Article Archive for February 2008
White Dwarf Acts Like A Pulsar
Observers had believed white dwarfs were inert stellar corpses that slowly cool and fade away…At least one white dwarf, known as AE Aquarii, emits pulses of high-energy (hard) X-rays as it whirls around on its axis. “We’re seeing behavior like the pulsar in the Crab Nebula, but we’re seeing it in a white dwarf,” says Koji Mukai of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
…Some white dwarfs, including AE Aquarii, spin very rapidly and have magnetic fields millions of times stronger than Earth’s. These characteristics give them the energy to generate cosmic rays.
Found at Space Daily.
(great, more to worry about!)
Mica Paint on Mayan Temple
Ancient Mayan temple builders discovered and used lustrous pigments to make their buildings dazzle in the daylight, a Queensland University of Technology researcher has discovered.
Studying tiny shards of paint from the Mayan city of Copan, QUT physical and chemical sciences PhD researcher Rosemary Goodall found evidence of mica that would have made the buildings glitter when hit by the sun.
Ms Goodall said the mica was applied over the red paint of stucco masks on the corners of Copan’s well-preserved Rosalila temple, found buried under another pyramid.
Mica is useful for protecting against cosmic rays!
The Black Death – Caused by Comets
It’s a wacky idea, and I don’t quite get it myself – read here for a long article explaining it. In part it says:
Mike Baillie …is saying that the Black Death, one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, said to have killed possibly two thirds of the entire population of Europe, not to mention millions all over the planet, probably wasn’t Bubonic Plague but was rather Death By Comet(s)!
…In an average year there is one atmospheric explosion with a yield of 100 kilotons or more. The large majority occur in such remote areas, or so high in the atmosphere, that they are not observed. Even if observed, the witnesses may see only a flash of light in the distance, or hear the ‘rumble of distant thunder’ coming from the open oceans. Thus even those that are observed are often not recognized.
What the article does highlight is a number …
The Calendar Ends Because It Has To?
I just read this blog post that was submitted here as a comment:http://shanmadham.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html
I’m not a fan of his main theory:As Solar Sun aligns with the galatical center in 2012, the electro magnetic gravitational forces balances out only after massive Solar flaring of huge Mass Energy ejection leading to creation of tiny planet between Sun and Mercury.
But then he proceeds to make a very valid point:“Around the Sun in 365.2425 days” by Earth will change and we have to revolve longer to curcumscribe our Solar Sun. Perhaps this is too a reason why Mayan/Aztec’s calenders end on 21 dec 2012 and they didnt calculate Calendrical system/Time after Time Wave Zero in 2012.
If there was to be a pole shift, or some kind of disturbance within the Solar System, then the Long Count calendar, which the ancient Mayans used for such things as predicting eclipses, would no longer be accurate. Even if …
Settlers Took a 20,000 Year Rest in Beringia?
According to the new theory, humans heading east after leaving Asia about 40,000 years ago were blocked by two huge glaciers that met at present-day Alaska.
With no way forward, the humans settled on the land bridge, called Beringia, that connected Asia and North America.
There they remained for 20,000 years. Beringia was cold and harsh, comparable to winters in modern-day Siberia. Small populations of mammoth, bison, caribou, and other animals provided sustenance for the migrants.
It’s a theory designed to make sense of some DNA research. In my mind it has a serious flaw – rather than spend 20,000 years in a cold, harsh place – why didn’t they just go back the way they came?
Giza Pyramids Mimic Cygnus, Not Orion?
Dr. Greg Little sums things up nicely:
…in a 2006 and 2007 book, The Cygnus Mystery, science writer Andrew Collins showed how the three crossbar stars of the northern constellation of Cygnus actually fit the three pyramids better than Orion’s Belt. In fact, the fitting of Cygnus onto the three pyramids doesn’t require turning either the sky or the world upside down (as the Orion idea requires), and Cygnus is a near-perfect match with the pyramids. Collins has also shown that key stars of Cygnus were actually visible above the three large pyramids when viewed from the southeast from the sacred mound of Gebel Ghibli. If the Cygnus alignment had been proposed before the Orion idea, the Cygnus alignment at Giza would have been the accepted one.
I’m sold.
Furthermore, there is a theory that the little pyramids indicate Orion, and its relative change in position from ancient times to the near future:
…where …
Doom 2012: When Will YOU Flee?
It’s a stand-up comedy show, which gives us a great insight into how popular this topic has become:
…McKeag isn’t just kidding when he tells us the end of the world is nigh, our days are numbered and that we’d better get ready. But he’s also gone a step further by asking how bad things have to get before we individually decide we’ve got no choice but to pack up and leave.
Think stuff like SARS, the Kelowna forest fires, Iraq and Iran, solar flares and their connection to hurricanes and tsunamis, looming pandemics, drug-resistant bugs, terrorism, climate change, impending economic collapse, water shortages, pine beetles and even Calgary’s flood of the century two years ago — you name it — and you begin to get the picture, McKeag says.
