University Of Hawaii Develops Charcoal Fired Fuel Cell
University of Hawaii researcher Michael Antal has developed a working fuel cell that uses charcoal as its fuel and operates at bread-baking temperatures. The Antal system, which he calls an aqueous alkali biocarbon fuel cell, is unlike other fuel cell technology both in that it uses a renewable fuel and that it does not require particularly high temperatures. Renewable energy is the watchword in the modern energy debate, an effort pushed in large part by high global oil prices and the perception that global political instability threatens the availability of fuel.
Michael Antal
Gov. Linda Lingle is backing a package of bills in the Legislature that includes strong support for renewables, and President Bush has been on the stump in recent weeks on behalf of energy initiatives that include hydrogen fuel cell cars, solar power, wind research, and more. Most research today focuses on cells fueled with hydrogen, which must be manufactured— in many cases from fossil fuels. But "this is effectively a battery that uses charcoal to make electricity," Antal said. The technology has attracted interest from around the world, said Dick Cox, director of the university's Office of Technology Transfer and Economic Development. "I think it's a tremendous innovation," Cox said. His office will license the technology to independent companies, which would pay Antal and the university for the use of the system. Antal's cell operates at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. By contrast, a carbon cell developed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory operates at 1,500 degrees. "People have been building hydrogen fuel cells for over a century. Our purpose is to awaken people to the fact that there are new things out there. We need to think outside the box," Antal said. The key to his cell's operation is the very chemically reactive property of charcoal, which has a large surface area and burns at relatively low temperatures, he said. Antal said he imagines industrial applications would be most appropriate for the fuel cell, but figures it might be capable of running an automobile. Antal's former associate, University of Tokyo researcher Kazuhiro Mochidzuki, said the system appears most appropriate for mid-sized power generation stations.
Michael Antal holds charcoal from macadamia nut shells that can be used to cook food, as a filter or with his newly developed fuel cell.
"Power generation by carbon fuel cell should not be in so big scale. The dispersed power system that does not require big generators is suitable for the carbon fuel cell," Mochidzuki said via e-mail. Right now, his lab at the University of Hawai'i is fine-tuning the design, and looking for companies that would finance the development of a commercial charcoal fuel cell. Mochidzuki said there are still technical issues to be resolved. "Carbon fuel cell is one of the promising technologies to obtain power from charcoal at a high efficiency. It can be said that the carbon fuel cell is an important technology to promote the sustainable biomass energy system," he said. However, "there are a number of problems to be solved against its practical use of carbon fuel cell, even if it theoretically has a good potential." The carbon cell functions something like a car battery. It has an anode and cathode positive- and negative-charged terminals in a liquid solution, and if you put an electrical load — like a light bulb — between them, electrical current flows from one to the other. But that's where the similarity ends.
In Antal's cell, the electrolyte is alkaline potassium hydroxide, not sulphuric acid. It is kept under pressure to prevent it from boiling away at 400 degrees. The negative terminal, or cathode, which acts as a catalyst, is made of nickel and silver or platinum. The positive terminal, or anode, is a porous ceramic column filled with charcoal powder. A piston keeps it pressurized, and serves at the attachment point for the electrical connection. In operation, hydroxide ions in the electrolyte attack the carbon, creating carbon dioxide and water. The process releases energy. The cell is fed air to provide the process with new oxygen, and it vents carbon dioxide. The charcoal does not burn in the sense of a campfire burning. The reaction occurs entirely within the liquid of the fuel cell. While fossil-fuel cells also produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, charcoal represents a sustainable source of fuel, since the living plants that produce the charcoal get their carbon by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Antal said that water-based or aqueous fuel cells have a considerable history. A hydrogen-based aqueous fuel cell was used in the first Apollo space mission. While his charcoal fuel cell works as it is, Antal said it needs to be more efficient, and his team is now fine tuning it — working with different catalysts, different electrolyte strengths and other changes. They also need to figure out how to continuously feed charcoal fuel to the system. "Handling of solid fuel, such as charcoal, is not easy. If we want to feed charcoal into the cell continuously, we have to solve the problem how it can be fed. This is one of the biggest problems of solid fuel," Mochidzuki said. Antal, who holds the University of Hawai'i's Coral Industries Chair of Renewable Energy Resources, is a longtime advocate of charcoal. Another of his projects is a flash carbonization reactor, which converts biomass like macadamia nut shells, wood and grass into charcoal. That charcoal can be used to cook food, as a filter or, in tandem with the new fuel cell, as a source of electricity.
An exorcist has carried out a ritual on a Sandwell school where seven members of staff have been struck down by a mystery illness. The exorcist came forward after being alerted to sickness problems affecting staff at The Meadows Special School in Oldbury. Sandwell Council education spokesman Coun Ian Jones revealed the exorcist had tried to clear the school of any malevolent presence.
Angela Duncan, headteacher at the school in Dudley Road East, started feeling unwell shortly after the £5 million building opened in September 2003. And since then another six members of staff have also complained of sickness and been moved to other schools. Environmental experts are still in the building trying to solve the mystery.
While Darren McGavin is probably best recognized by mainstream moviegoers for his role as the father of a boy yearning for the gift of a BB gun in the 1983 comedy A Christmas Story, horror fans know him as Carl Kolchak, the irascible reporter who was forever stumbling upon supernatural cases in the 1974-75 TV series, The Night Stalker.
McGavin died of natural causes at a Los Angeles-area hospital at 7:10 a.m. Saturday with his family at his side, said his son Bogart McGavin. Incidentally, he also starred alongside Don Knotts, who died Friday night, in the 1976 family comedy, No Deposit, No Return.
