KJK

Planet X or Dark Star? Andy Lloyd's startling hypothesis, if proved true, could turn Planet X from a conspiracy-tinged myth into a scientific reality

2011-08-29T19:56:00.000-07:00

via Fortean Times (July 2010)

Artist's impression of a sub-brown dwarf binary system.

The idea of Planet X isn’t a new one; scientists have been actively pursuing its presence in our galaxy for the best part of 100 years now.
One of the first was astronomer Clyde W Tombaugh, who inadvertently discovered Pluto – which he initially gave the temporary name ‘Planet X’ for 10th planet – while scanning the skies for a Neptune-sized body causing anomalies in both Uranus’s and Neptune’s orbits during the 1930s. Unfortunately for Tombaugh, Pluto was far too small – a mere 0.2 per cent the size of Earth – to exert the force required to create such anomalies.

However, Planet X returned to infamy once again during the 1980s in the work of American physicist Richard A Muller, who proposed in his book Nemesis: The Death Star (1984) that a giant planet on an elongated orbit, known as ‘Nemesis’, ‘Nibiru’ or ‘Planet X’, could be passing near the Oort cloud and sending comets flying into the inner Solar System every 26 million years, thus explaining the timing of Earth’s extinction cycles. However, Muller’s theory began to lose its charm after scientists and astronomers failed to discover any conclusive evidence of such a comet-displacing body.
But in 1983, a joint project between NASA, the Netherlands Agency for Aerospace Programmes and the UK Science and Engineering Research Council known as the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, or IRAS, began to reveal some rather significant anomalies – and the first “real” evidence of a Planet X-type body on the far reaches of the Solar System. On 31 December 1983, the Washington Post reported the following: “A heavenly body possibly as large as the giant planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation Orion by an orbiting telescope aboard the US Infrared Astronomical Satellite.”
Unfortunately, the IRAS project was wound up after only 10 months due to technical problems with the satellite; and while it did reveal numerous anomalies, the most significant of them, including the fabled Jupiter-sized object, were explained away by the mainstream science community as distant galaxies. Since then, Planet X has been relegated to the confines of conspiracy forums and far-fetched assertions by researchers intent on proving that Earth will be destroyed by Nibiru in the year 2012.
But the IRAS project left some 350,000 anomalies unexplained at its conclusion, which means investigations into the potential existence of Planet X are far from over – especially if Andy Lloyd, a UK-based writer, researcher and author, has anything to do with it.

SCIENCE AND MYTH

The subject of Planet X divides opinion. On one side are scientists attempting to find an additional extra-planetary body within our Solar System; on the other, you have conspiracy theorists rolling out their various end-of-days scenarios for 2012. Somewhere in the middle of this epistemological divide is Andy Lloyd, who presents a hypothesis which could potentially bridge the gap between science and myth once and for all.
Lloyd tells me he first became interested in Planet X after reading Zecharia Sitchin’s books, which claim that early Sumerian civilisation was created by an alien race called the Anunnaki who came to Earth from the planet Nibiru – or Planet X. According to Sitchin, the Anunnaki (identical with the Biblical Nephilim), genetically manipulated Homo sapiens DNA with their own to create mankind, who they soon put to work mining precious minerals and gold before the humans revolted and the Anunnaki left.
Sitchin’s theories are based on his interpretations of ancient texts, such as the Babylonian creation myth of the Enûma Elish, which, he says, not only describe the creation of our Solar System but also how Nibiru interacts with it every 3,600 years. Needless to say, his claims have been panned by scientists and Sumerian scholars alike.

Andy Lloyd says that while Sitchin’s theories make interesting reading, they “couldn’t possibly work on a physical and scientific level”. For starters, a planet like Nibiru would freeze over on such a large orbit around our Sun – rather detrimental to any life forms inhabiting it. However, Lloyd’s hypothesis avoids this problem by suggesting that Planet X isn’t actually a planet after all. Instead, Lloyd proposes that it’s a sub-brown dwarf.
Scientists are still rather vague on an actual definition of a sub-brown dwarf. Although it’s now generally accepted that they form from gas clouds, in a similar manner to stars, the distinction between a sub-brown dwarf and a planet is unclear, with astronomers divided into two camps.
With this in mind, Lloyd gives me a definition of a sub-brown dwarf in layman’s terms: “If you take Jupiter and dump more and more matter into it, it’ll start to condense, which means it gets smaller and heavier. And once you’re at five or six times the mass of Jupiter, you’re in sub-brown dwarf territory – they’re sort of proto-stars.”
Scientists have yet to come up with any conclusive evidence of these sub-brown dwarfs; they’re very hard to spot as they don’t emit much light and are practically invisible in the blackness of space. Nevertheless, there are a few “suspected” sub-brown dwarfs, such as 2M1207b, SCR 1845-6357, Cha 110913-773444, and OTS 44, which are currently under scrutiny.
However, more startling evidence regarding Planet X surfaced at the beginning of March this year when scientists suggested – again – that a brown dwarf-type object could very well be orbiting our Sun and throwing comets into the inner Solar System, causing catastrophic extinctions on Earth every 26 million years. [1]
NEW LIFE

Lloyd assures me that his Dark Star theory is a “nuts-and-bolts hypothesis” that’ll either be proved right or wrong – and probably within the next few years. Among other things, it opens up the potential for life to exist on the doorstep of our Solar System.
When stars are born, Lloyd explains, it usually happens within stellar nurseries, and for this reason stars tend to form in clusters – which is why the majority of observed star systems are binary in nature. Hardly a revelation, but when you consider that finding single star systems, such as ours, is very rare, it starts to sound more and more probable that something like the Dark Star – or a companion star to our Sun – could be a real possibility.

Brown dwarfs, he continues, form with their own planetary discs, like our Sun; and, again like our Sun, they can form their own planets. In this sense, Lloyd’s proposed Dark Star could be described as a miniature solar system within our Solar System.
In a purely hypothetical sense, Lloyd goes on to suggest that not only is life a possibility on the planets orbiting the Dark Star but that conditions would be more favourable to life than those we regularly endure here on Earth: “Earth, as a planet, is considered the jewel of the universe, because it has life. However, it’s bombarded with all kinds of harmful radiation, such as UV rays, Gamma rays and cosmic rays. In a sub-brown dwarf system, because it doesn’t burn with the intensity of the Sun, this isn’t the case. Also, in terms of location, the Dark Star is in a relatively quiet part of space, which means there’s less chance of it being affected by comets and dangerous hazards that have caused mass extinctions on Earth before. In this context, life could have evolved over a longer, and uninterrupted, time period on a planet orbiting the Dark Star.”

Lloyd’s theory also explains several anomalies which scientists have observed on the outskirts of our Solar System. One of which is the Kuiper cliff, an anomaly or disruption within the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper belt, which is like a second asteroid belt beyond Neptune, is thought to have been created from fragments of the original proto-planetary disc around the Sun that failed to fully coalesce into planets and instead formed into smaller bodies, which now orbit the Sun. Lloyd proposes that the Kuiper cliff, which is essentially where the belt stops dead, could be caused by the Dark Star, as it would take something extremely massive to create such an aberration within a system that should – in all probability – be uniform in its composition. “Something massive, like the Dark Star, could have come and, because of its gravitational power, torn a hole in the Kuiper belt similar to how Saturn’s moons have made holes in its ring,” suggests Lloyd.
Another interesting anomaly can be found in the Heliopause, farther out than the Kuiper belt and generally defined as the area where the outgoing solar wind and the incoming plasma from interstellar space meet. The Heliopause surrounds the Solar System and has long been thought to be uniform in shape. However, deep space probes have now revealed that it isn’t as uniform as the scientists had believed.
“The two probes, which passed through the Heliopause, did so at different points, which means that the heliopause is dented, or that it’s not uniform in shape; and this wasn’t expected,” says Lloyd.
NASA claims that the anomaly could be caused by a molecular cloud, but Loyd doesn’t buy this: “If you look at the Heliopause, a secondary object, such as the Dark Star, which has its own sufficient gravitational energy could cause these anomalies in the Heliopause’s shape. In addition to this, a Dark Star would also throw out lots of particles and have its own electromagnetic field, which, again, could affect the shape of the Heliopause in this way too.”

THE END OF THE WORLD?

I ask Lloyd if he might hazard a guess as to the Dark Star’s current location, but he claims it would be impossible to do so, as we haven’t even detected it yet. However, he does suspect that its orbit is more likely to be in the tens of thousands of years rather than Sitchin’s 3,600-year cycle. Perhaps, he says, it exists in the void between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud; its being there might explain why nothing else is.

Will Planet X cause the end of the world in 2012? Lloyd isn’t a believer, though he admits that something like the Dark Star would have a huge effect on Earth if it passed nearby; and he’s interested in the Mayan calendar, central to so many 2012 doomsday theories.

Lloyd believes that the Mayan calendar, like Sitchin’s interpretation of Sumerian texts, is undoubtedly based on astrology and the movements of the stars; it could be a system for recording some kind of anomaly, such as the Dark Star passing through the Solar System.

“Why would a culture, like the Mayans, design a calendar that starts thousands of years before they existed and end it thousands of years after their demise – could they have known something we don’t?” he wonders.

As Lloyd says, his theory is a nuts-and-bolts one that’ll either be proved correct or false. While he’s confident that the Dark Star will be discovered, he’s also prepared for the chance that it won’t be – it’s this agnostic approach that makes Andy Lloyd an example to forteans.
Could he be the man to create a bridge between science and myth, or will his fabled Dark Star remain an elusive object that forever evades our telescopes in the blackness of space?
Watch this space.
Note 1 The Sun reported on 12 March 2010: "An invisible star may be circling the Sun [the heavenly body rather than the newspaper!] and causing deadly comets to bombard the Earth, scientists said yesterday."
All three books are published by Timeless Voyager Press, and are available through Amazon: The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence (2005) Ezekiel One (2009) The Followers of Horus (2010).

Epileptic Seizures

2011-04-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

via Just dogs with Sherri

I was writing a blog as the poodles lay on their beds next to me. I heard a stomp and looked down to see that Luke had started a seizure. This was very unusual as he always comes to get me before it starts. We get comfy and then work through it. This one was different; I immediately got on the floor beside his bed and he was seizing but still there. There is usually a phase in the second half of the seizure where he totally leaves. There is no longer eye movement and no life in his eyes. This seizure was very different.

The beginning or when I joined him he was tense but not stiff. His eyes fixed but moving. I could see that he was still listening as his eyes moved when Tilley made a noise beside him. I talked to him a lot, I try to use words that I know he understands. Mommy, Daddy, Brad, ball, outside etc. I try my best to keep him with me. This lasted about 3 minutes and he started to come out. Normally this is when he has a very short break, 20 seconds or so and then it gets bad, really bad. The break was long and I actually thought it was over, he started his customary panting that comes at the end. It must have been 3-4 minutes and then he got a look in his eye. A look that I didn't like.

I cranked up the chatting, told him not to let it take him. We worked hard to keep him with me and he did not leave this time, there was eye movement until the end. It was a short phase and then it was over. I hoped that there was not going to be another one, this was a very unusual seizure. But this was the end, he started to get restless, shifting from side to side and his panting was heavy. The panting usually means that he is coming out of it, and he was. He does a great deal of sniffing around, making sure I am still by his side and smelling the surface beneath him. I know he is trying to figure out what happened but there are no answers for him.

He then tries to get to his feet, he always gets up too early and staggers around. This is the time that I must be very careful to not let him fall. He is also ramped up, panting heavy, fast tail wagging along with aimless pacing. I always try to make him rest but he is persistent with his pacing. Finally he lays down, it helps if I turn the tv on or get the laptop out, he knows these things mean that I will be stationary and he stops worrying. While he comes out of it he needs constant reassurance, we make eye contact at least every 20 seconds. He licks the drool from his legs and does a lot of air searching, searching for answers that never come for him.

Luke is 10.5 and has had seizures frome the age of around 3 years. We have chosen not to medicate him and switched him over to real food and try to keep his stress level down. I also work very hard at keeping toxins out of my home which seems to definitely be a trigger. This is what I was blogging about before he started to seizure. That blog tomorrow.

Working through a seizure demands control. Staying calm is important, you need to be there for your dog. I have found that talking and keeping his attention does seem to shorten and lessen the severity of his seizures. And touch is important, I think that it helps him focus on me, something other than the seizure. Seizures are very scary the first couple of time you see them, especially when the dog enters the "gone zone." Their eyes are fixed and they are no longer aware. But it is important to help them through and make sure that they do not injure themselves. Also be aware of feet and throwing heads, your dog may not be able to control their movements so be careful.

Here are some excellent sources of information on the subject.

Canine epilepsy network

Canine epilepsy resource

EPI Guardian Angels

Purely Pets

A k9 heart

2011-04-28T18:31:00.000-07:00

via Just dogs with Sherri:

How many times has a human let you down? If you are like most people; your answer will be often. This morning I was having a bit of bloggers block; it happens now and again so off to the gym I went. On my return; I was welcomed with an exhuberant display from a tiny Jack Russell doing her best "wild stallion" display. She grabbed her toy and stomped her way through the house at top speed. She had seen me coming; she was looking out the front window as I pulled into the driveway so as soon as I came through the door the show began.

How great is it to be greeted by your dog? After my big JRT greeting Tilley came flying down the stairs with her tail wagging and her teeth giving me the biggest grin. Geesh; I'd only been gone maybe 35 min. but they were overjoyed to see me. This old lady was acting like she was just given a shot of super juice and charged around barking and growling up a storm. She did the best "huge" greeting that her old legs could muster. We ran out the back door to continue our big event as she latched onto my arm the way she use to many years ago.

I knew it was only a matter of time before all the excitement got Luke out of bed. He watched from the livingroom until he could stand it no more and charged out to join in the fun. I don't know what got into Tilley this morning but she was surely excited to see me. It is a bit sad to see her mind going through the process but her legs have a hard time keeping up. But no matter; this morning made me smile, her sheer happiness made me happy. It is contagious; watching dogs have fun and being happy just for sake of being happy makes you happy.

Although the elaborate greetings are wonderful ; sometimes it is in the quiet times that you come to the realization; just how wonderful dogs really are. They seldom talk back; never put you down, never lie (that's a biggy), never disappoint you, worship the ground you walk on, hang on your every word and are always, always there for you. Dogs are great listeners; something that I try very hard to be but they are naturals at it. You can tell them your deepest darkest secrets and they won't tell anyone........Mom's the word.

My husband commented earlier this week "dogs are way happier than people." This is so true; my dogs are rarely in a grump and the worst of it is usually that they don't feel like obliging to one of my requests. They are up and ready all the time; even at the age of 12 and 13 my old girls are up for fun. And now that it is there time in life for all the special tlc they are still giving. When your really need a hug they are there to give them out freely; they seem to draw away all the bad and fill you with peace and happiness once again. Amazing what one simple hug can do for a human. Canines have amazing healing power; simply by being a dog.

Networking saves lives

2011-04-28T18:16:00.000-07:00

via Just dogs with Sherri:

Photo from Downey Shelter

I've recently been sent several stories of senior dogs who were dumped. The amount of surrendered dogs these days is staggering but the worst of the worst is the old ones. You all know that I have three old dogs; well Luke is still a young'n at 10 1/2. If ever our dogs needed us it is when they are old. They need TLC and frankly they more than deserve it. They require a soft bed, highly nutritious food an understanding and patient guardian and above everything else, love. I cannot imagine turning a dog in once they have passed their prime. It truly breaks my heart.

Networking is really making a difference though in the speed that rescues, rehabilitation and placement of dogs is happening. And it's not just the young ones, the old guys are getting their turn as well. Sharon Logan; who is one of the founders of Paw Protectors in Huntington Beach California sent this story to me.

Sharon was contacted about a 19 year old Retriever who had been surrendered, she got to work immediately. Action was swift as it passed through other rescues and volunteers via networking. As each person shared more people became aware and all came together with one goal in mind, to save this boy. The 19 year old retriever was quickly posted by Julie on petconnect.us. It was very short notice BarkandPurr Alliance Fund offered funds to help transport and put Sharon in touch with Peg from H.A.R.T Animal Rescue. Saturday night Rescue Paw Protectors agreed to get him out and transport him to Las Vegas Nevada where Peg Steed of H.A.R.T. Animal Rescue would transport him on to St.George Utah which would be his final home. Saturday night the plan was set, Sharon from Paw Protectors went down to the Downey Shelter right when it opened at 10:00 met by Celeste Charles and pulled the 19 Year old Retriever named Red, Sharon then drove him straight from Downey to Las Vegas 3.5 hours away handed him over to Peg Steed of H.A.R.T. Along with Kona a 7 Year Old Brindle that was Rescued from Devore 4 hours before his scheduled euth. Peg then drove them to St.George Utah and they now have loving homes. Sunday night Vegas traffic can be horrific; it took Sharon 6.5 hours to get home, but knowing that the 19 year old did not have to spend another night in the Shelter and would not die alone had made it all worth it!

Many, many people were connected in the effort to save "Red" the 19 year old Retriever. Julie at petconnect.us, many people on FB who networked, shared, and donated funds to get him to safety, Paw Protectors and Celeste Charles who pulled him, Sgt. Torres at the Downey Shelter who was helpful and accomodating, BarkandPurr Alliance Fund who donated for the transport fees and Peg Steed with H.A.R.T Animal Rescue who found forever homes for 2 unwanted Senior Dogs. People all across the country on FB united to save a 19 year old Retriever.

And look at him now.

When someone passes on some info to you about a dog in need, pass it along. You never know who will lend a hand.

Scientists Teleport Light

2011-04-28T02:37:00.000-07:00

via Discovery News:

THE GIST

By destroying light in one place and recreating it remotely in another place, researchers have found a way to teleport light.

This development might be used to design faster quantum computers.

Like the classic example of Schrödinger's cat, these entangled packets of light were paradoxically "dead" and "alive" at the same time.

********************************

Researchers from Australia and Japan have successfully teleported wave packets of light, potentially revolutionizing quantum communications and computing.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Tokyo, say this is the first-ever teleportation, or transfer, of a particular complex set of quantum information from one point to another.

They say it will make possible high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via communications networks.

The research appears today in the journal Science.

Professor Elanor Huntington, of the School of Engineering and Information Technology at UNSW's Canberra campus, explains that teleportation -- the transfer of quantum information from one location to another using normal, "classical" communications -- is a fundamental quantum communication technique.

"It relies on having two things," she said.

"One is the normal fiber optic internet or even copper cables, and the other is a shared resource between the sender and the receiver, that could have been shared at any time in the past: we call that entanglement."

Huntington says the idea of quantum teleportation has been around for about ten years, but has been difficult to put into practice.

"There used to be two ways of doing teleportation and both had their limitations," she said.

"One was quite fast, but had a limited probability of succeeding. The other way of doing it was quite slow, but had a very good probability of working."

"What we've done is managed to get it both fast and good quality," she said.

They did it by teleporting the wave packets of light in a 'Schrödinger's cat' state.

In Schrödinger's famous thought experiment of the 1930s, a cat would be placed in a sealed box with a device containing atomic material. A Geiger counter was included to measure radiation if at some point an atom decayed. Should that happen, the Geiger counter would trigger the release of cyanide gas, which would kill the cat.

The idea was that it was impossible to know whether or not the cat was alive or dead without opening the box and observing it, and that until that happened, both realities existed. This became known as superposition.

Schrödinger's is said to have devised the experiment to ridicule the emerging theories of quantum physics; but since then physicists have found many examples of superposition in the quantum world.

"What was funky about Schrödinger's idea was that you could take a normal macroscopic object, which we all think we know and understand fairly well, and you could put it into a quantum superposition -- and that's kind of weird," said Huntington.

"Nowadays any kind of system where you do that is known as a Schrödinger's cat."

"So in our case what we've done is take a macroscopic beam of light and put it into a quantum superposition, which is extremely fragile, and teleported that from one place to another."

"One of the ways that we encode digital information is by its phase," Huntington said, "so what we've done is created a wave packet that's simultaneously a one and a zero in its phase."

"Superposition is exactly what underlies the power of things like quantum computers. You enable parallel processing because at the same time it's a one and a zero. The point is, we've managed to teleport it from A to B without the one and the zero getting confused," she said.

Huntington says being able to demonstrate this will enable researchers to take the next step in quantum computing.

"[Being able to transfer data packets like this] is a necessary thing to do in order to build a proper quantum computer or a quantum communications device," she said.

SETI Interrupted....ET Call Back Later

2011-04-28T02:29:00.000-07:00

via Phantoms & Monsters:

discovery - The SETI Institute is suspending its search for extraterrestrial radio beacons using its most advanced alien signal-seeking tool while it hunts for new sources of funding.

The privately financed group, based in Mountain View, Calif., has been using an array of radio telescopes at Hat Creek Observatory, about 300 miles north of San Francisco, since October 2007, to study stars for non-naturally occurring radio signals that could indicate the presence of a technologically advanced civilization beyond Earth.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen provided an initial $25 million for the project, which is known as the Allen Telescope Array. The network eventually is intended to have 350 telescopes. The University of California at Berkeley, the National Science Foundation and several corporate and individual donors provided operating funds.

Budget cutbacks by the state of California and the NSF, however, have hit the project hard. Not only was the expansion postponed, now the search for ET itself is on hold.

In a blog post on Friday, astronomer Franck Marchis, who is not involved in SETI research but who works at institutes that are, disclosed that operations of the Allen Telescope Array have been suspended.

In addition to SETI work, the observatory shutdown impacts mainstream radio astronomy projects, such as a survey of extragalactic radio sources.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, however. Since 2009, writes Marchis, the Air Force has been looking at using the Allen Telescope Array to keep track of orbital debris whizzing around the planet.

Writes Marchis:
The future of the ATA may depend of the US Air Force program. Unfortunately, because of the recent federal finance turmoil, no clear decision has been taken with enough time to keep the observatory running. Since April 15, the observatory is in hibernation. All the equipments have been taken care of to make sure that they do not deteriorate over time.

