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Lemon-headed aliens, laser beams and attempted abductions feature among 800 official reports of UFO sightings released today. 'We want you, come with us,' some oddly-shaped visitors apparently told two young boys in a field in Staffordshire in 1995. They appeared from a saucer-shaped object that was so hot one of the boys' faces went 'the colour of beetroot', the other lad wrote. The pair ran to a police station, arriving 'agitated and distressed', said officers, who thought the object was an aircraft. The youngsters gave their account, including an image of the spacecraft. At the Glastonbury festival in 1994, two revellers 'standing soberly' in a field saw a UFO 'flashing in a way that was communicating to us'. The 'awestruck' pair saw the saucer glide effortlessly towards them. 'It went from red and orange to yellow and green. This had an amazing impact on me because I was wearing yellow and green,' said one, a metaphysics student. In another case in 1996, a young man on a night out reported a UFO following him with a light beam. The man – 'a sensible sort of lad ', according to police – then heard a noise 'like cats wailing' before light beams blasted down. He later found four smouldering railway sleepers at the spot, one with a 10cm (3in) hole burned through it. 'It does look rather odd,' a police officer in Cheshire reported. Reports from 1981 to 1996 were released in a joint project by the MoD and The National Archives. Sightings rose five-fold in 1996, when the film Independence Day was released. Source
Article Submitted by elcidcampeon. Video gamers are gamers for life, analysts say. And that's no surprise to the industry that peddles the games and the hardware, which grew last year as the rest of the economy went south. But health experts are worried that the deepening love affair some gamers have with their consoles may lead to addiction. Consumer spending on video game hardware, software and accessories rose by 19 percent in 2008 over the previous year to $22.9 billion, according to the report released this week by the Entertainment Merchants Association. New game console hardware sales increased by 11 percent, despite no price drops from Nintendo or Sony, two of the three major console manufacturers. Microsoft dropped the price of each version of their Xbox 360 console just prior to the holiday 2008 season. There are signs of a slowdown, however, including a dip in sales during June, also reported this week. And yesterday, Nintendo announced that sales of its popular Wii consoles fell by 57 percent in the latest quarter -- the first drop since 2006, according to news reports. Still, industry analysts expect overall industry profits to rebound with a slew of highly anticipated titles scheduled for release in the second half of the year. “Our data also shows that the number of video gamers is broadening across many demographics, meaning as people get older they keep playing because they are now playing video games with their kids or getting fit with the Nintendo Wii,” says George Van Horn, a senior analyst at IBISworld. One factor behind the rise: The average console game typically provides between 5 and 25 hours of playtime. When that game is completed, gamers look to a new game, often without replaying the old ones. "Once a person becomes a video gamer, he or she will remain a video gamer indefinitely, rendering the industry essentially turnover-proof,” Van Horn said. Meanwhile, the notion that video gaming can become addictive has remained controversial. A study published in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science found that nearly 1 in 10 youths who play video games behaved in ways that were similar to other addictive disorders, such as compulsive gambling. These behaviors include skipping chores, lying to parents and even stealing money to support their gaming habits. Excessive gaming has become a particularly severe problem in Asian countries, where a number of gaming-related deaths have been reported. In 2005, a 28-year old South Korean man died of exhaustion after playing computer games at an Internet café non-stop for close to 50 hours. A state survey released by the South Korean government revealed that an estimated 2.4 percent of the population aged 9 to 39 may be addicted to gaming. Still, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has yet to recognize those who play games excessively as having a disorder, though some experts expect that to change. “With these gamers, there’s almost always some other underlying issue such as depression, anxiety or some form of social disorder,” says Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Sciences University and an APA advisor. “But if the game playing poses a barrier to treating any of these other issues, it would have to be addressed separately as a pathology.” Block is currently lobbying the APA to include pathological video game playing in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due out in 2012. Source
WOMEN wanting to get pregnant should find themselves an ugly man, new research suggests. Scientists have found attractive males produce less sperm during sex. Researchers think good-looking males are biologically geared to hold back their sperm in each encounter to increase their chance of impregnating more females. But unattractive males know they are not going to bed so many females - so when they do get lucky they give it all they've got. The findings from the University of Oxford and University College London are backed up by studies of chickens and fish, but researchers think they could well apply to humans too. "Human attractiveness is complicated and influenced by a number of factors including cultural preferences," said UCL researcher Sam Tazzyman. "Nonetheless, ejaculate size and sperm quality are likely to have been moulded by similar forces, like attractiveness and the number of sexual partners, that are important in other species." Reporting the findings on the university's website he said: "The more attractive a male is, the more females will be willing to mate with him, reducing the value of each mating to him. This means it is optimal for him to contribute fewer sperm per mating." "Although this reduces fertility per mating, it maximises the number of offspring he sires overall. "Less attractive males secure fewer matings but value each of them more highly, and by allocating more sperm to each mating make the most of their meagre opportunities. "This leads to the rather paradoxical prediction that matings with attractive males may be less fertile than those with unattractive males." Source