University of Illinois physics researchers have built a quantum-based computer that can be awake and asleep at the same time. The computer can spit out answers even if its program is never triggered. "This is the way nature is," said Charles Bennett, an IBM researcher who dreamed up some of the new uses of quantum physics. "We should be learning how to get used to that."
The University of Illinois computer experiment, detailed in the journal Nature, could help refine the young field of quantum computing with such applications as precise simulations of how proteins work in the human body.
Barely three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the U.S. into war, Angelenos scrambled to defend this city against a different invader - a UFO. The impending anniversary of "the Battle of Los Angeles" - when our fair city lit up a huge, silvery disc and proceeded to blast the living crap out of it - to no effect ... Immediately, an air raid siren shattered the peaceful sleep of the residents, as volunteer Air Raid Wardens grabbed their gear, and headed to the streets, affecting a total blackout. Army's 37th Coast Artillery Brigade swung into action, lighting up the clear, black skies with their massive spotlights. What they saw was beyond belief. With the Japanese planes still flying in their nightmares, another menacing flying machine was now right on top of them.
Tonight is the anniversary of the 1942 Los Angeles U.F.O. Air Raid.
In a matter of a few short minutes, the entire southern area of California was looking to the skies, watching the intense spotlight beams converging on the giant invading UFO. The 37th's anti-aircraft guns helped light up the night, firing volley after volley at the large craft. Many eyewitness reports would state that the large object took many direct hits, but appeared undamaged. The 30+ minute barrage would send fragmented shells over homes, businesses, and citizens. In the aftermath six individuals were found dead from the spent and fragmented artillery shells. It was reported that hundreds upon hundreds of rounds were fired at the giant UFO, yet it appeared unaffected. Eyewitness accounts described the object as a "surreal, hanging, magic lantern." The object was especially visible as it hovered over the MGM studios in Culver City. There are a number of newspaper articles of this event, and an astonishingly clear picture of the object as it was under its heaviest attack. The object eventually made its way over Long Beach, before it silently disappeared from view. The cannons were now silent. "It was huge! It was just enormous! And it was practically right over my house. I had never seen anything like it in my life!" she said. "It was just hovering there in the sky and hardly moving at all." "It was a lovely pale orange and about the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. I could see it perfectly because it was very close. It was big!"
A creature that looked like a beaver, right down to its flat paddle-like tail and webbed feet, lived 164 million years ago alongside dinosaurs, U.S. and Chinese researchers reported. It might not have gnawed trees as modern beavers do -- its teeth suggest it ate fish -- but the little animal had fur and even the inner ear structure of a mammal, they report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Thomas Martin of the Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, said the finding showed mammals had conquered the water 100 million years earlier than anyone thought.
An artistic reconstruction of a creature that looked like a beaver, right down to its flat paddle-like tail and webbed feet, and lived 164 million years ago alongside dinosaurs
"This exciting fossil is a further jigsaw-puzzle piece in a series of recent discoveries, demonstrating that the diversity and early evolutionary history of mammals were much more complex than perceived less than a decade ago," Martin wrote in a commentary. The fossil was found in the Middle Jurassic Jiulongshan Formation in China, a deposit rich in the fossils of dinosaurs, early insects and other creatures. It dates to 164 million years ago. Qiang Ji and colleagues at Nanjing University in China and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh said the animal, which they named Castorocauda lutrasimilis, would have weighed just 500 grams (18 ounces). "It is the most primitive taxon in the mammalian lineage known to have fur and has a broad, flattened, partly scaly tail analogous to that of modern beavers," they wrote. They found remnants of fur, scales on the tail and, in between the back toes, webbing.
Gone does not necessarily mean forgotten, especially in biology. A recent finding by researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and colleagues from the University of Manchester have found new evidence that the ability to form previously lost organs--in this case, teeth--can be maintained millions of years after the last known ancestor possessed them. Birds do not have teeth. However, their ancestors did--about 70–80 million years ago. The evolutionary loss of teeth corresponded to the formation of the beak that is present in all living birds. Nonetheless, it has been known that if mouse tooth-forming tissue is in contact with bird jaw tissue, the bird tissue is able to follow the instructions given by the mouse tissue and participate in making teeth, and that these teeth look very much like those of mammals. However, Drs. Matthew Harris and John F. Fallon and colleagues have found that modern birds retain the ability to make teeth even without instruction from their tooth-bearing cousins.
In the new work, the researchers show that the talpid2 strain of chicken harbors a genetic change that permits tooth formation in both the upper and lower jaw of embryonic birds. These teeth show similar developmental position as mammalian teeth and are associated with similar molecular instructions. Furthermore, when comparing the initial development of the structures, the researchers realized that the teeth forming in the chicken did not look like mammalian teeth, but resembled those of the alligator, the closest living relative of modern birds. The findings strongly suggest that the birds were initiating developmental programs similar to those of their reptilian ancestors. In addition, the authors found that the capacity to form teeth still resides in normal chickens and can be triggered experimentally by molecular signals. Taken together, the new findings indicate that even though modern birds lost teeth millions of years ago, the potential to form them persists.
Anti-Smoking Laws May Be Detrimental To The Elderly
A Tough new anti-smoking law has an unlikely opponent: a retired doctor who argues the ban is forcing elderly smokers in nursing homes to take unnecessary risks. Dr. Robert Guild, 71, says the law is forcing him and other smokers at the Maplewood Gardens Retirement Apartments -- some in wheelchairs and walkers -- to brave ice and snow to get to a structure that is far enough away from the retirement facility to meet the ban's requirements. The smokers have dubbed the structure the "Butt Hutt," and argue that it is a poor replacement to the well-ventilated smoking lounge management provided before the ban on indoor smoking went into effect in December.
