[Unmuseum_newsletter] The UnMuseum Newsletter for February 2006

Mon May 8 19:45:02 EDT 2006

The UnMuseum Newsletter for February 2006.

Science Over the Edge
A Roundup of Strange Science for the Month
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In the News:

*Chinese Map at Center of Debate - Controversy swirls around a map that is 
allegedly an 18th century copy of another map almost 600 years old showing 
that the Chinese beat Columbus to discovering America by 74 years. The map, 
which shows the North and South American coasts in detail, was bought in 
2001 by Chinese lawyer and art collector Liu Gang. He says it is evidence 
supporting that Chinese explorer Zheng He's seventh voyage in 1418 took him 
to the west coast of the new world. Gang says he realized the maps 
significance after reading Gavin Menzies' bestseller "1421: the Year China 
Discovered America." Critics of the map believe it may be a fake and 
highlight a number of inconsistencies with it including language that does 
not fit the style of Ming China. Historical records do show that from 1405 
to 1433, Zheng, during the Ming period, led China's imperial Star Fleet on 
seven epic voyages that took him as far as the east coast of Africa.

*Stardust Returned Safely - Last month a mission some seven years in the 
making was successfully completed when a capsule containing particles from a 
comet safely landed in the Utah desert. The "Stardust" spacecraft, which was 
launched in 1999, used a tennis racket-sized collector to catch the dust 
particles from a comet known as Wild 2. While the mother ship remains in 
space, the capsule carried the collector back to Earth where it was opened 
by NASA scientists. Samples are to be shipped to laboratories all over the 
world for analysis. Researchers hope that the samples will yield clues to 
how the solar system formed as they are thought to be leftovers from the 
formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. The return of the 
capsule safely was an important success for NASA whose Genesis space probe, 
on a similar mission, carrying back solar wind samples, crashed when its 
parachutes failed to deploy back in 2004.

*Pluto's Moon an Icy Rock - Scientists using the European Southern 
Observatory have taken a close look at the Pluto's moon, Charon, and 
determined it is basically an icy rock with no atmosphere. Researchers 
achieved this observation by watching Charon as it passed in front of a star 
in July of 2005. Using this method they were also able to determine the 
density of the moon which is about 1.71 of that of water. The density is 
similar to that of Pluto's, which lends weight to theories that the planet 
was hit by another object, which caused a section of it to break off and 
eventually be trapped as a satellite. The occultation also allowed an 
accurate measurement of Charon's size which is between 753.75 and 757.5 
miles in diameter

*Eary Air Raids - Researchers think they have solved the mystery of a death 
that took place some 2 million years ago in Southern Africa. In 1924 the 
skull of possible human ancestor known as the Taung child was found. The 
child, part of species designated australopethicus africanus, was originally 
though to have been killed by leopard or saber-toothed cat. Lee Berger, a 
paleo-anthropologist at Johannesburg's University of Witwatersrand and 
fellow researcher Ron Clarke have advanced the theory that the child was 
killed by a large predatory bird. An examination of the skull shows there 
are ragged cuts in the shallow bones behind the eye sockets. A survey of 
thousands of monkey remains kill by bird attacks showed a pattern of damage 
consistent with those found on the australopethicus africanus skull. The 
bird would swoop down, pierce monkey skulls with their thumb-like back 
talons, then hover until the animal died. This leads researchers to think 
that human ancestors did just have to worry about attacks from land animals, 
but from the skies too.

*Ball Robots May Explore Mars - Two scientists are working on robots the 
shape and size of tennis balls that may someday explore Mars. Penelope 
Boston, associate professor at New Mexico Tech, and professor Steven 
Dubowsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are designing the 
devices so that they are relatively cheap and redundant. That way hundreds 
could be deployed for the same weight of a single rover and they could be 
used to explore areas, such as caves, that would be too difficult or 
dangerous for a traditional rover to go. If a few of the many robots were 
damaged in exploration they would be replaced by one of the many others that 
had been deployed. Each robot would have a set of sensing capabilities that 
might include testing air quality, temperature, humidity, or the ability to 
look for chemical or biological signatures. The devices would move by 
"hopping" about the surface. The scientists think that the robots could be 
deployed on mission to the moon or Mars within the next one or two decades.

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What's New at the Museum:

*The Mystery of the Rosetta Stone - Part I: - A little more than a century 
ago the history and culture of Ancient Egypt was a closed book. Nobody could 
understand the strange pictorial script that these people had left behind 
all over their fantastic monuments. What would finally provide the key to 
understanding this language and who figure out how to use it? 
(http://www.unmuseum.org/rosetta1.htm)

*Chapter Five of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" - Follow the 
expedition members in our graphic novel version as they try to avoid being 
eaten by hungry dinosaurs while finding a way to get home. 
(http://www.unmuseum.org/graphicclassic/lostw/index.htm)

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Ask the Curator:

*High Speed Hijinks - I have several questions concerning the speed of light 
and the speed of sound that my dad and I were discussing: 1: If you're in a 
car at night traveling the speed of light and you turn the headlights on 
will the headlights shine out in front of the car or will they just glow? 2: 
Let's say me and another guy are in an airplane traveling the speed of 
sound...one man in front of plane the other in back....the man in the back 
says hello. Will the man in the front hear him? Or say that both men stick 
their heads out the airplane (let's say it doesn't snap their heads 
off)....will the man in the front hear the man in the back if he says hello? 
Thanks - Shannon

An interesting set of questions! Let's talk about them in reverse order.

