Headlines

Concorde in the dust as new super sonic jet takes off. Full Article, New Scientist

New discoveries in deep space, question black hole theory. Full Article, New Scientist

"Nessie" Fosssils found in Australia, evidence suggests.

    The large, carnivorous reptiles lived 115 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs, when much of the continent was covered in water.

Fossils of two new species of plesiosaur were discovered near Coober Pedy in South Australia.

Plesiosaurs are popular in science fiction and are said to resemble Scotland's mythical Loch Ness monster.

The Australian specimens are described in recent editions of the journals Biology Letters and Palaeontology.

One, known as Umoonasaurus demoscyllus, was about 2.4m (7.2ft) long and had crests on its head, perhaps for display or mating purposes.

"Imagine a compact body with four flippers, a reasonably long neck, small head and short tail, much like a reptilian seal," said the lead author of the two papers, Dr Benjamin Kear of the University of Adelaide.

The other species, Opallionectes andamookaensis, grew to about 5m (16ft) long and had small needle-like teeth.

Treasure trove

Some 30 fossils were discovered at an opal mine near the outback mining town of Coober Pedy.

They are made up of the mineral opal, which filled the spaces left by bones when the original fossil-bearing rock was dissolved away by acidic ground water.

The fossils include several skeletons and a complete skull of Umoonasaurus, and a partial skeleton of Opallionectes.

They are thought to be of juvenile animals, suggesting the lake was a breeding and nursery ground.

Scientists believe sea-dwelling adults returned to the shallow inland waters to breed and raise their young.

At the time, Australia was much colder, and the inland ocean would have frozen over in places during the winter.

Scientists believe the creatures might have evolved mechanisms to cope with the harsh climate, such as a faster metabolic rate. They were carnivorous, feeding on fish and squid.

Source:BBC News

New Bird Flu vaccine promising new hope to curb Pandemic

LONDON -- A British company reported yesterday it had achieved the best results ever seen on an experimental human vaccine for bird flu and said mass production might be possible by 2007.

A global health official called GlaxoSmithKline's early results ``an exciting piece of science." If further tests are as promising, it would be a major step in the frustrating campaign to protect people from a possible deadly flu pandemic.

The US government's chief infectious disease scientist also was very optimistic.

``The data are really very impressive," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. ``It changes the whole complexion of the issue that we have to face of getting enough vaccine for people who might need it in a pandemic."

Glaxo's results came from tests on 400 people in Belgium, most of whom developed strong immune responses from very low doses of the prototype vaccine.

Success from wider tests of the vaccine could intensify competition with Sanofi-Aventis SA, whose vaccine unit, Sanofi Pasteur, reported disappointing results in March on its experimental product. It protected only about half of those who got two shots with a very high dose -- 90 micrograms of the key ingredient.

Glaxo said two shots of its vaccine provoked strong responses in more than 80 percent of people tested at lower doses than other experimental bird flu vaccines use. Some received as little as 3.8 micrograms, said Fauci, who has seen the test results.

The Glaxo vaccine includes an immune-system booster that allows it to use less of the main active ingredient, meaning that greater quantities could be produced if the H5N1 bird virus mutates into a form that spreads easily among people and causes a global epidemic. The vaccine uses an inactive version of the newer strain of H5N1, which was isolated in Indonesia last year

Source: Boston Globe

Headlines

Mystery woman helps dozens of Americans to safety. Full Article, CBS News

Chad and Sudan sign peace agreement. Full Article Global Good News

Russia offers amnesty to Chechens. Full Article Global Good News

Internet billionaire to build spaceport in Texas. Full Article, New Scientist

Nitric Oxide good for brain? Nitrous Oxide Bad! Full Article, New Scientist

Electricity helps heal wounds faster. Full Article, New Scientist

Global warming helped species evolve. Full Article, Science A Go Go

New hope for those suffering. Drug cocktail "stops MS in it's tracks"

    Multiple sclerosis sufferers have been offered hope of a normal life after doctors pioneered a wonder drug treatment.

