Extraordinary footage of a rarely seen giant deep sea fish has been captured by scientists.
Using a remotely operated vehicle, they caught a rare glimpse of the huge oarfish, perhaps the first sighting of the fish in its natural setting.
The oarfish, which can reach 17m long, has previously only been seen on a few occasions dying at the sea surface, or dead washed ashore.
The scientists also filmed for the first time the behaviour of a manefish.
Mark Benfield from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, US was undertaking a survey as part of the Serpent project, a collaboration between marine scientists and energy companies such as BP, Shell, Chevron and Petrobras working in the Gulf of Mexico.
Using remotely operated vehicles (ROV) provided by the oil and gas companies, the scientists are able to explore the deep like never before.
During one of these surveys, the scientists glimpsed a giant oarfish.
Sea serpent
Oarfish (Regalecus glesne) are one of the world's longest fish reaching 17m.
Their strange appearance may have provided the basis for the sea serpent myths told by early ocean travellers.
Not only are they elongated, they also have a prominent dorsal fin which gives it an unusual "serpent" appearance.
Recalling the event Professor Benfield explained how at first, they thought the fish was simply a drilling pipe called a riser being lowered into the water.
"We saw this bright vertical shiny thing, I said 'are they lowering more riser?' as it looked like they were lowering a huge pipe."
"We zoomed in a little bit and we said 'that's not a riser that's a fish!'"
"As we approached it retreated downwards swimming tail first in a vertical orientation as the ROV followed," Professor Benfield explained.
The team followed the fish for about five minutes before breaking off contact to resume their surveys.
"What was interesting about the fish was its swimming behaviour," said Professor Benfield.
"It moved by undulating its dorsal fin in waves that propelled it backwards at quite a good speed."
Early estimates measure the fish at between 5m and 10m in length.
Filmed alive
Professor Benfield said this may be the first time the oarfish has been filmed alive swimming in the so-called mesoplagic layer of the ocean.
Usually, they are seen dying at the sea surface or washed up dead.
The fish may have been caught on camera at a depth of 765m at another Serpent survey site, off western Africa in 2007, but a positive identification has not yet been made from that video.
On this occasion the fish was observed underneath Thunderhorse in the Gulf of Mexico, one of the largest semi-submersible oil rigs in the world.
The Serpent project run by the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS) is a unique collaborative project between scientists and industry.
Oil and gas companies allow scientists access to their deep sea technologies and infrastructure in a bid to aid their research.
"(It) provides a wonderful opportunity to learn more about life in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. That we found an oarfish while doing so was a fantastic bonus," said Professor Benfield.
The oarfish was not the only new discovery the team has made.
On another ROV survey in the Gulf of Mexico, the team came across the deep sea manefish (Paracaristius sp.).
They report this sighting in the journal Copeia.
This observation enabled the scientists to get a rare insight into the behaviour of the fish in its natural environment.
That gave them a further understanding of how it lives and what it looks like.
"When you see manefish collected in trawls they are incredibly beat up, they don't look like much of a fish at all," said Professor Benfield.
"So to actually see this fish in its natural habitat with its fins beautifully splayed out almost as a parachute, we get an idea that it's a really good swimmer."
Manefish are thought to steal food from or feed on a jellyfish-like animal called a siphonophore.
This may explain why the fish needs to swim so accurately.
"This fish has very precise control over its orientation and position, so if you are in very close proximity to an animal with tentacles that could potentially damage you, you want to able to really precisely control your locomotion."
Professor Benfield is excited by the potential for further discoveries and revelations from the deep that the Serpent project may bring.
"It's all very exciting, my vision for the Gulf Serpent Project is to establish a Gulf-wide deep sea biological observation system, with hundreds of ROV-equipped ships and rigs in the deep Gulf."
"(We can) get a good idea of what species are present, where they are present, and what are they doing."
SOURCE: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8501000/8501251.stm
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Mexico: UFOs over Iztapalapa
Contributing editor Ana Luisa Cid writes: "On January 21, 2010 Mr. Alfredo Mosco recorded a shape-shifting flying object over San Miguel Iztapalapa, to the east of the Mexican capital.
"This is the first time that the witness has recorded a video of this nature. He was in the company of his wife, in-laws and a 5-year-old niece. He claims having seen the object for over 30 minutes at noon.
"On that same date, another person from a neighboring community recorded something similar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon: it was Daniel Sánchez, a respected attorney and skywatcher."
SOURCE: http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/
Tubular structures on lunar surface, ideal landing sites
Terrain Mapping Camera on-board Chandrayaan-1 revealed such a formation in the Oceanus Procellarum area
AHMEDABAD: Remnant tubular structures or tunnel-like formations from lunar volcanic flows in the past, which extend a couple of kilometres on the moon’s surface, could serve as ideal landing as well as human settlement sites for future missions, including Chandrayaan-II, according to some new findings from India’s Chandrayaan-1.
These findings were reported on Monday at the Sixth Chandrayaan-1 Scientific Meeting being held at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) here.
Data from the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC), one of the Indian instruments on-board the spacecraft, has revealed one such volcanic tube in the Oceanus Procellarum area of the moon (central longitude 58.317 deg. W and latitude 14.111 deg. N).
The remnants of volcanic tubes on the moon whose roofs have capsized and a trench or valley is created are called a rille system, which is a groove or long narrow depression on the lunar surface. The volcanic tube identified by the TMC comprises two cobra hood-shaped rilles, the longer one measuring 3.65 km in NE-SW direction and the smaller one measuring 0.73 km.
