Nigeria’s space agency is no joke. It has launched satellites and aims to put Africans into space.

LONDON, U.K. — Recently I received an email labeled “Strictly Confidential” from Dr. Bakare Tunde, who said he was astronautics project manager at Nigeria’s space agency. He also told me he was the cousin of the first African in space, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde, and that this poor intrepid astronaut had been stranded on a secret Soviet military station ever since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1990.

“He is in good humor,” read the email, “but wants to come home.” No wonder he was keen to hurtle back earthwards, Tunde told me his cousin had accumulated almost $15 million in pay. For the price of my bank account details, I could claim 20 percent and fly the brave chap home to collect my portion of the earnings and transfer the rest on to him like the good space-supporter that I was.

This classic 419 scam is indeed far-fetched but one aspect of it is true.

Nigeria really does have a space agency. The west African nation’s National Space Research and Development Agency is already celebrating its 10th anniversary. And as America and Europe’s space agencies set their sights on joint exploration of Mars, Nigeria has big plans of its own: It wants to send a Nigerian up into space in 2015, making Nigeria home to the first black African astronaut.

Sitting across from Gerald Okeke, it’s hard to fathom that the quietly spoken fellow might one day fly beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Okeke, 28, is one of 27 Nigerian engineers being trained how to design and build an earth observation satellite in the U.K., at private British company Surrey Satellites Technology in Guildford, southeast of London. We are sitting in the canteen of the spacecraft-mad company, from whose ceilings dangle silver starburst lights and whose rubbish bins are shaped like shiny rockets.

“There is much to learn but we are coping,” says Okeke, whose father was also a scientist. “It’s a big challenge. Talking about space in Africa is kind of a new field but it’s a very big opportunity for us to explore.”

He says it would be an honor to be picked as Africa’s first black space sailor — who must be aged 27 to 37 at the time of lift-off and whose selection will begin next year ahead of four years of training. Okeke has already spent several years studying in the U.K., which he says is challenging. “The weather can be trouble and we try to cope with the food even though it’s not what we eat in Nigeria,” said Okeke.

His is not the only sacrifice in an expensive and widely questioned mission. Nigeria spends $20 million a year on its space program, in a country in which for every thousand children born, 137 will die before they are five years old. A collapse in the value of Nigeria’s naira currency — in part attributable to the global downturn — has meant the costs of its payments in U.S. dollars have also rocketed by a third.

“Even in the U.S. some people are opposed to the space program so we are not surprised this happens here,” says Seidu Onailo Mohammed, CEO of the Nigerian space agency. “But we want to assess the problems that have devastated this land. We need to monitor our environment, assess problems of flooding, deforestation — all this can only be done if we have a viable space program. Plus after so many years it’s a good idea to think of an astronaut.”

The country jetted up a $13 million earth observation satellite, made in the U.K. and launched from Russia, in 2003. A much more expensive communications satellite, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, was launched from China in 2007. It failed within 18 months but a replacement is due to be propelled into space by 2011, paid for by insurance.

But still the Nigerian agency wants more money. The government believes it will all pay off in the end.

Already the earth observation satellite has taken some pretty impressive snaps including pictures of poppy growing in Afghanistan, the state of cyclone damage after Myanmar’s authorities restricted access to international rescue teams in 2008 and, closer to home, identifying the whereabouts of illegal tankers parking far out at sea to steal Nigeria’s oil supplies.

Nigeria has managed to sell about 1,000 of its satellite images and hopes over the course of each satellite’s lifetime such data sales will cover the costs of manufacture and operation.

“We are bringing down space to apply it on the ground,” says Francis Chizea, Director of the Nigerian space agency. “It’s going to be very very important for the economy. We can map the wetlands and advise on areas very good for rice production; monitor desertification in the north; find the best place to locate dams; assess the environmental impact of oil drilling; locate oil spills and track movements on the border.”

It’s all been made possible by a new approach to space science that has let developing nations in on the extra-terrestrial act.

“We’ve been able to shrink a satellite from a double-decker bus down to the size of a TV set,” says Martin Sweeting, the British founder of Surrey Satellites Technology, a radio fanatic as a child who decided space shouldn’t be the privilege of the rich nations. “It’s now possible for an African country to have its own satellite for $10 to $15 million. It can yield real benefits at the right price.”

