Real-Life Iron Man: A Robotic Suit That Magnifies Human Strength

The prospect of slipping into a robotic exoskeleton that could enhance strength, keep the body active while recovering from an injury or even serve as a prosthetic limb has great appeal. Unlike the svelt body armor donned by Iron Man, however, most exoskeletons to date have looked more like clunky spare parts cobbled together.

Japan's CYBERDYNE, Inc. is hoping to change that with a sleek, white exoskeleton now in the works that it says can augment the body's own strength or do the work of ailing (or missing) limbs. The company is confident enough in its new technology to have started construction on a new lab expected to mass-produce up to 500 robotic power suits (think Star Wars storm trooper without the helmet) annually, beginning in October, according to Japan's Kyodo News Web site...

...CYBERDYNE (which film buffs will recognize as the name of the company that built the ill-fated "Skynet" in the Terminator movies) designed the HAL exoskeleton primarily to enhance the wearer's existing physical capabilities 10-fold. The exoskeleton detects—via a sensor attached to the wearer's skin—brain signals sent to muscles to get them moving. The exoskeleton's computer analyzes these signals to determine how it must move (and with how much force) to assist the wearer. The company claims on its Web site that the device can also operate autonomously (based on data stored in its computer), which is key when used by people suffering spinal cord injuries or physical disabilities resulting from strokes or other disorders...

Superhero Technology For Real Life

Wednesday, 03 Feb 2010

 

 

A couple of guys have taken the comic book hero’s wall walking abilities to the next step. They have invented a boot that will allow a human to walk up walls or walk on ceilings. The geniuses behind this superhero technology

are Paul Steen and Michael Vogel.

The technology mimics what thousands of little critters already do in nature. Large beetles use this same kind of scientific method to walk up plant stems or on the undersides of leaves.

The boots are powered with just a single 9-volt battery. The battery produces an electric field across a plate that is full of microscopic holes. The electric charge causes tiny drops of water to seep through the holes producing a suction against the surface. Once the proper stick is achieved, the user switches off the pump to avoid too much water being released and ruining the suction effect.

 

When the user is ready to accept the laws of gravity, they simply flip a switch which reverses the electric charge and sucks the water back in. The inventors believe the boots will support a person weighing up to 225 pounds. The boots will most likely work best on smooth glass surfaces. Brick walls may pose a problem with their uneven surface.

Water Adhesive Technology Offers Potential Superhero Abilities

February 4, 2010
By Dani Neuharth-Keusch

 

Cornell researchers have created a technology that one day could allow humans to walk on walls –– without any radioactive spider bites. The palm-sized device uses the combined surface tension of a series of minute water droplets to create a strong adhesive force. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, the device may one day be used as more than just a recreational accessory. It could allow soldiers to scale walls with ease and give them a tactical advantage.

The key to the invention lies in the controllability of its rapid adhesion, which allows the device not only to stick to surfaces, but to unstick just as easily. Unlike previous attempts at gecko-like adhesion mechanisms, the device can cling to almost any surface, regardless of its coarseness.

“This is a little device that can grab and release walls and objects,” Prof. Paul Steen, chemical and biomolecular engineering, said.

Steen, who pioneered the project with his former post-doctorate student Michael Vogel, was inspired by the Florida leaf beetle’s ability to adhere to surfaces and withstand force up to 100 times its own weight. He learned about the beetle in an afternoon talk at Statler Hall.

After five years of research and development, Steen and Vogel have a tangible result that replicates the leaf beetle’s extraordinary adhesive force.

The device uses a metal plate with a grid of tiny holes, micrometers in diameter. Beneath the plate lies a liquid reservoir, from which water is pumped by an electric field created with a standard 9-volt battery.

The surface tension from these exposed droplets causes the plate to stick to other surfaces, like how a glass of ice water condenses and suctions to a table when lifted. When the electric current is reversed, the water droplets are sucked in from the plate and the adhesion between the surfaces releases.

“The device pushes out small droplets of water and these droplets attach to whatever substrate you’re trying to attach to,” Vogel explained.

The smaller the holes, the more droplets and the greater the adhesive force. According to Vogel, a one-square-inch plate covered in millions of 1-micron sized holes could support up to 15 pounds.
The device could be adapted to other liquids with different properties, like oil, with varied effects that have yet been explored, Steen explained.

