Submitted by: Michael R. Mennenga (FarPoint Media CEO)

Remember that experiment that we talked about on one of our past Slice of SciFi shows about where it was postulated that scientists may create a mini-black hole that would destroy the universe?

Well, they now have a countdown clock. So we’ll know exactly how long we have before Cathuluh shows up and “SWALLOWS ALL OF OUR SOULS!”

Cover your butts everyone because vos âmes appartient à moi.

Muhahahahahahahah!

Watch the countdown HERE.

RETRACTION

It would appear that our SCI-Fi to SCI-FACT limb-growing pixie dust story from last week’s show ended up being more sci-fi than sci-fact.

Since last week the BBC has backtracked on its original story admitting to being duped. Slice of SciFi is in good company having been duped as well along with Fox News, the AP and just about every other legitimate news agency across the planet. However, the part of the story about growing organs, such as bladders, in the lab is true and currently being done by researchers in various labs across the world, including Purdue University. The techniques being employed have nothing to do with pixie dust but do use DNA cloning as the mechanism behind the organ re-production.

Source: The Associated Press

While it may not yet be the ability to be like Dr. Doolittle and talk to the animals, it is one step closer. The Associated Press reports Israeli jails are using a custom-built computer program to interpret the barks of guard dogs and distinguish warnings of a breakout from everyday woofs.

Noam Tavor, head of the Israel Prisons Service canine unit, said the program is designed to overcome mistakes in which guards have either not heard dogs sounding an alarm or failed to speedily identify its significance.

“It collects the dogs’ barks through microphones…and sorts and grades them,” Tavor told Army Radio. “It relays only the barks that are significant in terms of security — barks that reveal stress or aggression in the dog.”

The radio said prison staff monitor the system through loudspeakers and TV cameras that automatically zoom in on suspected hot spots.

Because of their heightened sense of smell and hearing, dogs can identify suspicious people well before they trip an alarm wire, Tavor told The Associated Press

The Prison Service has long used dogs to patrol its fences, but found the system had flaws. “The dogs would bark, and staff of the prison wouldn’t hear it, or would hear it and would not take action fast enough.” Tavor said.

He said prison staff would also sometimes ignore dogs’ barks if they thought it was nothing serious, what he called the “boy who cried wolf” phenomenon.

Six years ago, the Prisons Service joined with Bio-Sense, a high-tech company headquartered near Tel Aviv, to create a system that would notify them when dogs were barking because of something suspicious.

Bio-Sense recorded the patrol dogs barking in different situations, from playtime to cat encounters to real emergencies. They loaded thousands of these recordings into a computer program to determine “what makes the emergency bark different than the other barks,” said Bio-Sense project manager Orit Netz.

One of the keys turned out to be the dog’s stress level.

Bio-Sense developed a sensor that can determine a dog’s stress based on the sound of its bark. The sensor can be placed within a 15 yard radius of the dog to detect the “emergency barks” and sound an alarm in the prison’s control room.

According to Bio-Sense, they are the only ones to have developed this technology. “We don’t have any competitors at the moment,” Netz said.

The first system was put in place in 2005, and since then three more have been installed in Israeli prisons. Bio-Sense now has more than 100 clients in Israel, including farmers who need protection against theft, Netz said.

According to some medical news out of the southern part of that State one might think they have. Doctors are trying to find out what is causing a bizarre and mysterious infection that has surfaced there.

While the disease isn’t deadly it makes those who get it wish they were dead and that is no laughing matter. Called Morgellons Disease, those infected will break out with beads of black, tarry sweat and get lesions that never fully heal.

“Sometimes little black specks come out of the lesions and sometimes little spaghetti-like fibers,” stated one sufferer of the disorder.

Currently about 100 cases of this strange disorder have cropped up and been verified in the State with patient’s exhibiting a variety of bizarre symptoms and a great deal of pain.

Others complain of having overwhelming feelings like bugs are literally crawling under their skin.

