PROJECT PAPERCLIP

Dark side of the Moon

Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost.

[Added to this, the large number of still-secret Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy.]

SONIC WEAPON

Armed pirates approach the Seabourn Spirit, in a photo taken by British passenger Norman Fisher.


Pirates shoot at Britons' cruise liner

Terrified Britons came under fire from machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades yesterday when pirates tried to hijack one of the world's most luxurious cruise liners.
Holidaymakers on the Seabourn Spirit watched in disbelief as the armed bandits blew a hole in the side of the vast ship and hit a passenger cabin during their failed attempt to board.
The ship was carrying 161 crew members and 151 passengers who had paid up to £6,000 each to enjoy the 16-day cruise in the height of luxury.

[The ship's crew triggered a sonic weapon, which sent out ear-splitting bangs to repel the pirates. The Spirit escaped with minor damage and slight injuries to one crew member caused by shrapnel. The sonic device, known as a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, is a so-called "non-lethal weapon" developed for the military after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen as a way to keep operators of small boats from approaching U.S. warships.]

FLAWED LOGIC

Bush visits China

A reporter asks why he seemed so subdued earlier at his appearance with Mr Hu. The reporter suggests he was "off his game".
"Have you ever heard of jet lag?" Mr Bush fires back. He then ends the meeting by striding purposefully away towards a door - which turns out to be locked. An aide shepherds him out.

A freer economy will yield a freer political system

This is one of the president's core beliefs, in plain view on this trip: when a state liberalises its economy, political liberalisation will inevitably follow.
This belief obviates the need to confront the Chinese leadership. Economic liberalisation is underway in China. Ergo, political liberalisation is only a matter of time. The die is cast.

[How does it follow that opening up the economy frees up the political environment?]

MONEY PIT

For sale: Oak Islands buried mystery

Oak Island, in Nova Scotia, is famous for its Money Pit, a mystery that has endured two centuries, claimed six lives and swallowed up millions in life savings.
The Pit was discovered in 1795 by a local boy named Daniel McGinnis who, spotting an unusual clearing in the earth under one of the island's oak trees, was prompted to start digging. The discovery of layered planks, mysterious stone slabs, and mats made of coconut fibers descending deep into the ground turned his casual afternoon dig into an all-out excavation.
What appears to be a complex flooding trap has thwarted efforts to reach the bottom of the Money Pit ever since. Some think the pit was purposely flooded with seawater, via a series of artificial swamps and tunnels, to hide its contents.
Through the murk, drill borings and shafts dug by the island's series of owners have detected what seem to be cement vaulting, wooden chests, and scraps of parchment paper. Radiocarbon dating of these artifacts is consistent: whoever constructed the shaft likely did so sometime in the 16th Century.

[Oak Island's current owners, Dan Blankenship and David Tobias, have worked on the island since the 1960s, sinking millions of dollars into the project and revealing some intriguing clues of their own. For many who follow Oak Island developments, their abandonment of the treasure comes as a surprise. As recently as December of 2003, Blankenship told the Halifax Herald that he would announce some new, exciting findings in the following months. The revelation never came.]

FUEL'S PARADISE?

Power source that turns physics on its head

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel.
Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments.
The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics the idea is theoretically impossible.
What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron.
In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.
This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.
According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."

["Physicists are quite conservative. It's not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don't think [Mills's] theory should be supported," said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.]

AETHER UPDATE

Einstein's wrong, relatively speaking

In 2002, Australian Professor Reg Cahill started to question what he thought were anomalies in Einstein's theory that time and space are relative.
"They all agreed with one another and they were all indicating a huge speed difference in different directions," he said. "When you find out the speed of light differs, the whole Einstein theory starts collapsing."
Professor Cahill said that debunking the Einstein theories would lead to new discoveries in physics and greater understanding of phenomena that could not yet be fully explained.
"There are some incredible discoveries being made," he said. "We're discovering some properties about space that are awesome."
Those discoveries include the speed at which the solar system is travelling through space and the detection of gravitational waves.
Support for Professor Cahill is growing. The Australian Research Council gave a $60,000 grant for his research, and the world's largest particle physics laboratory - CERN in Switzerland - has donated $100,000 worth of optical fibres.

[Physicist Paul Davies of Macquarie University and the Australian Centre for Astrobiology said Einstein's theories of relativity had been tested, and there was no evidence to suggest they were wrong.]

MAGNETIC EARTH

New clues to make magnets more powerful

Using the Western Hemisphere's most powerful X-rays at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne, researchers were able to see new details of rare-earth ions, a critical component of permanent magnets.
The research found that rare-earth ions in dissimilar crystalline environments compete with one another, and undermine the magnetic performance of the highest performance magnets, said Argonne scientist Daniel Haskel, who led the research team.
These findings point to the need for specialized atomic engineering of the material -- manipulating the rare-earth local atomic structure to fully utilize the rare-earth contribution in next generations of magnets.

[The findings are published in Physical Review Letter]

FREE SPEECH

Airports at vanguard of dissent-crushing

Dawn Hansen arrived at the checkpoint at Oakland International Airport wearing a navy blue jacket with two small American flag pins and two political buttons with writing on them. The larger one reads "Dissent is Patriotic." The smaller, red one bears a smiling portrait of President Bush, labeled "Daddy's Little War Criminal".

"When I went to show my boarding pass she looked at me, yanked it out of my hand, undid the rope, and said, 'Come over here!' No 'Please,' no ID check. Then she said, 'Give me your jacket!' They made me go through the metal detector twice even though I didn't set it off either time. Then this second woman said, 'You go sit down over there!' They wanded me, they made me put my legs out, they went up inside my back and around my boobs.
"They passed my jacket from person to person, each security person in turn was looking at the buttons. They asked me, 'Why are you traveling with so much reading material?'"
Dawn says she was carrying seven or eight general circulation magazines, a biography of Ben Franklin and Bob Woodward's latest book. "I did have one subversive publication; I was carrying a copy of The New York Times. ... They asked me why I was carrying so many legal documents. I'd been in California helping my brother do some legal research on a case.
"When I got home I found out they'd taken the lids off all my creams and just left them like that so they got all over everything."

[Dawn Hansen is Nevada chairman of Mothers Against the Draft]

PRIME TARGET

Red carpet for warmonger

US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the main architects of the war on Iraq, is coming to Adelaide. With the blood of as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians on his hands, this supposed champion of democracy will be meeting with similar Australian champions behind massive police protection.

Adelaide to be locked down for Rumsfeld visit

Sections of Adelaide will be virtually locked down as part of a massive security operation to protect U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later this month.
The two-day visit will result in areas around the Hyatt Hotel and the Town Hall declared no-go zones amid fears of ugly anti-Iraq war protests. It is likely sections of North Tce and King William St will be fenced off to keep the thousands of expected protesters away from both sites.
Although there is no intelligence to suggest a threat, SA police are well aware Mr Rumsfeld is one of the world's top terrorist targets.

[Mr Rumsfeld, deputy U.S. Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and a senior U.S. army general are visiting Adelaide for Ausmin - the Australia-United States Ministerial Meeting - on November 17 and 18.]

ICEMAN COMETH

Death renews iceman 'curse' claim

The death of a molecular biologist has fuelled renewed speculation about a "curse" connected to an ancient corpse.
Tom Loy, 63, had analysed DNA found on "Oetzi", the Stone Age hunter whose remains were discovered in 1991.
Dr Loy died in unclear circumstances in Australia two weeks ago, it has been announced, making him the seventh person connected with Oetzi to die.

[Over the past few years many microbiologists have died in mysterious circumstances.]