Science Special News

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Fourth orbiter to arrive at Mars on Friday

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is approaching Mars and, if maneuvers go well, will join three other Earth spacecraft in orbit around the planet. About 4:25 p.m. EST Friday the $720 million spacecraft will reduce its speed by 2,200 mph, and begin to orbit Mars, The Washington Post reported Monday. If all goes well -- 21 Mars missions have ended in disaster -- after six months of course and speed corrections, it will settle into a "science orbit" between 199 and 158 miles above the Martian surface, joining three currently operating satellites -- two from NASA and one from the European Space Agency, the Post said. There it will remain for two years, using inspecting the planet. After that time it will be sent into a higher orbit to become a communications relay satellite. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been operating flawlessly since its launch in August.

"But we are getting into the dangerous portion of the mission," says Jim Graf of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "A lot can go wrong, and if we don't succeed, we will fly right by the planet."

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New organ discovered in mice

After a century of scrutinizing the laboratory mouse, one might imagine that scientists would know the creature's body like the back of their own hands. Think again, because German researchers say they have discovered a whole new organ.Common knowledge holds that in mice, the thymus, a pinkish-grey lump of tissue that helps to produce the infection-fighting T cells of the immune system, is roughly the size of a pea and nestles in the chest above the heart. Now Hans-Reimer Rodewald at the University of Ulm in Germany, and his colleagues say they have discovered a smaller, second thymus hidden in the necks of lab mice. "I couldn't believe it for the first couple of months," Rodewald says. "2006 is not the time that you expect to change anatomy."The discovery raises questions about some immunology studies in mice. Researchers interested in the immune system often slice out the main thymus of mice in order to study how this system works without it, and how T cells are produced in the gut and skin.

The presence of a second thymus suggests that many of these mice still had a working thymus in their necks, which could have confounded the results. These studies may need to be re-examined, Rodewald suggests: "Some people are not going to like this."The discovery isn't a total surprise: biologists already knew that other mammals, including some humans, harbour an extra thymus in their necks. Studies from as early as the 1940s suggest that as many as five out of six human fetuses have a second thymus in the neck, says Clare Blackburn who studies the mammalian thymus at the University of Edinburgh, UK. There were also suggestions of a second mouse thymus in a report from the 1960s.

[Rasputin]

Urban myths of the paranormal

Urban myths of the paranormal


Over the years the same stories tend to go round,Often they are embellishments of a true story or more often, have little basis in truth at all, and always happened to someone who is a friend of a friend of a friend. One such story is the tale of the headless hitchhiker, usually a young man or more often a woman, who thumbs a lift late at night, only to get out of the car at the destination with no head, so the story runs an accident at that spot some years ago left the young person decapitated.A particular favourite of mine is about the saying “ I nearly had kittens”.One of my college students came out with this after class.This comes from having an irrational fear, it originates from the middle ages and tells of the fear that witches would bring on pregnancy pains, which were a spell turning the baby into kittens, which clawed at her insides.Nowadays we know witches cannot do such things.Everyone knows the tale of some wicked old man who at the exact moment he died, all the clocks stopped, an internet search revealed over 40 similar stories. But how many are true ?

Another is the Chinese restaurant who puts cat and dog meat into the food, continued eating of which brings people to act like cats and dogs.Prolonged investigation through back copies of newspapers revealed just 7 convictions throughout the U.K over a 37 year period, for adding banned meat products.When you consider what goes into some sausage products, not really much cause for concern here.Another favourite of mine is the family holiday usually in Spain, where driving through a remote district, the old granny dies of a heart attack, and is put into the boot.When stopping at a roadside café, the car is stolen, only to be found intact washed and cleaned with an apologetic note, saying the thief would never interfere with a mafia killing, and is so sorry and will never take another car again.A friend holidaying in Tibet last year brought back a similar tale.Several people have told me the following story which they swear is true.The prime ministers wife Cherie Blair, went out wearing a bright red jumper,and was standing by a pillar box, when a short sighted old lady came and thrust a handful of Christmas cards into her mouth.I see the resemblance, but feel this is highly unlikely.The moral perhaps is not to believe all we are told, just as newspapers will miss out some major stories, and papers of different political persuasions will cover very differently the same news, so much that we read is questionable and needs some internal editing.

