Scientists retracing the footsteps of 1911 Antarctic expedition trapped in ice

Raw Story: Scientists retracing the footsteps of 1911 Antarctic expedition trapped in ice
Dec 25, 2013 | By Alok Jha, The Guardian

Icebreaker ships go to help MV Akademik Shokalskiy after captain issues distress call

A team of scientists and members of the public who have been retracing the footsteps of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) of 1911 have become trapped in heavy ice a few miles from the coast of Antarctica.

Passengers aboard the ship, the MV Akademik Shokalskiy, were informed on Christmas morning that the captain had issued a distress call to the Maritime Service Authority based in Falmouth in the UK earlier in the day. Three nearby icebreaker ships have been notified of the Shokalskiy’s situation and are on their way to help.

The nearest ship, the Chinese Xue Long (Snow Dragon), will take just over a day to reach the Shokalskiy’s position, around 1,500 nautical miles from Hobart in Tasmania. A French ship called the Astrolabe, and sent out from the nearest Antarctic base, Dumont D’Urville, could arrive around the same time. The furthest ship, also on its way, is the Australian icebreaker, Aurora Australis.

“The ship is no danger,” said Chris Turney. “We’re currently in heavy ice and we need help to get out. It’s frustrating – we’re only two miles from open water. Everyone is well on board and morale is high. We’ve had a fantastic Christmas and the science programme has been continuing while we’re stuck in position. The results looking really exciting. We’re very fortunate the Chinese are in the area, passing relatively close by.”

The Snow Dragon is a 166-metre-long icebreaker, cruising towards the Shokalskiy at 14.5 knots.

The Russian-built Shokalskiy left the port of Bluff in New Zealand on 8 December with 48 passengers and 20 crew members to follow in the footsteps of the great Antarctic explorer and scientist Douglas Mawson. Led by the climate scientist Chris Turney of the University of New South Wales, the ship has been sailing through the Southern Ocean, repeating and extending many of Mawson’s wildlife and weather observations in order to build a picture of how this part of the world has changed in the past 100 years.

The expedition had already reached the fast ice off Commonwealth Bay, carrying out measurements of the Southern Ocean along the way. A small team of scientists and conservationists also reached Mawson’s Huts at Cape Denison on Thursday last week, 40 miles (65km) across the ice from where the ship was anchored. The expedition was heading east on Tuesday to spend a day at the Mertz glacier when it became trapped among thick ice floes near Stillwell Island, off Cape de la Motte.

A spokeswoman for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is co-ordinating the rescue, said: “It’s in quite a remote part of the world. But we have everyone safe. The vessel isn’t in any immediate danger.”

Passengers were kept updated throughout the day about the ship’s situation. When the ship is free from the ice, expected by the weekend, this modern incarnation of the AAE will continue on to the Southern Ocean and will return to Bluff via a stop on Macquarie Island to carry out a short programme of wildlife, oceanography and climate research.

“We can’t wait to get to Macquarie Island,” said Turney. “It was a cornerstone of the original AAE and we’re keen to finish the research programme there.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013

Watch a snapshot of Frank Hurley’s footage of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition from 1911 to 1914:

German scientists show natural climate cycles dominated over last 7000 years...Blaming man is "witch-hunting"

© Wikipedia.org

German scientists show natural climate cycles dominated over last 7000 years...Blaming man is "witch-hunting"
Dec 21, 2013 | Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt \ No Tricks Zone

The pattern in society today is clear to see. Whenever a storm hits a region and submerges terrain in water, or if a drought destroys crops, then the one to blame is quickly found: It has got to be man and his debaucherous CO2-spewing lifestyle that is bringing the climate into a state of catastrophic instability. In former times witches and sorcerers were made responsible for meteorological extremes, and they were burned at the town square so that future bad weather could be prevented. Like today, back then no one really cared about scientific arguments.

But here one only needs to look over the scientific literature in order to recognize that storms and weather extremes have always been the case and things really aren't any different today. Yet another new study has just come out, appearing in the November 2013 edition of the Quaternary Science Reviews, by a team of scientists led by Tina Swierczynski of the Geoforschungszentrum (GFZ) Potsdam. The scientists examined sediment deposits taken from the Austrian Mondsee and they were able to identify the development of flooding phases of rivers in the region caused by heavy rainfalls in the spring and summers. The geological archive goes back more than 7000 years.

In total Tina Swierczynski and her colleagues found 271 flooding events that had occurred during 18 flood-rich phases, each having a duration of 30 - 50 years. The most important of these phases took place during the Neolithic (7100 - 7050 vyr BP and 6470 - 4450 vyr BP), the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age (3300 - 3250 and 2800 - 2750 vyr BP), the late Iron Age (2050 - 2000 vyr BP), throughout the Dark Ages Cold Period (1500 - 1200 vyr BP), and at the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (810 - 430 vyr BP). The scientists found that summer flood episodes in Lake Mondsee are generally more abundant during the last 1500 years, often coinciding with major advances of Alpine glaciers.

The study provides a historically important context that absolutely needs to be taken into account when assessing modern day flooding events. It is clear that there were always heavy rain phases in pre-industrial times. Therefore it also scientifically doubtful that the flooding events of today can be automatically connected to man-made climate change. Those who allow themselves to be seduced by the hypothesis of man-made climate are seriously under-estimating the potential of the natural fluctuation range of extreme weather occurrences.

(Translated, edited by P. Gosselin)

Is this a Preschool or a Prison? We Can’t Really Tell the Difference

Activist Post: Is this a Preschool or a Prison? We Can’t Really Tell the Difference
Aug 17, 2013 | TruthStream Media | Melissa Melton

Wasn’t America supposed to be the land of the free?