The interesting feature is that these rilles seem connected by an intermediate stretch of a two km-long and 360-metre-wide uncollapsed portion (see picture), which seems to be the roof of the lava tube that did not collapse for some reason, said A. S. Arya of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, who described the findings at the meeting.
More significantly, the uncollapsed part is very close to the surface, only 160 metre below. Its hollow interiors could be safe spots for lunar habitation, or even parking lunar landers for protection from the harsh impacts of interplanetary material, meteorite showers, solar wind and radiation.
“For future missions aimed at creating permanent base stations and human settlements on the moon, there is a need to identify such locales that have survived the onslaught of the past impacts and would provide safe shelters to human beings on the moon,” Dr. Arya said.
For instance, the Japanese mission Kaguya discovered a vertical hollow structure, but that is not suitable for habitation, Dr. Arya said. In a horizontal tubular structure, however, any lunar vehicle can just move along the rille into the tunnel structure for safe parking.
But the TMC findings could even become the starting point for identifying suitable locations for immediate missions such as Chandrayaan-II, which plans to land two lunar rovers, said M. Annadurai, Project Director, Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-II. Chandrayaan-II has set itself the ambitious goals of sustaining the two rovers in the harsh lunar environment for as long as six months. All previous missions have landed in the sunlit area and have not been able to survive beyond a few weeks.
“We need to see how Chandrayaan-1 data can be used from an engineering point of view in terms of site terrain information and soil interactions to know where to land our rovers from this perspective,” Dr. Annadurai said.
Like Chandrayaan-1, its follow-up mission, which is likely to be flown during 2012-13, will also focus mostly on the higher lunar latitudes, Dr. Annadurai said.
“From an engineering point of view, we need to look at the rovers spending longer night hours. For optimal power utilisation, they will function in hibernation mode when there is no sunlight for generating power,” he said.
“So a suitable site could be the edge of some crater or a site near such volcanic tubes where they can retreat for hibernation. But a cross comparison of data from different Chandrayaan-1 experiments can tell us much more than just the TMC data. And such a trend has been evident at this meeting.”
With Russia already part of the project, Chandrayaan-II is also likely to have international collaboration, especially with all the principal investigators of the various experiments keen on carrying the work forward by collaborating among themselves in the future.
SOURCE: http://www.hindu.com/
AHMEDABAD: Remnant tubular structures or tunnel-like formations from lunar volcanic flows in the past, which extend a couple of kilometres on the moon’s surface, could serve as ideal landing as well as human settlement sites for future missions, including Chandrayaan-II, according to some new findings from India’s Chandrayaan-1.
These findings were reported on Monday at the Sixth Chandrayaan-1 Scientific Meeting being held at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) here.
Data from the Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC), one of the Indian instruments on-board the spacecraft, has revealed one such volcanic tube in the Oceanus Procellarum area of the moon (central longitude 58.317 deg. W and latitude 14.111 deg. N).
The remnants of volcanic tubes on the moon whose roofs have capsized and a trench or valley is created are called a rille system, which is a groove or long narrow depression on the lunar surface. The volcanic tube identified by the TMC comprises two cobra hood-shaped rilles, the longer one measuring 3.65 km in NE-SW direction and the smaller one measuring 0.73 km.
The interesting feature is that these rilles seem connected by an intermediate stretch of a two km-long and 360-metre-wide uncollapsed portion (see picture), which seems to be the roof of the lava tube that did not collapse for some reason, said A. S. Arya of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, who described the findings at the meeting.
More significantly, the uncollapsed part is very close to the surface, only 160 metre below. Its hollow interiors could be safe spots for lunar habitation, or even parking lunar landers for protection from the harsh impacts of interplanetary material, meteorite showers, solar wind and radiation.
“For future missions aimed at creating permanent base stations and human settlements on the moon, there is a need to identify such locales that have survived the onslaught of the past impacts and would provide safe shelters to human beings on the moon,” Dr. Arya said.
For instance, the Japanese mission Kaguya discovered a vertical hollow structure, but that is not suitable for habitation, Dr. Arya said. In a horizontal tubular structure, however, any lunar vehicle can just move along the rille into the tunnel structure for safe parking.
But the TMC findings could even become the starting point for identifying suitable locations for immediate missions such as Chandrayaan-II, which plans to land two lunar rovers, said M. Annadurai, Project Director, Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-II. Chandrayaan-II has set itself the ambitious goals of sustaining the two rovers in the harsh lunar environment for as long as six months. All previous missions have landed in the sunlit area and have not been able to survive beyond a few weeks.
“We need to see how Chandrayaan-1 data can be used from an engineering point of view in terms of site terrain information and soil interactions to know where to land our rovers from this perspective,” Dr. Annadurai said.
Like Chandrayaan-1, its follow-up mission, which is likely to be flown during 2012-13, will also focus mostly on the higher lunar latitudes, Dr. Annadurai said.
“From an engineering point of view, we need to look at the rovers spending longer night hours. For optimal power utilisation, they will function in hibernation mode when there is no sunlight for generating power,” he said.
“So a suitable site could be the edge of some crater or a site near such volcanic tubes where they can retreat for hibernation. But a cross comparison of data from different Chandrayaan-1 experiments can tell us much more than just the TMC data. And such a trend has been evident at this meeting.”