The only course of treatment seems to be a regiment of antibiotics, pain meds and anti-parasitic remedies, but nothing seems to be 100 percent curative.

The pain and anguish is so intense that one patient took his own life to get relief from the horrendous symptoms.

So far, pathologists have failed to find any cause for the infection or how one contracts the disease.

For more information on Morgellons, visit the research foundation’s Web site at www.morgellons.org.

Source: Fox SciTech News

Akhenaten wasn’t the most manly pharaoh, even though he fathered at least a half-dozen children. In fact, his form was quite feminine. And he was a bit of an egghead.

So concludes a Yale University physician who analyzed images of Akhenaten for an annual conference Friday at the University of Maryland School of Medicine on the deaths of historic figures.

The female form was due to a genetic mutation that caused the pharaoh’s body to convert more male hormones to female hormones than needed, Dr. Irwin Braverman believes. And Akhenaten’s head was misshapen because of a separate condition in which skull bones fuse at an early age.

The pharaoh had “an androgynous appearance. He had a female physique with wide hips and breasts, but he was male and he was fertile and he had six daughters,” Braverman said. “But nevertheless, he looked like he had a female physique.”

Braverman, who sizes up the health of individuals based on portraits, teaches a class at Yale’s medical school that uses paintings from the university’s Center for British Art to teach observation skills to first-year students. For his study of Akhenaten, he used statues and carvings.

Akhenaten (ah-keh-NAH-ten), best known for introducing a revolutionary form of monotheism to ancient Egypt, reigned in the mid-1300s B.C. He was married to Nefertiti, and Tutankhamun, also known as King Tut, may have been his son or half brother.

Egyptologist and archaeologist Donald B. Redford said he supports Braverman’s belief that Akhenaten had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder marked by lengthened features, including fingers and the face. [Marfan syndrome would not have been responsible for his feminine appearance, however.]

Visiting clinics that treat those with the condition has strengthened that conviction, “but this is very subjective, I must admit,” said Redford, a professor of classic and ancient Mediterranean studies at Penn State University.

Others have theorized Akhenaten and his lineage had Froehlich’s Syndrome, which causes feminine fat distribution but also sterility. That doesn’t fit Akhenaten, who had at least six daughters, Braverman said.

Klinefelter Syndrome, a genetic condition that can also cause gynecomastia, or male breast enlargement, has also been suggested, but Braverman said he suspects familial gynecomastia, a hereditary condition separate from Marfan syndrome that leads to the overproduction of estrogen and the development of breasts.

The Yale doctor said determining whether he is right can easily be done if Egyptologists can confirm which mummy is Akhenaten’s and if Egyptian government officials agree to DNA analysis.

Braverman hopes his theory will lead them to do just that.

“I’m hoping that after we have this conference and I bring this up, maybe the Egyptologists who work on these things all the time, maybe they will be stimulated to look,” he said.

Previous conferences have examined the deaths of Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander the Great, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Florence Nightingale and others.

Some scientists now believe the foracious looking monster known as Tyrannosaurus rex was really, genetically speaking, nothing more than a big bawk, bawk, bawk — Chicken.

In a recent report from LiveScience, written by Jeanna Bryner, T. rex’s protein evidence acquired from soft tissue in the prehistoric animal’s leg bone now confirms that the gigantic and scary looking T. rex belongs to the same family-line of chickens and the ostrich.

This new evidence lends further credence to the growing idea that today’s living birds are the ancient, prehistoric dinosaur’s closets relatives and that many were not lost to some mysterious disappearance of the past 60 million years ago, but simply evolved into modern day avians.

“We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds — ostrich and chicken — better than any other organism that we studied,” said researcher John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “We also show that it groups better with birds than [with] modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards.”

Until this new genetic evidence surfaced scientists have long suspected that many in the dinosaur world were most closely related to modern-day birds. However, up until this time, the idea rested largely on similarities between the outward appearances of bird and dinosaur skeletons and not on scientifically proveable data. Now all that has changed.