Yet, both researchers have their eyes set on the new invention’s vast potential.
“The real question is, how strong can we make the device?” Vogel stated.
If the scientists were able to create a 3-by-5 inch plate and fit it to a shoe sole, for example, it could support up to 225 pounds.

The concept and its applications already have science blogs buzzing.

“Once the researchers master the pump mechanism to make adhesive forces even stronger, they want to turn humans into Spider-Man,” Katie Drummond wrote on wired.com.

While a Spider-Man type device is one of the gadget’s “wilder” applications, the invention’s enormous surface tension has potential uses as a small-scale explosive device with significant power, Vogel stated.
“You can think about making a credit card-sized device that you can put in a rock fissure or a door, and break it open with very little voltage,” Steen told the University. “It’s a fun thing to think about.”

Ordinary T-shirts could become body armor

Scientists add boron to material make a tough, lightweight fabric

By Eric Bland

updated 4/1/2010 6:22:56 PM ET

 

T-shirts available at Wal-Mart could be converted into wearable armor, according to scientists from South Carolina, Switzerland and China.

By combining the carbon in the cotton with boron, the scientists have created a tough, lightweight fabric of boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks. The research could lead to more comfortable body armor for soldiers and police. It could even be used to produce lightweight, fuel-efficient cars and aircraft.

"The current boron carbide armor is strong, but its not flexible and its very heavy," said Xiaodong Li, a scientist at the University of South Carolina and co-author of a recent article in the journal Advanced Materials. "We tried to solve this problem but with a different approach. In our approach, we used cotton T-shirts."

Boron carbide is the third hardest material on Earth, after diamond and another boron-based material. In bulletproof vests and tanks, thick, heavy ceramic plates of dark gray boron carbide protect soldiers and police.

Cotton, however, couldn't be more different from boron carbide. Soft and breathable, cotton clothes are cheap and widely worn.

The trick for the scientists was combining dissolved boron with the carbon fibers inside the cotton fibers to form boron carbide.

The scientists started with a $5 package of plain, white T-shirts purchased at Wal-Mart, which they then cut into thin strips. They dipped those white cotton strips into a black solution of boron. After an hour, the strips were removed from the solution and baked in at oven at more than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1832 degrees Fahrenheit) for an hour. The heat stripped away anything that wasn't carbon or boron, and combined these two elements into boron carbide.

The resulting fabric is very different than the original materials that at the start of the process. It's lighter, stronger, tougher and stiffer than the original cotton, but it can still be bent, unlike normal boron carbide armor plates. The physical properties of the new fabric are still being tested, said Li, but "from our preliminary results we can say the test have been very, very promising."

"We expect that the nanowires can capture a bullet," said Li.

The former T-shirt can also block other hazards as well, such as cancer-causing ultraviolet light from the sun and even life-threatening neutrons emitted by decaying radioactive materials, said Li.

Body armor is just one potential application of the new research. Covering cars or aircraft with cotton-based boron carbide, instead of the metal used today, would make these vehicles significantly lighter and more fuel efficient.

The number of potential applications is enormous, said Nicholas Kotov, a scientist at the University of Michigan who also works on developing new materials for body armor.

"In bulk the layers of this material are quite strong," said Kotov. "It's a great project and is very interesting and dynamic research direction."

© 2010 Discovery Channel

Scaling buildings like Spiderman could be a reality, scientists claim

Walking up the side of buildings like Spiderman could soon be a reality, scientists have claimed. 

By Laura Roberts
Published: 6:45AM BST 26 Aug 2010

Stanford researchers Paul Day (L) and Alan Asbeck with the Stickybot Photo: STANFORD UNI/EPIC NEWS

Sticky gloves and shoes are being developed using a material that allows the wearing to stick and climb up walls.

They have already created a new textile inspired by geckos which has been tested successfully on a small robot that can scale smooth surfaces such as glass and metal.

Engineers now want to "scale up" the design for humans as part of a project that has been codenamed Z-Man.

Geckos' ability to defy gravity is due to microscopic hairs on their toes, increasing the surface area, which creates a "one-way adhesive". A sticky bond is created with each step but that bond can be broken by movement in the other direction.

Technicians have struggled over the last 10 years to create an artificial version strong enough for a vertical climb to be attempted successfully. However, researchers at Stanford University, California, have created a rubber-like material covered with thousands of tiny polymer fibres to imitate the gecko's hairs. These hairs, which are called setae, are ten times thinner than a human hair.

The material is said to be strong and reusable, and leaves no residue or damage. It has been tested on a "robotic gecko" called Stickybot which can walk up panes of glass.

Scientists are now on the way to making a version of the material that "would allow humans to climb with gecko adhesive."

This would allow someone to hang and support their whole weight using the material.

Professor Mark Cutkosky, the lead designer, said, "Unless you use suction cups, which are kind of slow and inefficient, the other solution out there is to use dry adhesion, which is the technique the gecko uses."

The secret lies in the gecko's "one-way adhesive" which makes them very sticky when they touch a surface in one direction - but then come free when pulled back in another.

"It's very different from Scotch tape or duct tape, where, if you press it on, you then have to peel it off," explained Professor Cutkosky, an expert in "bio-inspired robotics".

He added: "Other adhesives are like walking around with chewing gum on your feet: You have to press it into the surface and then you have to work to pull it off. But with directional adhesion, it's almost like you can sort of hook and unhook yourself from the surface."

The Stickybot is shaped like a gecko with four feet, each about the size of a child's hand. As it steadily moves up the wall, the robot peels and then sticks its feet to the surface with ease, just like a real gecko.

Stanford University said efforts to make the material strong enough for humans was "in the works."

The development of the robots, which use adhesive toes and an agile tail to scale walls, just like a gecko, is funded by the US Department of Defense's advanced research projects programme.

New Artificial Skin Could Make Prosthetic Limbs and Robots More Sensitive

ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2010) — The light, tickling tread of a pesky fly landing on your face may strike most of us as one of the most aggravating of life's small annoyances. But for scientists working to develop pressure sensors for artificial skin for use on prosthetic limbs or robots, skin sensitive enough to feel the tickle of fly feet would be a huge advance. Now Stanford researchers have built such a sensor.

The sensor is sensitive enough to easily detect this Peruvian butterfly (Chorinea faunus) with transparent wings and red-tipped tails, positioned on a sheet of the sensors. (Credit: Linda Cicero, Stanford University News Service)

 

By sandwiching a precisely molded, highly elastic rubber layer between two parallel electrodes, the team created an electronic sensor that can detect the slightest touch.

"It detects pressures well below the pressure exerted by a 20 milligram bluebottle fly carcass we experimented with, and does so with unprecedented speed," said Zhenan Bao, an associate professor of chemical engineering who led the research.

The key innovation in the new sensor is the use of a thin film of rubber molded into a grid of tiny pyramids, Bao said. She is the senior author of a paper published Sept. 12 online by Nature Materials.

Previous attempts at building a sensor of this type using a smooth film encountered problems.

"We found that with a very thin continuous film, when you press on it, the material does not have room to expand," said Stefan Mannsfeld, a former postdoctoral researcher in chemical engineering and a coauthor.

"So the molecules in the continuous rubber film are forced closer together and become entangled. When pressure is released, they cannot go back to the original arrangement, so the sensor doesn't work as well."

"The microstructuring we developed makes the rubber behave more like an ideal spring," Mannsfeld said. The total thickness of the artificial skin, including the rubber layer and both electrodes, is less than one millimeter.
The speed of compression and rebound of the rubber is critical for the sensor to be able to detect -- and distinguish between -- separate touches in quick succession.

The thin rubber film between the two electrodes stores electrical charges, much like a battery. When pressure is exerted on the sensor, the rubber film compresses, which changes the amount of electrical charges the film can store. That change is detected by the electrodes and is what enables the sensor to transmit what it is "feeling."

The largest sheet of sensors that Bao's group has produced to date measures about seven centimeters on a side. The sheet exhibited a great deal of flexibility, indicating it should perform well when wrapped around a surface mimicking the curvature of something such as a human hand or the sharp angles of a robotic arm.
Bao said that molding the rubber in different shapes yields sensors that are responsive to different ranges of pressure. "It's the same as for human skin, which has a whole range of sensitivities," she said. "Fingertips are the most sensitive, while the elbow is quite insensitive."

