Quantum Spirit

Dreams Activate Brain As In "Real Life"

2012-02-01T17:52:00.000-08:00

Scientists, for the first time, have analyzed the activity of the human brain during dreaming. Using lucid dreamers ~ people who are aware of their dreaming state and are able to alter a dream's content ~ they determined that brain activity during a dream matches the activity of the brain during a state of wakefulness.

According to ScienceDaily.com:

Methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to visualize and identify the precise spatial location of brain activity during sleep. However, up to now, researchers have not been able to analyze specific brain activity associated with dream content, as measured brain activity can only be traced back to a specific dream if the precise temporal coincidence of the dream content and measurement is known.

Whether a person is dreaming is something that could only be reported by the individual himself.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, the Charité hospital in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig asked lucid dreamers to become aware of their dream actions while sleeping and then repeat certain actions while awake.

Click here for the complete article.

Facebook No Help for Low Self-Esteem

2012-01-31T18:15:00.000-08:00

You'd think Facebook would be great for people with low self-esteem because they can share information remotely. Not so. It seems low-self-esteemers behave counterproductively, bombarding their friends with negative tidbits about their lives and making themselves less likeable, according to a new study to be published in Psychological Science.

"We had this idea that Facebook could be a really fantastic place for people to strengthen their relationships," says Amanda Forest of the University of Waterloo.

Researchers investigated what students actually wrote on Facebook. They asked the students for their last 10 status updates, and each set of status updates was rated for how positive or negative it was. For each set of statements, a coder ~ an undergraduate Facebook user ~ rated how much they liked the person who wrote them.

People with low self-esteem were more negative than people with high self-esteem ~ and the coders liked them less. The coders were strangers, but that's realistic, Forest says. Research shows that nearly half of Facebook friends are actually strangers or acquaintances, not close friends.

Click here for the complete article.

World's Oldest Astrology Board Discovered

2012-01-21T09:33:00.001-08:00

Representation of Cancer on the ivory board.

Researchers exploring a Croatian cave have discovered a 2,000-year-old astrology board, believed to be the oldest such astrologer’s tool ever found. Surviving portions include 30 ivory fragments engraved with the zodiac signs for Cancer, Gemini and Pisces.

According to LiveScience.com:

"This is probably older than any other known example," according to Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. "It's also older than any of the written-down horoscopes that we have from the Greco-Roman world ~ we have a lot of horoscopes that are written down as a kind of document on papyrus or on a wall but none of them as old as this."

Archaeologists are uncertain of the board’s origins. Astrology originated in Babylon around 2,400 years ago. Around 2,100 years ago, it spread to the eastern Mediterranean, becoming popular in Egypt, which at the time was under the control of a dynasty of Greek kings.

"It gets modified very much into what we think of as the Greek style of astrology, which is essentially the modern style of astrology," Jones said. "The Greek style is the foundation of astrology that goes through the Middle Ages and into modern Europe, modern India (and) so on."

Radiocarbon dating shows that the ivory used to create the zodiac images dates back around 2,200 years ago, shortly before the appearance of this new form of astrology.

Click here for the complete article.

Click here for more photos of the board and cave.

Croatian cave where researchers found the board.

Southern Skies Revealed in Detail

2012-01-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

The Swan Nebula as photographed through the VST.

A section of our universe previously not photographed now is visible to all due to a newly installed super telescope. The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) recently snapped its first impressive images of the southern sky over the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The state-of-the-art telescope is the latest addition to the European Southern Observatory's network of telescopes at Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The first image released from the VST shows the spectacular star-forming region Messier 17, also known as the Omega nebula or the Swan nebula, as it has never been seen before.

According to LiveScience.com:

This nebula, full of gas, dust and hot young stars, lies in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The VST's field of view is so large that is able to observe the entire nebula, including its fainter outer parts.
The second of the newly released images is a portrait of the star cluster Omega Centauri in unprecedented detail. Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster in the sky and the VST's view includes about 300,000 stars.

The VST and its OmegaCAM over the next five years will make three detailed surveys of the southern sky. The data will be made public for astronomers around the world to analyze.

Click here for the article, including a video.

Your Brain Often Battles Itself

2011-12-18T09:41:00.000-08:00

New studies show that our brains often battle with themselves ~ as in the case of keeping a secret ~ and create stress in the process. According to NPR.org:

Your brain doesn't like to keep secrets. Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, have shown that writing down secrets in a journal or telling a doctor your secrets actually decreases the level of stress hormones in your body.

Keeping a secret, meanwhile, does the opposite. Your brain also doesn't like stress hormones. So when you have a secret to tell, the part of your brain that wants to tell the secret is constantly fighting with the part of your brain that wants to keep the information hidden, says neuroscientist David Eagleman.

"You have competing populations in the brain — one part that wants to tell something and one part that doesn't," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And the issue is that we're always cussing at ourselves or getting angry at ourselves or cajoling ourselves. What we're seeing here is that there are different parts of the brain that are battling it out. And the way that that battle tips, determines your behavior."

Eagleman's new book, Incognito, examines the unconscious part of our brains and the complex neural networks that constantly fight one another and influence our behavior.

Click here for the complete article and interview.

Strange Matter Behavior in Collider

2011-11-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

A lead-ion collision in the Large Hadron Collider.

The Large Hadron Collider ~ the world’s foremost portal to a new view of physics ~ is revealing bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts. The discovery could rewrite the known laws of particle physics and help explain why our universe is made mostly of matter instead of antimatter.

The 17-mile circular particle accelerator near Geneva has been colliding protons at high speeds to create explosions of energy, producing subatomic particles. Now researchers are reporting that some matter particles produced inside the machine appear to be behaving differently from their antimatter counterparts, which might provide a partial explanation to the mystery of antimatter.

According to LiveScience.com, scientists think the universe started off with roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Over the ensuing 14 billion years, most of the antimatter was destroyed, leaving a universe of mainly matter.

"It's certainly exciting, and certainly worth pursuing," LHCb researcher Matthew Charles of Oxford University told LiveScience. "At this point it's a tantalizing hint. It's evidence of something interesting going on, but we're keeping the champagne on ice, let's say."

Click here for the complete article.

Massive Study Confirms Warmer Earth

2011-10-22T15:50:00.001-07:00

A large independent study concludes that the Earth is warming up, though did not pursue exactly why this is happening. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group ~ comprising many of the biggest names in science today ~ analyzed an astounded 1.6 billion temperature reports from around the world.

According to the London Daily Mail:

But Berkeley group's analysis of 1.6 billion temperature reports from weather stations and ships confirmed that over the past 50 years, the world's land surface warmed by 0.911 of a degree centigrade. This tallies with previous estimates by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The group's conclusion is not about the causes of climate change ~ whether due to man-made emissions or natural cycles. It's purely a statistical analysis ~ but a more far-reaching one than previous studies. The group's four papers are still under review by fellow scientists.

The study head, physicist Richard Muller, said there were 'legitimate issues' with previous studies. “My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly skeptical,” he told the Daily Mail.

Click here for the complete article.

View of Universe May Redefine Gravity

2011-10-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

The universe appears to be clumpier than astronomers expected, according to the largest galaxy survey ever conducted ~ a finding that might lead to a new understanding of gravity.

“Maybe on very large scales, Einstein’s general relativity is slightly wrong,” says cosmologist Shaun Thomas of University College London. “This potentially could be one of the first signs that something peculiar is going on.”

According to DailyGalaxy.com:

When viewed close up, the matter in the universe bunches up into stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. But as you zoom out, cosmologists expect the universe to look more and more smooth, sort of the way details in an earthly landscape blend together when viewed from an airplane.

What clumpiness there is comes from tiny fluctuations in the density of matter in the early universe. As the universe expanded, spots with a little bit of extra matter gathered more and more matter through gravitational attraction. Based on the best model of how gravity works and what the universe is made of, cosmologists can extrapolate out from the Big Bang to get a pretty good idea of how lumpy the universe should be on every scale.

Thomas and colleagues looked at the most zoomed-out view of the universe yet acquired, and found more lumpiness than models predict, using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which covers about a fifth of the entire sky, to make a rough 3-D map of 723,556 galaxies that are at least 4 billion light-years away. The researchers calculated how evenly distributed, or smooth, the galaxies appear on length scales of 2 billion light-years.

The findings could mean cosmologists need to reassess their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that drives the universe outward at an ever-increasing rate. Dark energy itself is supposed to be almost perfectly smooth, but clumps of dark energy could draw clumps of visible matter around them.

Click here for the complete article.

2011-10-09T00:44:00.000-07:00

Number 57 ~ THE GENTLE

Success through what is small.

It furthers one to have somewhere to go.
It further one to see the great man.

Penetration produces gradual and inconspicuous effects. It should be not an act of violation but of influence that never lapses. Results of this kind are less striking to the eye than those won by surprise attack, but they are more enduring and more complete. If one would produce such effects, one must have a clearly defined goal, for only when the penetrating influence works always in the same direction can the object be attained. Small strength can achieve its purpose only by subordinating itself to an eminent man who is capable of creating order.

UFO Discovered on the Ocean Floor?

2011-10-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

A Swedish ocean exploration team has identified a crashed object some think may be a UFO on the ocean floor between Finland and Sweden. The team, headed by Peter Lindberg, was employing sonar in its search for a century-old wreck when it discovered the mysterious object.

According to LiveScience.com:

Lindberg explained to local media that his crew discovered, on the 300-foot-deep ocean floor between Finland and Sweden, "a large circle, about 60 feet in diameter. You see a lot of weird stuff in this job, but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this. The shape is completely round."

Adding to the mystery at the bottom of the Gulf of Bothnia, Lindberg said he saw evidence of scars or marks disturbing the environment nearby, suggesting the object somehow moved across the ocean floor to where his team found it.

. . . Some suggest the object is a flying saucer of extraterrestrial origin (and the seafloor scars were dug up when it crashed), though of all the things that might create a round sonar signature, that seems to be among the more outlandish. It might be a natural feature formation, or possibly a sunken, round man-made object.

Lindberg's claim that the object "is perfectly round" may or may not be accurate ~ the resolution of the sonar image was not high enough to verify that it is indeed round. Lindberg himself did not offer an extraterrestrial origin, though he did speculate it might be a "new Stonehenge."

Click here for the complete article and video.

Ten Long-Lost Books

2011-10-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

Books from some of the world’s most famous authors are lost and likely will remain so. Smithsonian.com has compiled a list of 10 of them, some of which are surprises to even literary types.