More at Canada.com – catch him in Calgary over the next week.
20th Century Mathematics in Ancient Islamic Tiles
Medieval Islamic artists produced intricate decorative patterns using geometrical techniques that were not understood by Western mathematics until the 20th century, scientists have discovered.
The combinations of ornate stars and polygons that have adorned mosques and palaces since the 15th century were created using a set of just five template tiles, which could generate patterns with a kind of symmetry that eluded formal mathematical description for another 500 years. More…
Planet X coming in 2012: Norwegian Politician
I’m not buying it, but I’m a cynic by nature. Enjoy!
I am a Norwegian politician. I would like to say that difficult things will happen from the year 2008 till the year 2012.
The Norwegian government is building more and more underground bases and bunkers. When asked, they simply say that it is for the protection of the people of Norway. When I enquire when they are due to be finished, they reply “before 2011”.
Israel is also doing the same and many other countries too.
My proof that what I am saying is true is in the photographs I have sent of myself and all the Prime Ministers and ministers I tend to meet and am acquainted with. They know all of this, but they don’t want to alarm the people or create mass panic.
Planet X is coming, and Norway has begun with storage of food and seeds in the Svalbard area …
Time Travel Begins in 2008
It’s a great headline, based on two facts:
1) The Large Hadron Collider that will be switched on this year (fingers crossed it doesn’t wipe us all out – but if it does, you probably wouldn’t see it coming), could open up miniature wormholes, of the type that some believe makes time travel possible
2) Because of causality, one cannot travel back in time beyond when time travel was invented, otherwise your device would cease to exist
Unfortunately, the only time travellers that could visit would be sub-atomic in size, so we’ll never know. We need to wait until something like the TARDIS is built. When that is first used, we could expect millions of time-travellers arriving in our present, all at once!
Human Sacrifice Occured Worldwide – Independently?
The practice of human sacrifice is recorded in China’s earliest writings, dating back as far as the Shang dynasty 4,000 years ago, experts say.
Warrior-kings at the time relied on diviners to communicate with ancestors and presented animal or human offerings to plead for victories in battle or for rains to end drought.
…But around the time the Jiangxi tomb was being built, the philosopher Confucius began denouncing human sacrifice and called for the practice to be banned, Xu said.
…Adrienne Mayor, a scholar on mythology and history at Stanford University, said human sacrifice has been praticed widely by various civilizations but became less common in many cultures at around the same time.
“Many cultures around the world practiced human sacrifice for many different purposes in antiquity, including txhe Chinese, Aztecs, Romans, Egyptians, Mongols, and Mayans,” she said.
Following history’s “axial age,” when sages including Confucius in China, Buddha in India, and Socrates in Greece …
Rollback your DNA
Found this at The Scientist. Seems even after DNA has been changed, planst can revert back to the DNA of their ancestors:
She had found that a mutant Arabidopsis plant could “fix itself” back to the wild-type and take on the genetics of its grandparents. That seemed to contradict the laws of Mendelian inheritance.
It all sounds very similar to current Windows software that saves a snapshot of your system, and lets you rollback to those settings if something bad happens – like catching a computer virus
According to this theory, somewhere in the plant cells exists an RNA copy of ancestral DNA, sequences of which the plants can tap and randomly substitute into their own DNA, accounting for the reversion. Of course, Gregor Mendel’s law of segregation states that offspring inherit two alleles for one trait, one allele from each parent. That means there’s a linear relationship of inheritance between parent and …
“Death Star” Galaxy has Violent Energy Jet!
The supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy is blasting a smaller neighbor with a violent energy jet—earning it the moniker the “Death Star” galaxy—scientists announced today.
The jet has probably fried the atmospheres of any planets in the way, researchers added.
…The unusually close distance between the two galaxies means humans don’t need to fear a “Death Star”-like blast in the Milky Way, the authors of the new study add.
There are many supermassive black holes with active jets pointing toward Earth. But these phenomena, known as “blazars,” are churning at much safer distances —millions or even billions of light-years away
Unless there is an invisble one nearby!Or one decides to zap us with a bit more than normal…
Tonga: Megaliths in the Birthplace of Polynesia
Simon Fraser University’s David Burley says his latest finds from the Nukuleka archeological site on one of Tonga’s southern islands shows it was the principal “founding settlement” of Polynesia about 2,800 years ago, and endured long enough for a genetically and culturally distinctive people to evolve and begin spreading across the immense “Polynesian triangle” bounded by Hawaii in the north, New Zealand in the southwest and fabled Easter Island in the far southeast, not far from the coast of South America.
So you’d expect Tonga to have a pyramid or ancient structures of some type. Like Tonga-Tabu, 2 pillars 4.88 meters high, weighing approx. 50 tons, supporting a 5.79 meter lintel:
And don’t forget the “burial mounds” which are actually short step pyramids using megalithic blocks:
More reading:
Megalithic Pacific
