RIGA, Latvia —  Visitor from deep space — or Latvian tricksters? That's the question Monday as geologists study a 30-foot wide crater that some claim was caused by a 3-foot meteorite, and others say is just the work of pranksters.

Scientists from the University of Tartu in Latvia on Monday afternoon concluded that the hole was probably dug by people and not caused by a meteorite, according to Latvian news site Apollo.

The web site spoke with Girts Stinkulis from Latvia University's Geography and Earth Sciences Department, who told the site that "scientists had ... discovered that this is not true." The scientists reached their initial conclusions after an hour-long study of the site.

The scientists noted spade marks on the sides of the crater, implying that it was dug by human hands. "There certainly were a number of people," Stinkulis told Apollo.

Other experts in the Baltic country also rushed to the site after reports that a metorite-like object had crashed late Sunday in the Mazsalaca region near the Estonian border.

Uldis Nulle, a scientist at the Latvian Environment, Geology and Meteorology Center, said his first impression after observing the site late Sunday was that the 27-foot wide, 9-foot deep crater had been caused by a meteorite. He said there was smoke coming out of the hole when he arrived.

However, Dainis Ozols, a nature conservationist who examined the hole in daylight on Monday, said it appeared to be a hoax. Ozols said he believes someone dug the hole and tried to make it look like a meteorite crater by burning some pyrotechnic compound at the bottom. He added he would analyze some samples taken from the site.

When asked about Ozols' theory, Nulle refused to comment, saying he needed more time to make tests at the site.

Inga Vetere of the Fire and Rescue Service said they received a call about the alleged meteorite on Sunday evening from an eyewitness. She said a military unit was dispatched to the site and found that radiation levels were normal. There were no injures.

Experts outside Latvia said it would be unusual for such a large meteorite to hit the Earth. The planet is constantly bombarded with objects from outer space, but most burn up in the atmosphere and never reach the surface.

In 2007, a meteorite crashed near Lake Titicaca in Peru, causing a crater about 40 feet wide and 15 feet deep.

Asta Pellinen-Wannberg, a meteorite expert at the Swedish Institute of Space Research, said she didn't know the details of the Latvian incident, but that a rock would have to be at least three feet in diameter to create a hole that size.

Henning Haack, a lecturer at Copenhagen University's Geological Museum said more information was needed to confirm that the crater was indeed caused by a meteorite.

"With all these kind of reports we get there always is a pretty large margin of error," he said.

From Fox News.com.

Animal tem 1,83 m e seu corpo não tem pele nem escamas.

Ele estava a cerca de mil metros de profundidade quando foi capturado.

Estudiosos e pescadores tiveram uma surpresa durante uma experiência no litoral norte da Bahia. Eles levaram um susto, pois nunca tinham visto um peixe tão estranho. Ele não tem carne, nem pele, nem escama. É formado por uma massa que mais parece gelatina.

O peixe foi capturado durante uma viagem de pesquisa do projeto Tamar. Os técnicos testavam anzóis circulares, que podem ser usados sem o risco de matar tartarugas marinhas, quando o animal foi fisgado.
“Quando vi o bicho e tomei aquele susto cai logo na água para filmar”, diz o coordenador do projeto Tamar, Guy Marcovaldi, que fez imagens inéditas do peixe com vida quando se aproximava da superfície.
O peixe estava a quase mil metros de profundidade. “Parece um animal pré-histórico”, diz o pescador Jucinei Evangelhista. “Parece que é de silicone, só tem gordura. Esse não dá pra comer”
Os pesquisadores calculam que a costa brasileira abriga pelo menos 150 espécies de peixe ainda desconhecida da ciência. As descobertas mais recentes foram de pequenos animais. Do porte desse peixe foi a primeira vez. O curioso é como um animal desse tamanho passou tanto tempo despercebido.
Ele pesa cerca de 40 quilos e é do tamanho de um homem alto. “Um metro e oitenta e três”, diz o pesquisador.
Olhos pequenos, boca grande e dentes quase invisíveis. O oceanógrafo Claudio Sampaio, professor da Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) confirma que não há registro desse peixe em nenhuma publicação científica. “A gente encontrar uma espécie como essa, totalmente nova para a ciência, é uma jóia rara. Um peixe que jamais foi visto pelo homem, é uma preciosidade”, diz Sampaio. “Provavelmente vai ser uma grande surpresa mundial."
O peixe será conservado em formol e vai fazer parte do acervo do Museu de Zoologia da UFBA. Para os biólogos, o desafio será maior do que uma simples identificação. Eles vão precisar descobrir também em que região dos mares vive essa raridade.

