World renowned UFO researcher Timothy Good tells BBC WM about the UFO sightings wave gripping Britain, the government's secret liaisons with extraterrestrials and why a real 'Star Wars' might be coming.
Read: Black Country DeLorean >
Timothy Good
Timothy Good is considered one of the world's leading experts on the UFO phenomenon.
For more than 40 years he has studied the controversial subject, having interviewed thousands of witnesses worldwide, many from military, governmental and scientific backgrounds.
Timothy has written numerous best-selling books on UFOs and aliens - which he calls 'the most highly classified subject on earth' - and has acted as a consultant to several US Congress investigations into the phenomenon.
An international lecturer, in January 1989 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Timothy became the first UFO researcher from the west to be interviewed on Russian television.
UFO over house
With UFO fever sweeping Britain, Timothy Good spoke live to BBC WM on Wednesday 9th July 2008.
Original Source

   more »

By Davide Castelvecch
Simulating the complexity of quantum physics would quickly overwhelm even the most advanced of today’s computers.If The Matrix really existed, it would probably have to be a quantum simulator. The fictional computer in that story can create virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real one and project them into people’s minds. But the real world includes quantum phenomena, something ordinary computers can’t fully simulate.
Now physicists have created a rudimentary prototype of a machine that simulates quantum phenomena using quantum physics, rather than using data kept in a classical computer. While the new device can't make people fly like the Matrix does, it demonstrates a technique that could enable physicists to create, in the virtual world, materials that don't yet exist in nature and perhaps figure out how to build, in the real world, superconductors that work at room temperature, for example.
Tobias Schätz of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and his collaborators built a model of the smallest solid object imaginable — one made of two atoms — by suspending two ions in a vacuum. The researchers used laser light to vary the electrical repulsion of the ions in order to simulate ...   more »

Biometric scans to verify students taking GMATs
By JOHN HECHINGER
In a sign of increasing concern about cheating, the nation's top business schools will soon require a high-tech identity check for standardized admissions tests.
Aspiring corporate executives taking the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, will have to undergo a "palm vein" scan, which takes an infrared picture of the blood coursing through their hands. The image — which resembles a highway interchange in a major city — is unique to every individual. The scans are used widely in Japan among users of automated teller machines but only recently have appeared in the United States.
Palm-vein scanning on GMAT test takers will begin next month in Korea and India, with U.S. centers starting as early as this fall and a worldwide rollout by May.
The technology targets "proxy" test taking, a fraud in which applicants hire high-scoring impostors to take exams in their place. Five years ago, federal authorities broke up a ring of six people who took more than 590 exams, including GMATs, for customers who paid at least $3,000.
Original Source
   more »

By Reuters   
Tags: biofuels, Muslim nations, D8  
Warning that escalating food and fuel prices could lead to disaster, a group of developing Muslim nations called on Tuesday for urgent measures
to lift food and oil output and a rethink on bio-fuels.  
Malaysia and Indonesia, the world's largest producers of palm oil, told the summit of eight developing Muslim-majority countries (D8), that they wanted to see an end to the conversion of arable land for bio-fuel production.
Palm oil is used as a feedstock to produce biofuel and also widely consumed in the region as cooking oil.
Leaders of the eight nations comprising nearly one billion people said at the summit in Kuala Lumpur that the twinproblems of food and energy security were putting a severe strain on their countries, especially on the poor.
The group of Developing Eight (D-8) countries - Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, Malaysia, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh - represent about one billion people, or 14 percent of the world's population.
"We must act on it once and in concert. To delay action on this great challenge of our time is to court disaster," Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the meeting. Yudhoyono's popularity in his ...   more »

PUPILS are being fingerprinted for food at a Huddersfield school.
All Saints Catholic College at Bradley Bar has followed other Kirklees schools in introducing a biometric payment system to replace cash for school dinners.
Students have had their fingers scanned to set up accounts like bank accounts.
They contain information about cash balances and what they have bought and when.
Instead of handing over cash at the till the pupils press their finger against a machine which recognises the print and relays the information.
A spokeswoman for the school said: “Each individual’s finger and thumb prints are unique.
“The biometric cashless system will store only a section of the print as a unique number and not as an image
“Each student will have that unique number stored on a central server.
“This is done by scanning the finger or thumb with a non-evasive electronic scanner, which passes light over the finger or thumb.”
The system is designed to make serving quicker and more efficient.
Information on the purpose for which fingerprints are gathered and who will use the data is provided to students to comply with the Data Protection Act. The college says it will “only be used by parties ...   more »