The public primary school for pre-kindergartners featured in the video below gave me chills. The brightly colored buildings belied their cold, hard, metal feel. The front entrance is card key secured, and a thick metal door attached to a gated metal security tunnel with a metal walkway leads back to a hallway of numbered, metal buildings. Every single window, including the little ones on the thick metal doors inside, have metal gratings bolted on the outside of them.



It felt like I was walking through a prison facility.

Four-year-olds attend this campus. That means these little ones are spending the majority of their weekdays all day long inside this place. These kids are literally being taught from the time they are tiny that spending one’s day in a prison-like gated metal security facility is somehow “normal” — this prepares them to expect nothing less than total control.

 This is just one example of a public school in modern day America. The president is currently mulling around with creating a federal universal daycare as part of the public education program in this country, and there is talk of making school run all year long without a summer break…with the implementation of CCTV cameras all over campuses, biometric scanning programs to buy lunches and check out library books, and RFID chip tracker tag ID cards, it would appear our schools are becoming way too much like our prisons.

Michael Snyder of American Dream Blog wrote about 18 examples of how life for students who attend public schools is the equivalent of being in a prison:

In the United States today, our public schools are not very good at educating our students, but they sure are great training grounds for learning how to live in a Big Brother police state control grid. Sadly, life in many U.S. public schools is now essentially equivalent to life in U.S. prisons. Most parents don’t realize this, but our students have very few rights when they are in school. Our public school students are being watched, tracked, recorded, searched and controlled like never before.

There’s a reason Rutherford Institute founder and constitutional lawyer John Whitehead refers to schools as one more part of America’s ever-expanding ‘electronic concentration camp‘. Our kids are being taught that giving up privacy and basic freedom to go about their daily lives in security lockdown while being continuously watched, chipped, tracked, traced, and totally controlled is…normal.

Related

How Schools Use Fear to Brainwash Students to Trust the System: A Parent’s Story

Melissa Melton is a co-founder of TruthstreamMedia.com, where this first appeared. She is an experienced researcher, graphic artist and investigative journalist with a passion for liberty and a dedication to truth. Her aim is to expose the New World Order for what it is — a prison for the human soul from which we must break free.

Plasma Tech: Fascinating Features On Sun Captured By Solar Dynamics Observatory

Image Caption: (Left) Rotating disc in solar
prominence. (Right) Superheated jet striking a
prominence. The jet is emitted to the left of the
prominence and travels in an anticlockwise arc,
striking the top of the prominence. Credit:
NASA/SDO/Li/Smith/Aberystwyth University

Plasma Tech: Fascinating Features On Sun Captured By Solar Dynamics Observatory
July 5, 2013 | Red Orbit | Lee Rannals

Scientists studying the solar atmosphere have spotted some fascinating moving features in the Sun’s sky.

A team using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) telescope on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite has found unusual solar prominences, including: a giant disc that rotates for several hours; feathery streams as long as fifty Earths; a super-heated jet striking the top of a prominence; and twisted ribbons flowing in opposite directions.

Prominences are cold gaseous features on the Sun with temperatures millions of degrees cooler than the surrounding hot solar atmosphere. They can be seen as features extending outwards from the Sun’s surface. Scientists often call prominences filaments when viewed against the solar disc.

Solar prominences help supply most of the material released in coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are eruptions on the Sun that leads to space weather.

The new observations of a rotating disc caused by turbulence produced at the interface of two gases of enormously different temperatures.

“We think the rotation is produced when hot gases enter a cold medium in an organized fashion. The magnetic field serves as a thermal barrier between the two media. The resulting rotation can last hours,” said Dr. Xing Li of Aberystwyth University.

Li and colleagues observed persistent horizontal motion of feather streamers from a solar prominence over a period of more than 15 hours. They believe the likely cause is a large-scale, slow restructuring of the magnetic field through a process known as magnetic reconnection.

The scientists also observed a jet of superheated gases that were sucked from the coronal cavity surrounding a prominence. They spiraled up a helical path to strike the top of the prominence.

“The feat of the jet hitting the top of the prominence, and the distances involved, is comparable to a ballistic missile hitting a satellite in geostationary orbit!” said Li.

The SDO observations showed counter-streaming flows at under a million miles per hour along a filament channel consisting of many very thin threads.

“These fabulous motions suggest more complex magnetic structures of filaments/prominences than scientists previously thought,” said Li. “These events are beautiful to observe and also set a fascinating challenge to get to the bottom of the physics involved.”

A team of British Geological Survey (BGS) researchers are working on a program to help scientists better understand how space weather caused by activity on the Sun could affect national grids. They are conducting continuous measurements of the background electric field in the UK to help nations be better prepared for interruptions caused by the Sun’s CMEs.

Source: Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online

Nutrition 101: How Processed Foods Make Us Fat, Malnourished, and Sick

Nutrition 101: How Processed Foods Make Us Fat, Malnourished, and Sick
June 22, 2013 | Activist Post | Daisy Luther

Did you ever wonder how people who exist on a diet of mainly processed foods can be both overweight and malnourished at the same time? Despite overly abundant calories, people who live off of boxed macaroni and cheese, frozen dinners, Ramen noodles, and other packaged foods aren’t getting the nutrients that people who eat a whole foods diet are getting. Deadly GMO ingredients aside, the sheer amount of chemicals in processed foods can lead to disease, obesity, and malnutrition.

If you aren’t entirely familiar with the way processed foods can affect your health, read on. This is an introduction to how processed foods differ from whole foods, based on frequently asked questions about the subject.

