They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
For more than 200 years, this book concealed the arcane rituals of an ancient order. But cracking the code only deepened the mystery.
The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.
The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.
Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear a School-Issued RFID Tracker
A Texas high school student is being suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip.
Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when the semester began in the fall. The ID badge has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number, and the RFID chip monitors pupils’ movements on campus, from when they arrive until when they leave.
Scientists urge ministers: tell truth on 'over-hyped' flu vaccine
The flu vaccine given to millions of people each year in Britain is “over-promoted” and “over-hyped” and the protection it offers against the seasonal illness has been exaggerated, scientists claim.
Flu causes thousands of deaths, mainly among the elderly, in the UK each year but the vaccine is of limited effectiveness, especially for older people. One expert told The Independent the Government should be held accountable for “wasting taxpayer’s money” on the annual £120m national vaccination campaign.
But scientists stressed it was still worth getting the jab as it is currently “the best we have”.
Making steam without water, thanks to nanoparticles
It is possible to create steam within seconds by focusing sunlight on nanoparticles mixed into water, according to new research.
That observation, reported Monday by scientists at Rice University in Texas, suggests myriad applications in places that lack electricity or burnable fuels. A sun-powered boiler could desalinate sea water, distill alcohol, sterilize medical equipment and perform other useful tasks.
"We can build a portable, compact steam generator that depends only on sunlight for input. It is something that could really be good in remote or resource-limited locations," said Naomi Halas, an engineer and physicist at Rice who ran the experiment.
New smell discovered: It's 'olfactory white' as in white noise
Scientists have discovered a new smell, but you may have to go to a laboratory to experience it yourself.
The smell is dubbed "olfactory white," because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise, researchers reported Monday (Nov. 19) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just as white noise is a mixture of many different sound frequencies and white light is a mixture of many different wavelengths, olfactory white is a mixture of many different smelly compounds.
In fact, the key to olfactory white is not the compounds themselves, researchers found, but the fact that there are a lot of them.
MDMA keeps severe stress at bay
The benefits of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) persist years after the first treatment with the drug (also known as ecstasy), according to a follow-up study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The finding gives hope to people with PTSD who do not respond to conventional treatments. However, the results come from a small-scale pilot study, and the outcomes have not been so convincing in other recently published work.
Antarctic Glacier Primed to Form Iceberg
With its protective sea ice barrier melted away, Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier grows ever closer to finally dropping its New York City-sized iceberg into the ocean, according to NASA.
The giant crack in Pine Island Glacier was first spotted by scientists with NASA's IceBridge mission in 2011 as they surveyed the massive ice shelf in their specially equipped DC-8 plane. A second rift also formed and joined the northern side of the crack in May 2012, as captured on satellite images that track the incipient iceberg.
Petroglyph thieves grab and deface California carvings
Saw-wielding thieves have stolen a series of ancient carvings from a California cliff side.
At least four of the carvings, known as petroglyphs, were taken over a period of several hours, US officials said, with others badly defaced.
The petroglyphs are thought to have survived for thousands of years at the desert site near Bishop, California.
Petroglyphs, or rock engravings, are created by removing the surface layer of rocks to reveal the colours below.
Ancient rock sculptures discovered in Maharashtra
Mumbai: Rock sculptures dating back to between 4,000-7,000 BC have been found in a well-preserved condition in the forests near Kudopi village in Sindhudurg district of coastal Konkan region, an official said here Tuesday.
There are more than 60 big and small images of Mother Goddess, birds and animals, found in a single location of around 20,000 square feet, considered one of the biggest such concentration anywhere in the country, Satish Lalit, leader of an expedition team which made the discovery last May, told reporters.
Eocene Big Bird Not so Scary, After All
The reign of the dinosaurs came to a catastrophic end 66 million years ago. That’s the common trope, anyway – a holdover from before we recognized that at least one feathery lineage survived and proliferated after the K/Pg devastation. We still live in the Age of Dinosaurs – a 230 million year old success story carried on by modern birds.
Still, even today’s birds seem to pale in comparison to their long-lost relatives. In the Eocene world that emerged from the vestiges of the Late Cretaceous, giant avian dinosaurs left their mark on the landscape. I mean that literally. In the latest issue of Palaeontology, Western Washington University paleontologist George Mustoe and co-authors present a set of several 53 million year old tracks made by an enormous bird that once strode across North America.
Wormholes from Centuries-Old Art Prints Reveal the History of the 'Worms'
By examining art printed from woodblocks spanning five centuries, Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has identified the species responsible for making the ever-present wormholes in European printed art since the Renaissance. The hole-makers, two species of wood-boring beetles, are widely distributed today, but the "wormhole record," as Hedges calls it, reveals a different pattern in the past, where the two species met along a zone across central Europe like a battle line of two armies.