[Rasputin]

Did Pentagon create orbital space plane ?

A prestigious aerospace magazine on Sunday laid out what it called "considerable evidence" that the U.S. military funded the development and testing of a small orbital space plane in the 1990s. In an article posted to its Web site, Aviation Week & Space Technology reported that the two-person "Blackstar" space vehicle may have made more than one orbital mission. But it said the project may have since been "quietly mothballed," possibly for budgetary or operational reasons.The report was met with skepticism from other aerospace industry observers, and even Aviation Week conceded that the evidence was inconclusive. In the report, senior editor William B. Scott said that Aviation Week has been investigating "myriad sightings of a two-stage-to-orbit system that could place a small military spaceplane in orbit" over the past 16 years."Now facing the possibility that this innovative 'Blackstar' system may have been shelved, we elected to share what we've learned about it with our readers, rather than let an intriguing technological breakthrough vanish into 'black world' history, known to only a few insiders," Scott wrote.Aviation Week reported that the "highly classified" project involved a large carrier aircraft called the SR-3, modeled on the XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber of the 1960s, as well as a small space plane called the XOV (for "experimental orbital vehicle"). The mothership would carry the XOV under its fuselage, rise to high altitude, then release the space plane at supersonic speeds. After the release, the XOV would fire its rocket engines to rise into orbit, and the mothership would return to base.At the end of its mission, the XOV would return to Earth along a flight profile much like that of the space shuttle.



Aviation Week said the system was designed in the 1980s "for reconnaissance, satellite insertion and, possibly, weapons delivery." The report said the Pentagon could conceivably use the system to conduct surprise reconnaissance of foreign military activities that were hidden from regularly scheduled spy-satellite overflights.Scott wrote that "observed spaceplane landings have been reported" at Hurlburt Air Force Base in Florida, Kadena Air Base in Okinawa and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. To preserve secrecy, the space planes were reportedly transported back to their home base in special C-5 Galaxy transports, and Blackstar's costs may have been charged to other projects such as the National Aero-Space Plane and the Navy's A-12 fighter, the magazine said.

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Liquid water on Enceladus could support life

Scientists have found evidence that cold, Yellowstone-like geysers of water are issuing from a moon of Saturn called Enceladus, apparently fueled by liquid reservoirs that may lie just tens of yards beneath the moon's icy surface. The surprising discovery, detailed in Friday's issue of the journal Science, could shoot Enceladus to the top of the list in the search for life elsewhere in our solar system. Scientists described it as the most important discovery in planetary science in a quarter-century. "I think this is important enough that we will see a redirection in the planetary exploration program," Carolyn Porco, head of the imaging team for the Cassini mission to Saturn, told MSNBC.com. "We've just brought Enceladus up to the forefront as a major target of astrobiological interest."The readings from Enceladus' geyser plumes indicate that all the prerequisites for life as we know it could exist beneath Enceladus' surface, Porco said."Living organisms require liquid water and organic materials, and we know we have both on Enceladus now," she said. "The plumes through which Cassini flew last July contain methane, contain CO2, propane — they contain several organic materials."The third necessary ingredient — energy for fueling life's processes — could exist around hydrothermal vents around the bottom of Enceladus' water reservoirs, just as it does around Earth's deep-ocean hydrothermal vents.The results impressed University of Colorado planetary scientist Robert Pappalardo, who has studied Enceladus and other icy moons but was not involved in the newly published research.

"I think the discovery of activity on Enceladus is about the most exciting discovery in planetary science since the volcanoes of Io," he said, referring to the detection of volcanic activity on Jupiter's moon by the Voyager probe in 1979.The findings unveiled Thursday are based on imagery as well as temperature readings from Cassini, a U.S-European spacecraft that has been studying the ringed planet and its moons since 2004.The precise sources of the geysers could not be spotted directly, because Cassini's camera isn't quite good enough to spot the bright spray of water and ice crystals against the bright ice on Enceladus' surface, said imaging team member Andrew Ingersoll, an atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology.

