A former undercover police officer has confessed his lies in court more than 30 years ago may have sent 150 people wrongfully to prison.
Police said they had started a criminal investigation into the activities of Patrick O’Brien after he wrote to Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias and former Police Commissioner Howard Broad, saying he was racked with guilt after carrying a “dreadful secret” for more than 30 years.
Mr O’Brien, an undercover officer during drugs operations in the 1970s, was the star witness in court trials but he later confessed he lied on oath every time he testified, the New Zealand Herald reported today.
His confession was made in November 2007 and police hired Wellington lawyer Bruce Squire, QC, to investigate.
He interviewed Mr O’Brien in July 2009 and reviewed court files, and a copy of his completed inquiry was now with police.
Mr O’Brien told the newspaper he would co-operate fully with the inquiry and plead guilty to any charges.
In his confession, he said he could not guess the number of people who were sent to prison because of his lies because he stopped counting arrests at 150, half-way through his three-year undercover stint.
He lied to the courts and juries to get convictions in every case, he said. As well, he was often high on drugs, including cannabis, cocaine, heroin and LSD – but never during trials.
Full story over at Stuff.nz
Jun 25, 2011
Polly-math Parrots, smarter than you think
Parrots are even less bird-brained than previously thought, suggests a new study in the journal Biology Letters. In a series of tests, researchers have learned that some African grey parrots can use logical reasoning to uncover hidden food.
Sandra Mikolasch and her colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria trained seven African grey parrots to find treats stashed under cups. While the birds watched, Mikolasch placed food under one cup and left an adjacent cup empty—the parrots had to choose the correct cup to get their snacks.
After training the birds, Mikolasch hid a seed and a walnut under two separate cups in front of the on-looking parrots. In plain view, she removed one of the treats and allowed the birds to choose cups again. Three of the parrots were able to correctly pick the cup with food at least 70 percent of the time. If the birds were purely guessing, they would have chosen the correct cup roughly half of the time.
Mikolasch repeated the experiment with one alteration: she masked her movements behind an opaque screen. She removed one of the treats and showed it to the birds, then had the birds choose cups. By noting which snack was removed, one of the parrots, Awisa, was able to deduce which cup still had food in 23 of the 30 trials (about 77 percent). The other parrots chose more randomly. Mikolasch suspects that Awisa was successful because she’s the parrot equivalent of a “whiz kid.”
Full story with examples at Discover
Sandra Mikolasch and her colleagues at the University of Vienna in Austria trained seven African grey parrots to find treats stashed under cups. While the birds watched, Mikolasch placed food under one cup and left an adjacent cup empty—the parrots had to choose the correct cup to get their snacks.
After training the birds, Mikolasch hid a seed and a walnut under two separate cups in front of the on-looking parrots. In plain view, she removed one of the treats and allowed the birds to choose cups again. Three of the parrots were able to correctly pick the cup with food at least 70 percent of the time. If the birds were purely guessing, they would have chosen the correct cup roughly half of the time.
Mikolasch repeated the experiment with one alteration: she masked her movements behind an opaque screen. She removed one of the treats and showed it to the birds, then had the birds choose cups. By noting which snack was removed, one of the parrots, Awisa, was able to deduce which cup still had food in 23 of the 30 trials (about 77 percent). The other parrots chose more randomly. Mikolasch suspects that Awisa was successful because she’s the parrot equivalent of a “whiz kid.”
Full story with examples at Discover
BBC Newsnight: Theta healing, the new crackpot faith healing movement
There’s a new movement in what’s known as Theta Healing, it’s a form of faith healing and it’s here in the UK. It’s practitioners claim to be able to regrow parts of the body and even cure AIDS. Newsnight tries to uncover the truth.
Rare Billy the Kid Photo to go on Auction
The two-by-three-inch tintype is the only known adult portrait of the Wild West gunslinger who variously went by William Bonney, Henry Antrim, Henry McCarty or just "the Kid."
It has also been one of the most commonly reproduced images of the outlaw since it appeared in Sheriff Pat Garrett's book on how he tracked down and killed the Kid in 1881.
"This is it -- the only one," said Brian Lebel, auctioneer for the 22nd annual Old West Show and Auction to be held in Denver, Colorado.
"We'll have over 500 (people) in the audience. We have eight telephone lines and we have three different Internet hookups, so people can bid live online with real-time bidding (and) with a camera, so you can see the auctioneer."
The unidentified photographer originally made four identical tintypes, but the other three have been lost.
The one remaining tintype is owned by brothers Stephen and Art Upham of California and Arizona, who last displayed it publicly in a museum in Lincoln, New Mexico, in the mid-1980s.
It has been sealed in a nitrogen-filled envelope and kept in a safety deposit box since then, Lebel said.
Billy the Kid's jawline appears asymmetrical in the photograph, possibly because he made a face or moved his head during the long exposure time.
The image is smeared across the hips -- apparently from the gunslinger stuffing the tintype into his pocket before it dried.
For years, Billy the Kid was thought to be left-handed because the tintype shows him wearing a holster on his left side, inspiring the 1958 film, "The Left-Handed Gun."
In fact, the holster was on his right side, and only appears to be on the left because tintype photography creates a mirror image of the subject.
Read more at Discovery News
55-Foot Beached Chinese 'Sea Monster' Identified
Live Science showed the photo to three marine biology experts: Scott Baker of Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute, Bill Perrin, senior scientist for marine mammals at the National Marine Fisheries Service, and Bob Brownell, senior scientist for international protected resources with NOAA's Fisheries Service.
All three said they think it's a whale. As to the exact species, they're not certain, but Live Science quoted Baker as saying, "it's a balaenopterid."
He added, "Judging from the reported size of 55 ft., maybe a fin whale. From the photo, however, it does not really look to be 55 ft., and so might be a smaller balaenopterid, like one of the Bryde's whales."
Read more at Discovery News
Jun 24, 2011
Dying Star Betelgeuse Spews Fiery Nebula
Betelgeuse, some 640 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, may look pretty healthy when you see it shining in the night sky (it is one of the brightest stars out there) but as this infrared image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows, Betelgeuse is falling apart... literally.
It's been known for some time that Betelgeuse is belching huge clouds of stellar plasma into space -- this is a symptom of the star's age and size. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star a fraction of the age of our sun, but because it is so massive (18 times the mass of the sun) it lives fast and dies young.
The 10 million year-old star has run out of hydrogen in its core -- and is now fusing helium into carbon and oxygen -- causing Betelgeuse to "puff up" to gargantuan proportions. If Betelgeuse was our sun, it would fill the entire inner solar system with its surface reaching the orbit of Jupiter! Earth would be toast.
The interior of the star is a violent bubbling mess, with huge plumes of searing hot plasma warping the shape of the star. Observations have previously shown Betelgeuse to be "lumpy," rather than a neat, spherical star. There are also some indications that the star is also shrinking, potentially revealing it is close (in cosmic timescales) to collapsing and exploding as a supernova -- but never fear, Betelgeuse poses no threat to life on Earth.
In the final stages of a red supergiant star's life, huge quantities of material are blown into space. As this ESO image shows, Betelgeuse is creating a vast, previously unseen, dusty cool nebula, extending 60 billion kilometers from its surface.
In the center of the image, the small red disk is Betelgeuse and the surrounding cloud (inside the black disk) is previous observations of plasma being belched into space. The colorful cloud surrounding the black disk comprises the new ESO observations taken by the ESO's Very Large Array (VLA).
Read more at Discovery News
Study suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress
Between the crowds and the noise and the pressure, city life often seems to set one’s brain on edge. Turns out that could literally be true.
A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers. The findings don’t indicate which aspects of city life had changed the students’ brains, but provide a framework for future investigations.
“Whether people are exposed to noise, live near a park, have a big group of friends or not — you can do those experiments, and tease apart which parts of urban living are associated with these changes,” said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a psychiatrist at German’s Central Institute of Mental Health.
Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness.
Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.
What those causes are is unknown, but many researchers have speculated that urban social environments are partly responsible. After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.
Read more at Wired
A study of German college students suggests that urbanite brains are more susceptible to stress, particularly social stress, than those of country dwellers. The findings don’t indicate which aspects of city life had changed the students’ brains, but provide a framework for future investigations.
“Whether people are exposed to noise, live near a park, have a big group of friends or not — you can do those experiments, and tease apart which parts of urban living are associated with these changes,” said Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, a psychiatrist at German’s Central Institute of Mental Health.
Meyer-Lindenberg’s findings, published June 23 in Nature, are a neurological investigation into the underpinnings of a disturbing social trend: As a rule, city life seems to generate mental illness.
Compared to their rural counterparts, city dwellers have higher levels of anxiety and mood disorders. The schizophrenia risk of people raised in cities is almost double. Literature on the effect is so thorough that researchers say it’s not just correlation, as might be expected if anxious people preferred to live in cities. Neither is it a result of heredity. It’s a cause-and-effect relationship between environment and mind.
What those causes are is unknown, but many researchers have speculated that urban social environments are partly responsible. After all, cities are hyper-social places, in which residents must be constantly on guard, and have mathematically more opportunity to experience stressful interaction. Too much stress may ultimately alter the brain, leaving it ill-equipped to handle further stress and prone to mental illness.
Read more at Wired
Jun 23, 2011
Big Dinos Stayed Cool
Because body temperature usually rises the larger an animal gets, the findings, published in the latest issue of Science, suggest huge sauropods had mechanisms for cooling themselves off.