-----

SETI Institute suspends search for alien signals

sfgate - State and federal budget cuts have forced astronomers operating the 42 telescopes at UC Berkeley's famed Hat Creek Radio Astronomy Laboratory to suspend their search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

SETI Institute astronomer Jill Tarter said Tuesday the entire laboratory in the remote Lassen National Forest near Redding is being "placed in hibernation" because $2.5 million in funds from the National Science Foundation and from UC's astronomy budget have dried up.

Other money expected from the Air Force for tracking orbital debris and satellites in space is awaiting congressional budget action, said Jack Welch, an astronomy professor at the UC Berkeley graduate school and a former director of the radio astronomy laboratory.

The suspension is a blow to the SETI Institute, whose astronomers have been seeking signs of life in distant space for more than 30 years. In recent years, the telescopes have cost about $1.5 million a year to operate, and another $1 million has gone to the SETI search, Tarter said.

The half-dozen UC scientists who use the Hat Creek telescopes remotely from their on-campus office computers can move their research efforts to radio telescope sites elsewhere, "but only with difficulty," said Leo Blitz, the lab's current director.

Leaders of NASA's Kepler spacecraft have detected 1,235 distant stars that might hold earthlike planets in "habitable zones," and the craft is now scanning 146,000 "candidate stars" that might also hold such planets.

Tarter said SETI astronomers who have joined the hunt with the telescopes at Hat Creek will have to cancel their work on the Kepler project.

"The Kepler mission for the first time has made people really understand that planets far away really might be very much like Earth and hold life - perhaps even civilizations - and that's what the SETI search is all about," Tarter said.

The telescopes and all the other equipment at the Hat Creek laboratory are being held in a "safe mode," ready to be started up again if money ever becomes available, said Tom Pierson, executive director of the SETI Institute.

"We're hoping to raise at least $5 million to return to full operations and assure the future of the telescopes," Tarter said.

The Allen Telescope Array was initially financed with an $11 million grant from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. It is planned to include a total of 350 6-meter telescopes, all arrayed in a pattern and operated simultaneously to scan across distant space.

Then advanced computers at the lab would analyze apparently random radio noise that might just turn out to be alien signals from unknown beings on distant planets that have yet to be found.

A Lot to Crow About

2011-01-22T19:00:00.000-08:00

In Victorian times, mammals were placed on the highest branches of Darwin’s “Tree of Life”. The famously wise old crow was knocked off its privileged perch, and stories of clever birds were downgraded to mere folklore. In fortean terms, they were damned data which science ignored. Birds have small brains and crucially lack the prefrontal cortex associated with intelligence in mammals, and that appeared to be the end of it.

continues at: http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/science/3538/a_lot_to_crow_about.html

Albino Muti Murders: The albinos killed for their 'magical' body parts

2011-01-22T17:58:00.000-08:00

By Bob Rickard

When Mary Owido, 36, a senior school teacher at Isebania, on the Kenya-Tanzania border, learned that a girl she knew had been murdered and parts of her body removed, she became afraid for her own life because, like the murdered girl, Mary was an albino. In 2009, Mary moved to Ahero, in western Kenya, where she now works for less pay and brings up her six children. However, she still doesn’t feel safe. “Wherever I go people start talking about me, saying that my legs and hands can fetch a fortune in Tanzania. That kind of talk scares me.”

continues at: http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/misc/3043/albino_muti_murders.html

Dark Green Blood

2011-01-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

A 42-year-old man developed a dangerous condition in his legs, known as compartment syndrome, after falling asleep in a sitting position. When a team of Canadian surgeons performed fasciotomies – limb-saving procedures which involve making incisions to relieve pressure and swelling – they were shocked when the patient began shedding dark greenish-black blood. He had been taking large does of sumatripan – 200 milligrams a day – for migraine. This had caused a rare condition called sulfhæmoglobinæmia, where sulphur is incorporated into the oxygen-carrying compound hæmoglobin in red blood cells. Describing the case in the Lancet, the doctors, led by Dr Alana Flexman from St Paul’s Hospital, Vancouver, wrote: “The patient recovered uneventfully, and stopped taking sumatripan after discharge. When seen five weeks after his last dose, he was found to have no sulfhæmoglobin in his blood” – which had returned to its normal colour. According to Star Trek, Mr Spock had green blood because the oxygen-carrying agent in Vulcan blood includes copper (as in hæmocyanin, found in many invertebrates), rather than iron, as is the case in humans. BBC News, 2 May 2010.

found at: Fortean Times

Asylum haunted by Nazi ghost: WWII spirit terrifies refugees

2011-01-21T20:35:00.000-08:00

By Alan Murdie

A ghost believed to date from World War II has returned to haunt an old asylum known as Vaterholmen, currently being used to house refugees at Verdalen in the north of Norway. At 5.28am on the morning of 15 January 2010, police were called out to the site by terrified residents, whom the officers found gathered in a crowd outside the building. They said they had been driven out by a ghost that had been opening drawers and closets during the night. Even the arrival of the police failed to calm the situation, with many residents refusing to go back inside. Officers then searched the building but their investigation failed to find the cause of the incidents. Subsequently, the police announced their investigation was closed.

The story received widespread coverage in the Norwegian media and is of interest as the asylum already enjoyed a reputation for being haunted. Yvonne Wollartsen, the country’s representative for the Psychical Research Foundation, reports:

continues at: http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/ghostwatch/3199/asylum_haunted_by_nazi_ghost.html

Rapping Poltergeists: Is that a ghost at the door?

2011-01-21T20:32:00.000-08:00

By Paul Sieveking

Acoustic analysis of inexplicable banging noises recorded during alleged poltergeist activity shows a different sound signature from ordinary banging noises, according to a paper by Dr Barrie Colvin in the latest SPR Journal.

Dr Colvin analysed 10 separate recordings of alleged poltergeist knocking sounds obtained from around the world over 40 years, from a 1960 case in Sauchie, Scotland, to one in Euston Square, London, in 2000, and including recordings made in the famous Enfield poltergeist case in north London during 1977–79. Though the two types of rap sound rather similar, they are actually acoustically different, and acoustic experts have been unable to replicate the pattern of the alleged poltergeist raps.

In the case of a normal rap, the sound (which often only lasts a few milliseconds) starts loudly and then decays; while in the case of all the poltergeist raps, the loudest part is near the beginning of the sound, but not at the very beginning. There is evidence suggesting the sound arises from within the structure of a material rather than from its surface, as would be the case with a normally produced rapping sound.

Dr Barrie Colvin BSc, PhD: “The Acoustic Properties of Unexplained Rapping Sounds” (Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 2010, vol.73.2 no.899, pp65–93).

found via: http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/ghostwatch/3916/rapping_poltergeists.html

Facing up to 'The Ugly One'

2011-01-21T20:29:00.000-08:00

The rare beast of ill omen discovered dead in Big Trout Lake

www.kitchenuhmaykoosib.com

In late May 2010, news media worldwide carried stories of an extraordinary-looking creature that had allegedly been discovered dead in Big Trout Lake, at the heart of a remote Oji-Cree Native American community south of Hudson Bay in northern Ontario, Canada. The animal had been found by two nurses walking by the lake earlier in May who photographed it but then left it on the lake’s rocky shoreline; when searched for a few days later, it had vanished. Based upon eyewitness descriptions and the photos, the creature was roughly 30cm long with brown fur and a rat-like tail, but its facial skin had been entirely eroded away, leaving only white flesh behind, and the same had happened to its right forefoot.

continues at http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/cryptozoology/3799/facing_up_to_the_ugly_one.html

Ships' Logs and Sea Monsters

2011-01-21T19:48:00.000-08:00

The MoD keeps no secret files, but Admiralty records detail encounters

Hulton Archive / Getty Images

The Ministry of Defence does not keep any secret files on sea monsters reported by Royal Navy personnel, but crews of ships and submarines who make unusual sightings can record their experiences in official logbooks that are public records. This emerged as a result of a Freedom of Information request made to the MoD by marine biologist Sebastian Darby in February. Darby’s request asked the MoD if there were “any abnormally large, or dangerous sea monsters hundreds of metres under the sea that haven’t been revealed to the public”. If such creatures did exist, he argued, it would be in the public interest to publish the facts as marine biologists’ lives could be at risk.

continues at http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/cryptozoology/3715/ships_logs_and_sea_monsters.html

Conspiracy and the Web

2011-01-21T19:37:00.000-08:00

Robin Ramsay looks at how the propagation of conspiracies has changed in the last 10 years

By Robin Ramsay, editor of Lobster

My association with Fortean Times began in 1996, when I spoke at the UnConvention on conspiracy theories. My presence - and that subject - was just another part of the X-Files effect on British popular culture. X-Files creator Chris Carter had used the US Air Force disinformation about Majestic 12 and the government-alien conspiracy as the programme's main theme. It was, in a sense, a contemporary version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers - one in which the pods had opened up and taken over the US military and intelligence outfi ts. Before this point in Anglo-American popular culture, the X-Files-generated interest in UFOs, the paranormal and US conspiracy theories would surely have run out of steam and been replaced by the next TV-manufactured enthusiasm. But 1996 was the year before the Internet began to take hold of our intellectual lives and conspiracy theories transferred from TV and magazines onto the Net. Where - ever since - they appear to have been something of a worry to our masters in Washington.

continues at http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/conspiracycorner/332/conspiracy_and_the_web.html

Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities

2011-01-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

A new website tells medical history stories through the religious, scientific and downright bizarre objects lurking in the dustier corners of the Science Museum’s collections

With its hulking solidity and its icy, aquamarine corridors reaching away into darkness, Blythe House can’t but call to mind the proverbial iceberg-below-the-waterline. Once the Victorian headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, the building’s recesses now hold some of the roughly 95 per cent of the major London museums’ collections not currently on public display. It’s a vast resource, and it is possible to visit, but access is hardly easy: aside from the logistical hassles of applying for permission and getting to or across London, even senior curators, once having navigated the building’s byzantine security, risk getting lost among their own skeletons every time they descend into its labyrinthine bowels. It’s not somewhere you’d want to unleash a school party, and so the Science Museum has launched a new website – Brought To Life: Exploring the History of Medicine – putting some of these objects, as well as items from its public galleries, online.

continued at Fortean Times

'Crop Circles' in Cyberspace

2011-01-21T18:49:00.000-08:00

A brand new strange phenomenon in that unlikeliest of places - the financial markets

found at: Fortean Times

On 6 May this year, the financial markets freaked. The Dow Jones index (which tracks the overall value of key stocks on the US market) crashed by 1,000 points in just a few minutes, creating what has become known as the “Flash Crash” and wiping billions of dollars off the value of the New York stock market. Now most people’s picture of a stock exchange involves a bunch of pushy geezers in red braces shouting and waving their arms about, and while that might have been the case in the 1980s, today’s markets are very different. These days, stock markets are high tech and virtual. Trading is carried out by carefully-honed, esoteric computer programs that can make thousands of trades a second using automated bots. Finance companies vie to locate their server farms as close to the trading floors as possible because these things trade so fast that even the speed of light (at which the data moves through the cables) is a factor in the calculations as to whether a successful trade is pulled off or not. It’s no longer the Gordon Geckos of this world who make the running, but PhD physicists who have defected to hedge funds, where their skill at creating algorithms to mimic physical processes is put to work modelling financial markets in order to pull off these light-speed trades.

continues at: http://www.forteantimes.com/features/fbi/4777/crop_circles_in_cyberspace.html

Pictures: Tube-Nosed Bat, More Rare Species Found

2010-11-14T21:12:00.000-08:00

found via : http://chrisperridas.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-bat-discovered.html

A Nose for Fruit

Photograph courtesy Piotr Naskrecki, Conservation International

This tube-nosed fruit bat is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea in 2009—including a katydid that "aims for the eyes" and a frog that does a mean cricket impression, Conservation International announced late Tuesday.
Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.
In all, the expeditions to Papua New Guinea's Nakanai and Muller mountain ranges found 24 new species of frogs, 2 new mammals, and nearly a hundred new insects. The remote island country's mountain ranges—which have yielded troves of new and unusual species in recent years—are accessible only by plane, boat, foot, or helicopter.
(Also see pictures of new species from Papua New Guinea's "Lost World.")
—Rachel Kaufman

Published October 6, 2010

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/photogalleries/101006-papua-new-guinea-species-tube-nosed-bat-science-animal-pictures/#/papua-new-guinea-new-species-bat_27185_600x450.jpg

Zoologger: Horror fly returns from the dead

2010-10-23T17:12:00.000-07:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19359-zoologger-horror-fly-returns-from-the-dead.html

found via http://grimreviews.blogspot.com/

Species: Thyreophora cynophila

Habitat: Oak forests in central western Europe – on and around dead mammals

This week: a mythical beast, not seen for more than 160 years. A nocturnal animal that feeds on the rotten flesh of large mammals. A species active only during the winter months that reportedly emits a luminous glow from its large, orange head. What new horror is this?

It's a fly, the bone skipper Thyreophora cynophila, and it is back from the dead. Considered globally extinct until now, the first fly to be killed off by humans, the bone skipper was first described by an entomologist who found it on the carcass of a dog in 1798. Last seen in the 1840s, it has now been rediscovered by Daniel Martín-Vega and colleagues of the University of Alcalá in Madrid, Spain. The fly turned up in baited traps in woodland around Madrid and in La Rioja province.

As might be expected of a species described as "mythical" even by entomologists and that until recently hadn't been seen in living memory, little is known of its feeding ecology or its behaviour. But we can make some educated guesses.
Big rotters

T. cynophila is sarcosaprophagous: that is, it specialises in eating and breeding in marrow from crushed bones of large mammals such as deer. In the past such carcasses would have been relatively common in European forests after kills by bears and wolves, but these days are scarce.

The decline in large predators coincided with the ecological effects of the industrial revolution: on farms across Europe livestock were better managed and carcasses disposed of in ways that left fewer bones for bone skippers. It is one of the dangers of overspecialisation that when the thing you rely on disappears, you yourself are imperilled – lessons for us all here.

Whether the newly discovered specimens have found something else to feed on and breed in is unknown, as the larvae have not been observed.

Envy the cousins

It would be surprising, however, if they didn't show the "leaping" behaviour characteristic of this family of flies (the Piophilidae). Bone skipper larvae curl and rapidly uncurl their bodies, thus skipping over their rotten-flesh meal and earning their common name. Larvae of a related fly, the cheese skipper, are only 8 millimetres long but can leap 15 centimetres into the air. These are the maggots, incidentally, that are intentionally added to pecorino in Sardinia, Italy, producing casa marzu rotten cheese.

Martín-Vega and colleagues were studying the colonisation of carrion as part of a forensic entomology study. The Piophilidae are valuable to police in ageing corpses and time of death, as they do not colonise bodies until three to six months after death. Martín-Vega speculates that one of the reasons T. cynophila has evaded entomologists for so long is because collections are not usually made in winter, when the flies are most active. Nor are most entomologists inclined to collect insects from highly decayed corpses.

The bright orange head and blue body of the males suggest that sexual selection is strong in the species, and that like the cheese skippers, bone skippers fight other males and court females. In the 19th century, entomologists impressed by the orange head reported that it could glow in the dark.
Journal reference: Systematic Entomology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-3113.2010.00541.x

I want it. And I want it now.

2010-06-30T17:10:00.000-07:00

[c] http://justdogswithsherri.blogspot.com

I was standing chatting with some friends; Luke was trying to achieve eye contact with me. I looked at him and asked "what do you want?" He grabbed his bottle of water that hangs off my dog pouch and pulled. He had just had a drink of water; I don't want him drinking too much at a time on a walk so I told him no more. He then grabbed his bowl which is also attached to the pouch; hmmmmm. I do not like demanding behavior; Luke wanted attention and wanted me to stop talking and keep walking. "Knock it off;" I told him making it clear that this was not acceptable behavior. He then gave me a quick look and ran off.

The other day in the park I watched as a young and very obnoxious dog attempted to control his guardian. The dog was off leash when I got there and by it's behavior I knew I didn't want it coming my way. I had Jessie and at 14 and grouchy she will not put up with obnoxious. The woman saw us and attempted to put the leash on; the dog was not helping. He was jumping; spinning and biting her arms and the leash. Once the leash was on he jumped and bit at the leash and her arms the entire time. She was fighting with him but he was winning; I was just glad she got the leash on.

All dogs can try your patience; some will test, some will push. The end result and lesson will result by what you do in return. Many demanding behaviors can seem cute to start with; "oh look he wants to walk himself." So if you don't know what is actually going on you can reinforce an obnoxious behavior. You not only allow it but you encourage it. Yikes.

Leash grabbing and yanking is a very common demanding behavior. Your dog may not feel like being on leash or want to go in an opposite direction as you want. They grab the leash and start pulling; or they start jumping up at you and biting. You may try to pull the leash back and a game of tug-o-war starts. That was easy; your dog simply had to tug on the leash and you oblige with a game. The annoying jumping resulted in a game of push and shove; it may not be fun to you but your dog got the attention he was seeking.

Depending on the demanding behavior will factor in how you should react. Ignoring is the first step; it is often all that is needed. If you watch dogs interacting they too use ignoring to deter attention seeking behavior. But if it is a persistant type dog or a behavior that has previously been reinforced; ignoring will often create a "gets worse before it gets better" situation. The best reaction is to nip it in the bud so to speak; at the first sign you must react. Often it can be avoided in entirety if you are quick enough. When you see the first sign of leash grabbing or whatever the demanding behavior is you do something else. Something that creates an incompatible behavior. Doing some heeling; learning a new trick, pick up the pace of your walk, do direction training, work on your dogs catch. By creating an incompatible behavior situation you get rid of the demanding behavior. But as is typically the case you must have good timing; you want to avoid any idea that the demanding behavior caused a good reaction; meaning reinforcing of bad behavior.

A good example is; Luke is demanding attention from me. So as to not create a reinforcing situation I will ignore him; walk away and make like I am involved in some other activity. As soon as he is distracted from getting my attention I will pick up the lead and get into some serious obedience training. If he decided to bite his leash while on a walk for some attention; he would not get it. He would get a huge sigh of disgust from me and ignoring. Defusing an attention seeking behavior is very tricky; you must take the utmost of care to have your timing down and in no way reward it.

If your dog is displaying a demanding behavior; think about what their agenda is. What are they wanting? Watch, ponder and learn. Many dogs bark outside so that you will then come and let them in; works doesn't it? Nudging at your hand while you are watching your favorite show is a great way to demand attention. Staring at the soaked tennis ball at your feet works like a charm. If they stare hard enough; you throw it right? Often these are the small things that mess up a good relationship; just who is in charge? And when you look at your relationship closely you may discover that it is not you at all that is in charge.

Controlling the beast

2010-06-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

[c] http://justdogswithsherri.blogspot.com

I'm sure everyone who walks their dog on a regular basis has crossed paths with a not so friendly dog on a leash. Typically the owner of these dogs is mortified; which they should not be, it is alot more common than not. In our world of leash laws; we have taken away our dogs ability to freely communicate. Correspondence get lost as the leash tightens. And as we humans tend to do; as the leash tightens igniting a frenzy from our dogs, we are sent into a stress induced adrenaline rush. So not only are we left with a dog that needs work; we need even more work.

Just the other day I had Luke out for a really nice walk; it was cool, we were relaxed and enjoying the fresh morning. Up ahead was a woman I'd seen before; two doxie's (weiner dogs) that were a bit feisty but nothing had happened before. This fact could have been because I usually give feisty a good big space. But this morning was different; one of the little dogs went off on Luke and slipped his collar which enabled him to charge us. He made impact and Luke countered his tiny attack; I pulled Luke in and the woman grabbed her dog. I quickly kicked into chill mode "whoa; that was pretty weird eh Luke?" This is imperative; and we happy continued our walk unphased. And I should add that the woman did not apologize for this attack; please always apologize.

There is another dog that we see regularly at the park; this is not a small dog but it acts in the same manner. The problem is with this one is that it looks like the gentleman who walks this dog is just barely hanging on. No one wants to see a big dog going crazy on the end of the leash with someone who looks like they are loosing their grip; literally. Control is the first issue; you need to make sure that this dog is not going to slip their collar or slip out of your hands. Had the doxie that went after Luke gone after one of the other dogs at the park; things could have turned out very different for the little dog.

Along with control is space; you must give yourself enough space to calm the beast. When you start working with a dog that has leash aggression issues you need to go far enough away from what causes the problem to alleviate the problem, then start there. Often sight alone starts it all so you may need to be 40-50 feet away to start teaching the calm. But the first thing that needs to be worked on is your own calm and knowing that your dog is firmly attached by their collar or harness and that you are capable of holding the leash is a starting point. When you know your dog is securely attached and that you have good control; calm is within reach for you. Having a flustered owner on the other end of the leash only fuels a leash aggressive dog.

So take a breath; chill, hold tight and get some distance. Now go walk your dog.

Fear and fireworks

2010-06-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

[c] http://justdogswithsherri.blogspot.com

NEVER BRING YOUR DOG TO A FIREWORKS DISPLAY

With July 4th just around the corner I thought I'd talk about this particular fear based behavior. Tilley is my fearful dog; she is terrified of fireworks. She never use to be; back when we lived in Canada it was Clyde (my male before Luke) who was petrified of storms and fireworks. It was about 6 years ago when she first showed signs of fireworks fear. Up until that point she had been fine with storms and light up the sky celebrations. So what happened? Who knows but she is now one of the many dogs fearful of fireworks.

All dogs display their fear differently; Tilley digs, she is luckily not a runner. Clyde was a climber and runner; running is the worst. If they get out of the safety of their home they can end up anywhere as they mindless attempt to run from the explosions. But luckily Tilley doesn't run; she hides and has been found in the bathroom; perhaps she feels safe in the small room. I located her once in our closet; she had tossed the entire contents in the small area everywhere. She'd dug and dug to no avail; there she lay at the top of the heap that she'd created. Tilley is obviously trying to hide; to somehow get away from the object of her fear by digging a hole.

Since the appearance of her fireworks fear have tried our best to ignore it and go about our business as usual. We rarely go out to watch the displays; opting to be at home just to be sure that she is fine. But last year we tried something new; we have a great balcony off of our bedroom where we sit and watch. The displays are pretty far away so there is no loud booming or huge explosions right near where we sit; it is all in the distance. We got chairs out and brought the three dogs out there to watch with us. Because they are so far away; I thought it might just help her to become accustom to the sound so that she may have a lesser fear response. (NEVER BRING YOUR DOG TO A FIREWORKS DISPLAY) We sat with a glass of wine and chatted; Luke and Jessie lay on their bed and Tilley paced. She paced and sat; then paced some more. So I asked her to come and sit by me; I did not touch her.

