... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 108: Nov-Dec 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Lake victoria's cichlid fishes: can random mutations explain them?Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake (420 kilometers long, but only 69 meters at its deepest). It is also the home of more than 300 species of cichlid fishes. Ordinarily, that number of different species would pose no problem for the biologists -- look at the 400 or so species of hummingbirds in Central and South America! Lake Victoria, however, is a very young lake, and all of these cichlid fishes are endemic. Therefore, they must have evolved rather rapidly. Recent seismic surveys of Lake Victoria and piston cores from its deepest parts by T.C . Johnson et al have surprised everyone: Lake Victoria was completely dry 12,400 years ago. Nor were there deeper "satellite" lakes that could have served as refuges for Lake Victoria's biota during extreme droughts. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the present-day 300+ species of cichlid fishes all evolved in less than 12,400 years. This being so, can random mutations -- the accepted source of evolutionary novelty -- have generated so many new species in such a short time? That would be one new species every 40 years or so on the average. (Johnson, Thomas C., et al; "Late Pleistocene Desiccation of Lake Victoria and Rapid Evolution of Cichlid Fishes," Science, 273:1091 ...

... Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects How The Incas Worked Stone Inca stonework is famous for its large stones (some over 100 tons), which are fitted so precisely that "a knife cannot be inserted into the joints." An aura of mystery has always hung about the great "walls" at Saqsaywaman and Ollantaytambo (spellings vary). How could the Incas have quarried, dressed, transported, and lifted such huge stones? As usual with such remarkable ancient structures, the overzealous have proposed antigravity devices, stone-softening agents, and similar wild notions. In truth, as J. Protzen relates in the subject article, Inca stonemasonry was surprisingly unsophisticated and yet efficient, although some mysteries remain. Protzen has spent many months in Inca country experimenting with different methods of shaping and fitting the same kinds of stones used by the Incas. He found that quarrying and dressing the stones were not problems at all using the stone hammers found in abundance in the area. Even the precision-fitting of stones was a relatively simple matter. The concave depressions into which new stones were fit were pounded out by trial and error until a snug fit was achieved. Protzen's first-hand experience is impressive and convincing. Certainly he required no radical solutions. The problems that Protzen was not able to solve to his satisfaction involved the transportation and handling of the large stones. The fitting process necessitated the repeated lowering and raising of the stone being fitted, with trial-and-error pounding in between. He does not know just how 100- ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 109: Jan-Feb 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Indeterminacy In Computers In SF#108, it was remarked that a chessplaying computer will sometimes make different moves when faced with identical boards. R.G . Everit responds that this is not really mysterious. The better chess-playing computers are actually designed to behave unpredictably when confronted by several moves of roughly equal promise. This feature makes it more interesting for human players. Everit also sets us straight in the matter of computer determinacy. "However, contrary to your basic assumption, most computers (even a home PC) can be forced to behave truly unpredictably. This cannot be done using the random-number generators supplied with the software, as these depend upon some mathematical formula and so are determined in advance, even if they appear to show no pattern. But if the machine has an internal clock readable by the programmer, he can determine the machine's choice depending upon the time required for some complex calculation, which will vary according to such factors as minute voltage variations and the aging of the machine's components. For example, the CDC 3600, on which I learned to program in 1975, had an accessible microsecond clock, and my program to calculate the first five perfect numbers* required about 15 minutes of run time; the last few digits of the exact number of microseconds required to run this program each time varied quite unpredictably. In other words, it was a random number, except ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 66: Nov-Dec 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Was burt stitched up?Sir Cyril Burt was, until a few years ago, the Grand Old Man of British Psychology. But then a scandal erupted. Burt was charged with manufacturing data and even faking the existence of research assistants. A devastating biography by L. Hearnshaw seemed to ruin Burt's reputation for good. With all the attendant publicity, the label "scientific fraud" stuck in everyone's mind. But, hold on, another book, one with a completely different conclusion, has hit the bookstores. This book, The Burt Affair , is by R.B . Joynson. Joynson demonstrates in great detail that Hernshaw's biography is seriously deficient in places. If Joynson is correct, Hearnshaw and Burt's other enemies are guilty of selective reporting. The case for fraud was fraud itself! (Blinkhorn, Steve; "Was Burt Stitched Up?" Nature, 340:439, 1989.) From Science Frontiers #66, NOV-DEC 1989 . 