The sensors have from several hundred thousand up to 25 million pyramids per square centimeter. Under magnification, the array of tiny structures looks like the product of an ancient Egyptian micro-civilization obsessed with order and gone mad with productivity.

But that density allows the sensors to perceive pressures "in the range of a very, very gentle touch," Bao said. By altering the configuration of the microstructure or the density of the sensors, she thinks the sensor can be refined to detect subtleties in the shape of an object.

"If we can make this in higher resolution, then potentially we should be able to have the image on a coin read by the sensor," she said. A robotic hand covered with the electronic skin could feel a surface and know rough from smooth.

That degree of sensitivity could make the sensors useful in a broad range of medical applications, including robotic surgery, Bao said. In addition, using bandages equipped with the sensors could aid in healing of wounds and incisions. Doctors could use data from the sensors to be sure the bandages were not too tight.
Automobile safety could also be enhanced. "If a driver is tired, or drunk, or falls asleep at the wheel, their hands might loosen or fall off the wheel," said Benjamin Tee, graduate student in electrical engineering and a coauthor. "If there are pressure sensors that can sense that no hands are holding the steering wheel, the car could be equipped with some automatic safety device that could sound an alarm or kick in to slow the car down. This could be simpler and cost less than other methods of detecting driver fatigue."

The team also invented a new type of transistor in which they used the structured, flexible rubber film to replace a component that is normally rigid in a typical transistor. When pressure is applied to their new transistor, the pressure causes a change in the amount of current that the transistor puts out. The new, flexible transistors could also be used in making artificial skin, Bao said.

As Bao's team continues its research, the members may find applications not yet considered as well as other ways to demonstrate the sensitivity of their sensors. They have already expanded their stable of insects beyond the bluebottle fly to include some beautiful, delicate looking -- albeit slightly heavier -- butterflies.
But if the researchers wanted an even more ethereal demonstration, could the sensors detect the bubbles rising in a glass of champagne?

"If the bubbles coming out from the champagne impinge onto the pressure sensor, that might be possible," Bao said. "That would be an interesting experiment to do in the lab."

Scientists 'Clone' Human Virus Responsible for Congenital Malformations and Other Life-Threatening Diseases

ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2010) — A team of Welsh scientists has successfully cloned a human virus, offering new hope for the treatment of potentially life-threatening diseases.

In this immunofluorescent image, a specimen of human embryonic lung reveals the presence of cytomegalovirus; magnification 25X. (Credit: CDC/Dr. Craig Lyerla)

Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a major infectious cause of congenital malformations worldwide. The virus is also known to cause life-threatening disease in transplant patients and people with HIV/AIDS.
The development of new treatments has been hampered as scientists have been unable to stably replicate HCMV outside the human body.

Dr Richard Stanton from Cardiff University's School of Medicine who led the joint research, said: "HCMV has by far the largest genome of all viruses affecting humans -- consequently it was technically difficult to clone in an intact form in the laboratory.

"Cloning a copy of the virus from a strain isolated by Cardiff Public Health Laboratories has enabled us to identify the genes causing the instability of the virus outside the body.

"Following the identification of these genes, we have successfully developed cells in which we can grow virus that corresponds to that which exists in the human body."

Cloning the virus for the first time will help virologists develop antivirals and vaccines against the virus that causes clinical disease.

Following the study, the clone has already been distributed to research laboratories worldwide, and is being tested by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as part of a study to develop an international diagnostic standard with which to compare clinical isolates.

The genome sequence of the Cardiff virus has also been designated the international reference for HCMV in the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) -- an international database that provides reference standards for biomedical and genomic information.

Dr Stanton added: "HCMV has been designated as a highest priority vaccine target by the US Institute of Medicine. When developing vaccines, anti-viral agents and improving understanding of disease, it is crucial to work with a virus that accurately represents the virus present in patients.

"For the first time our work has enabled us to create an exact copy of the virus outside of the body offering a vital step forward in the development of new treatments."

The study, published in the The Journal of Clinical Investigation and funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, was a joint collaboration between Cardiff University's Infection, Immunity and Inflammation Interdisciplinary Research Group and Drs Davison and Dargan at the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow.