The list includes obvious candidates such as the many lost books of the Bible ~ both Jewish and Christian ~ and a volume by Homer called "Margites" that predates both the Iliad and Odyssey.

Then there’s a missing play of Shakespeare’s entitled “Cardenio,” which is known to have been performed at least once in 1613. Then there are missing works of Jane Austen, Herman Melville and Thomas Hardy. Even more recent are lost writings of notable 20^th century authors Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath.

Click here for the complete list.

More Accounts of "Crisis Apparitions"

2011-10-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

Increasing recognition is being given to “crisis apparitions,” the term for the spirit of a recently deceased person who visits someone, usually to say goodbye.

According to CNN.com:

Reports of these eerie encounters are materializing in online discussion groups, books such as "Messages" ~ which features stories of people making contact with loved ones lost on September 11 ~ and local ghost hunting groups that have sprung up across the country amid a surge of interest in the paranormal.

Although such encounters are chilling, they can also be comforting, witnesses and paranormal investigators say. These encounters suggest the bond that exists between loved ones is not erased by death.

"We don't know what to do with these stories. Some people say that they are proof that there's life after death," said Steve Volk, author of Fringe-ology, a book on paranormal experiences such as telepathy, psychics and house hauntings.

Scientific research on crisis apparitions is scant, but one theory is that a person in crisis ~ someone who is critically ill or dying ~ telepathically transmits an image of themselves to someone they have a close relationship with, but they're usually unaware they're sending a message.

Another theory is that crisis apparitions are guardian angels sent to comfort the grieving. Of course skeptics say it's all a trick of the brain ~ that people in mourning unconsciously produce apparitions to console themselves after losing a loved one.

Click here for the complete article.

Evidence: Mayans and Extraterrestrials?

2011-10-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

Ancient Mayan sarcophagus lid with astronaut-like image.

The governments of Mexico and Guatamala are cooperating with filmmakers who contend there is proof of contact between the Mayan civilization and extraterrestrials.

"Mexico will release codices, artifacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists," according to Raul Julia-Levy, producer of “Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond,” due for release next year.

Luis Augusto Garcia Rosado, minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche, said new evidence has emerged "of contact between the Mayans and extraterrestrials, supported by translations of certain codices, which the government has kept secure in underground vaults for some time." He said among the evidence is proof of landings pads in the jungle that are 3,000 years old.

The Guatemalan government has joined the project as well, giving access to artifacts and newly discovered prophecies. While the Guatemalan government is not offering information about aliens, it has joined Mexico in supporting the project.

"Guatemala, like Mexico, is home to the ancient yet advanced Mayan civilization and has also kept certain provocative archeological discoveries classified, and now believes that it is time to bring forth this information in the new documentary," Guatemala's minister of tourism, Guillermo Novielli Quezada, said in a statement. He said the country was working with filmmakers "for the good of mankind."

Click here for the complete article.

Seeing is Believing ~ Even If It's False

2011-09-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

Due to a strange sensory phenomenon, what we see dominates what we hear. It’s called the “McGurk Effect,” after Harry McGurk, a Scottish psychologist who first identified this powerful illusion. What’s more, even if you know it’s an illusion, you can’t hear the truthful sound unless you close your eyes.

To better understand the profound McGurk Effect, watch this 3-minutes video featuring Prof. Lawrence Rosenblum.

Click here for the NPR article.

UFO Sightings Recently Double in US

2011-09-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) says sightings in the US have increased over the past six weeks, with some states more than doubling their normal numbers. "It's pretty exciting," Clifford Clift, the international director of MUFON, told Life’s Little Mysteries. "When you average 500 a month [nationwide] and go to 1,013 in one month, that's an interesting spike in sighting reports."

It could be the start of a verifiable increase in actual sightings or it may mean we’re experiencing a "UFO flap," one of many periodic increases in sightings over the years, usually occurring in urban areas.

According to Life’s Little Mysteries:

Sightings are often fueled by the mass media; people read about mysterious things or see TV shows about them, and interest or concern about them spreads from person to person. It's not that anyone is hoaxing or making up sightings: Research has shown that if you tell people what to look for (a phenomenon called "priming"), people will often see what they are looking for ~ whether those things exist or not. … It may not be that UFOs are actually appearing more often, but instead we're noticing them more. An identical process can be found in the medical field, where an increase in reports of a disease may not represent an increase in the actual number of cases, but instead reflects more public awareness of the disease or better screening techniques.

Scientists are aware that just because more people report a phenomenon does not necessarily mean the phenomenon is occurring more often. However, MUFON and others are keeping track of the current increase in sightings for further analysis.

Click here for the complete article.

'Da Vinci Code' and Fear of Death

2011-09-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

Da Vinci's "The Last Supper," key to some of the theories.

A new study finds that people who are anxious about death are more likely to believe in the conspiracy theories outlined in Dan Brown's 2003 book, The Da Vinci Code. The author contended in the best-seller that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children, leaving living descendents behind. Plus, he says the Catholic Church covered up this fact, while a secret society called The Priory of Sion was formed to keep Jesus' descendents safe.

"It's difficult to change people's beliefs in these theories because they tend to be very fundamental to the way they view the world," study researcher Anna Newheiser, a doctoral student in social psychology at Yale University, told LiveScience.com.

The researchers gathered college students who had read the book and conducted two studies. In the first, they asked 144 students to rate their agreement with Da Vinci conspiracy beliefs, such as, "The church has burned witches and other 'heretics' to keep the truth about Jesus hidden." The students also filled out questionnaires about their religiosity, biblical knowledge, enjoyment of The Da Vinci Code novel or movie, and their fear of death.

The students most likely to believe the conspiracies in Brown's novel were those who enjoyed the book the most, expressed the most New Age beliefs, and felt the most anxiety about dying. People who were religious, knowledgeable about the Bible and desiring of social approval, on the other hand, tended not to buy into the Da Vinci conspiracy.

Next, the researchers called 50 of the original students back and presented them with historical evidence that the Da Vinci conspiracy is false. They found that among the most religious participants, this counterevidence lessened the belief in the conspiracy. Nonreligious participants, however, did not budge.

Conspiracy theories "can alleviate people's sense of loss of control by giving them a reason that things happen," Newheiser said. "In this case, it's particularly interesting because it might help people who are nonreligious or non-Christian to understand the events related to early Christian history."

Click here for the complete article.

Mystery 'Wheels' Seen Only High Above

2011-09-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

Some of the wheels in Jordan's desert.

Thousands of mysterious ancient “geoglyphs” ~ similar in construction to Peru’s famous Nazca lines ~ have been found in the Middle East with the help of satellite-mapping technologies and aerial photography. According to LiveScience.com:

Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across.

"In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said.

His research reveals that these wheels are part of a variety of stone landscapes, including stone structures used for killing animals, lines of stone cairns that run from burials, and a number of strange structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

Click here for the complete article and a photo gallery.

Symphony of Time

2011-09-06T17:20:00.003-07:00

Greek's Oracles Relied on Nature's Signs

2011-09-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

"Priestess of Delphi," 1891, John Collier

Oracles in ancient Greece relied greatly on natural phenomena ~ sounds, smells, the rustling of leaves ~ to glean information regarding the fate of individuals and nations alike. According to an article in the Greek journal, ekathimerini.com:

Unlike fortunetellers today … ancient soothsayers dealt less with making specific predictions about the future than offering assurances that particular decisions were correct or incorrect or that the gods looked favorably or unfavorably upon particular actions. Ancient augury took many forms, including the reading of flights of birds and the examination of sacrificial animals’ livers or other internal organs. Sometimes right and wrong, or favor and disfavor, were determined through the casting of lots -- like the rolling of dice today. Colored pebbles or animal bones (including pigs’ “knucklebones”) were commonly used in these divinations.

More formal, highly ritualized prophetic practices also took place in or beside certain ancient Greek temples. Among the gods associated with oracles and prophesies were Apollo and Zeus, whose sanctuaries at Delphi and Dodona were well-known in Greek lands and elsewhere in the Mediterranean world for their priests’ and priestesses’ strange abilities to convey divine pronouncements.

Click here for the complete article.

2011-08-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

Number 58 ~ THE JOYOUS

The Joyous. Success.

Perseverance is favorable.

The joyous mood is infectious and therefore brings success. But joy must be based on steadfastness if it is not to degenerate into uncontrolled mirth. Trust and strength must dwell in the heart, while gentleness reveals itself in social intercourse.

In this way, one assumes the right attitude toward God and man, and achieves something. Under certain conditions, intimidation without gentleness may achieve something momentarily, but not for all time.

When, on the other hand, the hearts of men are won by friendliness, they are led to take all hardships upon themselves willingly, and if need be, will not shun death itself, so great is the power of joy over men.

Wormholes Again Deemed Possible

2011-08-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

Wormholes theoretically are shortcuts through space and time allowed by Einstein's theory of gravity and potentially permitting rapid travel across many light years' distances.

The concept was weakened, however, when some physicists concluded that wormholes connecting far apart distances in space would likely collapse before something traveling even as fast as the speed of light could pass through them. Now, a new study from Burkhard Kleihaus and Jutta Kunz of Germany's Universtat Oldenberg and Panagiota Kanti of Greece's University of Ioannina, reanalyzes the problem.

The new study employs string theory techniques used in the past to analyze black holes and reveals a range of wormhole diameter-to-energy ratios that appear stable. String theory ~ more properly "superstring theory" ~ broadly envisions subatomic particles as strings or loops of vibrating energy rather than point-like particles described in more standard physics theories.

Click here for the complete article.

Christian Scholars Question Adam & Eve

2011-08-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

A growing number of conservative scholars believe the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:7 has become too far-fetched in light of recent findings related to the human genome.

Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist and senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science, told NPR: "That would be against all the genomic evidence that we've assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all."

With the mapping of the human genome, the evidence is clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population ~ long before the Genesis timeframe of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.

To get down to just two ancestors, Venema says, "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time. Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."

Such statements are heresy to evangelicals. "From my viewpoint, a historical Adam and Eve is absolutely central to the truth claims of the Christian faith," according to Fazale Rana, vice president of Reasons To Believe, an evangelical think tank that questions evolution. "But if the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you've got a problem."

Click here for the complete article.

Etching "Adam and Eve" by William Blake.

2011-08-07T12:41:00.001-07:00

Number 61 ~ INNER TRUTH

Inner truth. Pigs and fishes.

Good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Perseverance furthers.