1989-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Microorganisms At Great Depths It was a surprise when diverse biological communities were discovered around deep-sea thermal vents, where sunlight is nonexistent and the energy for sustaining life must be extracted from the mineral-charged water gushing from the vents. An analogous situation occurs at great depths in the earth's crust itself, as proven by sampling at three deep boreholes in South Carolina. Number of microorganism colony types at various depths at Site P28. The concentration and diversity of microorganisms (mostly bacteria) at depths as great as 520 meters (1610 feet) below the ground's surface are remarkably high. It makes one wonder what will be found even farther down. To illustrate, more than 3000 different microorganisms have been found in the boreholes. Many of the bacteria are new to science. As the following two paragraphs demonstrate, subterranean life consists of many well-adapted microorganisms working together. "The traditional scientific concept of an abiological terrestrial subsurface is not valid. The reported investigation has demonstrated that the terrestrial deep subsurface is a habitat of great biological diversity and activity that does not decrease significantly with increasing depth. "The enormous diversity of the microbiological communities in deep terrestrial sediments is most striking. The organisms vary widely in structure and function, and they are capable of transforming a variety of organic and inorganic compounds. Regardless of the depth sampled, the microorganisms were able to perform the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, manganese, iron, and phosphorous. Although the organisms were ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 8: Fall 1979 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Convergent evolution or chance look-alikes Why should caddis fly larvae and a species of aquatic snail look alike? Mimicry is rather common in nature for it often confers some sort of advantage to one or both of the species in the turmoil of evolutionary pressures. Or so the theory goes. Most examples of convergent evolution involve closely related species. In the present case, though, the species are in different phyla. The caddis fly larva builds its snail-like shell by cementing grains of sand together with a silk-like secretion, while the snail's shell is a calcareous excretion. One would expect a strong advantage to be conferred on one or the other species, especially in the matter of predation. Using brook trout as predators, how ever, proved perplexing, for the trout would eat only the snails, avoiding the carbon-copy larvae. (Berger, Joel, and Kaster, Jerry; "Convergent Evolution between Phyla...." Evolution, 33:511, 1979.) Comment. This is a remarkable case of mimicry. One wonders how the caddisfly larvae know exactly what snails look like, and how the unique shell constructing methods were coded into its genes by evolution. Or did the snail emulate the larvae? From Science Frontiers #8 , Fall 1979 . 1979-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 114: Nov-Dec 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects It can't be true because it violates our ideas!This was the collective opinion of many atmospheric scientists when a satellite experiment found approximately 50% more water vapor at an altitude of 75 kilometers than well-established theory predicted. That was back in 1991. Now, a second satellite experiment of different design has confirmed the existence of this "excess" water vapor. Most geophysicists are perplexed, to say the least. Not L. Frank, though, because these experiments are in line with his theory that the upper atmosphere is continuously pelted by house-size, fluffy, icy comets -- some 20 each minute. (SF#112) Frank asserts: "When you get that excess of water vapor up there, it just can't come from the Earth. It must come from space." Even so, other geophysicists are reluctant to accept Frank's icy comets -- that would be too much "crow" to eat! One point levied against Frank's icy comets is that they would introduce more than three times the amount of water vapor actually measured. M. Summers, a theoretician at the Naval Research Laboratory, summed up mainstream opinion: "There's definitely something very unusual going on in the mesosphere that we don't understand at all, but I'm not even close to saying this supports the small-comet hypothesis." (Kerr, ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 118: Jul-Aug 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Day The Laws Of Physics Changed Well, maybe there weren't such things as "days" as we now know them back when the universe was very young. In fact, "time" then might have been different