Solar system attacked by Centaurs every 200 to 300 years? Library of Ancient Astronauts agrees.

You may have a good reason to be concerned about all the space junk orbiting our planet, but even without our help this  solar system is not a very tidy place.

Just as the threat exists (statistically 1 in 5 billion, but exists nonetheless), that a piece of falling space junk will smash into your house or car and kill you,  there is always the small chance that a comet will end life on earth.

The area around the orbit of Neptune is littered with "the Trojan asteroids"  some of which may swing into the inner solar system becoming comets we can witness every 200 to 300 years.

According to Phenominica:

The origin of ... "short-period comets" is unknown but the immediate source is thought to be the Centaurs—these are a collection of an estimated million icy objects more than 1 kilometre across on elliptical orbits that come closest to the sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune.

Only about 250 of these Centaurs have been imaged by telescopes. All are on unstable orbits, and have a big chance of receiving a gravitational boost when their orbit brings them near Jupiter or one of the other giant planets. Such perturbation could redirect them into the inner solar system - and possibly towards Earth.

As a wayward Centaur approaches the sun, its heat begins to evaporate the icy contents, resulting in a cometary tail.

Previous simulations of the Centaurs suggest something must be feeding them with extra material - each object will orbit for about 3 million years before it hits a planet, falls into the sun, is ejected from the solar system or simply disintegrates.

via Trojan asteroids around Neptune could hit Earth.

There is a theory that the Ica Stones of Peru are a library from an ancient advanced civilization that once visited our planet. According to the late Dr Javier Cabrera Darquea who owned the collection, the visitors left due to the threat of comets. Of course, skeptics claim that either the images below are not telescopes or the thousands of ica stone carvings were faked by one local man to sell to tourists.

The farmer who gave Cabrera his first stone was subsequently arrested for selling the stones to tourists.  In his defence, he said that he had not in fact found them in a cave, as he had told Dr Cabrera, but made them himself. Other local people continue to make these engraved stones. They are selling forged hoaxes – a Bad Archaeology double whammy! However, Cabrera countered this claim with the sheer numbers of stones. As well as the 20,000 or so in his collection and those sold to tourists, he said that locals have found about 50,000, while the cave contains another 100,000. This is too great a number to be the effort of a single poor farmer with little spare time to create so many hoaxes. Nevertheless, he maintained that he carved at least some of them. Neither he nor Dr Cabrera revealed the location of the cave that is supposed to contain the huge cache of stones.

For more about the stones, see my post, Did humans and dinosaurs co-exist?

Scientists Succeed with Teleportation... of an atom.

Would you like to teleport an object all the way across the galaxy instantly?

Image: the Joint Quantum Institute's Christopher Monroe  sits near  a 16-by-4-foot table covered in optical equipment. His team "teleported" an atom a distance of about 3 feet.

According to a story by Brent Baughman on NPR:

"It's not exactly the Star Trek version of teleportation, where an object disappears then reappears somewhere else. Rather, it "entangles" two different atoms so that one atom inherits the properties of another.

"According to the quantum theory, everything vibrates," theoretical physicist Michio Kaku tells NPR's Guy Raz. Kaku is a frequent guest on the Science and Discovery channels. "When two electrons are placed close together, they vibrate in unison. When you separate them, that's when all the fireworks start."

This is where quantum entanglement — sometimes described as "teleportation" — begins. "An invisible umbilical cord emerges connecting these two electrons. And you can separate them by as much as a galaxy if you want. Then, if you vibrate one of them, somehow on the other end of the galaxy the other electron knows that its partner is being jiggled."

This process happens even faster than the speed of light, physicists say.

Quantum entanglement isn't a new idea — Einstein once famously referred to it as "spooky action at a distance" — but it wasn't until the past 30 years that scientists were first able to observe this process.

It could one day lead to new types of computers, and some even think entanglement may explain things like telepathy. Scientists aren't quite ready to beam up Scotty yet, but this is the technology that one day may lead to such a feat.

via Scientists Take Quantum Steps Toward Teleportation : NPR.

