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.

Koogle The Kosher Google Debuts

Religiously devout Jews barred by rabbis from surfing the Internet may now “Koogle” it on a new “kosher” search engine, the site manager announced.

Yossi Altman said Koogle, a play on the names of a Jewish noodle pudding and the ubiquitous Google, appears to meet the standards of Orthodox rabbis, who restrict use of the Web to ensure followers avoid viewing sexually explicit material.

The site, at http://www.koogle.co.il/, omits religiously objectionable material, such as most photographs of women which Orthodox rabbis view as immodest, Altman said.

Its links to Israeli news and shopping sites also filter out items most ultra-Orthodox Israelis are forbidden by rabbis to have in their homes, such a television sets.

“This is a kosher alternative for ultra-Orthodox Jews so that they may surf the Internet,” Altman said by telephone.

The site was developed in part at the encouragement of rabbis who sought a solution to the needs of ultra-Orthodox Jews to browse the Web particularly for vital services, he said.

Nothing can be posted on the Jewish Sabbath, when religious law bans all types of work and business, Altman said. “If you try to buy something on the Sabbath, it gets stuck and won’t let you.”