South Africa, Algeria and Egypt are all marshaling their own satellite facilities, so there’s no question Africa’s scientists are reaching for the stars.

http://www.globalpost.com/

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By Francisco Alcuaz Jr. and Ian C. Sayson

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) — Typhoon Parma knocked down trees and power lines in northern Philippines after veering further away from Manila and surrounding provinces, parts of which are still flooded a week after they were hit by Tropical Storm Ketsana.

About a fifth of Tuguegarao City’s villages flooded after a river swelled, Mayor Randolph Ting said in a phone interview. The city is the capital of the Cagayan province, where Parma moved over land this afternoon. Read the full story

TAIPEI: A strong 6.3-magnitude earthquake rocked Taiwan early Sunday, the central weather bureau said, but there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

The quake hit at 1:36 am (1736 GMT Saturday) about 23 kilometres off the east coast of Taiwan at a depth of 15 kilometres and was felt in the capital Taipei, the bureau said. Read the full story

The Cleveland volcano in Alaska has erupted some hours ago. For the time being volcanologists says that no nearby inhabitants are at risk. It was a brief eruption which occurred at about 07:30 UTC. Read the full story

Sept. 28, 2009 — A number of ancient Roman statues might lie beneath the turquoise waters of the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri in southern Italy, according to an underwater survey of the sea cave.

Dating to the 1st century A.D., the cave was used as a swimming pool by the Emperor Tiberius (42 B.C. – 37 A.D.), and the statues are probably depictions of sea gods. Read the full story

Would you believe that the tallest bridge in France reaches higher than the Eiffel tower, or that a single dam in China can hold back 1.4 trillion cubic feet or water? Each of the projects depicted here has set at least one world record for its height, scale, daring or ingenuity. From Venice to Boston, Egypt to England, here are seven amazing engineering wonders of the modern world. Know of others? Add to the list below! Read the full story

We walk along the surface between patches of tundra and gravel. We are close enough to the coast to see the sand dunes that block the view of the Chukchi Sea. Point Hope, the western-most point of North America, is within walking distance. From the village of Point Hope you look north over the Arctic Ocean, or southwest over the Chukchi Sea. The population of the village is 750, mostly Inupiaq Eskimo with some Caucasians who have chosen to live there. The buildings at Point Hope are mostly small wooden houses, but there are some modern buildings, built since the Prudhoe Bay oil fields opened to provide income to the arctic villages. Prudhoe Bay is far to the northeast, about 450 miles distant. This is a very isolated place.

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The mysterious moving stones of the packed-mud desert of Death Valley have been a center of scientific controversy for decades. Rocks weighing up to hundreds of pounds have been known to move up to hundreds of yards at a time. Some scientists have proposed that a combination of strong winds and surface ice account for these movements. However, this theory does not explain evidence of different rocks starting side by side and moving at different rates and in disparate directions. Moreover, the physics calculations do not fully support this theory as wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour would be needed to move some of the stones.

The Mysterious Sailing Stones

In an area known as the “Racetrack playa” in Death Valley near the western border of Arizona, there are an amazingly large number of stones, ranging in size from mere pebbles to half ton boulders that regularly travel by themselves and no one has ever been able to explain why!

These huge stones move of their own volition, leaving miles of zig-zagged, curved and straight tracks that have continued to baffle the scientific community for decades.  As you can see by the photos, the hardened surface of the landscape is marbled with the trails of water rivulets that would make concealing evidence of outside interference impossible.  So the big question is, just how DO these mysterious stones move?

Early studies of the Sailing Stones began when geologists Allen Agnew and Jim McAllister mapped the area and noted the tracks left by the boulders in 1948.  After that, these Sailing Stones were forgotten or ignored  by scientists for two decades.

Then, in 1968, two scientists from the Institute of Technology
in California conducted an ambitious seven year study tracking the stones that involved painstakingly mapping their movements by noting their positions at regular intervals.  Although their data and their methods of observation were sound and well documented, their conclusions were found to be faulty.

In their report, the two geologists wrote that “the wind is able to pick up the rocks and start them moving.  They push aside the very slippery mud and slide along on the firm surface.”  According to Sharp and Carey, surface water would freeze overnight, creating a slippery surface upon which the rocks were propelled.