A five-year study, due to be published in August's Journal of Neurology, found that patients with the aggressive form of MS had a reduced relapse rate of 90% under the regime. The drastic reduction means that patients who would have faced bedridden lives will now be able to work and raise families uninterrupted.

The treatment, which was tested at the Walton Centre for Neurology in Liverpool, involves a limited course of the cancer drug Mitoxantrone, followed by the disease-moderating drug Copaxone. Results were so successful that a full study is now being initiated at 10 centres across the UK, for which volunteers are being sought.

Dr Mike Boggild, the consultant neurologist who led the research, said the two drugs appeared to have a powerful combined effect. "This regime has proved remarkably effective. Though there are certain risks, associated particularly with use of Mitoxantrone we have been able to limit these by using this agent for just a short induction period. Balanced against the high risk of early disability for these patients, the outcomes appear to justify this approach," he said.

Karen Ayres, 28, was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of MS in 2002. She was treated by Dr Boggild and has not suffered a single relapse.

Miss Ayres, of Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, said: "During my second relapse, which was when I came into Dr Boggild's care, I couldn't walk or feed myself. Since then I have led a completely normal life. I have travelled to all five continents and I'm now doing a PhD in psychology at Leeds University."

Source: Guardian Unlimited

Headlines

The last few days I have been sick, so the site hasnt been updated, but the good news is, I'm feeling better! And theres more good news..

Tropical storm Beryl weakens. Full Article, Reuters

Police make arrests in Mumbai Blast. Full Article, Reuters

Americans catching on to Hydrogen vehicles. Full Article, Global Good News

China to invest $175 Billion for environmental clean-up. Full Article, Global Good News

Delay funding group ordered to shut down and pay fine. Full Article, Reuters

Tiger out of the woods and in the lead in British Open. Full Article, Breitbart

German scientists launch project to decipher the genetic code of the Neanderthal. Full Article, ABC News

Study shows playtime is a good time for kid's health. Full Article, Breitbart

Newly developed fiber at MIT can detect light waves.. It sees everything!

     Throw away those cumbersome camera lenses, as MIT has just developed a new and amazing lightweight web fiber that can "see". The new light detecting material, featured in the journal Nature Materials, is expected to have a myriad of uses, from aiding the visually impaired, to outfitting soldiers on the battlefield. And maybe the technology could extend to chic urbane fashions, so you really could have eyes in the back of your head.

The optical system is comprised of mesh-like webs of light-detecting fibers, which can calculate the direction, intensity and characteristic properties of the light wave being detected. MIT researchers consider this latest technology to be an improvement upon traditional optical technologies, such as lenses, filters and detector arrays that are based on the eye and its retina. While the clarity of images sourced from traditional lens technologies is excellent, they do have a number of drawbacks, such as their unidirectional perspective, size, weight, and their susceptibility to damage. By comparison, the optical web is lightweight, flexible, and if shaped as a sphere, the web can detect the entire environment in which it resides.

"When you're looking at something with your eyes, there's a particular direction you're looking in," explains MIT researcher Ayman Abouraddy. "The field of view is defined around that direction. Depending on the lens, you may be able to capture a certain field of view around that direction, but that's it. Until now, most every optical system was limited by an optical axis or direction."

Working in unison at their points of intersection, a spherical array of the 1-millimeter diameter fibers (consisting of a photoconductive glass core encased in a transparent polymer insulator) can pinpoint the exact source of incoming light anywhere along their length. Fink's team has also experimented with flat panel versions of the fibers that when placed in parallel to one another can generate crude computer images of backlit shapes and letters of the alphabet. The computer images are constructed from calculations based on the light intensity distributions detected by the fibers. Researchers suggest that the fibers could be woven into a textile, and a small CPU could provide information about a user's surrounds audibly or on a display screen (Spidey senses tingling!).

The technology could be improved and honed even further if the diameter of the fibers was reduced and the density of the web increased, but the team is more reserved when asked if the web will ever rival the human eye. "Just the idea of imaging with a transparent object is a true eye opener," said team leader, Professor Yoel Fink.

