Source: Yahoo! News
by Claire RosembergFri Apr 18, 1:00 PM ET
As Indiana Jones gets set to hit cinema screens with a new death-defying adventure in the “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”, a Paris museum acknowledged Friday that its own star exhibit crystal skull was not what it was cracked up to be.
One of only a dozen such skulls known to exist worldwide, the Quai Branly museum’s piece was acquired in 1878 from an Indiana Jones-type explorer, Alphonse Pinart, as an Aztec masterpiece believed to be hundreds of years old, the remnant of an ancient and mysterious civilisation.
But in a statement Friday the museum admitted the skull, rather than dating from the Aztec period, was probably made in the 19th century.
From May 20 the Paris skull goes on view to coincide with the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — the fourth installment in Harrison Ford’s archaeologist’s adventures since the 1981 blockbuster “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
While the plot of the latest archeological epic by Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas remains a tightly-guarded secret, bets are the Indiana Jones movie will mirror Aztec beliefs surrounding the skulls.
Legend has it that the Paris skull represents the Aztecs’ Mictlantecuhtli, who reigned over the land of the deceased, Mictlan. Reuniting all 12 existing skulls plus a supposed-to-exist 13th could prevent the earth from tipping over, according to fable.
In a statement Friday, the Quai Branly said results of an analysis of its skull in 2007-2008 by the country’s C2RMF research and restoration centre “seem to indicate that it was made late in the 19th century.”
Over the past decade experts had voiced growing doubts over the Aztec origin of the crystal skulls, one of which is in the British Museum, another at Washington’s Smithsonian Institute.
The London skull was examined twice, in 1996 and 2004, and both studies tended to prove it was a fake, though the final conclusions have not been made public.
Fashioned in clear quartz crystal and 11 centimetres (4.4 inches) high, the Paris skull is marked by grooves and perforations that “reveal the use of jewellery burrs and other modern tools,” the museum said.
“Never has such technical precision been found in pre-Colombian art.”
C2RMF engineers Thomas Calligaro and Yvan Coquinot told AFP that three months of analysis of the skull highlighted that the piece “is certainly not pre-Columbian, it shows traces of polishing and abrasion by modern tools.”
Analysis by a particle accelerator had also shown traces of water dating from the 19th century, they said.
Like the London skull, the Paris piece was once in the hands of Eugene Boban, a controversial Paris dealer in archaeological objects believed to be well aware of the production of fake antiquities.
But though no crystal skull yet found at archaeological digs has proved to be authentic, the 12 located around the world continue to arouse interest and speculation.
Apart from the Paris, London and Smithsonian skulls, nine belong to private individuals — the skull of destiny, the Sha-Na-Ra skull, the synergy skull, the Max skull, the Maya skull, a so-called E.T. skull, the amethyst skull, the reliquary cross skull and the pink crystal skull.
Each skull was supposed to correspond to 12 worlds in which human life was present. They were brought by the Itza, the ancient people of Atlantis, to their civilisation in order to pass on their knowledge to man.
The 13th world, the land, also had its own crystal skull, and all 13 skulls were kept in a great pyramid by the Olmecs, the Mayas and ultimately the Aztecs.
The Aztecs are said to have been responsible for the dispersal and loss of the skulls, which when brought together possessed great powers, including being lined up on the last day of the Maya calendar — December 21, 2012 — to prevent the earth from tipping over.
Posted by dan as Historical at 11:28 PM CDT
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Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
Part of a detector to study results of proton collisions by a particle accelerator that a federal lawsuit filed in Hawaii seeks to stop.
by DENNIS OVERBYE
Source: NYTimes
Published: March 29, 2008
More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.
None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.
The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.
But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.
The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.
According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.
Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?
In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.
James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.
“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.
“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.
But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”
In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”
Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.
“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.
This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.
Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.
Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.
Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.
The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.
The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?
According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.
As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.
But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”
Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.
As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.
Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”
Posted by dan as Justice, Science and Technology at 3:52 PM CDT
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Here’s my predictions for ‘08 VP picks for each candidate, with runner-ups.
Obama/Webb
-Jim Webb is the most perfect choice especially to counteract McCain’s foreign policy credentials, and for the cultural fusion involved if the two pairs up. Webb, the man who tipped the balance of the Senate, definitely has VP credentials of his own, if I remember right, he was high up in the Marines, and was a Deputy SecDef. Downfalls are that a two senator ticket is untested, but I believe it doesn’t matter so much as the candidates, and external perceptions of, themselves. Also, I get the feeling that Webb may not accept the nomination, and his Congressional seat may be too valuable to give up.