"There's overhead heating, but it's very inconvenient, and there are no facilities," Guild said, noting that restrooms are important for folks his age. Guild started smoking cigars after he retired from private practice and his teaching position at Michigan State University. He says those who penned the clean indoor air initiative "ought to be shot." But he's willing to negotiate. "Give us our smoking room back, and all is forgiven," Guild told the reporter.
There is a news report about audio that was recorded in pottery - "Belgian researchers have been able to use computer scans of the grooves in 6,500-year-old pottery to extract sounds -- including talking and laughter -- made by the vibrations of the tools used to make the pottery."
Priests who tear out the throats of live chickens in ritual sacrifices to voodoo gods may risk contracting bird flu now the deadly virus has reached Africa. Voodoo priests in Benin, which borders Nigeria where an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 virus was found in poultry last week, sacrifice animals to invoke blessings or favours from the gods. Officials in the tiny West African country, which is the home of the ancient religion, say spreading the word about bird flu may help to save the lives of voodoo devotees.
"We have identified the groups at risk, including fetishists and followers of the voodoo cult who sometimes kill animals with their teeth," says Guillaume Hounsou-ve, director of livestock at Benin's agriculture ministry. Sheep, goats and other animals are sometimes sacrificed, but the favourite offering is a chicken. Priests commonly kill birds by ripping their throats out with their teeth or using a knife to cut their heads off. Both methods would bring them into contact with chicken blood, one of the ways bird flu is thought to be spread to humans. The disease has killed more than 90 people in Asia and Turkey since 2003. Hounsou-ve and other senior officials in Benin have spent the past few days drafting an action plan to counter bird flu. "We will target our messages, above all in regions where there are 'convents'," says Hounsou-ve, referring to the houses used for voodoo rituals.
An estimated 60% of Benin's 7 million people practise voodoo, although many also follow other religions like Christianity or Islam. Voodoo convents are found across Benin but more commonly in southern areas near the Atlantic seaboard. Once known as the Slave Coast, many thousands of Africans were shipped from here by European traders during more than three centuries of slave trading. Many took their voodoo beliefs with them to the New World, notably Haiti, where rites and traditions from different parts of Africa met and evolved. Voodoo in West Africa and the Caribbean encompasses a wide range of rituals, from sacrificing animals to dancing, in which devotees fall into trances said to be a form of possession by gods.
Ever since Superman wowed the world by using x-ray vision to fight crime, the ability to see through walls has been a dream. Now scientists believe they may have discovered the first steps towards making it happen. Research involving microscopic crystals has prompted the theory that walls could be built using materials which homeowners could render transparent at will. Such a discovery would revolutionise 21st-century building techniques. Contractors would be able to study pipes and wires behind the brickwork; police and soldiers would be able to spot dangers lurking behind walls. Today scientists at Imperial College in London and the University of Neuchatel, in Switzerland, will unveil their latest attempt to achieve this vision.
Details of the mechanism were being closely guarded last night. However, an invitation to hear more about the project revealed tantalising hints. A briefing note headed “New material developed to see through solid matter” said: “Researchers have created a new optical effect that means that solid objects, such as walls, could one day be rendered transparent.” The effect is believed to involve the development of a material that exploits the way atoms in matter move. Imperial College yesterday confirmed that a small but triumphant step had been taken in the laboratory, bringing mankind closer to the day when others can share Superman’s powers. The answer is not to provide people with x-ray vision but to make the buildings see-through. A college spokesman: “The breakthrough has been done using crystals that are not visible to the naked eye under specific conditions. The potential applications of it are exciting and far-reaching, but it’s still very early days.” Nevertheless, American military scientists are also working on developing devices which can see through existing structures. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing a system called Visi Building which, researchers hope, will see through entire buildings to show the floor plan, occupants and other materials. Researchers envisage soldiers driving past a building — or airmen flying above it — in order to capture an image similar to an x-ray. Japanese scientists have already — to an extent — turned fantasy into reality. Two years ago Susumu Tachi, a professor of computer science and physics at the University of Tokyo, unveiled an “invisibility cloak” similar to the garment used by Harry Potter, the fictional boy wizard, to conceal himself. Tachi’s cloak appears to make the wearer’s torso vanish, revealing the scene behind. It works by using a camera to film what is going on behind the wearer and then transmitting the scene to the front of the cloak, which acts like a screen. Experts claimed that to make an invisibility cloak work successfully would require six stereoscopic cameras and a garment containing more than 10m hyperpixels to provide the display.
As songbirds awaken the early risers at dawn on the farm, one resident is already up; in fact, he never slept – not once in the past 33 years. You’d think going without sleep for that long may have its drawbacks, but not for the man in central Quang Nam province who has never been ill after decades of insomnia. His inability to sleep has not only made him famous, but also represents a “miraculous” phenomenon worthy of scientific study. Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, known asHai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights. “I don’t know whether the insomnia has impacted my health or not. But I’m still healthy and can farm normally like others,” Ngoc said.
Thai Ngoc
Proving his health, the elderly resident of Que Trung commune, Que Son district said he can carry two 50kg bags of fertilizer down 4km of road to return home every day. His wife said, “My husband used to sleep well, but these days, even liquor cannot put him down.” She said when Ngoc went to Da Nang for a medical examination, doctors gave him a clean bill of health, except a minor decline in liver function. Ngoc currently lives on his 5ha farm at the foot of a mountain busy with farming and taking care of pigs and chickens all day. His six children live at their house in Que Trung. “I have tried sleeping pills and Vietnamese traditional medicine but nothing helps, even to sleep for a few minutes,” he said. Ngoc often does extra farm work or guards his farm at night to prevent theft, saying he used three months of sleepless nights to dig two large ponds to raise fish. Neighbor Vu said Ngoc volunteered to help beat a drum during the night and guard the house for the relatives of the dead during funeral ceremonies so that they could take a nap. Vu also said when the commune was planting sugar cane, several people also asked Ngoc to awaken them at midnight to go to work, since he was up anyway. On Ngoc’s prolonged insomnia, Phan Ngoc Ha, director of the Hoa Khanh Mental Hospital in Danang said sleep disorders often cause anorexia, lethargy, and irritability. But, in special cases, some people can handle it and still live and work normally, although this was a very small ratio among insomniacs, Ha added.