With Russia already part of the project, Chandrayaan-II is also likely to have international collaboration, especially with all the principal investigators of the various experiments keen on carrying the work forward by collaborating among themselves in the future.
SOURCE: http://www.hindu.com/
Rush for iron spurred Inuit ancestors to sprint across Arctic, book contends
One of Canada's top archeologists argues in a new book that the prehistoric ancestors of this country's 55,000 Inuit probably migrated rapidly from Alaska clear across the Canadian North in just a few years — not gradually over centuries as traditionally assumed — after they learned about a rich supply of iron from a massive meteorite strike on Greenland's west coast.
The startling theory, tentatively floated two decades ago by Canadian Museum of Civilization curator emeritus Robert McGhee, has been bolstered by recent research indicating a later and faster migration of the ancient Thule Inuit across North America's polar frontier than previously believed.
Now, in a just-published volume of essays by some of the world's leading Arctic archeologists, McGhee advances his theory — a 4,000-kilometre beeline quest for iron from Greenland's famous Cape York meteorite deposit — as the likeliest explanation for the sudden spread of the Thule culture across Canada around 1250 AD.
"Current evidence increasingly suggests that the concept of a relatively slow, environmentally driven Thule Inuit expansion across Arctic Canada, beginning around AD 1000, is no longer viable," McGhee writes in The Northern World: AD 900 to 1400, a newly released book he co-edited with two U.S. scholars.
Instead, he argues, new radiocarbon data and other reassessments of Eastern Arctic archeological sites suggest the Alaska-based Thule undertook an epic voyage by skin boat and dogsled — almost directly from Alaska to Greenland, and within a few summer travelling seasons — about 750 years ago.
Significantly, Thule Inuit archeological sites near the Cape York deposits are older than others in Canada closer to Alaska — further suggesting an initial dash to the northeast Arctic followed by a more gradual dispersal of population groups throughout present-day Nunavut, Northwest Territories and Yukon.
McGhee believes the Thule Inuit had learned about the valuable metal at the Cape York meteorite field from contact with Canada's aboriginal Dorset people, who were already using iron and trading it with Norse sailors from southern Greenland and Iceland.
"It would seem plausible to suggest that metal — meteoric iron from the Cape York meteorites and metal goods traded from the Norse — may have been the magnet that drew ancestral Inuit eastward from Alaska," McGhee contends.
He adds that this interpretation of Inuit origins in Canada — as resulting from "commercial motives" and "mercantile exploration" — challenges the prevailing view that ancient native cultures would only migrate to new territories incrementally and in response to environmental pressures, dwindling food supplies or competition from rival peoples.
"We may have been led astray by the deeply rooted archeological tendency to ascribe different sets of motives and different cultural processes to aboriginal peoples than we apply to Europeans or other societies with a written record of individual accomplishment," McGhee concludes. "Future archeological work may indicate that ancestral Inuit may be more accurately viewed as an entrepreneurial people" driven by the same kinds of economic opportunities that prompted such explorers as Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and Jacques Cartier to sail for the New World centuries later.
McGhee, who lives near Ottawa, told Canwest News Service on Monday that the Thule Inuit used iron for weapon points but also to carve the antler and bone implements central to their technology and culture.
The apparent target of the Thule Inuit's suspected race for Arctic resources — reminiscent of the current "rush" for polar oil by Canada and the four other Arctic coastal states — was the series of enormous nickel-iron space rocks that crashed to Earth in northwestern Greenland unknown millennia ago.
The Dorset people — a "paleo-Eskimo" culture that disappeared from the Canadian Arctic when the Thule Inuit arrived — are known from archeological investigations to have used Cape York meteoric iron for centuries.
But it wasn't until the 1890s that U.S. Arctic explorer Robert Peary first documented the meteorites and arranged for the transport of several large specimens to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where they are still on display.
Another enormous Cape York meteorite was shipped to Denmark, which governs Greenland, and can be seen today outside a geological museum in Copenhagen.
SOURCE: http://www.vancouversun.com/
Enceladus: Nasa discovers new evidence that Saturn moon 'may contain life'
New evidence that liquid water lies beneath the surface on the Saturn moonof Enceladus has been discovered by Nasa scientists, suggesting that life may exist.
Saturn's icy Moons visible here, from left to right are: Janus, Enceladus and Epimetheus captured by the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera Photo: REX
Nasa's Cassini spacecraft flew through icy plumes created by ice volcanoes and detected negatively charged water molecules, in a clear sign an underground sea exists.
On Earth this short-lived type of ion is produced where water is moving, such as in waterfalls or crashing ocean waves.
British scientists, reporting in the journal Icarus, say it is known that the jets contained water but it was not clear before whether this might be liquid.
If there is liquid water on Enceladus, Nasa scientists believe Saturn's sixth-largest moon could have the conditions necessary to sustain life.
High-resolution images already taken by the Cassini spacecraft show that the icy surface of Enceladus has a spreading Earthlike crust that has changed over time.
On Earth the spreading of the sea floor is driven by molten rock and Nasa scientists speculated that the liquid beneath the south pole of Enceladus may be water
Cassini scientist Andrew Coates said the evidence gathered by Cassini pointed to other constituents for life, such as carbon, plus a source of heat to keep the water liquid.
"While it's no surprise that there is water there, these short-lived ions are extra evidence for subsurface water," said Dr Coates, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.