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Satellite sleuth closes in on Noah's Ark

High on Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, there is a baffling mountainside "anomaly," a feature that one researcher claims may be something of biblical proportions. Images taken by aircraft, intelligence-gathering satellites and commercial remote-sensing spacecraft are fueling an intensive study of the intriguing oddity. But whether the anomaly is some geological quirk of nature, playful shadows, a human-made structure of some sort, or simply nothing at all—that remains to be seen.Whatever it is, the anomaly of interest rests at 15,300 feet (4,663 meters) on the northwest corner of Mt. Ararat, and is nearly submerged in glacial ice. It would be easy to call it merely a strange rock formation.But at least one man wonders if it could be the remains of Noah's Ark—a vessel said to have been built to save people and selected animals from the Great Flood, the 40 days and 40 nights of deluge as detailed in the Book of Genesis.The Genesis blueprint of the Ark detailed the structure as 6:1 length to width ratio (300 cubits by 50 cubits).



The anomaly, as viewed by satellite, is close to that 6:1 proportion.Identifying the Ararat anomaly has been a 13-year-long quest of Porcher Taylor, an associate professor in paralegal studies at the University of Richmond's School of Continuing Studies in Virginia.Taylor has been a national security analyst for more than 30 years, also serving as a senior associate for five years at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C."I've got new found optimism ... as far as my continuing push to have the intelligence community declassify some of the more definitive-type imagery," Taylor told SPACE.com. He points to a "new and significant development," a high-resolution image taken by DigitalGlobe's impressive QuickBird satellite and shown publicly for the first time."I'm calling this my satellite archeology project," Taylor said. It's an effort that has now included use of QuickBird, GeoEye's Ikonos spacecraft, Canada's Radarsat 1, as well as declassified aerial and satellite images taken by the various U.S. intelligence agencies.

[Rasputin]

View of Easter Island disaster 'all wrong'

The first settlers on Easter Island didn't arrive until 1200 AD, up to 800 years later than previously thought, a new study suggests. The revised estimate is based on new radiocarbon dating of soil samples collected from one of oldest known sites on the island, which is in the South Pacific west of Chile.The finding challenges the widely held notion that Easter Island's civilization experienced a sudden collapse after centuries of slow growth. If correct, the finding would mean that the island's irreversible deforestation and construction of its famous Moai statues began almost immediately after Polynesian settlers first set foot on the island.The study, conducted by Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii, Manoa and Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.According to one widely held view, a small band of Polynesian settlers, perhaps no more than a few dozen people, arrived on the Easter Island sometime between 400 and 1000 AD.The settlers lived in harmony with the environment for hundreds of years and the population slowly grew. Some scientists estimate that at its height, Easter Island's population may have been as much as 20,000 people.

Around 1200 AD, the story goes, the inhabitants began cutting down the island's subtropical trees and giant palms in large numbers to build canoes and to transport the giant stone statues, which started going up around this time.The large-scale deforestation led to soil erosion and over a span of several centuries, the island's ability to support wildlife and farming was compromised. People began to starve. In a last ditch effort at survival, they became cannibals.The collapse of both the island's ecology and civilization was so complete that by the time the Dutch arrived in the 1700s, Easter Island was a sandy grassland void of nearly all its native wildlife; its human inhabitants were reduced to a starving population of 3,000 or less.This is the story pieced together by researchers over the past several decades, but Hunt and Lipo think it is wrong.

[Rasputin]

Brain blindness

We all know that seeing something emotional can distract us, but researchers say that it might even blind us... not in our eyes, but in our brains. This ScienCentral news video explains.It's hard not to look when you pass an accident on the road, but doing so can be dangerous. Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald says "emotional" images — like car accidents, a gruesome murder scene, or a bit of pornography — can briefly blind us to everything else around us, limiting our senses and potentially putting us at risk."Something that's emotional not only captures our attention, but it does it to such an extent that it's blocking information that comes in after. We're no longer even looking at that image," says Zald. As reported in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Zald and his colleagues trained twenty-one people to spot a neutral target image out of a series flying by at ten pictures per second, and then state whether it was rotated to the left or the right. The volunteers performed well except when either a gory or erotic image — more graphic than can be shown here — appeared before the target image.

Co-author Steven Most, from Yale University, says in those cases participants were far more likely to miss the target."When an emotional picture appears, it seems to short-circuit that processing in the brain that will then help you construct a visual conscious perception," Most explains. Zald says these emotional blindings happen all the time in our daily lives, but are probably most important for drivers, since a lapse in attention of less than a second is enough to cause an accident.