The new optical web system could enhance pre-existing technologies like space telescopes, and lead to a variety of new applications aimed at helping the visually impaired or providing a tactical advantage to soldiers on the battlefield. Researchers say that the transparent web fibers are even capable of interacting with giant computer screens, which could be activated with light beams rather than touch. "It's intriguing - the idea of touching with light. We could use light to enhance interaction with computers and even gaming systems," said Fink.

A web fiber equipped business suit comes highly recommended for those politicians and corporate execs wishing to avoid being stabbed in the back - where "et tu, brut?" becomes "I saw you coming."

Source: Science a Go Go

New Giant Telescope will see 10 times sharper than Hubble's

    A giant telescope with a mirror up to 60 metres wide is being planned by the European Southern Observatory. The telescope would be able to detect Earth-like planets around other stars and spot the universe's first galaxies.

The ESO has created a new office to design the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). "ESO aims to put the E-ELT on a fast track," says Roberto Gilmozzi, the principal investigator for the project.

Project managers have not yet chosen the size of the mirror but say it could range from 30 to 60 metres wide. ESO had previously been considering a 100-metre telescope called the OverWhelmingly Large telescope (OWL). But a review of the concept concluded that the project would be too risky and would take too long to build, Gilmozzi says.

"The advice was to go for a smaller telescope so that there was less risk and so it could be built in a shorter time," he told New Scientist.

International partnerships

Their goal is to build it for €750 million ($950 million) and have it ready to observe by 2015. Gilmozzi says ESO will likely provide about half the funds needed, with more coming from individual ESO member countries. Other funds could come from possible partnerships with non-European countries like the US or Japan, he said.

Two other groups are also pushing forward with plans for giant telescopes. A US-Australian consortium is planning a 24.5-metre instrument called the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) to be built by 2016 (see World's largest telescope begins with a spin). And a US-Canadian group is planning the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), also to be built by 2016.

The huge mirrors used for these projects will be assembled from smaller segments. "That's way cheaper than trying to build a single big mirror," says TMT team member Ray Carlberg of the University of Toronto, Canada.

The other crucial ingredient is a technology called adaptive optics, which compensates for the way light is blurred by Earth's atmosphere. This involves bouncing light from the telescope off a small corrector mirror, whose shape can change to counteract atmospheric distortion.

New vistas

While space-based telescopes enjoy crystal-clear views, ground-based telescopes have their own advantages. "For a given budget, ground-based telescopes can be much larger than telescopes in space," says GMT project manager Matt Johns of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Observatories in Pasadena, California, US.

The giant ground-based telescopes will have vision roughly four times sharper than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that will replace Hubble, he says.

That powerful vision should open new vistas for astronomy. "The TMT, along with other telescopes, is largely going to figure out how galaxies form, how stars form and how planets form," says Carlberg.

As supporting technology such as adaptive optics improves, the new telescopes could eventually analyse the gases in the atmospheres of other Earth-like planets.

"Almost everyone is really excited about this planet stuff," Carlberg told New Scientist. "There's a whole vast new area of discovery there."

Source: New Scientist

Headlines

GOT GOOD NEWS?

Shuttle lands safely. Full Article, New Scientist

Tagged surgical equipment helps solve a deadly problem. Full Article Medical News Today

Sleep crucial to learning and memory. Full Article, Global Good News

Japan completes troop withdrawl from Iraq. Full Article, Global Good News

Virtual walking made possible by powered shoes. Full Article, New Scientist

High hopes for high altitude broadband. Full Article, Science a Gogo

Headlines

Shuttle lands safely. Is NASA back? Full Article, Breitbart

Plane built to flight with AA batteries. Full Article, Reuters

Organ doners and those in need now have an online ally in form of a website. Full Article, CBS News

20 Filipino seaman were released from Somalian Pirates after negotiating. Full Article, Global Good News

Invention: Device measures, Percentage of body fat. Full Aritcle, New Scientist

Rare lobster pulled from east coast waters

BAR HARBOR - The newest addition to the Mount Desert Oceanarium's lobster colony looks half-baked.

But it's nothing personal.

The rare 1-pound crustacean, caught earlier this week in Steuben, is a genetic mutation with a two-toned shell.

One side is the usual mottled dark green. The other side is the orange-red shade of a lobster that's already spent some time in the hot pot.