"And where there's water, carbon and energy, some of the major ingredients for life are present.
“The surprise for us was to look at the mass of these ions. There were several peaks in the spectrum, and when we analysed them we saw the effect of water molecules clustering together one after the other.”
Similar negatively charged ions have been found on another satellite of Saturn, Titan, which is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere.
The data from Enceladus's icy spray was collected by an instrument on Cassini called a plasma spectrometer.
It measured the density, temperature and speed of ions and electrons it collected as it flew through the jets.
Cassini is a project of Nasa, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
It has been a major success for U.S. and European scientists since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn and studying its rings and moons since 2004.
Nasa has just extended the mission's life by seven years.
But the British scientists have been told to abandon their research thanks to swingeing cuts in science spending by the government.
SOURCE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Saturn's icy Moons visible here, from left to right are: Janus, Enceladus and Epimetheus captured by the Cassini spacecraft wide angle camera Photo: REXNasa's Cassini spacecraft flew through icy plumes created by ice volcanoes and detected negatively charged water molecules, in a clear sign an underground sea exists.
On Earth this short-lived type of ion is produced where water is moving, such as in waterfalls or crashing ocean waves.
British scientists, reporting in the journal Icarus, say it is known that the jets contained water but it was not clear before whether this might be liquid.
If there is liquid water on Enceladus, Nasa scientists believe Saturn's sixth-largest moon could have the conditions necessary to sustain life.
High-resolution images already taken by the Cassini spacecraft show that the icy surface of Enceladus has a spreading Earthlike crust that has changed over time.
On Earth the spreading of the sea floor is driven by molten rock and Nasa scientists speculated that the liquid beneath the south pole of Enceladus may be water
Cassini scientist Andrew Coates said the evidence gathered by Cassini pointed to other constituents for life, such as carbon, plus a source of heat to keep the water liquid.
"While it's no surprise that there is water there, these short-lived ions are extra evidence for subsurface water," said Dr Coates, from University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory.
"And where there's water, carbon and energy, some of the major ingredients for life are present.
“The surprise for us was to look at the mass of these ions. There were several peaks in the spectrum, and when we analysed them we saw the effect of water molecules clustering together one after the other.”
Similar negatively charged ions have been found on another satellite of Saturn, Titan, which is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere.
The data from Enceladus's icy spray was collected by an instrument on Cassini called a plasma spectrometer.
It measured the density, temperature and speed of ions and electrons it collected as it flew through the jets.
Cassini is a project of Nasa, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.
It has been a major success for U.S. and European scientists since the spacecraft began orbiting Saturn and studying its rings and moons since 2004.
Nasa has just extended the mission's life by seven years.
But the British scientists have been told to abandon their research thanks to swingeing cuts in science spending by the government.
SOURCE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Calling ET: Your chance to send a message to alien life
To mark 50 years since the launch of the SETI - Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - programme, it's your chance to write a message that will be radioed into space.
ET: waiting for your call? Photo: UNIVERSAL/EVERETT/REX
If you had the chance to send a message into space, what would it say? "Greetings, fellow sentient beings"? "We come in peace"? "Hi… we've kind of messed up our planet, and we wondered if by chance anyone out there had a spare one?"
The subject of alien life – and its presence or absence in the universe – has been moving up the agenda recently, thanks to the approaching anniversary of the day in April 1960 when Frank Drake, an astronomer at Cornell University, pointed a radio telescope towards Tau Ceti, a suitably Sun-like star in our galactic neighbourhood. Drake was looking for unusual radio transmissions, which could indicate the presence of intelligent life. And even though the search came up empty, it was a good enough idea to kickstart the SETI programme – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Fifty years later, the team at SETI are still looking, and still puzzled by what is known as the Fermi paradox (first put forward by Enrico Fermi, the atomic scientist): the universe is large enough that there should be a host of advanced civilisations out there, so why haven't they been in touch?
Some have suggested that, while life may be abundant, complex and intelligent life may be exceedingly rare. Others think that bursts of gamma rays periodically sterilise the stars, forcing the process to begin again, or that any species which comes to dominate its planet will exhaust its resources long before it steps into the stars.
Then there is the problem of detection: SETI has spent decades looking for radio signals, but the equivalent emissions from our own planet are becoming harder to detect, as we graduate from radio broadcasts to digital distribution. "The trouble," says Dr Drake, "is that we are making ourselves more and more difficult to be heard. We are broadcasting in much more efficient ways today and are making our signals fainter and fainter."
Rather than sitting and waiting for ET to say hello, then, it may be better to go out and grab his attention. Nasa's Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin. The Voyager message, carried on a 12-inch, gold-plated copper disk, contained sounds and images "selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth": music, animal noises, spoken greetings in 55 languages, as well as messages from President Carter and the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Yet given that it will take this message in a celestial bottle 40,000 years to reach another planetary system, it seems most sensible to send signals by radio – which is where (itals)you(enditals) come in. To mark the SETI anniversary, as well as the publication of Paul Davies's The Eerie Silence, a new book about our search for extraterrestrial life, Penguin UK and National Science and Engineering Week will be firing off up to 5,000 messages into space via a radio telescope. The messages can be up to 40 words, and can say anything you like – greetings, warnings, confessions, jokes. The 50 best will be revealed in The Daily Telegraph in March, with each of the winners receiving a copy of Davies's book.