It could be a combination of 19th-century mechanics, 21st-century technology — and a 20th-century horror movie. A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies. Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site. That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone. EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone Power Technology of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an "external combustion chamber" burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity. The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced. Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship. In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through "foraging," despite the obvious military purpose. Source
STOCKHOLM (AFP) - – A Swedish gaming group said Tuesday it would buy The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular filesharing sites, for 5.6 million euros (7.8 million dollars). The company, Global Gaming Factory (GGF), plans to begin paying copyright fees once the deal is completed. "The listed software company, Global Gaming Factory (GGF), acquires The Pirate Bay website, one of the 100 most visited websites in the world... The purchase (sum) amounts to 60 million kronor, consisting of at least 30 million in cash," it said in a statement. The remainder will be paid in the form of newly issued shares in GGF. A Swedish court in April found the four men behind The Pirate Bay guilty of promoting copyright infringement by running the site, sentencing them to a year in prison. They were also ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($A4.74 million) to the movie and recording industry -- the sum agreed upon in cash in Tuesday's sale. The four have appealed the verdict, though no date has been set for the appeals trial. GGF said in the statement that it wanted content providers and copyright owners to get paid for content downloaded from The Pirate Bay, which is currently free of charge and does not pay copyright fees. New technology would require users to pay to download films, games and music, but "they will be able to make money" by sharing their files with other users, GGF chief executive Hans Pandeya said. "And if you earn money by sharing your files, then maybe it's not that hard to pay for top quality," he told Swedish news agency TT. One of The Pirate Bay founders, Peter Sunde, said it was time for the site to get fresh impetus from new owners. "We feel that we can't take The Pirate Bay any further. We're in a bit of a frozen situation where there's not much happening and there are neither people nor money to develop things," Sunde told TT. The sale "means things will go into a new gear for The Pirate Bay," he added. Sunde said the 30 million kronor paid in cash for The Pirate bay was not linked to the damages the court ordered the four to pay, and said the money would not reach their pockets. Rather, he said, the money would be used to create a fund to develop other Internet projects. The guilty verdict handed down against the three founders of The Pirate Bay and their main financier made headlines around the world, at a time when many countries are trying to hammer out legislation on Internet filesharing. Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay makes it possible to skirt copyright fees and share music, film and computer game files using bit torrent technology, or peer-to-peer links offered on the site. None of the material can be found on The Pirate Bay server itself. The Pirate Bay claims to have some 22 million users worldwide. Source
JERUSALEM, June 20 (UPI) -- The Israeli army is working with a local company to turn soldiers' blood into a freeze dried powder. Blood samples are taken from new recruits and processed. In the battlefield, the powder can be mixed with water to treat wounded soldiers, The Jerusalem Post reported Friday. The development was announced at a first-ever press conference for health reporters, conducted by the head of the Israeli army's Medical Corps this week, the paper said. Brig.Gen. Dr. Nachman Ash head of the medical corps told reporters if the idea proves itself it could also be adapted to civilian life. He said the company leading the research is Core Dynamics, a biotechnological company active in research and development of thawing and freeze-drying technologies in blood transfusions. Ash revealed a few other lifesaving devices currently being developed for the army, including a portable device with ceramic pipes that can produce oxygen in the field for wounded soldiers and a battery-operated device that could be used to ventilate wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Ash told reporters the army plans to convert the working models into commercial devices. Source
BERLIN (Reuters) – A new, superheavy chemical element numbered 112 will soon be officially included in the periodic table, German researchers said. A team in the southwest German city of Darmstadt first produced 112 in 1996 by firing charged zinc atoms through a 120-meter-long particle accelerator to hit a lead target. "The new element is approximately 277 times heavier than hydrogen, making it the heaviest element in the periodic table," the scientists at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research said in a statement late on Wednesday. The zinc and lead nuclei were fused to form the nucleus of the new element, also known as Ununbium, Latin for 112. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), confirmed the discovery of 112 by the team led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Helmholtz Center. IUPAC has asked for an official name for the element to be submitted. John Jost, executive director of IUPAC in North Carolina, told Reuters that creating new elements helped researchers to understand how nuclear power plants and atomic bombs function. The atomic number 112 refers to the sum of the atomic numbers of zinc, which has 30, and lead, which has 82. Atomic numbers denote how many protons are found in the atom's nucleus. Scientists at the Helmholtz Center have discovered six chemical elements, numbered 107-112, since 1981. The remaining five elements have already been recognized and named. In 1925, scientists discovered the last naturally occurring element on the periodic table. Since then researchers have sought to create new, heavier elements. Proving the existence of atoms with such a high mass, the so-called superheavy elements, is a complex procedure because they exist for only tiny fractions of a second and then decay radioactively into other elements. Source