Perhaps in a few years you'll be able to volunteer at the Joint Quantum Institute website to be the first human. There is a great episode titled "Daedalus" in the Star Trek Enterprise series which features the inventor of the transporter. A debate is retold at one point: is the transported person the same person, or a copy? Is an exact copy still you? Or is it someone else?

Herpes virus used to treat cancer

Doctors say they have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to treat successfully patients with head and neck cancer.

A London hospital trial of 17 patients found that use of the virus alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy helped kill the tumours in most patients.

It works by getting into cancer cells, killing them from the inside, and also boosting the patient's immune system.

Further trials are planned for later in the year.

Head and neck cancer, which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue and throat, affects up to 8,000 people every year in the UK.

Study leader Dr Kevin Harrington, who is based at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said current treatments were effective if the cancer was picked up early but that many patients were not diagnosed until it was more advanced.

The herpes virus, which is also being tested in patients with skin cancer, is genetically manipulated so that it grows inside tumour cells but cannot infect normal healthy cells.

Once there it has a triple effect - it multiplies, killing tumour cells as it does so, it is engineered to produce a human protein that activates the immune system and it also makes a viral protein that acts as a red flag to immune cells. ...

via BBC News - Herpes virus used to treat cancer.

After they cure you of cancer, they use modified cancer cells to get rid of the herpes. Just kidding.

Food agency probes cloned cow milk claim

Food safety officials in Britain are to investigate a claim that milk from the offspring of a cloned cow was on sale for public consumption, they said Monday.

The disclosure has provoked concern among some farming campaigners, and the Food Standards Agency FSA is set to investigate a report in Friday's International Herald Tribune newspaper.

But the body which represents Britain's dairy industry insisted that there was no danger. The newspaper quoted a British dairy farmer, speaking anonymously, saying that he was using milk from a cow bred from a clone as part of his daily production. The farmer did not want his name to be disclosed because he feared Britons saw cloning as "distasteful" so buyers would stop taking his milk if they knew who he was. The FSA said in response that it regarded meat and products from cloned animals and their offspring as "novel foods" which need to be authorised before being put on sale.

"The agency has not received any applications relating to cloning and no authorisations have been made," a spokeswoman said."The agency will, of course, investigate any reports of unauthorised novel foods entering the food chain." ...

via AFP: Food agency probes cloned cow milk claim.

The world's first robot with conscience

Spain has designed the world's first robot with its own "conscience" and "life", which will "entertain, teach and be a companion" to humans who purchase it.

The AISoy 1, which will go on sale in August, is the first social android developed by Spanish firm AISoy Robotics, which is now bringing its creation out of the laboratory.

"It almost seems like science fiction, but it's a reality," said Diego Garcia, one of the "fathers" of the robot and head of AISoy's product engineering and development division.

AISoy 1 was conceived to entertain and provide company to the user, but its main objective is "to live," just like any other being that "senses, has emotions and makes decisions".

At 25 cm in height and weighing 1.5 kg, the robot "is almost a living being. It has the same activity as a living being, it has its own autonomy and conscience", he said.

It also has a series of "basic needs, like nourishment and security, and other more advanced ones, like love, recognition, freedom and, above all, enjoying itself and getting along well".

In contrast to the available robots developed till date, its makeup does not consist of "a collection of limited actions or programmed responses. It's dynamic, it has its own life and, at times, it's unpredictable," said AISoy 1's designer.

The robot is capable of learning from experience and modifying "its behaviour, values and actions it can undertake at specific times," he said.

"If you take two AISoy 1's and leave them in two different families, within two months they will be totally different because they will have had different experiences," said Garcia. ...

via The world's first robot with conscience.

New insights into how stem cells determine what tissue to become

IMAGE: This is an immunofluorescence image of a human mesenchymal stem cell growing on a plate of microposts, which have the approximate consistency of Silly Putty.

Within 24 hours of culturing adult human stem cells on a new type of matrix, University of Michigan researchers were able to make predictions about how the cells would differentiate, or what type of tissue they would become. Their results are published in the Aug. 1 edition of Nature Methods.

Differentiation is the process of stem cells morphing into other types of cells. Understanding it is key to developing future stem cell-based regenerative therapies.