from "time" now. This sounds like so much physics-speak; but, seriously, during the birth pangs of the universe, there seems to have been what cosmologists call a "phase change," a mysterious moment when the laws of physics suddenly became more complex. You can reasonably ask: "How can supposedly immutable physical laws change?" The answer seems to be that anything can happen when something is being made from nothing! This apparent plasticity in the laws governing the cosmos is suggested by observations of how galaxies in the early universe were distributed. The standard theory for the origin of the universe predicts that clumps of galaxies of all sizes were created early on. This is not what a survey by S. Sarkar et al, at the University of Oxford, found. A split second after the Big Bang, galaxies were organized in structures about 300-million light years across. The standard model of particle physics cannot account for this preferred size. The theorists' recourse is a phase change, a point in time when the warp and woof of the universe changed; that is, change the rules until they fit. (Chown, Marcus; "In the ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 50: Mar-Apr 1987 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Hardball for Keeps Connecticut "Boat" Cairn "High"-tech Farming At Tiahuanaco Astronomy The Cosmological Atlantis Mysterious Bright Arcs May Be the Largest Objects in the Universe Too Many Short-period Comets Quantized Galaxy Redshifts The Fossil Record and the Quantization of Life! Biology Whales and Seafloor Pits Strange Patterns in Another Oceanic Habitat Lunar Magnetic Mollusc Monarchs Slighted -- sorry! Did We Learn to Swim Before We Learned to Walk? How Cancers Fight Chemotherapy The Melanic Moth Myth Chain of Crevicular Habitats? Feathered Flights of Fancy Geology Why Are Antarctic Meteorites Different? More on the Soviet Plume Events Geophysics Sympathetic Lightning Ball Lightning Burns A Rayed Circle on A Shed Wall Magnetic Precursors of Large Storms On the Trail of the Fifth Force Psychology Do You Hear What I Hear? Mind-bending the Velocity Vectors of Marine Algae ...

... Apr 1987 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Hardball For Keeps "Archeologists call them "balls" for want of a better word; but, after several centuries of intensive collection, scrutiny and study, nobody really knows what they are. "Imagine, if you will, a spherical piece of carved rock a little smaller than a baseball. The shape bespeaks artifice. Something -- somebody -- made it. "More than 500 of these objects have been found in Great Britain and Ireland, most of them in Scotland, near prehistoric dwelling places, passage graves and the mysterious rings of standing stones whose specific purpose also eludes the experts." Archeologists believe the balls are more than 4,000 years old. All are different; all are symmetrical with projecting knobs, six in most cases. So much for the basic data. Now let us progress (? ) to theory. D.B . Wilson suggests that the balls were really hand-thrown missiles used in bloody games played at standing-stone sites during astronomically decreed rites. (Remember the Maya had their grisly ballgames, too!) The stone balls are indeed perfectly weighted, shaped and textured for throwing at the heads of opposing players. Perhaps, says Wilson, the games had rules such that you were safe when touching a standing stone, but to score you had to run to another standing stone while fair game for the first IPMs (Interpersonal Missiles). And so on and so on. You now get the gist of this ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 37: Jan-Feb 1985 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Recent Pulsations Of Life At a recent meeting of scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, E. Vrba, of the Transvaal Museum, in Pretoria, stated: "If we eventually are able to establish a good time resolution with the continental record, I expect to be able to discern synchronous pulses of evolution that involve many groups of fauna and flora. Many different lineages in the biota will respond by synchronous waves of speciation and extinction to global temperature extremes and attendant environmental changes. This is my starting hypothesis." Vrba was speaking mainly about the last 25 million years, a mere flash in geological time. For this brief period, the Deep Sea Drilling Program has provided geologists with a detailed and continuous record of climate changes as they were recorded in deep-sea sediments. By contrast, the faunal history of the continents is rather fragmentary, making it rather difficult to match up pulsations of climate with pulsations of life. Even so, scientists have found rather strong correlations between climatary change and biological speciation and extinction at 15, 5, and 2.4 million years ago. (Lewin, Roger; "The Paleoclimatic Magic Numbers Game," Science, 226:154, 1984.) Comment. Note that this is just the period our ancestors seemed to be evolving rapidly. Also interesting is the general agreement between Vrba's statement about the driving forces behind evolution and McClintock's conclusion quoted earlier ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 