The odds of this kind of mutation occurring are very rare - something like one in 50 million to 100 million, according to oceanarium staff. The chance of finding a blue lobster is far more common, at one in a million.

"Isn't he pretty?" Bette Spurling of Southwest Harbor cooed Thursday as she stroked the lobster's shell to calm him down. "It's quite a drawing card for people because they're quite unusual."

Spurling is the wife of a lobsterman and works part time at the oceanarium. She explained that lobster shells are usually a blend of the three primary colors - red, yellow and blue. Those colors mix to form the greenish-brown of most lobsters. This lobster, though, has no blue in half of its shell.

That was a shock to longtime lobsterman Alan Robinson, who hauled him out of Dyer's Bay in Steuben.

"I didn't know what to think," Robinson said. "I thought somebody was playing a joke on me. Once I saw what it was ... it was worth seeing. I've caught a blue one before. But they claim this is rarer than the blue ones."

In his 20-plus years of fishing, he has never seen a lobster like this one.

"It was something with the line drawn so straight like that," Robinson said.

Bernard Arseneau, the former manager at the oceanarium's affiliated lobster hatchery, drove to Lubec on Wednesday to pick up the two-toned creature. He explained that lobsters have a growth pattern in which the two sides develop independently of each other.

"Even regular colored ones have a left-right sort of growth," Arseneau said.

Children visiting the oceanarium were struck right away by the unusual coloration.

"Dude, it's half orange and half, like, regular color for a lobster," exclaimed Alyssa Bonin, 12, of Webster, Mass.

Robinson donated the colorful crustacean to the oceanarium, which often is the beneficiary of strange things that fishermen pull up from the sea. It has received only three two-toned lobsters in its 35 years of existence, officials said.

"Fishermen have been super to us over the years, bringing things in to us," said David Mills, the co-director and owner of the oceanarium. "Our charge is to teach people about the marine life and commercial fishing in Maine."

Mills intends to keep the two-toned lobster over the winter and have him on display for educational purposes, though he has no plans to name him.

"Lobsters are interesting but not personable," he said.

Source: Bangor News

Tiny radio chip can store video clips

    A radio chip the size of a grain of rice that holds up to half a megabyte of video has been developed at Hewlett Packard's research labs in the UK.

The chip, called a Memory Spot, is small enough to be attached to a postcard or a photograph and could be used to append video, audio or hundreds of pages of text to all sorts of everyday objects. In hospitals, for example, the chips could allow doctors to add detailed medical records to a patient’s plastic wristband.

Details of the chip were revealed at an event held in London on Monday. A Memory Spot can be read by a specialised device or an appropriately modified cellphone or PDA. It does not require a battery as it draws power from the reading device's radio field.

Existing radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can store up to a few kilobytes of data and transmit this wirelessly over a range of a few metres. They are often used to add information to a product for tracking or identification purposes.

Reading speed

Hewlett-Packard's new chip provides much more memory – between 32 and 500 kilobytes – and can be read at about 10 megabits per second, fast enough to download everything from a 500 kilobyte chip in one-third of a second and about 10 times faster than a typical RFID chip.

"A Memory Spot uses similar principles to RFID but significantly extends them in terms of reading speed and memory capacity," says Huw Robson, director of media technologies at Hewlett-Packard's labs in Bristol, UK. "We can move up to higher memory densities."

In addition, unlike RFID tags, the new chips can be made rewritable and perform simple processing tasks for themselves, such as data encryption. However, instead of beaming the data out over several metres, a Memory Spot can only be read from a distance of 1.5 millimetres or less. The term for this is "near field communications".

Plans for the technology were hatched two years ago when HP was searching for a way to add audio data to photographs, Robson says. HP sees a future in which its colour printers will be able to add video, audio and text to a chip already embedded in a printed document.

Major players

"Memory spot technology is a very interesting development," says Heikke Huomo, technical director of Innovision Research and Technology in Cirencester, UK, a firm that makes custom microchips.

Hewlett-Packard hopes to persuade cellphone and PDA makers to enable their products to read the chips. "We have started discussions with the major players," Robson says. "We need the reader to be built into a ubiquitous application, something the user carries all the time, like a phone."