"We show, for the first time, that we can predict stem cell differentiation as early as Day 1," said Jianping Fu, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering who is the first author on the paper.

"Normally, it takes weeks or maybe longer to know how the stem cell will differentiate. Our work could speed up this lengthy process and could have important applications in drug screening and regenerative medicine. Our method could provide early indications of how the stem cells are differentiating and what the cell types they are becoming under a new drug treatment." ...

via New insights into how stem cells determine what tissue to become.

Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent

Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested.

Reader Clint discovered that all you had to do is use something like Peer Block, which grabs the IPs of the other users also downloading the torrent and identifies which company or university or organization they belong to. You can check this yourself by hopping on the torrent and doing the same thing.

Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent. A couple caveats to these. Just because a company is on the list, doesn't mean that it's a sanctioned download by the company itself to grab the user information for some purpose. It could easily just be some dude at the company who wanted to download the torrent himself to check it out. Also, the IP addresses assigned to a company might fluctuate (they usually don't, much, unless major companies change their connection to the internet, so it should be mostly accurate).

A.C. Nielsen, Agilent Technologies, Apple, AT&T - Possible Macrovision, Baker & McKenzie, BBC, Bertelsmann Media, Boeing, Church of Scientology, Cisco Systems, Cox Enterprises, Davis Polk & Wardwell, Deutsche Telekom, Disney, Duracell, Ernst & Young, Fujitsu, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, HBO & Company, Hilton Hospitality, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Levi Strauss & Co., Lockheed-Martin Corp, Lucasfilm, Lucent, Lucent Technologies, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Mcafee, MetLife, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Novell, Nvidia, O'Melveny & Myers, Oracle Corp, Pepsi Cola, Procter and Gamble, Random House, Raytheon, Road Runner RRWE, Seagate, Sega, Siemens AG, SONY CORPORATION, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, The Hague, Time Warner Telecom, Turner Broadcasting system, Ubisoft Entertainment, Unisys, United Nations, Univision, USPS, Viacom, Vodafone, Wells Fargo, Xerox PARC

via Major Corporations Are Downloading Those 100 Million Facebook Profiles off BitTorrent.

Enjoy all the extra spam you may now get. I quit Facebook six months ago, around January of 2010 and haven't missed it.

I'd agree that this means some employee at each of these large companies is downloading the face book information, not that the company itself is doing so.

Notice, Apple is on the list, but not Microsoft. This may just be an indication that internal network security is better at Microsoft than at Apple.

How to save a life: Compression-only CPR found effective

Always check for a pulse first. Chest compressions can fracture ribs. If you are certain there is no pulse,  push 100 times per minute with enough force to compress the chest 1.5 to 2 inches. This requires 100 to 125 pounds of force.

Look at a ruler to be sure you know what 2 inches is (most people are wrong about this).  Also, try pushing on your bathroom scale to be sure you know what it feels like to press with 125 lbs of force.

Chest compressions alone are as effective in rescuing victims of heart attacks as conventional cardiopulmonary resuscitation that combines compressions with forced breathing, researchers said Wednesday

Studies in Washington and Sweden confirm the growing idea that the breathing component of CPR is necessary only for children and those who have suffered drowning or who have respiratory problems. Recent guidelines based on these and earlier studies may overcome some of the fears of bystanders who are reluctant to initiate CPR because of the danger of infectious diseases.

"These studies reinforce the message that the American Heart Assn. has been promoting since 2008," said Dr. Michael Sayre, a professor of emergency medicine at Ohio State University in Columbus and a spokesman for the heart association. "When you encounter a person who has collapsed suddenly, the best thing to do is to call 911 and then push hard and fast on their chest. It's simple, and something anyone can do even if they don't have any training."

... Studies in animals have shown that halting chest compressions to blow air into the patient's mouth reduces blood flow by a startlingly large amount. And the breathing drill, in any case, may not be necessary: For most patients who suffer a heart attack, the blood will contain some oxygen for at least several minutes.

"What we have learned is that continuous blood flow, even if it is not fully [oxygen-] saturated, is probably much better in terms of helping restore spontaneous circulation," Pepe said. ...