Among the entries already submitted is the following from Andy Hamilton, writer of the hit sitcom Outnumbered: "Attractive, fun-loving lifeform, blessed (and cursed) with a hungry mind, and wondering if it is alone in the Universe, would like to meet other lifeforms with view to meaningful relationship. Must have good sense of humour."
Quentin Cooper, the presenter of Radio 4's Material World, is responsible for the plea at the start of this piece for another planet to despoil, while Paul Davies has opted for the slightly more obscure "10001001.00001001001101110011110001101000011101110100100011110010111101", an expression of the strength of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation, as expressed in binary arithmetic. (Given our neurological and biological differences, the best way to communicate with alien life could be through the universal constants of maths and physics.) Comedian and QI panellist Alan Davies has a more pressing concern on his mind: "How do you address the issue of landfill on your planet, particularly with regard to disposable nappies…?"
It may be that we are firing these messages into an empty sky – that a better technique for hunting aliens would be to hunt for microbes here that may have come from Mars. Or, as Paul Davies has suggested, we could look for alien life in the history of our own planet: species which came and went before we evolved, or are lurking in the planet's most inhospitable corners.
It may also be, as Professor Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University warned at a Royal Society seminar last month, that alien species will be as rapacious and aggressive as our own – that such a meeting would be more War of the Worlds than Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we would do better to keep our cosmic heads down. In other words, by entering our competition, you may well doom the human race. Still, it's worth a shot, isn't it?
To enter the competition, submit your message of no more than 40 words at www.penguin.co.uk/eeriesilence Entries will be accepted until February 28, with the winners being announced in March. For full details and terms and conditions, see the website.
SOURCE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
ET: waiting for your call? Photo: UNIVERSAL/EVERETT/REXIf you had the chance to send a message into space, what would it say? "Greetings, fellow sentient beings"? "We come in peace"? "Hi… we've kind of messed up our planet, and we wondered if by chance anyone out there had a spare one?"
The subject of alien life – and its presence or absence in the universe – has been moving up the agenda recently, thanks to the approaching anniversary of the day in April 1960 when Frank Drake, an astronomer at Cornell University, pointed a radio telescope towards Tau Ceti, a suitably Sun-like star in our galactic neighbourhood. Drake was looking for unusual radio transmissions, which could indicate the presence of intelligent life. And even though the search came up empty, it was a good enough idea to kickstart the SETI programme – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Fifty years later, the team at SETI are still looking, and still puzzled by what is known as the Fermi paradox (first put forward by Enrico Fermi, the atomic scientist): the universe is large enough that there should be a host of advanced civilisations out there, so why haven't they been in touch?
Some have suggested that, while life may be abundant, complex and intelligent life may be exceedingly rare. Others think that bursts of gamma rays periodically sterilise the stars, forcing the process to begin again, or that any species which comes to dominate its planet will exhaust its resources long before it steps into the stars.
Then there is the problem of detection: SETI has spent decades looking for radio signals, but the equivalent emissions from our own planet are becoming harder to detect, as we graduate from radio broadcasts to digital distribution. "The trouble," says Dr Drake, "is that we are making ourselves more and more difficult to be heard. We are broadcasting in much more efficient ways today and are making our signals fainter and fainter."
Rather than sitting and waiting for ET to say hello, then, it may be better to go out and grab his attention. Nasa's Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin. The Voyager message, carried on a 12-inch, gold-plated copper disk, contained sounds and images "selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth": music, animal noises, spoken greetings in 55 languages, as well as messages from President Carter and the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Yet given that it will take this message in a celestial bottle 40,000 years to reach another planetary system, it seems most sensible to send signals by radio – which is where (itals)you(enditals) come in. To mark the SETI anniversary, as well as the publication of Paul Davies's The Eerie Silence, a new book about our search for extraterrestrial life, Penguin UK and National Science and Engineering Week will be firing off up to 5,000 messages into space via a radio telescope. The messages can be up to 40 words, and can say anything you like – greetings, warnings, confessions, jokes. The 50 best will be revealed in The Daily Telegraph in March, with each of the winners receiving a copy of Davies's book.
Among the entries already submitted is the following from Andy Hamilton, writer of the hit sitcom Outnumbered: "Attractive, fun-loving lifeform, blessed (and cursed) with a hungry mind, and wondering if it is alone in the Universe, would like to meet other lifeforms with view to meaningful relationship. Must have good sense of humour."
Quentin Cooper, the presenter of Radio 4's Material World, is responsible for the plea at the start of this piece for another planet to despoil, while Paul Davies has opted for the slightly more obscure "10001001.00001001001101110011110001101000011101110100100011110010111101", an expression of the strength of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation, as expressed in binary arithmetic. (Given our neurological and biological differences, the best way to communicate with alien life could be through the universal constants of maths and physics.) Comedian and QI panellist Alan Davies has a more pressing concern on his mind: "How do you address the issue of landfill on your planet, particularly with regard to disposable nappies…?"
It may be that we are firing these messages into an empty sky – that a better technique for hunting aliens would be to hunt for microbes here that may have come from Mars. Or, as Paul Davies has suggested, we could look for alien life in the history of our own planet: species which came and went before we evolved, or are lurking in the planet's most inhospitable corners.
It may also be, as Professor Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University warned at a Royal Society seminar last month, that alien species will be as rapacious and aggressive as our own – that such a meeting would be more War of the Worlds than Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we would do better to keep our cosmic heads down. In other words, by entering our competition, you may well doom the human race. Still, it's worth a shot, isn't it?