Admittedly, during the rainy season the water can flood the surface of the “playa” rather quickly, but the volume and the strength of the water current would simply not be enough to provide sufficient propulsion.

As I mentioned earlier, Carey and Sharp maintained that the rocks would sometimes zig-zag across the desert floor in these erratic patterns because of shifting winds. Even at first glance, this theory is flimsy at best.

Yet amazingly, it was widely accepted until 1991, when yet another geologist studied the enigmatic stones and brought his students along to test the validity of the earlier findings.

This time, John Reid from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and a group of students converged on the stones en masse, during a time where the weather conditions matched those stated in the 1968 study.  Reid and his students slid in the mud quite easily but they attempted as a group to push, shove and/or pull the rocks with ropes.  Yet nothing could budge them and despite their valiant efforts, the rocks remained stubbornly immobile.

“The Tristan Effect” is yet another theory that has recently been suggested.  The University of Zurich conducted research dealing with the actual physical properties of the rocks themselves.  Their theory maintains that the air within the porous interior of the rocks compresses during the sub-zero nights.

The next day, the intense desert heat and sun

causes the air inside to once again expand and thus propel the rocks along their paths.  However, this writer doubts the validity of the theory.

I highly doubt that anything short of an explosion would cause enough sudden changes in air pressure surrounding the rocks to cause them to move.  If that were the case, I would think the rocks would become unstable due to these repeated changes of internal pressure and eventually crumble.

Even now, the scientific community is still investigating and trying to discover just how these rocks move.  Currently, they are being tracked with GPS devices and satellite tracking.  It would also be interesting to discover if time lapse photography or video surveillance cameras could shed light on their movements.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but I continue to find it intriguing that these Sailing Stones happen to be in a reasonably close proximity to the famed Roswell Area 51.   Being interested in ancient ley lines and their alignments with heightened strengths of lines in the magnetic field of our planet, I can’t help but think there may be a connection.

For now, I suppose, our planet and these fascinating Sailing Stones will simply have to continue to mystify, enchant and baffle us.

http://scienceray.com

A species of crustacean with no eyes and venom-injecting fangs has been discovered in an underwater volcanic cave in the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa.

Researchers discovered the new animal during a diving expedition through the world’s longest submarine lava tube, called the Tunel de la Atlántida, or “tunnel to Atlantis.” The divers were searching for specimens of a closely related crustacean species that they’d discovered 25 years ago in the same cave. But after capturing several of the sea creatures, the researchers noticed something peculiar. Read the full story

Supercell is the name given to a continuously rotating updraft deep within a severe thunderstorm (a mesocyclone) and looks downright scary. They are usually isolated storms, which can last for hours, and sometimes can split in two, with one storm going to the left of the wind and one to the right. They can spout huge amounts of hail, rain and wind and are often responsible for tornados, though they can also occur without tornados. Supercells are often carriers of giant hailstones and although they can occur anywhere in the world they’re most frequent in the Great Plains of the US. Read the full story

Undoubtedly one of the most beautiful events to occur in our world, the Aurora Borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, has both astounded and amazed people since it was first discovered. This phenomenon ocurrs when the sun gives off high-energy charged particles (also called ions) that travel out into space at speeds of 300 to 1200 kilometres per second. Read the full story

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — With winds of 135 mph, Hurricane Jimena was approaching Mexico’s Baja California peninsula on Sunday as a Category 4 storm, forecasters said.

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The Blue Grotto is a spectacular accident of nature. Found on the Italian island of Capri, this soft limestone cave is suffused by an eerie blue light. The light comes from another underwater entrance to the cave and is reflected off the white cave floor. Roman emperors supposedly used the grotto as a private bath. Read the full story

This watery abyss inspired both Edgar Allen Poe’s A Descent into the Maelstrom and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. One of the world’s most ferocious eddies, it appears twice a day just off the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway. As the tide runs back into the main stream, it triggers huge whirlpools that spiral down into the depths at high speed.

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America’s south-west is scored with numerous sleek slot canyons, narrow fissures in the rock eroded by water and wind over the millennia. The most striking is Lower Antelope Canyon, also known as the Corkscrew, located on Navajo land near Page. Its interior changes constantly with the sun’s rays bouncing down the whirling walls. Read the full story