"What we can say is that sauropods did not have body temperatures that were as cold as modern crocodiles and alligators," lead author Robert Eagle, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, told Discovery News.
Eagle pointed out that many models had predicted that sauropods would have high body temperatures of over 104 degrees.
"This suggests that sauropods may have had cooling mechanisms to prevent very high body temperatures being reached due to their gigantic size," he said.
So-called "gigantotherms" maintain warm temperatures due to sheer size. Plant-eating dinosaurs may have then been cold-blooded, in the sense that they could have depended on their environment for heat, as opposed to generating it internally, as warm-blooded species do.
"If you're an animal that you can approximate as a sphere of meat the size of a room, you can't be cold unless you're dead," explained co-author John Eiler, a Caltech geochemist.
Eiler, Eagle and their colleagues made the determinations after studying 11 teeth belonging to Brachiosaurus brancai and Camarasaurus dinosaurs.
The scientists measured concentrations of the rare isotopes carbon-13 and oxygen-18 in bioapatite, a mineral found in teeth and bone. How often these isotopes bond with each other depends on temperature, so the lower the temperature, the more carbon-13 and oxygen-18 clumps exist. Measuring these clumps revealed the temperature of the environment in which the mineral formed inside the dinosaur.
This geochemical "thermometer" shows Brachiosaurus had a temperature of about 100.8 degrees, while Camarasaurus had a temperature of approximately 96.3 degrees.
Eagle said that Jurassic temperatures were probably "significantly hotter than today," so even if sauropods were cold-blooded they likely were not very restricted, in terms of habitat range, due to climate. In fact, they probably spent a lot of time trying to cool down their hefty bodies.
The researchers suspect the long necks and tails of these animals might have dispelled some heat. Lower metabolic rates might have helped to reduce internal warmth.
Read more at Discovery News
Lab yeast make evolutionary leap to multicellularity
IN JUST a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells. This suggests that the evolutionary leap to multicellularity may be a surprisingly small hurdle.
Multicellularity has evolved at least 20 times since life began, but the last time was about 200 million years ago, leaving few clues to the precise sequence of events. To understand the process better, William Ratcliff and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in St Paul set out to evolve multicellularity in a common unicellular lab organism, brewer's yeast.
Their approach was simple: they grew the yeast in a liquid and once each day gently centrifuged each culture, inoculating the next batch with the yeast that settled out on the bottom of each tube. Just as large sand particles settle faster than tiny silt, groups of cells settle faster than single ones, so the team effectively selected for yeast that clumped together.
Sure enough, within 60 days - about 350 generations - every one of their 10 culture lines had evolved a clumped, "snowflake" form. Crucially, the snowflakes formed not from unrelated cells banding together but from cells that remained connected to one another after division, so that all the cells in a snowflake were genetically identical relatives. This relatedness provides the conditions necessary for individual cells to cooperate for the good of the whole snowflake.
"The key step in the evolution of multicellularity is a shift in the level of selection from unicells to groups. Once that occurs, you can consider the clumps to be primitive multicellular organisms," says Ratcliff.
In some ways, the snowflakes do behave as if they are multicellular. They grow bigger by cell division and when the snowflakes reach a certain size a portion breaks off to form a daughter cell. This "life cycle" is much like the juvenile and adult stages of many multicellular organisms.
After a few hundred further generations of selection, the snowflakes also began to show a rudimentary division of labour. As the snowflakes reach their "adult" size, some cells undergo programmed cell death, providing weak points where daughters can break off. This lets the snowflakes make more offspring while leaving the parent large enough to sink quickly to the base of the tube, ensuring its survival. Snowflake lineages exposed to different evolutionary pressures evolved different levels of cell death. Since it is rarely to the advantage of an individual cell to die, this is a clear case of cooperation for the good of the larger organism. This is a key sign that the snowflakes are evolving as a unit, Ratcliff reported last week at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution in Norman, Oklahoma.
Other researchers familiar with the work were generally enthusiastic. "It really seemed to me to have the elements of the unfolding in real time of a major transition," says Ben Kerr, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "The fact that it happened so quickly was really exciting."
Sceptics, however, point out that many yeast strains naturally form colonies, and that their ancestors were multicellular tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. As a result, they may have retained some evolved mechanisms for cell adhesion and programmed cell death, effectively stacking the deck in favour of Ratcliff's experiment.
"I bet that yeast, having once been multicellular, never lost it completely," says Neil Blackstone, an evolutionary biologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. "I don't think if you took something that had never been multicellular you would get it so quickly."
Read more at New Scientist
Multicellularity has evolved at least 20 times since life began, but the last time was about 200 million years ago, leaving few clues to the precise sequence of events. To understand the process better, William Ratcliff and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in St Paul set out to evolve multicellularity in a common unicellular lab organism, brewer's yeast.
