Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Acoustic Archaeology Yielding Mind-Tripping Tricks

Image
© Jorge Mori Chavin stone art in the shape of a head, housed at the Museo De La Nacion in Lima, Peru.
Recently uncovered sound effects include a clapping echo that sounds like a jungle bird.

Researchers are uncovering the secrets of ancient civilizations who built fun house-like temples that may have scared the pants off worshipers with scary sound effects, light shows and perhaps drug-induced psychedelic trips.

The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is a new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control.

Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research and Acoustics, has been studying the 3,000 year-old Chavin culture in the high plains of Peru. Kolar and her colleagues have been mapping a maze of underground tunnels, drains and hallways in which echoes don't sound like echoes.

Info

Ice Meteorite Found with Extraterrestrial Life-Forms

Ice Meteorite_1
© 24/7 Press ReleaseIce Meteorite
South Haven, Michigan, -- Duane P. Snyder will announce the discovery of the first and only known ICE METEORITE containing EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE-FORMS on November 30, 2010 at 10:00am at the Ramada Inn Center, 1555 Phoenix Road, South Haven, MI 49090.

Also to be announced: The ICE METEORITE's particle analysis, it's gas analysis, where it likely came from and PHOTOS of EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE-FORMS found in the melt-water of the ICE METEORITE.

Ice Meteorite_2
© 24/7 Press ReleaseLife form.
Dr. Albert Schnieders of Tascon USA Inc, Chestnut Ridge, New York 10977, has commented that we basically found nearly all elements up to 90u in the sample spherical particles.

snydericyrite.com is a website dedicated to releasing information on the Ice meteorite found in year 2000 and the extraterrestrial life forms found in it. For further information, please contact us at duanepsnyder@snydericyrite.com

Ice Meteorite_3
© 24/7 Press ReleaseBoney structure part of a life-form.

Sherlock

Flashback Tests on Skull Fragment Cast Doubt on Adolf Hitler Suicide Story

hitler,skull
© Mikhail Metzel/APA general view of what Russian officials claim to be a fragment of Adolf Hitler's skull, at an exhibition in Moscow, Wed April 26, 2000.
Bone with bullet hole found by Russians in 1946 came from an unknown woman, not the German leader

In countless biographies of Adolf Hitler the story of his final hours is recounted in the traditional version: committing suicide with Eva Braun, he took a cyanide pill and then shot himself on 30 April 1945, as the Russians bombarded Berlin.

Some historians expressed doubt that the Führer had shot himself, speculating that accounts of Hitler's death had been embellished to present his suicide in a suitably heroic light. But a fragment of skull, complete with bullet hole, which was taken from the bunker by the Russians and displayed in Moscow in 2000, appeared to settle the argument.

Until now. In the wake of new revelations, the histories of Hitler's death may need to be rewritten - and left open-ended. American researchers claim to have demonstrated that the skull fragment, secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence, belonged to a woman under 40, whose identity is unknown. DNA analyses performed on the bone, now held by the Russian State Archive in Moscow, have been processed at the genetics lab of the University of Connecticut. The results, broadcast in the US by a History Channel documentary, Hitler's Escape, astonished scientists.

Book

Leo Tolstoy, 100 Years Later

Image
© UnknownLeo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy, as a famous French writer Anatole France put it, "saw with his spiritual eyes the horizons that are still invisible to us. I can compare Tolstoy with Homer. He will be studied in the millennia to come. His alleged utopias have already partly found confirmation. The old world is falling apart ... Tolstoy is a prophet of new humanity."

One hundred years ago, in November 1910, at an unknown railway station in Astapovo, Russia, there ended, as Ivan Bunin wrote, "not only the life of one of the most extraordinary men, who had ever lived in this world, there ended a unique in its force, length and difficulty heroic act, an extraordinary fight for 'liberation.'" Yet one hundred years following his death, Tolstoy's spiritual voice, shaped by his obsession with Eastern philosophy, lives on through his words.

On the Religion of the Future

Albert Einstein said, "The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism."

Info

Beringians Found In Icelandic Gene Pool

Beringians_1
© The Right PerspectiveIcelanders in the southern part of the country have been found to have Beringian DNA.

New anthropology and genealogy studies indicate that "Native" Americans, more correctly known as Beringians for having entered the North American continent from Asia via the Bering Straits, accompanied Norsemen to Iceland 500 years before Christopher Columbus discovered America.