What happens in your body when you eat processed foods?

When you eat heavily preserved foods, your body can’t break them down to use the nutrients in them (if there are nutrients left in the first place after all that processing). The video below compares how homemade noodles from fresh, wholesome ingredients and Ramen noodles travel through your digestive system.

This video is an excellent illustration of what happens in your body after consuming two different types of food:



Do you see how it is impossible for the digestive acids in the body to break down the processed food? The Ramen noodles remain recognizable most of the way through the system until they are ready to be excreted. This means that the few nutrients that may still be present are not made available for the body’s use. The accessibility of nutrients for your body’s use is called “bio-availability”.

This is the reason that North America is full of malnourished fat people – those who rely on processed food must consume far more of it in a vain effort to get the nutrients they need. They crave food because their bodies are crying out for the vitamins and minerals that are needed to function.

Mood disorders and mental illness can also be directly related to the consumption of processed foods. They are lacking in the Omega 3s and other nutrients that are vital in proper brain function and good mental health. (You can learn more about nutrition for mental health HERE). This is not to oversimplify the seriousness of mental illness – it is a crushing, debilitating experience. But the symptoms can be lessened, if not cured altogether, with excellent nutrition and the avoidance of trigger chemicals.

 It’s not just about malnutrition, it’s about consuming poison.

Additives like high fructose corn syrup, sugar and MSG are linked to obesity, not just because of the excess useless calories and lack of nutritional bio-availability mentioned above, but because of their “addictive” qualities. When you consume them, they actually trigger the release of dopamine in your brain, the same hormone that is released when an addict takes a needle full of heroin. Over time, it takes more and more of the same substance to achieve the same feeling, that of pleasure and euphoria. Foods containing these ingredients are actually engineered to create cravings and addiction. It gives a whole new meaning to the old Lay’s Potato Chip commercial, “Bet you can’t eat just one.”

The problems don’t end with malnutrition and associated illnesses. The chemicals added to these foods are directly linked with cancer, diabetes, infertility, autoimmune disorders, and heart disease.

Make over your diet

Changing your eating habits will be one of the most important things your ever do for yourself and your family. While processed foods are cheap, quick, and abundant, whole foods require a little more effort. Your health is worth it!

• The first thing to do is to rid your kitchen of all of the toxins. If it’s there, you’ll eat it. Spend one week eating only what you cook completely from scratch. Just one week will highlight for you the places where you are using “food” instead of “ingredients” to make your meals. Use only single ingredients for one week: flour, rice, oats, organic milk and yogurt, grass-fed meat, organic fruits and vegetables, and basic pantry supplies (yeast, baking soda, etc.) Include your kids in the process of making homemade pretzels, baking cookies and creating gourmet oatmeal flavors like maple syrup apple pecan. (If they’re included in the preparations, it helps to lessen the complaining if they are craving foods that are more familiar.) Even if your diet is already pretty clean, you may be surprised to discover that you have more of a reliance on packaged items than you thought.
• Many people are put off by the high price of eating healthy. And they are right, to a certain extent. If you go to the health food store and buy packages of organic crackers, fancy breads from the bakery, and other gourmet items, you will spend a fortune. But keep in mind that an organic processed food is still a processed food. It’s better then something from Kellogg’s or General Mills, but it isn’t ideal. There are a lot of ways to clean up your diet without breaking the bank. Click HERE to read about “20 Ways to Build a Whole Foods Kitchen on a Half Price Budget.” All of the suggestions won’t work in every location, but you should be able to cobble together enough of them to create a healthful, non-processed diet at a fraction of the price you expected to pay. Be sure to check our your local farmers’ market to find a local, nutritious bounty at a great price.
• Another of the major complaints about a whole foods lifestyle is that it is too time-consuming. Here’s a list of 40 Quick and Clean Snacks that require little to no prep time. Being sick and unhealthy is far more time-consuming than taking a moment to prepare a non-processed meal or snack.

Once you cut the processed foods from the majority of your diet, you will begin to notice how awful you feel when you go off-plan and eat a bag of chips or a fast food meal. The interesting (and horrifying) thing about this is – you felt that way ALL THE TIME before cutting that food from your diet, but you didn’t realize it because feeling unwell was your normal baseline.

Daisy Luther is a freelance writer and editor. Her website, The Organic Prepper, where this article first appeared, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow Daisy on Facebook and Twitter, and you can email her at daisy@theorganicprepper.ca

NASA identifies 28 new asteroid families

© WISE
Astronomers using data from NASA's
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
have identified 28 new families of asteroids
in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA identifies 28 new asteroid families
May 30, 2013 | Press Trust India

Washington: Astronomers using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have identified 28 new families of asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

An asteroid family is formed when a collision breaks apart a large parent body into fragments of various sizes. Some collisions leave giant craters. For example, the asteroid Vesta's southern hemisphere was excavated by two large impacts.

Other smash-ups are catastrophic, shattering an object into numerous fragments. The cast-off pieces move together in packs, travelling on the same path around the Sun, but over time the pieces become more and more spread out.

"We're separating zebras from the gazelles," said Joseph Masiero of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study.

"Before, asteroid family members were harder to tell apart because they were travelling in nearby packs. But now we have a better idea of which asteroid belongs to which family," Masiero said in a statement.

The new families were found in millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE all-sky survey, called NEOWISE.

The NEOWISE team looked at about 120,000 main belt asteroids out of the approximately 600,000 known.

They found that about 38,000 of these objects, roughly one third of the observed population, could be assigned to 76 families, 28 of which are new. In addition, some asteroids thought to belong to a particular family were reclassified.