Soon she started to relax; everything around her was calm, I got my camera out with my big zoom lens and shot fireworks and she watched us intently. This is when it is EXTREMELY important to play "chill." You need to do your best and most relaxed display of behavior ever; sort of like "what fireworks?" She was soon relaxing; not completely but there was a marked improvement. I decided to get out her ball and see if we could even create a positive association; all is well when you are playing with a tennis ball. I tossed it around to see if there was any tiny interest; Luke snatched it up in a flash. This was good because it took Tilley's mind off of the noise and flashes and onto Luke stealing the tennis ball. And with Luke playing ball; this had a very calming affect on Tilley.

She is not cured of her fireworks fear but she sure got through it last year with flying colors. This year I am hoping to try out a product call the Thunder shirt; I am very excited to try it out and hope that it gets here in time for the fireworks display. And on Tilley's next visit to the vet I will give it a try as well; she comes unglued when there is a veterinarian visit required.

For all dog owners; even ones who do not have dogs that already show signs of fear during fireworks, pay extra attention to safety.

- Make sure that your dog is indoors safely confined; keep dog doors closed.
- Turn the tv or radio on to add some constant noise.
- If your dog is fearful; best to stay home with them.
- Many dogs become injured trying to get out of a house when they are in such a state of fear; often a crate is the only safe place for these guy.
- Never respond to fear behaviors with petting and hugging.
- Put on your best "chill" face; inform the entire family to do the same.

Far too many dogs end up in shelters or worse on July 4th; left in their yard they become frenzied and attempt to escape the noise. Once they are out they will just run. In this state they have no idea where they are running; they are just running. So lock up the dogs on July 4th and NEVER BRING YOUR DOGS TO A FIREWORKS DISPLAYS.

The Devil Rides Out : How Dennis Wheatley sold black magic to Britain

2010-06-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/2623/the_devil_rides_out.html

FT256

William Blake’s verdict on Milton was: “Of the Devil’s party without knowing it”, and much the same could be said of Dennis Wheatley. He virtually invented the popular image of Satanism in 20th-century Britain, and he made it seem strangely seductive. If the appeal of Black Magic in popular culture was ultimately erotic, then this was largely due to Wheatley’s writing, with its reliable prospect of virg ins being ritually ravished on altar tops.

By the time he died in 1977, Wheatley had shifted around 50 million books, helped by a massive surge in paperback sales during the “occult explosion” of the late Sixties and early Seventies. By then, his books seemed to be every where, in a uniform range of black paperbacks, each one featuring a naked woman who seemed to be go-go dancing behind a splurge of flame.

She was the same on each cover, but the occult props varied: on different books you’d find a skull with a black candle, a leather-bound tome, a goat’s head, a crystal ball, a tribal mask, and so on: all the décor of the arts of darkness. Inside the books, it was secret Sabbats, Satanists in mansions, astral projection, masked orgies, and the rest. The public couldn’t get enough of it.

Thanks to Wheatley, people “knew” what Black Magic and Satanism – historic ally an almost non-existent phen omenon – were like. Professor Jean La Fontaine made an astute link to Wheatley-derived imagery in her debunking of the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic, and Ronald Hutton, inThe Triumph of the Moon, remembers adolescents borrowing “risqué imagery” from Wheatley’s books to decorate parties: “For my generation of Essex teenagers, they represented the essential primer in diabolism.”

Their salacious promise of something impendingly kinky made Wheatley’s books particularly popular with adolescents, but they had a far wider appeal. There is a comforting air of luxury and connoisseurship about the world of Wheatley, particularly in the Duke de Richleau books such as The Devil Rides Out, where the Duke’s flat in Curzon Street has a Tibetan Buddha on a lotus, ancient bronzes, jewelled Russian icons and “curiously carved ivories from the East”. Along with his knowledge of the mystic arts, like a prototypical Doctor Strange, the smoking-jacketed Duke also enjoys his Imperial Tokay wine and his Hoyo de Monterrey cigars.

With their attention to drink and food (“the bécasse is a bird for which I have a quite exceptional partiality”), their old-style English values, and the pukka decency of their leading characters, the Duke de Richleau books have an almost Christmassy warmth. But it is not Dickensian; it is an aristocratic warmth – or an idealised suburban fantasy of it – creating a realm where pentagrams are drawn on the floors of country house libraries, and the Prince of Darkness rubs shoulders with rare books and fine wines.

Despite the fact that the Duke and his friends battle against Satanism, Wheatley infused the whole idea of the occult with something of his own snobbery, and the association stuck. “What really happens ‘after the Ball is over’ at leading country houses?” asked the blurb of June Johns’s 1971 book Black Magic Today (published by iconic paperback imprint the New English Library, which also published Richard Allen’s Skinhead books).

Another New English Library title, Sandra Shulman’s 1970 novel The Degenerates (“exposes the evil of Satanism in Britain today”) features an evil cult in swinging London. Young ingénue Jenny is taken to an extremely select party (“like one of those exclusive clubs – White’s or the Athenæum”) where she is wide-eyed at the carpets and tapestries: “[E]ven the wall of leather-bound books… suggested another unknown world. This, she understood with dismay, was real class.”

Incense drifts up from gilded burners and there is a candle burning between the horns of a gigantic goat-headed effigy. There are lobsters and caviar before the time comes for Jenny’s ritual ravishment (“[T]hey will hold you down until your initiation is accomplished”). It is a “rare sideshow of depravity”, but these people are not just any old degenerates: “Maxted and Mireille argued about the true value of a Chinese grey jade figurine which had recently been auctioned at Sotheby’s.” Jenny’s companion, David, recognises the ambience at once: “He had whiled away hours… in the company of too many Wheatley characters not to recognise the Satanic set-up.” Indeed.

BRITAIN'S OCCULT UNCLE
Along with Sex and Snobbery (two of the “three esses” that critic Cyril Connolly thought were central to successful popular fiction, the other being Sadism; he was thinking particularly of the James Bond books), people also got a certain amount of spiritual sustenance from Wheatley. Whatever the subject – and the occult was only a part of Wheatley’s output, although it’s the part he will be remembered for – Wheatley’s books were always research-heavy, and this has a special role in his occult books, where the relentless parade of factoids starts to wear down the reader’s disbelief.

The Devil Rides Out is so insistently packed with esoteric lore that readers soon learn about the astral plane, elemental spirits, the inner meaning of alchemy, familiars, grimoires, scrying, and the rest. The effect is richly atmospheric, with an immersion in specialised jargon such as “passing the Abyss”, the “dispersion of Choronzon”, “St Walburga’s Eve”, the “Clavicule of Solomon”, “Our Lady of Babalon”, and the Golden Dawn levels of Magister Templi, Neophyte, Zelator, and Ipsissimus.

Plenty of modern occultists began with Wheatley’s books, although they might not always admit it. From The Devil Rides Out alone, the main planks of an occult worldview are clear: mind rules matter; spirit is transcendent; the soul is eternal; we move through successive incarnations “towards the light”; and there are “Hidden Masters” operating above and behind the scenes.

Coming largely from the wider cult ural fall-out of Theosophy, this is an uplifting package with an undeniable popular appeal. Wheatley writes partic ularly well about astral projection or out-of-body-experi ence, which was also a powerful draw in the bestselling works of Lobsang Rampa (aka Cyril Hoskins; see FT63:24–26) and the anthropological fraud Carlos Castaneda (see FT117:42–44; 238:56–57).

Wheatley had an immense mailbag and he answered his fan letters diligently, but he noticed his occult books brought a different quality of post; a number of the writers were clearly deranged. Looking back on his life, he preferred to dwell on the letters he had received from physically sick people in hospital, who said his books had enabled them to forget their pain. His books would be doubly comforting in the circumstances, not just for their page-turning distraction but the transcendent occult message of mind over body.

By the time he published his non-fiction religious compendium The Devil And All His Works (1971), Wheatley had become Britain’s occult uncle, and his publishers cashed in on this towards the end of his life with a paperback series called “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult”. Originally planned to include hundreds of books, it ended up running to 45 – Bram Stoker, Blavatsky, Sax Rohmer, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany and many more – with undemanding introductions by Wheatley. Barbara Cartland lent her name to “The Barbara Cartland Library of Love” around the same time.

Wheatley’s identification with the occult – and his famously bad prose style – meant a certain comedy value grew up round his name, albeit affectionate, and it has been there ever since. Still, it was hard work being a national figure; batt ing back letters from teen agers, lecturing to Church of England clergymen about demonic possession, and even giving his specialist opinion on crimes that might have an occult angle, such as the Charles Manson Family murders.

In fact, Wheatley was getting remarkable mileage out a rather superfcial knowledge of the occult. It was based particularly on the works of the Reverend Montague Summers, along with Grillot de Givry’s Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy.

In the 1930s, he befriended a number of occultists for his research, notably Summers and Rollo Ahmed, and he treated Aleister Crowley to a slap-up lunch at the Hungaria Restaurant on Regent Street. In later life, he was happy to give the impression of a more protracted acquaintance, but in reality he wasn’t keen to see Crowley again.

Wheatley believed in reincarnation, but he was less absorbed in the occult than his popular image suggests: he would like to have been equally remembered as a writer of thrillers and historical romances, but it was clear what his public wanted and by the end of his life he had to go along with it. His deeper interests were history and politics, and these were weirdly intertwined with his more clandestine personal mission as a writer, which we can now see hidden in full view.

SATANISTS AND SWASTIKAS
Like many thriller writers, Wheatley was a man of frankly reactionary opinions. In his Cold War thriller Curtain of Fear, a foolish left-wing professor remembers reading a book by none other than Dennis Wheatley, a “drum-banging” writer whose characters “glorified the sort of reactionary sentiments that had been current in Disraeli’s day. They were absurd and unreal, and wickedly calculated to inspire anti-social ideas in the young…”

Wheatley often wrote himself into his books. One of his early thrillers,Such Power Is Dangerous, is set in the Hollywood film industry, where a character plans to film a novel called The Forbidden Territory. We are told it has “sledge scenes in the snow – aeroplanes – a gun-fight with the Reds in a ruined chateau, and a dash to the frontier in a high-powered car… plenty of love interest… great spectacle… educative value”, and “It’s by a feller named Wheatley – who he is, God knows”. In another writer, this overlap between art and life might be almost avant-garde… if it wasn’t for the asterisked footnote announcing the book was available from Hutchinson at 7/6d.

The dangerous power of the title is media power, and it shows an acutely Thirties awareness of what a critic of the time, IA Richards, called “the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loudspeaker”. In the opening chapter, “A Plot to Dominate the World”, criminal dwarf Lord Gavin Fortescue explains that by means of a film monopoly he and his co-conspirators can not only achieve limitless wealth, but “…our sphere of influence would be unbounded. By the type of film which we chose to produce we could influence the mass psychology of nations.”

All his life, Wheatley had an intense consciousness of media power and propa ganda. Propaganda was a particularly well-known concept in Wheatley’s intellect ually formative years between the wars, when the press baron Lord Beaverbook described Christ as “the Divine propagand ist”, and people woke up to the fact that there was as much, if not more, power in owning newspapers as there was in reaching elected office.

Wheatley had a more frivolous confirm ation of media influence when he worked as a celebrity gossip columnist in the Thirt ies. Reporting a dance, he conspired with some other society journalists to invent a fictitious beauty named Ermintrude Wraxwell. Next day, offers starting coming in from agents and film companies: “Had we named a real girl, we could have made a fortune for her.”

After being an army officer and then a Mayfair wine merchant, Wheatley started writing thrillers after his business was caught out by the Wall Street Crash. He had already written five books when he found his real subject in 1934 with The Devil Rides Out, a book with a special mess age for contemporary readers.

Hitler had come to power in 1933, and already people feared another war. It was expected to be like the last, only worse. Along with the attrition of the Western Front trenches, there would be new weapons such as “death rays”, and the poison gas bombing of cities. The technology of bombing was known to have improved, and it was widely believed London could be completely destroyed in the opening stages of a new conflagration.

There was a further reason for avoiding war in some circles, which was that Hitler was thought to be preferable to Bolshevism, and even a useful antidote to it. Wheatley was in this camp, and he sympathised with Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts. Press barons Beaverbrook and Rothermere were also opposed to war, in Rothermere’s case because he was another Fascist sympathiser, believing that “[T]he sturdy young Nazis are Europe’s guardians against the Communist danger.” Rothermere’s flagship paper, the Daily Mail, was also pro-Mosley; so much so that in January 1934 it carried a piece by Rothermere himself, with the headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”.

And so it was that on Hallowe’en 1934, the Mail began a thrilling new serial novel about a struggle to avoid a new war with Germany. It wasThe Devil Rides Out, by “master of sensation” Dennis Wheatley. The Thirties subtext, lost in the celebrated 1968 Hammer film and now largely forgotten, is that the Satanists are trying to start a new war, and the Duke de Richleau and his chums have to stop them. Rescuing his Jewish friend Simon Aron from the Satanists with a sock on the jaw, the Duke places a supernatural charm around his neck to keep him safe; in one of the weirder moments in Thirties fiction, it is a golden swastika, which the Duke explains is “the oldest symbol of wisdom and right thinking in the world…”

The swastika was not so associated with Nazism as it has been since the War: as an Eastern charm, it appeared on the covers of Kipling books (and, perhaps less innocently, it was given away as a lucky watch fob by Coca-Cola, which later sponsored the Berlin Olympics). The Duke’s comments are not pro-Nazi, and it may even be that Wheatley was trying to weaken the strong ‘brand identity’ of Nazism, prising the swastika loose from it.

At the same time, Germany is specific ally exonerated from having caused World War I. “I thought the Germans got a bit above themselves,” says the Duke’s friend Rex van Ryn, to which the Duke says “You fool! Germany did not make the War. It came out of Russia.” It was caused by Rasputin, supposedly a black magician. This exemption from blame is part of the book’s inner message, which is (to borrow a line from Noel Coward) “Let’s not be beastly to the Hun.”

Given the strong overlap between the esoteric and far-right sensibilities – noticed by Orwell, among others, who mentions in his essay on WB Yeats that the French Fascist paper Gringoire was crammed with adverts for astrologers – it is extremely fitt ing that the greatest popular occult novel of the 20th century should have a subtext of peace with Nazi Germany.

WHEATLEY'S WAR
Wheatley changed his mind about Mosley and Hitler, and he had an extraordinary war. He began by writing papers for the King and the Joint Planning Staff on subjects such as Resistance to Invasion, where he advocated a last-ditch civilian struggle of the kind never yet seen in Britain, with every village doing its bit to delay the German advance by digging in to die as an isolated unit.

His masterpiece of the period, however, was Total War, which had some quite sophisticated ideas about the war in general: Wheatley argued that while WWI had been a tribal war, WWII was better understood as a civil war (an idea which must have made particular sense after being a fellow-traveller of the other side only a few years earlier).

Further, “Total War” was idea war: “…the decisive sphere of Total War is the Mental Sphere,” and “The primary Power Instrument of Total War is not Armed Force, but propaganda.” Armed force came third in Wheatley’s estimation, below propaganda and military intelligence; in fact, “Armed force must be considered as the backing for propaganda power.” As for propaganda itself, “the science of influencing ideas”, it “loses its value if it is recognised as propaganda”.

Wheatley moved from writing these papers to working in deception-planning, with extraordinary characters such as Dudley Clarke and Johnny Bevan. Lieutenant-Colonel Clarke was the founding genius of British deception in WWII and he became a legendary figure to his colleagues, although his sanity was questioned after he caused a diplomatic incident in neutral Spain, where he was arrested while dressed as a woman.

When the Allies were ready to invade Sicily, Johnny Bevan had to convince the Germans that an invasion of France was imminent instead. He had banknotes printed saying “British Army of Occupation in Northern France”, and Wheatley and others would accidentally hand these over in restaurants and shops, snatching them back when they had been seen. Later, even as the D-Day landings were happening in Normandy, Bevan and his colleagues had led the Germans to believe they were only a feint, so they continued to keep the bulk of their armoured divisions uselessly in the Pas de Calais where they expected the real attack.

British deception was one of the great success stories of the war, and by the strat egic legerdemain of arriving in decisive numbers where they were not expected, the Allies saved thousands of lives on both sides (See “Bodyguard of Lies”, FT185:38–45). It was also one of the great successes of Wheatley’s life, bringing him a new circle of friends and an enduring conn ection with the military and intelligence establishments.

Wheatley continued to write fiction during the early stages of the war, particularly thrillers about British secret agent Gregory Sallust, but in 1941 he published his second occult novel, Strange Conflict. This had the Nazis in league with a Haitian practitioner of voodoo, and its central supernatural feature is astral projection, used for spying purposes (it might sound like the sort of nonsense that belongs only in the world of Wheatley, but the American government later poured an estimated million into military clairvoyance experiments under the concept of “remote viewing”, notably in the CIA’s notorious Stargate Programme.

The idea of flying around on the astral plane was also calculated to lessen the fear of death – the Duke discusses exactly this aspect, as he encounters the spirits of the departed rising from blitzed buildings – and to prepare a wartime readership to endure widespread bereavement.

Like a one-man Ministry of Information, Wheatley thought this would be good for public morale, and there was a further mess age broadcast inStrange Conflict concerning the Blitz. Not only had the Blitz fallen heaviest on working class industrial areas, but many middle class people were able to leave London for the country, a freedom resented by those trapped in the capital. The King and Queen were booed in the East End, and the Blitz was proving socially divisive, as the Germans hoped it would. It is with this in mind that the Duke de Richleau makes a positive point of staying in London: “I loathe discomfort and boredom,” he says, “but no amount of either would induce me to leave London when there are such thousands of poor people who cannot afford to do so.”

RED DEVILS
With the War over and the Cold War gett ing underway, Wheatley published The Haunting of Toby Jugg in 1948. Featuring a Satanic school, this was inspired by Wheatley’s inside knowledge of MI5’s investigation of Dartington Hall, a liberal arts-based school in Devon. It was in Jugg that Wheatley broached his great Cold War theme, suggesting that Communism was actually a cover for Satanism, and vice versa.

As a Satanist explains, Satan “mocks those who no longer believe in his existence by having them demonstrate in favour of rule by the Proletariat on the first of May. Have you never realised that it is his anniversary, and that it is born of May-day Eve – Walpurgis Nacht – on which we celebrate his festival?” Walpurgis Night or St.Walburga’s Eve should be familiar to Wheatley readers from The Devil Rides Out, while May Day, the old pagan festival and more recently international workers’ day, was the occasion of a massive military parade of troops, tanks and missiles through Moscow, once a familiar annual sight on British television.

The anti-Communist line continues almost routinely through Wheatley’s next occult thriller, To The Devil – A Daughter (one of Wheatley’s best books, featuring a girl with a split personality and a vill ain – Canon Copely-Syle – derived from Montague Summers) but there was a more specific message to come in 1956 with The Ka of Gifford Hillary. This features a man who comes back from the dead – in his Ka, a kind of astral self derived from Egyptian religion – after being killed, and manages to re-animate his body, only to find himself on trial for a murder he didn’t commit. Along with a generous quota of thrills and spills, the novel contained a new and distinct message about nuclear armaments, making it very topical: CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) was founded in 1957, a year after the book was published. The crux is that Britain must reduce her conventional weapons in order to afford nuclear weapons, and the public, despite their sentimental attachment to the old-style Army and Navy, must be brought onside. As a well-placed friend tells Sir Giff ord, the heaviest burden in a democracy is “persuading the mainly ignorant masses to accept a programme that sound evidence has shown to be best for them”.

The friend asks Sir Gifford if he will raise public awareness of the issues by rejecting a Ministry of Defence order for conventional warships, despite the knock to his firm’s profits, and writing a letter to The Timesto explain why he has done so. The Ka of Gifford Hillary was a remarkably well-informed book, slightly ahead of the 1957 White Paper on Defence. In publishing a million-seller with these pro-nuclear arguments, Wheatley achieved exactly the same publicity mission that Sir Gifford is asked to undertake within the narrative.

Having revealed in Toby Jugg that Commun ism in general was the new vehicle for Satanism, in The Satanist (1960) Wheatley turned his attention to the Trade Union movement in particular. Again, it makes the book very much a document of its time, published a year after the Boulting Brothers comedy I’m All Right, Jack, with Peter Sellers as the Stalinist shop steward Fred Kite.

Communist influence was widespread in some unions, furthered by rigged elect ions, and The Satanist opens in the office of Colonel “Conky Bill” Verney, a character loosely based on Maxwell Knight, a friend of Wheatley’s in MI5. One of his agents has been crucified upside down with his throat cut, and his discussion of this horrible event slides smoothly into ballot-rigging and the spectre of Satanic Trade Unionism.

Society seemed to be falling to pieces in the late Sixties and early Seventies, with industrial unrest, student rebellion and terrorism. Britain was also coming to terms with multi-culturalism, Enoch Powell was talking about “rivers of blood”, and the Black Power movement was prominent in America. In the last of his major occult novels,Gateway to Hell (1970), Wheatley’s new worry was Black Power, and he tried to defuse the pro spect of worldwide race war.

Wheatley’s anxieties about everything going to the dogs were equally visible in his non-fiction magnum opus The Devil And All His Works(1971). Wheatley was far from alone in this – as the Seventies crisis continued there was talk of “private armies” and plans in Britain for counter-revolution – but the particular spin he gave it was distinctly his own. “Is it possible that riots, wildcat strikes, anti-apartheid demonstrations and the appalling increase in crime have any connection with magic and Satanism?” he asked his readers.

Wheatley’s whole career is remarkable for its calculated propaganda angle. His books were a mixture of potboiling and public service – at least according to his own values – written to manipulate the national consciousness. It’s fascinating that this should be particularly true of his occult books.