This week’s news have been flooded with pictures and details about the apparently extra terrestrial creature that threatened a group of teenagers in the Panamanian Blue Hills, that was killed by the kids after they thought the creature would attack them, and so forth.

First few images of the creature would not help much, and of course headliners would try to highlight the odd features of the so called monster of the blue hill.

After checking recent images unveiled by several news vehicles from several Latin American countries like Brazilian Globo.com and Panamanian Telemetro.com, for me it is a no brainer: it is a sloth. Mutated sloth maybe, a sloth with some odd skin disease maybe (let’s consider the unveiling of the real chupacabras in the southern US and Puerto Rico), but it would surprise me bad if it is not a ground sloth.

Great reference on this blog Tetrapod Zoology ( by Darren Naish) whcih states the same thoughts with much more scientific property.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090421-most-earthlike-planet.html

Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News

April 21, 2009

It probably wouldn't feel exactly like home. But the planet known as Gliese 581d has a lot more in common with Earth than astronomers first thought.

A distant world known as Gliese 581e (foreground in this artist's conception) is the lightest planet outside our solar system found to date, astronomers announced in April 2009. The planet, one of four orbiting a red dwarf star, is just less than twice the mass of Earth.
Astronomers also announced that one of the system's other planets, Gliese 581d, is an Earthlike world that orbits in the right zone to host liquid water, and thus potentially life.

New measurements of the planet's orbit place it firmly in a region where conditions would be right for liquid water, and thus life as we know it, astronomer Michel Mayor, from Geneva University in Switzerland, announced today.

"It lies in the [life-supporting] habitable zone, and it could have an ocean at its surface," Mayor said during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference, being held this week at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K.

First discovered in 2007, Gliese 581d was originally calculated to be too far away from its host star—and therefore too cold—to support an ocean.

But Mayor and colleagues now show that the extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, orbits its host in 66.8 days, putting it just inside the cool star's habitable zone.

At the same time, Mayor and colleagues announced that they have spotted a fourth planet orbiting in the Gliese 581 star system—and it's the lightest exoplanet found so far.

The planet, dubbed Gliese 581e, is only about twice the mass of Earth and is the closest planet to the star, completing its orbit in about 3.15 days.

"It brings down the mass [of the lightest known exoplanet] by more than a factor of two. The previous smallest was around five Earth masses," said Andrew Collier Cameron, an astronomer at the University of Saint Andrews in the U.K. who was not involved in the find.

Near Neighbor

Gliese 581, a red dwarf star in the constellation Libra, lies around 20.5 light-years from Earth.

"In astronomical terms it is one of our near neighbors, the 87th closest known star system to the sun," said Carole Haswell, an astronomer at the Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K.

Since planets orbiting Gliese 581 are too far away to be seen directly, Mayor and colleagues originally spotted Gliese 581d by searching for tiny wobbles in the host star's motion using the European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope at La Silla in Chile.

Weighing in at around seven Earth masses, Gliese 581d is unlikely to be made of rocks alone, the team believes.

"We can only speculate at this stage, but it may have a rocky core, encased in an icy layer, with a liquid ocean at the surface and an atmosphere," Mayor said.

Meanwhile, the much smaller and lighter Gliese 581e "probably doesn't look too different to Earth, except that it will be very hot, because it is so close to its host star," said Andrew Norton, an astronomer also at the Open University.

Norton's colleague Haswell added: "It is very exciting that such a promising candidate for an Earthlike planet has been found so close to us. It means there are likely to be many more when we search further."

And the more Earthlike planets there are, the greater the chance of discovering one that harbors life.

"I think it is only a matter of time," Norton said. "If life really does exist elsewhere in the universe, then within the next 10 to 15 years I expect we may see the first signs of life, via spectroscopic signals from exoplanets."

One of the last known baiji, photographed in captivity before its death in 2002. Nobody eats baiji, but it became a bycatch of other fishing.

The Yangtze River dolphin, or baji, is presumed extinct by marine mammal experts.

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Fishing nets on the Yangtze River