The controversial theory is put forward in the Master thesis of Sigrídur Sunna Ebeneserdóttir, who is studying anthropology at the University of Iceland (HÍ), and was conducted on behalf of deCODE Genetics. According to the study published in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, some 350 Icelanders alive today carry genes characteristic of Beringians, and proves Europeans had been in North America more than 1,000 years ago.

Ebenesdóttir's work is the continuation of a study published in 2000 by HÍ and deCODE anthropologist Agnar Helgason, who served as her tutor. In his study, Helgason indicated that most of the women who settled in Iceland came from the British Isles, while most of the male settlers came from Scandinavia.

Question

Should Pluto Be a Planet After All? Experts Weigh In

Pluto
© Space.comPluto

Now that Pluto may have regained its status as the largest object in the outer solar system, should astronomers consider giving it back another former title - that of full-fledged planet?

Pluto was demoted to a newly created category, "dwarf planet," in 2006, partly because of the discovery a year earlier of Eris, another icy body from Pluto's neighborhood. Eris was thought to be bigger than Pluto until Nov. 6, when astronomers got a chance to recalculate Eris' size.

Now it appears that Pluto reigns - though only by the slimmest of margins (the numbers are so close as to be nearly indistinguishable, when uncertainties are taken into account).

The new finding brings renewed attention to Pluto, and to the controversial decision to strip the frigid world of its planet status. Should Pluto be a planet? Should Eris, and many other objects circling the sun beyond Neptune's orbit? Or is the current system, which recognizes just eight relatively large planets, the way to go?

SPACE.com asked some experts to weigh in on this debate, which affects how astronomers view the solar system, as well as how complicated school children's planet-memorizing mnemonics must be.

Evil Rays

Study finds Wi-Fi makes trees sick

tree
© na

All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected

Radiation from Wi-Fi networks is harmful to trees, causing significant variations in growth, as well as bleeding and fissures in the bark, according to a recent study in the Netherlands.

All deciduous trees in the Western world are affected, according to the study by a group of institutions, including the TU Delft University and Wageningen University. The city of Alphen aan den Rijn ordered the study five years ago after officials found unexplained abnormalities on trees that couldn't be ascribed to a virus or bacterial infection.

Additional testing found the disease to occur throughout the Western world. In the Netherlands, about 70 percent of all trees in urban areas show the same symptoms, compared with only 10 percent five years ago. Trees in densely forested areas are hardly affected.

Telescope

Spacecraft Flew Through 'Snowstorm' on Encounter with Comet Hartley 2

Image
© Unknown
College Park. -- On its recent trip by comet Hartley 2, the Deep Impact spacecraft took the first pictures of, and flew through, a storm of fluffy particles of water ice being spewed out by carbon dioxide jets coming from the rough ends of the comet. The resulting images and data shed new light on the nature and composition of comets, according to the University of Maryland-led EPOXI science team, which today announced its latest findings and released the first images of this comet created snowstorm.

Magnify

First Americans "Reached Europe Five Centuries Before Columbus Discoveries'

Image
© PoodlesRock/CorbisChristopher Columbus did not introduce the first native Americans to Europe, according to new research
Scientists claim first Americans arrived long before Columbus bumped into an island in the Bahamas in 1492.

When Christopher Columbus paraded his newly discovered American Indians through the streets of Spanish towns at the end of the 15th century, he was not in fact introducing the first native Americans to Europe, according to new research.

Scientists who have studied the genetic past of an Icelandic family now claim the first Americans reached Europe a full five centuries before Columbus bumped into an island in the Bahamas during his first voyage of discovery in 1492.

Researchers said today that a woman from the Americas probably arrived in Iceland 1,000 years ago, leaving behind genes that are reflected in about 80 Icelanders today.

The link was first detected among inhabitants of Iceland, home to one of the most thorough gene-mapping programs in the world, several years ago.

Telescope

First Glimpse of a Planet from Another Galaxy

Image
© Agence France-PresseThis artist's impression shows HIP 13044 b, an exoplanet orbiting a star
A hot, gaseous and fast-spinning planet has been found orbiting a dying star on the edge of the Milky Way, in the first such discovery of a planet from outside our galaxy, scientists said Thursday.

Slightly larger than the size of Jupiter, the largest in our solar system, the newly discovered exoplanet is orbiting a star 2,000 light years from Earth that has found its way into the Milky Way.

The pair are believed to be part of the Helmi stream, a group of stars that remains after its mini-galaxy was devoured by the Milky Way some six to nine billion years ago, said the study in Science Express.

"This discovery is very exciting," said Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

"Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach."