Henry County Sheriff Gib Cady had no real explanation for the phone call Saturday morning to report mysterious damage to a soybean crop west of Geneseo. His department had a bit of fun with the situation, asking people to call CrimeStoppers if they saw any UFO's with soybeans trailing behind.

But all kidding aside, the bizarre scene near Jim Stahl's soybean field has a lot of people scratching their heads. And phenomena experts are taking samples of the flattened crop to see what could have caused the crop circles.

"No one has been able to determine really how they're made or who makes genuine ones," said JoAnne Scarpellini, an investigator. "Many, many total fakes...total frauds."

Scarpellini says crop circles are certainly no urban legend. In fact, they've been killing farmers' crops since the first ones appeared in the late 1700's in England. She says every so often crop circles are spotted in fields throughout the Midwest, but to this day researchers have not been able to find out how they're made.

And she says there's no basis to the UFO stories.

"No one has seen a UFO making a crop circle," she said. "Until that happens, I can't say who does it or how they do it."

The circles have attracted people from Geneseo and other parts of the area. Some think it's just teenagers playing a joke but others say it could be from extraterrestrial beings.

"I watch it all the time on the Discovery Channel," said Luke Rawlings of Galva, Illinois. "You see all kinds of stuff like this. I just couldn't believe it. I had to see it with my own eyes."

"It's nothing serious," said Dave Paxton of Geneseo. "I think it's pranksters who got in there, because you can get in and out of a cornfield and a bean field without leaving any type of tracks."

The three biggest crop circles are 50 feet in diameter.

The dead soybeans will be tested and then compared to the healthy ones to see if they can determine what caused them all to fall flat and die. Because of the large circles, the entire crop will have to be destroyed.

People in Geneseo are scratching their heads over an unusual sight in the middle of a soybean field.

You can see in the pictures what has them so confused. The field has been damaged by what's being described as several circles with no path in or out of the field.

Over the weekend, Henry County Sheriff's officials said jokingly, if you have happen to see a UFO with soybeans attached to it, to contact them.

Several police districts logged reports from members of the public who observed "something" flying at high speed.

"What they're talking about here is some sort of flying object, and we can't explain what it was," Oddgeir Slettli, operations leader for the Midtre Hålogaland Police District, told dagbladet.no.

Observations were reported from Finnsnes to Trondheim. The main search and rescue station in northern Norway (Hovedredningssentralen Nord-Norge) reported that calls also came from crews on board ships off the northern coast, according to Dagbladet.

"It was colored white, green and gold, and lights seemed to blow off it like it was a sparkler," said one observer, Andre Grønmo. "It looked like it was a comet, and it was around four- to five times larger than a plane, and it flew much faster."

Slettli said others described a "green, lighted ball with a tail" that flew low. He said neither the Defense Department's radar station or its rocket facility at Andøya, nor the tower at Evenes airport, which serves Harstad and Narvik, had picked up the object.Slettli said calls came from people in Narvik, Vesterålen and Lofoten among other places, just before midnight on Monday.

A flurry of reports also came over the Coast Guard radio, and from an SAS flight and a Hurtigruten (Coastal Voyage) passenger ship.

Knut Jørge Røed Ødegaard, one of Norway's most well-known astronomers, said he thinks the UFO was actually another meteorite, a large rock containing a lot of chemical elements. There have been confirmed reports of at least two meteorites hitting Norway since June.

"When they enter the earth's atmosphere and meet the air, they warm up and can light up in a second," he told dagbladet.no.

This one's contents, the astronomer said, could explain why it seemed to change color as it flew through the night sky, which only recently has started getting dark again after the summer's midnight sun.

A frosty reception

Uninvited visitors to a nest of trap-jaw ants can expect a vicious response.

The ants are named after their characteristically long jaws, which they use to hurl unfamiliar neighbours from their nests, cripple prey, or deliver a brutal bite to anything they consider a threat.

Employing the same high-speed imaging methods as those used to film flying bullets, an American research team now show that the jaws can move at exceptional speeds.

"This is really by far and away the fastest recorded animal limb movement" said lead researcher Sheila Patek, of the University of California, Berkeley, who worked with ants from Costa Rica.

"The ants' jaws are relatively short, but they deliver such a powerful bite because they can accelerate so quickly. It's simple physics."

Airborne antics

The new findings, reported this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also explain why the ants sometimes bounce into the air when they bite.

"If they bite something which is too hard to be crushed or thrown back by their jaws, the impact tosses them upwards" said Dr Andy Suarez of the University of Illinois, a co-author in the study.

This recoil effect propels the biter onto a brief, haphazard flight which ends in a crash landing several centimetres away.

Such a chaotic journey might seem uncomfortable, but the ants are simply too light to be injured by their misadventures. In fact, Dr Patek and her team have now shown that the ants sometimes perform the flights voluntarily.

A new way to move

By biting the hard ground, rather than another animal, the ants can propel themselves skyward whenever the need arises.

The impact throws their tiny bodies upwards. In effect, the ants are using their enormous bite force as a means to suddenly take off.

This novel way to move may help them to escape predators such as lizards, which attack very quickly and would not be discouraged by a simple bite.

The popcorn-effect of many ants jumping at once might also serve to confuse attackers.

"The results show us the surprising and interesting ways in which a single mechanical system can be co-opted for such different behaviours," says Dr Patek.

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."

Miller's report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That's despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. "We don't seem to be going in the right direction," Miller says.

There is some cause for hope. Team member Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, finds solace in the finding that the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 in the same time. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared, from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year. "That is a group of people that can be reached," says Scott.

The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.

Ironically, the separation of church and state laid down in the US constitution contributes to the tension. In Catholic schools, both evolution and the strict biblical version of human beginnings can be taught. A court ban on teaching creationism in public schools, however, means pupils can only be taught evolution, which angers fundamentalists, and triggers local battles over evolution.

These battles can take place because the US lacks a national curriculum of the sort common in European countries. However, the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind act is instituting standards for science teaching, and the battles of what they should be has now spread to the state level.

Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don't agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

From issue 2565 of New Scientist magazine, 19 August 2006, page 11