It was a time when giants roamed the earth. Giants like the palaeeudyptes, a 1.5m-high penguin - the 40 million-year-old remains of which have been found near Kawhia, an hour's drive south of Hamilton. The remains of this giant bird were found by Tony Lorimer who stumbled across the find while on a trip escorting the Hamilton junior naturalists club. Dwarfing the huge emperor penguin, the palaeeudyptes would have cut an imposing figure across the Waikato landscape.
palaeeudyptes
It seems to have died on the foreshore and sunk into the mud at a time when much of the area was just small low-lying islands. "Two of us were walking along when we almost banged heads going for a look and realised they were bones," Mr Lorimer said. Ewan Fordyce, associate professor of paleontology at Otago University, said the find was extremely significant. The bones may now become the showpiece of a small museum run by the Hamilton junior naturalists club. But Alan Tennyson, curator of fossils at Te Papa, said the fossil was a national treasure and should be somewhere where it could be appreciated by everyone.
This is the closest-ever picture of the Beast of Bexley. Over several years there have been scores of sightings around the borough of a panther-like creature. And at the weekend, mum-of-three Debbie Marshall took this amazing picture at the bottom of her garden. Mrs Marshall, of Crombie Road, Sidcup, was making the bed when she looked out of the window and saw the beast. At first she was confused but the more she looked the more she realised it was no ordinary moggy. The 40-year-old grabbed a digital camera and, surrounded by her three children, waited for a photo opportunity. Eventually the creature moved closer and crouched in tall grass, allowing the human resources officer to capture it. She said: "I waited and eventually it made its way across the field.
Picture of the Beast
"It wasn't running or galloping like a normal cat, it was more tiger-like in its movements." Mrs Marshall, who is married to Brian, 41, says her neighbour's cat was also in the field but was around "six or seven times smaller" than the beast. She said: "I have read about the Beast of Bexley before and sort of believed them but now I have seen it myself I am convinced it is real." Mrs Marshall's children Bradley, 15, Hannah, 11, and Daniel, nine, wanted to stand on the garden shed to get a better view but she would not let them, choosing to stay in the bedroom, which she estimates to have been 100ft from the big cat. She added: "I couldn't believe what I was looking at and was desperate to get a picture to show people so they would believe me. This wasn't like any ordinary cat."
A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot. The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself. Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University of Southampton, UK, who developed the slime-controlled bot with colleagues from Kobe University in south-central Japan, says the idea is to find simpler ways to control a robot’s behaviour. "The computers we have today are very good for what we built them for," he told New Scientist. "But, in a complex or paradoxical environment, things tend not to work out."
The slime mould - pictured on the screen in the experimental set-up - causes a robot to naturally avoid the light
Physarum polycephalum is a large single-celled organism that responds to food sources, such as bacteria and fungi, by moving towards and engulfing it. It also moves away from light and favours humid, moist places to inhabit. The mould uses a network of tiny tubes filled with cytoplasm to both sense its environment and decide how to respond to it. Zauner's team decided to harness this simple control mechanism to direct a small six-legged (hexapod) walking bot. They grew slime in a six-pointed star shape on top of a circuit and connected it remotely, via a computer, to the hexapod bot. Any light shone on sensors mounted on top of the robot were used to control light shone onto one of the six points of the circuit-mounted mould – each corresponding to a leg of the bot. As the slime tried to get away from the light its movement was sensed by the circuit and used to control one of the robot's six legs. The robot then scrabbled away from bright lights as a mechanical embodiment of the mould. Eventually, this type of control could be incorporated into the bot itself rather than used remotely. Zauner believes engineers will need to look towards this type of simple control mechanism, especially as components are scaled down. "On the nanoscale, we have to learn how to work with autonomous components," he says. "We have to let molecules do what they naturally do." Biology is already influencing the evolution of robots in other ways.
The six-legged hexapod robot is remotely-controlled by slime
For example, researchers led by Chris Melhuish at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, have developed robots that generate power by consuming flies. "Computational autonomy has been studied for some time,” says Ioannis Ieropoulos of the University of Western England team. “For a truly autonomous robot, the level of computational complexity will depend on the available energy.” Details of the slime-bot project were presented at the Second International Workshop on Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology, held in Osaka, Japan, on 26 and 27 January.
Decreased Risk Of Alzheimer's With Mental Exercise
Several studies have shown regular exercise cuts an individual's Alzheimer's risk by up to 40 percent. Louise Lentz is at an increased risk for developing the disease because her mother died from it. She goes out of her way not to take it easy. Some think she's a physical fitness buff, but she's more of a mental fitness fanatic. "And it makes sense. If you keep your body healthy, you're gonna reduce the risk of your brain shriveling up to a little walnut," Lentz said.
Lentz runs and climbs stairs to keep her brain thinking young and working hard. She's gone back to college to pursue a master's degree and she also eats well ... all components of the Alzheimer Association's "Maintain Your Brain Program." Alzheimer's expert Dr. Richard Golden said, "We knew lifestyle played a part (but) we didn't know exactly how to take advantage of that." Golden said Lentz has it right. Even moderate exercise makes a difference in delaying the onset of dementia. "We're not talking about pumping iron for hours a day," Golden said. He is also a big fan of mental gymnastics, or challenging your brain to learn something new. Golden said, "It's a good time to learn Spanish, if you don't speak it. It's a good time to play the piano, if you've never played. (It's a) nice time to learn watercolors. " Experts said the simplest things forge new connections in the brain. Varying a routine for getting to work or doing crossword and brain-teaser puzzles are all helpful.