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Brain swapping comes of age

For more than two decades, Evan Balaban has honed his skills at manipulating embryonic tissue samples using tiny instruments of his own making. He can cut a small access window into a quail's egg, and using a scalpel no wider than a human hair, excise a few hundred thousand cells from the birds developing central nervous system. This is only the first step of the intricate process required to place this minuscule brain into another animal's head. Some of these surgeries end in untimely death for brain-transplanted embryos, but Balaban says he has elevated the typical survival rate from less than 20% to more than 60%. That was unimaginable in the 1950s, he says, when success was more along the lines of one or two in 1,000, and some researchers "were doing this with piano wire."But don't cue the maniacal laughter just yet. As much T.H. Morgan as it is Dr. Moreau, brain-swapping research is coming into its own, with the potential to answer questions other technologies can't, says Balaban.

This associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal is unfazed by the contrast between the glitz of kindred work, such as stem cell implantation, and the whiff of gothic horror that accompanies his work.Far from being a throwback, he insists, brain swapping is "really working at the right level for answering a lot of interesting questions about brain development and behavior," and techniques are improving all the time. Not until two or three decades ago did biologists understand brain circuitry well enough to make good scientific use of brain transplants, though they have been technically feasible since H.G. Wells' time. Since then, researchers have swapped the brains of various species of frogs and salamanders, as well as ducks, in addition to the quails and chicks that Balaban uses. He plans on trying it on songbirds too.

[moonlight79]

For more than two decades, Evan Balaban has honed his skills at manipulating embryonic tissue samples using tiny instruments of his own making. He can cut a small access window into a quail's egg, and using a scalpel no wider than a human hair, excise a few hundred thousand cells from the birds developing central nervous system. This is only the first step of the intricate process required to place this minuscule brain into another animal's head. Some of these surgeries end in untimely death for brain-transplanted embryos, but Balaban says he has elevated the typical survival rate from less than 20% to more than 60%. That was unimaginable in the 1950s, he says, when success was more along the lines of one or two in 1,000, and some researchers "were doing this with piano wire."But don't cue the maniacal laughter just yet. As much T.H. Morgan as it is Dr. Moreau, brain-swapping research is coming into its own, with the potential to answer questions other technologies can't, says Balaban.

This associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal is unfazed by the contrast between the glitz of kindred work, such as stem cell implantation, and the whiff of gothic horror that accompanies his work.Far from being a throwback, he insists, brain swapping is "really working at the right level for answering a lot of interesting questions about brain development and behavior," and techniques are improving all the time. Not until two or three decades ago did biologists understand brain circuitry well enough to make good scientific use of brain transplants, though they have been technically feasible since H.G. Wells' time. Since then, researchers have swapped the brains of various species of frogs and salamanders, as well as ducks, in addition to the quails and chicks that Balaban uses. He plans on trying it on songbirds too.

age intori beshe man maghzamo ba maghze anishtan avaz mikonam

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Huge impact crater found in Egypt

giant crater made by a meteorite impact millions of years ago has been discovered in Egypt's western desert. Boston University experts found the 31km (19 mile) wide crater while studying satellite images of the area. It is more than twice the size of the next largest Saharan impact depression and more than 25 times the size of Arizona's famous Meteor Crater. The American team that found it says its sheer size may have helped it escape detection all these years. The structure, which has an outer rim surrounding an inner ring, has been named "Kebira", which means "large" in Arabic and also relates to the crater's physical location on the northern tip of the Gilf Kebir region in southwest Egypt. "Kebira may have escaped recognition because it is so large," said Dr Farouk El-Baz, director of the Boston University Center for Remote Sensing, where the find was made.



"Also, the search for craters typically concentrates on small features, especially those that can be identified on the ground. The advantage of a view from space is that it allows us to see regional patterns and the big picture." Water and wind erosion may also have helped hide its extra-terrestrial origin. The heat from this impact may be responsible for the extensive field of "Desert Glass", yellow-green silica glass fragments found on the desert surface between the giant dunes of the Great Sand Sea in southwestern Egypt.

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The missing library of Iona

The island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland is steeped in ancient lore and mystery. Known internationally as the monastic birthplace of Scottish religion, it is a place of pilgrimage and deep spirituality.St Columba landed there in 563 AD with 13 followers and established a monastery. This isolated island, off the south-western tip of Mull, was soon to become the intellectual powerhouse of the medieval world.There are those who say that Columba didn't choose this island by accident, but that it is a place which has magnetically attracted spiritual seekers since before the birth of Christ. To them this island is a special place thought to have been the repository of many ancient items and many ancient mysteries.They believe that Iona once housed an incredible library and held the most extraordinary books known to man. Think Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or the recent international best-seller The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason and consider that a hunt for hidden knowledge and elusive manuscripts could actually be very real. Pre-Columba the island was sometimes referred to as Innis nam Druidneach, the Isle of Druids. Old stories record St Columba and his followers fighting off the local Druid elders when they landed to take possession of the island.This version of history sees fifth-century Druids escaping persecution from Imperial Rome and finding sanctuary on the outer wilds of civilisation. There, it is said, they founded a library – which if true would be extraordinary, as the Druids were not known as a people who wrote down their teachings. The impact that finding this library would have on our interpretation of history would be explosive. But as revelatory as this would be, it gets even better.Another story attached to the island suggests that as well as housing the written records of the Druids it was also home to books from the greatest library in Europe.

Scottish history is a murky puddle. Few records exist for the first half of the first millennium. Stories, myths and half-truths cloud this period and a consensus is impossible to find. Yet some histories have King Fergus II joining forces with Alaric the Goth to fight the Roman Empire during its decline and fall. This version of history reports that when Rome fell in 410 AD Fergus II was not only there, but carried off books from the plundered libraries of that once great city. These books would have been marvellous: illuminated religious manuscripts, books from the ancient Greek philosophers and ancient Persians. This treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom was said to have been brought back by Fergus and taken to Iona for safekeeping in the Druidic library.

[Rasputin]

On-line psychic advisers

Kathleen Meadows (psychicanada.com), certified psychic and tarot grandmaster writes about the growing interest in psychics available through the internet today: Psychic readings ONLINE is reportedly one of the fastest growing businesses in the world. One of the largest advisor online companies reported a $67 million profit last year – a whopping double the amount from the year before. Companies like Microsoft and ebay are offering access to advisors as a perk for employees. For more information read this article published in the San Francisco Chronicle last year. Additionally, the client base of those who buy online reading services would read like the world’s directory of who’s who – if you could find out who they are that is. Only the owners of these sites know for sure by the credit card holder. 99% of the time the readers don’t have a clue who are they are reading for.

Typically the client is assigned a login which fails to reveal the client’s true identity, and the questions asked by clients online are commonly too general to offer a hint as to the true identity of the client. Of course if a client is coming to a reader everyday for 1-2 hours, at $4 a minute, there is reason to believe that this degree of disposable income is somewhat more stellar than average, thereby hinting that the client is in all likelihood of the famous or perhaps infamous variety. Nonetheless, the client’s true identity remains anonymous.If you read client’s comments or testimonials beside the reader’s Profiles on most of these psychic advisory sites, you’ll discover possibly to your amazement that these readings are objectively, reportedly accurate. Comments left to readers are done so by customers who have paid rather handsomely for the service (they haven’t been paid for comments!)

So we have pages and pages of comments on the Internet extolling the benefits and accuracy of ONLINE psychic readings. I suggest you really ponder this fact. What else is going on in the world that can speak more eloquently to the existence of true psychic phenomena than this?People have declared for years that psychics are only shrewd in picking up non-verbal cues which they manipulate to extrapolate information that upon hearing, could be construed as “psychic”. But this certainly cannot be said about online readers. Online psychics have little upon which to base their psychic impressions other than an anonymous login and the client’s query. Talk about flying blind!

The truth of the matter is that never before in history has such real evidence of telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience and mediumship been so abundant, easily accessible, and irrefutable!I’ve been a practicing psychic for more than twenty years, but it’s only in the past year and a half that I’ve been reading online, via chat, phone and email. I confess that in the beginning I was skeptical that I would have any degree of accuracy. Every time my phone rang or my chat box clanged, my heart rate bumped up, my aura darkened and well, frankly I was scared witless. But I’ve always been driven by an insatiable curiosity and when a colleague recommended that I read online, I knew that curiosity of mine would inevitably and relentlessly drive me to the Online Psychics cyber door.

[Rasputin]

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reaches target

With a crucially timed firing of its main engines today, NASA's new mission to Mars successfully put itself into orbit around the red planet. The spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will provide more science data than all previous Mars missions combined. Signals received from the spacecraft at 2:16 p.m. Pacific Time after it emerged from its first pass behind Mars set off cheers and applause in control rooms at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver. "This is a great milestone to have accomplished, but it's just one of many milestones before we can open the champagne," said Colleen Hartman, deputy associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Once we are in the prime science orbit, the spacecraft will perform observations of the atmosphere, surface, and subsurface of Mars in unprecedented detail."

The spacecraft traveled about 500 million kilometers (310 million miles) to reach Mars after its launch from Florida on Aug. 12, 2005. It needed to use its main thrusters as it neared the planet in order to slow itself enough for Mars' gravity to capture it. The thruster firing began while the spacecraft was still in radio contact with Earth, but needed to end during a tense half hour of radio silence while the spacecraft flew behind Mars. "Our spacecraft has finally become an orbiter," said JPL's Jim Graf, project manager for the mission. "The celebration feels great, but it will be very brief because before we start our main science phase, we still have six months of challenging work to adjust the orbit to the right size and shape." For the next half-year, the mission will use hundreds of carefully calculated dips into Mars' atmosphere in a process called "aerobraking." This will shrink its orbit from the elongated ellipse it is now flying, to a nearly circular two-hour orbit. For the mission's principal science phase, scheduled to begin in November, the desired orbit is a nearly circular loop ranging from 320 kilometers (199 miles) to 255 kilometers (158 miles) in altitude, lower than any previous Mars orbiter. To go directly into such an orbit instead of using aerobraking, the mission would have needed to carry about 70 percent more fuel when it launched. The instruments on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will examine the planet from this low-altitude orbit. A spectrometer will map water-related minerals in patches as small as a baseball infield. A radar instrument will probe for underground layers of rock and water.

One telescopic camera will resolve features as small as a card table. Another will put the highest-resolution images into broader context. A color camera will monitor the entire planet daily for changes in weather. A radiometer will check each layer of the atmosphere for variations in temperature, water vapor and dust. "The missions currently at Mars have each advanced what we know about the presence and history of water on Mars, and one of the main goals for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is to decipher when water was on the surface and where it is now," said JPL's Dr. Richard Zurek, project scientist for the mission. "Water is essential for life, so that will help focus future studies of whether Mars has ever supported life."

[Rasputin]

Storybook Atlantis

Atlantis Rises: When we think of the civilization of Atlantis, as described by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, a brilliant playwright and storyteller, we immediately think of an isolated island with a cultivated people so in tune with nature and their surroundings that it borders on a psychic synchronization with the planet itself. But the ideal of Atlantis is much more than a simple story told and retold by a group of men one night and discussed philosophically. It’s a symbol of what mankind can accomplish if we set aside our greed and hatred and look towards the betterment and improving our quality of life. This is why I think we are on a path of annihilation that if unchecked and unchanged will eventually lead us to our ultimate destruction! Over the years the search for Atlantis has lead scientists to hundreds of possible locations as its final resting site, however what they fall to realize is that Atlantis isn’t merely in one place - it’s in many.

Plato placed the island of Atlantis outside the Pillars of Heracles, or using today’s geographical map is known as the Straits of Gibraltar, in the Atlantic Ocean, outside the Greeks comprehensive knowledge of the world. Most historians of that time tended to place the location of story locations outside their known world. If you couldn’t reach it, how could it be disbelieved? The Timeaus and Critias, which describe the tail of Atlantis hold a certain truth about the story as a whole, I think. The story of Atlantis, as many historians claim, was merely a story used for unification, a means for the Greek people to come together during some sort of hardship or perhaps a plague that was ravishing the time period. But I think he was describing a real place.Thousands of years of speculation and stories passed down from generation to generation about an ancient advanced civilization is a way for a story to be remembered and the story of Atlantis holds an underline theme of how corrupt humanity can become; however, there just seems to be more than just the Atlanteans failing, their fall from grace and how it destroyed their civilization. In Plato’s story, he was trying to relate a lesson, but at the same time tell of a lost people, lost in time and to time.