There are several reasons for this, the simplest being that they tend to be contemporary (and obviously better suited to play with current fears than his Napol eonic-era Roger Brook series, for example). They hold up a kind of magic mirror to their times. But over and above that, it is peculiarly appropriate to the overlap between propaganda and magic as means of influencing consciousness within an idea-led, thought-driven view of the world, tampering with reality by means of words and images. It was in this context that Capt ain JFC Fuller – occultist, historian, tank expert, and associate of both Crowley and Hitler – told readers of the Occult Review that magic remained a “formidable weapon under the name of ‘propaganda’”. Talking of Germany’s chief PR man and “minister of public enlightenment”, he added: “Is not Dr Goebbels a magician?”

Gateway to Hell Is one of Berlin's most prized antiquities - the Pergamon Altar - actually Satan's throne on Earth?

2010-06-28T13:22:00.001-07:00

The Great Altar of Pergamon.
Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/3118/gateway_to_hell.html

By Mark Fernyhough

FT260

The iron gate opened at an unnervingly sluggish pace. The grand villa, which hosted 1942’s notorious Wannsee Conference, stood solemnly before us, framed gracefully by mournful branches. At this very location, against an idyllic fairytale backdrop of wooded suburbs and beautiful lakes, senior Nazis met in splendour to formally seal the fate of Jews across Europe. We ventured down the driveway, which offered nothing more than regimented nature and two stone statues, which would have been cherubic if they hadn’t so uncannily resembled Winston Churchill. As we stood breathing in the potent ambiance of melancholy, we noticed a solitary grey-haired gentleman who appeared to be observing the bleakly poignant building from an apprehensive distance. Politely, I nodded in his direction.

“Hello,” he barked in a thick Wild West twang.
“You’re American?” I shot back, hoping not to offend yet another Canadian.
“I’m a minister from Texas. Do you know of the evil that happened in the building before us?”

The Texas origin added up. He was a sharply dressed fellow, even in the autumn of his years, and possessed a certain no-nonsense gunslinger quality. In place of a revolver however, he brand ished a brown, leather-bound Bible. “I’ve visited here over 30 times,” he informed my Swedish companion Frida and me. “Berlin is the gateway to Satan, so I keep coming back.”

While this chance encounter was taking an unexpected turn, I initially deduced that the man must be a fundamentalist Christian angered by Berlin’s famously liberal values and long, and still lively, tradition of burlesque decad ence. However, I was wrong. Taking his cue from The Book of Revelation, he explained that the Great Altar of Pergamon, the defining jewel of Berlin’s world-renowned collection of antiquit ies, the Pergamon Museum, is in fact Lucifer’s red carpet into our world.

The preacher man believed, as he explained to us, that the Altar’s removal from the Ancient Greek city of Perg amon (now Bergama, in modern-day Turkey) and its subsequent placement in Berlin had been a precursor to both of the 20th century’s world wars – and that its sinister influence will soon bring about the next. Satan would apparently bring about WWIII during the fallout of the current economic crisis.

His calm yet intense intonation had nothing of the manic amateur thespian quality one typically associates with relig ious fanatics. Rather, he possessed an air of Stetson-clad authority that brought to mind John Wayne or the latter-day Johnny Cash. Most captivatingly, he was clearly utterly convinced by the validity of his God-given mission to bring salvation to Berlin, Satan’s apparent heartland.

“I’m praying for you,” he declared finally.

As we continued on our original journey into the Villa Wannsee, which now acts as a muted Holocaust museum, our self-appointed spiritual guru resumed his vigil. However, peering through a window back over the driveway just moments later, I observed that, in true cinematic tradition, he had vanished.

Stepping into the mindset of fringe Christ ianity can be challenging. It’s a place where embodiments of good and evil stalk the Earth, fighting an all-too-real war and acting as the catalysts behind significant global events. Metaphors and half measures are out of vogue, as angels, devils and supernatural parables are taken on a completely literal level. Nonetheless, whether super stitious hyperbole or not, the Pergamon Altar’s hist ory is undeniably intertwined with the horr ors of war and depression.

Constructed in Pergamon in the second century BC, the Altar is commonly understood to be a dedication to Zeus or Athena. Its sculpted ‘Great Frieze’ depicts a vicious battle of mythical gods and giants, encompassing winged horses, poisonous serpents and irate lions sinking their teeth into bullnecked goliaths. A once culturally rich city of divine beauty, Pergamon fell into ruin after an economic slump made it a prime target for invaders, who left many of its inhabitants gruesomely slain.

The Altar was rediscovered in the 1870s by German engineer Carl Humann, who at the time was working on road construction in Turkey. Concerned that his finds would become the prey of locals using the area as a stone quarry, Humann elected for a short period to take up residence amongst the ghosts of Pergamon. By September 1878, in exchange for 20,000 marks, the powers behind Berlin’s museums had been authorised by the Turkish State to begin their excavation of the Pergamon ruins under Humann’s direction. “We are not totally indifferent to the implications of uprooting the remains of a great monument from its native soil to bring it to us where we will not ever again be able to offer it the light and surroundings in which it was created, and in which it once was fully effective,” wrote German archæologist Alexander Conze, a specialist in ancient Greek art, “yet we have seized it from certain, complete destruction.” [1]

However, the resurrection of the Pergamon Altar brought little good fortune to its new host city. The Altar’s relocation to Berlin was to precede the mass bloodshed of World War I by little more than a decade. The subsequent great depression, heralded by Black Tuesday, followed in 1929. Looking for political change, an economically frail Germany, suffering from high unemployment, class warfare and unparalleled inflat ion, gave Adolf Hitler the Chancellor ship. Not ably, the Pergamon Altar acted as muse to head Nazi architect Albert Speer, who based Nuremberg’s Nazi rally grandstand, the ‘Zeppelintribüne’, on its imposing design.

The Pergamon Museum was badly damaged by air raids towards the end of WWII, while segments of the Altar, which had been stored for safekeeping in a Berlin bunker, were seized by the Red Army and taken back to the Soviet Union. In 1959, these pieces were returned to the GDR, along with other AWOL relics, before the Altar could be restored to its pre-war glory under the direction of archæologist Carl Blümel.

The Altar’s notoriety in Christian circles stems from the aforementioned poss ible reference in the Book of Revelation 2:12–13:

And to the angel of the church in Pergamos write; These things saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges;
I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.

Dr Volker Kästner is a leading archæo logist specialising in the city of Pergamon. He has worked at the Pergamon Museum since 1982 and has been heavily involved in its continuing restoration. For him, the idea that Pergamon is “where Satan’s seat is” can be explained: “Pergamon was seen by Byzantine sources as a particularly pagan place where unchristian cults thrived, and with some imagination the Altar could resemble a throne. Secondly, the Altar’s frieze encompasses many sculpted snakes, which since Antiquity have been viewed as a symbol connected to the underworld, representing something inhuman – but it’s all speculation.”

A further stir erupted when Barack Obama apparently plundered the design of ‘Satan’s Altar’ for the epic backdrop to his Democratic nominee acceptance speech [2] following his well-documented visit to Berlin in July of 2008. This elaborate stage dressing was widely seen as a pre-election Democratic faux pas and mocked by the media and Obama’s Republican opponents, who insisted that his employment of phoney Greek columns exposed delusions of grandeur. Unsurprisingly, the allegedly Lucifer-endorsed ‘Barapolis’ also raised the collective eyebrows of conservative Christ ians already suspicious of Obama’s supposedly leftist agenda.

On another scale entirely, this polit ical showmanship has fuelled extremist assertions that Obama is the Antichrist incarnate poised to destroy America [3] just in time for the 2012-doomsday celebrat ions. To put that into sobering context though, these very same people typically believe that the number of letters in Obama’s name unquestionably equates to ‘666’ and that his crowd-rousing mantra of “yes we can” is actually “thank you, Satan” mouthed backwards. Back on Planet Earth, Dr Kästner himself sees little foundation in the Obama/Pergamon connection. “As far as I am aware, Obama and his people have made no contact with the Pergamon Museum or given us any indication that they are interested in the Altar.”

Surveying the Altar today, a popular highbrow tourist attraction in the heart of Berlin, it is certainly extraordinary. At 46m long and 11m high, its stone mass reduces the spectator to insect-like obscurity.

“The sculptures contained within the Altar’s frieze are to me, extraordinarily emotional works of world class art,” says Kästner. Indeed, it’s easy to see how myths and legends have sprung from such a grand iose work and intriguing to ponder the Altar’s great secrets, forever buried in the mists of time. Could it be an Earthly portal for Christianity’s arch nemesis? A monument imbued by the spirit of the ancient Pagan gods? A cursed harbinger of doom?

“The Pergamon Museum is the most visited museum in Berlin,” Dr Kästner informs me. “Last year, we had 1.5 million people through our doors. This year, it’s likely the Altar will have even more guests.”

Whether or not one of them will be sporting cloven hooves and a pitchfork remains to be seen.

March 2010

Have aliens hijacked Voyager 2 spacecraft

2010-05-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/wacky/have-aliens-hijacked-voyager-2-spacecraft/story-e6frev20-1225865566982

IT left Earth 33 years ago, now it's claimed the Voyager 2 spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens after sending back data messages NASA scientists can't decode.
NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.
But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format!
The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a secret message?
Alien expert Hartwig Hausdorf said:"It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe – thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth"
Engineers are working to solve the data transmissions from the Voyager 2 spacecraft near the edge of the solar system, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said today.
The spacecraft late last month began sending science data 8.6 billion miles to Earth in a changed format that mission managers could not decode.
Engineers have since instructed Voyager 2 to only transmit data on its own health and status while they work on the problem.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, explored the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and kept on going. Nearly 33 years later, they are the most distant human-made objects.
Voyager 1 is 10.5 billion miles from Earth and in about five years is expected to pass through the heliosphere, a bubble the sun creates around the solar system, and enter interstellar space.
Voyager 2 will follow after that.

CERN-Wissenschaftler feiern Meilenstein in der Teilchenforschung

2010-04-25T14:00:00.000-07:00

http://nachrichten.t-online.de/teilchenbeschleuniger-cern-urknall-test-gelingt-endlich/id_41175788/index

vom 30.03.2010 AFP, dpa

Die mit Spannung erwartete Urknall-Rekonstruktion im größten Teilchenbeschleuniger der Welt hat geklappt - zumindest im dritten Anlauf. Bei der Hochgeschwindigkeits-Kollision prallten die zwei Protonenstrahlen mit einer nie dagewesenen Energie wie geplant aufeinander, teilte die Europäische Organisation für Kernforschung, besser bekannt als CERN, unmittelbar nach dem Versuch in Genf mit. Ein Schwarzes Loch, wie von manchen befürchtet, ist nach derzeitigem Kenntnisstand nicht entstanden.

Die Protonenstrahlen wurden für den Test nahezu mit Lichtgeschwindigkeit durch die 27 Kilometer lange, ringförmige und unterirdische Röhre gejagt. Die Energie bei dem Zusammenstoß war mit rund sieben Billionen Elektronenvolt dreimal höher als bei bisherigen Experimenten. Im Kontrollraum des weltgrößten Teilchenbeschleunigers LHC brachen die Forscher in Jubel aus und applaudierten frenetisch, als die Detektoren gegen 13 Uhr die Kollision anzeigten. "Das ist der Höhepunkt der Arbeit tausender Menschen über Jahrzehnte und der Beginn einer neuen Ära der Teilchenphysik", sagte der Forschungsdirektor des Hamburger Teilchenforschungszentrums Desy, das an zwei Detektoren am LHC beteiligt ist.
Zwei Fehlversuche
Kurz zuvor hatte es bereits nach einem erneuten Pannentag für die CERN-Mitarbeiter ausgesehen: Die beiden ersten Versuche wurden wegen technischer Probleme gestoppt. Es soll leichte Probleme mit der Stromversorgung gegeben haben, woraufhin die ganze Anlage irrtümlich herunterfuhr.
Äußerst komplizierte Versuche
Mit den Experimenten, die eineinhalb bis zwei Jahre dauern sollen, wollen die Forscher physikalische Bedingungen wie kurz nach dem Urknall herstellen. Unter anderem wollen sie das sogenannte Higgs-Teilchen nachweisen, das eine große Bedeutung beim Aufbau des Universums haben soll. Die Versuche sind jedoch äußerst kompliziert. Der CERN-Wissenschaftler Steve Myers hatte sie im Vorfeld mit dem Versuch verglichen, zwei Nadeln durch den Atlantik zu schießen, die sich auf halbem Weg treffen sollen.
Schwere Panne bei Inbetriebnahme
Der Teilchenbeschleuniger war nach mehr als einjährigen Reparaturarbeiten im November wieder angelaufen. Der milliardenteure Teilchenbeschleuniger musste im September 2008 wegen schwerer Pannen kurz nach der Inbetriebnahme gleich wieder abgestellt werden. Beim Neustart lief der LHC zunächst nur mit gebremster Kraft an, seitdem werden Energie und Beschleunigung der Teilchen langsam erhöht.

University of Kansas researcher investigates mysterious stone spheres in Costa Rica

2010-03-25T04:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.palenews.net/2010/03/university-of-kansas-researcher.html

The ancient stone spheres of Costa Rica were made world-famous by the opening sequence of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when a mockup of one of the mysterious relics nearly crushed Indiana Jones. So perhaps John Hoopes is the closest thing at the University of Kansas to the movie action hero.

Hoopes, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program, recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica where he and colleagues evaluated the stone balls for UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization that might grant the spheres World Heritage Status.

His report will help determine if sites linked to the massive orbs will be designated for preservation and promotion because of their "outstanding value to humanity."

Hoopes, who researches ancient cultures of Central and South America, is one of the world's foremost experts on the Costa Rican spheres. He explained that although the stone spheres are very old, international interest in them is still growing.

"The earliest reports of the stones come from the late 19th century, but they weren't really reported scientifically until the 1930s — so they're a relatively recent discovery," Hoopes said. "They remained unknown until the United Fruit Company began clearing land for banana plantations in southern Costa Rica."

According to Hoopes, around 300 balls are known to exist, with the largest weighing 16 tons and measuring eight feet in diameter. Many of these are clustered in Costa Rica's Diquis Delta region. Some remain pristine in the original places of discovery, but many others have been relocated or damaged due to erosion, fires and vandalism.

The KU researcher said that scientists believe the stones were first created around 600 A.D., with most dating to after 1,000 A.D. but before the Spanish conquest.

"We date the spheres by pottery styles and radiocarbon dates associated with archeological deposits found with the stone spheres," Hoopes said. "One of the problems with this methodology is that it tells you the latest use of the sphere but it doesn't tell you when it was made. These objects can be used for centuries and are still sitting where they are after a thousand years. So it's very difficult to say exactly when they were made."

Speculation and pseudoscience have plagued general understanding of the stone spheres. For instance, publications have claimed that the balls are associated with the "lost" continent of Atlantis. Others have asserted that the balls are navigational aids or relics related to Stonehenge or the massive heads on Easter Island.

"Myths are really based on a lot of very rampant speculation about imaginary ancient civilizations or visits from extraterrestrials," Hoopes said.

In reality, archaeological excavations in the 1940s found the stone balls to be linked with pottery and materials typical of pre-Columbian cultures of southern Costa Rica.

"We really don't know why they were made," Hoopes said. "The people who made them didn't leave any written records. We're left to archeological data to try to reconstruct the context. The culture of the people who made them became extinct shortly after the Spanish conquest. So, there are no myths or legends or other stories that are told by the indigenous people of Costa Rica about why they made these spheres."

Hoopes has a created a popular Web page to knock down some of the misconceptions about the spheres. He said the stones' creation, while vague, certainly had nothing to do with lost cities or space ships.

"We think the main technique that was used was pecking and grinding and hammering with stones," said Hoopes. "There are some spheres that have been found that still have the marks of the blows on them from hammer stones. We think that that's how they were formed, by hammering on big rocks and sculpting them into a spherical shape."

"yet no species has a life stage able to breath, feed, and develop either continually submerged or without access to water"

2010-03-25T03:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7497374/Worlds-first-amphibious-insects-discovered.html

World's first amphibious insects discovered

The world's first amphibious insects have been discovered by scientists

The tiny caterpillars belong to the moth genus Hyposmocoma which includes an enormously diverse group of at least 350 species found only on Hawaii.

Entomologist Professor Daniel Rubinoff and colleagues observed larvae feeding and breathing in streams and on dry rocks - a newly discovered phenomenon.

Many insects can withstand extreme conditions in a dormant state, but never before has one been known to survive an entire life cycle above and below the water's surface.

The team sequenced the caterpillars' genes and say their versatility represent an example of parallel evolution - a rare event in which unrelated organisms develop similar characteristics simply by living in the same place.

And they believe it has occurred three separate times during Hyposmocoma's history beginning six million years ago before the current islands existed.

Prof Rubinoff, of Hawaii University, said similar patterns of parallel evolution have also been found in damselflies and birds which are unique to the islands.

Four species of Hyposmocoma including molluscivora have been discovered to binds snails with silk webbing before devouring them whole - the first caterpillars known to eat snails or molluscs of any kind.

This behaviour occurs nowhere else on Earth. The overwhelming majority of caterpillars are vegetarians and even the few known predatory groups feed exclusively on insects.

But peculiar adaptations are par for the course in Hawaii - the most remote islands in the world - which also boasts spiders that impale flying insects with their long claws.

Such oddities are probably a result of the islands' great isolation which means many ecological niches normally exploited by other animals remain vacant.

The researchers said their findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights the need for "proactive conservation" on Hawaii which has high rates of extinction and habitat loss.

Prof Rubinoff said: "Insects are the most diverse form of life on the planet, dominating both terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, yet no species has a life stage able to breath, feed, and develop either continually submerged or without access to water.

"Such truly amphibious insects are unrecorded.

"In mountain streams across the Hawaiian Islands, some caterpillars in the endemic moth genus Hyposmocoma are truly amphibious.

"These larvae can breathe and feed indefinitely both above and below the water's surface and can mature completely submerged or dry.

"Why and how Hyposmocoma, an overwhelmingly terrestrial group, repeatedly evolved unprecedented aquatic species is unclear, although there are many other evolutionary anomalies across the Hawaiian archipelago.

"The uniqueness of the community assemblages of Hawaii's isolated biota - plant and animal life - is likely critical in generating such evolutionary novelty because this amphibious ecology is unknown anywhere else."

So I'm spending the first night since more than 10 years without any feathered friend ...

2010-03-08T12:42:00.000-08:00

So I'm spending the first night since more than 10 years without any feathered friend ...

Due to my allergic reaction, that was probably triggered by owning 3 budgies instead of 2, I had to give them away ...

They're already in their new home, a nice, large aviary somewhere in Berlin. I know it's the best for all of us ... still, I miss them terribly. The flat is so quiet, so calm - and I threat the moment when I turn off the TV tonight. I really do.

I'll get through this night, somehow ... and through the next nights and days as well ...

Want to support She Never Slept? Pick up a nifty keychain, or bumpersticker or t-shirt!

2010-03-04T16:56:00.000-08:00

She Never Slept @ http://www.zazzle.com/she_never_slept

Want to support She Never Slept? Pick up a nifty keychain, or bumpersticker or t-shirt!

She Never Slept is a news and reviews site (with occasional interviews, articles and convention reports) for books, film, art, music, games and more in the genres of Science Fiction, Strange Tales, and Horror. This is the store where you can pick up swag and show your support.

The End of the Borg

2010-03-02T09:34:00.000-08:00

The End of the Borg - found at: http://elvis33.250x.com/

Picard: "Mr. LaForge, have you had any success with your attempts at
finding a weakness in the Borg? And Mr. Data, have you been able to
access their command pathway?"

Geordi: "Yes, Captain. In fact, we found the answer by searching
through our archives on late Twentieth-century computing technology."

(Geordi presses a key, and a logo appears on the computer screen.)
Riker (looking puzzled): "What the hell is a 'Microsoft'?"

Data (turning to answer): "Allow me to explain. We will send this
program, for some reason called 'Windows', through the Borg command
pathways. Once inside their root command unit, it will begin consuming
system resources at an unstoppable rate."

Picard: "But the Borg have the ability to adapt. Won't they alter their
processing systems to increase their storage capacity?"

Data: "Yes, Captain. But when 'Windows' detects this, it creates a new
version of itself known as an 'upgrade'. The use of resources increases
exponentially with each iteration. The Borg will not be able to adapt
quickly enough. Eventually all of their processing ability will be
taken over and none will be available for their normal operational
functions."

Picard: "Excellent work. This is even better than that 'unsolvable
geometric shape' idea."

... 15 Minutes Later ...

Data: "Captain, We have successfully installed the 'Windows' in the
command unit and as expected it immediately consumed 85% of all
resources. We however have not received any confirmation of the
expected 'upgrade'."

Geordi: "Our scanners have picked up an increase in Borg storage and
CPU capacity to compensate, but we still have no indication of an
'upgrade' to compensate for their increase."

Picard: "Data, scan the history banks again and determine if there is
something we missed."

Data: "Sir, I believe there is a reason for the failure in the
'upgrade'. Apparently the Borg have circumvented that part of the plan
by not sending in their registration cards."

Riker: "Captain we have no choice. Requesting permission to begin
emergency escape sequence 3F."

Geordi (excited): "Wait, Captain, I just detected their CPU capacity
has suddenly dropped to 0%!"

Picard: "Data, what do scanners show?"

Data: "Apparently the Borg have found the internal 'Windows' module
named 'Solitaire' and it has used up all the CPU capacity."

Picard: "Let's wait and see how long this 'Solitaire' can reduce their
functionality."

Riker: "Geordi, what's the status of the Borg?"

Geordi: "As expected the Borg are attempting to re-engineer to
compensate for increase CPU and storage demands, but each time they
successfully increase resources I have setup our closest deep space
monitor beacon to transmit more 'Windows' modules from something called
the 'Microsoft Fun-Pack'."

Picard: "How much time will that buy us?"

Data: "Current Borg solutions rates allow me to predict an interest
time span of 6 more hours."

Geordi: "Captain, another vessel has entered our sector."

Picard: "Identify."

Data: "It appears to have markings very similar to the 'Microsoft'
logo!"

Over the speakers:

"THIS IS ADMIRAL BILL GATES OF THE MICROSOFT FLAGSHIP MONOPOLY. WE HAVE
POSITIVE CONFIRMATION OF UNREGISTERED SOFTWARE IN THIS SECTOR.
SURRENDER ALL ASSETS AND WE CAN AVOID ANY TROUBLE. YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS
TO COMPLY."

Data: "The alien ship has just opened its forward hatches and released
thousands of humanoid shaped objects."

Picard: "Magnify forward viewer on the alien craft!"

Riker: "Good God Captain! Those are humans floating straight toward the
Borg ship with no life support suits!
How can they survive deep space?!"

Data: "I don't believe that those are humans sir, if you look closer I
believe you will see that they are carrying something recognized by
twenty-first century man as doe skin leather briefcases, and wearing
Armani suits!"

Riker and Picard (together horrified): "LAWYERS!!!"

Geordi: "It can't be. All the lawyers were rounded up and sent hurtling
into the sun in 2017 during the Great Awakening."

Data: "True, but apparently some must have survived."

Riker: "They have surrounded the Borg ship and are covering it with
pieces of paper."

Data: "I believe that is known in ancient vernacular as 'red tape' --
it often proves fatal."

Riker: "They're tearing the Borg to pieces!"

Picard: "Turn off the monitors. I can't stand to watch, not even the
Borg deserve that."

Joe Pulver @ blogspot

2010-02-18T04:32:00.000-08:00

Our very own Joseph S. Pulver has signed on to blogspot as well -

you may find / add him here:

Joe Pulver @ blogspot

Talk about taking things to literally : Man killed by dinner train in southwest Florida

2010-02-16T04:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/story.aspx?storyid=120113

North Fort Myers, Florida - The Lee County Sheriff's Office is continuing to investigate how a man ended up being struck by a train Monday night in North Fort Myers.

The man, who has not been identified by authorities, was struck and killed by a Murder Mystery Dinner Train around 9:15 p.m.

Investigators are still looking into how the man died and why he was laying on the tracks.

Photo Gallery: Man killed by dinner train

The dinner train was heading south on the Seminole Gulf Railway toward Fort Myers, Schall said. "There was a male laying on the tracks for whatever reason, and he was run over," he said.

A deputy on the scene said it appeared the man was alive and perhaps fell asleep on the tracks about a half mile north of Slater Road. "It's quite a ways to walk off the beaten path," Schall said.

He said it's too early to speculate why the man was on the tracks.

Passengers on the rail had paid $75 for a scenic train ride to a boat cruise in Punta Gorda and a five-course dinner. The journey was delayed by two hours due to the crash.

A death investigation is under way. No further details were available.

The Fort Myers News-Press and The Associated Press.

Bigfoot in the northwoods? Camera picks up strange image near Remer

2010-02-16T04:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.twincities.com/ci_13968657?src=yahoohome&nclick_check=1

By Molly Miron
Bemidji Pioneer

Updated: 12/25/2009 11:53:46 PM CST

Tim Kedrowski and his sons, Peter and Casey, are not pushovers for Bigfoot stories, but a frame on a game trail camera set up on their hunting land north of Remer has left them in a quandary.

"To us, it's very hard because we lean toward the skeptical type," Kedrowski said in a telephone interview from his Rice, Minn., home.

But after checking with neighbors and any other hunters who might have been walking through the dense woods at 7:20 p.m. on the rainy night of Oct. 24, he said they couldn't imagine what else the image could be. Tim said he considered ideas from a bear to a bow hunter in a fuzzy suit. But the arm and hand couldn't be a bear's, or its upright gait. And there is no evidence in the photo of a bow or flashlight a hunter might be using to track a wounded deer.

The Kedrowskis checked the Minnesota Bigfoot Web site and came up with the names of Don Sherman and Bob Olson, the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Research Team.

Sherman is the facilities manager for the Cass Lake Indian Health Service Hospital, and Olson is an auto body repairman in Deer River.

Sherman has responded to numerous area Bigfoot sighting reports and has made casts of footprints. He said he once caught footage of a Bigfoot on a thermal imaging camera and heard its warbling call.

When Sherman saw the image the Kedrowskis sent him, Tim said the researcher responded that he believes it is a picture of a Bigfoot. Sherman went with the Kedrowskis to the photo site and measured the height of the creature in comparison the sapling next to it. He determined the animal is about 7 feet tall.

"I've hunted there for 43 years," Tim said of their property near Shingle Mill Lake. "I've seen one bear off my deer stand. I've seen three timber wolves."

Casey Kedrowski said he and his brother had gone out to the family's hunting shack prior to deer season to bring in firewood and make other preparations. They set up a game trail camera to see what might be wandering around their property.

Casey said he and his brother were the only people who knew where the camera was located. They took the camera down when deer season started, and a couple of weeks later checked on what they had caught.

When they came to the picture of the long-armed creature walking upright, Casey said, "We just looked at each other. Each of us thought we were playing a trick on each other."

When they determined that neither of them had pulled a prank on the other, they checked to see if anyone had been in the area that night. Tim said the only neighbors were two elderly hunters in their own shack, neither of whom matched the size and appearance of the creature caught on camera.

However, he said, when he asked the men about the night the camera clicked on the mystery, they said they had gone out about 2 a.m. to use the outhouse and had heard strange squealing noises. Tim said he asked them to show him the direction of the sounds. They pointed to the area where the camera had been, although they had no idea of its location.

Tim said he just released the photo and permission for its publication last weekend.

"It was deer season and we wanted to concentrate on deer hunting, and (we) really wanted to talk to people in the area and ... make sure they weren't scamming us," he said. "We're not 100 percent sure, obviously. After visiting with (Sherman and Olson) we feel they've done a lot more investigation. That's why we put it in their hands."

Sherman said the Northern Minnesota Bigfoot Research Team started receiving reports of Bigfoot sightings in 2006 and has had reports every year since, including four reports this year. He said the first reported sighting he investigated was from a man running a road grader near Six Mile Lake south of Lake Winnibigoshish. Sherman said he was able to make casts of the footprints. A more recent sighting report was by a truck driver.

"I've talked to this guy — this was last year — he was coming from Crosby (Minn.) with a load of lumber by Washburn Lake," Sherman said. "It had hands, he said, like baseball mitts. It took three steps to cross the road. He was pretty shook up."

In spite of such seemingly credible reports, biologists remain unconvinced.

"Personally, I don't buy the fact this thing exists," said Blane Klemek, assistant wildlife manager with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in Bemidji.

"There are certainly species that are discovered each year -but megafauna — rare is it a big mammal is discovered," he said.

He noted the belief that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct after all is based on a fleeting, indistinct video image of some kind of woodpecker recorded in 2004 in the Big Woods of Arkansas. No other sightings have been reported.

He also noted than no one has ever found a Bigfoot carcass.

"All organisms die; they don't just go away," Klemek said. "You'd think someone someday would find one."

Evan Hazard, Bemidji State University retired mammalogist, also expressed doubt about the Bigfoot's existence.

"I just don't know," he said. "My background in mammalogy makes me skeptical, not expert. My inclination is to say we really don't have good evidence."

Hazard said proof would be a clear photo matched with footprints at the same site — multiple pieces of overlapping evidence.

Sherman said the research would go on. He said he believes the Bigfoot is intelligent and perfectly at home in the woods.

"That's why they're so elusive," he said. "They know the woods better than any hunter because they live it."

One thing the hunters agree on is that even if they could produce a carcass for examination, they wouldn't shoot a Bigfoot.

"Absolutely not — no way," said Tim. "I asked my sons would they shoot it, and they said no. It has every right to live."

"I've talked to people who've had them in their sights and their scopes, and they said they couldn't pull the trigger," she Sherman.

He urged anyone who wants to report a Bigfoot sighting or evidence of the creature to call him at 218-308-1451 or Olson at 218-246-8493.

"We've got all kinds of equipment, night vision, cameras, listening devices," Sherman said.

Happy Valentine's Day ...

2010-02-15T01:09:00.001-08:00

The best thing about Christmas?

2010-02-15T01:06:00.000-08:00

The rather unusual gifts ... :o)

Those for me:

as well as those for my wonderful XXX

Harley updates ...

2010-02-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

It's been some time since I updated this page and there's a hell of a lot of pics from our Prince Harley that I have to chose from ... I guess limiting myself to only a few is the best I can do for now ... There's more to follow ...

Harly, already feeling at home although no papers had been signed yet. I guess he had already made his mind up ...

Peacefully resting after wrecking havoc.

A pic for his breeder. Try finding out by yourself how difficult it is to make an overly excited puppy SIT STILL for just about 10 seconds ...

FINALLY a hint of silver ...

Yes, he IS that big :o)

Sceptically eyeing the photographer's cellphone ... [taken November, 1st 2009]

"Say that again?"

January 2010

FX Legend Rick Baker Talks to BD About New 'Wolfman'!

2010-02-14T21:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/19034

Beyond the break you'll find a new video interview that we're extremely excited about. FX legend Rick Baker talked exclusively to BD's Chris Eggertsen about Universal Pictures The Wolfman redo, which arrives in theaters this Friday, along with how the original Wolf Man film inspired him and star Benicio del Toro, keeping the look true to original, and how he was very nervous about the CG enhancement (the transformation is entirely CGI) in the redo. Watch this spot for more in the coming week. Upon his return to his ancestral homeland, an American man (Del Toro) is bitten, and subsequently cursed by, a werewolf.

Video Interview with 'Wolfman' Stars Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins & Hugo Weaving!

2010-02-14T21:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/19061

Beyond the break you'll find our first batch of video interviews for Universal Pictures' The Wolfman that feature stars Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins and Hugo ("Mr. Anderson") Weaving. Emily Blunt talks about how it was easy to act afraid with such great FX work by Rick Baker, comments on green screen hell and suggests that the atmosphere called for the film to be released in black and white. Anthony Hopkins chats about his vision of how to play Sir John Talbot, his love for the previous Wolf Man films (he sounds genuine, which is rare) and even the Frankenstein monster. Hugo Weaving talks about his role as Abberline, doing research on the character, and the history of the ripper murders.

Toy Fair '10: New Freddy Krueger Figures Reveal New Glove?!?!

2010-02-14T21:46:00.001-08:00

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/19101

Sunday, February 14, 2010

By: MrDisgusting

While carousing through the images from this years New York Toy Fair, we stumbled across something quite interesting from the Warner Bros. Pictures' A Nightmare on Elm Street redo. Below you'll find a look at NECA's toyline feature a burnt and unburned Freddy Krueger arriving in stores this April. If you take a close look at the unburned Freddy you'll notice he has a glove previously unseen by anyone! Is looks like a wool glove with rusty nails attached.

Sarah’s Flight – A Silent Auction

2009-12-20T19:38:00.000-08:00

Sarah’s Flight – A Silent Auction

Dear Fiends, I am writing to you today because I need your help. I am in a bit of a rough spot. Henry, my fiancé, was just informed by the Hospice nurses that his Mom only has a few days left to live. I desperately want to be there for him during this rough time but finances are bleak for both of us currently. (A little background for those who do not know… Henry and I are currently in a long distance relationship because of a contract position I took. He lives in North Carolina and I am in Oregon. I just started this contract position and haven’t even received my first check yet – hence the tight finances.) I plan on putting any Christmas or Birthday money I may receive Monday towards these tickets, but I know it will barely put a dent in the cost. A last minute flight would cost me more than a month’s rent… ah the airlines. So it is obviously out of my reach. I have been attempting to raise the funds, and have received about 33% of the total costs so far. I am very thankful to all of those who contributed.

The fabulous artist Tom Brown has offered up a piece of original art to help get me to my love. So, we are holding a silent auction. This is a great piece of art from The Copper Age Webcomic – a gothic/manga epic tale. It is the first full rendering of Sal’s parents Durosimi and Mellisandra. You can see the details for the art and an image > here<. Place bids by emailing me at: sarah@sheneverslept.com. I will keep a running update of the highest bid in the comment section. The auction will last for 36 hours, ending 7:30AM Pacific Time on 12/22. Please bid and check back regularly to see if you have been outbid. Good Luck!

Abstrusely, Sarah L. Gerhardt

Virgin Galactic Shows Off SpacecraftTwo

2009-12-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356843,00.asp

by Jamie Lendino

Virgin Galactic has taken the wraps off the first of five long-awaited SpaceShipTwo spacecraft.

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson were on hand to christen the spacecraft with the customary bashing of champagne bottles, National Geographic reports. Meanwhile, Sir Richard Branson's daughter Holly announced the first ship's name: V.S.S. Enterprise.

The 60-foot-long ship is based on the original SpaceShipOne, a reusable manned spacecraft that won the $10-million Ansari X Prize back in 2004. EVE, a twin-fuselage mother ship, carries the V.S.S. Enterprise to launch altitude at about 50,000 feet before it separates, the report said.

The ship is designed to carry two pilots and six passengers, who "will pay handsomely for two and a half hour flights into suborbital space," to experience weightlessness and see the Earth's curvature.

Originally posted to Gearlog.

'World's First' Bionic Fingers Unveiled

2009-12-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

'World's First' Bionic Fingers Unveiled

Ruth Barnett, Sky News Online

A former concert pianist has told of her joy at getting what scientists in West Lothian claim are the world's first bionic fingers.
Maria Antonia Iglesias, from Catalonia, Spain, said the motor-powered devices allow her to pick up a glass, hold cutlery and write for the first time since she lost her digits after an illness.

The fingers were made by the inventors of the bionic i-Limb hand when they realised more could be done for the 1.2 million people worldwide who have missing digits.

The loss of two fingers can reduce hand function by up to 20 to 40%.

Ms Iglesias, 42, lost hers after developing pneumococcal septic shock in 2003.

She is among the first to get Touch Bionics' custom-made devices, called ProDigits, which cost between £35,000 and £45,000.

"I am very pleased to be part of this project and the benefits my new hand is giving me are like a dream," she said.

The bionic fingers are unveiled

"Even a simple thing like holding and lifting a glass of water to drink from was impossible before, but with ProDigits I can do it easily."

The fake digits, which are covered in a hi-tech robotic skin, are controlled by "myoelectric sensors" which register signals from any muscles that remain in the hand. Alternatively, they can be activated by a touch pad.

"There has been no solution like this for the partial hand amputee community," Phil Newman, Touch Bionics' marketing director said.

"The ProDigits provide a powered device with a grip and it has returned these people to a level of functionality and independence.

"It is supporting a community that has never had support before."

Garbage: I would die for you / No. 1 crush

2009-10-12T00:42:00.000-07:00

I would die for you
I would die for you
I've been dying just to feel you by my side, to know that you're mine

I would cry for you
I would cry for you
I will wash away your pain with all my tears, I'm drowning on fear

I will pray for you
I will pray for you,
I will sell my soul for something pure and true, someone like you

See your face every place that I walk in
Hear your voice every time that I'm talkin'
You will believe in me, and I will never be ignored

I will burn for you
Feel pain for you
I will twist the knife and bleed my aching heart, and tear it apart

I will lie for you
Beg and steal for you
I will crawl on hands and knees until you see, you're just like me

Violate all the love that I'm missin'
Throw away all the pain that I'm livin'
You will believe in me, and I can never be ignored

I would die for you
I would kill for you
I will steal for you
I'd do time for you
I will wait for you
I'd make room for you
I'd sink ships for you,
Take the cross for you
Make me a part of you
Because I believe in you
I believe in you
I would die for you

Liam Neeson to sing in Irish showbands film

2009-10-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

Monday, 12 October 2009

Liam Neeson will sing his own songs in a star-studded new £9m movie about Irish showbands — which may co-star sultry beauty Eva Mendes.

And that is straight from the Horslips' mouth — from the Tyrone musician and writer who penned the screenplay for "The Virgin of Las Vegas".

Ex-Horslips musician Barry Devlin, in town to promote a December concert by his reformed folk-rock band, told Sunday Life: "Liam is a good singer. He'll be doing his own vocals."

The Ballymena-born actor has been lined up to play the part of an ageing Irish showband singer who is working the nightclubs in Las Vegas.

U2 frontman Bono is producing the movie and Brendan Gleeson is expected to make his directorial debut.

Neeson's repertoire will include classic showband songs like "The Hucklebuck" and "I Ran All the Way Home" which were huge hits in the Sixties for the Royal Showband, whose lead singer Brendan Bowyer has, of course, been a regular on the Vegas club circuit.

"However Liam's character is not based on Brendan Bowyer," said Barry Devlin, who's from Ardboe on the shores of Lough Neagh.

"Everyone who knows Brendan knows he is a total gentleman. The character that Liam is playing is anything but a nice guy. In fact he's a dreadful man."

The film-makers are hoping either of the sultry Hollywood stars Eva Mendes or Penelope Cruz will play the female lead in the movie, which will be shot on location in Vegas, in Alberqueque in New Mexico and possibly Spain, starting in April or May next year.

Barry Devlin has based the story on his own experiences playing in bands all over Ireland.

Neeson is currently working on a movie version on the Eighties TV hit The A-Team, playing Hannibal, the wily team leader who was played by George Peppard in the telly series.

Producers are also in talks with a number of Irish actors who will play the members of the seven-piece showband who back Neeson. They include Colin Farrell, Killian Murphy and Gabriel Byrne.

Barry Devlin has also written another film called "A Kiss for Jed Wood" which stars Coleraine actress Jayne Wisener and was shot in New York. It's due to be released within the next few months.

n More details about the Horslips reunion will be included in Ivan’s Little at Large column next week

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/film-tv/news/liam-neeson-to-sing-in-irish-showbands-film-14528413.html

Classical Chaos Occurs In The Quantum World, Scientists Find

2009-10-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — Chaotic behavior is the rule, not the exception, in the world we experience through our senses, the world governed by the laws of classical physics.

Even tiny, easily overlooked events can completely change the behavior of a complex system, to the point where there is no apparent order to most natural systems we deal with in everyday life.

The weather is one familiar case, but other well-studied examples can be found in chemical reactions, population dynamics, neural networks and even the stock market.

Scientists who study "chaos" -- which they define as extreme sensitivity to infinitesimally small tweaks in the initial conditions -- have observed this kind of behavior only in the deterministic world described by classical physics.

Until now, no one has produced experimental evidence that chaos occurs in the quantum world, the world of photons, atoms, molecules and their building blocks.

This is a world ruled by uncertainty: An atom is both a particle and a wave, and it's impossible to determine its position and velocity simultaneously.

And that presents a major problem. If the starting point for a quantum particle cannot be precisely known, then there is no way to construct a theory that is sensitive to initial conditions in the way of classical chaos.

Yet quantum mechanics is the most complete theory of the physical world, and therefore should be able to account for all naturally occurring phenomena.

"The problem is that people don't see [classical] chaos in quantum systems," said Professor Poul Jessen of the University of Arizona. "And we believe quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory, the theory that describes everything, and that we should be able to understand how classical physics follows as a limiting case of quantum physics."

Experiments Reveal Classical Chaos In Quantum World

Now, however, Jessen and his group in UA's College of Optical Sciences have performed a series of experiments that show just how classical chaos spills over into the quantum world.

The scientists report their research in the Oct. 8 issue of the journal Nature in an article titled, "Quantum signatures of chaos in a kicked top."

Their experiments show clear fingerprints of classical-world chaos in a quantum system designed to mimic a textbook example of chaos known as the "kicked top."

The quantum version of the top is the "spin" of individual laser-cooled cesium atoms that Jessen's team manipulate with magnetic fields and laser light, using tools and techniques developed over a decade of painstaking laboratory work.

"Think of an atom as a microscopic top that spins on its axis at a constant rate of speed," Jessen said. He and his students repeatedly changed the direction of the axis of spin, in a series of cycles that each consisted of a "kick" and a "twist".

Because spinning atoms are tiny magnets, the "kicks" were delivered by a pulsed magnetic field. The "twists" were more challenging, and were achieved by subjecting the atom to an optical-frequency electric field in a precisely tuned laser beam.

They imaged the quantum mechanical state of the atomic spin at the end of each kick-and-twist cycle with a tomographic technique that is conceptually similar to the methods used in medical ultrasound and CAT scans.

The end results were pictures and stop-motion movies of the evolving quantum state, showing that it behaves like the equivalent classical system in some significant ways.

One of the most dramatic quantum signatures the team saw in their experiments was directly visible in their images: They saw that the quantum spinning top observes the same boundaries between stability and chaos that characterize the motion of the classical spinning top. That is, both quantum and classical systems were dynamically stable in the same areas, and dynamically erratic outside those areas.

A New Signature Of Chaos Called 'Entanglement'

Jessen's experiment revealed a new signature of chaos for the first time. It is related to the uniquely quantum mechanical property known as "entanglement."

Entanglement is best known from a famous thought experiment proposed by Albert Einstein, in which two light particles, or photons, are emitted with polarizations that are fundamentally undefined but nevertheless perfectly correlated. Later, when the photons have traveled far apart in space, their polarizations are both measured at the same instant in time and found to be completely random but always at right angles to each other.

"It's as though one photon instantly knows the result for the other and adjusts its own polarization accordingly," Jessen said.

By itself, Einstein's thought experiment is not directly related to quantum chaos, but the idea of entanglement has proven useful, Jessen added.

"Entanglement is an important phenomenon of the quantum world that has no classical counterpart. It can occur in any quantum system that consists of at least two independent parts," he said.

Theorists have speculated that the onset of chaos will greatly increase the degree to which different parts of a quantum system become entangled.

Jessen took advantage of atomic physics to test this hypothesis in his laboratory experiments.

The total spin of a cesium atom is the sum of the spin of its valence electron and the spin of its nucleus, and those spins can become quantum correlated exactly as the photon polarizations in Einstein's example.

In Jessen's experiment, the electron and nuclear spins remained unentangled as a result of stable quantum dynamics, but rapidly became entangled if the dynamics were chaotic.

Entanglement is a buzzword in the science community because it is the foundation for quantum cryptography and quantum computing.

"Our work is not directly related to quantum computing and communications," Jessen said. "It just shows that this concept of entanglement has tendrils in all sorts of areas of quantum physics because entanglement is actually common as soon as the system gets complicated enough."