This new genetic evidence came from a prehistoric femur bone found in 2003 by Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in the Hell Creek Formation. It dates to about 68 million years ago and comes from a “teenage T. rex” with some of its soft tissue still in good order and useful for testing of its genetically-linked protein structure. Though no genetic material was preserved, researchers were able to extract the proteins from the collagen tissues. By comparing the T. rex’s protein sequences with those of 21 living organisms, a team of researchers say they have locked in the dinosaur-bird link. In the case of T. rex’s collagen, “it was responsible for making hard bone so that the dinosaur could stand.”

“The proteins are what carry out the function inside the cells and organs. So the protein does a lot of the work. That [protein] sequence was derived from DNA,” Asara told LiveScience.

Source: Fox News Sci-Tech

WASHINGTON — Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has been thinking a lot about the cosmic question, “Are we alone?”

The answer is probably not, he says.

If there is life elsewhere in the universe, Hawking asks why haven’t we stumbled onto some alien broadcasts in space, maybe something like “alien quiz shows?”

Hawking’s comments were part of a lecture at George Washington University on Monday in honor of NASA’s 50th anniversary. He theorized that there are possible answers to whether there is extraterrestrial life.

One option is that there likely isn’t life elsewhere. Or maybe there is intelligent life elsewhere, but when it gets smart enough to send signals into space, it also is smart enough to make destructive nuclear weapons.

Hawking said he prefers the third option:

“Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare,” he then quickly added: “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

However, because alien life might not have DNA like us, Hawking warned: “Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance.”

The 66-year-old British cosmologist, who suffers from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and must speak through a mechanical device, believes “if the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Hawking compared people who don’t want to spend money on human space exploration to those who opposed the journey of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

“The discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old. Just think we wouldn’t have had a Big Mac or KFC.”

On the surface, it may sound like the plot for the upcoming Austin Powers film, but in reality it’s not.  China is planning on using weather control to ensure the opening ceremonies for the upcoming Olympic games go off without a hitch.  Well, at least without a hitch weatherwise. 

Because the Chinese Olympic Stadium lacks a roof, Beijing’s Weather Modification Office is working to make sure spectators and world dignitaries at the opening ceremonies don’t get drenched.

How you ask?

An IBM p575 supercomputer is being used to provide hourly weather forecasts for 17,000 square miles around the city.

If rain clouds are expected the Weather Modification Office can call on 1,500 staff with 30 aircraft to drop chemicals into the clouds to force them to drop their water early.

A further 37,000 part-time staff can fire additional materials into the clouds using 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.

Zhang Qian, head of Beijing’s Weather Modification Office, told MIT’s Technical Review: “We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size.

“As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced.”

Cloud seeding is not new, but it is thought that China has taken the technology further than any other country. 

Let’s just hope this technology doesn’t fall into the hands of Dr. Evil

Spanish scientists announced the discovery of the smallest planet outside of our solar system Wednesday reports the Associated Press.

The new planet, GJ 436T, is located 30 light years from Earth. It was discovered by a team led by Ignasi Ribas through a technique observing the planet’s gravitational pull on other planets already discovered around the same star in the constellation of Leo.

This new technique “will allow us to discover in less than 10 years the first planet resembling earth in terms of mass and orbit,” said Ribas.

“GJ 436T” has a mass five times the size of Earth, which makes it the smallest extrasolar planet among the roughly 300 identified so far, Ribas said in announcing the discovery.

He said the new planet is uninhabitable due to the distance that separates it from its star, which is far less than that between the earth and the sun.

To sustain life, a planet must have a mass similar to that of earth, liquid water on its surface, an atmosphere and a similar orbital distance from its star as that of the earth from the sun.

Initial calculations by the team indicated that “GJ 436T” rotates in 4.2 earth days and orbits its star every 5.2 days.

Written by: Lewis Smith for the

Source: Fox SciTech News

A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for 150 years has been identified as a witness’s account of the asteroid suspected of being behind the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Researchers who cracked the cuneiform symbols on the Planisphere tablet believe that it recorded an asteroid thought to have been more than half a mile across.

The tablet, found by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the royal palace at Nineveh in the mid-19th century, is thought to be a 700 B.C. copy of notes made by a Sumerian astronomer watching the night sky.

He referred to the asteroid as a “white stone bowl approaching” and recorded it as it “vigorously swept along.”

Using computers to recreate the night sky thousands of years ago, scientists have pinpointed his sighting to shortly before dawn on June 29 in the year 3123 B.C.

About half the symbols on the tablet have survived and half of those refer to the asteroid. The other symbols record the positions of clouds and constellations. In the past 150 years scientists have made five unsuccessful attempts to translate the tablet.

Mark Hempsell, one of the researchers from Bristol University who cracked the tablet’s code, said: “It’s a wonderful piece of observation, an absolutely perfect piece of science.”

He said the size and route of the asteroid meant that it was likely to have crashed into the Austrian Alps at Köfels. As it traveled close to the ground it would have left a trail of destruction from supersonic shock waves and then slammed into the Earth with a cataclysmic impact.

Debris consisting of up to two-thirds of the asteroid would have been hurled back along its route and a flash reaching temperatures of 400 Centigrade (752 Fahrenheit) would have been created, killing anyone in its path.

About one million sq kilometers (386,000 sq miles) would have been devastated and the impact would have been equivalent to more than 1,000 tons of TNT exploding.

Dr Hempsall said that at least 20 ancient myths record devastation of the type and on the scale of the asteroid’s impact, including the Old Testament tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the ancient Greek myth of how Phaeton, son of Helios, fell into the River Eridanus after losing control of his father’s sun chariot.

The findings of Dr. Hempsall and Alan Bond, of Reaction Engines Ltd., are published in a book, “A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels Impact Event.”

The researchers say that the asteroid’s impact would explain why at Köfels there is evidence of an ancient landslide 3 miles wide and a quarter of a mile thick.

Tale of devastation

“Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and he overthrew those cities and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities … [Abraham] looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the valley, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.”

Source: Genesis 19:24-28

[Pictured above: An Assyrian planisphere, or star chart, from about 700 B.C. which may depict events recounted by Sumerians from around 3123 B.C.]

A new cache of human bones and rudimentary tools dating back to over 1.2 million years ago have been unearthed in the northern part of Spain. These fossils prove that humans roamed in Europe far earlier than researchers had previously thought and taught. This exciting find places humans in Europe about 400,000 years before any previous earliest findings.

Excavated at the site was a jaw bone, some human teeth and simple tools. These were found inside a cave outside the city of Burgos, Spain. The findings have been published in Nature Magazine.

“These are the oldest human remains in Europe. With this fossil, we can say it [European Continent] was populated earlier than was thought,” researcher Andreu Olle told Reuters News Service.

“The find adds weight to the theory that early humans spread from Africa via the Middle East, not across the Straits of Gibraltar separating Africa from Europe, because the jaw was a similar shape to one unearthed in the central Asian country of Georgia thought to be 1.7 million years old,” stated journalist Ben Harding who covered the find.

[In the above — An undated handout photograph released on March 26, 2008 shows the top view of a jaw bone, which could belong to the oldest known European, excavated by Spanish researchers in a cave at the Atapuerca site near the city of Burgos.]
(Jordi Mestre/EIA/Handout/Reuters)

NASA has rescinded its order for the cut back on current Mars research. Yesterday we reported how the space agency was set to lay a load of scientists and technical analysts off due to budgetary cutbacks.

After all the stir from the press and scientific community it would appear that NASA has come to its senses and is rethinking that cut-back plan.

NASA is saying Tuesday that it has rescinded a letter that recommended budget cuts in the Mars Rover program to cover the cost of a next-generation rover on the Red Planet.

This comes just one day after the announcement from NASA of their plans to shut down 1 rover and layoff up to 300 employees.

Nice to see reason prevail over the almight dollar.

Written by: Clara Moskowitz (LiveScience Staff Writer)

Scientists keep finding more similarities between humans and chimps. They share most of our genes, they seem to be able to handle tools, and they grasp some English pretty well, too.

Now researchers have found that we share a similar brain pattern when communicating.

Broca’s area, located in the part of the human brain known as the inferior frontal gyrus, has been shown to be critical for human speech and sign language. When a person speaks, or even plans to say something, this region lights up with activity.

“This is the first time someone has measured activity in that area in chimp brains,” said Jared Taglialatela, a biologist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. “It looks like a similarity between humans and chimps.”

Taglialatela and his colleagues used a PET scan to image activity in the brains of three chimps after doing two tasks. In one, the chimps asked for food by gesturing and vocalizing — making grunts and other noises. In another they passed rocks out of their cages in exchange for food, as they had been taught to do before.

The scientists found that Broca’s area was activated in the chimps’ brains after making gestures and vocalizing, but not after the rock task, signaling that this brain region is particularly tied to communication.

The finding, reported online Feb. 28 in the journal Current Biology, narrows the gap between humans and chimpanzees a little bit more.

“If we really want to talk about the big differences between humans and chimps — they’re covered in hair and we’re not,” Taglialatela told LiveScience. “Their brains are about one-third the size of humans’. But the major differences come down to ones of degree, not of kind.”

He said we share many profound likenesses with our closest animal relations. They have been shown to possess remarkable language capacities, to have the ability to make and use tools and even to learn behaviors from other members of their community — all traits once thought to be the hallmarks of humanity.

Chimps have been trained to use computer touch screens to communicate with humans and can understand many words of spoken English.

They can also solve basic puzzles, sequence numbers in order, and, in one surprising study, beat college students on tests of short-term memory.

We even share most of our DNA. Reportedly, the human and chimpanzee genomes differ by only 1.5 to 5 percent.

So what does separate us from apes?

“I would really stress that the differences are just a matter of degree,” Taglialatela said. “There’s some fairly good work with regards to chimps making and using tools in the wild, but of course it doesn’t really compare to operating an MRI scanner.”

The same goes for language, he said.

“Their English comprehension has been shown to be very sophisticated, but they could never have a conversation like we’re having right now,” he said. “And recursiveness — the ability to talk about language — is something I think is beyond the ability of chimpanzees.”

Taglialatela also said chimps do not have the self-control humans do. Where people often censor their words and actions to fit a social situation, chimps generally act on impulse. If they are hungry, they will ask for food; if they are angry at another chimp, they might take a swat at him.

“They’re not furry little humans, is what it comes down to,” he said. “But nonetheless, they’re not so different.”

[Pictured above is Leslie, is a 38-year-old female chimpanzee at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center] Credit: Jared Taglialatela, PhD, Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

Source: Fox SciTech News

A team of German and Peruvian archaeologists say they have discovered the oldest known monument in Peru: a 5,500-year-old ceremonial plaza near Peru’s north-central coast.

Carbon dating of material from the site revealed it was built between 3500 B.C. and 3000 B.C., Peter Fuchs, a German archaeologist who headed the excavation team, told The Associated Press by telephone Monday.

The discovery is further evidence that civilization thrived in Peru at the same time as it did in what is now the Middle East and South Asia, said Ruth Shady, a prominent Peruvian archaeologist who led the team that discovered the ancient city of Caral in 2001.

Shady serves as a senior adviser to Peru’s National Culture Institute and was not involved in the project.

The find also raises questions about what prompted “civilizations to form throughout the planet at more or less the same time,” Shady said.

The circular, sunken plaza, built of stones and adobe, is part of the Sechin Bajo archaeological complex in Andes foothills, 206 miles northwest of Lima, where Fuchs and fellow German archaeologist Renate Patzschke have been working since 1992.

It predates similar monuments and plazas found in Caral, which nonetheless remains the oldest known city in the Americas dating back to 2627 B.C.