The main asteroid belt is a major source of near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets that come within 45 million kilometres of Earth's path around the Sun.

Some near-Earth objects start out in stable orbits in the main asteroid belt, until a collision or gravitational disturbance flings them inward like flippers in a game of pinball.

"NEOWISE has given us the data for a much more detailed look at the evolution of asteroids throughout the solar system," said Lindley Johnson, the programme executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Programme at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"This will help us trace [near-Earth asteroids] back to their sources and understand how some of them have migrated to orbits hazardous to the Earth," Johnson said.

The next step for the team is to learn more about the original parent bodies that spawned the families.

The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Neanderthals’ large eyes might have led to their extinction

Neanderthals’ large eyes might have led to their extinction
Mar 14, 2013 | Phenomenica

Neanderthals became extinct because they had larger eyes than modern humans, a new study of skulls of the now extinct species has suggested.

As Neanderthals had larger eye, researchers believe more of their brain was devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing, according to the BBC.

Neanderthals are a closely related species of human that lived in Europe from around 250,000 years ago. They coexisted and interacted briefly with our species until they went extinct about 28,000 years ago, in part due to an ice age, explained researchers of the study, which is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Journal.

The research team wanted to explore the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the back of their brains.

The humans that stayed in Africa, on the other hand, continued to enjoy bright and beautiful days and so had no need for such an adaption. Instead, these people, our ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher level thinking, before they spread across the globe.

Eiluned Pearce of Oxford University decided to check this theory.

She compared the skulls of 32 Homo sapiens and 13 Neanderthal skulls and found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets – on average 6mm longer from top to bottom.

Although this seems like a small amount, she said that it was enough for Neanderthals to use significantly more of their brain to process visual information.

Since Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of the Neanderthal brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking, she explained to BBC News.

 Prof Chris Stringer, an expert in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London but also involved in the research, also agreed.

“We infer that Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. If you live in a larger group, you need a larger brain in order to process all those extra relationships,” he said.

The researchers also assumed that the Neanderthals more visually focused brain structure might also have affected their ability to innovate and to adapt to the ice age that was thought to have contributed to their demise.

The results contradict emerging research that Neanderthals were not the stupid brutish creatures portrayed in Hollywood films, but may well have been as intelligent as our species.

Oxford University’s Prof Robin Dunbar, who supervised the study, said that the team wanted to avoid restoring the stereotypical image of Neanderthals.

“They were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as Homo sapiens,” he told BBC News.
He suggested that the difference might have been enough to tip the balance when things were beginning to get tough at the end of the last ice age.

ANI

Image credit: Wikimedia

Kansas Slammed By Second Worst Storm on Record

Kansas Slammed By Second Worst Storm on Record
Feb 22, 2013 | Samantha-Rae Tuthill | AccuWeather.com

This article was provided by AccuWeather.com.

Credit: NOAA.

A massive winter storm system gave Kansas some of the highest snowfall amounts it's ever seen. The Wichita Mid-Continent Airport recorded 14.2 inches of snow on Feb. 21, an amount only topped by a storm in 1962 that left them covered in 15 inches of snow. This storm also brought reports of thundersnow.

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"Wichita didn't miss the record amount by much," said AccuWeather.com Meteorologist Dan Pydynowski. "This storm brought around a foot of snow to the Plains, with areas in Kansas being the hardest hit."

The storm resulted in dangerous travel conditions that left many stranded. Highways were closed across the state from the storm. A plane from Denver become stuck in the snow on the tarmac at the Wichita airport.

The Kansas City International Airport shut down all together, canceling nearly 2,000 flights.

© AccuWeather.com. All rights reserved. More from AccuWeather.com.

Nazca lines: Mysterious desert drawings form labyrinth

© Unknown

Nazca lines: Mysterious desert drawings form labyrinth
Dec 30, 2012 | Live Science | Tia Ghose

Some of the Nazca Lines, mysterious geoglyphs that span a vast swath of the rugged Peruvian desert, may have once been a labyrinth with a spiritual purpose, a new study suggests.

The new insight, published in the December issue of the journal Antiquity, came because two archaeologists decided to use a decidedly low-tech method to understand the sand drawing's ancient secrets: by walking it.

At the time the Nazca Lines, which span 85 square miles (220 square kilometers), were drawn, "people were not looking at this stuff from the air, they were looking at stuff from the ground level," said Timothy Ingold, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen, who was not involved in the study. "To appreciate what they might have meant to ordinary people, then you have to walk them."

While that seems like an obvious first step, in actuality, very few archaeologists have studied the Nazca Lines from that vantage point, because most of the pictures drawn out by the lines are only visible from foothills above or from space.

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The Nazca Lines have been a mystery since they were first discovered in the 1920s by Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe. Long-forgotten people from the Nasca culture created the drawings between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 by brushing away the dark top layer of barren desert to reveal the light, sandy soil underneath, wrote Clive Ruggles, an archaeologist from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, in an email. The dry, windless climate has preserved most of the carvings - hundreds of depictions of animal shapes such as jaguars and monkeys, as well as geometric designs - to this day.

But just why ancient people created the Nazca Lines has been an enduring mystery: Some archaeologists have suggested it was an alien landing strip, a primitive sun calendar, or an irrigation system.

"There is no simple answer. Different geoglyphs were clearly created over a significant period of time and almost certainly had a variety of meanings and purposes," Ruggles wrote.

Concerns about degradation of the mysterious geoglyphs prevented most traffic through the region since the 1990s. But when Ruggles and Aberdeen colleague Nicholas Saunders came upon a previously undiscovered set of lines north of the Nazca desert in 1984, they wondered whether the geoglyphs might reveal their secrets from a more terrestrial point of view.