First, the men with their heads leaning out the window of the plane going 
faster than the speed of sound: Sound waves are vibrations that move through 
a medium. The medium can be almost anything, but it has to exist (sound does 
not travel through a vacuum like you would find in outer space). Different 
mediums have different speeds that sound will travel through them. For air 
at sea level this speed is roughly 12 miles a minute. That's why if you see 
a flash of lightning (The speed of light is so high we can say that the 
flash of the light reached you almost instantaneously) and then count three 
seconds - a twelfth of a minute - till the thunder arrives, you know that 
the strike occurred about a mile away.

If you made a sound while traveling through a medium faster than the speed 
of sound for that medium, it will only be heard behind you. A real life 
example is an airplane traveling faster than the speed of sound. You cannot 
hear it approach because it is traveling faster than the sound waves it is 
making. Because it is moving faster than sound, the waves tend to "pile up" 
on the plane and come off as a powerful shock wave streaming behind the 
plane. This shock wave is what we call a "sonic boom."

For this reason a man sticking his head outside the back of a plane would 
not be heard by a man with his head out the front of the plane. They are 
moving too fast for the sound waves to overtake the front of the plane.

For the two men inside the plane conditions are completely different. In 
this case, the plane is filled with a medium - air - that is traveling the 
same velocity as the plane. Since the air is not moving relative to the 
plane or the men, it's exactly the same as if the plane was parked on the 
ground. The sound moves from one man to the other (it doesn't matter front 
to back or back to front) at the speed of sound.

The final one we will tackle is the headlights at the speed of light. 
Technically we can't get a car, spaceship or any object with mass going at 
the speed of light. It simply requires more energy than there is available 
in the universe. However, we can talk about a headlight as it approaches the 
speed of light and such a situation should shed light your question. Light 
is unlike sound it that it needs no medium to travel though. That's why we 
can see stars through the vacuum of space (Before 
Einstein(http://www.unmuseum.org/einstein.htm) came out with his Special 
Theory scientists did speculated that there was a medium needed for light 
which they called "ether"). Light is special in that it travels through 
vacuum at a particular speed (about 186,000 miles per second) that that 
speed does not change no matter how fast the source of the light it 
traveling. Since there is no medium, the speed of the medium is irrelevant. 
If a stationary observer were to watch a car speeding by at near 90 percent 
of the speed of light, they would see the light traveling away from the 
front of the head lights at just 10 percent faster.

The weird part is what the driver of the car would see. From his point of 
view the light would appear to be speeding away from him at the full speed 
of light (186,000 mps). How is this possible? Time slows down as you pick up 
speed. Time would have slowed enough for the driver that when he measures 
the light speeding away from him it seems to go ten times farther than for 
the stationary observer, because the clock the driver is using to measure 
time is going only one tenth as fast.

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In History:

*The Mermaids of Papua New Guinea - For years people had claimed that 
mermaids lived off the coast of Papua New Guinea. These merfolk were said to 
look like people down to their hips and below have a tail ending in a 
horizontal fin. In February of 1985 an expedition to the area solved the 
mystery. Underwater photographs of a "mermaid" showed a creature called a 
dugong. Dugong's are the smallest members of the order Sirenia and relatives 
of the manatee. These aquatic mammals grow to no more than nine feet in 
length. Although such creatures don't look much like merfolk when seen by 
underwater cameras, water and and atmospheric conditions may have altered 
the creatures appearances from the surface at times making the look more 
human.

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In the Sky:

*Orion Guides - Feburary is an excellent time of year to let the 
constellation Orion, the Hunter, guide you to some night time stars. Orion 
is easilly recongnized by the three bright stars that form his belt. If you 
follow a line created by the belt to the SE you will run into Sirius, the 
brightest nighttime star. Follow the belt in the opposite direction and you 
will get to Aldebaran, eye of Taurus the Bull. Betelgeuse is the star that 
makes up Orion's shoulder and Rigel is the brighter of his feet.

Observed:

*Authorities Looking for Malaysian "Bigfoot" - Wildlife authorities in 
Malaysia are looking for a "Bigfoot" type creature in their southern 
jungles. The excitement started back in December when some fish farm workers 
claimed to have spotted three of the ape-like beasts on the edge of a forest 
in southern Johor state. Shortly after that a member of the indigenous tribe 
Orang Asli also claimed that he had seen one of the almost mythical ape-men. 
He described the creature as being hairy and brownish in color and about 12 
feet in height. The authorities are taking the claims seriously enough to 
think about setting up camera traps to capture images of anything roaming 
the jungles. There has also been a telephone hotline created so members of 
the public can report encounters they may have had with the animals. Reports 
of such beasts in Malaysia jungles go back for several decades

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On the Tube:

Currently we are only able to give accurate times and dates for these 
programs in the United States. Check local listings in other locations.