Toilet Water Cleaner Than Ice At Fast Food Restaurants
12-year-old Jasmine Roberts is a seventh-grade student at Benito Middle School in New Tampa. When it came time for her to choose a science project, she wondered about the ice in fast food restaurants.
Jasmine Roberts, 7th-grade student: "My hypothesis was that the fast food restaurants’ ice would contain more bacteria that the fast food restaurants’ toilet water."
So Roberts set out to test her hypothesis, selecting five fast food restaurants, within a ten-mile radius of the University of South Florida. Roberts says at each restaurant she flushed the toilet once, the used sterile gloves to gather samples.
Jasmine Roberts: "Using the sterile beaker I scooped up some water and closed the lid."
Roberts also collected ice from soda fountains inside the five fast food restaurants. She also asked for cups of ice at the same restaurant's drive thru windows. She tested the samples at a lab at the Moffitt Cancer Center where she volunteers with a USF professor. Roberts says the results did not surprise her.
Jasmine Roberts: "I found that 70-percent of the time, the ice from the fast food restaurant's contain more bacteria than the fast food restaurant's toilet water."
Roberts' graph shows the toilet water, shown in red, had less bacteria in most cases than the ice inside shown in blue, and the ice from drive-through windows shown in green. Roberts' teacher says he wasn't surprised either.
Mark Danish, Honors Science Teacher: "It does concern me and I think with any restaurant you have to think twice about what you may get there."
Roberts says she'll think twice before getting ice at fast food restaurants again. Her project won the science fair at Benito Middle School, and she hopes to win the top prize at the Hillsborough County Regional Science and Engineering Fair, which starts Tuesday at the USF Sun Dome.
Scientists in Massachusetts say they`ve found the brains of rats immediately replay new experiences in reverse. The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say their discovery might help explain why we learn tasks better if there are breaks in between repetitions, why hyperactivity might cause learning problems and why simply being awake, but resting, can help learning.
Researchers already know cells in the hippocampus of rats rerun patterns of neural activity when they are asleep. Now MIT`s David Foster and Matthew Wilson have examined what happens in those cells when the animals are awake, as rats run up and down a track, pausing at each end. The researchers show hippocampal cells fire in a particular sequence as the rat runs and that this sequence of firing is repeated backwards when they pause. This may help etch a memory of the route into the brain, the authors say.
As the well known X Files catchphrase goes; ' the truth is out there.' That is what UFO investigator Russell Kellett hopes to uncover on his saucer searching mission in Conwy. But without the help of Mulder and Scully, the full-time researcher from FIley, North Yorkshire, has spent eight years unfolding the details of a paranormal event, believed to have occurred in North Wales nearly 32 years ago. And Russell is hoping that a return trip to the Welsh hills and vales will unearth new supernatural soils, and conclude the mystery that he has named Dragon Lights.
Russell Kellett
The story began when a group of four men were travelling home on the evening of January 23 1973. They were near a field in Llandrillo when they saw an unidentified object land on the ground. Arriving promptly on the scene, the army ordered the men to leave but not before they caught a glimpse of five humanoid creatures, two of which were in distress. The military surrounded the area and told the men not to speak of what they had just witnessed, but the men later set up meetings to discuss their sightings. The plot began to thicken as more and more witnesses spoke out, and after years of research, Russell discovered that there had also been an earthquake that night. He said: “My investigation is very detailed and has a lot of background to it and I have documents and witness statements that really are mindblowing. “I believe that a military movement out at sea caused the raising of a UFO from underwater which later crashed in land.
“My investigations so far have helped things to fall into place, this blows what happens on sci-fi TV right out of the water. “I am currently searching for people in the area who have been on battleships and would be grateful if any readers who may have any information about a battle fleet that was in the Colwyn Bay/ Puffin Island or Liverpool Bay area at that time could get in touch with me.” You can email Russell at: rkellett@supanet.com.
With Japan's pollen allergy season about to set in, a Tokyo hotel is setting up a special floor to ease the suffering for sneezing guests. Allergy-suffering guests checking in at the Tokyu Inn in the business district of Shinbashi, will step into a phone booth-style box to have the pollen blown off their clothes by a high-powered air shower before going to their rooms.
Windows on the allergy-sufferers' floor will be kept closed to keep the pollen out and peppermint tea, said to alleviate the symptoms, will be provided in each room, along with a special spray to prevent pollen sticking to clothing. Cedar trees are behind most of pollen allergies in Japan, after a reforestation program following World War Two covered many of the country's hillsides with the pollen-rich trees. Sufferers, who often resort to masks and goggles to protect themselves from the problem, will likely take comfort from forecasts saying pollen levels are likely to be lower than average this year, after record levels were recorded in 2005.
A gigantic white worm that smells like lilies was recently unearthed in the state of Washington. The invertebrate, called the Giant Palouse Earthworm because it can grow to around three feet long, had not been seen in nearly two decades and is believed to be extremely rare, according to a University of Idaho press release. The worm may be suffering from competition from non-native species, revealing that even underground soil dwellers are vulnerable to ecosystem disruption.
A giant Palouse earthworm, compared here with a regular earthworm. The Palouse can grow to three feet long.
UI soil science doctoral candidate Yaniria Sanchez-de Leon found the worm while digging in a 10-inch-square and 12-inch-deep pit of dirt located at Washington State University's Smoot Hill Ecological Preserve near Palouse, Wash.. The area is part of the Palouse prairie, which covers approximately two million acres across north central Idaho and southeastern Washington. Sanchez-de Leon noticed the worm immediately because "it's very white and the anterior part is pink near the mouth."