Stem Cell 'Homing' Fixes Joints in Rabbit Experiments

Researchers are reporting they have successfully persuaded damaged joints to regrow cartilage and bone using a novel "cell homing" approach.

The experiments, conducted in rabbits, are a proof of concept of a method that may one day replace artificial joint transplants in humans, according to Jeremy Mao of Columbia University and colleagues.

The method uses a carefully constructed "bioscaffold," impregnated with a natural substance called a growth factor. the growth factor in the scaffold causes precursor cells to migrate to the site and become cartilage and bone cells, Mao and colleagues wrote online in The Lancet.

In contrast with previous attempts to regrow tissue in joints, the researchers reported that they did not transplant any cells.

Animals treated with the method fully recovered weight-bearing and locomotion within a month, and the regenerated tissue was similar to naturally occurring cartilage and bone, the researchers said.

via Stem Cell 'Homing' Fixes Joints in Rabbit Experiments - ABC News.

Doomsday shelters making a comeback

Jason Hodge, father of four children from Barstow, Calif., says he's "not paranoid" but he is concerned, and that's why he bought space in what might be labeled a doomsday shelter.

Hodge bought into the first of a proposed nationwide group of 20 fortified, underground shelters — the Vivos shelter network — that are intended to protect those inside for up to a year from catastrophes such as a nuclear attack, killer asteroids or tsunamis, according to the project's developers.

"It's an investment in life," says Hodge, a Teamsters union representative. "I want to make sure I have a place I can take me and my family if that worst-case scenario were to happen."

via Doomsday shelters making a comeback - USATODAY.com.

Vivos condios my darling. Survival of the super rich.

Michael Bay working on a secret 'Confidential Alien Project' film

How much does Michael Bay love aliens? This much—even while he's been blowing up Chicago, which we've learned about through a flood of Transformers 3 set photos and videos, the director has been negotiating to unleash even MORE aliens on Hollywood.

Bay, along with his Platinum Dunes partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, just picked up a script from screenwriter Bobby Glickert that's about alien abductions. But that's really all we know, because the title—currently "Confidential Alien Project"—is giving up as few secrets as Area 51.

This would be Bay's fourth alien-related movie, because in addition to the three pictures in the Transformers franchise, he's also producing the aliens-in-high-school thriller I Am Number Four.

Are you looking forward to Bay invading theaters with more aliens? Or do you wish he'd move on to some other sci-fi plot?

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

via Michael Bay working on a secret 'Confidential Alien Project' film | Blastr.

Deepak Chopra's God 2.0, quantum flapdoodle?

Michael Shermer has this interesting post about Deepak Chopra's  quantum God.

In most surveys, nine out of ten Americans respond in the affirmative to the question “Do you believe in God?” The other 10 percent provide a variety of answers, including a favorite among skeptics and atheists: “Which god do you mean?” And then they offer a litany of classical and non-Western deities: Aphrodite, Amon Ra, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithras, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, and Zeus. “We’re all atheists of these gods,” the stock reply concludes, “but some of us go one god further.”

I have debated many theologians who make the traditional arguments for God’s existence: the cosmological argument (prime mover, first cause), the teleological argument (the order and design of the universe), the ontological argument (if it is logically possible for God to exist, then God exists), the anthropic argument (the fine-tuned characteristics of nature, making human life possible), the moral argument (awareness of right and wrong), and others. These are all reasons to believe in God only if you already believe. If you do not already believe, these arguments ring hollow, having been refuted over the ages by philosophers from David Hume to Daniel Dennett.

This past spring, however, I participated in a debate with a theologian of a different stripe, the New Age spiritualist Deepak Chopra. His arguments for the existence of a deity take a radically new tack. During our exchange, which was taped by ABC’s Nightline and viewed by millions, Chopra set out a series of scientific-sounding arguments for the existence of a divine quantum force capable of nonlocal “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein famously described quantum entanglement. Call this new theology God 2.0.

Chopra provided a preview of these arguments in his 2006 book Life After Death. Consider this passage:

The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom. Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images I could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron. ...

Chopra believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.

Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Penrose and Hameroff conjecture that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons. This, in turn, triggers the neurons to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can only come about when an atom is “observed” (that is, affected in any way by something else), “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons . . . and so on.