The plaza served as a social and ritual space where ancient peoples celebrated their “thoughts about the world, their place within it, and images of their world and themselves,” Fuchs said.

In an adjacent structure, built around 1800 B.C., Fuchs’ team uncovered a 3,600-year-old adobe frieze — six feet tall — depicting the iconic image of a human sacrificer “standing with open arms, holding a ritual knife in one hand and a human head in the other,” Fuchs said.

The mythic image was also found in the celebrated Moche Lords of Sipan tombs, discovered on Peru’s northern coast in the late 1980s.

Walter Alva, the Peruvian archaeologist who uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs, said the plaza found in Fuchs’ dig was probably utilized by an advanced civilization with economic stability, a necessary condition to construct such a ceremonial site.

The excavation was the fourth in a series of digs at the Sechin Bajo complex that Fuchs and Patzschke began on behalf of the University of Berlin in 1992. Deutsche Forschung Gemeinschaft, a German state agency created to sponsor scientific investigations, has financed the most recent three digs.

The find “shows the world that in America too, human beings of the New World had the same capacity to create civilization as those in the Old World,” Shady said.

Her discovery, Caral, made headlines in 2001 when researchers carbon-dated material from the city back to 2627 B.C., proving that a complex urban center in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt — 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.

Written by: Clara Moskowitz (Staff Writer )

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice,” wrote the poet Robert Frost. Astronomers, it turns out, are in the former camp.

A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun’s gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not.

Other theorists have predicted that our planet will fry as the sun expands in its old age. But the time estimates have varied by a couple billion years.

“Although people have looked at these problems before, we would claim this is the best attempt that’s been made to date, and probably the most reliable,” said astronomer Robert Smith, emeritus reader at the U.K.’s University of Sussex, who made the new calculations with astronomer Klaus-Peter Schroeder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. “What we’ve done is to refine existing models and to put the best calculations we can at each point in the model.”

If 7.6 billion years doesn’t sound like an urgent death sentence, don’t relax yet. Regardless of whether Earth will ultimately be vaporized, as the sun heats up, our planet will become too hot to live on before then.

“After a billion years or so you’ve got an Earth with no atmosphere, no water and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees, way above the boiling point of water,” Smith told SPACE.com. “The Earth will become dry basically. It will become completely impossible for life of any kind to exist. It’s a pretty gloomy forecast.”

Nonetheless, scientists are curious about the ultimate fate of our planet after we are gone (like all previous hominids and more than 99 percent of all species that have lived on Earth, humans will probably go extinct, and it will likely happen sooner than a billion years).

Smith’s earlier studies found that Earth would narrowly escape being engorged. As the sun ages and expands into a red giant star, it will shed its outer gaseous layers, thus losing mass and weakening its gravitational pull. Previous calculations found that this let-up would allow the Earth’s orbit to shift outward, enabling the planet to slip free of the smoldering sun.

But this scenario doesn’t account for tidal forces, and the drag of the sun’s outer layers. As the Earth orbits the sun, its smaller gravitational pull isn’t completely negligible — it actually causes the side of the sun closest to our planet to hoard more mass and bulge out toward us.

“Just as the Earth is pulling on the sun’s bulge, it’s pulling on the Earth, and that causes the Earth to slow in its orbit,” Smith said. “It will spiral back and finally end up inside the sun.”

In addition, the gas that the sun expels will also drag Earth inward toward its demise.

Smith’s previous calculations had ignored these effects.

“We didn’t think it mattered, but it turns out it does,” he said. “You might say our previous models had a gap.”

There may even be hope for Earth. Some scientists have proposed a scheme for down the road to use the gravity of a passing asteroid to budge Earth out of the way of the sun toward cooler territory, assuming there is life around at the time that is intelligent enough to engineer this solution.

“It sounds like science fiction, but there’s a group of people who have quite seriously suggested that it might be possible,” Smith said. “If it’s done right, that would just keep the Earth moving fast enough to keep it out of harm’s way. Maybe life could go on for as much as 7 billion years.”

Smith’s findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.