Pigs and fishes are the least intelligent of all animals and therefore the most difficult to influence. The force of inner truth must grow great indeed before its influence can extend to such creatures. In dealing with persons as intractable and as difficult to influence as a pig or a fish, the whole secret of success depends on finding the right way of approach. One must first rid oneself of all prejudice and, so to speak, let the psyche of the other person act on one without restraint. Then one will establish contact with him, understand and gain power over him. When a door has thus been opened, the force of one’s personality will influence him. If in this way one finds no obstacles insurmountable, one can undertake even the most dangerous things, such as crossing the great water, and succeed.

Superstitions and Evolutionary Benefits

2011-06-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

Researchers are finding that superstition may be linked to the ability to learn. Clearly, it makes no sense for organisms to believe a specific action influences the future when it can't, yet superstitious behavior in both humans and animals often persists in the face of evidence against it.

According to Live Science:

Superstitions are not free ~ rituals and avoidances cost an animal in terms of energy or lost opportunities. The question becomes how can natural selection create, or simply allow for, such inappropriate behavior?

"From an evolutionary perspective, superstitions seem maladaptive," said Kevin Abbott, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario and co-author with Thomas Sherratt of a recent study published in Animal Behavior.  

The study suggests multiple reasons for such anomalies to exist: perhaps superstition is adaptive as a placebo, or for social bonding. Or maybe it really is maladaptive now, but is "the outcome of traits that were adaptive in ancestral environment; sort of like cognitive wisdom teeth," said Abbott.

The first description of superstitious behavior in animals came from psychologist B.F. Skinner in 1948. He put half-starved pigeons in cages, offering them a few seconds of access to food trays at regular intervals. As long as the intervals were short, the birds began offering up behaviors ~ like spinning counter-clockwise, rocking from side to side or tossing their heads up as if they were lifting a bar.

They would do these behaviors "as if there were a causal relation between [its] behavior and the presentation of food," wrote Skinner. Once the behaviors were established, they tended to persist, even as time intervals between feeding lengthened.

Click here for the complete article.

Unexpected Drop in Solar Activity

2011-06-15T09:50:00.000-07:00

Fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles are signs the sun may be less active in the coming years. Three separate studies point to the sun heading into a more dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.

"The solar cycle may be going into a hiatus," Frank Hill, associate director of the National Solar Observatory's Solar Synoptic Network, said in a June 14 news briefing. today (June 14). "This is highly unusual and unexpected. But the fact that three completely different views of the sun point in the same direction is a powerful indicator that the sunspot cycle may be going into hibernation."

According to Live Science:

Sunspots are temporary patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity. These structures sometimes erupt into energetic solar storms that send streams of charged particles into space.

Since powerful charged particles from solar storms can occasionally wreak havoc on Earth's magnetic field by knocking out power grids or disrupting satellites in orbit, a calmer solar cycle could have its advantages.

Astronomers study mysterious sunspots because their number and frequency act as indicators of the sun's activity, which ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle. Typically, a cycle takes roughly 5.5 years to move from a solar minimum, when there are few sunspots, to the solar maximum, during which sunspot activity is amplified.

Click here for the complete article.

Red Wariness is Evolutionary

2011-06-13T19:10:00.000-07:00

New research indicates that evolution has played a key role in why people have strong associations with the color red ~ stop, danger, hot, and dominance, to name just a few. Tests into the meaning and impact of colors involved the male rhesus macaques, a species of monkey found in Puerto Rico.

“The similarity of our results with those in humans suggests that avoiding red or acting submissively in its presence may stem from an inherited psychological predisposition,” says Dartmouth College neuroscientist Jerald D. Kralik.

According to Medical News Today:

Two human experimenters, one male and one female, entered the monkeys' colony and found isolated males to test. Both people knelt down, placed a Styrofoam tray in front of them, drew an apple slice from their backpacks, held the slice at chest level for the monkey to see, then placed the apple on the trays. Both stood up simultaneously and took two steps back.

The monkey typically went directly to the slice he wanted, ran off, and ate it.

The humans wore T-shirts and caps, whose colors ~ red, green, and blue ~ were changed in each of four conditions: red on female, green on male; then vice-versa; red versus blue; blue versus green.

The results were striking. The monkeys paid no mind to the sex of the experimenter. Green or blue made little difference to them either. But in the significant majority of cases, they steered clear of the red-clad humans and stole the food from the other tray.

"We ~ primates and then humans ~ are very visual," Kralik explains. "We are also very social." In both realms, color has important effects, from telling us which food is edible to helping us gauge the emotions of others by the relative redness of their skin. Put the two together, he says, "and we start to see that color may have a deeper and wider-ranging influence on us than we have previously thought."

Click here for the complete article.

"Wave/Particle" Measurement Achieved

2011-06-12T01:10:00.000-07:00

Physicists have now observed light behaving as both a wave and a particle ~ a feat that “pulls back the veil” on quantum reality in a way previously thought impossible.

According to the BBC:

For instance, a well-known rule called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle maintains that for some pairs of measurements, high precision in one necessarily reduces the precision that can be achieved in the other. One embodiment of this idea lies in a "two-slit interferometer", in which light can pass through one of two slits and is viewed on a screen.

… Now, Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto and his colleagues have sidestepped this limitation by undertaking "weak measurements" of the photons' momentum. The team allowed the photons to pass through a thin sliver of the mineral calcite that gave each photon a tiny nudge in its path, with the amount of deviation dependent on which slit it passed through.

By averaging over a great many photons passing through the apparatus, and only measuring the light patterns on a camera, the team was able to infer what paths the photons had taken.

On one level, the experiment appears to violate a central rule of quantum mechanics, but Professor Steinberg said this was not the case. "While the uncertainty principle does indeed forbid one from knowing the position and momentum of a particle exactly at the same time, it turns out that it is possible to ask 'what was the average momentum of the particles which reached this position?'" he told the BBC. "You can't know the exact value for any single particle, but you can talk about the average."

Click here for the complete article.

Learning the Language of Attraction

2011-06-11T16:05:00.003-07:00

Here Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho talks about the workings of the universe and attraction. He's the author of The Alchemist, a short novel he wrote in 1988 and that now has sold 65 million copies and is one of the best-selling books in history.

Do We See the "Apocalypse" as Renewal?

2011-06-10T05:12:00.000-07:00

People’s fascination with “end times” likely is rooted in the emotional and cognitive processes of our brains. Such thinking helps us make sense of the world, according to Michael Shermer, author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Conspiracies and Politics.

Writing in New Scientist, he says:

Emotionally, the end of the world is actually a renewal, a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come. In religious narratives, God smites sinners and resurrects the virtuous.

For secularists, the sins of humanity are atoned through a change in our political, economic or ideological system. Environmental prognostications of calamity are usually followed with reproaches and recommendations for how we can save the planet.

… Cognitively, there are several processes at work, starting with the fact that our brains are pattern-seeking belief engines.

… Apocalypse thinking is a form of pattern-seeking based on our cognitive percepts of time passing. We connect A to B to C to D causally because they are connected chronologically, and even though occasionally they form false patterns, in the natural world they are connected often enough that in our brains time and causality are inseparable.

Shermer believes apocalyptic visions help people make sense of “an often seemingly senseless world.”

Click here for the complete article.

Drawing: Albrecht Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

New Research Confirms Rise in Narcissism

2011-06-09T18:38:00.000-07:00

Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse, 1903.

Narcissism continues to rise in American society, along with hostility and anger. The latest research to support the growth of this psychological disorder concerns popular song lyrics.

University of Kentucky psychologist Nathan DeWall and his colleagues recently analyzed lyrics from the Billboard Hot 100 Chart from 1980 to 2007. They found a statistically significant trend toward narcissism in the music, with the words "I" and "me" gradually replacing "we" and "us."

Narcissism and outward hostility have been linked by psychology research in the past, and DeWall's analysis shows that it's linked in song lyrics as well. "In the early '80s lyrics, love was easy and positive, and about two people," psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego University says. "The recent songs are about what the individual wants, and how she or he has been disappointed or wronged."

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a beautiful and beloved youth who loved none but himself. He wasted away staring at his reflection in the surface of a pond. According to several new studies, more and more of today's youths are developing the rather unattractive quality exhibited by Narcissus in the fable.

Click here for the complete article.

Scientists May Be Atheists, But Still Spiritual

2011-06-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

Nearly 300 scientists who consider themselves atheists also claim to have distinct spiritual beliefs. More than 20 percent of atheist scientists, according to new research from Rice University, say they have a spirituality that’s consistent with science, although they are not formally religious.

While the general public tends to marry spirituality with religion, the study found that spirituality is a separate idea ~ one that more closely aligns with scientific discovery ~ for "spiritual atheist" scientists.

"Our results show that scientists hold religion and spirituality as being qualitatively different kinds of constructs," said Elaine Howard Ecklund, assistant professor of sociology at Rice and lead author of the study. "These spiritual atheist scientists are seeking a core sense of truth through spirituality ~ one that is generated by and consistent with the work they do as scientists."

"There's spirituality among even the most secular scientists," Ecklund said. "Spirituality pervades both the religious and atheist thought. It's not an either/or. This challenges the idea that scientists, and other groups we typically deem as secular, are devoid of those big 'Why am I here?' questions. They too have these basic human questions and a desire to find meaning.”

According to the research, the scientists find spirituality congruent with science and separate from religion, because where spirituality is open to a scientific journey, religion requires buying into an absolute "absence of empirical evidence."

Click here for the complete article.

US Belief in God Still at 90 Percent

2011-06-07T15:06:00.000-07:00

Michaelangelo's "Conversion of St. Paul"

A new Gallup poll finds more than nine in 10 Americans continuing to believe in God. Ninety-two percent of Gallup's 1,018 respondents answered yes when asked whether they believed in God.

According to Gallup pollsters:

Despite the many changes that have rippled through American society over the last 6 ½ decades, belief in God as measured in this direct way has remained high and relatively stable. Gallup initially used this question wording in November 1944, when 96% said "yes." That percentage dropped to 94% in 1947, but increased to 98% in several Gallup surveys conducted in the 1950s and 1960s.

When asked, "Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?" 80 percent said they believed in God and 12 percent said they believed in a universal spirit. The survey did not probe into specific religious allegiances.

Belief in God drops below 90% among younger Americans, liberals, those living in the East, those with postgraduate educations, and political independents. Believing in God is nearly universal among Republicans and conservatives and, to a slightly lesser degree, in the South.

Click here for the complete article.

Osho on Love and Hate

2011-06-06T15:15:00.000-07:00

Here Osho delves into love and hate, which he considers as two sides of the same coin. He also explores several implications, including:"Never judge anybody by his act, because the real thing is not the act but the consciousness through which that act has been performed."

2011-06-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

Number 4 ~ YOUTHFUL FOLLY

Youthful folly has success.
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.
Perseverance furthers.

In the time of youth, folly is not an evil. One may succeed in spite of it, provided one finds an experienced teacher and has the right attitude toward him. This means, first of all, that the youth himself must be conscious of his lack of experience and must seek out the teacher. Without this modesty and this interest, there is no guarantee that he has the necessary receptivity, which should express itself in respectful acceptance of the teacher. This is the reason why the teacher must wait to be sought out instead of offering himself. Only thus can the instruction take place at the right time and in the right way.

Reconciling Parallel Universe and Multiverse

2011-06-04T14:44:00.000-07:00

The idea that the cosmos constantly splits into parallel universes ~ in which every conceivable outcome of every event happens ~ has been unified with the idea that our universe is part of a larger multiverse. While solving a bizarre but fundamental problem in cosmology, the concept and has set physics circles buzzing with both excitement and bewilderment.

The problem is the observability of our universe. While most of us simply take it for granted that we should be able to observe our universe, it is a different story for cosmologists. When they apply quantum mechanics - which successfully describes the behavior of very small objects like atoms - to the entire cosmos, the equations imply that it must exist in many different states simultaneously, a phenomenon called a superposition. Yet that is clearly not what we observe.

Cosmologists reconcile this seeming contradiction by assuming that the superposition eventually "collapses" to a single state. But they tend to ignore the problem of how or why such a collapse might occur, says cosmologist Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley. "We've no right to assume that it collapses. We've been lying to ourselves about this," he says.

In an attempt to find a more satisfying way to explain the universe's observability, Bousso, together with Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in California, turned to the work of physicists who have puzzled over the same problem but on a much smaller scale: why tiny objects such as electrons and photons exist in a superposition of states but larger objects like footballs and planets apparently do not.

Click here for the complete article.

Closing In On Space-Time Ripples

2011-06-03T13:54:00.000-07:00

3-D visualization of gravitational waves.

Scientists have been trying ~ but failing ~ for years to detect theoretical ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. New research suggests that building just one more detector might finally bring success.

Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity as a result of some of the most violent events in the universe, such as the collision of two neutron stars. When two neutron stars merge into each other, they are predicted to release strong gravitational waves that should be detectable on Earth.

Four gravitational wave detectors are currently in operation. Proposals have been submitted to build additional ones each in Japan, Australia and India. Constructing just one of these would double the amount of sky being covered in current searches for gravitational waves and would drastically increase the chances of a detection.

A study last year estimated that by 2016 the four existing gravitational wave detectors would be able to detect, on average, 40 neutron-star merger events per year. This could be increased to 160 events per year with improved data analysis techniques, that research found.

Click here for the complete article.

Talking Dogs Were Goal of Nazi Research

2011-06-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

Nazi scientists attempted to breed an army of educated dogs that could read, write and talk. "In the 1920s, Germany had numerous ‘new animal psychologists’ who believed dogs were nearly as intelligent as humans, and capable of abstract thinking and communication," writes Cardiff University historian Jan Bondeson in his new book Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities.

Scientists envisioned a day when dogs would serve alongside German troops and perhaps free up SS officers by guarding concentration camps. Hitler set up a Tier-Sprechschule (Animal Talking School) near Hanover and recruited “educated dogs” from throughout the country.

Teachers claimed a number of incredible findings. An Airedale terrier named Rolf became a mythic figure of the project after teachers said he could spell by tapping his paw on a board (the number of taps represented the various letters of the alphabet). With that skill in hand, he mused on religion, learned foreign languages and even asked a noblewoman, "Can you wag your tail?" Perhaps most outlandish is the claim by his German masters that he asked to serve in the German army because he disliked the French. Another mutt barked "Mein Fuhrer" when asked to describe Hitler.

Click here for the complete article.

Physicists Successfully Trap Antimatter

2011-05-30T13:39:00.000-07:00

Artist's conception of antimatter trap.

Physicists say they have trapped antimatter ~ an elusive type of matter rare in the universe ~ for more than 16 minutes, an eternity in particle physics. Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva expect to soon begin experiments on this rare substance.

Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle, a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist, with the same mass but the opposite charge. Trapping it is difficult, because when it comes into contact with matter, the two annihilate each other. So a container for antimatter can't be made of regular matter, but is usually formed with magnetic fields.

Click here for the complete article.

Australia's UFO Files Now Missing

2011-05-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

Australian defense officials say the country’s files on UFO sightings are lost or destroyed. Two months ago, an Australian newspaper submitted a Freedom of Information request for files on UFO sightings across the country. Government officials have come back empty handed.

"The files could not be located,” Australia Department of Defense's FOI assistant director, Natalie Carpenter, told the Sydney Morning Herald, the newspaper that had made the request. Two months spent going through drawers turned up only one UFO-related file, Carpenter said. All other files had been lost or destroyed.

This isn't the first time in recent history that a government body has misplaced UFO files. Earlier this year, Britain's Ministry of Defense released thousands of reports related to UFO sightings in Britain over the past few decades. All files from 1980 to 1982, however, were missing, raising suspicion among conspiracy theorists.

Click here for the complete article.

Tree Rings Say Violent Storms to Continue

2011-05-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

Scientists studying ancient tree rings are assembling important benchmark data for studying effects of El Niño and La Niña worldwide, already concluding that our current era ~ because of its warming trends ~ will continue to witness extreme storms.

Due to Earth’s current phase of global warming, which is causing temperatures in the tropical Pacific to rise, the world might see “enhanced El Niño Southern Oscillation variability ~ more severe El Niños and La Niñas, and more extreme climate conditions around the globe,” according to researcher Jinbao Li of the University of Hawaii.

According to LiveScience.com:

The tree rings reveal that over the centuries, the intensity of this climate pattern has been highly variable, with decades of strong El Niño and La Niña events and decades of little activity. The least variability happened during the Medieval Climate Anomaly in the 11th century, whereas the highest variability occurred between the 18th and 20th centuries.

Many of the El Niño and La Niña events of the last millennium were more intense than the ones scientists have direct data on. Overall, the world has seen a trend of increasing swings to extremes over the past millennium, researchers said.

These changes in the intensity appear to be linked to the tropical Pacific climate. Samples from lake sediments in the Galapagos Islands, the northern Yucatan in Mexico and the Pacific Northwest suggest that the eastern-central tropical Pacific climate swings between warm and cool phases, each lasting from 50 to 90 years. During warm phases, El Niño and La Niña events were more intense than usual, and during cool ones, they deviated little from the long-term average.

The international team of scientists has peered back into the history of this climate pattern by analyzing trees up to 1,100 years old. Periods of El Niño result in wider tree rings, and periods of La Niña in narrow ones.

Click here for the complete article.

Roswell a Soviet Scheme to Create Panic?

2011-05-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

Was the 1947 flying saucer crash at Roswell actually a Soviet ruse to cause Americans to panic? That’s one of the conclusions journalist Annie Jacobsen reached in her new book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. Her findings throughout the book are based on interviews with 74 people with firsthand knowledge of Area 51.

The saucer that crashed at Roswell was the invention of two brothers who were former aerospace designers in the Third Reich ~ Walter and Reimar Horten. The craft contained several child-size beings ~ possibly the creation of Soviet human experimentation programs ~ who appeared alien.

“The plan, according to my source,” Jacobsen said in an NPR interview, “was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack.”

The bodies were taken from Roswell to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton and then, in 1951, transferred to the new secret military installation in Nevada, which from then on would be called Area 51.

Click here for the NPR article.

Compilation of Recent UFO Sightings

2011-05-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

Sightings of UFOs around the world are increasing, according to several sources. This video compilation of newscasts mostly from the past two years certainly supports that point. It contains some of the best footage yet on these mysterious objects. I'm not sure what to say about the audio clip at the end from the Art Bell radio show regarding the former Area 51 employee.

Tales of the Invisible Companion

2011-04-23T19:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when a person is in great peril, he or she senses the presence of a companion. Accounts of a supportive presence ~ sometimes called the "third-man phenomenon" ~ are common in mountaineering literature.

For example, in 1933, Frank Smythe made it to within 1,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest before turning around. On the way down, he stopped to eat a mint cake, cutting it in half to share with someone who wasn't there but who had seemed to be his partner all day.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

In “The Third Man Factor," John Geiger, a fellow at the University of Toronto, presents many accounts of such experiences, and not only from climbers. Among those who have felt a ghostly companionship, he cites Charles Lindbergh on his solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and the last man to walk out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center before it collapsed on 9/11.

"Over the years," Mr. Geiger writes, "the experience has occurred again and again, not only to 9/11 survivors, mountaineers, and divers, but also to polar explorers, prisoners of war, solo sailors, shipwreck survivors, aviators, and astronauts. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having experienced the close presence of a companion and helper."

"The Third Man represents a real and potent force for survival," Mr. Geiger writes, "and the ability to access this power is a factor, perhaps the most important factor, in determining who will succeed against seemingly insurmountable odds, and who will not." Mr. Geiger, however, is at a loss to explain why some can access this power and others can't.

Click here for the complete article.

Leaked Memo Points to Higgs Boson Particle

2011-04-22T18:57:00.000-07:00

A leaked internal memo regarding the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva hints at the existence of the Higgs boson, the long-sought theoretical particle that could make or break the standard model of particle physics.

The controversial note was posted April 21 in an anonymous comment on physicist Peter Woit’s blog, Not Even Wrong. Four physicists claim that ATLAS ~ one of the LHC’s all-purpose particle hunting experiments ~ caught a Higgs particle decaying into two high-energy photons, but at a much higher rate than the standard model predicts.

According to Wired.com:

“The present result is the first definitive observation of physics beyond the standard model,” the note says. “Exciting new physics, including new particles, may be expected to be found in the very near future.”

The word from CERN, which operates the LHC, is that the leaked note is not an official result, and hasn’t been backed up by the cast of thousands that makes up the rest of the ATLAS collaboration.

“It’s way, way too early to say if there’s anything in it or not,” said CERN spokesman James Gillies. “The vast majority of these notes get knocked down before they ever see the light of day.”

A member of the ATLAS collaboration who wished to remain anonymous said unexpected signals show up frequently and turn out to be due to errors. The signal is much more likely to be a fluke than anything else, he cautioned.

Click here for the complete article.

