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World's smallest helicopter to fly in da Vinci birthplace

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:35:14 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: I like the gesture.

The world's smallest one-man helicopter will soon take flight in the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci, who is credited with having first thought of a vertical-flight machine, its developer said.

The 75-kilogram (165-pound) helicopter will make a demonstration flight in the city of Vinci, near Florence, on May 25, according to Japanese developer Gennai Yanagisawa, 75.

"Since the concept of our helicopter came from Italy, I always wanted to take a flight in the birthplace of da Vinci," Yanagisawa said.

"I feel like I'm greeting an ancestor. I hope da Vinci would be pleased," Yanagisawa told AFP.

Renaissance genius da Vinci was born in Vinci in 1452 and spent the first several years of his life there.

His sketch, dated in 1493 and discovered in the 19th century, shows a vertical flight machine. As in the drawing, the GEN H-4 has no tail.

The current model is priced at six million yen (58,250 dollars).

Tags: aviation, history of aviation

Britain releases batch of files on UFO sightings

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:32:27 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The truth is out there... and now in physorg.com.

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

AP) -- The men were air traffic controllers. Experienced, calm professionals. Nobody was drinking. But they were so worried about losing their jobs that they demanded their names be kept off the official report.

No one, they knew, would believe their claim an unidentified flying object landed at the airport they were overseeing in the east of England, touched down briefly, then took off again at tremendous speed. Yet that's what they reported happened at 4 p.m. on April 19, 1984.

The incident is one of hundreds of reported sightings contained in more than 1,000 pages of formerly secret UFO documents being released Wednesday by Britain's National Archives. It is one of the few that was never explained.

"They were absolutely astonished," he said. "It was a bright, circular object, flashing different colors, and after it touched down it disappeared at fantastic speed. The report comes from very qualified people, and it's one of the few that remained unexplained."

Tags: ufo

Physicists Demonstrate How Information Can Escape From Black Holes

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:24:06 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Hawking's idea was generally accepted by physicists until the late 1990s, when many began to doubt the assertion. Even Hawking himself renounced the idea in 2004. Yet no one, until now, has been able to provide a plausible mechanism for how information might escape from a black hole.

A team of physicists led by Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, now has discovered such a mechanism. Broadly, their findings expand space-time beyond its assumed size, thus providing room for information to reappear.

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Physicists at Penn State have provided a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes, those regions of space where gravity is so strong that, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, not even light can escape. The team's findings pave the way toward ending a decades-long debate sparked by renowned physicist Steven Hawking. The team's work will be published in the 20 May 2008 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

In the 1970s, Hawking showed that black holes evaporate by quantum processes; however, he asserted that information, such as the identity of matter that is gobbled up by black holes, is permanently lost. At the time, Hawking's assertion threatened to turn quantum mechanics--the most successful physical theory posited by humankind--on its head, since a fundamental tenet of the theory is that information cannot be lost.

Tags: physics, quantum physics, black holes