13: Winter 1981 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Tidal Wave Of Gammas Sweeps Solar System On March 5, 1979, a colossal burst of gamma rays swept through the solar system, triggering radiation detectors on nine different spacecraft. By comparing the times of arrival of the burst, the direction of the source was narrowed down to a "box" a couple of arc minutes across. Gamma-ray bursts have never before been correlated with visible sources, but this time the box contained the remnants of a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. The anomaly that arises involves the immense distance of the supposed source and the strength of the burst when it reached the solar system. The power level of the supernova remnant gamma flash would have had to be about 1037 watts -- a stupendous figure. If the supernova remnant is a neutron star, as current theories suggest, the neutron star would have to be 10 to 100 times the size of the usual neutron stars. (Anonymous; "Gamma-Ray Burst Comes from Outside the Galaxy," New Scientist, 87:776, 1980.) From Science Frontiers #13, Winter 1981 . 1981-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 48: Nov-Dec 1986 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Water, water: how far down?The upper 10-15 kilometers of the earth's continental crust is different in several ways from the lower crust. The top layer is electrically resistive, seismically transparent, the source of almost all earthquakes, and responds to stress elastically. In contrast, the lower crust is electrically conductive, contains many reflectors of seismic energy, provides few quakes, and responds like a ductile material to stress. The diverse characteristics of both regions can be explained if the entire crust contains saline water. In the up-per crust the water is thought to be in separated cavities, while deep down it forms an interconnected film on crystal surfaces. (Gough, D. Ian; "Seismic Reflectors, Conductivity, Water and Stress in the Continental Crust," Nature, 323:143, 1986.) In an accompanying commentary, B.W .D . Yardley notes that the Soviet deep borehole on the Kola peninsula has found water down to at least 12 kilome ters. (Yardley, Bruce W.D .; "Is There Water in the Deep Continental Crust?" Nature, 323:111, 1986.) From Science Frontiers #48, NOV-DEC 1986 . 1986-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Aug 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The mystery of eugene island 330 Eugene Island is a submerged mountain in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles off the Louisiana coast. The landscape of Eugene Island is riven with deep fissures and faults from which spew spontaneous belches of gas and oil. Up on the surface, a platform designated Eugene Island 330 began producing about 15,000 barrels of oil per day in the early 1970s. By 1989, the flow had dwindled to 4,000 barrels per day. Then, suddenly, production zoomed to 13,000 barrels. In addition, estimated reserves rocketed from 60 to 400 million barrels. Even more anomalous is the discovery that the geological age of today's oil is quite different from that recovered 10 years ago. What's going on under the Gulf of Mexico? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the oil reservoir at Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself from "some continuous source miles below the earth's surface." In support of this surmise, analysis of seismic records revealed a deep fault which "was gushing oil like a garden hose." The deep-seated oil source at Eugene Island strongly supports T. Gold's theory about The Deep Hot Biosphere . Gold holds: "that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the ...

... see words concerning this article that we never thought would be permitted in a mainstream science magazine. After first noting that 10 years ago it was generally agreed that all organisms evolved from a single ancestral cell that existed about 3.5 billion years ago, there comes the assertion that the Tree of Life: "is far more complicated than was believed and may not have had a single root at all." The article proper relates how the Tree of Life has its own evolutionary history. Twenty years ago, scientists had that single ancestral cell splitting into two main trunks: the prokaryotes (bacteria) and the eukaryotes (every-thing else). More recently, a third trunk has been grafted onto the Tree; namely, the archaea (microorganisms that look like bacteria but possess markedly different genes). The archaea favor extreme environments and, curiously, are more closely related to you and me than are the bacteria. But according to this article (by W.F . Doolittle), the triple-trunked Tree of Life is simplistic. One reason for this is that genes, once thought to flow only from parent to progeny, are now known to travel laterally. Species barriers are broken. Genes jump from trunk to trunk, from branch to branch, twig to twig. Of course, these jumps are seen primarily among the microorganisms. The real Tree of Life, then, is more like a snarl of vines--a Jungle of Life, a genetic Tower of Babel! Furthermore, no longer does the multiplicity of life forms spring from a single ...

... East. Cross section of a typical Iranian qanat. Unlike the exposed spring of the Bahrainian qanat, the water source here is at the bottom of a deep well. (From: Ancient Infrastructure) In our recent catalog, Ancient Infra-structure , we describe the qanats of Iran. (See figure.) Some of these shaft-tunnel structures run for miles and re-present a prodigious amount of labor. How prodigious? In Iran alone there are about 37,500 qanats with an aggregate length of some 100,000 miles! Qanats rank right up there with the Inca roads and the Great Wall of China as wonders of the ancient world. After reading our catalog section on Iranian qanats, E. von Fange informs us that the qanats of Bahrain pose a set of different problems. The Bahrainian qanats are easy to follow across the desert because the access shafts protrude a few feet above the sand. As one follows them up-slope for a mile or two, some greenery appears in the distance---low bushes perhaps. A closer approach proves instead that the greenery is actually the tops of palms. These trees are growing in a sunken oval area about 200 yards long girt by a wall 20-30 feet high. Outside, the desert sand reaches nearly to the top of the wall; inside, steps lead down to limestone bedrock from which springs of crystal-clear water flow. The qanat entrance can be seen down near the bottom of the wall, but the water level is now too low to feed the abandoned qanat. In ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 129: MAY-JUN 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects From Nature's Atelier One of geology's more fascinating mysteries concerns the formation of concretions. Concretions are structures within rock that differ in form and/or composition from the matrix. Often, they form around an impurity of some sort, say, a tiny fossil. If concretions were all nicely spherical or crystalline in shape, we might be able to explain them as we do with the oyster's pearl and winter's snow-flake. Unfortunately for the theorists, concretions usually come in bizarre shapes -- shapes an avant garde sculptor might appreciate. Not only do concretions come in weird geometries but they may be replicated in prodigious numbers, like the famous Kimmeridge "coal money." Additionally, some flint concretions are arrayed in thick chalk beds in amazingly regular three-dimensional arrays that tax the ingenuity of any theorist. To illustrate the extremes of nature's inorganic-chemical imagination, we now provide some illustrations from a recent two-part article in Rocks & Minerals and one of our catalog volumes. (Dietrich, R.V .; "Carbonate Concretions,' Rocks & Minerals, 74:266 and 74:335, 1999. ESA3 in Neglected Geological Anomalies.) Carbonate concretions (" imatra stones") from Finland. Virtually identical concretions occur in the Connecticut River Valley. Vertical lines of flint concretions in chalk cliffs near Norfolk, England. Presumably the 3-dimensional array ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 37: Jan-Feb 1985 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects When Mars Had Lakes Rhythmic layered deposits can be seen in the Valles Marineris, a large Martian valley. The strata are erosional remnants up to 5 kilometers high, with individual layers 170-220 meters thick. They can be traced on spacecraft photographs for some 50 kilometers. The material making up the strata is clearly different from that of the valley walls. After the layers were deposited, they were deeply eroded by some event in Martian history that seems related to the formation of the great outflow channels associated with Valles Marineris. The author of this American Geophysical Union paper concludes: "The morphology and history of the sediments are consistent with deposition in standing bodies of water early in Martian history." (Nedell, Susan S., and Squyers, Steven W.; "Geology of the Layered Deposits in the Valles Marineris, Mars," Eos, 65:979, 1984.) Comment. The "event" that deeply eroded the Martian deposits may have been similar to the catastrophic emptying of Lake Missoula, which carved out the Channelled Scablands of eastern Washington state as the Ice Ages waned. From Science Frontiers #37, JAN-FEB 1985 . 