Journal reference:

S. Chaudhury, A. Smith, B. E. Anderson, S. Ghose & P. S. Jessen. Quantum signatures of chaos in a kicked top. Nature, 2009; DOI: 10.1038/nature08396

Adapted from materials provided by University of Arizona.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091007153743.htm

Bluehenge unearthed: Prehistoric site that could be famous stone circle's little sister

2009-10-11T22:56:00.000-07:00

An aerial view of the world famous monument, Stonehenge, in Salisbury, Wiltshire

The prehistoric circle has been named Bluehenge after the colour of the 27 giant stones it once incorporated

By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 1:17 PM on 03rd October 2009

Archaeologists have discovered Stonehenge's little sister - just a mile from the famous monument.

The prehistoric circle, unearthed in secret over the summer, is one of the most important prehistoric finds in decades.

Researchers have called it 'Bluehenge' after the colour of the 27 giant Welsh stones it once incorporated - but are now missing.

The find is already challenging conventional wisdom about how Stonehenge was built - and what it was used for.

Bluehenge was put up 5,000 years ago - around the same time as work began on Stonehenge - and appears to have been a miniature version of it.

The two circles stood together for hundreds of years before Bluehenge was dismantled. Researchers believe its stones were used to enlarge Stonehenge during one of a number of redevelopments.

Professor Tim Darvill, Stonehenge expert at Bournemouth University, said: 'This adds to the richness of the story of Stonehenge.

'We thought we knew it all, but over the last few years we have discovered that something as familiar as Stonehenge is still a challenge to explore and understand. It wouldn't surprise me if there weren't more circles.'

All that remains of the 60ft wide Bluehenge are the holes of 27 giant stones set on a ramped mount. Chips of blue stone found in the holes appear to be identical to the blue stones used in Stonehenge.

The four-ton monsters, made of Preseli Spotted Dolerite - a chemically altered igneous rock harder than granite - were mined in the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire and then rolled, dragged and floated the 200 miles to the site on the banks of the Avon in Wiltshire.

Once installed, the stones would have been polished to a dark blue with silver flecks resembling the night sky. Bluehenge lies at the end of the 'Avenue' - a ritual pathway that connected Stonehenge to the Avon.

Stonehenge itself was built and rebuilt over 600 years in three main phases. The first - begun in 3000BC - saw the creation of a ditch and bank which later enclosed a circle of 56 holes for posts or stones.

Around 2600BC the site was transformed into two circles of 82 blue stones brought from the Welsh mountains.

Then, 150 years later, the ancient Britons set up 50-ton sarsen stones quarried at Marlborough, 25 miles away.

The blue stones were dug up and repositioned, and the sarsens used to create the Stonehenge familiar today. The new find changes this account of this history.

It suggests that the creators of Stonehenge originally built two circles - one with 56 stones at Stonehenge, and another with 27 at Bluehenge. The stones of the smaller circle were eventually incorporated into the bigger one.

Bluehenge was discovered by Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of Sheffield University, who argues the monuments were linked to rituals of life and death.

Julian Richards, archaeologist and presenter of BBC2 TV series Meet The Ancestors, believes, however, that such certainty is beyond our reach.

Any one person who says they have the answer is being a bit over-confident,' he said.

'If you think that Stonehenge was created, used and modified over 1,400 years then it probably was used for many different things.'

Professor Geoffrey Wainwright, who found the source of the Stonehenge stones in Wales with Professor Darvill, said: 'This [new] henge is very important because it forms part of the picture of ceremonial monuments in the area and puts Stonehenge into context.

'It's no longer Stonehenge standing alone, but it has to be seen in context with the landscape.'

Lovers of prehistoric sites will have to wait until February before the full details of Bluehenge are published.

The creators of Stonehenge - who saw the Stone Age pass into the Bronze Age - were farmers who lived in small villages in huts made of wooden stakes and twigs, covered with a thick layer of clay and chalk.

Farming had been established for at least 1,000 years and the builders of Stonehenge were skilled at growing wheat and barley and keeping pigs and sheep.

Some experts believe they made cider and beer and ground wheat into flour to make bread and cakes.

But they were still forced to depend on wild fruit, peas, lentils, nuts and honey. Clothes were primitive leather coats and jackets, woollen leggings and simple shoes made of skins bound with twine.

No one knows what gods they worshipped, but the alignment of Stonehenge to the solstice shows that the Sun - and maybe the Moon - was important.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1217752/Henge-stones-Unearthed-site-monuments-little-sister.html?ITO=1490

'Second Stonehenge' discovered near original

2009-10-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

Bluestonehenge: Aerial view of the site of a 'second Stonehenge' discovered on the west bank of the Avon river. Photograph: Aerial-Cam/Stonehenge Riverside Project

'Bluestonehenge' found by archaeologists less than two miles from world-famous prehistoric monument

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 October 2009 16.56 BST
James Sturcke and Maev Kennedy

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of what they believe was a second Stonehenge located a little more than a mile away from the world-famous prehistoric monument.

The new find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called "Bluestonehenge", after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up.

Excavations at the site have suggested there was once a stone circle 10 metres in diameter and surrounded by a henge – a ditch with an external bank, according to the project director, Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of the University of Sheffield.

The stones at the site were removed thousands of years ago but the sizes of the holes in which they stood indicate that this was a circle of bluestones, brought from the Preseli mountains of Wales, 150 miles away.

The standing stones marked the end of the avenue that leads from the river Avon to Stonehenge, a 1¾-mile long processional route constructed at the end of the Stone Age.

The outer henge around the stones was built about 2400BC but arrowheads found in the stone circle indicate the stones were put up as much as 500 years earlier.

Parker Pearson said his team was waiting for results of radiocarbon dating which could reveal whether stones currently in the inner circle of Stonehenge were originally located at the other riverside construction.

It should also show whether the newly discovered circle's stones were removed by Neolithic people and dragged along the route of the avenue to Stonehenge, to be incorporated within its major rebuilding about 2500BC. After that date Stonehenge consisted of about 80 Welsh stones and 83 local sarsen stones.

Pearson said: "The big, big question is when were our stones erected and when were they removed – and when we get the dating evidence we can answer both those questions."

He added: "We speculated in the past that there might have been something at the end of the avenue near the river. But we were completely unprepared to discover that there was an entire stone circle.

"I think we have found incontrovertible proof that the river was very important to the people who used Stonehenge. I believe that the river formed a conduit between the living and the dead and this is the point where you leave the realm of the living at the river and enter the one of the dead at Stonehenge."

The summer dig, which ended last month, also found evidence that the builders of the stone circle used deer antlers as pickaxes.

Excavations by the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is a consortium of university teams, have uncovered a wealth of finds in recent years including the Neolithic village of Durrington Walls in 2005.

"Not many people know that Stonehenge was Britain's largest burial ground at that time. Maybe the bluestone circle is where people were cremated before their ashes were buried at Stonehenge itself," Parker Pearson added.

Dr Josh Pollard, project co-director from the University of Bristol, described the discovery as "incredible".

"The newly discovered circle and henge should be considered an integral part of Stonehenge rather than a separate monument and it offers tremendous insight into the history of its famous neighbour. Its landscape location demonstrates once again the importance of the river Avon in Neolithic funerary rites and ceremonies."

Another team member, Professor Julian Thomas, said the discovery indicated that this stretch of the river Avon was central to the religious lives of the people who built Stonehenge.

"Old theories about Stonehenge that do not explain the evident significance of the river will have to be rethought," he said.

There have been many theories about the use of Stonehenge, including that it was believed to have healing properties and was a giant astronomical observatory.

Stonehenge only acquired its famous silhouette after centuries of continuous rearrangement. In about 2500BC the gigantic sarsen stones were dragged across Salisbury plain and added to the smaller bluestones. Evidence from earlier excavations had already suggested that more bluestones were brought in to make a more complex pattern.

"The assumption was that they went back to Wales for more," Pearson said. "My hunch is that they just took them from our circle down the road." He believes the new circle marked the processional avenue from the river Avon to Stonehenge.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/06/second-stonehenge-discovered

Fossil Ardi reveals the first steps of the human race

2009-10-11T22:46:00.000-07:00

Ardi evolved from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees and was equally at home walking on the ground and swinging through the trees

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 October 2009 15.30 BST

The remains of a female who lived and died at the dawn of humanity have been uncovered in Ethiopia, giving the clearest picture yet of the origin of our species.

The partial skeleton, the oldest from a human ancestor ever discovered, belonged to a female who walked on two legs but was adept at climbing trees and moving through the forest canopy some 4.4m years ago.

Experts have described the find as the most important regarding human evolution in the past century.

The female, named Ardi by the researchers who worked on her, belongs to a new species Ardipithecus ramidus and may be the earliest human ancestor ever discovered that was capable of walking upright.

The finding sheds light on a critical but unknown period of evolution at the root of the human family tree, shortly after our ancestors split from chimpanzees more than 6m years ago.

Remnants of the skeleton, skull, pelvis, hands, feet and other bones were excavated from the reddish-brown sediments of an ancient river system near the village of Aramis in northern Ethiopia, along with fragments from at least 35 other individuals.

Fossil hunters first glimpsed the new species in 1992 when a tooth belonging to Ardipithecus was spotted among pebbles in the desert near Aramis. Over the next two years, the researchers scoured the area on hands and knees and slowly uncovered pieces of bone from the hand, ankle and lower jaw, and finally a crushed skull.

A total of 47 researchers then spent a further 15 years removing, preparing and studying each of the fragments ahead of the publication tomorrow of an in-depth description of the species in 11 papers in the US journal Science.

Their investigation shows Ardi stood four feet (1.2m) tall and weighed a little under eight stone (50kg), making her similar in size and weight to a living chimpanzee. But many of Ardi's features are far more primitive than those seen in modern apes, suggesting chimpanzees and gorillas have evolved considerably after they split from the common ancestor they shared with humans.

The discovery of Ardi provides vital clues about the earliest human ancestor that lived at the fork in the evolutionary road that led to humans on one side and chimps on the other.

"Darwin was very wise on this matter. Darwin said we have to be really careful. The only way we're really going to know what this last common ancestor looked like is to go and find it," said Tim White, a lead author on the study and professor of human evolution at the University of California, Berkeley. "Well, we haven't found it, but we've come closer than we've ever come, at 4.4 million years ago."

The remains of animals, seeds and pollen uncovered at the excavation site reveal it to have been a woodland where colobus monkeys swung in trees full of swifts, doves and lovebirds, and spiral-horned antelope, elephants, shrews and early forms of peacock roamed the forest floor below.

The discovery is being seen as more important than Lucy, the 3.2m-year-old skeleton of a potential human ancestor which proved at a stroke that early humans walked upright before evolving large brains. The remains of Lucy, who belongs to the species Australopithecus afarensis, were uncovered in another part of Ethiopia in 1974.

"We thought Lucy was the find of the century but, in retrospect, it isn't," palaeontologist Andrew Hill at Yale University told Science. "It's worth the wait."

Measurements of Ardi's skeleton reveal she had a brain the size of a chimp's, but very long arms and fingers, and opposable toes that would have helped her grasp branches while moving through the forest.

Though Ardi would have spent much of her time in the trees, her pelvis was adapted to walking upright when she came down to the forest floor. Her unusual skeleton led White to comment of her species that "if you wanted to find something that moved like these things, you'd have to go to the bar in Star Wars."

Analysis of Ardi's teeth points to a diet of figs and other fruit, leaves and small mammals. Remarkably, both male and female Ardipithecus had very small incisors and canines, which are enlarged in modern apes. The finding suggests that unlike chimpanzees, baboons and gorillas, the male did not bare its teeth in battles over females and was already part of a more cooperative social group. It was probably involved in the parenting process.

"Natural selection has led to the reduction of this male canine tooth very, very early in time, right at the base of our branch of the family tree."

It may take years to confirm exactly where Ardi fits in the history of human evolution. One possibility is that she is a direct ancestor of Lucy's species, Australopithecus.

"The most important thing in the broader sense is that we now no longer have to guess about where we came from ... We now have an evidentiary basis for understanding that we didn't get here in the form we see today, we evolved," said White.

Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said: "This is as important as the Lucy skeleton in terms of what it tells us about an even earlier stage of human evolution."

"The assumption among many researchers is that while humans have evolved a lot, chimps haven't changed much, so we can use them as a model of the common ancestor we shared. But why shouldn't chimps have changed? Everything evolves."

"We are really trying to establish what set us off on our evolutionary path," he added. "What would start the process off? That is one of the great mysteries."

• This article was amended on 6 October 2009. Some references in the original called Ardi a woman. This has been corrected.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/01/fossil-ardi-human-race

Cryptozoologist to open museum in Portland, Maine

2009-10-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

PORTLAND, Maine—Bigfoot is coming to downtown Portland.

Loren Coleman says his International Cryptozoology Museum will open in a Congress Street storefront on Nov. 1.

As a cryptozoologist, Coleman studies creatures that have been reported to exist but aren't formally recognized by science.

Among the displays will be his 8-foot-tall, 400-pound Bigfoot sculpture, which now stands on the front porch of his home. He'll also have a model of the Loch Ness monster, along with what he says are a footprint cast and hair sample from the Abominable Snowman, found during a 1959 expedition in the Himalayas.

Coleman, who has written 17 books on cryptozoology, tells the Portland Press Herald the museum will be in the rear of a new bookstore that will specialize in supernatural fiction, horror fiction and weird fiction.

------

Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com

http://www.boston.com/news/local/maine/articles/2009/10/05/cryptozoologist_to_open_museum_in_portland_maine/

Bees Fight Back Against Colony Collapse Disorder: Some Honey Bees Toss Out Varroa Mites

2009-10-11T22:15:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (Oct. 5, 2009) — Honey bees are now fighting back aggressively against Varroa mites, thanks to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) efforts to develop bees with a genetic trait that allows them to more easily find the mites and toss them out of the broodnest.

The parasitic Varroa mite attacks the honey bee, Apis mellifera L., by feeding on its hemolymph, which is the combination of blood and fluid inside a bee. Colonies can be weakened or killed, depending on the severity of the infestation. Most colonies eventually die from varroa infestation if left untreated.

Varroa-sensitive hygiene (VSH) is a genetic trait of the honey bee that allows it to remove mite-infested pupae from the capped brood—developing bees that are sealed inside cells of the comb with a protective layer of wax. The mites are sometimes difficult for the bees to locate, since they attack the bee brood while these developing bees are inside the capped cells.

ARS scientists at the agency’s Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics and Physiology Research Unit in Baton Rouge, La., have developed honey bees with high expression of the VSH trait. Honey bees are naturally hygienic, and they often remove diseased brood from their nests. VSH is a specific form of nest cleaning focused on removing varroa-infested pupae. The VSH honey bees are quite aggressive in their pursuit of the mites. The bees gang up, chew and cut through the cap, lift out the infected brood and their mites, and discard them from the broodnest.

This hygiene kills the frail mite offspring, which greatly reduces the lifetime reproductive output of the mother mite. The mother mite may survive the ordeal and try to reproduce in brood again, only to undergo similar treatment by the bees.

To test the varroa resistance of VSH bees, the Baton Rouge team conducted field trials using 40 colonies with varying levels of VSH. Mite population growth was significantly lower in VSH and hybrid colonies than in bee colonies without VSH. Hybrid colonies had half the VSH genes normally found in pure VSH bees, but they still retained significant varroa resistance. Simpler ways for bee breeders to measure VSH behavior in colonies were also developed in this study.

This research was published in the Journal of Apicultural Research and Bee World.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091002103210.htm

The high stakes of melting Himalayan glaciers

2009-10-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding quicker than those in other parts of the world and could disappear altogether by 2035 according to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

The result of this deglaciation could be conflict as Himalayan glacial runoff has an essential role in the economies, agriculture and even religions of the regions countries.

The Himalayan glaciers form the world's largest ice body outside of the polar caps. Popularly known as the "Water Tower of Asia," they are the source of water for rivers that flow across the continent: the Indus River in Pakistan, the Brahmaputra that flows through Bangladesh, the Mekong that descends through Southeast Asia, the Irrawaddy in Myanmar, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers of China and a multitude of smaller rivers that flow through the Indo-Gangetic plains of Northern India.

Satellite data from the Indian Space Applications Center, in Ahmedabad, India, indicates that from 1962 to 2004, more than 1,000 Himalayan glaciers have retreated by around 16 percent. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China's glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since 1950s.

Dr. Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist, physicist and leader in the International Forum on Globalization, has just returned from a "Climate Yatra," a research journey to the Himalayas to study the impact of climate change and the glacial melt upon communities in Asia.

"Himalayan rivers support nearly half of humanity," Dr. Shiva told CNN. "Everyone who depends on water from the Himalayas will be affected."

One area of increasing concern for Shiva is flooding. "In Ladakh villages have already been washed away due to flash floods," she said.

The situation has exacerbated the occurrence of Glacier Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs). Impacts include loss of lives, domestic property, cultivable land, mountain infrastructure downstream, forced migration and long-term secondary environmental degradation.

In the short term, the glacial retreat could cause not just an overflow of rivers within countries, but more significantly, a cross border overflow into countries that already have a history of tension.

Rivers such as the Indus, Jhelum, Ravi, Bias and Sutlej rivers, are shared between India and Pakistan (that have fought five wars since 1947) while melt-water from the Tibetan glaciers supply both India and China (that fought a war over disputed Himalayan border territory in 1962).

Both India and China are exploring opportunities to harness Himalayan waters for hydroelectric power projects, and while the initial melt promises to provide plenty of water for both sides, the loss of glaciers could lead to water shortages further in the future.

Underground aquifers in Asia depend heavily on snow melt during the dry summer season, and long-term implications of the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers mean that access to water could become a serious political problem.

According to Wendy Barnaby, editor of People and Science magazine, the United Nations issued a warning in February this year that climate change harbors the potential for serious conflicts over water.

Water-related conflicts have already been witnessed in other parts of the globe such as in the West Bank and in Darfur.

According to Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, almost 70 percent of the non-monsoon flows in almost all the Himalayan rivers come from glacier melt.

International water security issues within Asia could be likely since the waters of the Indus, Ganges and the Brahmaptura basins flow into China in the upstream, and are shared across South Asia in the downstream.

Dr. Shiva believes the situation will render major security issues, between India and China particularly, as flows reduce and demands intensify.

In India, deglaciation poses the question of political and social upheaval within the country itself. According to Thakkar, the rate of retreat for the Gangotri glacier over the last three decades was more than three times the rate during the preceding 200 years.

The Gangotri feeds the River Ganges, India's holiest river which has historically been a focal point for Hinduism. That the Ganges could become a seasonal river in the near future will throw a spanner in the works of Hindu religious customs, woven into the socio-economic life and culture of Northern India.

Moreover, future water allocation that favors economics over religion could spark conflict in a society that already experiences religious and inter-communal strife.

Even though some authorities in India do not consider the phenomenon to be particularly alarming, there is an increased understanding that the melting of Himalayan snows is real and needs to be taken seriously.

China and India are expected to sign an agreement this month that will enable scientists to cooperate on cross border research with regard to the Himalayan glacial melt.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/05/himalayas.glacier.conflict/index.html

The DNA Mystery: Scientists Stumped By "Telepathic" Abilities

2009-10-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn't be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet.

Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.

Even so, research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals.
In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently tagged DNA strands placed in water that contained no proteins or other material that could interfere with the experiment. Strands with identical nucleotide sequences were about twice as likely to gather together as DNA strands with different sequences. No one knows how individual DNA strands could possibly be communicating in this way, yet somehow they do. The “telepathic” effect is a source of wonder and amazement for scientists.
“Amazingly, the forces responsible for the sequence recognition can reach across more than one nanometer of water separating the surfaces of the nearest neighbor DNA,” said the authors Geoff S. Baldwin, Sergey Leikin, John M. Seddon, and Alexei A. Kornyshev and colleagues.
This recognition effect may help increase the accuracy and efficiency of the homologous recombination of genes, which is a process responsible for DNA repair, evolution, and genetic diversity. The new findings may also shed light on ways to avoid recombination errors, which are factors in cancer, aging, and other health issues.
Posted by Rebecca Sato.
Related Galaxy posts:
1,000 Genomes Project -World's Most Detailed Map of the Human Genome Bringing Ancient Human Viruses Back to Life: A Jurassic Park or Salvation?“Star Trek” Teleportation: Physicists Develop a Way to “Beam Up” Atoms Physicists Use Levitation To Solve a Sticky Problem
Source: ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B

Gay penguins book is most banned

2009-10-01T18:29:00.001-07:00

Authors, artists and musicians are due to gather at a library in San Francisco to protest against the banning of books in schools and libraries in the US.

The event, part of the 27th annual Banned Books Week, has been organised by the American Library Association.

Since 2001 bans on 3,736 books and other materials have been requested.

In recent years, And Tango Makes Three - based on a true story and centring on gay penguins in New York's Central Park Zoo - has had the most ban requests.

The book's authors are Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell.

Reasons given by organisations and individuals for their requests to get it removed from public shelves, include "anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group".

Other works featuring in the most-challenged books list for 2008 include Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.

Parents' concern

Pullman told Britain's Guardian newspaper that he was glad to be on the list.

However he added: "Of course it's a worry when anybody takes it upon themselves to dictate what people should or should not read."

The association said the aim of the annual awareness week, which ends on Saturday, is to remind US citizens not to take their freedom for granted.

Among those at the San Francisco Public Library event will be authors and musicians Ben Fong-Torres, Richie Unterberger and Roy Zimmerman.

They plan to stage a number of performances and defend controversial books.

In 2008 the American Library Association recorded 517 ban requests. Seventy-four were successful.

The organisation recorded that the most common reason given was that contents were too "sexually explicit".

Other classic literature subjected to complaints include JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling also feature on the list.

Earlier this week, it was claimed that Harry Potter author JK Rowling missed out on the Presidential Medal of Freedom because some US politicians believed she "encouraged witchcraft".

Jennifer, will you marry me? A marriage proposal on telephone poles turns sour ...

2009-10-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

A mystery woman called Jennifer has become the talk of the town in Bigola, NSW, Australia, after a series of signs appeared on telephone poles along Barrenjoey Rd, the busiest road in the area...

The bat that came out of the dark

2009-10-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

A tiny bat living in central Italy has emerged from the dark and started hunting by day.

This switch in hunting strategy is highly unusual among insectivorous bats, which routinely hunt at twilight or by night to avoid predators.

Yet a small group of soprano pipistrelles has been spotted brazenly flying by day in a mountain canyon within an Italian beech forest.