Shermer discredits this idea as does Murray Gell-Mann:

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different types of mathematics. ...

via Deepak Chopra's God 2.0 | Big Questions Online.

It seems our desire to be immortal leads many to speculate that the brain is not responsible, by itself, for our experience of consciousness.

Model describes universe with no big bang, no beginning, and no end

By suggesting that mass, time, and length can be converted into one another as the universe evolves, Wun-Yi Shu has proposed a new class of cosmological models that may fit observations of the universe better than the current big bang model. What this means specifically is that the new models might explain the increasing acceleration of the universe without relying on a cosmological constant such as dark energy, as well as solve or eliminate other cosmological dilemmas such as the flatness problem and the horizon problem.

Shu, an associate professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, explains in a study posted at arXiv.org that the new models emerge from a new perspective of some of the most basic entities: time, space, mass, and length. In his proposal, time and space can be converted into one another, with a varying speed of light as the conversion factor. Mass and length are also interchangeable, with the conversion factor depending on both a varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light (G/c2). Basically, as the universe expands, time is converted into space, and mass is converted into length. As the universe contracts, the opposite occurs.

“We view the speed of light as simply a conversion factor between time and space in spacetime,” Shu writes. “It is simply one of the properties of the spacetime geometry. Since the universe is expanding, we speculate that the conversion factor somehow varies in accordance with the evolution of the universe, hence the speed of light varies with cosmic time.”

As Shu writes in his paper, the newly proposed models have four distinguishing features:

via Model describes universe with no big bang, no beginning, and no end.

Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?

The recent decoding of a cryptic cup, the excavation of ancient Jerusalem tunnels, and other archaeological detective work may help solve one of the great biblical mysteries: Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The new clues hint that the scrolls, which include some of the oldest known biblical documents, may have been the textual treasures of several groups, hidden away during wartime—and may even be "the great treasure from the Jerusalem Temple," which held the Ark of the Covenant, according to the Bible.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered more than 60 years ago in seaside caves near an ancient settlement called Qumran. The conventional wisdom is that a breakaway Jewish sect called the Essenes—thought to have occupied Qumran during the first centuries B.C. and A.D.—wrote all the parchment and papyrus scrolls.

But new research suggests many of the Dead Sea Scrolls originated elsewhere and were written by multiple Jewish groups, some fleeing the circa-A.D. 70 Roman siege that destroyed the legendary Temple in Jerusalem.

"Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews," said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. (The National Geographic Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.) ...

Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers?

In 1953, a French archaeologist and Catholic priest named Roland de Vaux led an international team to study the mostly Hebrew scrolls, which a Bedouin shepherd had discovered in 1947.

De Vaux concluded that the scrolls' authors had lived in Qumran, because the 11 scroll caves are close to the site.

Ancient Jewish historians had noted the presence of Essenes in the Dead Sea region, and de Vaux argued Qumran was one of their communities after his team uncovered numerous remains of pools that he believed to be Jewish ritual baths.

His theory appeared to be supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, some of which contained guidelines for communal living that matched ancient descriptions of Essene customs.

"The scrolls describe communal dining and ritual bathing instructions consistent with Qumran's archaeology," explained Cargill, of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). ...

via Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery Solved?.

Before the CIA, there was the Pond

It was a night in early November during the infancy of the Cold War when the anti-communist dissidents were hustled through a garden and across a gully to a vehicle on a dark, deserted road in Budapest. They hid in four large crates for their perilous journey.

Four roadblocks stood between them and freedom.

What Zoltan Pfeiffer, a top political figure opposed to Soviet occupation, his wife and 5-year-old daughter did not know as they were whisked out of Hungary in 1947 was that their driver, James McCargar, was a covert agent for one of America's most secretive espionage agencies, known simply as the Pond.

Created during World War II as a purely U.S. operation free of the perceived taint of European allies, the Pond existed for 13 years and was shrouded in secrecy for more than 50 years. It used sources that ranged from Nazi officials to Stalinists and, at one point, a French serial killer.

It operated under the cover of multinational corporations, including American Express, Chase National Bank and Philips, the Dutch-based electronic giant. One of its top agents was a female American journalist.

Now the world can finally get a deeper look at the long-hidden roots of American espionage as tens of thousands of once-secret documents found in locked safes and filing cabinets in a barn near Culpeper, Va., in 2001 have finally become public after a long security review by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The papers, which the Pond's leader tried to keep secret long after the organization was dissolved, were placed in the National Archives in College Park, Md., in 2008 but only opened to the public in April. Those records plus documents obtained by The Associated Press in the past two years from the FBI, CIA and other agencies under the Freedom of Information Act portray a sophisticated organization obsessed with secrecy that operated a network of 40 chief agents and more than 600 sources in 32 countries. The AP has also interviewed former officials, family members, historians and archivists.

The Pond, designed to be relatively small and operate out of the limelight, appeared to score some definite successes, but rivals questioned its sources and ultimately, it became discredited because its pugnacious leader was too cozy with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other radical anti-communists. ...

via AP IMPACT: Before the CIA, there was the Pond - Yahoo! News.

New high-resolution photo of famous 'Face on Mars' proves it is just a rocky hill

It was the startling photograph that spawned a thousand conspiracy theories.

A photograph taken by the American Viking 1 Orbiter in July 1976 appeared to show a hill in the shape of a human face on the dusty surface of Mars.

But a new photograph released today, which was taken with Nasa’s high-definition HiRISE camera, finally shows the Face on Mars for what it really is: just a large, rocky hill in the middle of the Martian desert.

This is the closest ever image of the famous outcrop which should, once and for all, scotch the conspiracy theorists who believe that the 'face' is conclusive evidence of intelligent life on Mars.


Within days of its discovery in 1976, space enthusiasts were speculating that the structure was man-made and had been built by Martians in the distant past.

Today's image was taken by HiRISE from on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which can pick out incredible detail from 300 kilometres above the planet’s surface.

The rocky formation is known as a mesa, a large rocky outcrop with a flat top and steep, cliff-like sides.

The Face’ mesa is in the Cydonia region and is a couple of miles long and a few hundred feet high.

Conspiracy theorists insist that the 'face' is an artifact from an ancient Martian civililsation and the centre of a Nasa cover-up.

Nasa even added to the theory by referring to the picture's human likeness in the caption it added to the photo when it first released it to the general public.


The outcrop looked a little like a face, complete with eyes, nose and mouth, because of the angle of the sun and its cratered surface, and Nasa happily pointed this fact out. ...

2nd image: A black and white version of the new HiRISE photo, The face is almost impossible to spot in this high-res image

via New high-resolution photo of famous 'Face on Mars' proves it is just a rocky hill | Mail Online.

Weird mountain.

HMS Investigator, Ship Lost For More Than 150 Years, Recovered In Canada

Canadian archeologists have found a ship abandoned more than 150 years ago in the quest for the fabled Northwest Passage and which was lost in the search for the doomed expedition of Sir John Franklin, the head of the team said Wednesday.

Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada's head of underwater archaeology, said the HMS Investigator, abandoned in the ice in 1853, was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay along the northern coast of Banks Island in Canada's western Arctic.

"The ship is standing upright in very good condition. It's standing in about 11 meters (36 feet) of water," he said. "This is definitely of the utmost importance. This is the ship that sailed the last leg of the Northwest Passage."

The Investigator was one of many American and British ships sent out to search for the HMS Erebus and the Terror, vessels commanded by Franklin in his ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice said the British government has been notified that one of their naval shipwrecks has been discovered, as well as the bodies of three sailors.

via HMS Investigator, Ship Lost For More Than 150 Years, Recovered In Canada.

Japanese Researchers Invent Holograms You Can Touch

We're still waiting for flying cars, laser guns and teleportation devices, but it looks like we can scratch one childhood dream off the list: touchable holograms. According to the NTDTV report posted after the jump, researchers at Japan's Tokyo University have managed to concoct holograms that not only react to touch, but that also create the sensation of touch, itself. Apparently, and not surprisingly, an integral part of the system is Nintendo's Wiimote technology, which senses user input. That's right nerdlings, with this contraption, you could not only talk to that Princess Leia hologram, but you could actually lovingly caress her cinnamon bun-like tresses. If that ain't progress, we don't know what is. [From: LiveLeak, via: Billionaire Boys Club]

via Japanese Researchers Invent Holograms You Can Touch.