In Japan, cellphone company NTT DoCoMo already makes devices that can wirelessly make payments, using a near field communications chip developed by Sony, called Felica. "It makes sense to make a small corner of a phone's main processor handle near field communications applications," Huomo says. "Setting up a connection is simple and automatic."

Full Article, New Scientist

Headlines

Move over disneyland, Vanuatu happiest place on earth. Full Article, Global Good News

Next Martian lander taking shape. Full Article, Science A Go Go

Device designed to display feeling. Full Article, New Scientist

New law asks state to study use of alternative medicine. Full Article, Global Good News

Seaweed compound blocks cervical cancer. Full Article, New Scientist

Host of new creatures discovered in Deep-Sea Abyss

These five stunning images of a host of bizarre beasts were among those unveiled at the 11^th International Deep-Sea Biology Symposium, held this week in Southampton, UK. Scroll down for more pictures.

Annelid Worm

Nereis species found at a deep-sea vent.

Piglet Squid

Perhaps a species of Helicocranchia. Its cartoon-character appearance is a result of its habit of swimming upside down, which makes its tentacles look like hair.

Dumbo Octopus

Stauroteuthis syrtensis, a deep-sea cirrate octopus. Also known as the Dumbo octopus due to the ear-like fins above the eyes. One of only two octopus species known to bioluminesce, it swims in a bell shape at depths of up to 4000 metres in the North Atlantic.

Cirrate Octopod

Probably Vampyroteuthis infernalis, meaning "vampire squid from hell". It has a skirt-like skin membrane around its legs, and ear-like fins above the eyes. It is covered in light-producing organs called photophores, which generate a bluish light that makes it difficult to see against the faint light from the sky.

Deep Sea Physonect

A siphonophore from the Arctic Ocean, related to jellyfish. Each polyp along the orange stalk is an individual animal, and the colony swims as the individuals undulate their bodies. The colony is bioluminescent, and the orange "flames" at the base of the structure are feeding tentacles.

Mysteries of the Deep Sea -The deep sea is one of the harshest habitats on Earth, but is home to many remarkable creatures. Learn more in our comprehensive special report.

Source: New Scientist

KV-63 the first tomb discovered in Eygpt's Valley of the Kings in 84 years unlike any other

    It is barely 7:30 a.m. in the Valley of the Kings, and tourists are already milling just beyond the yellow police tape like passersby at a traffic accident. I step over the tape and show my pass to a guard, who motions for me to climb down a wooden ladder sticking out of a small, nearly square hole in the ground. Eighteen feet down a vertical shaft, the blazing Egyptian sun is gone, the crowd's hum is muted and the air is cool. In a small chamber lit by fluorescent lamps, a half-dozen archaeologists are measuring, drawing and gently probing relics in the first tomb to be found in the Valley of the Kings, more than 400 miles up the Nile from Cairo, since the resting place of King Tutankhamen was discovered here 84 years ago.

A jumble of seven wooden coffins of various sizes fills one corner of the room. Termites have turned parts of some of them into powder, while others have suffered only a thin layer of dust. Edwin Brock, an Egyptologist formerly at the American University of Cairo, is on his knees, cataloging the contents of a coffin filled with a strange assortment of pottery, rocks, cloth and natron—the powdery substance used to dry mummies. A couple of yards away, University of Chicago archaeological artist Susan Osgood intently sketches the serene yellow face painted on a partially intact coffin. It was likely built for a woman; men's faces were typically rendered a sunburned red. Deeper in the pile, a child-size casket is nestled between two full-sized ones. Something resembling a pillow seems to bulge out of another casket. The 17-foot-long space, which has plain limestone walls, also holds a number of knee-high ceramic storage jars, most still sealed.

Nervous about bumping into someone—or worse, something—I make my way back out to the narrow shaft and climb to the surface with Otto Schaden, the dig's director. Until this past February, he had worked in obscurity, splitting his time between studying a minor Pharaoh's tomb nearby and playing bass fluegelhorn in a Chicago band. Back up amid the heat and tourists, the 68-year-old archaeologist pulls out tobacco and bread crumbs, thrusting the first into a pipe and flinging the second onto the ground for some twittering finches. Just yards away, visitors in shorts and hats are lining up to get into King Tut's cramped tomb, named KV-62 because it was the 62nd tomb found in the Valley of the Kings.