1985-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 39: May-Jun 1985 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Upside-down animals Stephen Jay Gould's recent essay, "The Flamingo's Smile," like all his writing, is thought-provoking. The essay goes far beyond the happy flamingo. It is about unusual adaptations in nature, as illustrated by three inverted or partially inverted creatures. The flamingo is a filter-feeder that strains food out of the water with its bill while its head is upside-down. The flaming's bill and tongue are (and must be ) radically different from those of other birds to succeed in this strange behavior. One type of jellyfish, rather than swimming around with its pulsating bell on top, plunks itself upside-down on the bottom and uses its bell as a suction cup to anchor itself. It then shoots poisonous darts attached to strings of mucous at passing targets and reels them in. Some African catfish graze on algae on the undersides of water plants. They swim upside down all the time and display a reversed color scheme, being black on the bottom and light on top. Gould employs these three examples to argue that changes in animal behavior must have preceded the many changes in form, function, color, etc. that make upside down living profitable. In other words, the proto-flamingos tried feeding with their heads upside down; and it didn't work too well. But "nature" responded with a series of random biological changes ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 36: Nov-Dec 1984 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Whirlwind spirals in cereal fields: quintuplet formations "In 1983, as British meteorologists are well aware, Britain had one of its better summers of the century, with July proving to be the hottest in the 300-year record. At the same time, 1983 proved to be a bumper summer for the production of 'mystery spirals' (and for heat whirlwinds generally). Moreover, and entirely unexpectedly, some of the spiral formations turned out to be symmetrically complex systems in an extraordinary manner: as many as four sets in different parts of southern England were found to consist of a single circle attended by four smaller satellite ones. "The beauty of these sets of circles caught the attention of the national newspapers, and thence the imagination of the general public. The story about the manner and the sequence of several of the 1983 discoveries has been given by Ian Mrzyglod (Probe Report, vol. 4, 4-11). Here, we shall simply summarize the main facts, many of which have not been detailed before. "Set 1. Set of five circles at Bratton, Wiltshire (NGR ST 902522, below and northeast of the Westbury White Horse), consisting of one large circle (15 m diameter) and four satellites (each 4 m diameter). The distance between opposite pairs of circles was about 40 m (centre to centre)." The other three sets are very similar and ...

... of thousands of stars all compressed into 5-25 parsecs -- they are much more tightly packed than those in the Milky Way in general. In fact, though, you would have to observe this blazing sky from a spaceship, because diligent searches have not detected any planets in any of the many globular clusters. In 1999, a team of 24 astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to search for planets in the cluster named 47 Tucanae. Their method was to look for dark planets crossing the bright disks of the cluster's stars. After patiently watching 34,000 stars, they came up empty-handed. For some unknown reason, planets never formed around the stars in 47 Tucanae -- or in any other globular clusters checked so far. Are globular clusters in general different from the rest of the Milky Way? Possibly, see below. (Anonymous; "No Globular Planets?" Astronomy, 28:34, October 2000. Anonymous; "Planets Come Up Missing in a Globular Cluster," Sky & Telescope, 104:23, October 2000.) Answer. Globular clusters are peculiar in several additional ways. For example, the globular clusters in the Milky Way have a spherical distribution rather than being compressed into a flat spiral with the rest of our galaxy's stars. There is even evidence that the clusters may not participate in the Milky Way's ponderous rotation. See AOB4 in Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos for still more globular-cluster idiosyncracies. A spherical cloud of globular clusters coexists in space with the disc-shaped Milky ...

... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 15: Spring 1981 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Distant galaxies look like those close-by Apropos the preceding item that the Expanding Universe Theory may be flawed, astronomers have discovered that supposedly distant galaxies look pretty much like those in our immediate neighborhood. Specifically, galaxies 10 billion light years away differ little spectrally speaking from those only a billion light years away. The point is that the distant galaxies should appear 9 billion years younger because their light took that long getting here. They look the same, and that fact could imply: (1 ) Galaxies mature rapidly and do not change much after a billion years; (2 ) Our cosmic time scale is all wrong; (3 ) There was no Big Bang and galaxies may have widely varying ages; or (4 ) None of the above. (Anonymous; "Most Distant Galaxies: Surprisingly Mature," Science News, 119:148, 1981.) Reference. Distant galaxies are anomalously blue. See AWF1 in our Catalog: Satrs, Galaxies, Cosmos. For ordering information, visit: here . From Science Frontiers #15, Spring 1981 . 1981-2000 William R. Corliss ...

... is emerging that precludes such a simple one-to-one mapping. Furthermore, the genome can exhibit considerable flexibility to adapt when the expression of a particular gene fails, and the interpretation of a mutant phenotype [life form] is also less trivial than it may seen. "Not only are behavioural phenotypes very sensitive to non-genetic influences," writes [R .] Greenspan, "but also the highly interconnected network of the nervous system sets up an additional layer of complexity between the gene and the realization of the phenotype." (Ref. 1) Many genes code for multiple variants of the same protein. And many proteins are modified by adding sugar molecules, which play a big role in determining where proteins go and what they do. What's more, different proteins can join together to carry out completely new functions. (Ref. 2) A group of French biologists, led by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod showed that the gene's boundaries are fuzzier than had been thought and that genes are not restricted to chromosomes. Recently, biologists have found genes within genes, overlapping genes, and DNA sequences that specify one protein when read "forward" and another when read "in reverse." Muddling things further, the instructions encoded in the DNA do not always reach the ribosome as a literal translation. In a phenomenon known as RNA editing, an enzymatic highwayman intercepts the RNA message en route and alters it, so the resulting protein is not identical to that specified by the DNA. (Ref. 3) We can sum up ...

... .. .. . Those who believe in cold fusion are quite excited. "It's a world-turning experiment, a lollapalooza," says John O'M . Bockris, a physical chemist who has researched cold fusion at Texas A&M University in College Station. (R1) According to Dr. Mallove of M.I .T ., another provocative set of experiments are those at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where Dr. Howard Menlove has repeatedly detected bursts of neutrons, subatomic particles that are a fusion byproduct. (R2) In an interview, [Dr. R.I . Mills] said he had conducted 1,000 experiments with a simple apparatus over the past 18 months and had applied for patents on the process, which differs markedly from the Utah one. He also asserted that he had set a new record for generating heat, saying his apparatus puts out up to 40 times more energy than put in. (R4) (R3) Physicists F.J . Mayer and J.R . Reitz theorize that cold fusion as well as several other riddles of physics can be explained with a hypothetical new particle created through the fleeting union of a proton and electron. (R4) In sum, coldfusion research seems to be rising Phoenix-like after being zapped by most establishment scientists. It will be difficult to overcome the PR campaign orchestrated (by whom?) against cold fusion. However, honest doubts do remain: "It just violates all that we know about nuclear physics," said nuclear chemist ...

... 24 kilograms. Their layered appearance is thought to result from flow and stirrings as they solidified in small pools of melted rock and soil splashed from nearby impact craters. These irregular chunks of solidified melt could not have traveled great distances like their streamlined brothers. They lie at most only a few crater diameters from their parent craters. Since layered tektites are found over an area 800 x 1140 kilometers in extent, and they are not far-travelers, Southeast Asia must have been peppered with many small cosmic projectiles 700,000 years ago (the disputed age of the event). Whereas geologists have been searching diligently for a single huge crater (perhaps 100 kilometers in diameter) to explain the Australasia strewn field, they should be looking for many 1-kilometer craters. This scenario is radically different from mainstream thinking about this great event in earth history. (Wasson, John T.; "Layered Tektites: A Multiple Impact Origin for the Australasian Tektites," Journal of Geophysical Research, 102:95, 1991.) Reference. For more on tektites, see ESM3 in the catalog Neglected Geological Anomalies. For details, visit: here . From Science Frontiers #78, NOV-DEC 1991 . 1991-2000 William R. Corliss ...