On:

James Greenleaf, Paul Ogburn and Mostafa Fatemi of the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minnesota have found that ultrasound examinations during pregnancy expose the fetus to a sound as loud as a subway train coming into a station. But they don?t think the experience causes the baby any lasting harm.

Ultrasound machines generate sound waves in pulses lasting less than one ten-thousandth of a second. Pulses are used because a continuous soundwave could generate too much heat in the tissue being examined.

Neither adults nor fetuses can hear the actual ultrasound waves because they vibrate at too high a frequency for our ears to detect them. But researchers found that ultrasound causes secondary vibrations in a woman?s uterus.
read more

On:

The Great Falls Tribune reports that cattle mutilations have returned to Montana. The same bizarre mutilations occurred on ranches in the area 20 years ago and local law enforcement agencies are still baffled. There were rumors about UFOs, cults and government conspiracies. The mutilations stopped in the 1990s, but this summer they began again.
read more

On:

In a report titled ?Signs of Life,? a multidisciplinary group of scientists talk about techniques and technologies that can be used to detect evidence for extraterrestrial life on other worlds.

?The report is based on a workshop that brought together a healthy spectrum of senior experts and young researchers,? says Jonathan Lunine, professor of planetary science and physics at the University of Arizona in Tucson. ?The discussion was vigorous and exciting. This is a different world of life detection than that in 1976, at the time of Viking.?
read more

On:

The Greek philosopher Plato first described an ancient island kingdom buried beneath the sea around 360 BC. Since then, scientists and adventurers have searched for the sunken remains of Atlantis. They?ve combed through Plato?s Dialogues, looking for clues about whether Atlantis actually existed, where it was and how it vanished.

French geologist and prehistorian Jacques Collina-Girard believes Atlantis was a real place?a small mid-channel island sitting in what is now the Strait of Gibraltar that sank 11,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, when rising seas deluged it along with six other nearby islands.
read more