Victoria Springitt lifted up the slimy mess blocking her garden drain and screamed after realising it was not just mud and leaves clogging it up. The 37-year-old Staffordshire University student watched in horror as her nine-year-old son Isaac then pulled out what they believe was a dead, black octopus, using fire tongs. "I saw water flowing from the garden drain, and thought it might be a banana skin covered in leaves," explained the mother-of-two, of Oxford Road, Basford. "I prodded it with a stick and then I got my nine-year-old son to sort it out."
Neither friends nor neighbours can explain how the muddy salt-water marine mollusc ended up in the garden, although some speculate a passing seagull may have dropped it. Vicky added: "Isaac wasn't fazed by it at all and has gone back to St Wulstan's Primary School telling everyone he wants to bring it in." Her sister Becky Springitt, aged 34, who was brave enough to handle the specimen, said: "It definitely looks like an octopus and feels soft and porous - not like a rubber toy. "If this is someone's exotic pet that they've flushed down the toilet, then I think it is a real shame." Mature student Vicky, who moved back to North Staffordshire 16 months ago, said: "I just want to know where it came from. I've travelled to many places around the world, but I've never seen anything like this." Pictures of the creature have puzzled experts at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. Information officer Douglas Herdson said: "We've had people looking at the photos and there are certain things that look right about the body and certain things that don't. "It is very difficult to say for certain whether this is an octopus." He said it was feasible that an octopus owner had flushed a dead specimen down the drain - they cannot last more than 20 minutes in freshwater. He added: "Some people don't realise it is illegal to release exotic creatures into the wild in Britain."
A scary find at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport; a routine search turned up a human skull with teeth, hair and skin found in one passenger's luggage. Thirty-year-old Myrlene Severe told authorities she got the package which contained the human head from a male in Haiti to be used as a part of her voodoo beliefs.
Myrlene Severe
Severe is a permanent U.S. resident. The criminal complaint filed Friday charges her with smuggling a human head into the U.S. without proper documentation, failure to declare the head, and transporting hazardous material in air commerce. Severe is being held in jail on a $100,000 bond. She is due back in federal court March 2.
The same genes that give sharks their sixth sense and allow them to detect electrical signals are also responsible for the development of head and facial features in humans, a new study suggests. The finding supports the idea that the early sea creatures which eventually evolved into humans could also sense electricity before they emerged onto land. The study, led by Martin Cohn and his lab at the University of Florida, is detailed in the current issue of the journal Evolution & Development. Sharks have a network of special cells that can detect electricity, called electroreceptors, in their heads. They use them for hunting and navigation.
The dark markings indicate gene expression in the electrosensory organs in the head of an embryonic shark.
This sense is so developed that sharks can find fish hiding under sand by honing in on the weak electrical signals emitted by their twitching muscles. The researchers examined embryos of the lesser spotted catshark. Using molecular tests, they found two independent genetic markers of neural crest cells in the sharks' electroreceptors. Neural crest cells are embryonic cells that pinch off early in development to form a variety of structures. In humans, these cells contribute to the formation of facial bones and teeth, among other things. The finding suggests that neural crest cells migrate from the sharks' brains to various regions of the head, where they develop into electroreceptors. Glenn Northcutt, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study, said the finding was interesting, but that more studies are needed before a direct link between neural crest cells and electroreceptors can be established. "It still requires a definitive experiment, where the developing neural crest cells are marked with dye, the embryo develops and the dye clearly shows up in the electroreceptors," Northcutt said. In the new study, the researchers found snippets of genetic material associated with neural crest cells in the electroreceptors. They did not dye the neural crest cells and trace their development.
Scientists think that all primitive animals with backbones, including the early ancestors of humans, could sense electricity. As they evolved, mammals, reptiles, birds and most fish lost the ability. Today, only sharks and a few other marine species, such as sturgeons and lampreys, can sense electricity. "Our fishy ancestors had the anatomy for it," said study team member James Albert, a biologist from the University of Louisiana. The ability to sense electrical signals is useful in aquatic environments because water is so conductive. On land, however, the sense is useless. "Air doesn't conduct electricity as well," Albert said. "When it happens, it's called a lightning bolt and you don't need special receptors to sense it." The development of the electroreceptors is believed to mirror the development of the lateral line, a sense organ in fish that allows them to detect motion in surrounding water. Similar processes are thought also to be involved in the development of the inner ear, the organs which help humans keep their balance. The electroceptors are also believed to behind many sharks' ability to detect changes in the Earth's magnetic field. Other studies indicate that like sailors, sharks can also navigate by celestial cues. Scientists think that these two abilities are what allow some sharks to swim straight lines across vast distances of featureless ocean. One recent study found that a great white shark, nicknamed Nicole, swam nearly 7,000 miles between South Africa and Australia in just under 100 days.
NASA has delayed two programs to search for planets capable of supporting life as the space agency instead focuses on developing a new manned spacecraft to return to the moon in the next decade. Astronomers have found evidence of more than 100 extrasolar planets, but most are gas giants larger than Jupiter and unfriendly to life. President Bush ‘s budget proposal released Monday seeks to give the National Aeronautics and Space Administration $16.8 billion for fiscal year 2007, a 3 percent increase from the year before. Of that, about $5.3 billion in funding will go toward the space agency‘s science missions. Under the proposed budget, the SIM PlanetQuest project would receive $98.5 million in fiscal year 2007. But under a reorganization plan, its original launch date of 2011 was pushed back to no earlier than 2015.