LONDON (Reuters) - An ancient burial pit containing 45 severed skulls, that could be a mass war grave dating back to Roman times, has been found under a road being built for the 2012 British Olympics. Archaeologists, who have only just begun excavating the site, say they do not yet know who the bones might belong to. "We think that these dismembered bodies are likely to be native Iron Age Britons. The question is -- how did they die and who killed them," said dig head, David Score, of Oxford Archaeology. "Were they fighting amongst themselves? Were they executed by the Romans? Did they die in a battle with the Romans? "The exciting scenario for us possibly is that there were skirmishes with the invading Romans and that's how they ended up chopped up in a pit," he told Reuters. When the main Roman invasion force landed in Britain in AD 43, Claudius' legions moved swiftly through western England to subdue fierce Celtic tribes. The skulls and other bones were unearthed at a place called Ridgeway Hill, on the construction site of a new major relief road to Weymouth, on the Dorset coast in southwest England. The seaside town -- in the heart of Thomas Hardy country -- is to host sailing events for the London Olympics. The grave site is close to Maiden Castle -- Europe's largest Iron Age hill fort where local tribes are said to have staged a last stand against the Roman legions after the invasion. Some historians believe the Romans sacked the site, butchering its population including women and children, before burning it to the ground. Score said they had counted 45 skulls so far in the 6-metre wide pit, together with a tangle of torsos, arms and legs, More could be found in the coming weeks. Most of the skulls were those of young men, supporting the theory they could have been killed in battle or executed en masse. "One of the things that we will be looking for is do they have sword cut marks on the bones, and how were the heads dismembered: prior to or after death in an act of victory," Score said. Archaeologists say they could also be Roman citizens or indigenous people who had died through disease or disaster. Few artefacts have so far been found with the bones, though pottery shards dating to the late Iron Age and early Roman period have been found scattered around the pit. "It is rare to find a burial site like this one," Score said. "There are lots of different types of burial where skeletons may be aligned along a compass axis or in a crouched position, but to find something like this is just incredible." Source
Going boldly where no man has gone before is likely to leave you going bald, claims scientists – not to mention fat and ugly. Making long space journeys, like those envisaged in the future, will not be good for your looks or figure, claim scientists who believe they will leave astronauts looking short, fat and bald. They believe living permanently in space for many years, perhaps even for many generations, adversely affects human's looks because they will not require any effort to move or keep warm. Near zero gravity would leave humans stunted and cause their bones and muscles to be underdeveloped, said astrobiologist Dr Lewis Dartnell. They will also have bloated faces and lose their hair because fluid would pool in their skulls and there would be no need for insulation from the cold. Dr Dartnell, from University College London, admitted that by the time they reach their destination they may not pass an audition for Star Trek. "With little effort required to move around in microgravity and an environment that is never too hot or cold, future spacemen and women are likely to become pretty chubby," he said. "Without gravity, fluid would float up to pool in the skull, which would cause the head to look permanently swollen out of proportion. "Also, with no need for hair to insulate the head or eyelashes to flick dust from their eyes, future humans may become completely hairless." Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Dr Dartnell also addressed the question of what aliens on other worlds might look like. He said: "Certain features of the human body, such as camera-like eyes, head, and legs would evolve time and time again on different worlds, and so many features of alien animals are likely to be instantly recognisable. "However other features of life, such as the number of limbs animals develop, or the shape and colour of trees, would be much more variable between worlds." The Kepler space telescope was launched earlier this year and is expected to find dozens of Earthlike planets orbiting distant stars. Some of these could host complex life. But even the nearer stars are so far away that travelling to them could take generations. By the time the first humans arrive on an extrasolar planet, any aliens they meet are likely to find their appearance a shock. Source
One-quarter of a century, 25 years. It's hard to believe that Tetris, a simple, casual game that most have seen has been around that long. It involves rotating falling geometric shapes made up of bricks to complete and cause rows to vanish. On June 6th, 2009, it reaches the ripe old age of 25. Tetris is not just simple, it's easy: you only need cursor keys (on a PC) to rotate the shapes. The game has been ported from PC to mobile gaming systems, PDAs, smartphones, even to regular cell phones. In the 1980s, Alexey Pajitnov was a mathematician specializing in AI research at a Russian university. Writing games was a hobby. Little did he know that what he unleashed on the world on June 6, 1984 would become a classic video game. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but so many knock-offs resulted that in 1996, Pajitnov and Hank Rogers entered into a partnership to manage and license the Tetris. That company, Blue Planet Software, owns the full rights to the game, and will vigorously defend it. Source