Only one other species of insectivorous bat frequently flies during daylight.

A research team lead by Dr Danilo Russo, a bat expert from the University of Bristol, UK and the University of Naples Federico II in Italy report the discovery in the journal Mammalian Biology.

Together with colleagues from both institutions, Dr Russo initially set out to find the roosts of another species, the barbastelle bat (Barbastella barbastellus), in the beech forests within a mountain canyon near the village of Villavallelonga in the Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise National Park in central Italy.

"One late afternoon, walking in the woodland, we spotted some bats flying unusually early," Dr Russo explains.

"We thought the phenomenon might be occasional, as sometimes happens, so we came back at the same time on the following days and the bats were there."

The scientists established that the bats are soprano pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus), a species with a high-pitched call that is closely related to the common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus).

The bats routinely come out to forage well before sunset, commonly feeding on gnats, wasps and bugs.

Deadly trade-off

Such behaviour is extremely rare for insectivorous bats.

These bats face a trade-off. During the day there are more insects around to feed on. But the bats themselves are very vulnerable to being caught and eaten by predatory birds, which fly by sight.

So instead, the bats have evolved to fly in the dark, only emerging during the hours of twilight or darkness. That keeps the bats safe, and their echolocating ability allows them to navigate and hunt those insects that are still about.

Yet over many evenings spread over two summers, the researchers continually saw this one population of soprano pipistrelles hunting insects by day.

The bats only do so at the bottom of the canyon, where local conditions seem to provide a safe haven for day flying.

The forest canopy lining the canyon protects the bats from predators, while offering a bountiful supply of insect food.

The researchers suspect that other local populations of bats may also have become day-hunters.

But they have not been recorded before by scientists as "bat researchers seldom look for bats in daytime", says Dr Russo.

"In my career I have rarely come across a fully occasional daytime flight," he adds.

Individual bats are sometimes seen flying during the day. But they usually do so soon after hibernation, when they are starving and need to replace fat reserves depleted during the winter.

"But this behaviour, performed systematically, was absolutely new to us."

Only one other bat, the Azores noctule (Nyctalus azoreum), is known to regularly hunt by day.

This species hunts insects in the dry forests of the Azores, where there are no predatory birds that fly by day.

Czech senators challenge Lisbon Treaty in Constitutional Court

2009-09-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

By Lenka Ponikelska

Tuesday September 29 2009

A group of Czech senators filed a new court challenge to the Lisbon Treaty at the country's Constitutional Court, said Tomas Langasek, a spokesman for the Brno, a Czech Republic-based institution.

The senators seek to overturn the validity of the treaty on the grounds that it may violate national sovereignty. A previous challenge to the treaty in 2008 was rejected by the 15-member panel.

The case comes as voters in Ireland prepare for vote on the Lisbon Treaty for a second time after it was rejected in a similar referendum in June last year.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who has yet to sign the treaty after it was approved by both houses of Parliament, has said he will wait until after the Irish vote and the court challenge before deciding how he will proceed.

The Lisbon Treaty must be approved by all 27 members of the EU.

- Lenka Ponikelska

[http://www.independent.ie/national-news/lisbon-treaty/czech-senators-challenge-lisbon-treaty-in-constitutional-court-1899610.html]

Wolfsheim : Lovesong

2009-09-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

Wait my dear ... no jealousies
Silly thing ... you can't know how I feel

Come take my hand I will show you the flame
Burning secrets, burning wishes ... your name

Don't be insecure, don't be afraid ... I'll hold you tight
Oh, virgin weakness, infinite sweetness ... that's you so let's dance
all alone

I want to kiss you, want to feel you deep
Your silky skin, a tender touch,
a sign that promises so much
I want to kiss you, want to feel you deep
and so we dance

Nothing ever spoils my joy of loving you,
of looking in your eyes ... I couldn't be that blind
that I won't crave for you
And still we dance all alone

I want to kiss you ...

Derry mum reveals haunted house hell

2009-09-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

Published Date: 11 September 2009

A Derry mother has told the 'Journal' that she was driven to a nervous breakdown by the supernatural spirits that haunt her Shantallow home.
The woman, who does not wish to be named and who claims she was a total sceptic prior to moving into the property, says she was forced to turn to mediums and paranormal investigators after failing to find a logical explanation for the eerie happenings that have left both her and her family petrified.

Over the six years years since moving into the house, the woman, her friends and family have heard footsteps across the landing and hall, the sound of someone dragging a heavy object through the house, drawers opening and closing on their own and light bulbs smashing above their heads.

She says a ghostly voice saying, " I will kill you", has also been recorded on electronic voice phenomena (EVP) equipment while ghostly figures have appeared in the middle of the night to both the woman and her daughter.

She says that, at times, a foul smell will fill the house, door handles will move up and down, and strange knocking will be heard on doors and floors.

She says she has even seen unexplained child-like writing on the inside of a cupboard, has heard ghostly whisperings and has been awoken from her sleep in a state of panic feeling she was being suffocated.

"We moved into the house in 2003; a new house in a lovely area, nothing like how people would imagine a haunted house to be. At first there was a lot of banging, footsteps in the hall, then one day the kitchen drawers started opening and closing on their own.

"One particular time, my son and I were sitting in the living room with the door open when we heard 'bang, bang, bang', someone thumping their way across the landing as if they really wanted us to hear them. We were frozen with fear, we waited for the footsteps to start again, for them to walk back the way they came, but we never heard them again.

Couldn't breathe or move
"Another time, as I lay in bed, I felt something, a presence, lying on top of my chest. I couldn't breathe, couldn't move, couldn't force it off me. Eventually I jumped out of the bed and ran into the bathroom, and went into a panic attack. I didn't know what was going on, didn't know what was happening.

"For a long time it was terrifying, I would just flee, get out of the house," she says.

One of many psychic investigators enlisted over the years has suggested the spirits do not belong to the house but have a historical connection to the land it is built on.

"The psychic suggested it is a caretaker, a very nasty man, a very controlling man, who will not let his wife and children cross over into the light. Another saw a young boy covering his face in the corner of the room, like he was hiding,"

She says most activity centres on the landing and stairs, while a bedroom in the back of the house makes many visitors to the house feel uneasy."

The woman says the phenomena comes and goes without warning and while she "has now got used to it" the eerie events almost destroyed her life.
"At first I thought I was going mad, being paranoid. It drove me to a nervous breakdown - to hell and back. I felt I couldn't tell anyone."
She says it was only when family and friends began to experience the ghostly goings-on that she was sure of her sanity.

Her quest for an explanation took her to the Northern Ireland Paranormal Society (NIPS) which has visited and investigated the house on a number of occasions.

Their probe into the Derry haunting has used sophisticated electronic voice phenomena audio equipment, cameras, dowsing rods and attempts to contact the spirits directly.

"On one occasion they asked the spirits to clarify their presence by knocking; first there were two knocks, then they kept coming. On another occasion, the EVP captured a voice saying, 'I will kill you', as clear as a bell."

The woman says she now has learned to live with the spirits and has no desire to leave her home. However,she insists her quest for an explanation will continue.

"There is no rational, logical explanation for what is going on here. The investigators have been a huge help and have reassured me. I love my house and the area we are in; in many ways, this experience has made me feel stronger, given me a real belief in the afterlife."

The full article contains 785 words and appears in n/a newspaper.Page 1 of 1

Last Updated: 11 September 2009 10:42 AM
Source: n/a
Location: Derry

I have been playing along for long enough. Could I kindly have my old world back? Please?

2009-09-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

Lately, things seem to fall into place ... I don't know how or why this all got started, but it did.

I had been anticipating my stay in Dublin for several reasons - but first and foremost I simply wanted to go back. Needed to get back home and was desperate to finally feel the home soil under my feet again, to be able to breathe again and to find peace.
Not from the turmoil of daily life, but peace for myself. Too many things had been happening within the last months, things that had cost me by desperatly needed balance.

First of all, Harly had (literally) jumped into my life, turning all my well planned actions into chaos. I loved him deeply from the very first second I had layed eyes on him - and none of my idea(l)s had any chance to become reality. No chance to remain at safeguard this time, to keep my love and care in balance. Ruined by a single look into these puppy's eyes.
Do I regret it? Not for one second ... he brought back love and devotion to my life. This little creature (back than all teeth and claws and furry like a gremlin) had my helpless and under its spell. He still has.
All the nightmares I had had before were mercilessly destoroyed by this ray of sunshine that crashed into my world without giving me as much as a chance to resist.

Just when I had gotten used to this, my mother confessed that she had a serious alcohol addiction [Surprise, Surprise - as though we had not had fight after fight about this] and that she was thinking about getting help. What can I say?
I don't know if any of you [if, in fact, anyone is reading this] know what something like that does to a borderliner? I need a controlled environment, I need to know what and whom I am dealing with. As horrible and terrifying the alcohol abuse was, I knew what I was dealing with.
Now, suddenly, things were out of my reach. I had to trust, to rely on her strength and willpower to get through this. Helpless, I had to watch her fight by herself, knowing that none of my guidance, help and support had ever changed her mind.
I had to wait, to trust and watch it all unfold. Not for a second had I been upset or mad, that she had never given in to my pledges, my emotional and physical scars, my threats or my begging. You just can't make them understand what happens until they see for themselves.
By now, she has been off the alcohol for more than 100 days (YAY!!!!) and I start to trust.
I had a moment of fear when I realized just how far away I was in Dublin ... how many things could happen and the panic was back ... just like that. Not just knowing that something might happen - but the shere knowledge that something had happend. Now. Trying hard to sound casual I called my mum ... asking if everything was okay ... how Harly was doing ... if she found it difficult to remain by herself. She said that she did, but she was doing okay. And suddenly I could stand this. No panic attacks, no tears in the night, no trace of "I can't stand this. This will kill me."
Things were just ... okay.

In all this madness I pretty much lost count of the time - and suddenly Dublin was no more than a week away. The tickets and the room had been paid, the money had been withdrawn from my account and there I was - with a packed bag and not much more than a piece of paper upon which my fate relied.
To kill time I had been logging in to FB again and had agreed to "design" a homepage for Joseph Pulver whom I had befriended by then. All this kept me pretty busy (and was a hell of a lot of fun). Promoting Joe's book in some kind of virtual/viral marketing was new ground for me and I think we both have been doing a pretty good job.
With all this done and Dublin in my grasp I was relaxed, in a brilliant mood and willing to enjoy my 5 days back home. Seems I've been to relaxed and had opened up to much. My friend still claims she didn't recognize me during our holidays ... no surprises here, as I realized far too late, that I had fallen back into my old behaviour patterns. Being off guard, alive and unwilling to give in to reason she certainly had some trouble to understand what kind of tunderstorm was hitting her - and when it would strike again.

This also gave you the chance to sneak into my life ... you found some unguarded backdoor in my mind. You kept me spellbound, mesmerized and willing to follow you. In the small hours before the flight your face and your words haunted me.
I had a well laid plan for Dublin: I wanted to get you out of my mind, out of my heart and my soul for good. One week of silence should be enough to get me off this strange addiction that had come over me ... no contact, no mails, nothing to remind me of you. I would return as a new, stronger and balanced person - the woman that had been able to be lulled by compliments, charme and the thrill of love would never again return. I would not be hurt again, never again been torn between love and despair, between admiration and hate, between white and black.
But you wouldn't let me, would you? I had barely reached Dublin when I saw your first mail - telling me that you missed me. And I realized that it was too late to turn. Too late to free my heart. You remained so deep in my thoughts and in my soul that it was impossible not to think of you.
By now, I understand that I am in love. Helpless as a child I watch myself and wonder: can I get through this? Can I let go off all the hate, the need to be in control and my despration, my fear and all the pain that comes with it? Can I trust? For the first time feel love without knowing that this would be over, some day. Without dreading the end - and just fall into the here and now?
You tought me what it means to rely on one's feeling and to trust in fate. To understand that, for now, there is nothing I can do but to give in to what I feel.
To enjoy this.
And I do. Oh, how I do. This is too good to give it up.
This feels good, it feels right - and I am not willing to give this up.
For once I want to let go, knowing I am safe in your arms, blessed [if you will] with your love.
You have no idea of the hell that I am going through, but you have mastered your own darkness and I hope every single day that this will be enough to keep me going.
I am not willing to give up, this is all I can promise you.
No more, but also no less.

The Mission : Tower of Strength

2009-09-09T15:35:00.001-07:00

How very well do I remember the first time that I heard that song live ...

You raise me up
When I'm on the floor
You see me through
When I'm lonely and scared
And I'm feeling true to the written word
And you're true to me
And still I need more
It would tear me apart
To feel no one ever cared
For me
For me
For me
You are a tower of strength to me

You stand firm and proud
When the wind blows in your face
And when the sun shines in your eyes
You just turn your head away
To me
To me
To me
You are a tower of strength to me

You rescue me
You are my faith
My hope
My liberty
And when there is darkness all around
You shine bright for me
You are the guiding light

To me
To me
To me
You are a tower of strength to me

You are all passion and heart
When I lay in your embrace
And heaven is in your kiss
Salvation lies just a touch away

To me
To me
To me
You are a tower of strength to me

Goo Goo dolls - Iris (lyrics)

2009-09-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

And I'd give up forever to touch you
Cause I know that you feel me somehow
You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be
And I don't want to go home right now

And all I can taste is this moment
And all I can breathe is your life
Cause sooner or later it's over
I just don't want to miss you tonight

And I don't want the world to see me
Cause I don't think that they'd understand
When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

And you can't fight the tears that ain't coming
Or the moment of truth in your lies
When everything seems like the movies
Yeah you bleed just to know your alive

And I don't want the world to see me
Cause I don't think that they'd understand
When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

I don't want the world to see me
Cause I don't think that they'd understand
When everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am

Thomas Ligotti on BWHIS

2009-09-07T01:44:00.001-07:00

Thomas Ligotti (yes, THE Thomas Ligotti) has this to say about BWHIS:

"Some writers one admirers and others make one want to do as they do, or try. For me, Joe Pulver is of the latter type. His imagination is so vile so much of the time that it makes me giggle with amazement. And the prose so deadly visionary. I'm grateful that the pieces in this collection are those of a fellow horror writer who has raised the ante on what it means to be such a creature." - Thomas Ligotti

Spahn Ranch - An Exit

2009-09-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

The actor bows to a crowd
So completely in another age
Stumbles toward a pale room
Turn another page
The pulsing of the gauge
The eyes turning to her frame
And all that he saved
From the roles he played

He looks to the door
And finds it no longer a race
He is looking through the door
And finds it no longer a race

The light is partially glazed
Silence of the screen
The line they cannot read
And it's contrary to belief
The browning of the page
From all the yesterdays

He looks to the door
And finds it no longer a race
He is looking through the door
And finds it no longer a race

He looks to the door
And finds it no longer a race
He is looking through the door
And finds it no longer a race

Eyes to a frame
Are all he saved
Eyes to her frame
Are all he saved

He looks to the door
And find it no longer a race
He is looking through the door
And finds it no longer a race

He looks to the door
And find it no longer a race
He is looking through the door
And finds it no longer a race

Conspiracy theorists rejoice: Prized 'moon rock' in Dutch national museum is a fake

2009-09-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

AMSTERDAM - It's not green cheese, but it might as well be.

The Dutch national museum said Thursday that one of its prized possessions, a rock supposedly brought back from the moon by U.S. astronauts, is just a piece of petrified wood.

Rijksmuseum spokeswoman Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, said the museum will keep it anyway as a curiosity.

"It's a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered," she said. "We can laugh about it."

The museum acquired the rock after the death of former prime minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees received it as a private gift on Oct. 9, 1969 from then-U.S. ambassador J. William Middendorf during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts, part of their "Giant Leap" goodwill tour after the first moon landing.

Middendorf, who lives in Rhode Island, told Dutch NOS news that he had gotten it from the U.S. State Department, but couldn't recall the exact details.

The U.S. Embassy in the Hague said it was investigating the matter.

The museum had vetted the moon rock early on by checking with NASA, Van Gelder said.

She said the space agency told the museum then that it was possible the country had received a rock: NASA gave moon rocks to more than 100 countries in the early 1970s, but those were from later missions.

"Apparently no one thought to doubt it, since it came from the prime minister's collection," Van Gelder said.

The rock is not usually on display; the museum is primarily known for its paintings and other works of fine art by masters such as Rembrandt.

It was on show in 2006 and a space expert informed the museum it was unlikely NASA would have given away any moon rocks three months after Apollo returned to Earth.

Researchers from Amsterdam's Free University said they could see at a glance the rock was not from the moon.

"It's a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone," Geologist Frank Beunk said in an article published by the museum.

He said it was worth no more than C50 ($70).

Is the Loch Ness monster on Google Earth?

2009-09-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

A security guard claims to have spotted the Loch Ness monster while browsing Google Earth.

The image, which can be seen on the satellite mapping program, depicts a large object resembling a sea creature clearly visible beneath the surface of the water.
Jason Cooke told The Sun he spotted "Nessie" while browsing the website's satellite photos. Mr Cooke, 25, of Nottingham, said: "I couldn't believe it. It's just like the descriptions of Nessie."

Researcher Adrian Shine, of the Loch Ness Project, told the newspaper: "This is really intriguing. It needs further study." The image can be seen by entering coordinates Latitude 57°12'52.13"N, Longitude 4°34'14.16"W in Google Earth.
Earlier this year it was reported that climate change may have killed the Loch Ness Monster. There have been "no "credible sightings" of Nessie for over a year.
Veteran American monster hunter Bob Rines thinks environmental conditions in the Highland loch have changed and can no longer sustain the elusive reptile.
Gary Campbell, of the monster's official fan club, said: "I'm concerned. There have been none of the normal sightings that verify that Nessie and her family are still alive and well."
The animal was first brought to the world's attention in 1933. Since then there have been dozens of sightings, many of which have turned out to be hoaxes.
There have also been a number of searches for the creature. The most recent was in 2008 when scientists used sonar and underwater cameras in an attempt to find the animal.

The Dark Matter of the Human Brain

2009-09-03T09:40:00.000-07:00

Meet the forgotten 90 percent of your brain: glial cells, which outnumber your neurons ten to one. And no one really knows what they do.

by Carl Zimmer

Some of the common words we use are frozen mistakes. The term influenza comes from the Italian word meaning “influence”—an allusion to the influence the stars were once believed to have on our health. European explorers searching for an alternate route to India ended up in the New World and uncomprehendingly dubbed its inhabitants indios, or Indians. Neuroscientists have a frozen mistake of their own, and it is a spectacular blunder. In the mid-1800s researchers discovered cells in the brain that are not like neurons (the presumed active players of the brain) and called them glia, the Greek word for “glue.” Even though the brain contains about a trillion glia—10 times as many as there are neurons—the assumption was that those cells were nothing more than a passive support system. Today we know the name could not be more wrong.

Glia, in fact, are busy multitaskers, guiding the brain’s development and sustaining it throughout our lives. Glia also listen carefully to their neighbors, and they speak in a chemical language of their own. Scientists do not yet understand that language, but experiments suggest that it is part of the neurological conversation that takes place as we learn and form new memories.

If you had to blame one thing for the mistaken impression about glia, it would have to be electricity. The 18th-century physiologist Luigi Galvani discovered that if he touched a piece of electrified metal to an exposed nerve in a frog’s leg, the leg twitched. He and others went on to show that a slight pulse of electricity moving through the metal to the nerve was responsible. For two millennia physicians and philosophers had tried to find the “animal spirits” that moved the body, and Galvani discovered that impetus: It was the stuff of lightning.

Over the next two centuries scientists got a clearer understanding of how those signals work. When a branch at one end of a nerve cell, or neuron, is stimulated, an electric pulse races toward the main body of the cell. Other branches might send separate pulses at the same time. The main body of the neuron conveys those pulses to an outgoing arm, or axon, which splits into numerous branches, each of which nearly touches other neurons. The slight gap between two nerve cells is called a synaptic cleft. The signal-sending neuron pumps chemicals into the space, and the signal-receiving neuron takes up some of them, triggering a new electric pulse.

All neurons have certain characteristic attributes: axons, synapses, and the ability to produce electric signals. As scientists peered at bits of brain under their microscopes, though, they encountered other cells that did not fit the profile. When impaled with electrodes, these cells did not produce a crackle of electric pulses. If electricity was the language of thought, then these cells were mute. German pathologist Rudolf Virchow coined the name glia in 1856, and for well over a century the cells were treated as passive inhabitants of the brain.

At least a few scientists realized that this might be a hasty assumption. The pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal earned a Nobel Prize in 1906 for what came to be known as the neuron doctrine—the theory that neurons are the fundamental units of the brain. Ramón y Cajal didn’t think glia were necessarily just glue, however. Instead, he thought they were a mystery—a mystery, he wrote, that “may remain unsolved for many years to come until physiologists find direct methods to attack it.”

Today the mystery of glia is partially solved. Biologists know they come in several forms. One kind, called radial glia, serve as a scaffolding in the embryonic brain. Neurons climb along these polelike cells to reach their final location. Another kind of glia, called microglia, are the brain’s immune system. They clamber through the neurological forest in search of debris from dead or injured cells. A third class of glia, known as Schwann cells and oligodendrocytes, form insulating sleeves around neurons to keep their electric signals from diffusing.

But the more neuroscientists examine glia, the more versatile these cells turn out to be. Microglia do not just keep the brain clean; they also prune away extra branches on neurons to help fine-tune their developing connections. Oligodendrocytes and Schwann cells don’t just insulate cells; they also foster new synapses between neurons. And once radial glia are finished helping neurons move around the developing brain, they don’t die. They turn into another kind of glia, called astrocytes.

If the glial cells called astrocytes really do process information, that would be a major addition to the brain’s computing power.Astrocytes—named for their starlike rays, which reach out in all directions—are the most abundant of all glial cells and therefore the most abundant of all the cells in the brain. They are also the most mysterious. A single astrocyte can wrap its rays around more than a million synapses. Astrocytes also fuse to each other, building channels through which molecules can shuttle from cell to cell.