Their approach was simple: they grew the yeast in a liquid and once each day gently centrifuged each culture, inoculating the next batch with the yeast that settled out on the bottom of each tube. Just as large sand particles settle faster than tiny silt, groups of cells settle faster than single ones, so the team effectively selected for yeast that clumped together.
Sure enough, within 60 days - about 350 generations - every one of their 10 culture lines had evolved a clumped, "snowflake" form. Crucially, the snowflakes formed not from unrelated cells banding together but from cells that remained connected to one another after division, so that all the cells in a snowflake were genetically identical relatives. This relatedness provides the conditions necessary for individual cells to cooperate for the good of the whole snowflake.
"The key step in the evolution of multicellularity is a shift in the level of selection from unicells to groups. Once that occurs, you can consider the clumps to be primitive multicellular organisms," says Ratcliff.
In some ways, the snowflakes do behave as if they are multicellular. They grow bigger by cell division and when the snowflakes reach a certain size a portion breaks off to form a daughter cell. This "life cycle" is much like the juvenile and adult stages of many multicellular organisms.
After a few hundred further generations of selection, the snowflakes also began to show a rudimentary division of labour. As the snowflakes reach their "adult" size, some cells undergo programmed cell death, providing weak points where daughters can break off. This lets the snowflakes make more offspring while leaving the parent large enough to sink quickly to the base of the tube, ensuring its survival. Snowflake lineages exposed to different evolutionary pressures evolved different levels of cell death. Since it is rarely to the advantage of an individual cell to die, this is a clear case of cooperation for the good of the larger organism. This is a key sign that the snowflakes are evolving as a unit, Ratcliff reported last week at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution in Norman, Oklahoma.
Other researchers familiar with the work were generally enthusiastic. "It really seemed to me to have the elements of the unfolding in real time of a major transition," says Ben Kerr, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "The fact that it happened so quickly was really exciting."
Sceptics, however, point out that many yeast strains naturally form colonies, and that their ancestors were multicellular tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. As a result, they may have retained some evolved mechanisms for cell adhesion and programmed cell death, effectively stacking the deck in favour of Ratcliff's experiment.
"I bet that yeast, having once been multicellular, never lost it completely," says Neil Blackstone, an evolutionary biologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. "I don't think if you took something that had never been multicellular you would get it so quickly."
Read more at New Scientist
Jun 22, 2011
Tyrannosaurus Rex 'hunted in packs'
Tyrannosaurids, including the Tyrannosaurus Rex, have traditionally been portrayed by experts as formidable but solitary and dull-witted creatures because their skeletons were found alone.
But new research based on finds in the Gobi Desert suggests that the species was not only equipped with the build and speed for pack hunting, but also the brain capacity to work together as a team, experts claim.
Dr Philip Currie, of the University of Alberta, said that evidence from 90 skeletons of Tarbosaurus Bataar – a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex – suggested strongly that about half a dozen of the dinosaurs were part of a social group that died together.
He said Tyrannosaurids' hunting technique may have involved juveniles chasing and catching prey, with fully grown adults taking over and delivering the fatal bites.
This is because younger Tyrannosaurids' skeletons show they would have been faster and more agile than adults, which were slower but much heavier and more powerful.
The close similarities between the Tyrannosaurid family – as well as evidence from a quarry site in South Dakota, USA where three Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons were found in close proximity – mean that Tyrannosauruses would likely have been capable of the same behaviour as their cousins, Dr Currie said.
He added: "We now have a lot of sites worldwide which show these Tyrannosaurids were grouping animals which at certain times did get together into gangs, either to hunt or move from one region to another.
Read more and see the video at The Telegraph
But new research based on finds in the Gobi Desert suggests that the species was not only equipped with the build and speed for pack hunting, but also the brain capacity to work together as a team, experts claim.
Dr Philip Currie, of the University of Alberta, said that evidence from 90 skeletons of Tarbosaurus Bataar – a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex – suggested strongly that about half a dozen of the dinosaurs were part of a social group that died together.
He said Tyrannosaurids' hunting technique may have involved juveniles chasing and catching prey, with fully grown adults taking over and delivering the fatal bites.
This is because younger Tyrannosaurids' skeletons show they would have been faster and more agile than adults, which were slower but much heavier and more powerful.
The close similarities between the Tyrannosaurid family – as well as evidence from a quarry site in South Dakota, USA where three Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons were found in close proximity – mean that Tyrannosauruses would likely have been capable of the same behaviour as their cousins, Dr Currie said.
He added: "We now have a lot of sites worldwide which show these Tyrannosaurids were grouping animals which at certain times did get together into gangs, either to hunt or move from one region to another.
Read more and see the video at The Telegraph
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