More on Fear and the Amygdala

2011-04-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Several recent commentaries map brain structure against political views, all with similar findings based on recent research: Conservatives have larger amygdalas and more fear, while liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex and greater tolerance.

It remains unclear, however, whether the structural differences cause the divergence in political views or are the effect of them.

According to new article on a recent study from the University of London, other research has shown greater brain activity in those areas, according to which political views a person holds, but the University of London’s is the first study to show a physical difference in size in the same regions.

"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala," the study said.

"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Ryota Kanai of the University College London, where the research took place. "Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."

People with a large amygdala are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions," the study said. "Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."

Click here for the complete article.

More Proof: Meditation Conquers Pain

2011-04-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

While this particular study may be new, its main conclusion is centuries old. Not only in eastern spiritual beliefs, but also in mind/body research a few decades ago, the ability of meditation to greatly reduce chronic pain has been widely confirmed.

“Only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” according to Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “We found a big effect ~ about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent.”

For the study, 15 healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention, a form of mindfulness meditation where people attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts.

Both before and after meditation training, study participants’ brain activity was examined as a pain-inducing heat device was placed on the participants’ right legs. Scans taken after meditation training showed that every participant’s pain ratings were reduced, with decreases ranging from 11 to 93 percent, Zeidan said.

Click here for the complete article.

More Catholic Priests Being Trained as Exorcists

2011-04-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

The handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil. So now, American bishops are training more priests and bishops to respond to the demand.

The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki recently told the New York Times. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person. But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary.”

According to the New York Times:

Exorcism is as old as Christianity itself. The New Testament has accounts of Jesus casting out demons, and it is cited in the Catholic Church’s catechism. But it is now far more popular in Europe, Africa and Latin America than in the United States.

Most exorcisms are not as dramatic as the bloody scenes in films. The ritual is based on a prayer in which the priest invokes the name of Jesus. The priest also uses holy water and a cross, and can alter the prayer depending on the reaction he gets from the possessed person, said Matt Baglio, a journalist in Rome who wrote the book “The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist” (Doubleday, 2009). “The prayer comes from the power of Jesus’ name and the church. It doesn’t come from the power of the exorcist. The priest doesn’t have the magic power.”

Some of the classic signs of possession by a demon, Bishop Paprocki said, include speaking in a language the person has never learned; extraordinary shows of strength; a sudden aversion to spiritual things like holy water or the name of God; and severe sleeplessness, lack of appetite and cutting, scratching and biting the skin.

Click here for the complete article.

Authorship of Several Scriptures In Question

2011-03-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

Rembrandt's "Paul." Wrote only 7 of the 13 Pauline letters?

The words “lie” and “Bible” aren’t often linked, but a leading biblical historian points out that the level of deception in the scriptures is much greater than most people think ~ especially regarding issues of authorship.

Bart Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, says that the New Testament book of 2 Peter was not written by the apostle Peter, and that Paul wrote only seven of the 13 letters ascribed to him.

Regarding the impact of such fakery, Ehrman writes:

This may all seem like a bit of antiquarian curiosity, especially for people whose lives don't depend on the Bible or even people of faith for whom biblical matters are a peripheral interest at best. But in fact, it matters sometimes. Whoever wrote the book of 1 Timothy claimed to be Paul. But he was lying about that -- he was someone else living after Paul had died. In his book, the author of 1 Timothy used Paul's name and authority to address a problem that he saw in the church. Women were speaking out, exercising authority and teaching men. That had to stop. The author told women to be silent and submissive, and reminded his readers about what happened the first time a woman was allowed to exercise authority over a man, in that little incident in the garden of Eden. No, the author argued, if women wanted to be saved, they were to have babies (1 Tim. 2:11-15).

Largely on the basis of this passage, the apostle Paul has been branded, by more liberation minded people of recent generations, as one of history's great misogynists. The problem, of course, is that Paul never said any such thing. And why does it matter? Because the passage is still used by church leaders today to oppress and silence women. Why are there no women priests in the Catholic Church? Why are women not allowed to preach in conservative evangelical churches? Why are there churches today that do not allow women even to speak? In no small measure it is because Paul allegedly taught that women had to be silent, submissive and pregnant. Except that the person who taught this was not Paul, but someone lying about his identity so that his readers would think he was Paul.

Ehrman is author of bestsellers including Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted. His latest is Forged: Writing in the Name of God ~ Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.

Click here for the complete article.

Ode to the Brain

2011-03-23T17:31:00.000-07:00

"Ode to the Brain" is the ninth episode in the Symphony of Science music video series. Here’s creator John Boswell’s explanation of this video:

Through the powerful words of scientists Carl Sagan, Robert Winston, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Jill Bolte Taylor, Bill Nye, and Oliver sacks, it covers different aspects the brain including its evolution, neuron networks, folding, and more. The material sampled for this video comes from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Jill Bolte Taylor's TED Talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran's TED Talk, Bill Nye's Brain episode, BBC's "The Human Body", Oliver sacks' TED Talk, Discovery Channel's "Human Body: Pushing the Limits" and more.

First Public Showing for Mysterious Sculpture

2011-03-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

A mysterious sculpture ~ thought by some experts to predate the pyramids of Egypt ~ is being displayed publicly for the first time in hopes of attracting international attention and fresh insights into its origins.

No expert among the many consulted over the past decade can identify the sculpture's age or artistic tradition, nor can they decipher the "ancient, yet unidentifiable language" etched into the artwork.

The large limestone object depicting two entwined and perhaps emaciated figures, "could be one of the rarest finds of its kind," according to Clarence Epstein of Montreal’s Concordia University.

The two nude subjects ~ one a male and the other possibly a female holding a child ~ are depicted in a sitting position with abnormally large heads and elongated limbs. It was brought to Canada in the 1940s by Vincent and Olga Diniacopoulos, Greek immigrants from France who had amassed a world-class collection of antiquities gathered from Egypt, Israel and other ancient sites. The family's vast collection was donated about 10 years ago to Concordia.

The Diniacopouloses considered the mysterious sculpture the centerpiece of their collection. And while there is little documentation about the artwork's provenance, the couple had listed the object under the title "The Starving of Saqqara," referring to one of Egypt's largest burial grounds.

Click here for the complete article.

Ancient Israelites Worshipped God and His Wife

2011-03-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

Asherah, or Ishtar, on 2nd millennium BC terracotta relief.

Findings that the ancient Israelites worshipped Asherah ~ the wife of Yahweh, the Israelites’ god ~ is gaining new prominence among biblical scholars. Accounts of Yahweh and Asherah are in the Old Testament’s Book of Kings.

The first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah was Raphael Patai in 1967. The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter.

According to Discovery News:

"You might know him as Yahweh, Allah or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him," writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. "He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many ... or so we like to believe."

"After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife," she added.

Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.

Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.

J. Edward Wright, president of both The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies and The Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, told Discovery News that he agrees several Hebrew inscriptions mention "Yahweh and his Asherah."

"Asherah was not entirely edited out of the Bible by its male editors," he added. "Traces of her remain, and based on those traces, archaeological evidence and references to her in texts from nations bordering Israel and Judah, we can reconstruct her role in the religions of the Southern Levant."

Asherah ~ known across the ancient Near East by various other names, such as Astarte and Istar ~ was "an important deity, one who was both mighty and nurturing," Wright continued.

Click here for the complete article.

Dreamtime Sees Origin of Life in Meteors

2011-03-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

Ancient Aboriginal cave drawing.

Aboriginal dreamtime stories were linking meteorites to the origins of life thousands of years before modern science reached the same conclusion.

Duane Hamacher of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, says the Arrernte and Luritja people of central Australia have an unusually strong focus on meteors, meteorites and impact craters and knew about the nightly and yearly movements of stars. Many of their folk tales and legends feature meteorites as origins of life.

According to Hamacher, one story spoke of life coming from two rocks that fell out of the sky. "These rocks were people described as stars falling to the ground; they were like Adam and Eve," he says. "Another described how the egg of life was accidently dropped from the sky, falling to the ground and breaking into pieces, bringing life to the Earth."

Hamacher says science has recently confirmed that amino acids ~ the basic building blocks of life ~ are transported to earth by comets and meteors.

Click here for the ABC Science article.

Political Conservatives and the Larger Amygdala

2011-03-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

New research linking conservative political views with an enlarged part of the brain called the amygdala ~ responsible for reflexive impulses such as fear ~ still lacks sufficient data to say which came first: Does a fear-provoking enlarged amygdala encourage political conservatism, or does conservative thinking actually change the brain to create a larger amygdala?

Conservatives also display a smaller anterior cingulated, which is the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.

"We were very surprised to find that there was an area of the brain that we could predict political attitude,” according to Professor Geraint Rees of the University College of London, who lead the study. "It is very surprising because it does suggest there is something about political attitude that is encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that there is something in our brain structure that determines or results in political attitude."

The new research ~ to be published this year ~ supports an earlier study showing that some people were born with a "Liberal Gene" that makes people more likely to seek out less conventional political views. That gene, a neurotransmitter in the brain called DRD4, could even be stimulated by the novelty value of radical opinions, according to the London Telegraph.

Click here for the London Telegraph article.

Large Hadron Collider May Be a Time Machine

2011-03-18T16:19:00.000-07:00

Concept of H.G. Wells' time machine by artist Danny Cardle.

The Large Hadron Collider ~ the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year ~ could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.

One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.

According to Science Daily:

“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Tom Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, "but it doesn't violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”

According to the theory Weiler and Chui Man Ho have developed, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

"One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes," Weiler said. "Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future."

Weiler began looking at time travel six years ago to explain anomalies that had been observed in several experiments with neutrinos, says Science Daily. Weiler and Ho's theory is based on M-theory, a "theory of everything." A small cadre of theoretical physicists have developed M-theory to the point that it can accommodate the properties of all the known subatomic particles and forces, including gravity.

Click here for the article.

Detecting Future Criminal Behavior in Children?

2011-03-16T12:12:00.000-07:00

The demon Krampus marching naughty children to Hell.

Some criminologists are suggesting that children be screened with brain-imaging technology to identify violent tendencies. If the tendencies are present, the children would be treated … in some fashion.

They claim abnormal brain make-up could be a cause of criminality ~ psychopaths and criminals have smaller amygdala and prefrontal cortex, both of which regulate and control emotion and behavior. They also argue that children as young as four exhibit “callous unemotional traits” such as lack of guilt and empathy that suggest future bad behavior.

