Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Towers point to ancient Sun cult

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: The oldest solar observatory in the Americas has been found, suggesting the existence of early, sophisticated Sun cults, scientists report. It comprises of a group of 2,300-year-old structures, known as the Thirteen Towers, which are found in the Chankillo archaeological site, Peru. The towers span the annual rising and setting arcs of the Sun, providing a solar calendar to mark special dates. The study is published in the journal Science. Clive Ruggles, professor of archaeoastronomy at Leicester University, UK, said: "These towers have been known to exist for a century or so. It seems extraordinary that nobody really recognised them for what they were for so long. "I was gobsmacked when I saw them for the first time - the array of towers covers the entire solar arc." The Thirteen Towers of Chankillo run from north to south along the ridge of a low hill within the site; they are relatively well-preserved and each has a pair of inset staircases leading to the summit. The rectangular structures, between 75 and 125 square metres (807-1,345 sq ft) in size, are regularly spaced - forming a "toothed" horizon with narrow gaps at regular intervals. About 230m (750ft) to the east and west are what scientists believe to be two observation points.

From these vantages, the 300m- (1,000ft-) long spread of the towers along the horizon corresponds very closely to the rising and setting positions of the Sun over the year. "For example," said Professor Ruggles, "if you were stood at the western observing point, you would see the Sun coming up in the morning, but where it would appear along the span of towers would depend on the time of the year." "So, on the summer solstice, which is in December in Peru, you would see the Sun just to the right of the right-most tower; for the winter solstice, in June, you would see the Sun rise to the left of the left-most tower; and in-between, the Sun would move up and down the horizon." This means the ancient civilisation could have regulated a calendar, he said, by keeping track of the number of days it took for the Sun to move from tower to tower.

[Rasputin]

Girl's 5 weeks of hiccups finally end

She sipped pickle juice, held her breath, breathed into a bag, even went to a neurologist, but for more than five weeks nothing would stop a 15-year-old girl's rapid hiccups — until they finally just stopped on their own. After trying countless remedies and attracting national media attention, Jennifer Mee said her hiccups suddenly stopped around 5 p.m. Wednesday. No one is certain why."Right now, my nose is burning and my throat hurts," she told the St. Petersburg Times, but she said she felt a lot better than she has in weeks.Jennifer had started hiccuping Jan. 23 close to 50 times a minute and said it only stopped when she was sleeping.She saw an infectious disease specialist, a neurologist, a chiropractor, a hypnotist and an acupuncturist. She tried a patented device that is designed to stop hiccups, plus all the old remedies. Her mother called the media two weeks ago to try to find more help for her daughter, who ended up on NBC's "Today" show.

According to the National Institutes of Health,Top of Form 1Bottom of Form 1 hiccups can be triggered by anything from spicy foods to stress, and they can start for no reason at all. They're caused by involuntary contractions of the diaphragm, which causes the vocal cords to close briefly, making that distinctive sound.

[Rasputin]

Skunk ape tracker seeks to protect

North America's Pacific Northwest has Bigfoot. The Himalaya region of Nepal and Tibet has the Yeti.But in Florida's swamps, Dave Shealy is on the lookout for the skunk ape, hoping to prove the smelly creature does actually exist and win it government protection.Shealy, 43, claims he saw his first skunk ape -- a creature similar to an orangutan or gorilla but with a foul odor -- in 1974 and has been searching for more ever since."All of a sudden there was this big, hairy creature walking like a man through the marsh," said Shealy while on a cigarette break from fixing a water pump at his Trail Lakes Campground, some 70 miles west of Miami."I didn't see another one until the summer of 1997."Shealy claims three sightings of the skunk ape and boasts to be the world's leading researcher of the mystery creature.

He also runs a small roadside shop stocking skunk ape memorabilia like T-shirts, rudimentary clay models, and a DVD film he has made about his work.He is not alone in his belief in the skunk ape. There was a wave of sightings in the 1970s, all describing the creature as about seven feet tall, weighing about 300 pounds (136 kgs), and bringing a foul odor as it emerged from the swamp.