To enter the competition, submit your message of no more than 40 words at www.penguin.co.uk/eeriesilence Entries will be accepted until February 28, with the winners being announced in March. For full details and terms and conditions, see the website.
SOURCE: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
UFO seen by many in Shanghai, incredible photo taken
Michael Cohen m.cohen@allnewsweb.com
A UFO was seen by many residents on 3 February at 9pm in the city of Shanghai The sighting has enlivened Chinese Internet forums with numerous witnesses posting their own accounts of the event. Most of the witnesses are certain that what they saw was of alien or ET origin. A minority disagree, with some witnesses of the opinion that the object was either a kite or a reflection of highrise lights.
A few witnesses were able to photograph the disc-shaped UFO which descended upon the Chinese metropolis, hovered above city buildings for a few minutes and then shot zoomed off skyward. One such photo (above) has been released by Chinese media.
The local astronomical observatory has received numerous calls from witnesses and is planning to investigate the event. The observatory head, Mr Haiming Tang remarked that people should not rush to conclude that the origin of the UFO is extraterrestrial. He noted that 'In the past many such events have been incorrectly regarded as alien visitation when in fact the explanation was more mundane.'
UFO sightings are commonplace in Shanghai. A number of events that have transpired in the skies above that city have been declared by scientists to involve a genuine UFO in the sense that the object in question was never identified.
SOURCE: http://www.allnewsweb.com/
Monday, February 8, 2010
Iran cuts cultural links with British Museum over Cyrus Cylinder
The Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon is regarded as the world's first declaration of human rightsIran has severed all cultural ties with the British Museum over the institution’s failure to hand over an ancient Persian treasure.
At the centre of the diplomatic row is a 2,500-year-old cuneiform tablet, known as the Cyrus Cylinder, which most historians regard as the world’s first declaration of human rights.
Curators had been due to lend the artefact to Tehran last month, but announced that the handover would be delayed after the discovery of new tablets that they believe could help its research. The delay has provoked the anger of Iranian officials, who announced an end to dialogue yesterday in protest at a decision that they believe is politically motivated.
Hamid Baghaei, head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation, said that the move to keep the cylinder was unacceptable. “The Cultural Heritage Organisation has cut all its relations and co-operation with the British Museum,” he said.
Mr Baghaei added that his organisation would send a letter of complaint to Unesco, the United Nations’ cultural body, and threatened to write to all international museums warning them against working with the British Museum.
The museum expressed “great surprise” at Iran’s reaction, which now threatens to end a symbolic friendship that has survived despite decades of political turmoil.
The museum said in a statement last night that it had confirmed its intention to lend the artefact and associated fragments of clay tablet to the National Museum of Tehran in the second half of July in a phone call to Iranian officials last week. This was followed with an e-mail and faxed letter to Mr Baghaei a few days later.
“The new announcement from Mr Baghaei therefore comes as a great surprise. The British Museum has acted throughout in good faith, and values highly its hitherto good relations with Iran. It is to be hoped that this matter can be resolved as soon as possible.”
The statement added: “The British Museum has a longstanding policy of lending its unparalleled collection as widely as possible across the world. This cultural exchange is a vital part of the museum’s commitment to being a museum for the world ... allowing valuable dialogues to develop independently of political considerations.”
The cultural row comes amid heightened tension between Britain and Iran over its nuclear activities.
When Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, and Mr Baghaei signed the loan agreement in January 2009, six months before the violence surrounding the presidential elections, their friendly encounter was hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough. At the time even the British Ambassador in Tehran was struggling to maintain a dialogue.
The clay cylinder, which was acquired by the museum after its discovery in 1879, was written in Babylonian cuneiform on the orders of the Persian king Cyrus the Great after his conquest of Babylon in 539BC. It remains of huge significance in Iranian, Iraqi and Jewish history.
The Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, accepting her Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, hailed the charter as “one of the most important documents that should be studied in the history of human rights”, and cited Cyrus as a leader who “guaranteed freedoms for all”. Last week she reiterated her support for lending it to Tehran. “Whatever happens inside Iran has nothing to do with sending the cylinder to Iran,” she said.
SOURCE: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
Will NASA Send Robots to the Moon with "Project M?"
This video surfaced today on NASA Watch, but there's not a lot of details about Project M. According to the America Space website, Project M is a program being developed out of the Johnson Space Center Engineering Directorate to put a lander on the moon with a robot. Supposedly, the mission could be done within a 1,000 days once the project got the go-ahead.
It would be different than other NASA projects in that there would be no prime contractors, but just using "the best engineers in the world to get the job done on time," said America Space.
Cryptically, the website also says the project has been “go” since Monday, November 9th, 2009.
SOURCE: http://www.universetoday.com/
It would be different than other NASA projects in that there would be no prime contractors, but just using "the best engineers in the world to get the job done on time," said America Space.
Cryptically, the website also says the project has been “go” since Monday, November 9th, 2009.
SOURCE: http://www.universetoday.com/
The sewage engineer, the 'Wow! Signal' and the proof that there really IS life on Mars
Aliens are back in fashion. Even the Royal Society, the most level-headed of scientific establishments, is getting in on the action. Last month it hosted a meeting about the prospects of finding or making contact with extraterrestrials.
But everyone seems to have forgotten something. Reputable scientists say we have already found aliens - and heard from them, too. Did no one tell you?
