Mermaids Are Not Real Claims NOAA
Last month, Nuke the Fridge’s Namtar reviewed a program which aired on Animal Planet entitled “Mermaids: The Body Found.” NOAA (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration,) which mainly deals with environmental matters like tsunamis and hurricanes, took the strange step of posting a statement on their website denying that mermaids exist. In a post titled, “No Evidence of Aquatic Humanoids Has Ever Been Found,” NOAA states:
“The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species. Magical female figures first appear in cave paintings in the late Paleolithic (Stone Age) period some 30,000 years ago, when modern humans gained dominion over the land and, presumably, began to sail the seas. |  |
Physicists find new particle, but is it the Higgs?
Physicists in Europe will present evidence of an entirely new particle on Wednesday, Nature has learned. But more data will be needed to officially confirm whether it is indeed the long-awaited Higgs boson — the particle thought to be behind the mass of all the others.
Even as rumours fly in the popular media, physicists have begun quietly cheering at CERN, the European particle-physics lab near Geneva in Switzerland. “Without a doubt, we have a discovery,” says one member of the team working on the ATLAS experiment, who wished to remain anonymous. “It is pure elation!” For nearly half a century, physicists have predicted the existence of a particle that helps to endow others with mass. |  |
Major project to document all Egypt's sites starts with Beni Hassan tombs
Eight years after giving the go-ahead for the National Project to Document Egypt’s Heritage, Beni Hassan necropolis in the Upper Egyptian town of Minya has become the first site on the list to be documented.
The Ministry of State for Antiquities (MSA) is responsible for archaeologically documenting Egypt’s cultural and historical heritage, in an attempt to protect and preserve it, as well as providing comprehensive and detailed studies of every site and monument in Egypt for researchers and students in the field. Mohamed Ibrahim, antiquities’s minister, told Ahram Online that Egyptologists used state-of-the-art equipment and modern technology to document the necropolis and published the findings in a booklet of 337 pages, including 268 photos and 62 drawings and charts. |  |
"Beautiful" Squirrel-Tail Dinosaur Fossil Upends Feather Theory
A newfound squirrel-tailed specimen is the oldest known meat-eating dinosaur with feathers, according to a new study. The late-Jurassic discovery, study authors say, strikes down the image of dinosaurs as "overgrown lizards."
Unearthed recently from a Bavarian limestone quarry, the "exquisitely preserved" 150-million-year-old fossil has been dubbed Sciurumimus albersdoerferi—"Scirius" being the scientific name for tree squirrels. Sciurumimus was likely a young megalosaur, a group of large, two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs. The hatchling had a large skull, short hind limbs, and long, hairlike plumage on its midsection, back, and tail. "I was overwhelmed when I first saw it. Even apart from the preservation of feathers, this is certainly one of the most beautiful dinosaur fossils ever found,"... |  |
'Cat ladies' more likely to commit suicide, scientists claim
Women who own cats are more likely to have mental health problems and commit suicide because they can be infected by a common parasite that can be caught from cat litter, a study has found.
Researchers found women infected with the Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) parasite, which is spread through contact with cat faeces or eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables, are at increased risk of attempting suicide. The study involved more than 45,000 women in Denmark. About a third of the world’s population is infected with the parasite, which hides in cells in the brain and muscles, often without producing symptoms. The infection, which is called toxoplasmosis, has been linked to mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and changes in behaviour. |  |
5mn born through IVF since first test-tube baby
PARIS — In-vitro fertilisation (IVF) has given the world about five million new people since the first test tube baby was born in England 34 years ago, according to an estimate released on Monday.
As the initial controversy over man's scientific manipulation of nature has faded, about 350,000 babies conceived in petri dishes are now born every year, said the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE). That represents about 0.3 percent of the 130-million-odd babies added to the world population annually. "Millions of families with children have been created, thereby reducing the burden of infertility," said David Adamson, chairman of the International Committee for Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ICMART). |  |
Scientists discover that Milky Way was struck some 100 million years ago, still rings like a bell
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy surrounded by dozens of smaller satellite galaxies. Scientists have long theorized that occasionally these satellites will pass through the disk of the Milky Way, perturbing both the satellite and the disk. A team of astronomers from Canada and the United States has discovered what may well be the smoking gun of such an encounter, one that occurred close to our position in the galaxy and relatively recently, at least in the cosmological sense.