Starting in 2007, Ruggles and Saunders spent 150 days walking 932 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the ancient carvings. They found the newly uncovered geoglyph was a single line that radiated out in a mystifying, confusing pattern, with a series of sharp, disorienting turns leading up to a mound whose purpose remains unknown. What's more, the meandering line was in pristine condition, leading the archaeologists to conclude that the paths that were carved out were rarely, if ever, used.

Many labyrinths have a spiritual purpose, so one possibility is that the paths weren't walked at all, but instead were intended for the passage of gods or spirits, Ruggles wrote. For instance, in the 5th century B.C. Herodotus mentions a vast Egyptian labyrinth that served as a mortuary temple, while the Hopi indians saw labyrinths as symbols of Mother Earth.

The researchers note this is still just speculation, Ingold told LiveScience.

"We still have absolutely no idea what these people were doing or what the point of it was," Ingold said.

Math Reveals Perfectly Cozy Penguin Huddles

Penguins in a colony pack extremely tightly
together, but still shuffle around without crushing anyone.
CREDIT: March of the Penguins (National Geographic film)

Math Reveals Perfectly Cozy Penguin Huddles
Nov 16, 2012 | Stephanie Pappas

Greed is good for penguins that huddle together to avoid Antarctica's icy weather.

According to a new study, penguin groups can maximize everyone's heat when individual birds act selfishly, huddling in ways that keep them toastiest.

"Even if penguins are only selfish, only trying to find the best spot for themselves and not thinking about their community, there is still equality in the amount of time that each penguin spends exposed to the wind," study researcher Francois Blanchette, a mathematician at the University of California, Merced, who normally studies fluid dynamics, said in a statement.

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Blanchette became interested in penguin huddles after watching the hit documentary "The March of the Penguins." He and his colleagues made mathematical models of penguin huddles, varying wind strength and turbulence to see what sort of shapes arose. The model calculated which penguin along the edge of the huddle would be coldest and had that penguin move toward the center of the huddle in a sort of constant rotation.

These models produced long, thin huddles that gradually crept away from the wind direction. In real life, penguin huddles are more rotund, so researchers went about making their models more realistic. They added an element of uncertainty, such as wind eddies and differences in size of the huddled penguins. The result was huddles that look much like those seen on real Antarctic ice. [Album: The Penguins of Deception Island]
"A penguin huddle is a self-sufficient system in which the animals rely on each other for shelter, and I think that is what makes it fair," Blanchette said. An obstacle to the ideal shape, such as a wall, would likely make the huddles less fair, he added.

Blanchette and his mathematician colleagues report their work today (Nov. 16) in the journal PLOS ONE, and will present the findings at the American Physical Society's fluid dynamic conference next week in San Diego. They hope to get feedback from biologists on their findings. The model may also help biologists refine their observations of penguins in the field by letting them know what behaviors to look for in huddles.

Blanchette also hopes the penguin study will help spread the word about his first love, math.

"Nearly everybody seems to love penguins, and not enough people love math," he said. "If we use math to study penguins, we could potentially teach more people to love math, too!"

Nikola Tesla – An Inspirational Genius

Nikola Tesla – An Inspirational Genius
Nov 3, 2012 | Waking Times

Life Sucks
Waking Times

When I went to school, who was portrayed as the greatest genius of all time? Einstein. Who was the greatest inventor? Thomas Edison. The “education system” and media brainwashing system of the contrived matrix has convinced most people that these are indisputable facts. But are they?

Have you heard of a man called Nicola Tesla? If you said no, you’re in good company. I find it very sad that most people have never heard of Tesla.

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So who was Nicola Tesla?

Tesla was a Serbian genius who changed the world and whose achievements are unparalleled in the history of applied science. And yet, he is little known and many of his inventions have been hijacked by others. The reasons were political.

Here is a list of some of Tesla’s achievements:

1. Alternating current. The electrical system that the whole world works on today was created by Tesla. Tesla discovered that by using alternating current (A/C power), electricity could be transported over long distances with practically zero loss of energy. Thomas Edison’s direct current “solution,”  by contrast, failed miserably and was eventually abandoned due to the fact that it, well… kept burning down buildings!

And yet, Edison became famous while Tesla was reduced to obscurity. As a matter of fact, the historical record shows that when Tesla arrived in the United States as an immigant, Thomas Edison did everything within his power to destroy Tesla’s chances of doing business in the United States and opposed him every chance he got.

2. Neon and florescent lights. Tesla not only created those lights, but he made them light up with no wires whatsoever, using energy that he injected into the air.

3. X-rays. In school textbooks, the discovery of the x-rays is attributed to Wilhelm Rontgen. Again, the invention was first made by Tesla, who had X-rayed his own hand before any mention of Rontgen’s “discovery.”

4. Radio. Tesla generated the first radio transmission. Not long after, the discovery of the radio was attributed to the now much more famous Marconi, who had great connections with the British aristocracy of the time. As it turns out, after Tesla’s death, Marconi’s “discovery” was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, because Marconi had violated several of Tesla’s patents.

5. Remote control. Tesla created the first remote control device. He controlled a small boat by remote control, to the astonishment of everybody who was there to see it.

6. The Tesla coil. This was a device that generated electricity and pumped it into the environment. It could be pumped into clouds, causing rain, or into the ionosphere. This technology was taken out by both the Soviet and United States militaries, and probably other countries as well. Tesla also left the blueprints for a particle beam, and that project has now been realized by several countries.