*NOVA - The Perfect Corpse - Forensic investigators tease secrets from the 
well-preserved bodies of people buried long ago in peat bogs. On the PBS: 
February 7 at 8 pm ET/PT

*Disappearance of the PX-15 - In 1969, as astronauts walked on the moon, a 
second mission, the PX-15 Ben Franklin, launched six aquanauts on an 
historic 30-day drift dive of the gulf stream. Eclipsed by the moonwalk, the 
story of the earthbound mission is told for the first time. On the Science 
Channel: FEB 23 @ 09:00 PM; FEB 24 @ 12:00 AM; FEB 24 @ 04:00 AM; FEB 24 @ 
10:00 AM; FEB 24 @ 02:00 PM; FEB 25 @ 02:00 PM; ET/PT

*Wild and Weird Rockets - The largest amateur rocket competition blasts off 
in Kansas -- with a chance to break world records and put some of the most 
unusual rockets into the atmosphere. Can the Aurora hit Mach 2? And can an 
outhouse really fly? On the Science Channel: FEB 22; @ 10:00 PM FEB 23 @ 
01:00 AM; FEB 23 @ 05:00 AM; FEB 23 @ 11:00 AM; FEB 23 @ 03:00 PM; FEB 26 @ 
03:00 PM; ET/PT

*Mastodon In Your Backyard - The Ultimate Guide - Learn how the mastodon 
evolved, migrated out of Africa, and survived in the North American forests 
for roughly 3.7 million years and dozens of climate changes. Explore the 
controversy among theories explaining how and why this species disappeared. 
On The Science Channel: FEB 13 @ 08:00 PM FEB 13 @ 11:00 PM; FEB 14 @ 03:00 
AM; FEB 14 @ 09:00 AM; FEB 14 @ 01:00 PM; FEB 18 @ 04:00 PM; ET/PT.

*Parallel Universe - The strange notion of parallel universes is gaining 
strength in the scientific community and may solve our most basic questions 
about the universe, including the origins of the Big Bang itself. On The 
Science Channel: FEB 07 @ 10:00 PM; FEB 08 @ 01:00 AM; FEB 08 @ 05:00 AM; 
FEB 08 @ 11:00 AM; FEB 08 @ 03:00 PM; FEB 12 @ 06:00 PM ET/PT.

*The Real Da Vinci Code - 'The Da Vinci Code' has been a phenomenal success 
with millions of readers hooked, but what do historians think of the book? 
Discover the facts about the Holy Grail and cut through the thicket of 
mystery that surrounds the subject. On The Discovery Channel: FEB 05 @ 08:00 
PM; FEB 05 @ 11:00 PM; FEB 06 @ 04:00 AM; FEB 06 @ 07:00 AM; FEB 06 @ 12:00 
PM; FEB 06 @ 03:00 PM ET/PT.

*Traveling Sideshow: Shocked and Amazed - From turn of the century dime 
museums to present day circuses and carnival midways, the sideshow has 
provided a bounty of remarkable sights and tales. Hear the stories of 
sideshow performers, including fire eaters and sword swallowers. On The 
Discovery Channel: JAN 26 @ 07:00 PM; JAN 27 @ 03:00 AM; JAN 27 @ 11:00 AM; 
FEB 23 @ 10:00 PM; FEB 24 @ 01:00 AM; FEB 24 @ 06:00 AM; FEB 24 @ 09:00 AM; 
FEB 24 @ 02:00 PM; FEB 24 @ 05:00 PM ET/PT.

*Deep Sea UFOs - Join us for a detailed examination of the little-known 
phenomenon of USOs, or "Unidentified Submerged Objects", an advanced type of 
UFO that can operate just as efficiently in water as in the atmosphere. 
These supposed otherworldly vessels have been reported, some believe, as far 
back as ancient Egypt. Others believe that USOs were reported by Alexander 
the Great and Christopher Columbus, and might even involve the lost city of 
Atlantis. Highlights include the 1967 "Shag Harbour Incident", a 
government-documented USO crash off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, and a 
trip to the area around Laguna Cartegena in Puerto Rico, a reported hotbed 
of USO activity. On History Channel: February 3 @ 6pm ET/PT.

*Digging for the Truth: America's Pyramids. - In 1539, Hernando de Soto's 
Conquistadors landed in Florida in search of new lands and treasure for the 
Spanish Crown. Three years later, they were run off the continent by Native 
American warriors that lived on enormous, earthen pyramids along the 
Mississippi River. Who were these people? And how did they defeat one of the 
world's most powerful armies? Follow Josh Bernstein as he paddles down the 
bayous; builds his own earthen pyramid with modern equipment; and 
scuba-dives the cold, dark waters of Wisconsin to solve the mystery of 
America's pyramid builders On History Channel: February 5 @ 7pm, ET/PT.

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*LGM: Check out the antics of Meep and Zeep as they try to find their flying 
saucer! (http://www.unmuseum.org/soearch/over.htm#lgm)