All those connections put astrocytes in a great position to influence the goings-on in the brain. They also have receptors that can snag a variety of neurotransmitters, which means that they may be able to eavesdrop on the biochemical chatter going on around them. Yet for a long time, neuroscientists could not find any sign that astrocytes actually responded to signals from the outside. Finally, in 1990, neuroscientist Ann Cornell-Bell at Yale discovered what seemed to be a solution to the mystery. It turned out that astrocytes, like neurons, can react to neurotransmitters—but instead of electricity, the cells produce waves of charged calcium atoms.

The calcium comes from sealed packets scattered through the astrocytes. When stimulated, the cells rip open the calcium packets in the ray that first senses the neurotransmitters, triggering the opening of other packets elsewhere in the cell. The astrocytes then stash the calcium atoms back in their packets, only to unleash them again when next stimulated. Cornell-Bell noticed that a wave of such activity that started in one astrocyte could spread to other astrocytes. Several research teams also discovered that astrocytes themselves release powerful neurotransmitters. They can produce glutamate (which excites neurons so that they are more likely to respond to a signal from another neuron) and adenosine (which can blunt a neuron’s sensitivity).

For some brain scientists, these discoveries are puzzle pieces that are slowly fitting together into an exciting new picture of the brain. Piece one: Astrocytes can sense incoming signals. Piece two: They can respond with calcium waves. Piece three: They can produce outputs—neurotransmitters and perhaps even calcium waves that spread to other astrocytes. In other words, they have at least some of the requirements for processing information the way neurons do. Alfonso Araque, a neuroscientist at the Cajal Institute in Spain, and his colleagues make a case for a fourth piece. They find that two different stimulus signals can produce two different patterns of calcium waves (that is, two different responses) in an astrocyte. When they gave astrocytes both signals at once, the waves they produced in the cells was not just the sum of the two patterns. Instead, the astrocytes produced an entirely new pattern in response. That’s what neurons—and computers, for that matter—do.

If astrocytes really do process information, that would be a major addition to the brain’s computing power. After all, there are many more astrocytes in the brain than there are neurons. Perhaps, some scientists have speculated, astrocytes carry out their own computing. Instead of the digital code of voltage spikes that neurons use, astrocytes may act more like an analog network, encoding information in slowly rising and falling waves of calcium. In his new book, The Root of Thought, neuroscientist Andrew Koob suggests that conversations among astrocytes may be responsible for “our creative and imaginative existence as human beings.”

Until recently, studies of astrocytes examined only a few cells sitting in a petri dish. Now scientists are figuring out how to observe astrocytes in living animals and learning even more about the cells’ abilities. Axel Nimmerjahn of Stanford University and his colleagues, for instance, developed a way to mount microscopes on the skulls of mice. To watch the astrocytes, they inject molecules into the mice that glow when they bind to free calcium. Whenever a mouse moves one of its legs, Nimmerjahn and his colleagues can see a little burst of calcium waves. In some cases, hundreds of astrocytes may flare up at once, and the flares can last as long as several seconds.

Astrocytes are also vital for synapses. Stanford University neuroscientist Ben Barres and his colleagues found that neurons that grew with astrocytes formed nearly 10 times as many synapses as neurons growing without them, and the activity in those synapses was nearly 100 times greater. Since synapses change as we learn and form new memories, Marie E. Gibbs of Monash University in Australia suspected that astrocytes might be important to our ability to learn. To test that idea, she and her colleagues gave chicks colored beads to peck at. The red beads were coated in a bitter chemical; usually a single peck was enough to make the chicks learn never to peck a red bead again. But when they were injected with a drug that prevented astrocytes from synthesizing glutamate, the birds were unable to remember the bad taste and would peck at the beads again.

But these sorts of experiments have not swayed some skeptics. If the calcium waves really are so important, for instance, you would expect that a genetically engineered mouse that couldn’t make calcium waves would be one sorry rodent. Ken McCarthy, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his colleagues engineered mice to grow astrocytes that lack a key protein required to pry open their calcium packets. These mice grew up to be indistinguishable from ordinary ones, for reasons still unclear.

There is something marvelous in the fact that we barely understand what most of the cells in our brains are doing. Beginning in the 1930s, astronomers realized that all the things they could see through their telescopes—the stars, the galaxies, the nebulas—make up just a small fraction of the total mass of the universe. The rest, known as dark matter, still defies their best attempts at explanation. Between our ears, it turns out, each of us carries a personal supply of dark matter as well.

Dublin pics

2009-08-31T01:42:00.000-07:00

I uploaded the pics from Dublin yesterday to Facebook ... have a look, if you wish :)

KJK @ Facebook

SNS reviews BLOOD WILL HAVE ITS SEASON

2009-08-31T01:40:00.000-07:00

Sarah's SHE NEVER SLEPT has kindly reviewed BWHIS as well.
Have a look at her page, the review is brilliant!

SHE NEVER SLEPT

Aliens in no mood to response to SETI right now

2009-08-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

The SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) telescope has produced its first scientific results, but unfortunately it's still waiting for a response from the aliens.

The project, called the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) after benefactor and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, went live in 2007.

It was designed to scan for broadcasts from alien civilizations with more consistency and a wider field of view than any previous effort.

Run jointly by the SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, from a site in northern California, the ATA is ultimately intended to comprise 350 dishes.

But, even with its current complement of 42, it has an impressively wide field of view. It uses relatively small, 6-metre dishes that together can take in five square degrees of sky at a time - a box as wide as 10 full moons.

"At any one moment, you look into a very large piece of the sky," said Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute. "At 350 (telescopes), the ATA just blows any other survey telescope out of the water. Even at 42, it's interesting," she told New Scientist.

According to Joeri van Leeuwen, an ATA team member who presented the project's first results at a conference in the Netherlands in June, "You can see entire galaxies within one shot."

One question the ATA aims to answer is a mystery of missing gas.

Star-forming regions don't seem to have enough molecular gas to keep up the star-formation rates we observe.

Some researchers think atomic hydrogen might make up the difference.

ATA team members have searched for it in four groups of galaxies so far, but have not yet found any new intergalactic gas, deepening the mystery.

"This paper was our first science paper, so we've answered some questions, but we're finding new questions again. This paper really shows that our setup is working, we have all the algorithms working, and we could easily upgrade to a more powerful system still," van Leeuwen said.

Such surveys do not distract from the search for aliens, which - if they exist and are attempting to communicate - may send out broadcasts at wavelengths not commonly emitted by astrophysical objects.

Britain's Roswell: a flying saucer in Suffolk

2009-08-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

Could the strange metallic object reportedly seen hovering in Rendlesham Forest have been an alien craft? Photo: GETTY

UFO sightings tend to provoke cynicism, but could there be truth behind a sighting in Suffolk dubbed Britain's equivalent to the Roswell incident?

By Jasper Gerard
Published: 7:00AM BST 18 Aug 2009

Rather like the green shoots of economic recovery or sunshine in summer, reported sightings of alien life are endless, but almost impossible to verify. And there will be plenty of knowing smirks following release of the government's UFO files. Among the thousands claiming to have received a visitation from outer space was that unusual specimen, the "sober" Glastonbury reveller. Oh, and the Belgian air force, which one rather imagines being more mythical than the Swiss navy, or indeed the UFO it supposedly tracked.

But those of us inclined to dismiss UFO enthusiasts as geeky conspiracy theorists who live with their mothers and spend too long in their darkrooms might have to take all this stuff more seriously.

Sure, the 800 cases reported to the Ministry of Defence between 1993 and 1996 in the newly released files do detail endless sightings of implausible individuals with "lemon heads" trying to abduct boys and the like; but they also show that Lord Hill-Norton, the then chief of the defence staff, wrote to the defence secretary of the time, Michael Heseltine, demanding that Britain take seriously the possible threat of alien life. How Tarzan rode to the rescue we are not told, but the high-level exchange followed a mysterious incident in 1980 when American servicemen stationed at Rendlesham in Suffolk claimed to have seen a strange metallic object hovering near an RAF base.

The incident is now being described as "Britain's Roswell", a reference to the notorious case in New Mexico in 1947. Then, an American commander initially reported the crashing of a possible UFO, apparently with mysterious debris scattered for miles around. To type "Roswell" into a search engine is to enter a fantastical world where alien body parts are apparently cold stored in secret American bases as part of endless – and contradictory – conspiracies. The story even provided inspiration for Scooby Doo. Yet amid all the paranoia and cartoon fun there are enough eyewitness accounts to make you wonder just a little bit.

It now emerges that senior American personnel gave similar credence to the British sighting. A day after the incident, a US commander supposedly found indentations near the scene in the Suffolk forest and later reported "red, sun-like light" through trees which "moved about and pulsed".

Hill-Norton became a Churchillian voice in the wilderness, warning about the alien threat. He wrote to Heseltine in 1985, describing failure to prepare as "a potential 'banana-skin'," a mandarin's mild and mercurial way to describe the potential invasion of the planet by flesh-eating monsters from outer space.

I was the reporter on the Mandrake column who, many years ago, first disclosed the late chief of the defence staff's new-found interest and I confess I ascribed it to the vivid imagination of a man approaching his senior years.

But with plausible evidence emerging from American commanders and other sources more respectable than Glastonbury revellers – however sober – it grows harder to dismiss every UFO sighting as X-Files fantasy. Well, isn't it arrogant to assume that ours is the only civilisation? How do we know what may lurk in an infinite universe, or indeed in infinite universes?

But what actually is a UFO? The newly released files highlight public and official confusion with the case of "Aurora", an American spy plane whose existence has never been admitted. In 1993 there were numerous sightings over the West Country, prompting an exchange between the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (ACAS), Sir Anthony Bagnall to the head of the Ministry of Defence's UFO desk (yes, there is such a thing). After much debate, the UFO desk was told to drop its investigation. As Hereward Pelling, a documentary maker who has investigated numerous sightings says: "A UFO is simply unidentified – there need not be anything supernatural about it."

Either way, few would have predicted this latest story, best summarised as "UFO: the comeback". After all, hadn't UFOs gone out of fashion? Hadn't digital photography shown "flying" saucers to be kitchen saucers? Hadn't we discovered enough real human threats to our security without inventing phantom superhuman menaces from galaxies far away of which we know little?

How quaint it now seems that President Ronald Reagan could have posited to the Soviets that it would actually have been a blessing if humankind discovered a threatening enemy life form, so the competing nations of earth might unite against the common enemy, the lemon-headed peril.

Certainly UFOs now seem rather retro, like very exotic classic cars. With reason. Pelling, whose documentary, Nazi UFO Conspiracy, says UFO fever reached its peak in the cold war. Back then man had not even landed on the moon, so space was unknown. One theory Pelling has investigated was that German scientists working for the Nazis created the first "flying saucer" and that these experts were taken to America after the war, where they continued to develop spaceship technology. "There is just about enough evidence for this to be plausible," ventures Pelling, who has interviewed many of the most prominent people in the UFO world. "What is true is that a high proportion of sightings are near military bases," he says.

During the war, Allied pilots reported seeing so-called "Foo Fighters", which moved at great speed and with alien agility, and which were investigated at length by Britain and America. But Pelling says the first major sighting of a UFO was by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 in America. "The craft he describes is identical to the German Second World War Horton Brothers Flying Wing prototype that was taken by the Allies in 1945 and shipped back to the US. In turn, this flying-wing design is identical to the B-2 Stealth Bomber." America was also testing a vertical take-off flying saucer with conventional propulsion methods, though with scant success.

"Perhaps," speculates Pelling "it has suited the American and British authorities to have people believe they have seen a UFO rather than so-called 'black projects', secret new kit they are trying out." Stealth Bombers do move with incredible speed and silence, so these may have confused witnesses. But such explanations don't account for the incident at the British base, where service personnel witnesses would surely recognise an aeroplane.

And the American authorities appear to have taken UFOs surprisingly seriously, since Washington was supposedly "buzzed" in 1952, with even President Truman becoming involved. Ditto Britain. Long before the intervention by the chief of the defence staff, Winston Churchill was on the case. Indeed, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he is credited with the first "official" reporting of a UFO, above Kent on October 141912.

The incident must have left an impression because in the Fifties, Churchill was involved in the delightfully titled, comic-book sounding Flying Saucer Working Party, which was, naturally, terribly hush, hush. More recently, correspondence has emerged from 1952 between the prime minister and his air minister asking for an assessment of the truth about flying saucers.

Far from being some period piece of Cold War paranoia, the surprise is that UFO sightings are actually on the rise. A councillor in Lincolnshire recently claimed to have spotted one. A dazzling light in Norfolk has just sparked huge speculation, with independent sightings as far as Suffolk. Recently we have had alleged sightings on a television broadcast, over Hatfield House and trailing an RAF Hercules. And nor is there a shortage of those willing to believe. A Briton facing extradition to America for hacking into top-secret military computers claimed he was actually trying to expose a conspiracy that Washington is covering up its knowledge of UFOs.

Sure, many "sightings" have more humdrum explanations, from meteors to the shimmering white craft that turned out to be nothing but an airship and an inevitable Virgin publicity stunt. Nick Pope, who was employed by the Ministry of Defence to look into UFO sightings, actually found that one of the biggest causes is the party craze for releasing Chinese lanterns – they float for miles, often in groups, radiate light, then suddenly disappear when the candle burns out. Pelling estimates up to 90 per cent of sightings can now be attributed to these rather soulful party emblems.

Yet as even one eminently sober gentleman from the Public Records Office conceded on the nation's airwaves yesterday, not all incidents are so easily dismissed. True, great surges in UFO "sightings" follow films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Independence Day; but just as certain atheists can be a little too categorical that god doesn't exist, perhaps we UFO sceptics should reserve final judgement. After all, if we don't dismiss them out of hand, perhaps the little green men with lemon heads might be a bit nicer to us when they really do come a calling...

Science ponders 'zombie attack'

2009-08-18T14:31:00.000-07:00

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.

They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures.

The scientific paper is published in a book - Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress.

In books, films, video games and folklore, zombies are undead creatures, able to turn the living into other zombies with a bite.

But there is a serious side to the work.

In some respects, a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal, rapidly spreading infection. The researchers say the exercise could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations.

In their study, the researchers from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University (also in Ottawa) posed a question: If there was to be a battle between zombies and the living, who would win?

Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake) and colleagues wrote: "We model a zombie attack using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies.

"We introduce a basic model for zombie infection and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions."

To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films.

"While we are trying to be as broad as possible in modelling zombies - especially as there are many variables - we have decided not to consider these individuals," the researchers said.

Back for good?

Even so, their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.

In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".

They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."

According to the researchers, the key difference between the zombies and the spread of real infections is that "zombies can come back to life".

Professor Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK government's chief advisers on controlling the spread of swine flu, said the study did have parallels with some infectious diseases.

"None of them actually cause large-scale death or disease, but certainly there are some fungal infections which are difficult to eradicate," said Professor Ferguson, from Imperial College London.

"There are some viral infections - simple diseases like chicken pox have survived in very small communities. If you get it when you are very young, the virus stays with you and can re-occur as shingles, triggering a new chicken pox epidemic."

Professor Smith? told BBC News: "When you try to model an unfamiliar disease, you try to find out what's happening, try to approximate it. You then refine it, go back and try again."

"We refined the model again and again to say... here's how you would tackle an unfamiliar disease."

Professor Ferguson went on to joke: "The paper considers something that many of us have worried about - particularly in our younger days - of what would be a feasible way of tackling an outbreak of a rapidly spreading zombie infection.

"My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever. So perhaps they are being a little over-pessimistic when they conclude that zombies might take over a city in three or four days."

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show

2009-08-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

By ANDREW POLLACK

Published: August 17, 2009
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.

The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.

“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”

Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.

The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.

Using some of the same techniques, it may be possible to scavenge anyone’s DNA from a discarded drinking cup or cigarette butt and turn it into a saliva sample that could be submitted to a genetic testing company that measures ancestry or the risk of getting various diseases. Celebrities might have to fear “genetic paparazzi,” said Gail H. Javitt of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Tania Simoncelli, science adviser to the American Civil Liberties Union, said the findings were worrisome.

“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” she said. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”

John M. Butler, leader of the human identity testing project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said he was “impressed at how well they were able to fabricate the fake DNA profiles.” However, he added, “I think your average criminal wouldn’t be able to do something like that.”

The scientists fabricated DNA samples two ways. One required a real, if tiny, DNA sample, perhaps from a strand of hair or drinking cup. They amplified the tiny sample into a large quantity of DNA using a standard technique called whole genome amplification.

Of course, a drinking cup or piece of hair might itself be left at a crime scene to frame someone, but blood or saliva may be more believable.

The authors of the paper took blood from a woman and centrifuged it to remove the white cells, which contain DNA. To the remaining red cells they added DNA that had been amplified from a man’s hair.

Since red cells do not contain DNA, all of the genetic material in the blood sample was from the man. The authors sent it to a leading American forensics laboratory, which analyzed it as if it were a normal sample of a man’s blood.

The other technique relied on DNA profiles, stored in law enforcement databases as a series of numbers and letters corresponding to variations at 13 spots in a person’s genome.

From a pooled sample of many people’s DNA, the scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. They said that a library of 425 different DNA snippets would be enough to cover every conceivable profile.

Nucleix’s test to tell if a sample has been fabricated relies on the fact that amplified DNA — which would be used in either deception — is not methylated, meaning it lacks certain molecules that are attached to the DNA at specific points, usually to inactivate genes.

'Hunt for the Skinwalker' story details discussed

2009-08-17T17:26:00.000-07:00

The Coast to Coast radio show with George Noory discussed the Hunt for the Skinwalker case.
The show audio was posted on YouTube by 3rdKrypton.

From the YouTube site, a little background if you're unfamiliar with this case:
Journalist George Knapp and research scientist Colm Kelleher, the authors of Hunt for the Skinwalker, shared details about a ranch in Utah where the "Gorman" (a pseudonym) family was terrorized by a series of unexplainable encounters that included UFOs of various shapes, mutilated cattle, disembodied voices, poltergeist activity and invincible creatures. The isolated location in northeastern Utah has a history of bizarre reports dating back at least 50 years, with many of the accounts being catalogued by a science teacher, Junior Hicks.

The local Native-American tribe, the Utes, referred to the ranch area as the "path of the Skinwalker," and advised avoiding this land. According to their legend, a skinwalker is an "evil sorcerer," capable of shape-shifting and turning into various animals, explained Knapp. Indeed, when the Gorman family first moved into the ranch in 1994 they encountered a wolf the size of a small horse that was impervious to bullets, even though it was struck numerous times. When they followed the creature, its tracks just suddenly disappeared, as though it had just vanished into thin air, said Kelleher.

In 1996, Tom Gorman saw a blue orb and his dogs chased the object into a dense thicket. He heard a yelping and later found three circles of dried out grass and a gooey mess, as though the animals had been vaporized, Kelleher reported. Before selling the ranch to NIDS (the research organization Kelleher was formerly associated with), the Gormans lost a total of 12 cattle that were mysteriously mutilated. Some type of intelligence, capable of manipulating matter was making its presence known in the area, the two concluded. Knapp further speculated that the ranch could be an "interdimensional portal."

please find the mentioned videos here

Florida triangle UFO video case termed 'true unknown'

2009-08-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

A Wesley Chapel, Florida, triangle UFO sighting has been termed a "true unknown" by Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Field Investigator Morgan Beall.

The July 17, 2009, sighting has multiple witnesses and the event was videotaped. The object had three points of light. Two of the lights were white, and a third light was blue.

The object hovered in the sky, but tilted back and forth, throughout the multi-hour sighting.

The object returned to that same location again on July 25, 2009, and was also videotaped by the witnesses.

Video from both the July 17 and July 25 cases are in Beall's video at the top of this page. Note: although the original case is dated July 17, the witness states on the tape that it is July 16.

In his investigation, Beall reviewed video taken from other U.S. locations as well as from several different countries that match the video shot in Florida.

The following is the original unedited witness testimony. Additional video from other locations is at the bottom of this page.

FL, July 17, 2009 - It was a 3 pointed triangle with 3 lights on each corner and a 4th light was on the bottom. General Shape - upside down pyramid but with only 3 sides. MUFON Case # 18256.

At 11:42 pm 7/17/2009, my neighbor knocked on my door. It was unusual because it was really late so I thought it was an emergency.

She said "sorry to bother you so late, but my husband is in the back yard looking at some weird lights in the sky and thought you might want to see them too." I then said "ok, I'm out back right now."

I then opened up my sliding glass door to go to the lanai and I looked up in the eastern sky at about 45 degrees, or the 1 o'clock position, and saw a triangular object in the sky moving from left to right and back left and up and down and it surely didn't look like anything I've ever seen in my life.

I then ran back into the house to wake up my wife, who is the biggest ufo skeptic that I know, and said "Wake up! Wake up! You've got to come outside and see this thing!!" She said "No, I've to go to sleep, I have to work in the morning!" I preceded to say "You have to see this thing in the sky, just trust me, you have to come out and see this!" I then looked for our camera, a casio exilim 10.1 mega pixel camera, and went back outside with my dog and started recording footage of this thing in the sky.

I walked over to my neighbors house and we, three of us, watched this thing for 2 and a half hours. My neighbor had binoculars and a telescope, but it was easier to use the binoculars to see the silohuette of this object. It was moving in different patterns, but generally stayed in the eastern sky moving from left to right in a pendulum type pattern, but it would also moved westward a little bit, but still remained at the 1 o'clock to 1:30 position in the sky.

If you held a dime towards the sky, the size was a little smaller than the dime. It seemed to be about 1000-3000 feet in the sky hovering over I-75 near SR 54. The feelings I felt was "what the heck is that?" We sat on some chairs and watched this thing for a couple hours. I started to feel really sleepy so I went back inside the house to go to sleep, but I kept checking out my window because I wanted to see where this thing will go once it's done hovering over Wesley Chapel, FL.

I found my other battery that was fully charged so I went back outside for a few more minutes and fimed one more video. I don't know what we saw, but it wasn't a plane. Matter of fact, we saw 2 planes fly by that night, one was flying from East to Southwest. We heard the sounds of the engines as it came closer to us and as it flew past us. The sounds were evident even when the plane seemed to be further to us than the triangular object in the sky. The next plane fly past us from South to North and you could also hear it as it flew past us. But this object made no sounds at all. The night sky was very clear and there was no or very little wind that night.

Videos can be viewed here: