A mystery over the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

In 1951, a village in southern France was suddenly struck with mass insanity and loopy hallucinations. At least five people died and dozens were sent to asylums.

Until now it was assumed that the local bread had been poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence to suggest the CIA added LSD as part of a mind control experiment during the Cold War.

The inhabitants were suddenly hit by horror hallucinations of beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his gran! Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back.

H.P.Albarelli, the journalist who broke the story said the "smoking gun" was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of French nationals who had been employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the incident. Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

French intelligence chiefs have demanded the CIA explain itself following the book's revelations.

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron.

He added that the assault on Pope Benedict XVI on Christmas Eve by a mentally unstable woman and the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the Anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See.

"The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences," said Father Amorth, 85, who has been the Holy See's chief exorcist for 25 years

"He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, or even appear to be sympathetic. At times he makes fun of me. But I'm a man who is happy in his work."

While there was "resistance and mistrust" towards the concept of exorcism among some Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI has no such doubts, Father Amorth said. "His Holiness believes wholeheartedly in the practice of exorcism. He has encouraged and praised our work," he added.

The evil influence of Satan was evident in the highest ranks of the Catholic hierarchy, with "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus and bishops who are linked to the demon," Father Amorth said.

In a rare insight into the world of exorcism, the Italian priest told La Repubblica newspaper that the 1973 film The Exorcist gave a "substantially exact" impression of what it was like to be possessed by the Devil.

People possessed by evil sometimes had to be physically restrained by half a dozen people while they were exorcised. They would scream, utter blasphemies and spit out sharp objects, he said.

"From their mouths, anything can come out – pieces of iron as long as a finger, but also rose petals," said Father Amorth, who claims to have performed 70,000 exorcisms. "When the possessed dribble and slobber, and need cleaning up, I do that too. Seeing people vomit doesn't bother me. The exorcist has one principal duty - to free human beings from the fear of the Devil."

The attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish gunman in 1981 and recent revelations of "violence and paedophilia" committed by Catholic priests against children in their care was also the work of the Devil, said Father Amorth, who has written a book about his vocation, Memoirs of an Exorcist, which was published recently.

Father Amorth, who is the president of the Association of Exorcists and fought as a partisan during the war, has previously claimed that both Hitler and Stalin were possessed by the Devil.

In an interview with Vatican Radio in 2006, he said: "Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.

"I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler and Stalin did."

He also condemned the Harry Potter books, saying they were dangerous because they dabbled in the occult and failed to draw a clear distinction between "the Satanic art" of black magic and benevolent white magic.

The government of the Ulianovsk Region in the Volga area has approved a five-year program to produce so-called "flying saucers" - a bizarre hybrid of a helicopter and an aerostat.

The first such aircraft, officially named "aerostatic thermoballasted vehicle" or simply "Locomoskayner" after its manufacturer LocomoSky, was presented MAKS-2009 air show. The prototype flying saucer was seven meters (23 feet) in diameter and was able to transport 20 kg (44.4 lbs) of cargo.

The company, however, plans to produce aircraft with a cargo-carrying capacity of up to 600 metric tons or a passenger capacity of up to 11,000 people.

It will be able to hover, perform a vertical landing, move in a straight line with speeds close to 100 kmph, turn around and will need no special ground-based facilities to land.

The flying saucer will have low fuel consumption as compared to ordinary aircraft due to its aerodynamic form and will be able to transport outsized cargoes to remote and inaccessible areas.

According to the regional government's estimates, the project will attract over $90 billion in investments. It will also create about 800 jobs in the region and bring some $4 million to the budget in tax payments.

LocomoSky has already started to build a production facility site in an industrial zone in the area.

Gutted! The annual Gloucestershire cheese rolling - where nutters hurl themselves down a hill after a tumbling cheese - has been cancelled over health and safety fears.

Dating back hundreds of years, the event at Cooper's Hill sees hundreds of contestants trip and fall their way down the hill while chasing a 7lb Double Gloucester cheese.

A series of races are held, and while the first person down in each wins a cheese, many others just get to take away bruises and broken bones.

But bizarrely this isn't the safety aspect which has caused trouble for the historic event, scheduled to take place on Monday 31 May -- it's the number of fans.

Last year over 15,000 spectators turned up to see the strange sight and organisers have been warned this is three times the legal capacity of the Brockworth site.