One more step towards the holy holodeck. This was posted September 16, 2009 on youtube:

"Up until now, holography has been for the eyes only, and if you'd try to touch it, your hand would go right through. But now we have a technology that also adds the sensation of touch to holograms." The technology consists of software that uses ultrasonic waves to create pressure on the hand of a user touching the projected hologram. Researchers are using two Wiimotes from Nintendos Wii gaming system to track a users hand.  The technology was introduced at SIGGRAPH, an annual computer graphics conference, and has so far only been tested with relatively simple objects. But its inventors have big plans for touchable holograms in the future.

[Hiroyuki Shinoda, Professor, Tokyo University]:

Mars site may hold 'buried life'

Researchers have identified rocks that they say could contain the fossilised remains of life on early Mars.

The team made their discovery in the ancient rocks of Nili Fossae.

Their work has revealed that this trench on Mars is a "dead ringer" for a region in Australia where some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth has been buried and preserved in mineral form.

They report the findings in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The team, led by a scientist from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (Seti) in California, believes that the same "hydrothermal" processes that preserved these markers of life on Earth could have taken place on Mars at Nili Fossae.

The rocks there are up to four billion years old, which means they have been around for three-quarters of the history of Mars.

When, in 2008, scientists first discovered carbonate in those rocks the Mars science community reacted with great excitement; carbonate had long been sought as definitive evidence that the Red planet was habitable - that life could have existed there.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

This is the place that we should be checking out for life on early Mars”

End Quote Adrian Brown Seti Institute

Carbonate is what life - or at least the mineral portion of a living organism - turns into, in many cases, when it is buried. The white cliffs of Dover, for example, are white because they contain limestone, or calcium carbonate.

The mineral comes from the fossilised remains shells and bones and provides a way to investigate the ancient life that existed on early Earth. ...

via BBC News - Mars site may hold 'buried life'.

Mars has been abandoned for a long time... at least that's how it seems on the surface. Richard Hoagland has some of the most entertainingly different ideas about Mars.

Data Leak: Galaxy Rich in Earth-Like Planets

NASA didn't plan it this way, but earlier this month a co-investigator on the Kepler satellite mission in the hunt for other Earth-like planets announced to a conference in Oxford, England, that "planets like our own Earth are out there. Our Milky Way galaxy is rich in this kind of planet." The announcement—which wasn't getting out until conference organizers posted a video online last week—was especially striking because it was largely based on Kepler data that team members had been allowed to keep to themselves for further analysis until next February. So, traditionally, such data would be released formally with all involved scientists onboard.

The all-too-public leak came from astronomer and Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov of Harvard University at the annual TEDGLobal conference, a production of the nonprofit TED.

At 8:15 into his 18-minute talk, Sasselov showed a bar graph of planet size. Of the approximate 265 Kepler planets represented on the graph, about 140 were labeled "like Earth," that is, having a radius smaller than twice Earth's radius. "You can see here small planets dominate the picture," said Sasselov. Until now, astronomers' exoplanet finds had been more like gas giant Jupiter than rocky little Earth. Even Kepler investigators had refrained from discussing any Earth-size finds.

Sasselov did emphasize that these are candidates, not confirmed exoplanets. With further observation, half of them could well turn out to be false alarms. Many could also be Earth-like in size but orbiting so close to their stars that nothing but their size would be Earth-like. Sasselov said that astronomers will be able to identify at least 60 Earth-like planets. So the unauthorized presentation of preliminary results would seem to confirm that Kepler has succeeded in showing that Earth is no fluke.

NASA has yet to comment.

via Data Leak: Galaxy Rich in Earth-Like Planets - ScienceInsider.

The universe is  such a big place that we could each have our own planet. Ours, for example, has been owned for the last 2.2 million years by an alien named Resubius Krobs. As a landlord, we could do worse, but Krobs almost always ignores my requests. He never fixes things, but he always gets paid.  I may move.