newscientist - There's now scientific backing for the old adage that when two people "click" in conversation, they have a meeting of minds. The evidence comes from fMRI scans of 11 people's brains as they listened to a woman recounting a story.The scans showed that the listeners' brain patterns tracked those of the storyteller almost exactly, though trailed 1 to 3 seconds behind. But in some listeners, brain patterns even preceded those of the storyteller.
"We found that the participants' brains became intimately coupled during the course of the 'conversation', with the responses in the listener's brain mirroring those in the speaker's," says Uri Hasson of Princeton University.
Hasson's team monitored the strength of this coupling by measuring the extent of the pattern overlap. Listeners with the best overlap were also judged to be the best at retelling the tale. "The more similar our brain patterns during a conversation, the better we understand each other," Hasson concludes.
There was no match between the brain patterns of the storyteller and the listeners, however, when they heard the same story in Russian, which they could not understand.
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Meteorite Lands on Cricket Pitch During Match
telegraph - However Jan Marszel, 51, and Richard Haynes, 52, were not witnessing a six, but an extremely rare meteor strike.The rock, a few inches long and believed to be up to 4.5 billion years old, broke in two when it hit the ground in front of them close to the pitch.
The pair – both Sussex members – were sitting square of the wicket watching the England player Luke Wright bat with Monty Panesar when they spotted the black, five-inch rock hurtling towards them.
Mr Marszel, an IT consultant, said: “We were sitting at the boundary edge when all of a sudden, out of a blue sky, we saw this small dark object hurtling towards us.
“It landed five yards inside the boundary and split into two pieces.
“One piece bounced up and hit me in the chest and the other ended up against the boundary board.
“It came across at quite a speed – if it had hit me full on it could have been very interesting."
The pair have kept the seemingly extraterrestrial pieces of rock for posterity and said they would be happy for experts to examine them.
Retired Mr Haynes, said: “We were quietly supping our pints, both looked up at the same time and saw a black object coming towards us – we didn’t know what it was.
“If it had come from the other direction we might have suspected someone had thrown it, but we saw it come in straight over the ground from quite a way out – it was definitely a meteorite.”
Dr Matthew Genge, a meteorite expert at Imperial College, London, said: “If this turns out to be a meteorite it’s very exciting and would be the first fall in the UK since 1992.
"Potentially it contains secrets as to the formation of our solar system."
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Teen Survives 16-Storey Fall
stuff - A 15-year-old boy who fell from his 16th-floor apartment on Thursday night is now up and about in hospital.
He is expected to be discharged on Friday.
The boy fell from the top floor of the Proximity Apartments in Manakau City's Amersham Way.
He appears to have survived by landing on the corrugated steel roof of a parking building below, which bent and cushioned his fall.
Stuff was allowed into a nearby apartment on the 16th floor today and the damaged roof 50 metres below is yet to be repaired.
Building manager Jason Epps-Eades says the family involved wants to keep their identity out of public view.
"They're long term residents who have been here for about six months."
Mr Epps-Eades said police arrived soon after the boy fell.
"The police have been and inspected the balcony and they declared it structurally sound," he told Stuff.
He said it was not clear what happened.
The balcony is chest high to an adult and would be difficult to climb.
The top of the balcony is a round steel pipe, anchored to the walls.
From outside there appeared to be no damage to the balcony where the boy fell from.
A police spokeswoman confirmed they had investigated the fall and were satisfied it was not a building or balcony fault.
They are taking no further action.
Mr Epps-Eades said the family were with the boy at Middlemore Hospital.
"He is getting better quite fast and this morning he got up and went to the bathroom without help," he said.
"He was very lucky, its incredible that he survived."
The family were relieved but enormously stressed by the event, he said.
Mr Epps-Eades said that the apartment management was now under strain - "media flu", he called it.
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UFO Stuns Pretoria, South Africa Residents
news24 - An unidentified flying object (UFO), which apparently consisted of three bright lights, astounded residents from Booysens in Pretoria for two consecutive nights for several hours.
Engela van der Spuy, 67, who lived in Attie Street in Booysens, contacted Beeld after she watched the strange set of lights on Thursday night for the second consecutive night.
"I'm not saying it's green little space men," said Van der Spuy. "We just really want to know what it is."
Van der Spuy for the first time saw the UFO on Wednesday night shortly after sunset in the western sky.
"I couldn't make out the shape of the object because the three lights were too bright, but it almost had a heart shape because there were two lights on top, a blue light on the left and an emerald green light directly next to it, on the right side, with a big bright white light underneath it which shone straight down," she said.
Dumbfounded
According to her, the UFO hung in the air for two hours without moving and then, at about 20:30, slowly started moving down, diagonally to the left and still down, disappearing behind the horizon.
On Thursday night, the UFO again appeared shortly after sunset and at 20:30 again started moving down before disappearing.
"I called all the neighbours and we looked at it together, but no one could figure out what it could be. All we knew, was that it definitely was not a star or a normal plane."
Henrico Swart, 19, Van der Spuy's neighbour, who looked at the UFO through binoculars, was dumbfounded.
"It has to have a very strange shape, because even through the binoculars I couldn't make out the shape," said Swart.
"All you could see, were three bright lights."
On enquiry, spokespeople from the Hercules police station, the Johannesburg Planetarium and the South African Air Force had no knowledge of the incident and were unable to explain the phenomenon.
"I don't think it is a flying saucer, because we would've been able to see the saucer shape. This is something even stranger," said Van der Spuy.
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Welcome to Planet Klingon...qalegh 'oH QaQ 'e'
abc - The Jenolan Caves near the Blue Mountains west of Sydney is about to become possibly the first tourist attraction in the world to launch tours in the fictional Star Trek language of Klingon.
The link between the world's oldest dated limestone cave system and the fictional Star Trek language is through a spaceship, the USS Jenolan, which featured in an episode of the Next Generation series.
Earlier this month two Klingon scholars from the United States flew to Australia to tour the caves and finalise the translation of a self-guided tour.
They have recorded it at a Sydney studio and the commentary will be available late next month on a digital audio device.
Jenolan Caves tours will also be available in 10 other more commonly-spoken languages.
Fortean / Oddball News - 7/28/2010