Accordingly, Schaden's newly opened chamber is KV-63. Unlike Tut's, it contains neither gold statues and funerary furniture nor, as of early June, the mummified body of a long-dead Pharaoh. Despite the coffins, this probably isn't even a gravesite. Still, the discovery, announced in February, was trumpeted worldwide, because most archaeologists had long ago given up hope of finding significant discoveries in the valley. More remarkably, the artifacts appear to have been undisturbed for more than three millennia, not since one of Egypt's most fascinating periods—just after the death of the heretic king Akhenaten, who, unlike his predecessors, worshiped a single deity, the sun god Aten.

The child-size coffin in KV-63 held the flashiest artifact: a second, nested coffin coated in gold leaf. It was empty. Instead of the usual mummies, the other coffins opened so far contain only a bizarre assortment of what appears to be debris and constitute a 3,000-year-old mystery: Why fill coffins and jars with rocks and broken pottery, then carefully seal them up? Why hew out a subterranean chamber only to turn it into a storeroom? And who went to all this effort? "It may not be the most glamorous find," says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University, "but it is a whole new kind of entombment—which raises all kinds of questions."

Full Article: Smithsonian

Bush has hands full as he meets with German Chancellor Angela Merkel

     It was supposed to be a light-hearted photo opportunity showing the gentle side of the world's most powerful man.

Unfortunately, nobody told the baby.

Despite being closely vetted by both the U.S. secret service and German intelligence agents, the startled infant voiced a noisy protest as it was handed to George Bush.

Unable to placate the wailing child - despite all his skills of diplomacy - President Bush was forced to hand it back to its waiting mother.

And the baby, whose parents are German, was not the only one unhappy with Mr Bush's presence in the village of Trinwillershagen, in the former East Germany.

Around 5,000 protesters did their best to interrupt the outdoor meeting and meal between the president and Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel. Eventually shielded from the noise by 40 tons of barbed wire and 12,000 policemen, the pair sat down to dine on a roasted wild boar slaughtered earlier that day, uninterrupted by protesters. Or babies.

Source: Daily Mail

Picture of the Day!

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Headlines

House renews Voting Rights Act. Full Article, NY Times

White House agrees to review surveillance program. Full Article, NY Times

Fire fox making big gains against Internet Explorer. Full Article, IT Wire

Bird in Galapagos Islands prove Darwin right. Full Article, Breirbart

Shady Enron bankers extradited to face justice. Full Article, Reuters

Inflatable Space craft in orbit and operational. Full Article, New Scientist

Mysteries in venus. Full Article, New Scientist

Rainbow and lightning bolts!

    When a rainbow formed in the sky people stopped and stared at the natural wonder.

But then lightning sparked across the evening panorama as two of nature's most spectacular phenomenon created an unusual alliance.

See more incredible storms and lightning pictures here

The clash of weather was seen above the affluent city of Fort Smith, in the Southern state Arkansas.

One onlooker said: "It was awe inspiring. The lightning made a huge rumbling sound and when you looked up there was also this incredible rainbow forming on the horizon."

The intracloud lightning, known as an anvil crawler, is the most common form of lightning, with the electrical charge contained within a single cumulonimbus cloud.

Lightning often occurs during heavy storms while rainbows are generally formed after the rain has stopped, making an appearance of both simultaneously relatively rare.

The actual electric charge in a flash of lightning comes from particles from the sun sent out in the solar wind which gather in the outer atmospheric layers before creating a strike.

Scientists are still divided by what actually causes lightning, with one theory suggesting falling droplets of ice and rain become electrically polarised as they fall through the natural electric field in the Earth's atmosphere.

This would explain why lightning often accompanies storms and heavy rain. The same droplets also cause the rainbow, when light from the sun is refracted by the water to cause a spectrum.