Linking these features with “conduct problems” such as throwing tantrums could be a strong way to predict who could be anti-social in later life.

Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University used data from more than 9,000 twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996. Assessments of callous unemotional traits and conduct problems were based on teacher questionnaires when the children were seven, nine and 12. Information was taken from parents when the children were as young as four.

She found there was a correlation between risk factors at a young age and bad behavior at an older age.

A British criminologist, Adrian Raine, told the Telegraph he acknowledged the ethical implications of treating children before they had done anything wrong, but argued that “biological” causes of crime could not be ignored. “We could be ostriches and stick our heads in the sand but I believe we have to pursue the causes of crime at a biological and genetic level as well as at a social,” he said.

Click here for the Telegraph article.

Evidence Points to Probable Site of Atlantis

2011-03-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

Artist's conception of Atlantis's multiple rings.

Researchers using satellite views of an ancient city submerged in southern Spain’s marshlands are claiming they may have located Atlantis. The site is 60 miles inland, just north of Cadiz. Following the researchers' scenario, a giant tsunami would have destroyed Atlantis millennia ago.

They believe the site may be Atlantis because it fits the age-old description of a multi-ringed metropolis, according to Richard Freund of the University of Hartford, Connecticut, the professor leading an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of “memorial cities” ~ built in Atlantis's image by its refugees after the city's destruction ~ gave researchers added proof, they say. Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled farther inland and built new cities there.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain's southern coast. “We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense,” he says.

Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as “an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules,” as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity.

Click here for the Reuters article.

Is Magnetic Pole Shift a Cause for Alarm?

2011-03-05T19:29:00.000-08:00

A recent Wall Street Journal article cited the movement of the earth’s magnetic field as a cause for potential alarm ~ but still posed the question, “Should we be alarmed?”

The earth's magnetic field is weakening at an accelerating rate. It is 15% weaker than it was at the time the north magnetic pole was "discovered"—and claimed for King William IV—by a British explorer in 1831. Should we be worried?

What's more, the north magnetic pole, after meandering through Canadian islands for half a millennium, is heading off across the Arctic Ocean toward Russia at the breakneck speed of 37 miles a year. It will pass close to the geographical North Pole in a few years. With the dastardly Russians about to pinch this British heirloom, should we be doubly worried?

While the WSJ admits we don’t know the answer, it contends there is no concrete evidence pointing to reasons for undue concern:

Though odds are strongly against it, it is just possible that this is the beginning of a polar reversal, when the North and South magnetic poles swap places. This used to happen quite often—by which I mean every hundred thousand years or so—but it's now 780,000 years since it last occurred, an unusually long interval.

During such a reversal there is probably a very brief interval (oops, there I go again; by "very brief" I mean a thousand years or so) when the earth has no stable magnetic field. This does not seem to have bothered our ancestors: There is no evidence of biological extinctions peaking during magnetic-pole reversals.

Click here for the complete article.

Extraterrestrials? What Would Jesus Do?

2011-02-25T20:03:00.000-08:00

"Baptism of Christ," Aert de Gelder, 1710 (with saucer overhead)

In a far-reaching analysis of the potential impact on humans of learning that extraterrestrials exists, Christians likely would be scrambling to reconcile the idea of Jesus Christ with life on other planets.

“It's been argued for a couple of centuries now whether one incarnation of God as Jesus Christ for the entirety of creation is sufficient,” says theologian Ted Peters of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. For instance, aliens might lead religions to question whether a second genesis of life elsewhere belongs within the biblical understanding of creation. Might Jesus Christ have appeared more than once in the universe?

According to Space.com:

To see what effects the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might have on religion, Peters and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,300 individuals worldwide from multiple religious traditions ~ including Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists and non-religious groups.

They found the vast majority of religious believers ~ regardless of religion ~ were overwhelmingly confident that they wouldn’t suffer a collapse in faith in the face of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In addition, roughly one-third of religious people thought that the faith of other religions would be threatened, while two-thirds of nonreligious people thought that aliens would sway the faith of the religious as a whole.

There are many open questions as to how people on Earth might view beliefs from space. Could advances that alien civilizations could bring be perceived much like a secular form of salvation? Might advanced civilizations and their perhaps equally advanced philosophies make our religions feel primitive?

Alien religions could draw converts, and if there are many points of agreement between religions on Earth and from space, one might see communication of ideas across species as well, Peters believes. “Greek philosophers never met the God of Moses, but there were people who said, ‘Doggone, there seems to be much that coheres,’” he added.

Click here for the Space.com article.

Music's Popularity Resides in Dopamine

2011-02-23T21:25:00.000-08:00

Music causes the brain to release the chemical dopamine, creating a pleasurable rush and even helping listeners to anticipate a particularly thrilling moment. Previous research suggested a role for dopamine~ a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other ~ but new data shows it affects the brain directly.

Scientists for years have known dopamine creates pleasurable sensations when people eat, have sex, or take drugs. According to the Associated Press:

The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.

The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.

Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don't feel chills are also experiencing dopamine's effects, Zatorre said.

PET scans showed the participants' brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces.

Click here for the article.

Is the Future Leaking into the Present? Maybe So.

2011-02-18T21:42:00.000-08:00

Alice and the White Queen.

Ordinary people may be altered by experiences they haven't had yet, indicating the future can leak into the present. At least that’s the conclusion of a respected psychology professor, Daryl Bem of Cornell.

According to NPR:

Already critics are jumping up and down, saying this can't be, time is not porous, the experiments are flawed. But because this is the Professor Daryl Bem (he's in your high school textbook for his work on self perception) and because the journal publishing his article is top-of-the-line rigorous, all over the world psychologists are trying to duplicate what Dr. Bem has done. If serious scientists can repeat his results, this story is going to be big.

The NPR article describes two experiments Bem conducted at Cornell that seem to prove his hypothesis. The article concludes:

So who knows? Maybe psychologists, like quantum physicists, will have to deal with the deep strangeness of our universe. Maybe time doesn't behave properly. Maybe it makes little leaps, suddenly appears uninvited when porn is in the air. Or maybe not.

It's not like we've never thought about this before. In his paper Bem recalls that in Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen casually mentions to Alice that in her realm, "memory works both ways."

Not only does the Queen remember past events, she can also remember "things that happened the week after next."

Alice, always puzzled, says, "I'm sure mine only works one way... I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen seems a little sorry for Alice. "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," she says.

In a year or so, Bem suggests, we may have to agree with the Queen.

Click here for the article.

More Research: Yes, Meditation Changes Brain

2011-01-29T13:49:00.000-08:00

A new study on meditation confirms what several previous studies have shown ~ that the practice actually results in physical changes to the brain. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.

Many people like myself who have meditated to some extent over the years and who’ve followed the scientific research have heard these reports before. Now, it seems, the findings are at last moving even farther into the realm of mainstream medicine.

According to the New York Times:

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.

Previous studies have also shown that there are structural differences between the brains of meditators and those who don’t meditate, although this new study is the first to document changes in gray matter over time through meditation.

Britta Hölzel, psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, said participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s.

Click here for the complete article.

For more articles, click on the “Meditation” label below in the footer.

String Theory Points to Parallel Universe

2011-01-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

String theory likely holds the secret to the magnitude of our universe ~ which is probably actually a “multiverse,” according to physicist Brian Greene.

“You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe,” Greene tells NPR. “There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.”

Greene believes the key to understanding these multiverses comes from string theory, the area of physics he's studied for the past 25 years.

According to NPR:

In a nutshell, string theory attempts to reconcile a mathematical conflict between two already accepted ideas in physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

“Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things,” Greene says. “Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum ~ for small things. The big problem is that each theory is great for each realm, but when they confront each other, they are ferocious antagonists and the mathematics falls apart.”

String theory smoothes out the mathematical inconsistencies that currently exist between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. It posits that the entire universe can be explained in terms of really, really small strings that vibrate in 10 or 11 dimensions ~ meaning dimensions we can't see. If it exists, it could explain literally everything in the universe ~ from subatomic particles to the laws of speed and gravity.

Greene, the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, tackles the existence of multiple universes in his latest book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Law of the Cosmos.

Click here for the NPR article and “Fresh Air” interview.

Magnetic North Pole Continues To Slip

2011-01-07T18:33:00.000-08:00

Earth’s magnetic north pole is continuing to shift toward Siberia, a situation of concern to those who link a “Pole Shift” with End Times. In its most dramatic form, a shift would result in reversal of the north and south magnetic poles ~ something that happens about every 250,000 years ~ with resulting cataclysmic havoc.

The situation was highlighted this week when two large airports in Florida renumbered runways to reflect new compass readings to match the new pole location.

Earth’s magnetic poles are governed by forces deep inside the planet. According to space.com:

An inner core of solid iron is surrounded by an outer core of molten iron. They rotate at different rates, and the interaction between the regions creates what scientists call a "hydromagnetic dynamo." It's something like an electric motor, and it generates a magnetic field akin to a giant bar magnet. The process is not completely understood.

In the past 15 million years, there have been four reversals every 1 million years, or about one shift each 250,000 years, says Brad Clement of Florida International University, who has lead a recent study on pole reversals. The last one, however, was 790,000 years ago. That might suggest we're overdue for a big change.

Not necessarily so, Clement says. The flips are not periodic, meaning they don't adhere to a schedule of even intervals. Yet the intensity of the magnetic field has been dropping for the last 2,000 years, and "it has dropped significantly" during the past two decades, Clement said.

Some scientists speculate a reversal is underway. Clement said that's like forecasting that the bottom will drop out of the stock market because it's gone down the past few days. "We just don't know," he said.

Click here for LiveScience article on recent developments.

Click here for Space.com background article quoted above.

Click here for 2012 Pole Shift predictions.

UFOs from Middle Ages to Modern Times

2010-12-22T14:34:00.000-08:00

I remember the thrill I felt from the 1960s well into the 1990s at the prospect of UFO sightings and alien abductions. To me they suggested something unknown, enchanting, and perhaps miraculous about the world we inhabit. They were proof that we couldn’t understand ~ couldn’t “prove” ~ everything that happened around us.

In contrast, this last decade has been a drought of UFO excitement. Most of the UFO information we encounter is recycled from past decades, and anyone who openly accepts the idea of UFOs or aliens is greeted with heaps of scorn and ridicule, except on the History Channel. That’s why I’m glad to see a new book by Jacques Vallee, a French astronomer and leading commenter on UFO phenomena. Vallee always has taken the broad view ~ including the possibilities of archetypal symbolism or other-dimensional activity ~ to better understand UFOs, and seems to be expanding his perspectives even more with Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times.

