Jordanian Paper’s April Fool’s UFOs Spark Panic

A Jordanian newspaper’s April Fool’s Day report chronicling a late-night visit by 10-foot-tall aliens in flying saucers sparked public panic and almost led to the town’s emergency evacuation, officials said.

The Al Ghad newspaper published a front-page article April 1 about the fake UFO landing near the desert town of Jafr, some 185 miles (300 kilometers) from the capital, Amman. The report said the UFOs lit up the whole town, interrupted communications and sent fearful residents streaming into the streets.

Jafr’s mayor, Mohammed Mleihan, got caught up in the paper’s prank and said he sent security authorities in search of the aliens.

“Students didn’t go to school, their parents were frightened and I almost evacuated the town’s 13,000 residents,” Mleihan told The Associated Press. “People were scared that aliens would attack them.”

A Jordanian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss security issues, said an emergency plan was almost enacted in Jafr.

Britain Pulls The Plug On Its UFO Hotline

Britain’s military has closed a hotline that took reports of UFOs.

The Ministry of Defense says that the phone service and an associated e-mail address were taken offline Tuesday.

The military explained Friday that more than 50 years of UFO sightings had not revealed any evidence of alien life or threats to the U.K.

It said that there was “no defense value in investigating UFO reports” and that the money could better be used funding operations in Afghanistan.

The officer who used to deal with the reports has now been reassigned.

European Scientists Find 32 New Planets

European astronomers announced they had found 32 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system and said they believe their find means that 40 percent or more of Sun-like stars have such planets.

The planets range in size from about five times the size of Earth to about five times the size of Jupiter, they said. More have been discovered, too, they said, promising more announcements later this year.

The latest discoveries bring the total of known exoplanets to about 400, said Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland.

“Nature doesn’t like a vacuum so if there is space to put a planet it will put a planet there,” Udry told reporters in an Internet briefing from a meeting of astronomers in Porto, Portugal.

“More than 40 percent of stars like the sun have low mass planets,” Udry added.

The team used the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS, a spectrograph attached to the European Southern Observatory‘s 3.6-metre (11.8-foot) telescope in La Silla, Chile.

The spectrograph does not image the planets directly but scientists can calculate their size and mass by detecting tiny changes in a star’s wobbling caused by a planet’s small gravitational pull.

Astronomers are keen to find Earthlike planets as these are the most likely to harbor life. HARPS has spotted 75 planets circling 30 different stars. The ESO team did not give details of which stars the 32 new planets were circling.

IgNobel Prizes Awarded – Congratulations To The Winners!

Engineers who invented a brassiere that converts quickly into a gas mask, pathologists who determined that beer bottles can crack your skull even when empty and Irish police officers who mistakenly wrote tickets to “Driver’s Licence” all won spoof “IgNobel” prizes.

Prizes also went to Zimbabwe for issuing banknotes that range in value from one Zimbabwean cent to 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars, to Mexican scientists who made diamonds out of tequila and to the directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks that suffered spectacular collapses.

The IgNobel prizes — a play on the name of the Nobel prizes awarded every October from Stockholm and Oslo — are given out by the Harvard-based humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard Computer Society.

The Public Health prize went to Elena Bodnar of Hinsdale, Illinois and colleagues who designed and patented a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.

Ireland’s police won the literature prize from writing more than 50 traffic tickets to a frequent visitor and speeder named Prawo Jazdy. In Polish, this means “driver’s licence”.

Pathologist Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland won for a study they did to determine whether an empty beer bottle does more or less damage to the human skull than a full one in a bar fight.

“Both suffice in breaking the human skull. However, the empty ones are more sturdy,” Bolliger said by e-mail. This is because the pressure of the beer, aided by carbonation, makes a full beer bottle explode quickly.

Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank which is struggling to fight runaway inflation, won an award “for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one Zimbabwean cent to $100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars.

The economics prize went to managers at Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank and Central Bank of Iceland “for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa”.

Donald Unger of California was honoured for a lifelong, experiment in which he cracked the knuckles of his left hand but never his right for more than 60 years to prove that cracking your knuckles does not cause arthritis.

Other winners included farmers who showed that naming your cows makes them give more milk, researchers who used panda droppings to break down household trash and a scientist who calculated why pregnant women do not fall over.

Body Worlds Plans Show Dedicated To Sex

German anatomists plan a new show dedicated solely to dead bodies having sex as part of th Body Worlds exhibitions.

Gunther von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley show corpses prepared using a technique invented by von Hagens called “plastination,” that removes water from specimens and preserves them with silicon rubber or epoxy resin.

“It’s not my intention to show certain sexual poses. My goal is really to show the anatomy and the function,” Body Worlds creative director Whalley told Reuters in an interview, adding the sex exhibition may open next year.

Body Worlds exhibitions, visited by 27 million people across the world, have been criticized for presenting entire corpses, stripped of skin to reveal the muscles and organs underneath, in lifelike and often theatrical positions.

Von Hagens has already triggered uproar with a new exhibit which shows just two copulating corpses.

German politicians called the current “Cycle of Life” show charting conception to old age “revolting” and “unacceptable” when it showed in Berlin earlier this year because it included copulating cadavers.

The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should wear fewer clothes in Zurich than was the case in Berlin.

“Switzerland is the first country that already said from the outset that we could show whatever we wanted,” said von Hagens.

“Zurich is ready … but it’s maybe not so easy in every other town,” he said. “We have discussed whether it is proper to show homosexuality and in what way. This is a very delicate subject.”

Von Hagens and Whalley said they both intended to donate their bodies for plastination, but would not leave instructions about how to display them, dismissing this as vanity.

“I find it a great opportunity to give something to others by donating my body, namely self-awareness,” said Whalley.

Von Hagens said he and some other body donors even saw plastination as an alternative to burial or cremation, giving them more certainty about would happen to their bodies after death.

“Cremation for me is hell,” he said.

Astronaut Ilan Ramon’s Son Dies In Fighter Jet Crash

The son of the late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon was killed in the crash of an Israeli Air Force fighter plane.

Capt. Assaf Ramon, 21, died Sunday while flying the F-16 aircraft as part of advanced training.  He had completed the training course for pilots with honors in June, receiving his wings from President Shimon Peres.  He had escaped death in a training flight in March.

His father, Israel’s first astronaut, was killed aboard the U.S. space shuttle Columbia in 2003 when it broke apart upon its return to earth.

The Air Force ordered all F-16 training halted until further notice. The plane crashed in the Hebron Hills.

Ilan Ramon himself was a fighter pilot in the Air Force and participated in the 1981 strike on an Iraqi nuclear reactor.

Assaf Ramon, the oldest of four children, was 15 when his father died.  He had said he would like to become a pilot like his father and perhaps even an astronaut.

Jewish-American astronaut Garrett Reisman, a close friend of the Ramon family, departed Sunday night from the U.S. to attend the funeral. Since the explosion of the Columbia space shuttle in which Assaf’s father Ilan was killed, Reisman has maintained ties with the widow and her children. According to some accounts, Reisman taught Assaf to fly when he was 17.

Asteroid Comes Mighty Close To Mother Earth

An asteroid of a similar size to a rock that exploded above Siberia in 1908 with the force of a thousand atomic bombs whizzed close past Earth on Monday, astronomers said.

2009 DD45, estimated to be between 68 and 152 feet across, raced by at 1344 GMT on Monday, the Planetary Society and astronomers’ blogs reported.

The gap was just 44,750 miles, or a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Moon and only twice the height of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, the website space.com said.

The estimated size is similar to that of an asteroid or comet that exploded above Tunguska, Siberia, on June 30 1908, flattening 80 million trees in a swathe of more than 800 square miles.

2009 DD45 was spotted last Saturday by astronomers at the Siding Spring Survey in Australia, and was verified by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre (MPC), which catalogues Solar System rocks.

The closest flyby listed by the MPC is 2004 FU162, a small asteroid about 20 feet across which came within about 4,000 miles of Earth in March 2004.