“We have found evidence that our Milky Way had an encounter with a small galaxy or massive dark matter structure perhaps as recently as 100 million years ago,” said Larry Widrow from Queen’s University in Canada. |  |
First private deep space mission will search for Earth-destroying asteroids
The B612 Foundation announced the first privately Funded Deep Space Mission yesterday morning. It's called Sentinel, a half-meter infrared telescope designed to look for any asteroids whose orbits will cross the Earth's in the next hundred years, down to thirty meters in size. Construction is expected to begin this fall, and the nearly complete design will be similar to the already-successful Spitzer and Kepler telescopes, albeit slightly smaller. It's still 1 1/2 tons and 25 feet tall. The prime contractor will be Ball Aerospace, contractor for Spitzer and Kepler.
The B612 Foundation unofficially began in 2001. Astrophysicist Piet Hut and former astronaut Ed Lu held a 2001 workshop on Near-Earth Asteroids in Houston. The workshop attendees concluded that something needed to be done... |  |
99.9 Percent Accurate Genome Sequencing
Competition is fierce among biotech companies vying to bring out radical new genome sequencing machines, and it's not at all clear who has the best approach. But a cutting-edge technique called single-molecule sequencing just got a boost from a team of computational biologists—the researchers who focus on crunching the massive amounts of data produced by genetic sequencing.
In a paper published yesterday in Nature Biotechnology, the researchers say their error-correcting software boosts the accuracy of single-molecule sequencing results to a very impressive 99.9 percent. This is for "de novo" sequencing, a tough task, in that scientists taking their first look at a species' genome don't have any prior results for comparison's sake. |  |
Destruction of ancient Timbuktu shrines a ‘war crime’: ICC prosecutor
The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor on Sunday warned Islamist rebels to stop destroying ancient Islamic shrines in northern Mali’s Timbuktu, saying it amounted to a war crime.
“My message to those involved in these criminal acts is clear: stop the destruction of the religious buildings now. This is a war crime which my office has authority to fully investigate,” Fatou Bensouda told AFP in an interview. She said that Mali was signatory to the Rome Statute which established the ICC, which states in Article 8 that deliberate attacks against undefended civilian buildings which are not military objectives are a war crime. “This includes attacks against historical monuments as well as destruction of buildings dedicated to religion,” said Bensouda. |  |
From the archives: 75th anniversary of Amelia Earhart's disappearance
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan took off from New Guinea, en route to Howland Island. It was to be one of the final stops on their attempt to circumnavigate the globe--but they never arrived. The following is United Press's coverage of the disappearance, 75 years ago.
Earhart down in Pacific; coast picks up new SOS SAN FRANCISCO, July 3, 1937 (UP) -- Miss Earhart's husband, George Palmer Putnam, maintaining a ceaseless vigil at Oakland airport, was not convinced today that the voices heard by amateur radio operators were those of either Miss Earhart or Captain Noonan, her navigator. He also was not certain that the plane actually had sent out earlier dot and dash signals picked up by Coast Guard stations, by the British cruiser Achilles and the freighter New Zealand. |  |
Physicists Inch Closer to Proof of Elusive Particle
Like Moses seeing the Promised Land but not being able to go there, physicists from Fermilab said Monday that its Tevatron, now shuttered but once the most powerful physics machine in the world, had fallen just short of finding a long-hypothesized particle.
Known as the Higgs boson, it explains why things in the universe have mass, and is a cornerstone of modern physics despite never being seen.
The news from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory added more buzz and hype about the long-sought particle as physicists and many others are standing by for an announcement on Wednesday from CERN...
Known as the Higgs boson, it explains why things in the universe have mass, and is a cornerstone of modern physics despite never being seen.
The news from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory added more buzz and hype about the long-sought particle as physicists and many others are standing by for an announcement on Wednesday from CERN...