, and watches for their response. He has been able to map how the different levels of sound will prompt the cephalopods into different behaviours.

“They react in about 10 milliseconds,” he says. “That’s really fast; it’s essentially a reflex. That’s really important in terms of behavioural responses because they’re not thinking about processing it; they’re not deciding whether they should react – they’re just doing it.

And he adds: “The responses can be really dynamic. They can be a change in colour; they can be jetting (moving quickly) or inking responses. Squid are also very cool because you can look at a range of colour changes – is it a really startling colour change or a more subtle change?

“Squid can probably use their hearing to find their way around the environment – to sense the soundscape of the environment; for example, to find their way towards a reef or away from a reef, towards the surface or away from the surface.” …

via BBC News – Eavesdropping on the squid world.

Man Sentenced For Urinating On Transformer, Knocking Out Electricity To 2000 UK Homes

A heroin user was sentenced to a year in prison after he tried to rob a UK power station last year, only to suffer severe injuries when he urinated on a transformer, according to ThisIsLeicesterShire.com.

Michael Harper, 36, suffered serious burns in the blast which knocked out power to some 2,000 homes and caused $42,000 in damage to businesses in March, FOX reported.

The Leicester father of two was left for dead by his 50-year-old accomplice, Richard Boyce, who tried to drive away but was found later with burnt hands. Harper sustained burns to his body and face, but survived.

The two had reportedly broken into the power station to steal metal and take heroin.

An English judge sentenced Boyce to four years in jail, but reduced Harper’s sentence to one year because of his medical ordeal.

Harper had “suffered a punishment, it seems to me, already,” Judge Michael Stephens told Harper in court. “You were seriously injured and very nearly lost your life, and will be permanently disfigured.” …

via Michael Harper Sentenced For Urinating On Transformer, Knocking Out Electricity To 2000 UK Homes.

T. rex bite was world’s strongest

Tyrannosaurus rex had the most powerful bite of any creature that has ever walked the Earth, say scientists.

Previous estimates of the prehistoric predator’s bite suggested it was much more modest – comparable to modern predators such as alligators.

This measurement, based on a laser scan of a T. rex skull, showed that its bite was equivalent to three tonnes – about the weight of an elephant.

The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

Dr Karl Bates from the biomechanics laboratory at the University of Liverpool led the research.

He and his colleague, Peter Falkingham from the University of Manchester, used the life-sized copy of a T. rex skeleton exhibited at Manchester Museum as a model for their study. “We digitised the skull with a laser scanner, so we had a 3-D model of the skull on our computer,” Dr Bates explained.

Dr Karl Bates explains how he recreated the snapping jaws of T. rex

“Then we could map the muscles onto that skull.”

The scientists then reproduced the full force of a bite by activating the muscles to contract fully – snapping the digital jaws shut.

“Those [simulated] muscles closed the jaw as they would in life and… we measured the force when the teeth hit each other,” Dr Bates explained to BBC Nature.

“The maximum forces we found – up at the [back] teeth – were between 30,000 and 60,000 Newtons,” he said.

“That’s equivalent to a medium-sized elephant sitting on you.”

Previous studies had estimated that T. rex’s bite had a force of 8,000-13,000 Newtons. …

via BBC Nature – T. rex bite was world’s strongest.

Stone Age Pebble Holds Mysterious Meaning

The world’s oldest known engraved object may be an ochre pebble from Klasies River Cave in South Africa.

The 100,000-year-old ochre pebble features what researchers believe are at least 23 engraved lines.

It’s possible that the design was a symbol that communicated something meaningful to prehistoric humans.

A colorful pebble bearing a sequence of linear incisions may be the world’s oldest engraving.

The object, which will be described in the April issue of the Journal of Archaeology, dates back approximately 100,000 years ago and could also be the world’s oldest known abstract art. It was recovered from Klasies River Cave in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.

“Associated human remains indicate that the engraved piece was certainly made by Homo sapiens,” co-author Riaan Rifkin of the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Human Evolution told Discovery News. Rifkin and colleagues Francesco d’Errico and Renata Garcia Moreno performed extensive non-invasive analyses of the object. Methods like X-ray fluorescence and microscopic analysis enabled the researchers to examine every minute detail of the ochre pebble, which appears to have split off from a once larger piece.

The scientists conclude that humans intentionally made the sub-parallel linear incisions on the Middle Stone Age pebble.

“Upon engraving the piece with a sharp lithic implement, it is likely to have produced a markedly bright and dark red-maroon powder,” Rifkin said. “The design may therefore have been strikingly visible shortly after it was produced.”

Ochre is a mineral-rich, naturally tinted clay that primarily consists of hydrated iron oxide. Ochre was among the earliest pigments used by humans and possibly other hominids for artistic purposes. Some even refer to it as the caveman’s “crayon.”

The Klasies River object measures close to 3 inches in length and contains a series of seven “deep broad engraved lines and several, about 16 or so, narrower and somewhat shallower linear features,” Rifkin said. “The fragment is a remnant of a formerly semi-circular ochre pebble that likely contained a much more extensive engraved design on its surface.”

Of particular interest now is whether or not the engraver made the design with symbolic intent. …

via Stone Age Pebble Holds Mysterious Meaning : Discovery News.