[Rasputin]

Hawking plans zero-gravity flight

Submitted by Waspie Dwarf: The British physicist Professor Stephen Hawking is to take a zero-gravity flight in a specially modified plane next month. Professor Hawking said as someone who has studied gravity all his life, he was excited at the thought of experiencing weightlessness. His trip is being paid for by an American firm, Zero Gravity, which normally charges $3,750 (£1,915). It also plans to have two seats on the flight auctioned off by charities. Professor Hawking, who uses a wheelchair and is almost completely paralysed, will be accompanied by medical staff. He will take off in April aboard a specially modified Boeing 727 from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The plane flies to 32,000 ft (9.75km) at a steep angle and then dives 8,000 ft (2,400m) to allow passengers to experience weightlessness for 25 seconds. As the plane climbs, passengers experience being pushed down hard, feeling 1.8 times the normal pull of the Earth. In an e-mail interview, Professor Hawking said he wanted to encourage public interest in spaceflight.

"I also want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit," he said. Last year he spoke of how humanity needed to colonise the solar system and beyond if it wanted to survive. Professor Hawking has already spoken about his desire to travel into space. On his 65th birthday in January he said he hoped to take a flight on a space plane being developed by Richard Branson's company Virgin Galactic.

[Rasputin]

Acupuncture Meridians & the Cosmic Spider Web

Jay Alfred: In 1999 computer simulations of magnetic fields in galaxy clusters by Klaus Dolag revealed that galaxy clusters are embedded in a large-scale spider-web-like structure of filaments. Extensive galaxy surveys also show that structures resembling sheets and filaments characterize the distribution of galaxies. Consistent with the simulations, this distribution resembles a complicated spider's web several hundred mega parsecs in diameter. According to Nobel laureate, Hans Alfvén, space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large distances. Hot plasma streams along such filamentary currents. Now, astronomers have actually detected a 'universal web'. Vast filaments of hot gas tracing the web have been 'seen'. Astronomers using NASA's X-ray satellite observatory, Chandra, 'viewed' the filaments stretching for millions of light years through space, with one passing through our own galaxy. They calculate that the filaments contain five times more mass than all the stars in the universe!

Invisible Filaments in Space
Astronomers say that the filamentary structures are so hot that it would generally be invisible to optical, infrared, and radio telescopes. These invisible filaments are detected only because higher density ordinary matter tends to accumulate and condense in these filaments - generating radiation which can be measured by scientists to confirm the existence of these filaments in intergalactic space. Being invisible, they are by definition components of 'dark matter and energy'. Dark matter and energy are invisible matter and energy that make up more than 99% of our universe - according to scientists. Studies show that both ordinary and invisible dark matter work in concert to build filaments in space, with dense junctions where galaxies cluster. The resulting structure looks something like a spider web, dappled with water droplets. The filaments betray the presence of invisible dark matter because gas at millions of degrees centigrade found within these filaments has a natural tendency to spread. To find it confined into filaments means that a very strong gravitational field must be pulling it into place and only dark matter can do this - according to the scientists.

Filaments in Subtle Bodies
In 1904 metaphysicist Annie Besant reported (when describing the formation of a subtle body in the womb) that 'during human antenatal life a single thread weaves a network, a shimmering web of inconceivable fineness and delicate beauty, with minute meshes. Within the meshes of this web the coarser particles of the bodies are built together. During physical life, prana [which is a plasma of charged super particles according to plasma metaphysics] courses along the branches and meshes.' This web interpenetrating the human fetus certainly has features which resemble the cosmic spider web - with currents of charged prana (or qi particles) coursing through its 'threads' and denser material accumulating on it.