Source: Daily Mail

Plame sues Rove and Cheney

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA officer whose identity was leaked to reporters sued Vice President Dick Cheney, his former top aide and presidential adviser Karl Rove on Thursday, accusing them and other White House officials of conspiring to destroy her career.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney, Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of revealing Plame's CIA identity in seeking revenge against Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration's motives in Iraq.

ON DEADLINE: Read the complaint

Several news organizations wrote about Plame after syndicated columnist Robert Novak named her in a column on July 14, 2003. Novak's column appeared eight days after Wilson alleged in an opinion piece in The New York Times that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify going to war.

The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in early 2002 to determine whether there was any truth to reports that Saddam Hussein's government had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger to make a nuclear weapon. Wilson discounted the reports, but the allegation nevertheless wound up in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

"This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of ... (Plame), whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country," the Wilsons' lawyers said in the lawsuit.

Libby is the only administration official charged in connection with the leak investigation. He faces trial in January on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges, accused of lying to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about when he learned Plame's identity and what he subsequently told reporters.

Source: USA today

Headlines

New Firefox 2.0 released for beta testing. Full Article, ABC News

Microsoft to Release 1980's games on XBOX 360. Full Article, Washington Post

Brain sensors allow parapalegic to function computers and artificial limbs. Full Article, BBC

Army to end exclusive contract with Haliburton. Full Article, Washington Post

Inflatable space hotel set to launch. Full Article, New Scientist

Routine excersize may extend life. Full Article, Food Consumer

Chavez says No to genetically engineered foods. Full Article, Global Good News

Shootings down 16% in Canada. Full article Canada Free Press

European economies doing better than expected. Full Article, Global Good News

Giant catfish finally protected from Thai fishing

    In honor of the King of Thailand's 60th year on the throne, fishers in northern Thailand have promised to stop catching the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish. The largest freshwater fish in the world, the giant catfish can grow up to 10 feet (3 meters) long and weigh 650 pounds (300 kilograms).

It is found only in the Mekong River system, which runs through China, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
(See Thailand map.)

More than 60 fishers made the pledge to stop catching the giant fish at a ceremony held last month in the northern city of Chiang Kong. It was one of several events to celebrate Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej's reign.

Fishers in neighboring Laos have also vowed to stop hunting the giant fish.

"[This] is the most significant development in the conservation of the Mekong giant catfish in the last ten years," said Zeb Hogan, an associate research biologist at the Mekong Wetlands Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Use Program.

Conservationists say that while the ban is an important step toward saving the giant catfish, more has to be done before the unique species is off the hook.

As part of that effort, Hogan runs a tracking program in which he tags the fish to discover their spawning grounds and to study their migration patterns.

(Watch video: "Tracking Asia's Giant Catfish.")

"This project is the first ever large-scale attempt to use underwater biotelemetry to study fish migrations in the Mekong River Basin," Hogan said.

Hogan's research is funded in part by the National Geographic Society. (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

Full Article, National Geographic

Spiders use silk as parachutes to travel over oceans

    The mystery of how spiders use silk “parachutes” to carry them hundreds of miles – sometimes across open ocean - may have been explained by a new model.

Spiders use simple parachutes to ride the wind wherever it may take them. The tiny creatures, weighing only a few milligrams, typically crawl up to the edge of a blade of grass, stick their backside in the air and release a thin line of silk, like that used to build their webs.

This “dragline silk” is so fine that it encounters an unusual amount of air friction and, as a result, it acts like a parachute. Each gust of wind can pull the spiders, such as Erigone atra and Tenuiphantes tenius, further into the air.

Researchers previously used mathematical models to estimate how far the spiders could travel using dragline silk. But these simulations could not explain the long distances spiders can travel: they are often the first species to colonise new volcanic islands, sometimes isolated from other land by as much as 200 miles.

Nor could the older models explain why parachuting spiders are found at remarkable heights, typically occupied by high altitude aircraft.

Silky skills

Part of the problem is that previous models do not take into account the flexibility of the spiders’ silk draglines, explains Dave Bohan of Rothamsted Research, an agricultural science institute in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, UK.