Runner up: Hillary is the second most strategic choice for Obama. Edwards might hope to be a choice for Obama, I remember their double-teaming and what looked like a secret alliance during in the early debates, but I don’t see him actually being anything but a 2nd try VP and therefore a liability for Obama.
Hillary/Obama
-I just think Obama has captured too much of the voting masses to take off the ticket. I also still believe he will be POTUS one day, if not in ‘09.
Runner up: Nobel Peace Prize winner, and former VP, Al Gore probably has the power to sway this election. If he were running on top of the ticket, many believe he could win it.
McCain/Leiberman
-I think McCain will eventually pick Leiberman as his veep while thinking that maybe he can get some crossover voters and independents, along with the Republican voters who have no alternative.
Runner up: Mitt Romney has been seen on the campaign trail with McCain lately. The strategic maneuvering such as Romney just suspending his campaign through the primaries and other little things, only served McCain and not the remaining candidates of the time. Tom Ridge has also been seen campaigning with McCain, he might make a respectable pick but I doubt he is in consideration.
Posted by dan as World and Politics, Commentary and Predictions, 2008 Election at 3:14 AM CDT
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Source: Foxnews.com
Friday, March 28, 2008
By Catherine Herridge and Ian McCaleb
WASHINGTON — The FBI has narrowed its focus to “about four” suspects in the 6 1/2-year investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, and at least three of those suspects are linked to the Army’s bioweapons research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, FOX News has learned.
Among the pool of suspects are three scientists — a former deputy commander, a leading anthrax scientist and a microbiologist — linked to the research facility, known as USAMRIID.
The FBI has collected writing samples from the three scientists in an effort to match them to the writer of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed to two U.S. senators and at least two news outlets in the fall of 2001, a law enforcement source confirmed.
The anthrax attacks began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, further alarming a nation already reeling from the deaths of 3,000 Americans. Five people were killed and more than a dozen others were infected by the deadly spores in the fall of 2001.
A leading theory is that the anthrax was stolen from Fort Detrick and then sealed inside the letters. A law enforcement source said the FBI is essentially engaged in a process of elimination.
Much of the early public focus fell on a Fort Detrick scientist named Steven Hatfill, who is suing federal authorities for identifying him as a person of interest. Now the FBI is focusing on other scientists at the facility.
“Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It’s the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States,” a bioterrorism expert told FOX News.
Asked to comment on the likelihood that the anthrax originated at the facility, the expert said:
“It’s not suprising, except that it would underscore that there was serious security deficiencies that existed at one time at Fort Detrick — the ability of researchers to smuggle out some type of very sophisticated anthrax weapon and in some quantity. And, nevertheless, it was possible.”
In December 2001, an Army commander tried to dispel the possibility of a connection to Fort Detrick by taking the media on a rare tour of the base. The commander said the Army used only liquid anthrax, not powder, for its experiments.
“I would say that it does not come from our stocks, because we do not use that dry material,” Maj. Gen. John Parker said. The letters that were mailed to the media and Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy all contained powdered anthrax.
But in an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.
“Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared … to duplicate the letter material,” the e-mail reads. “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same … his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ‘But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’”
Asked for comment, an Army spokeswoman referred all calls to the FBI. The FBI would not comment about the pool of suspects, but a spokeswoman said the investigation clearly remains a priority.
Posted by dan as Terrorism, Obvious, Science and Technology at 2:49 PM CDT
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Source: CBS News
(CBS) Imagine re-growing a severed fingertip, or creating an organ in the lab that can be transplanted into a patient without risk of rejection. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. It’s the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine, in which scientists are learning to harness the body’s own power to regenerate itself, with astonishing results. Correspondent Wyatt Andrews brings you to the scientific frontier.
Three years ago, Lee Spievack sliced off the tip of his finger in the propeller of a hobby shop airplane.
What happened next, Andrews reports, propelled him into the future of medicine. Spievack’s brother, Alan, a medical research scientist, sent him a special powder and told him to sprinkle it on the wound.
“I powdered it on until it was covered,” Spievack recalled.
To his astonishment, every bit of his fingertip grew back.
“Your finger grew back,” Andrews asked Spievack, “flesh, blood, vessels and nail?”
“Four weeks,” he answered.
Andrews spoke to Dr. Steven Badylak of the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine and asked if that powder was the reason behind Spievack’s new finger tip.
“Yes, it is,” Badylak explained. “We took this and turned it into a powdered form.”
That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.
“It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth,” said Badylak.
Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and “direct” them to grow.
“Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do,” Badylak explained. “It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever.”
If this helped Spievack’s finger regrow, Badylak says, at least in theory, you should be able to grow a whole limb.
Advances That Go Beyond Theory
In his lab at Wake Forest University, a lab he calls a medical factory, Dr. Anthony Atala is growing body parts.