Here is a portion of his recent interview on Salon.com about the new book.

Why is the idea of ancient UFO sightings a controversial one?

Most UFO believers believe the phenomenon began in 1947, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw several objects that he described as behaving like saucers skipping on water. And he saw them from his plane flying over Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington. And that was the beginning of the flying saucer era in the media. I came to a point where I wondered when the phenomenon had begun, and I found a lot of material describing objects that seemed to behave the same way [as UFOs] and entities [resembling aliens] that dated back to the Middle Ages. At that time they were called angels or demons or leprechauns or elves or fairies and so on. So I published a book called "Passport to Magonia" that caused something of a scandal with the believers, because I was shaking that idea that UFOs were a recent phenomenon.

Stephen Hawking has discounted reports of UFOs by suggesting they only appear to "cranks and weirdos?" Why don't you think these ancient witnesses were just delusional?

Because delusions have their own pattern, and these don't seem to fit them. A delusion is usually single-witness and there are many multiple-witness cases in the book. You also have authority figures, astronomers and well-known people making claims. You have Michelangelo seeing a triangle with three lights of different colors in the sky and making a painting of it. It's staggering when you hear modern scientists saying only idiots and crazy people report UFOs. The consuls in ancient Rome made a law that they had to have an annual report on any unexplained aerial phenomena. They were not looking for UFOs, they were looking for astrological warnings of famines, or revolutions and wars and death of emperors and that type of thing. Many of them were copied by historians, and they have survived.

Click here for the complete interview.

Same Birth Chart, Similar Lives

2010-12-20T17:47:00.000-08:00

People who question the basis of astrology—and there are plenty of them due to today’s sweeping misrepresentations of all things astrological—frequently raise the question of characteristics bestowed upon individuals at the time and place of birth. They wonder, for example, about two people born at the same time and same place. There are some anecdotal legends regarding the situation, but one of the most famous and well-documented examples I’ve run across is cited by historian Benson Bobrick in his 2005 book The Fated Sky: Astrology in History. And I quote:

One such famous case involved an English subject and his king. On June 4, 1738, in the parish of St. Martins-in-the-Fields, two boys were born less than a minute apart. One was William Frederick, later crowned George III, King of England; the other, James Hemmings, an ironmonger’s son. Widely separated by class, yet bound to a parallel fate, these two men, each in his own social sphere, lived out the edict of his stars. In October 1760, when George III succeeded his father on the throne, thereby fulfilling the purpose to which he was born, Hemmings took over his father’s business. Both men were married on September 8, 1761, fathered the same number of children (even, weirdly, the same number of boys and girls), suffered the same accidents, succumbed to the same diseases, and died within less than an hour of each other on Saturday, January 29, 1820.

Exchanging Vibration for Linear Time

2010-11-14T17:47:00.000-08:00

Here the channeled Abraham-Hicks points out the importance of tweaking the way we view the world around us. The emphasis is away from linear time/space matters and focuses instead on emotional and vibrational aspects of our beliefs.

Research Reveals Clues to Phobia Creation

2010-11-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

Scientists experimenting with images of tarantulas have concluded that the human brain responds differently to threats based on proximity, direction and how scary people expect something to be. While those conclusions are totally obvious, the recent experiments are revealing specifically what parts of the brain are involved in identifying and magnifying human fear.

Researchers in Cambridge, England used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track brain activity in 20 volunteers as they watched a tarantula placed near their feet.

"We've shown that it's not just a single structure in the brain, it's a number of different parts of the fear network and they are working together to orchestrate the fear response,” Dean Mobbs, who led the study, tells Reuters News. "It seems that when a spider moves closer to you, you see a switch from the anxiety regions of the brain to the panic regions."

Volunteers were actually watching an elaborately rigged video of a tarantula which they believed was near their foot, since getting the spider to do the same thing for each volunteer would have been impossible.

The scientists also asked volunteers beforehand how scared they thought they might be of the tarantula. They found that those who thought they would be most scared had a false impression afterwards of how large the spider was. This so-called "expectation error" could be the key to people developing a phobia ~ an irrational, intense and persistent fear of certain things, people, animals or situations.

"This may be one cognitive mechanism by which people acquire phobias," said Mobbs.

Click here for the complete Reuters article.

Click here for a Business Week article on the topic.

Writer Ponders Wiltshire's Crop Circles

2010-11-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

Crop circle discovered in August in Wiltshire.

Here are excerpts from an interesting article appearing recently in the London Telegraph, written by Clive Aslet, a skeptic. The article describes his reactions to some of the new scientific findings.

. . . The archaeological features of this part of Britain are unique: only in southern England do you find white horses etched into hillsides, and there is no equivalent elsewhere to mysterious Silbury Hill. Crop circles are found in other parts of the globe, but not many. The 55 that have been spotted so far this year in Britain – mostly in Wessex – are more than half the total number observed throughout the world.

. . . Soil samples from beneath the circles that have been sent off for analysis in the States have apparently revealed traces of silica, suggesting exposure to intense heat – yet for so short a time that the crop does not burn up. Nevertheless, the wheat itself appears to be changed. Plant grain from a crop circle and it will grow taller and stronger than control samples, she insists, as though genetically modified.

It is widely believed in the crop-circle community that the shapes appear fully made, in a flash of light that illuminates the whole valley. “We don’t know where the energy comes from,” says Blake.

. . . Crop circles first appeared – or, as Blake would have it, were first noticed – in the Eighties. After a decade of speculation, during which it seemed that no human agency could be responsible for these miraculous designs, two men in their sixties stepped forward. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed responsibility for a spectacular hoax, perpetrated not with sophisticated or extraterrestrial technology, but homespun equipment such as a plank and a length of rope. A baseball cap with a circle of wire attached to the visor provided a sight that could be aligned with an object on the horizon to keep the design steady. Case closed.

Well, not quite: certainly not to a community supported and reinforced by the internet and dedicated to finding alternative explanations. “We know that there are fakes,” says the study group’s bubbly administrator, Clare Oatley. “But as somebody said: ‘Just because a faker can copy a van Gogh, doesn’t mean that van Gogh didn’t exist.”’

Click here for the complete article.

Isaac Newton Was Secret Alchemist

2010-10-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

It turns out Sir Isaac Newton ~ one of the most influential scientists in history ~ was a closet alchemist. In fact, he was a passionate practitioner of alchemy for over three decades, according to Indiana University professor William Newman.

According to Discovery News:

Newton invented calculus, described the law of universal gravitation and built the first reflecting telescope. Just a few resume highlights for someone considered to be the most influential scientist in history.

That's why alchemy is a strange hobby for someone who clearly mastered the scientific method. Alchemy involves transmuting one element into another. Only not so much focusing on chemical reactions, as invoking spiritual and philosophical approaches.

Alchemy is now considered a pseudo-science. But even during its height, critics such as Chaucer characterized alchemists as charlatans, and it was banned by Pope John XXII and King Henry IV.

But before you think less of Newton, consider that most experimental scientists of the 17th century believed in it too. Professor Newman also counters that alchemists of the time were more similar to chemists than wannabe magicians. They helped create new drugs, brighter pigments and improved booze distillation.

Newton's involvement in alchemy was never fully secret, more like neglected, Newman believes. Only recently have science historians fully analyzed Newton's extensive writings on the subject.

New Data Contradicts Mayan Calendar End Date

2010-10-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

The Mayan Long Count calendar likely doesn’t end on December 21, 2012 ~ the date hyped by many apocalyptic thinkers ~ according to new research into the technique for translating the ancient calendar into Gregorian calendar years.

The research also contends that the actual end date of the Mayan calendar is essentially unknown within at least a 100-year span. In fact, the Mayan calendar may have already ended.

According to LiveScience:

A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.)

The Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California.

Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus.

"He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct." But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable.

Click here for the complete article.

Astronomers Find 800 Trillion More Suns

2010-10-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

Galaxy cluster, with older galaxies circled in yellow and younger in blue.

Astronomers have discovered the most massive galaxy cluster ever found, containing several hundred galaxies and a mind-boggling 800 trillion suns. Scientists at the South Pole can view the cluster as it appeared 7 billion years ago, when the universe was half its current age and before our solar system existed.

Despite its enormous size, the galaxy cluster ~ named SPT-CL J0546-5345 ~ was unseen until astronomers looked for distortions in the cosmic microwave background.

Click here for the complete article.

An Adventure in Magnitudes ~ The Power of Ten

2010-10-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

I’d been thinking lately about the enormity of our universe, especially the concept that our universe is only one of many. Today I learned about this 10-minute film called “The Power of Ten.” Called an adventure in magnitudes, it begins on a picnic blanket near Chicago’s shore of Lake Michigan, then takes us to the farthest realm of our universe, moving 10 times farther out every 10 seconds. Then, in an interesting turnabout, it moves inward, back to the picnic blanket and into the atomic structure of a cell in the man’s hand.

As the Hermetic adage goes … “As above, so below.”

Far From Brutes, Neanderthals Had Compassion

2010-10-06T20:06:00.001-07:00

Neanderthal reconstruction in Prehistoric Museum of Halle, Germany.

New research indicates Neanderthals displayed “a deep seated sense of compassion” and were not the dumb brutes often depicted in archaeological lore.

“Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion,” researcher Penny Spikins of the University of York tells Discovery News. “It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive. This apparent fragility makes addressing the evidence for the development of compassion in our most ancient ancestors a unique challenge, yet the archaeological record has an important story to tell about the prehistory of compassion."

Based on fossils, artifacts and other evidence, the scientists propose a four-stage model for the development of human compassion:

The first stage began six million years ago, according to the scientists, when the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees experienced the initial awakenings of an empathy for others and motivation to help them, perhaps with a gesture of comfort, or moving a branch to allow them to pass.

The second stage from 1.8 million years ago sees compassion in Homo erectus beginning to be regulated as an emotion integrated with rational thought. Care of sick individuals represented an extensive compassionate investment while the emergence of special treatment of the dead suggested grief at the loss of a loved one and a desire to soothe others feelings, the researchers conclude.

The third stage, based on findings from Europe between around 500,000 and 40,000 years ago, sees humans such as Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals developing deep-seated commitments to the welfare of others illustrated by a long adolescence and a dependence on hunting together. There is also archaeological evidence of the routine care of the injured or infirm over extended periods. These include the remains of a child with a congenital brain abnormality who was not abandoned, but lived until five or six years old. The researchers also note that there was a Neanderthal with a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye who must have been cared for, perhaps for as long as twenty years.