The research, which is the first of its kind to use printed art as a "trace fossil" to precisely date species and to identify their locations, will be published in the journal Biology Letters on Nov. 21.
The Potential Health Benefits of Parasitic Gut Worms
A dose of parasitic whipworms cured monkeys with chronic diarrhea, fixing immune systems gone haywire and offering a snapshot of what worms might do for people.
Whipworms are typically considered a scourge, but there’s also reason to think they have benefits. In the monkeys, they seemed to restore intestinal bacterial balance and prevent the monkeys’ immune systems from dangerous overreaction.
“If you compare monkeys that had colitis with healthy monkeys, there is a big difference in types of bacteria that are attached to the intestinal wall,” said microbiologist P’ng Loke of New York University, co-author of a Nov. 15 PLoS Pathogens study of the worm treatment. “Immune response is calibrated to the presence of worms. In their absence, you get a different response.”.
Mars Mystery: Has Curiosity Rover Made Big Discovery?
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.
The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.
Water on Mars and Earth Had Similar Origins
The Earth's oceans and the water that once flowed on Mars likely came from a similar source: meteorites that landed on the planets when they were first forming, new research suggests.
Scientists analyzed the makeup of two rare Mars rocks that crashed into Earth as meteorites, and found that Martian water probably came from planetary building blocks similar to those that formed Earth. The two planets likely formed in parallel ways, but then took divergent evolutionary paths.
Now, spacecraft to land like copters
WASHINGTON: Nasa has tested a new rotor landing system in an attempt to enable its future space capsules to land like helicopters.
The idea behind the new landing system, tested in the 550 foot fall Vehicle Assembly Building at the space agency's Kennedy Space Center, is to replace parachutes with spinning blades to enable soft and controlled landings on land instead of the ocean.
NASA may soon unveil new manned moon missions
NASA is serious about sending astronauts back to the moon's neighborhood and will likely unveil its ambitious plans soon now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected, experts say.
The space agency has apparently been thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon's far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025.
Is
Io, the Volcanic Epicenter of the Solar System, a Hotspot for Life?
Io, the innermost of Jupiter's large satellites and the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with plumes of matter rising up to 186 miles (300 km) above the surface, is considered a prime candidate as a hotspot for extreme extraterrestrial life.
In the image above Two sulfurous eruptions are visible on Io from the robotic Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. At the image top, over Io's limb, a bluish plume rises about 140 kilometers above the surface of a volcanic caldera known as Pillan Patera.
Ban ‘Killer Robots’ Before It’s Too Late
Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention.
The 50-page report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” outlines concerns about these fully autonomous weapons, which would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. In addition, the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations.
New satellite will seek out and assist other satellites in need
NEW YORK — A young spaceflight company is building what it hopes will be the ultimate space handyman, a combination repair droid and orbital gas station to serve ailing satellites around Earth.
The company, called ViviSat, is planning to launch a fleet of specially built spacecraft that will be able to attach to other vehicles in Earth orbit that need a pick-me-up.
Mystery Sources of Gamma Rays Baffle Astronomers (Weekend Feature)
The Fermi Space Telescope has detected close to 2,000 gamma ray sources in space, and nearly 600 are complete mysteries. Researchers are speculating on the nature of the mystery sources, including the possibility that they are made of dark matter. In 2011 NASA's Fermi team released the second catalog of gamma ray sources from its satellite's Large Area Telescope and have no idea where nearly one-third of gamma rays originated.
World greenhouse gas levels hit fresh records
They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
For more than 200 years, this book concealed the arcane rituals of an ancient order. But cracking the code only deepened the mystery.
The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.
The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.
The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.
The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.
Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear a School-Issued RFID Tracker
A Texas high school student is being suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip.
Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when the semester began in the fall. The ID badge has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number, and the RFID chip monitors pupils’ movements on campus, from when they arrive until when they leave.
Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when the semester began in the fall. The ID badge has a bar code associated with a student’s Social Security number, and the RFID chip monitors pupils’ movements on campus, from when they arrive until when they leave.
Scientists urge ministers: tell truth on 'over-hyped' flu vaccine
The flu vaccine given to millions of people each year in Britain is “over-promoted” and “over-hyped” and the protection it offers against the seasonal illness has been exaggerated, scientists claim.
Flu causes thousands of deaths, mainly among the elderly, in the UK each year but the vaccine is of limited effectiveness, especially for older people. One expert told The Independent the Government should be held accountable for “wasting taxpayer’s money” on the annual £120m national vaccination campaign. But scientists stressed it was still worth getting the jab as it is currently “the best we have”. | |
Making steam without water, thanks to nanoparticles
It is possible to create steam within seconds by focusing sunlight on nanoparticles mixed into water, according to new research.
That observation, reported Monday by scientists at Rice University in Texas, suggests myriad applications in places that lack electricity or burnable fuels. A sun-powered boiler could desalinate sea water, distill alcohol, sterilize medical equipment and perform other useful tasks. "We can build a portable, compact steam generator that depends only on sunlight for input. It is something that could really be good in remote or resource-limited locations," said Naomi Halas, an engineer and physicist at Rice who ran the experiment. | |
New smell discovered: It's 'olfactory white' as in white noise
Scientists have discovered a new smell, but you may have to go to a laboratory to experience it yourself.
The smell is dubbed "olfactory white," because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise, researchers reported Monday (Nov. 19) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just as white noise is a mixture of many different sound frequencies and white light is a mixture of many different wavelengths, olfactory white is a mixture of many different smelly compounds. In fact, the key to olfactory white is not the compounds themselves, researchers found, but the fact that there are a lot of them. | |
MDMA keeps severe stress at bay
The benefits of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) persist years after the first treatment with the drug (also known as ecstasy), according to a follow-up study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
The finding gives hope to people with PTSD who do not respond to conventional treatments. However, the results come from a small-scale pilot study, and the outcomes have not been so convincing in other recently published work. | |
Antarctic Glacier Primed to Form Iceberg
With its protective sea ice barrier melted away, Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier grows ever closer to finally dropping its New York City-sized iceberg into the ocean, according to NASA.
The giant crack in Pine Island Glacier was first spotted by scientists with NASA's IceBridge mission in 2011 as they surveyed the massive ice shelf in their specially equipped DC-8 plane. A second rift also formed and joined the northern side of the crack in May 2012, as captured on satellite images that track the incipient iceberg. | |
Petroglyph thieves grab and deface California carvings
Saw-wielding thieves have stolen a series of ancient carvings from a California cliff side.
At least four of the carvings, known as petroglyphs, were taken over a period of several hours, US officials said, with others badly defaced. The petroglyphs are thought to have survived for thousands of years at the desert site near Bishop, California. Petroglyphs, or rock engravings, are created by removing the surface layer of rocks to reveal the colours below. | |
Ancient rock sculptures discovered in Maharashtra
Mumbai: Rock sculptures dating back to between 4,000-7,000 BC have been found in a well-preserved condition in the forests near Kudopi village in Sindhudurg district of coastal Konkan region, an official said here Tuesday.
There are more than 60 big and small images of Mother Goddess, birds and animals, found in a single location of around 20,000 square feet, considered one of the biggest such concentration anywhere in the country, Satish Lalit, leader of an expedition team which made the discovery last May, told reporters. | |
Eocene Big Bird Not so Scary, After All
The reign of the dinosaurs came to a catastrophic end 66 million years ago. That’s the common trope, anyway – a holdover from before we recognized that at least one feathery lineage survived and proliferated after the K/Pg devastation. We still live in the Age of Dinosaurs – a 230 million year old success story carried on by modern birds.
Still, even today’s birds seem to pale in comparison to their long-lost relatives. In the Eocene world that emerged from the vestiges of the Late Cretaceous, giant avian dinosaurs left their mark on the landscape. I mean that literally. In the latest issue of Palaeontology, Western Washington University paleontologist George Mustoe and co-authors present a set of several 53 million year old tracks made by an enormous bird that once strode across North America. | |
Wormholes from Centuries-Old Art Prints Reveal the History of the 'Worms'
By examining art printed from woodblocks spanning five centuries, Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has identified the species responsible for making the ever-present wormholes in European printed art since the Renaissance. The hole-makers, two species of wood-boring beetles, are widely distributed today, but the "wormhole record," as Hedges calls it, reveals a different pattern in the past, where the two species met along a zone across central Europe like a battle line of two armies.
The research, which is the first of its kind to use printed art as a "trace fossil" to precisely date species and to identify their locations, will be published in the journal Biology Letters on Nov. 21. | |
The Potential Health Benefits of Parasitic Gut Worms
A dose of parasitic whipworms cured monkeys with chronic diarrhea, fixing immune systems gone haywire and offering a snapshot of what worms might do for people.