It is a well accepted fact in metaphysics that there are filaments within our subtle bodies, which have been referred to as 'meridians', 'nadis' and 'channels' - in the Chinese, Indian and Tibetan literature, respectively. In Taoist and Qigong literature, they are also referred to as 'circuits' and 'orbits'. For example, Qigong practitioners may speak of the 'microcosmic orbit' - which is the main meridian through which particles are accelerated in the relevant practices to bring energy to the rest of the subtle body. According to plasma metaphysics, these meridians are magnetic lines of force, largely frozen into the subtle magnetic plasma (or magma) bodies. The currents flowing through them are 'Birkeland currents', as described in plasma cosmology. The large scale structure of the universe, with a web of filaments punctuated with rotating galaxies, undoubtedly bears a strong resemblance to the web of acupuncture meridians or nadis punctuated with rotating chakras (or vortexes) and acupoints that is found in the 'etheric' component of the physical body.

"I envisioned hundreds of little DC [direct current] generators like dark stars sending their electricity along the meridians, an interior galaxy that the Chinese had somehow found and explored by trial and error over two thousand years ago. It was obvious that the acupuncture charts had an objective basis in reality. Our readings indicated that these meridians were conducting current." - Robert Becker, The Body Electric

Invisible Filaments in the Subtle Body
The meridian system, chartered by Chinese acupuncture, can be considered the arterial system of (what metaphysicists would term) the (lower energy) 'physical-etheric' body. These meridian pathways are ordinarily invisible to the biological eyes - just like the invisible cosmic filaments. And just like cosmic filaments, these invisible meridians can be detected when they generate radiation. French researcher Pierre de Vernejoul injected a radioactive substance into the acupoints of patients and measured the radiation using a special camera. He found that the substance migrated along classical Chinese acupuncture meridian pathways. Other injections made by Vernejoul into random points of the body and into veins and lymphatic channels were unable to demonstrate similar results, suggesting that the meridian system is a unique and separate network of pathways in the body. Further experiments showed that terminating a meridian that related to the liver resulted in a rapid degeneration of liver tissue. Without energy supply from the physical-etheric body via the meridians; tissues, organs and cells of the physical-biomolecular body do not appear to function properly.

- Click here to view filament diagram -

The Universal and Human Physical-Etheric Bodies
The invisible cosmic web of filaments together with the dark matter that shapes them is in fact embedded in the lowest energy physical-etheric body of our universe. When we look out from Earth what we are seeing is the physical universe, shaped by this body. Astronomers say that the invisible filaments in space are detected only because higher density matter tends to accumulate and condense in these filaments. Similarly, the invisible meridians in the subtle body can only be detected because of radiation from other substances that are channeled through them.

Plasma naturally forms filaments in response to electric and magnetic fields within the subtle body (which according to plasma metaphysics is composed of dark matter). Charged particles are guided within these filaments by the magnetic fields and accelerated by the electric fields - generating currents - as observed by Robert Becker.

Just as the physical-etheric body of the universe generates a web of filamentary currents (or filaments) that plays an important part in the large scale structure of the universe, the physical-etheric component of the human body generates a web of filamentary currents (or meridians) that is instrumental in developing the physical-biomolecular body of a human being. Of course, the Chinese already knew this - they have been exploring these filaments for more than three thousand years!

[Rasputin]

Lunar eclipse wows sky watchers

Sky watchers across the world have been enjoying the first total lunar eclipse in more than three years. The eclipse began at 2018 GMT, with the Moon totally immersed in the shadow of the Earth between 2244 and 2358 GMT. During "totality" the Moon took on a reddish hue; the only light reaching its surface by this stage had been filtered through Earth's atmosphere. The eclipse was visible from the whole of Europe, Africa, South America, and eastern parts of the US and Canada. The copper-red Moon was visible across large areas of the UK thanks to clear skies. Robin Scagell, from the Society for Popular Astronomy, said that it was "one of the best lunar eclipses from Britain for years". "It was fascinating to watch the Moon's graceful movement through the shadow of the Earth and check its coppery glow," he said. The last total eclipse visible from the UK was back in May 2004, but it was obscured by cloudy skies. Lunar eclipses occur when the Sun, Earth and Moon are in a near-perfect line in space. The Moon travels through the long cone-shaped shadow that the Earth casts in space. At totality, the only light reaching the Moon's surface has been refracted through the Earth's atmosphere.