His team re-modelled the equations to take this flexibility into account. The revamped models treat the dragline similarly to a yo-yo string instead of as a fixed-length thread. And these simulations seem to match up with the long-distance reality of spider travel.

While most of this work is theoretical, the team is currently measuring the flexibility of real silk draglines. They hope to plug this real-world information into the revamped equations to calculate a limit on how far parachuting spiders can travel.

Bohan believes that understanding the way spiders can parachute into areas could one day even help reduce farmers’ pesticide use as spiders are prime predators of bugs such as aphids, which devastate food crops.

Source: New Scientist

Headlines

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Scientists conclude taking psilocybin, induces profound mystical experience

    “Magic” mushrooms really do have a spiritual effect on people, according to the most rigorous look yet at this aspect of the fungus's active ingredient.

About one-third of volunteers in the carefully controlled new study had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin, with half of them describing their encounter as the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes.

However, psilocybin use has been associated with side effects such as severe paranoia, nervousness and unwanted flashbacks and so experts warn against experimentation. “Once you’ve started down the path, you might not like where it ends,” comments Herbert Kleber, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York, US. “These are powerful agents that are just as likely to do harm as to do good.”

Psilocybin is found in mushrooms such as the liberty cap (Psilocybe semilanceata and about 186 other species. Hippies embraced the compound during the 1960s, after its mind-altering potential was touted by Timothy Leary, then a researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But as its use grew, US lawmakers took action. It is now generally illegal to sell or possess psilocybin drugs in the US.

Demonised compound

But Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and his colleagues believe there is a need to revisit the biological effects of psilocybin, which have been virtually ignored by the scientific community for about 40 years. “It so traumatised our society that we’ve demonised this compound,” he says.

Griffiths's team recruited 36 healthy volunteers who had not experimented with the drug before. They were informed that they would receive a hallucinogen but did not know in which of two or three sessions they would receive it. Each session was separated by two months.

They either received a substantial dose – about 30 milligrams – of psilocybin or a similar dose of an "active" placebo, Ritalin. The latter has a stimulating effect but is not known as a hallucinogen. An inactive placebo would be easy to identify by the volunteers when compared to psilocybin, which could bias the experiences they reported.

The researchers used psychological questionnaires and found that 22 of the 36 volunteers had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin – far more than the four who reported this type of experience after taking Ritalin.

More than one-third of the volunteers said that their encounter with psilocybin was the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes – no person given Ritalin said the same. Experts say the study is the most rigorous study of psilocybin’s potential to elicit spiritual feelings because it is the first to use an active control.

Spiritual shortcut

However, more than 20% of the participants described their psilocybin sessions as dominated by negative feelings such as anxiety. And while psilocybin appears to mimic the brain signalling-chemical serotonin, its precise action on mind function remains elusive.

Griffiths says that in the future psilocybin might have a therapeutic use, perhaps helping people who have just learned they have cancer come to terms with the news. But he is quick to add that “the therapeutic application is very speculative”.

“My guess is that there will be people saying ‘You’re looking for a spiritual shortcut’” says Griffiths. He stresses that the drug is no replacement for the mental health benefits of continuous personal reflection: “There’s all the difference in the world between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life.”

Source: New Scientist

Mystery object found in center of Supernova

    Embedded in the heart of a supernova remnant 10,000 light-years away is a stellar object the likes of which astronomers have never seen before in our galaxy.

At first glance, the object looks like a densely packed stellar corpse known as a neutron star surrounded by a bubble of ejected stellar material, exactly what would be expected in the wake of a supernova explosion.

However, a closer 24.5-hour examination with the European Space Agency's XMM Newton X-ray satellite reveals that the energetic X-ray emissions of the blue, point-like object cycles every 6.7 hours—tens of thousands of times longer than expected for a freshly created neutron star.

It is behavior that's more commonly seen in neutron stars that have been around for several million years, researchers say.

"The behavior we see is especially puzzling in view of its young age, less than 2,000 years," said study leader Andrea De Luca of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Milan. "For years we have had a sense that the object is different, but we never knew how different until now," De Luca said.

The finding is detailed in the July 7 issue of the journal Science.

Full article, Space.com

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