Atala and his team have built, from the cell level up, 18 different types of tissue so far, including muscle tissue, whole organs and the pulsing heart valve of a sheep.
“And is it growing?” Andrews asked.
“Absolutely,” Atala said, showing him, “All this white material is new tissue.”
“When people ask me ‘what do you do,’ we grow tissues and organs,” he said. “We are making body parts that we can implant right back into patients.”
Dr. Atala, one of the pioneers of regeneration, believes every type of tissue already has cells ready to regenerate if only researchers can prod them into action. Sometimes that prodding can look like science fiction.
Emerging from an everyday ink jet printer is the heart of a mouse. Mouse heart cells go into the ink cartridge and are then sprayed down in a heart shaped pattern layer by layer.
Dr. Atala believes it’s a matter of time before someone grows a human heart.
“The cells have all the genetic information necessary to make new tissue,” Atala explained. “That’s what they are programmed to do. So your heart cells are programmed to make more heart tissue, your bladder cells are programmed to make more bladder cells.”
Atala’s work with human bladder cells has pushed regenerative medicine to a transformational breakthrough.
In this clinical trial at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, Dr. Patrick Shenot is performing a bladder transplant with an organ built with this patient’s own cells. In a process developed by Dr. Atala, the patient’s cells were grown in a lab, and then seeded on a biodegradable bladder-shaped scaffold.
Eight weeks later, with the scaffold now infused with millions of regrown cells, it is transplanted into the patient. When the scaffold dissolves, Dr. Shenot says what’s left will be a new, functioning organ.
“The cells will differentiate into the two major cells in the bladder wall, the muscle cells and the lining cells,” he explained. “It’s very much the future, but it’s today. We are doing this today.”
Repairing The Wounded
Today, one of the biggest believers in regeneration is the United States military, which is especially interested in the matrix that regrew Lee Spievack’s finger.
The Army, working in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh, is about to use that matrix on the amputated fingers of soldiers home from the war.
Dr. Steven Wolf, at the Army Institute of Surgical Research, says the military has invested millions of dollars in regenerative research, hoping to re-grow limbs, lost muscle, even burned skin.
“And it’s hard to ignore this guys missing half his skin, this guy’s missing his leg,” Wolf said. “You start asking the question, is there somebody out there with the technology that can do this for us?”
“You mean regrow the tissue?” Andrews asked.
“The answer,” Wolf said, “is maybe.”
At the burn unit at the Brooke Army Medical center, the very idea of regeneration brings a glimmer of hope.
Army Staff Sgt. Robert Henline was the only survivor of an IED attack on his Humvee north of Baghdad.
“It’s a great idea,” Henline said, talking with Andrews about the military’s investment into the new technology. “If they can come up with something that’s less painful and can heal it with natural growth, without all this scarring, it’s definitely something to check into.”
Regeneration Race Goes Global
Several different technologies for harnessing regeneration are now in clinical trials around the world. One machine, being tested in Germany, sprays a burn patient’s own cells onto a burn, signaling the skin to re-grow.
Badylak is about to implant matrix material - shaped like an esophagus - into patients with throat cancer.
“We fully expect that this material will cause the body to re-form normal esophageal tissue,” Badylak said.
And in a clinical trial at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, patient Mary Beth Babo is getting her own adult stem cells injected into her heart, in hopes of growing new arteries. Her surgeon is Dr. Joon Lee.
“It’s what we consider the Holy Grail of our field for coronary heart disease,” Lee said.
The Holy Grail, because if stem cells can re-grow arteries, there’s less need for surgery.
“It’s a big difference from open heart surgery to this,” said Babo. “If people don’t have to go through that, this would be the way to go … if it works.”
The Business Of Regeneration
Corporate America, meanwhile, already believes regeneration will work. Investment capital has been pouring in to commercialize and mass produce custom-made body parts.
The Tengion Company has bought the license, built the factory, and is already making those bladders developed at Wake Forest that we told you about earlier.
“We’re actually building a very real business around a very real and compelling patient need,” said Dr. Steven Nichtberger, Tengion’s CEO.
Tengion believes regeneration will soon revolutionize transplant medicine. Transplant patients, instead of waiting years for a donated organ, will ship cells off to a lab and wait a few weeks to have their own re-grown.
“I look at the patients who are on the waitlist for transplant,” said Nichtberger. “I look at the opportunity we have to build bladders, to build vessels, to build kidneys. In regenerative medicine, I think it is similar to the semi-conductor industry of the 1980s, you don’t know where it’s going to go, but you know it’s big.”
Posted by dan as Science and Technology at 2:57 PM CDT
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