The virus, named Merlin, was isolated from a clinical sample identified by the Diagnostic Unit, Public Health Wales.

Reconstruction of the complete human cytomegalovirus genome in a BAC reveals RL13 to be a potent inhibitor of replication -- is available in the on-line edition of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

NASA's Dynamic New Eye On The Sun

Posted by Jon King - Conscious Ape on Apr 23, 2010

Full disk view of the sun from NASA’s SDO

NASA’s recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun’s dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

“These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society.
This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics.”

A full-disk multiwavelength extreme ultraviolet image of the sun taken by SDO on March 30, 2010. False colours trace different gas temperatures. Reds are relatively cool (about 60,000 Kelvin, or 107,540 F); blues and greens are hotter (greater than 1 million Kelvin, or 1,799,540 F). Credit: NASA/Goddard/SDO AIA Team.

 

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun’s magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and climate.

Since launch, engineers have been conducting testing and verification of the spacecraft’s components.
Now fully operational, SDO will provide images with clarity 10 times better than high-definition television and will return more comprehensive science data faster than any other solar observing spacecraft.

THE DROPA - THE LITTLE ALIENS OF TIBET

Legend says the Dropa resembled the 'grey' alien

 

In 1938 a complex system of artificially carved tunnels and caves was discovered in the remote region of Baian-Kara-Ula in the Himalayas, on the borders of China and Tibet. Inside the caves were several neatly arranged burial chambers containing the remains of a mysterious pygmy race called the Dropa.

According to local legend, the Dropa were extraterrestrials who crash-landed in the region around 10,000 BCE, and who were hunted down and killed by the indigenous Ham tribe because they appeared so strange.
Legend says they were between 2ft and 4ft tall, frail and sinewy with very large heads and eyes—not unlike today’s descriptions of grey aliens.

On the walls of the caves archeologists discovered pictograms of the planets and the sun joined by lines of dots, a remarkable discovery in itself.

But an even more remarkable discovery was yet to be unearthed.

As they rummaged deeper in the caves one of the archeologists discovered a strange stone disk which had evidently been fashioned by hand and etched with a fine ‘groove’, so that it looked like an old-school vinyl record.

Further rummaging eventually unearthed a total of 716 of these strange disks, and what’s more, closer scrutiny revealed that the ‘groove’ was not a simple groove after all, but a spiral-shaped series of tiny hieroglyphs depicting this people’s origins in the stars and their journey to earth in a spaceship 12,000 years ago.

Remarkably, the disks were later scientifically dated, and were found to be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old.

 

Before we get too excited, though, I’m afraid there’s a downside to this otherwise incredible find.

Evidently the Chinese authorities banned full disclosure of what the ancient form of writing on the disks said, so we might now never know exactly who the Dropa were or where they came from.

If there’s anyone out there able to shed further light on this mystery, we’d dearly love to hear from you…
image source: Alien UFO Pictures Best Today

Engineers Make Artificial Skin out of Nanowires

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2010) — Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a pressure-sensitive electronic material from semiconductor nanowires that could one day give new meaning to the term "thin-skinned."

"The idea is to have a material that functions like the human skin, which means incorporating the ability to feel and touch objects," said Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the UC Berkeley research team developing the artificial skin.

The artificial skin, dubbed "e-skin" by the UC Berkeley researchers, is described in a Sept. 12 paper in the advanced online publication of the journal Nature Materials. It is the first such material made out of inorganic single crystalline semiconductors.

A touch-sensitive artificial skin would help overcome a key challenge in robotics: adapting the amount of force needed to hold and manipulate a wide range of objects.

"Humans generally know how to hold a fragile egg without breaking it," said Javey, who is also a member of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center and a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Materials Sciences Division. "If we ever wanted a robot that could unload the dishes, for instance, we'd want to make sure it doesn't break the wine glasses in the process. But we'd also want the robot to be able to grip a stock pot without dropping it."

A longer term goal would be to use the e-skin to restore the sense of touch to patients with prosthetic limbs, which would require significant advances in the integration of electronic sensors with the human nervous system.

Previous attempts to develop an artificial skin relied upon organic materials because they are flexible and easier to process.