They are now working with police and the local authority to improve crowd safety and traffic access for a planned 2011 event. Until then, keep reading to see a few videos of brave stupid contestants chasing cheese. Scenes that will be sorely (or not sorely) missed this year.

A dog which sailed aboard the Mary Rose ship 465 years ago is to take up residence in the Mary Rose Museum at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

The animal's skeleton, which has been reconstructed by staff at the Mary Rose Trust, will go on display from Friday 26 March.

The dog was discovered trapped in the sliding door of the carpenter's cabin of the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545.

The dog, named Hatch by museum staff, was probably used as a ratter.

'Expert analysis'

Tudor seafarers did not allow cats on board ship as they were thought to bring bad luck.

John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, said: "Expert analysis of Hatch's bones suggests that she spent most of her short life within the close confines of the ship.

"It is likely that the longest walks she took were along the quayside at Portsmouth, her home town."

The Mary Rose sank in 1545 at the Battle of the Solent.

Well-preserved artefacts including clothing, jewellery, furniture, musical instruments, medical equipment and weapons were discovered when the vessel was raised in 1982.

A new museum to house the Mary Rose Collection is planned for 2012. It will also display the preserved hull of the ship.

The largest meat-eating plant in the world is designed not to eat small animals, but small animal poo.

Botanists have discovered that the giant montane pitcher plant of Borneo has a pitcher the exact same size as a tree shrew's body.

But it is not this big to swallow up mammals such as tree shrews or rats.

Instead, the pitcher uses tasty nectar to attract tree shrews, then ensures its pitcher is big enough to collect the feeding mammal's droppings.

Details of the discovery are published in the journal New Phytologist.

Big reputation

Pitcher plants have elaborate structures which entice creatures such as ants or spiders into a precarious position, from which they fall into a fluid-filled trap, where they drown and are ingested.

These arthropods are thought to provide the plant with vital nitrogen and phosphorus, which it cannot obtain any other way.

Pitchers are the largest carnivorous plants, and the largest pitchers grow in Borneo.

One, known as Nepenthes rajah, is believed to be the largest meat-eating plant in the world, growing pitchers that can hold two litres of water if filled to the brim.

This plant's pitcher is so big that they are reputed to catch vertebrates.

"This species has always been famous for its ability to trap rodents, but I've been looking at the pitchers of this species on and off since 1987, and I've never seen a trapped rat inside," says Dr Charles Clarke, an expert on carnivorous plants based at Monash University's Sunway Campus in Selangor, Malaysia.

"This made me wonder: if it is large enough to trap rats, but it only traps them very rarely, it is likely that the pitchers are large because of some other reason?"

To find out, Dr Clarke and colleagues Ms Lijin Chin of Monash University and Dr Jonathan Moran of Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada turned their attention to tree shrews, which inhabit the same forest as N. rajah.

They did so after noticing that tree shrews, which are a similar size to rodents but most closely related to primates, sometimes left faeces in the traps of large pitchers.

"All of a sudden we realised that there may be some relationship between big pitchers and tree shrews," says Dr Clarke.

"So we decided to look at the pitcher geometry."

What they found "totally blew us away", says Dr Clarke.

Precise dimensions

N. rapah pitchers have huge orifices, but they also grow large concave lids held at an angle of about 90 degrees away from the orifice.

The inside of these lids are covered with glands that exude huge amounts of nectar.

Most importantly, the distance from the front of the pitcher's mouth to the glands corresponds exactly to the head to body length of mountain tree shrews.

The same is true for two other species of large meat-eating pitcher plant, N. lowii and N. macrophylla that are also visited by tree shrews.

However, the pattern does not hold for other pitcher species not associated with the small mammals.

"In order for the tree shrews to reach the exudates, they must climb onto the pitchers and orient themselves in such a way that their backsides are located over the pitcher mouths," explains Dr Clarke.

The tree shrews then appear to defecate as a way of marking their feeding territory.

That suggests these supposedly "meat-eating" plants have evolved a mutualistic relationship with tree shrews.

The tree shrews get nectar, a valuable food source, and in return, the plants get to catch and absorb the tree shrew's faeces which likely supplies the majority of nitrogen required by the plant.

These particular species of pitcher also live in the highlands where insects and other arthropods are more scarce.

