Stephen Hawking

After issuing a statement about the existence of horrendous extraterrestrials, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking re-create the controversy.

No longer care about being branded ‘mad scientist’, Hawking again issued a second theory which is also surprising.

Preparing for his appearance in a documentary on the Discovery, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, which aired next week, May 9, 2010, he confessed to believe humans can explore the time.

Humans, according to Hawking, can crawl up to millions of years into the future to fill out and start again the civilization of Planet Earth that has been destroyed.

Someday, Hawking said, there will be exploration of outer space plane that could fly faster than the speed of light. One day of exploration in space equal to one year on Earth. Continue Reading

Sri Mulyani

By Aloysius Unditu and Sandrine Rastello

May 5 (Bloomberg) — Indonesia’s Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, who has been a candidate to head her nation’s central bank, was selected to be a top adviser to World Bank President Robert Zoellick.

Sri Mulyani will start June 1 as one of the Washington- based bank’s three managing directors, the highest rank under Zoellick. She “brings a unique set of skills and experience to the World Bank Group, from the vantage point of an advancing middle-income country that still faces significant challenges of poverty,” Zoellick said in an e-mailed statement.

The selection highlights the rising global role of Indonesia, the fourth most-populous nation and a member of the Group of 20 emerging and developed countries. It may also affect Indonesia’s economic leadership, as Sri Mulyani was one of two candidates proposed last June to head Bank Indonesia, an appointment stymied by a parliamentary probe led by factions within the governing coalition and members of the opposition. Continue Reading

DARPA: The A160 Hummingbird

ON 6 December 1957 a hollow aluminium sphere the size of a small melon burst from a blazing fireball, rose a mere metre or so above Florida before landing with a thump. The US was in trouble. A month earlier, the Soviet Union had sent a 500-kilogram capsule bearing a dog called Laika into space. But here was the US unable to even notch up its first foray into orbit.

President Dwight Eisenhower responded by creating a new research agency tasked with ensuring such “technological surprises” like Sputnik would never be sprung on the US again. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), conceived in February 1958 not only still exists, it has consistently made the US military the most advanced on Earth and unleashed life-changing technologies such as the internet, GPS and the computer mouse along the way. Continue Reading

otzi the iceman

The new Iceman photoscan website lets you explore the body of the famous Alpine mummy in unprecedented detail. See some of the best images and find out how he lived and died.

Ötzi is a mummified human discovered in 1991 in the Schnalstal glacier in the Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy. He died around 3300 BC.

The mummy offers a wealth of information about the humans living in Europe at the time. Ötzi was named after the Ötztal region where he was found.

The new Iceman photoscan website now gives all web users access to images of the body gathered by researchers. The site has a dynamic online-map-style interface to let people zoom into photographs that capture Ötzi from all angles and show details as small as 1 millimetre.
(source:newscientist.com)

ida fossil

Unbridled hoopla attended the unveiling of a 47-million-year-old fossil primate skeleton at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on 19 May. Found by private collectors in 1983 in Messel, Germany, the press immediately hailed the specimen as a “missing link” and even the “eighth wonder of the world.”

Google’s homepage evolved, incorporating an image of the new fossil – nicknamed Ida – into the company’s logo. Now that the first description of the fossil has been published, the task of sifting through the massive public relations campaign to understand the true significance of the new fossil can begin.

Ida forms the basis for a new genus and species of adapiform primate, Darwinius massillae. The adapids are a branch of the primate tree that leads to modern lemurs (see figure). Continue Reading