Whipworms are typically considered a scourge, but there’s also reason to think they have benefits. In the monkeys, they seemed to restore intestinal bacterial balance and prevent the monkeys’ immune systems from dangerous overreaction. “If you compare monkeys that had colitis with healthy monkeys, there is a big difference in types of bacteria that are attached to the intestinal wall,” said microbiologist P’ng Loke of New York University, co-author of a Nov. 15 PLoS Pathogens study of the worm treatment. “Immune response is calibrated to the presence of worms. In their absence, you get a different response.”. | |
Mars Mystery: Has Curiosity Rover Made Big Discovery?
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to learn what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.
The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported today (Nov. 20). SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it. | |
Water on Mars and Earth Had Similar Origins
The Earth's oceans and the water that once flowed on Mars likely came from a similar source: meteorites that landed on the planets when they were first forming, new research suggests.
Scientists analyzed the makeup of two rare Mars rocks that crashed into Earth as meteorites, and found that Martian water probably came from planetary building blocks similar to those that formed Earth. The two planets likely formed in parallel ways, but then took divergent evolutionary paths. | |
Now, spacecraft to land like copters
WASHINGTON: Nasa has tested a new rotor landing system in an attempt to enable its future space capsules to land like helicopters.
The idea behind the new landing system, tested in the 550 foot fall Vehicle Assembly Building at the space agency's Kennedy Space Center, is to replace parachutes with spinning blades to enable soft and controlled landings on land instead of the ocean. | |
NASA may soon unveil new manned moon missions
NASA is serious about sending astronauts back to the moon's neighborhood and will likely unveil its ambitious plans soon now that President Barack Obama has been re-elected, experts say.
The space agency has apparently been thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon's far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025. | |
Is
Io, the Volcanic Epicenter of the Solar System, a Hotspot for Life?
Io, the innermost of Jupiter's large satellites and the most volcanically active body in the solar system, with plumes of matter rising up to 186 miles (300 km) above the surface, is considered a prime candidate as a hotspot for extreme extraterrestrial life.
In the image above Two sulfurous eruptions are visible on Io from the robotic Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. At the image top, over Io's limb, a bluish plume rises about 140 kilometers above the surface of a volcanic caldera known as Pillan Patera. | |
Ban ‘Killer Robots’ Before It’s Too Late
Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention.
The 50-page report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” outlines concerns about these fully autonomous weapons, which would inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. In addition, the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations. | |
New satellite will seek out and assist other satellites in need
NEW YORK — A young spaceflight company is building what it hopes will be the ultimate space handyman, a combination repair droid and orbital gas station to serve ailing satellites around Earth.
The company, called ViviSat, is planning to launch a fleet of specially built spacecraft that will be able to attach to other vehicles in Earth orbit that need a pick-me-up. | |
Mystery Sources of Gamma Rays Baffle Astronomers (Weekend Feature)
The Fermi Space Telescope has detected close to 2,000 gamma ray sources in space, and nearly 600 are complete mysteries. Researchers are speculating on the nature of the mystery sources, including the possibility that they are made of dark matter. In 2011 NASA's Fermi team released the second catalog of gamma ray sources from its satellite's Large Area Telescope and have no idea where nearly one-third of gamma rays originated.
| |
Atmospheric volumes of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change hit a new record in 2011, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in its annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin on Tuesday.
The volume of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, grew at a similar rate to the previous decade and reached 390.9 parts per million (ppm), 40 percent above the pre-industrial level, the survey said.
It has increased by an average of 2 ppm for the past 10 years.
The volume of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, grew at a similar rate to the previous decade and reached 390.9 parts per million (ppm), 40 percent above the pre-industrial level, the survey said.
It has increased by an average of 2 ppm for the past 10 years.
'Mount Doom' set to erupt in New Zealand
The Department of Conservation (DOC) warned hikers to avoid the summit of Mount Ruapehu, saying that temperature readings by scientists indicated there was an increased risk of eruption at New Zealand's largest active volcano.
"The current situation can't continue, Ruapehu is so active that the temperatures have been going up and down a lot," DOC volcanic risk manager Harry Keys told Radio New Zealand. |  |
Bugarach: the French village destined to survive the Mayan apocalypse
Up in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a tiny village nestled amid breathtaking landscapes and eagles in flight, a man in a woolly hat pushes a wheelbarrow up a narrow street whistling to himself as the smell of woodsmoke drifts out of chimneys. The only sight slightly out of place are 20 zombies, staggering wild-eyed and bleeding, down the mountain path. But, unlike most of the bizarre things said about this place, the zombies at least make sense. "We're making a pastiche film about the apocalypse for our university leaving do," says Joel, 23, a pharmacy student from Montpellier dressed in a torn grey suit with two black eyes and a dribble of blood from his mouth. His student friend, a dwarf in a cow suit, adds: "Bugarach was the perfect setting. Everyone knows this village as the world centre of armageddon, we couldn't resist.".
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