"The problem is that organic materials are poor semiconductors, which means electronic devices made out of them would often require high voltages to operate the circuitry," said Javey. "Inorganic materials, such as crystalline silicon, on the other hand, have excellent electrical properties and can operate on low power. They are also more chemically stable. But historically, they have been inflexible and easy to crack. In this regard, works by various groups, including ours, have recently shown that miniaturized strips or wires of inorganics can be made highly flexible -- ideal for high performance, mechanically bendable electronics and sensors."
The UC Berkeley engineers utilized an innovative fabrication technique that works somewhat like a lint roller in reverse. Instead of picking up fibers, nanowire "hairs" are deposited.

The researchers started by growing the germanium/silicon nanowires on a cylindrical drum, which was then rolled onto a sticky substrate. The substrate used was a polyimide film, but the researchers said the technique can work with a variety of materials, including other plastics, paper or glass. As the drum rolled, the nanowires were deposited, or "printed," onto the substrate in an orderly fashion, forming the basis from which thin, flexible sheets of electronic materials could be built.

In another complementary approach utilized by the researchers, the nanowires were first grown on a flat source substrate, and then transferred to the polyimide film by a direction-rubbing process.
For the e-skin, the engineers printed the nanowires onto an 18-by-19 pixel square matrix measuring 7 centimeters on each side. Each pixel contained a transistor made up of hundreds of semiconductor nanowires. Nanowire transistors were then integrated with a pressure sensitive rubber on top to provide the sensing functionality. The matrix required less than 5 volts of power to operate and maintained its robustness after being subjected to more than 2,000 bending cycles.

The researchers demonstrated the ability of the e-skin to detect pressure from 0 to 15 kilopascals, a range comparable to the force used for such daily activities as typing on a keyboard or holding an object. In a nod to their home institution, the researchers successfully mapped out the letter C in Cal.

"This is the first truly macroscale integration of ordered nanowire materials for a functional system -- in this case, an electronic skin," said study lead author Kuniharu Takei, post-doctoral fellow in electrical engineering and computer sciences. "It's a technique that can be potentially scaled up. The limit now to the size of the e-skin we developed is the size of the processing tools we are using."

Other UC Berkeley co-authors of the paper are Ron Fearing, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences; Toshitake Takahashi, graduate student in electrical engineering and computer sciences; Johnny C. Ho, graduate student in materials science and engineering; Hyunhyub Ko and Paul Leu, post-doctoral researchers in electrical engineering and computer sciences; and Andrew G. Gillies, graduate student in mechanical engineering.

This is an artist's illustration of an artificial e-skin with nanowire active matrix circuitry covering a hand. A fragile egg is held, illustrating the functionality of the e-skin device for prosthetic and robotic applications. (Credit: Ali Javey and Kuniharu Takei)

 

 

The National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency helped support this research.

X File Claims Loch Ness Monster Beyond Doubt

2:13pm UK, Tuesday April 27, 2010

Tim Hewage, Sky News Online

The existence of the Loch Ness Monster was "beyond doubt", according to a 1930s police report that has just been published.

Was Nessie caught on camera?

 

 

The 1930s government 'X' file about the elusive Nessie has been released by the National Archives of Scotland (NAS).

In it William Fraser, the then-chief constable of Inverness-shire, wrote to the Scottish Office raising concerns over the creature's safety.

He said: "That there is some strange creature in Loch Ness now seems beyond doubt.

"But that the police have any power to protect it is very doubtful."

In 1933, following a number of public sightings and dodgy pictures, the Scottish Office was asked to confirm the existence of a monster or sea serpent in Loch Ness.

Though not as convinced as Mr Fraser, ministers did propose that "reliable observers" be placed around the Loch to get further photographic evidence of the sightings.

If the monster's existence was then proven, the next step would be to trap it without injury - but given the size and depth of Loch Ness this could prove a difficult task.

The records go on to reveal that as the monster's reputation spread it was decided to let the legend grow with it and any real scientific attempt to discover what may have lurked in the Loch's depths was shelved.

Greetings truth hounds!

Welcome to the unveiling of Digital Thiopental!  This sight is for all the believers out there that know they aren't getting all of the story by watching the nightly news and reading the Sunday paper.  Please feel free to share your questions, comments, and any possible stories you may have, or may want "D.T." to do a bit of sleuthing into.  Stay tuned Believers.