Concepts for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, including a visible-light coronagraph that would have sought planets around distant stars, at left; and a formation-flying infrared interferometer for studying extrasolar planets in depth, at right
The dual Terrestrial Planet Finder telescopes, originally scheduled to lift off in 2016 and 2019, will use the information by SIM to photograph those planets to look for evidence of life. That program has been indefinitely postponed. "I‘m disappointed that our society can‘t put more resources into answering the glorious question of whether we humans are alone in this universe," said Marcy, who is also a principal investigator for SIM. "NASA‘s robotic exploration program is being flat-lined," said Louis Friedman, the society‘s executive director. "All of JPL‘s high priority projects for the near future are either fully funded or funded with some delays to their implementation," JPL said in a statement. The NASA budget allocated $90.5 million toward the launch of Phoenix Mars lander in 2007. The stationary probe will land on Mars‘ north pole and use its robotic arm to dig into the icy terrain for signs of water. Last year, another JPL-managed project — the Dawn mission to visit two of the solar system‘s largest asteroids — was told to stand down because of cost overruns and technical problems. The Dawn spacecraft was to launch in June, but NASA is awaiting an independent review of the project before going ahead.
Scientists said they had found a "Lost World" in an Indonesian mountain jungle, home to dozens of exotic new species of birds, butterflies, frogs and plants. "It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the U.S., Indonesian, and Australian expedition to part of the cloud-shrouded Foja mountains in the west of New Guinea. Indigenous peoples living near the Foja range, which rises to 2,200 metres, said they did not venture into the trackless area of 3,000 sq km -- roughly the size of Luxembourg or the U.S. state of Rhode Island.
The team of 25 scientists rode helicopters to boggy clearings in the pristine zone. "We just scratched the surface," Beehler told Reuters. "Anyone who goes there will come back with a mystery." The expedition found a new type of honeyeater bird with a bright orange patch on its face, known only to local people and the first new bird species documented on the island in over 60 years. They also found more than 20 new species of frog, four new species of butterfly and plants including five new palms. And they took the first photographs of "Berlepsch's six-wired bird of paradise", which appears in 19th century collections but whose home had previously been unknown. The bird is named after six fine feathers about 4 inches long on the head of the male which can be raised and shaken in courtship displays.
The expedition also took the first photographs of a Golden-fronted bowerbird in front of a bower made of sticks, while he was hanging up blue forest berries to attract females. It found a rare tree kangaroo, previously unsighted in Indonesia. Beehler said the naturalists reckoned that there was likely to be a new species of kangaroo living higher altitudes. The scientists visited in the wet season, which limited the numbers of flying insects. "Any expedition visiting in the dry season would probably discover many more butterflies," he said. Beehler, who works at Conservation International in Washington, said the area was probably the largest pristine tropical forest in Asia. Animals there were unafraid of humans. "I suspect there are some areas like this in Africa, and am sure that there are similar places in South America," he said. Around the world, pristine areas are under increasing threat from expanding human settlements and pollution. A U.N. meeting in Brazil in March will seek ways to slow the currently accelerating rate of extinctions. Beehler said the Indonesian government was doing the right thing by keeping the area off limits to most visitors -- including loggers and mineral prospectors. The scientists cut two trails about 4 km long, leaving vast tracts still to be explored.
For 25 years, Jodine Stevens harboured an embarrassing secret that haunted her every day. Up until last August, the pretty healthcare assistant spent every day drenched in her own sweat. Suffering from an apparently incurable condition called hyperhydrosis, Jodine’s profuse perspiration was taking over her life. In a bid to rid herself of the embarrassing illness, she tried every type of medicine and even resorted to surgery. But nothing worked and as she approached her 26th birthday, Middlesbrough-born Jodine was fast losing hope. Speaking exclusively to The Sun Online, she revealed: “I felt I was suffocating in my own skin.
Jodine Stevens
“It left me with absolutely no confidence and affected everything I did. “I found it difficult to leave the house because I would get dressed and then have to change immediately because my clothes would be soaking wet, drenched in sweat. “And going out with men or going to the pub with friends was completely out of the question. “I was miserable and honestly felt I was coming to the end of my tether.” Every night after work, Jodine desperately searched the internet for remedies that could free her of what had become a living hell. While online she saw an advert appealing for people with unusual ailments to take part in a U.K. TV show called The Spa Of Embarrassing Illnesses. Led by telly nutritionist Amanda Hamilton and set in sunny Spain, the spa promised to deal with the root causes of afflictions rather than mask them with quick and easy remedies. Desperate to find a cure, Jodine applied straight away and six weeks later joined six others in the alternative medicine haven. She told us: “I was fairly sceptical they would be able to help. And the thought of leaving my parents and friends to go on telly scared the life out of me.
Jodine Stevens
“But I honestly saw it as my final hope. “When I arrived I felt incredibly anxious but by the second day I completely let go. I got to know the others and stopped feeling like an odd one out. “The therapists helped me talk about my problem and used detox methods to rejuvenate my system. “I found the yoga and acupuncture very effective and the hypnosis was fantastic. “More than anything I felt relieved that my condition was given a name and that it was treatable “For so long I believed I was abnormal. Ever since school I've been a bit of an outsider and even though I grew used to spiteful comments, I hated being the way I was. “So when I stopped sweating after the first week, I couldn’t believe it. “The experience has turned my life around and has completely opened my mind. “When I got back to England my friends and family could hardly recognise me. “I’ve grown in confidence and I’ve even been on a couple of dates, something I couldn’t even imagine doing this time last year. “People used to ask me out but I would say no because I didn’t feel comfortable with myself. “Now I realise that my condition doesn’t make me a lesser person. It’s something I can control."