Gilbert Levin, the man who found life on Mars, is now in his 80s but his eyes still sparkle whenever he talks about the day Nasa's Viking probe touched down on the Martian Plains of Gold. It was July 20, 1976.
Space invaders: Martian robots were used to advertise Smash instant potato in the Seventies - when the Viking lander reported evidence of life on the Red Planet
'Oh, it was very exciting,' he told me when I visited his offices in Beltsville, Maryland, a few years ago. A grin broke out across his face. 'Everything went just right.'
That includes the experiment he designed to look for the signs of life. Levin is a sewage engineer by training, and it was this that led him to invent a novel way to detect microbes.
His trick was to put out radioactive food and watch for wisps of radioactive gas belching out as a by-product of microbe digestion. Nasa saw it as an ideal way to test for life in Martian soil.
Levin's experiment worked perfectly. Before launch, the apparatus successfully detected the scarce life in soil samples taken from the Californian desert. Two hundred million miles from Earth, it worked again: Levin's instrument got another positive result from Martian soil samples.
Levin went out to buy champagne and cigars. A party was in full swing when renowned astronomer Carl Sagan phoned Levin to offer his congratulations. Levin remembers it as the happiest day of his life.
His unhappiest came just two days later when the Viking mission leader announced they had failed to find life on Mars.
A colleague dug Levin in the ribs. 'He said, "Goddamit, Gil, will you get up and tell them you detected life?"' But Levin, cowed by his relatively junior status, did not dare.
The problem was straightforward. Another of the instruments on the Viking mission had searched for traces of carbon in Martian soil and found none. With no carbon, the mission chiefs reasoned, there could be no life. The result of Levin's experiment must have been a mistake, they said. Carl Sagan called again - to withdraw his congratulations.
The trouble is, the mission chiefs had been misled.
Ten years after the Viking probe landed on Mars, a scientist called John Milan Lavoie Jnr contacted Levin and told him he had worked on the instrument that was supposed to look for carbon. No one had admitted it at the time, but the instrument had never worked properly, he said. Levin told a few people but no one seemed to care.
A further 15 years passed and another of the instrument's engineers, Arthur Lafleur, came forward and told the same story. On Earth, before the mission had blasted off for Mars, the instrument had been given relatively large quantities of carbon to detect. It had failed but the scientists had kept quiet about it.
The final nail in the instrument's coffin came in 2006 when the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences published a devastating critique of it. Their report said it had not been sensitive enough to rule out the existence of carbon-based molecules in Martian soil.
Signs of life: Two clues point to life on Mars and beyond, but have been strangely forgotten
You would think that, given all this, Levin would have been vindicated by now. In fact, he has been labelled a troublemaker. At the party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Viking mission, he caused a bit of a scene by suggesting that Nasa revisit his results. When the 30th anniversary party came around, he simply wasn't invited.
A growing minority of scientists are now taking Levin's claims seriously, saying that Viking may well have discovered life. But most shrug their shoulders and say it was all too long ago to be sure.
Which brings us on to that alien signal - if that is what it was. It came on August 15, 1977, the night before Elvis Presley died.
The Ohio radio telescope that picked up the signal was called the Big Ear. At 11.16pm, it recorded a single pulse of radiation that seemed to come from somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius.
It is now known as the 'Wow! Signal'. That's what Jerry Ehman, the man who spotted it in the computer printout, scrawled in the margin. He had good reason to do so: the characteristics of the signal were exactly what alien-hunters had been told to look out for.
Eighteen years previously, researchers had put themselves in ET's shoes and tried to work out the best way to attract our attention. They decided that the most noteworthy signal would be a radio signal at exactly 1,420 MHz. This is the vibration frequency of hydrogen, the most common molecule in the universe.
Everyone agreed that it would be the most widely intelligible way of saying, 'We're here - are you?' When the Wow! Signal came in, its frequency was 1,420 MHz.
I have never met Jerry Ehman but we have exchanged emails and talked on the phone. He got in touch with me - he had heard that I was looking for the latest thinking on what the signal meant.
His first email told me everything I needed to know. 'I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense,' it said.
Ehman and his colleagues have explored every possibility: military transmissions, reflections of Earth signals off asteroids or satellites, natural emissions from stars, but nothing fits.
The strangest thing of all is that it came from a blank patch of sky. When Ehman and his colleagues looked at the exact location of the source, it turned out to be devoid of stars. Ehman's only thought is that it could have been beamed from a spaceship travelling through the universe in search of some sign of life.
Not that he is totally convinced it really was aliens but he has never come up with a better explanation.
'It had all the earmarks of being a signal from an intelligent civilisation,' Ehman told me on the phone. 'There it was, like it was saying, "Here I am - can you see me?"' But, he concedes, we may never have proof one way or the other.
Ehman was inspired to become an astronomer after coming across a Reader's Digest article by Frank Drake, one of the first scientists to calculate our chances of finding extraterrestrial life. I was there when Drake spoke at the Royal Society meeting last month.
He told the audience that, given the sheer vastness of the universe and the relative weakness of our technology, the chances of finding life or making contact with an alien civilisation are unbelievably slim. In other words, it might happen just once in a lifetime.
Which made me wonder: have we been both extraordinarily lucky and extraordinarily careless? It seems we have had two chances, and missed them both.