Such creatures would normally provide the nitrogen needed by the pitcher, forcing it to evolve its huge size to attract tree shrews instead.

Radical rethink

"150 years after the discovery of N. rajah, we finally have an explanation for why the largest carnivorous plant in the world produces such big pitchers," says Dr Clarke.

Dr Clarke says it is the "neatest" discovery he has made in more than 20 years of studying Nepenthes meat-eating plants.

"The findings should radically alter how we look at these plants," he says.

He believes there is much we still have to learn about the true habits of carnivorous plants.

They suspect another highland species, N. ephippiata, likely feeds on faeces too, as may a huge meat-eating plant called N. attenboroughii which was only discovered last year.

In the lowlands of Borneo, bats roost in the pitchers of yet more Nepenthes species, suggesting these plants may too feed off the faeces of other small mammals.

AN invisible star may be circling the Sun and causing deadly comets to bombard the Earth, scientists said yesterday.

The brown dwarf - up to five times the size of Jupiter - could be to blame for mass extinctions that occur here every 26 million years.

The star - nicknamed Nemesis by Nasa scientists - would be invisible as it only emits infrared light and is incredibly distant.

Nemesis is believed to orbit our solar system at 25,000 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.

As it spins through the galaxy, its gravitational pull drags icy bodies out of the Oort Cloud - a vast sphere of rock and dust twice as far away as Nemesis.

These "snowballs" are thrown towards Earth as comets, causing devastation similar to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Now Nasa boffins believe they will be able to find Nemesis using a new heat-seeking telescope that began scanning the skies in January.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer - expected to find a thousand brown dwarfs within 25 light years of the Sun - has already sent back a photo of a comet possibly dislodged from the Oort Cloud.

Scientists' first clue to the existence of Nemesis was the bizarre orbit of a dwarf planet called Sedna.

Boffins believe its unusual, 12,000-year-long oval orbit could be explained by a massive celestial body.

Mike Brown, who discovered Sedna in 2003, said: "Sedna is a very odd object - it shouldn't be there.

"The only way to get on an eccentric orbit is to have some giant body kick you - so what is out there?"

Professor John Matese, of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said most comets come from the same part of the Oort Cloud.

He added: "There is statistically significant evidence that this concentration of comets could be caused by a companion to the Sun."

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne ... z0i3lnNt4Z

ScienceDaily (Mar. 11, 2010) — The weird world of quantum mechanics describes the strange, often contradictory, behaviour of small inanimate objects such as atoms. Researchers have now started looking for ways to detect quantum properties in more complex and larger entities, possibly even living organisms.

A German-Spanish research group, split between the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), is using the principles of an iconic quantum mechanics thought experiment -- Schrödinger's superpositioned cat -- to test for quantum properties in objects composed of as many as one billion atoms, possibly including the flu virus.

New research published on March 11 in New Journal of Physics describes the construction of an experiment to test for superposition states in these larger objects.

Quantum optics is a field well-rehearsed in the process of detecting quantum properties in single atoms and some small molecules but the scale that these researchers wish to work at is unprecedented.

When physicists try to fathom exactly how the tiniest constituents of matter and energy behave, confusing patterns of their ability to do two things at once (referred to as being in a superposition state), and of their 'spooky' connection (referred to as entanglement) to their physically distant sub-atomic brethren, emerge.

It is the ability of these tiny objects to do two things at once that Oriol Romero-Isart and his co-workers are preparing to probe.

With this new technique, the researchers suggest that viruses are one type of object that could be probed. Albeit speculatively, the researchers hope that their technique might offer a route to experimentally address questions such as the role of life and consciousness in quantum mechanics.

In order to test for superposition states, the experiment involves finely tuning lasers to capture larger objects such as viruses in an 'optical cavity' (a very tiny space), another laser to slow the object down (and put it into what quantum mechanics call a 'ground state') and then adding a photon (the basic element of light) in a specific quantum state to the laser to provoke it into a superposition

The researchers say, "We hope that this system, apart from providing new quantum technology, will allow us to test quantum mechanics at larger scales, by preparing macroscopic superpositions of objects at the nano and micro scale. This could then enable us to use more complex microorganisms, and thus test the quantum superposition principle with living organisms by performing quantum optics experiments with them."