When the Apollo astronauts returned to their lunar landers, they all noticed that the moondust - which had clung to their boots and suits - had some interesting properties. For starters, it smelled like spent gunpowder; as if someone had just fired a gun in the lander. Apollo 17's Jack Schmitt came down with a brief case of extraterrestrial hay fever. It could be that the relatively damp interior of the lander causes particles from the solar wind to evaporate into the air.
Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt, with his spacesuit grayed by moondust.
NASA plans to send people back to the moon in 2018, and they'll stay much longer than Apollo astronauts did. The next generation will have more time and better tools to tackle the mystery. We've only just begun to smell the moondust.
A four year old boy has been found living on the streets — being raised by wild dogs and cats. Social workers took three weeks to catch Arthur Zverev, who barks and runs on all fours. The “Mowgli” boy was discovered sleeping in a makeshift kennel he shared with strays. Wearing just a pullover, he roamed a rubbish tip with a pack of dogs, cuddling up to them at night. His weight was not abnormal, suggesting the dogs helped him scavenge food. He was seen drinking from puddles in the Stavropol region of southern Russia.
Dr Alexander Egors, rehabilitating the lad, said: “Another year of that life and we’d have lost him forever.” Arthur was neglected by homeless and alcoholic mum Viktoria, 45. He has been diagnosed with Mowgli syndrome after the Jungle Book character.
Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School compared the effects of different colored lights on alertness and performance. They found that people exposed to blue light rated themselves as less sleepy, with a quicker reaction time than those exposed to green light. They also claimed to have fewer lapses in their attention than the others. According to the researchers light may improve “people’s health”. Dr. Steven Lockley, the lead author of the study that appears in this issue of the journal Sleep said “Subjects exposed to blue light were able to sustain a high level of alertness during the night when people usually feel most sleepy, and these results suggest that light may be a powerful countermeasure for the negative effects of fatigue for people who work at night”. He is a researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Division of Sleep Medicine.
These findings may help those who need to maintain alertness for long periods of time. Long distance drivers, pilots, and others that must sustain long trips without stimulation may benefit form blue light. The researchers now believe that we use our eyes to see more than just objects, but are used to detect light for other purposes. It has been known that animals use light to help set their internal clocks. The photoreceptor system is different than that used for normal vision. It has a different sensitivity to the color of light and is retained in some totally blind people. Lockley warns that blue light can cause damage to the eye and exposure needs to be monitored, but adds "With the advent of new, more controllable lighting technologies, we can begin to develop 'smart' lighting systems designed to maximize the beneficial effects of light for human health."
A candidate for governor of Minnesota whose platform includes public impalement of terrorists found himself behind bars on a pair of outstanding arrest warrants. Jonathon Sharkey, 41, of Princeton, Minnesota was arrested Monday night on two felony counts from Indiana, said Mike Smith, the Mille Lacs County jail administrator. One warrant was for escape, another for stalking.
Jonathon Sharkey
Smith didn't have any other information and Sheriff Brent Lindgren didn't immediately return a phone call. Sharkey gained national attention when he launched his campaign last month. His platform includes an emphasis on education, tax breaks for farmers and better benefits for veterans, but he also said he favored impaling certain wrongdoers in front of the State Capitol.
Travel through the countryside of the Czech Republic during winter and the sweeping valleys and wooded hills are covered in fresh snow, the village churches looking as though they belong in Narnia. Seventy kilometres through the valleys east of Prague is an unassuming 13th-century chapel in a village called Sedlec. And just like the magical world of Narnia, discovered beyond a wardrobe door, step over the chapel's humble threshold and you'll find a place where reality meets fantasy in a morbid yet majestic display of Slavic craftsmanship. Sedlec is on the outskirts of Kutna Hora, a town that flourished in the 14th century thanks to vast deposits of silver. Sedlec would be similar to hundreds of other Czech villages if it weren't home to the chapel which draws a year-round stream of curious visitors.
The chandelier inside the chapel, which is made up of every bone in the human body.
Chapels are traditionally places where grief is softened by the quiet faith of believers and the consoling words of priests. But within this sacred place are the bones of 40,000 human skeletons, bright and white and arranged in sculptures that seem to poke fun at the mortality of human beings, who in turn are given to hushed laughter and many a smile of wonderment. Tickets for entry are bought in the arched entrance chamber, and they read: "You are entering a pious space. Conserve, please, respect to the dead. Do not touch the bones. Do not enter outside the reserved space." Walking into the main chamber of the chapel, there is no escaping the dark eye sockets of thousands of skulls staring out from every shadowed niche and stretch of wall. Sometimes, fact really is stranger than fiction, and the story of Sedlec Chapel is testimony to that. In 1278, King Otakar II of Bohemia sent the Cistercian abbot Henry from Sedlec on a diplomatic mission to the Holy Land, Palestine. When leaving Jerusalem, Henry filled a jar with the earth from Golgotha and called his souvenir "holy soil". Upon his return to Sedlec he sprinkled it throughout his church's cemetery to bless the grounds. As fate would have it, word spread faster than wildfire and before long thousands of Europeans had heard stories about holy soil in Sedlec and wanted the bodies of their loved ones buried in the little town's cemetery. Those wealthy or committed enough made the journey to Bohemia with corpses in tow. They believed being buried with the soil of Golgotha was as close as one came to being assured of a place in heaven. The corpses kept rolling in and when the bubonic plague hit in the 14th century, the count rose to 30,000. Yet more bodies were added to the collection when the Hussite wars of the 15th century claimed thousands of victims.
CRUEL KEV: A Third Class Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy during the Cold War. Presently a member of the Navy League. A Republican with Libertarian leanings. (South Park Republican) My goals for the several blogs that I am involved with is to find and post Interesting News including occasional Criticism, Comments & Analysis