7. Bio-electricity and biophysics. Tesla showed that it was possible to use vibrations to kill viruses, cancer cells, bacteria and yeast cells through sympathetic vibrations, just as opera singers can break crystal glasses with the vibration of their voices. This idea was later taken up by a scientist named Royal Raymond Rife, who began to use it in a healing capacity.

8. Ozone. Tesla was the first man to create an ozone generator and inject the ozone into olive oil, in order  to  then use the olive oil for healing by oxygenation.

This is a very basic introduction, and for me it’s a labor of love. Tesla’s achievements go way beyond the scope of this article, and I hope that you look him up yourself or get some documentaries about this great genius.

I recommend the videos here and here.

The life of Nicola Tesla is yet another example of how history can be manipulated by those in power. It’s a story of how a man who changed the world with his discoveries has been left out of the history books, out of the schools and out of the collective consciousness. It’s an example of what I call the contrived matrix.

After all, there is no excuse. Tesla is the man who made it possible for us to have electricity in our homes. Tesla wired up entire cities. He transformed the way people live. To top it all off, he did everything he could to teach society how to create cheap and clean energy. Perhaps that’s why he was metaphorically buried while he was still alive and died poor, living in a hotel room. He threatened too many economic interests.

Tesla had integrity. His aim was to improve the life of humanity and not his own lot in life.

Nicola Tesla is a true inspiration.

Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A

© University of Vienna
A new framework for quantum mechanics
which does not assume a pre-existing
global time. It demonstrates the possibility
for two agents to perform a communication
task in which it is impossible to tell with
certainty who influences whom.

Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A
Oct 2, 2012 | Fabio Costa

This press release is available in German.

One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B cannot be a cause of A. Now theoretical physicists from the University of Vienna and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have shown that in quantum mechanics it is possible to conceive situations in which a single event can be both, a cause and an effect of another one. The findings will be published this week in Nature Communications.

Although it is still not known if such situations can be actually found in nature, the sheer possibility that they could exist may have far-reaching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity and quantum computing.

Causal relations: who influences whom

In everyday life and in classical physics, events are ordered in time: a cause can only influence an effect in its future not in its past. As a simple example, imagine a person, Alice, walking into a room and finding there a piece of paper. After reading what is written on the paper Alice erases the message and leaves her own message on the piece of paper. Another person, Bob, walks into the same room at some other time and does the same: he reads, erases and re-writes some message on the paper. If Bob enters the room after Alice, he will be able to read what she wrote; however Alice will not have a chance to know Bob's message. In this case, Alice's writing is the "cause" and what Bob reads the "effect".

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Each time the two repeat the procedure, only one will be able to read what the other wrote. Even if they don't have watches and don't know who enters the room first, they can deduce it by what they write and read on the paper. For example, Alice might write "Alice was here today", such that if Bob reads the message, he will know that he came to the room after her.

Quantum violation of causal order

As long as only the laws of classical physics are allowed, the order of events is fixed: either Bob or Alice is first to enter the room and leave a message for the other person. When quantum mechanics enters into play, however, the picture may change drastically. According to quantum mechanics, objects can lose their well-defined classical properties, such as e.g. a particle that can be at two different locations at the same time. In quantum physics this is called a "superposition". Now an international team of physicists led by Caslav Brukner from the University of Vienna have shown that even the causal order of events could be in such a superposition. If - in our example - Alice and Bob have a quantum system instead of an ordinary piece of paper to write their messages on, they can end up in a situation where each of them can read a part of the message written by the other. Effectively, one has a superposition of two situations: "Alice enters the room first and leaves a message before Bob" and "Bob enters the room first and leaves a message before Alice".

"Such a superposition, however, has not been considered in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics since the theory always assumes a definite causal order between events", says Ognyan Oreshkov from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (formerly University of Vienna). "But if we believe that quantum mechanics governs all phenomena, it is natural to expect that the order of events could also be indefinite, similarly to the location of a particle or its velocity", adds Fabio Costa from the University of Vienna.

The work provides an important step towards understanding that definite causal order might not be a mandatory property of nature. "The real challenge is finding out where in nature we should look for superpositions of causal orders", explains Caslav Brukner from the Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum Information group of the University of Vienna.

Publication:

"Quantum correlations with no causal order"
Ognyan Oreshkov, Fabio Costa, Caslav Brukner. Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2076.

Why Weird Experiences Boost Creativity

© alternet.org

Why Weird Experiences Boost Creativity
Sept 10, 2012 | Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.

We all have the potential for creativity and there are so many different triggers that can broaden our minds, inspire, and motivate.

Creative people think differently. But why? There is no magic bullet or single pill. We all have the potential for creativity, but there are so many different triggers that can broaden our minds, inspire, and motivate. Of course, there are just as many triggers that can shut down our minds. Since creativity is so important for individual well-being and societal innovation, it's important that we systematically pull the right triggers.

A crucial trigger is the experience of unusual and unexpected events. These events can take many different forms, ranging from the loss a parent to living abroad. But one need not experience any of these specific events to think more creatively. In a recent paper in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Simone Ritter and colleagues propose that any life experience, from the traumatic to the joyful, can lead to flexibility and creativity as long as it diversifies your experiences and pushes you outside your normal thought patterns.

To test their idea, the researchers put people in a virtual reality world where participants took a virtual three-minute stroll through the university cafeteria, and during the course of their walk experienced weird events that violated the laws of physics. In one event, as people walked closer to a suitcase standing on a table, the size of the suitcase decreased, but as they walked away, its size increased. In another event, people were made to feel as though they were walking faster than they really were, and in a third event, as people walked toward a table, a toy car inched closer to a bottle, but when the car actually hit the bottle, instead of falling to the ground it slowly moved upwards!

They also had people take a test of cognitive flexibility where they were required to come up with as many ideas as possible to the question "What makes sound?" Those who generated a greater variety of categories were scored as more cognitively flexible. Those who were actively engaged in the weird virtual-reality world scored higher on the test of cognitive flexibility than a group of people who engaged in a normal version of the virtual world, and higher than a group of people who just watched a film showing the unexpected events. They also found that their results couldn't be explained by differences in positive or negative emotion.

In a second experiment they asked participants to prepare a sandwich with butter and chocolate chips (apparently, this is a breakfast delicacy in the Netherlands, where the study was conducted). Some people were told to prepare the sandwich in an unusual order, first putting chocolate chips on a dish, then buttering the bread, and then placing the bread buttered-side-down on the dish with the chocolate chips. They had another group make the sandwich in the usual order, and another group just watched a video of a person making the sandwich in either the unusual way or the usual way. Again, people who actively made the sandwich in the unusual order scored highest in cognitive flexibility compared with the other groups, and the results couldn't be explained by differences in positive or negative emotion.

These results are provocative and have some important implications. While prior research shows that early traumatic life experiences can be conducive to creativity, thankfully it's not necessary to lose a parent or experience a physical illness to see the world differently. The core feature is actively experiencing a violation of how things are supposed to happen. The results help explain why periods of immigration often precede extraordinary periods of creative achievement: Immigrants bring their own customs and ideas to a new environment, diversifying experiences for everyone.

These results also suggest that if you want to get into a creative mindset, do your normal routine in a completely different way. Write with your other hand. Moonwalk backwards on your way to work. Eat something new for lunch. Smile at strangers. Be weird. With your brain re-shuffled, you'll be in a better position to be creative.

Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive psychologist specializing in the development of intelligence, creativity, and personality.

Saturn and its largest moon reflect their true colors

A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet
undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color
view of Titan and Saturn from NASA's Cassini
spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

Saturn and its largest moon reflect their true colors
Aug 30, 2012 | Phys.org

A wide-angle view in today's package captures Titan passing in front of Saturn, as well as the planet's changing colors. Upon Cassini's arrival at Saturn eight years ago, Saturn's northern winter hemisphere was an azure blue. Now that winter is encroaching on the planet's southern hemisphere and summer on the north, the color scheme is reversing: blue is tinting the southern atmosphere and is fading from the north.

The other three images depict the newly discovered south polar vortex in the atmosphere of Titan, reported recently by Cassini scientists. Cassini's visible-light cameras have seen a concentration of yellowish haze in the detached haze layer at the south pole of Titan since at least March 27. Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer spotted the massing of clouds around the south pole as early as May 22 in infrared wavelengths. After a June 27 flyby of the moon, Cassini released a dramatic image and movie showing the vortex rotating faster than the moon's rotation period. The four images being released today were acquired in May, June and July of 2012.

Read view more..

Indo-European Languages Originated in Anatolia, Research Suggests

New research links the origins of Indo-European
with the spread of farming from Anatolia 8000-9500
years ago. (Credit: Image courtesy
of Radboud University Nijmegen)

Indo-European Languages Originated in Anatolia, Research Suggests
Aug 23, 2012 | Science Daily

The Indo-European languages belong to one of the widest spread language families of the world. For the last two millenia, many of these languages have been written, and their history is relatively clear. But controversy remains about the time and place of the origins of the family. A large international team, including MPI researcher Michael Dunn, reports the results of an innovative Bayesian phylogeographic analysis of Indo-European linguistic and spatial data.

Their paper appears this week in Science.


The majority view in historical linguistics is that the homeland of Indo-European is located in the Pontic steppes (present day Ukraine) around 6,000 years ago. The evidence for this comes from linguistic paleontology: in particular, certain words to do with the technology of wheeled vehicles are arguably present across all the branches of the Indo-European family; and archaeology tells us that wheeled vehicles arose no earlier than this date. The minority view links the origins of Indo-European with the spread of farming from Anatolia 8,000 to 9,500 years ago.

Lexicons combined with dispersal of speakers

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The minority view is decisively supported by the present analysis in this week's Science. This analysis combines a model of the evolution of the lexicons of individual languages with an explicit spatial model of the dispersal of the speakers of those languages. Known events in the past (the date of attestation dead languages, as well as events which can be fixed from archaeology or the historical record) are used to calibrate the inferred family tree against time.

Importance of phylogenetic trees 

The lexical data used in this analysis come from the Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database (IELex). This database has been developed in MPI's Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture group, and provides a large, high-quality collection of language data suitable for phylogenetic analysis. Beyond the intrinsic interest of uncovering the history of language families and their speakers, phylogenetic trees are crucially important for understanding evolution and diversity in many human sciences, from syntax and semantics to social structure.

The Revelation of the Pyramids

The Revelation of the Pyramids
Aug 16, 2012 | Phenomenica

The Revelation Of The Pyramids takes an in depth look into one of the seven wonders of the world, the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Mystery has surrounded these epic structures for centuries with theories varying from the scientific to the bizarre.

However with over thirty-seven years of in depth research taking in sites from China, Peru, Mexico and Egypt, one scientist has as at last managed first to understand and then to reveal what lies behind this greatest of archaeological mysteries: a message of paramount importance for all mankind, through time and space.

Mexican Archaeologists Discover 'Unprecedented' Aztec Burial

© Reuters
Archaeologists work on human
bones found at the Templo Mayor in the
heart of Mexico City.

Mexican Archaeologists Discover 'Unprecedented' Aztec Burial
Aug 8, 2012 | Associated Press

Mexican archaeologists say they have found an unprecedented human burial in which the skeleton of a young woman is surrounded by piles of 1,789 human bones in Mexico City's Templo Mayor.

Researchers found the burial about five metres (15ft) below the surface, next to the remains of what may have been a sacred tree at one edge of the plaza, the most sacred site of the Aztec capital.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the find was the first of its kind, noting the Aztecs were not known to use mass sacrifice or the reburial of bones for the interment of a member of the ruling class.

University of Florida archaeologist Susan Gillespie, who was not involved in the project, called the find "unprecedented for the Aztec culture".

She said on Tuesday that when the Mayas interred sacrifice victims with royal burials, but they were usually found as complete bodies. And, except for special circumstances, the Aztecs, unlike other pre-Hispanic cultures, usually cremated members of the elite during their rule from 1325 to the Spanish conquest in 1521.

"Although the bodies of sacrificial victims have been found in burials of elite persons in Mesoamerica going back to at least the preclassic period, funerary deposits for Aztec elites have only rarely been encountered," said Gillespie.

The institute said some of the bones showed what may be cut marks to the sternum or vertebrae, places where a ritual heart extraction might leave a mark, but added that it did not seem likely the dead were sacrificed on the spot to accompany the burial because their bones were found separated.

The researchers discovered the skulls of seven adults and three children in one pile, long bones including femurs in another grouping, and ribs in another.

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The physical anthropologist Perla Ruiz, who was in charge of the dig, said that might suggest the bones were disinterred from previous burials and reburied with the woman. While some pre-Hispanic cultures disinterred bones as part of ancestor worship, it is not clear the Aztecs did.

The burial dates to about 1481-1486, based on the "stage" of temple buildings at which they were found. The Templo Mayor, like many sites, was rebuilt by successive generations, one stage atop another.

Another unusual finding was the sacred tree, actually a rather battered oak trunk found planted on a small, round platform near the burial at what would have been the edge of the temple complex. It may be a couple of decades older than the burial.

The Aztecs, like other pre-Hispanic cultures, venerated trees, believing they had spiritual importance.

Institute archaeologist Raúl Barrera said it may be related to the four sacred trees the Aztecs believed held up the sky, but Gillespie noted it could also have been a tree or trunk brought in for an annual ceremony.

"It seems to have been positioned there for a span of time, perhaps for a special ceremony or to create a particular vision of a sacred landscape, but then abandoned as uses of that limited sacred space changed over time," Gillespie said.

Barrera said the tree trunk appeared to have been split, perhaps intentionally.

Richard D. Wolff: "Personal Debts" (Video)

Mar. 21, 2011: Richard D. Wolff: "Personal Debts" (Video)by Richard D. Wolff

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. He has a PhD in Economics from Yale University as well as degrees from Harvard University (history BA) and Stanford University (economics MA). Wolff has authored or co-authored 10 books and over 50 scholarly articles and 75 popular articles. His recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the current global economic crisis.

His documentary film on that crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, can be previewed at www.capitalismhitsthefan.com. He also published a book of essays on the current crisis in 2010 entitled Capitalism Hits the Fan: the Global Economic meltdown and What to Do About it. Detailed information on and copies of his many writings, audios and videos of his media interviews, lectures, and classes, and his speaking schedule are all available at his website: www.rdwolff.com.

150 mph Super Typhoon Sets Aim at Japan: Fukushima near center of forecast track — “Expected to intensify” and already the highest category storm

150 mph Super Typhoon Sets Aim at Japan: Fukushima near center of forecast track — “Expected to intensify” and already the highest category storm - Enenews.com

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 Tropical Cyclone Information
Japan Meteorological Agency
00:00 JST, 18 June 2012



Super Typhoon Sets Aim at Japan
Accuweather
By Evan Duffey, Meteorologist
Jun 17, 2012; 11:32 AM ET

Guchol, a tropical cyclone in the western Pacific, rapidly strengthened Saturday afternoon, local time. Winds are now in excess of 150 mph, making Guchol a super typhoon, the highest classification for tropical cyclones in the western Pacific.

If Guchol were an Atlantic Hurricane, it would be considered a Category 5 storm.

[...]

the storm is also expected to intensify further over the next day or two.

[...]

Guchol will still likely be a very powerful tropical cyclone upon reaching the Ryukyu Islands of Japan. Powerful winds, torrential rain and intense surf will be among some of the problems expected for the islands.

[...]

In fact, the main threat the storm poses to the main island of Japan will be its torrential rains. Heavy rain could lead to mudslides and flash flooding, especially in the mountains just west of Tokyo.

[...]

Source: noaa.gov

World Awakening Awards Exhibition in Tehran

World Awakening Awards Exhibition in Tehran - Press TV Global News



World Awakening Awards Exhibition. Veteran artists from 59 countries from around the globe forwarded their art works in the forms of posters, caricatures and photographs to the secretariat of World Awakening Exhibition in Tehran. 439 art works from 3006 works of art were selected to compete in the first World Awakening Awards Exhibition. The head of Imam Ali Religious Museum where the event took place said that bringing together renowned international artists to work with top Iranian experts as jury members was an important event all by itself.

Art critiques talked about some intricate points in the art works and tried to explain to us what the artist wants the viewer to see.Some visitors said that looking at different works of art at this exhibition made them feel the pains and struggles of people fighting for freedom in the region and through out the world. The event kicked off on May 13th and was to end on June 11th but it was extended until June 21st because of great number of people wanting to attend.