The appearance of the lunar surface varies according to how much dust is in the Earth's upper atmosphere. For example, following major volcanic eruptions, the Moon appears to be a deep red and almost invisible. As there have not been any recent sizeable eruptions, astronomers had predicted that the Moon would be bathed in a bright orange light. In Belgium, about 200 people gathered at the Mira observatory in Grimbergen to witness the eclipse.

[Rasputin]

UFO technology to combat climate change ?

Submitted by Kratos: A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday. "I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation ... that could be a way to save our planet," Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper.Such alien technologies could offer humanity alternatives to fossil fuels, he said, pointing to the enigmatic 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico -- which has become a shrine for UFO believers -- as an example of alien contact."We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know.

Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough," he said.Hellyer became defense minister in former prime minister Lester Pearson's cabinet in 1963, and oversaw the controversial integration and unification of Canada's army, air force and navy into the Canadian Forces.He shocked Canadians in September 2005 by announcing he once saw a UFO.

[Rasputin]

Huge 'ocean' discovered inside Earth

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean. The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle.The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms—records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet. They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or “attenuate,” and also slow down slightly. “Water slows the speed of waves a little,” Wysession explained. “Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”Previous predictions calculated that if a cold slab of the ocean floor were to sink thousands of miles into the Earth’s mantle, the hot temperatures would cause water stored inside the rock to evaporate out.“That is exactly what we show here,” Wysession said. “Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it’s quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water.”

The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water. “It would still look like solid rock to you,” Wysession told LiveScience. “You would have to put it in the lab to find the water in it.”Although they appear solid, the composition of some ocean floor rocks is up to 15 percent water. “The water molecules are actually stuck in the mineral structure of the rock,” Wysession explained. “As you heat this up, it eventually dehydrates. It’s like taking clay and firing it to get all the water out.”The researchers estimate that up to 0.1 percent of the rock sinking down into the Earth’s mantle in that part of the world is water, which works out to about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.“That’s a real back of the envelope type calculation,” Wysession said. “That’s the best that we can do at this point.”

[Rasputin]

Albino millipedes discovered in Grand Canyon

Two albino millipedes have come out of their cavernous hiding places to represent an entirely new genus of these leggy organisms. Scientists spotted the millipedes in caves on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. One species was found in a cave on the South Rim and the other in two caves on the North Rim. "We knew the millipedes likely represented two distinct species because the two populations were separated by the Grand Canyon," said biologist J. Judson Wynne, a cave expert at Northern Arizona University who also works for the U.S. Geological Survey. "The fact these two species belong to an entirely new genus was a great surprise to us."Wynne made the discovery with Kyle Voyles, a cave expert with the Bureau of Land Management.A genus is a major subdivision within a family of living things that typically includes more than one species.

Before they ever ended up in the caves, these millipedes were ready for a life of constant darkness, high humidity and scarce food. They lack functional eyes, which would be useless in the blackout conditions, and have no pigment since there is no need for protection from the sun's rays. Instead the cave critters have lots of legs and feelers for finding the rare speck of food washed into the cave from above.

[Rasputin]

The thinnest material known to man

Scientists have created the thinnest material in the world and predict that it will revolutionise computing and medical research. A layer of carbon has been manufactured in a film only one atom thick that defies the laws of physics. Placed in layers on top of each other it would take 200,000 membranes to reach high enough to match the thickness of a human hair. The substance, graphene, was created two years ago but could be made only when stuck to another material. Researchers have now managed to manufacture it as a film suspended between the nanoscale bars of scaffolding made from gold. Such a feat was held to be impossible by theorists, backed up by experimentation, because it is in effect a two-dimensional crystal that is supposed to be destroyed instantly by heat. The crystalline membrane, comprising carbon atoms formed into hexagonal groups of six to create a honeycomb pattern, is thought to be able to exist because rather than lying flat it undulates slightly. Un- dulation provides the structure with a third dimension that gives it the strength to hold together, the researchers have reported in the journal Nature. The graphene membrane has proved to be so stable that it holds together in vacuums and at room temperature.

All other known materials oxidise, decompose and become unstable at sizes ten times the thickness. It was created by scientists at the University of Manchester, working with the Max Planck Institute in Germany. “This is a completely new type of technology — even nanotechnology is not the right word to describe these new membranes,” said Professor Andre Geim, of the University of Manchester. “We have made proof-of-concept devices and believe that the technology transfer to other areas should be straightforward. The real challenge is to make such membranes cheap and readily available for large-scale applications.”

[Rasputin]

Museum IDs new species of horned dinosaur

A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard-long horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said. The dinosaur’s horns, thick as a human arm, are like those of triceratops — which came 10 million years later. However, this animal belonged to a subfamily that usually had bony nubbins a few inches long above their eyes.Michael Ryan, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, published the discovery in this month’s Journal of Paleontology. He dug up the fossil six years ago in southern Alberta, Canada, while a graduate student for the University of Calgary.“Unquestionably, it’s an important find,” said Peter Dodson, a University of Pennsylvania paleontologist. “It was sort of the grandfather or great-uncle of the really diverse horned dinosaurs that came after it.”

Ryan named the new dinosaur Albertaceratops nesmoi, after the region and Cecil Nesmo, a rancher near Manyberries, Alberta, who has helped fossil hunters.The creature was about 20 feet long and lived 78 million years ago.

[Rasputin]

Tarot cards help $6.8M lotto win

When a psychic reveals whether you will live happily ever after, think of Judy Mayer before you dismiss it all as a bunch of baloney. Even though Mayer's good fortune wasn't forecast in a crystal ball, she has more than six million reasons to put her faith in the wisdom of tarot card readings. The Winnipegger won $6.8 million in last Wednesday's Lotto 6-49 draw using five of six numbers she obtained during a reading in 2005. "She didn't tell me I was going to win a substantial amount of money. Sometimes they hit on the right things, sometimes they don't," Mayer, 56, said yesterday after claiming Manitoba's latest multi-million dollar lottery jackpot. In her purse, Mayer carries the psychic's business card on which her numbers are scribbled. Further luck was involved but it was Mayer's doing. For reasons she was unable to explain, she changed the sixth number given to her -- 45 -- to 46. Numbers drawn were 5, 6, 17, 21, 31 and 46.

"Over the years we've had people pick their (winning) numbers a lot of different ways. Tarot cards, I can't recall anybody," said John Matheson of Western Canada Lottery Corp. Mayer's fortune was "in the cards," a press release quipped.

[Rasputin]

Seeking life on Europa

As NASA develops its next "flagship" mission to the outer solar system, Jupiter's enigmatic moon Europa should be the target, says Arizona State University professor Ronald Greeley. Although Europa lies five times farther from the Sun than Earth, he notes it may offer a home for life.Greeley, a Regents' Professor, heads the Planetary Geology Group in ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration. He presented the Europa proposal Feb. 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco."Europa is unique in our solar system," says Greeley. "It's a rocky object a little smaller than our Moon, and it's covered with a layer of water 100 miles deep." This holds more water than all the oceans on Earth, he explains. Greeley adds that Europa also has the two other basic ingredients of life -- organic chemistry and a source of energy.Scientists have identified four candidate worlds beyond Earth that might contain life, either now or in the past, Greeley says. These four are Mars, Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus, and Jupiter's moon Europa.Mars is the target of numerous ongoing missions, and NASA's Cassini spacecraft is studying both Titan and Enceladus at present. Cassini's results, however, show that Titan and Enceladus have temperatures hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit below zero and may not hold any liquid water.

NASA's Galileo mission surveyed Europa in the late 1990s. Greeley notes the mission found that Europa's surface ice was mixed with organic minerals that came up from the solid rocky part of the moon or were deposited by meteorite and comet impacts at the surface. Yet Galileo's results raised more questions than answers."We know Europa's surface is frozen," Greeley says. "But we don't know if it's frozen all the way down, or if there's an ocean under an ice shell."The ice thickness is a key question, notes Greeley."Ultimately, we want to get down through that ice shell and into the ocean where any action is," he says. "So it matters whether the ice is 10 yards thick, or 10 miles or more. The data we have today will never answer that question."

[Rasputin]

Earliest gospels acquired by Vatican

The world's oldest known copy of the Gospel of Saint Luke, containing the earliest known Lord's Prayer, and one of the oldest copies of the Gospel of Saint John have been acquired by the Vatican, according to reports from Rome. A nonsectarian New York nonprofit, Pave the Way, helped facilitate the acquisition.Now stored in the Vatican's Library, the documents are for the first time available for scholarly review. In the future, excerpts may be put on display for the general public. Collectively known as the Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV, the documents date to 175-225 A.D. and consist of 51 leaves from a manuscript that originally consisted of 72 leaves folded in the middle to form a single quire, according to Father Richard Donahoe, rector of the Cathedral of St. Paul in Birmingham, Alabama, who also helped with the acquisition."The papyrus authenticates that which has been passed down over the millennia," Fr. Donahoe told Discovery News.He believes it is even possible the texts may have been copied from the original gospels. Many of the earliest Biblical texts are in the possession of private collectors. In this case, the materials were found, along with other papyri, in 1952 at Pabau, Egypt, near the ancient Dishna headquarters of the Pachomian order of monks. The papyrus was mysteriously smuggled to Switzerland, where collector Martin Bodmer purchased it.

To fund the construction of a library, the Martin Bodmer Foundation contacted the auction house Christie's about a sale. Gary Krupp, founder of Pave the Way, Donahoe and others learned of the sale and, with the Vatican's help, sought a buyer who could purchase the papyrus for the Vatican. Frank J. Hanna III , CEO of an investment management company and co-chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence, agreed to be the buyer. Hanna privately purchased the documents for an undisclosed, "significant" price.

[Rasputin]

How did the Vikings navigate on cloudy days ?

Vikings navigated the oceans with sundials aboard their Norse ships. But on an overcast day, sundials would have been useless. Many researchers have suggested that the on foggy days, Vikings looked toward the sky through rock crystals called sunstones to give them direction. No one had tested the theory until recently.A team sailed the Arctic Ocean aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden and found that sunstones could indeed light the way in foggy and cloudy conditions. Would have worked Crystals such as cordierite, calcite or turmaline work like polarizing filters, changing in brightness and color as they detect the angle of sunlight. From these changes, Vikings could have accurately determined where the polarized sky light was coming from and pinpointed the direction of the sun, said biophysicist Gabor Horvath."Under foggy or cloudy conditions a Viking navigator could have guessed the position of the sun hidden by clouds or fog by determining the sky light polarization in two celestial points ... and could have guessed the position of the invisible sun," said Horvath, of Eotvos University in Budapest. "Although all these are pure hypotheses, researchers can test the scientific possibility of such a polarimetric navigation."

In previous studies Horvath and colleagues demonstrated that Vikings might have required some kind of device, other than just the naked eye, to accurately guess the position of the sun on cloudy days. Their latest findings, published in the April issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, suggest that if Vikings were to have sunstones onboard, the Norsemen could have used them to determine where to go.