Thursday's search involved 11 planes and five ships in an area of the
vast southern Indian Ocean where officials believe the plane ran out of
fuel and crashed, killing all 239 people aboard.
They were trying
to locate 122 objects captured in French satellite images on 23 March
that senior Malaysian officials described as the most credible lead yet
as to the jetliner's whereabouts.
Later on Thursday, Thailand said
it had satellite images showing 300 floating objects floating in
roughly the same area. The objects, ranging in length from two to 15
metres, were found about 125 miles from the site where the French
satellite had earlier spotted more than 100 pieces of debris.
Anond
Snidvongs, executive director of Thailand's space technology
development agency, said the information had been passed on to
Malaysia. "But we cannot – dare not – confirm they are debris from the plane," he told AFP.
Officials
from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said Thursday's search
had been split into two areas totalling 78,000 sq km (30,000 square
miles). The operation involves planes and ships from the US,
China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Locating
and retrieving at least some of the floating objects could prove
crucial in the absence of any physical evidence supporting the theory
that MH370 ran out of fuel hours after it turned sharply off course and
disappeared from air traffic controllers' screens over the South China
Sea en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
Search teams are hoping
that the detection equipment will be able to pick up acoustic pings
emitted every second from the plane's black box flight data recorder and
cockpit voice recorder.
Each of the two recorders has a beacon,
attached to the outside of the black box, which once activated by
contact with water makes a sound every second.
But it is a race
against time: the beacons have a battery life of 30 days, after which
the pings begin to fade. Chuck Schofield of Dukane Seacom, a company
that has sold the pingers to Malaysia Airlines, told Associated Press
that the batteries might last an additional five days before dying.
Assuming
that the plane crashed on 8 March, as Malaysian officials insist, that
means the beacons aboard MH370 will begin to fade around 7 April and
could go silent around 12 April.
The US navy tracking equipment – a
special listening device known as a "towed pinger locator" and an
underwater drone dubbed Bluefin-21 – has arrived in Perth, where the
international effort is based and is being sent to the search site.
Reports
said the equipment would be loaded on to the Australian navy's HMAS
Ocean Shield, which will drag the locator through the water in the hope
of picking up a signal.
The drone can dive to depths of about
4,500 metres, using sonar to form images of the ocean floor. Similar
technology was used to locate the main wreckage from Air France flight
447 in 2011 – yet it still took searchers two years to recover the black
box from the depths of the Atlantic.
The operation has been
hampered by bad weather and conditions, prolonging the anguish of
relatives after Malaysian officials said they had concluded that the
aircraft had crashed into the sea with the loss of all on board.
Experts
said search crews faced significant dangers due to frequent bad weather
and the area's distance from land. "This is a really rough piece of
ocean, which is going to be a terrific issue," Kerry Sieh, director of
the Earth Observatory of Singapore, told Associated Press. "I worry that
people carrying out the rescue mission are going to get into trouble."
Criticism
of the Malaysian authorities' handling of the incident has continued,
with relatives of the 154 Chinese passengers on board MH370 ridiculing
Malaysian government and airline officials at a meeting in Beijing on
Wednesday.
On Thursday, Malaysia Airlines ran a full-page message
of condolence in the New Straits Times. "Our sincerest condolences go
out to the loved ones of the 239 passengers, friends and colleagues.
Words alone cannot express our enormous sorrow and pain," it said.
Chinese insurance companies have started paying compensation to the families of passengers, according to Xinhua.
Several
Chinese celebrities took to social media to voice anger at the
Malaysian government. In a widely shared post on Sina Weibo, China's
version of Twitter, the singer and actor Chen Kun said he would boycott
Malaysian goods, while the Hong Kong-born actor Deric Wan called for
evidence that the plane had crashed.
"What Chinese people wanted
was the truth of the missing plane instead of a pointless press
conference," he said on Weibo, according to China Daily.
But in an
opinion piece in Thursday's Global Times, Wang Wenwen said that while
Malaysia had handled the crash aftermath ineptly, raw emotion should not
be allowed to determine relations between the Chinese and Malaysian
governments. "It is too early to let public opinion lead the way at the
current stage. Whether Beijing-Kuala Lumpur relations will dim depends
to some extent on how the [Chinese] government will act between
diplomatic manoeuvering and public opinion."
The New Zealand
family of Paul Weeks, one of the passengers, added their voice to
criticism of the Malaysian authorities. "The whole situation has been
handled appallingly, incredibly insensitively," Sara Weeks, the missing
man's sister, told Radio Live in New Zealand.
"Everyone is angry
about it. "The Malaysian government, the airline – it's just all been
incredibly poor. Who's to say they couldn't have located the plane the
day that it happened?"
Washington (AFP) - For the first time, scientists have been able to send a simple mental message from one person to another without any contact between the two, thousands of miles apart in India and France.
Research led by experts at Harvard University shows technology can be used to transmit information from one person's brain to another's even, as in this case, if they are thousands of miles away.
"It is kind of technological realization of the dream of telepathy, but it is definitely not magical," Giulio Ruffini, a theoretical physicist and co-author of the research, told AFP by phone from Barcelona.
"We are using technology to interact electromagnetically with the brain."
For the experiment, one person wearing a wireless, Internet-linked electroencephalogram or EEG would think a simple greeting, like "hola," or "ciao."
A computer translated the words into digital binary code, presented by a series of 1s or 0s.
Then, this message was emailed from India to France, and delivered via robot to the receiver, who through non-invasive brain stimulation could see flashes of light in their peripheral vision.
The subjects receiving the message did not hear or see the words themselves, but were correctly able to report the flashes of light that corresponded to the message.
"We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways," said co-author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.
"One such pathway is, of course, the Internet, so our question became, 'Could we develop an experiment that would bypass the talking or typing part of Internet and establish direct brain-to-brain communication between subjects located far away from each other in India and France?'"
Ruffini added that extra care was taken to make sure no sensory information got in the way that could have influenced the interpretation of the message.
Researchers have been attempting to send a message from person to person this way for about a decade, and the proof of principle that was reported in the journal PLOS ONE is still rudimentary, he told AFP.
"We hope that in the longer term this could radically change the way we communicate with each other," said Ruffini.
http://news.yahoo.com/telepathy-experiment-sends-1st-mental-message-222701481.html