SOURCE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
But everyone seems to have forgotten something. Reputable scientists say we have already found aliens - and heard from them, too. Did no one tell you?
Gilbert Levin, the man who found life on Mars, is now in his 80s but his eyes still sparkle whenever he talks about the day Nasa's Viking probe touched down on the Martian Plains of Gold. It was July 20, 1976.
Space invaders: Martian robots were used to advertise Smash instant potato in the Seventies - when the Viking lander reported evidence of life on the Red Planet'Oh, it was very exciting,' he told me when I visited his offices in Beltsville, Maryland, a few years ago. A grin broke out across his face. 'Everything went just right.'
That includes the experiment he designed to look for the signs of life. Levin is a sewage engineer by training, and it was this that led him to invent a novel way to detect microbes.
His trick was to put out radioactive food and watch for wisps of radioactive gas belching out as a by-product of microbe digestion. Nasa saw it as an ideal way to test for life in Martian soil.
Levin's experiment worked perfectly. Before launch, the apparatus successfully detected the scarce life in soil samples taken from the Californian desert. Two hundred million miles from Earth, it worked again: Levin's instrument got another positive result from Martian soil samples.
Levin went out to buy champagne and cigars. A party was in full swing when renowned astronomer Carl Sagan phoned Levin to offer his congratulations. Levin remembers it as the happiest day of his life.
His unhappiest came just two days later when the Viking mission leader announced they had failed to find life on Mars.
A colleague dug Levin in the ribs. 'He said, "Goddamit, Gil, will you get up and tell them you detected life?"' But Levin, cowed by his relatively junior status, did not dare.
The problem was straightforward. Another of the instruments on the Viking mission had searched for traces of carbon in Martian soil and found none. With no carbon, the mission chiefs reasoned, there could be no life. The result of Levin's experiment must have been a mistake, they said. Carl Sagan called again - to withdraw his congratulations.
The trouble is, the mission chiefs had been misled.
Ten years after the Viking probe landed on Mars, a scientist called John Milan Lavoie Jnr contacted Levin and told him he had worked on the instrument that was supposed to look for carbon. No one had admitted it at the time, but the instrument had never worked properly, he said. Levin told a few people but no one seemed to care.
A further 15 years passed and another of the instrument's engineers, Arthur Lafleur, came forward and told the same story. On Earth, before the mission had blasted off for Mars, the instrument had been given relatively large quantities of carbon to detect. It had failed but the scientists had kept quiet about it.
The final nail in the instrument's coffin came in 2006 when the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences published a devastating critique of it. Their report said it had not been sensitive enough to rule out the existence of carbon-based molecules in Martian soil.
Signs of life: Two clues point to life on Mars and beyond, but have been strangely forgottenYou would think that, given all this, Levin would have been vindicated by now. In fact, he has been labelled a troublemaker. At the party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Viking mission, he caused a bit of a scene by suggesting that Nasa revisit his results. When the 30th anniversary party came around, he simply wasn't invited.
A growing minority of scientists are now taking Levin's claims seriously, saying that Viking may well have discovered life. But most shrug their shoulders and say it was all too long ago to be sure.
Which brings us on to that alien signal - if that is what it was. It came on August 15, 1977, the night before Elvis Presley died.
The Ohio radio telescope that picked up the signal was called the Big Ear. At 11.16pm, it recorded a single pulse of radiation that seemed to come from somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius.
It is now known as the 'Wow! Signal'. That's what Jerry Ehman, the man who spotted it in the computer printout, scrawled in the margin. He had good reason to do so: the characteristics of the signal were exactly what alien-hunters had been told to look out for.
Eighteen years previously, researchers had put themselves in ET's shoes and tried to work out the best way to attract our attention. They decided that the most noteworthy signal would be a radio signal at exactly 1,420 MHz. This is the vibration frequency of hydrogen, the most common molecule in the universe.
Everyone agreed that it would be the most widely intelligible way of saying, 'We're here - are you?' When the Wow! Signal came in, its frequency was 1,420 MHz.
I have never met Jerry Ehman but we have exchanged emails and talked on the phone. He got in touch with me - he had heard that I was looking for the latest thinking on what the signal meant.
His first email told me everything I needed to know. 'I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense,' it said.
Ehman and his colleagues have explored every possibility: military transmissions, reflections of Earth signals off asteroids or satellites, natural emissions from stars, but nothing fits.
The strangest thing of all is that it came from a blank patch of sky. When Ehman and his colleagues looked at the exact location of the source, it turned out to be devoid of stars. Ehman's only thought is that it could have been beamed from a spaceship travelling through the universe in search of some sign of life.
Not that he is totally convinced it really was aliens but he has never come up with a better explanation.
'It had all the earmarks of being a signal from an intelligent civilisation,' Ehman told me on the phone. 'There it was, like it was saying, "Here I am - can you see me?"' But, he concedes, we may never have proof one way or the other.
Ehman was inspired to become an astronomer after coming across a Reader's Digest article by Frank Drake, one of the first scientists to calculate our chances of finding extraterrestrial life. I was there when Drake spoke at the Royal Society meeting last month.
He told the audience that, given the sheer vastness of the universe and the relative weakness of our technology, the chances of finding life or making contact with an alien civilisation are unbelievably slim. In other words, it might happen just once in a lifetime.
Which made me wonder: have we been both extraordinarily lucky and extraordinarily careless? It seems we have had two chances, and missed them both.
SOURCE: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
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