In the fourth stage, the scientists say modern humans starting 120,000 years ago extended compassion to strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts.

“We have traditionally paid a lot of attention to how early humans thought about each other,” Spikins adds, “but it may well be time to pay rather more attention to whether or not they ‘cared.’”

Click here for the complete Discovery News article.

Research Discovers Pathways for Neurotransmitters

2010-10-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

Depiction of a neurotransmitter.

New research showing that the neurotransmitter serotonin uses a special pathway to regulate biological functions could greatly affect future therapies for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

The Scripps Research Institute study published in the October 6, 2010 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience contends serotonin has significant influence over control of perception, cognition, sleep, appetite, pain, and mood.

"Our study shows that while both serotonin and hallucinogens act at the serotonin 2A receptor, serotonin utilizes a very specific pathway and its actions are independent of those produced by hallucinogens," says Laura Bohn, an associate professor on the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute. "Future drug discovery efforts to identify lead compounds for treatment of depression may consider focusing upon those that only engage that pathway. This work may also lend insight into the mechanisms that underlie the hallucinations that occur in schizophrenia."

This may be particularly important for the treatment of depression because traditional therapies ~ focusing on elevating serotonin levels ~ can sometimes produce serious side effects such as hallucinations, and is especially serious when antidepressants are mixed with monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

Click here for the complete PhysOrg.com article.

Sea Census Finds Many Species Thought Extinct

2010-10-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

The newly discovered Ceratonotus Steiningeri copepod.

The first global picture of life in the oceans was released this week. Some 2,700 scientists spent 9,000 days at sea to compile the Census of Marine Life, and they admit they have only scratched the surface of oceanic diversity.

In all, some 250,000 marine plant and animal species have now been formally described, out of the 1 million thought to exist.

"There are three to four unknown species for every known," says Paul Snelgrove of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John's, Canada.

The Census has so far added 1,200 new species to the tally, though that is likely to rise as over 5,000 more organisms that were collected have yet to be studied or named. The new species include several that were thought to have disappeared, such as the "Jurassic shrimp” thought to have died out 50 million years ago.

Click here for the complete article.

2012 ~ Epicenter of a Cultural Earthquake

2010-10-02T17:37:00.000-07:00

Anyone following my Quantum Spirit blog for any length of time probably knows I have great respect for author and physicist Peter Russell. Here is his take on 2012, entitled "2012: Temporal Epicenter of a Cultural Earthquake."

I encourage you to view it for its profound insights into taking advantage of the changes that may already be entering our lives.

The script for his video appears on his blog "Spirit of Now." Here are the concluding paragraphs.

People sometimes talk about the winds of change. I think we’re heading into a storm of change. The question is how can we prepare ourselves for this, how can we cope with an increasingly unpredictable world?

We can get some clues by looking at what helps a tree survive a storm.

First, it needs strong roots, so it does not blow over. Similarly, we need to be able to remain stable so that we are not shaken by every unexpected change. If we loose our inner balance, if we react emotionally to everything that happens, we end up getting more stressed and more likely to burn out.

Second, like a tree we also need to be flexible. We need to be able to move with the flow of change. This means letting go of past assumptions. We need to learn to think more clearly, allow new ideas in, let deeper intuitions and feelings come to the surface.

And third, just as a tree is much better off if it is protected by other trees in the forest, so too we will be much better able to withstand change if we have a strong sense of community. We need to care for each, support each other in times of need. We need to develop greater care and compassion, to open our hearts to kindness, and have our vision guide us in these turbulent times.

A longtime advocate of meditation and consciousness studies, Russell is author of several books including From Science to God, Waking Up in Time, The Consciousness Revolution, and The Brain Book, among others.

Study Shows Meditation Improves Attention Span

2010-09-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Ancient mandala with meditation symbols.

Inspired by Buddhist meditation techniques, researchers have determined that meditation improves people’s attention span and in distinguishing small differences in what they are viewing.

The recent study involved selecting 60 participants, then sending half of them to a meditation retreat while the rest waited their turn ~ and essentially functioned as the control group. All 60 were experienced meditators. The retreat for the study lasted about three months.

According to ScienceDaily:

At three points during the retreat, participants took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response.

Participants got better at discriminating the short lines as the training went on. This improvement in perception made it easier to sustain attention, so they also improved their task performance over a long period of time. This improvement persisted five months after the retreat, particularly for people who continued to meditate every day. The task lasted 30 minutes and was very demanding.

"Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it’s kind of a perfect index of meditation training," Katherine MacLean of the University of California and one of the authors of the study, told ScienceDaily. "People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation, and you get to be at peace with yourself. That's what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted."

Click here for the complete article.

Earth's Volcanic Sites Reveal Planetary Pulse

2010-09-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

Scientists are theorizing that several volcanic hot spots may be Earth’s planetary pulses, beating at a rate of five to 10 million years. Researchers in Norway, Hawaii and Australia suggest that the regular fluctuations originate in the Earth’s core, travel up through the mantle and create eruptions on the planet’s surface.

According to Discovery News:

Among the most famous hot spots are Hawaii, Yellowstone and Iceland. All of these sites have long histories of eruptive pulses that have burned through the slowly moving crust above like a cutting torch -- leaving a long, telltale wake of dead volcanoes made of progressively older rocks.

This is in contrast to other sorts of volcanoes, which are caused by shallower things, like one tectonic plate being shoved under another, then melting.

“Hot spots remain some of the greatest enigmas in earth science,” commented geologist Mike Coffin of the University of Tasmania, Australia. “Plate tectonic theory does not explain them.”

Some of these hot spots have been linked to vast eruptions that, in turn, are suspected of affecting some of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth.

Click here for the Discovery News article.

Robert Walter, Joseph Campbell Foundation

2010-09-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

Robert Walter, president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, talks about the consciousness-jarring impact of visions. In an elevated state of consciousness, these events can be spiritual blessings. But when we return to the mundane state, they can be negative. Sublimating them has led, Walter says, to creation of much of our mythology, literature, and religious teachings.

Götterdämmerung & Propaganda

2010-09-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

I admit to seriously mixed feelings of fascination and revulsion when I watch this 8-minute 1941 German film entitled Stukas. Richard Wagner is among my Top Five favorite composers and here we see the remarkable curative strength of music, specifically from his 1876 Ring-cycle opera Götterdämmerung.

Trouble is, the miraculously cured patient in the film is a clinically depressed Nazi pilot who is hospitalized and then hears the soaring strains of Wagner’s music. The pilot is miraculously rejuvenated, rejoins his cheering squadron and takes to the air again to continue the Reich’s merciless bombing of Britain.

This clip’s Götterdämmerung music is worthy here, but I offer Stukas more as a clear example of how propaganda is structured and the type of story it tells. We live in an age where the propaganda is subtler, but it’s undeniably present, especially on some cable networks. Beware.

Thanks to Alex Ross, author of the excellent book The Rest is Noise, who earlier posted this film on his blog at www.therestisnoise.com.

New Evidence Indicates Rapid Pole Shift

2010-09-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

Just before we entered the new millennium in 2000, a flurry of books touted the apocalyptic prediction of a “pole shift,” where Earth’s magnetic pole would move from north to south with untold catastrophic damage. Originally discredited by most people as an outlandish scare tactic devised to sell books, the concept of shifting magnetic poles seems now to have much more scientific credence ~ though the pace is different and the effects not necessarily so dire.

Not only do pole shifts actually occur, but they happen rapidly in a geomagnetic sense, as new geological findings near Battle Mountain, Nevada, show. The new discovery reinforces similar findings in 1995 at the Steens Mountains in southeastern Oregon.

Describing the new Nevada find, Science News states:

Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa. Such ‘geomagnetic field reversals’ occur every couple hundred thousand years, normally taking about 4,000 years to make the change. The Nevada rocks suggest that this particular switch happened at a remarkably fast clip.

The Nevada find indicates the magnetic pole shift occurs at about one degree a week, while the Oregon evidence indicates up to six degrees a day.

Researchers aren’t sure why the geomagnetic field reverses itself. Many think it must have something to do with what creates the field in the first place ~ convective motions of liquid iron in the planet’s spinning outer core.

The last stable reversal occurred 780,000 years ago, according to Science News. Some geologists argue Earth is overdue for a reversal and might even be entering one now, as the geomagnetic field has been getting weaker over the past 150 years or more.

Click here for the complete Science News article.

Transforming Fear

2010-08-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

Picasso's 1937 painting, Guernica.

Robert Sardello calls himself a spiritual psychologist and his beliefs are rooting in the thinking of both Austrian philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner and Swiss psychological sage Carl Jung. There’s something about Sardello’s writing that awakens parts of my soul. When I read him ~ I’m now in my third Sardello book ~ it’s as if a deep-toned gong is being struck, sending out reverberations of truth.

I would not classify his 1999 book Freeing the Soul From Fear as your standard self-help book. His discussion of personal fear goes well beyond the familiar descriptions, and many of his observations of fear in today’s world are profound. Here’s a small sample:

Fear constitutes a much larger and more comprehensive presence than has yet been realized. Beginning in the nineteenth century, therapeutic psychology sought to identify the symptoms related to this phenomenon. The types of fear recognized included hysteria, behind which some trauma, real or imaged, was always to be found; shell shock or combat neurosis, now commonly called post-traumatic stress syndrome, which was first investigated after World War I; abuse and domestic violence; fear of natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, or fire; individual phobias such as panic attacks, anxieties, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

The reality of fear is far more wide-ranging, however. Working with victims of trauma does little to impede the larger presence of fear in the world. The goal is to become more conscious of what we are dealing with and to recognize that different fears require different capacity of soul to overcome them. The need is not to remove fear from the world, but instead to develop in ourselves the psychic capacity to confront its destructive power. In this realm, consciousness, coupled with love, is everything. Enlarging consciousness to include an awareness of soul allows a healthy struggle with fear, and love makes possible its transformation, not just within ourselves but also within the world.

I’ve not yet finished the book. His overall message, at this point, promises to be optimistic.

Musical Interlude: "Teach Me to Dance"

2010-08-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

Here's the wonderful dance scene from Michael Cocoyanis's film adaptation of Zorba the Greek, the 1946 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. The story concerns the interplay of our earthy selves with our intellectual selves, represented by Alexis Zorba (played by Anthony Quinn) and Basil, a young English-Greek intellectual (played by Alan Bates), respectively.

At one point in the book, Zorba recounts: "I felt once more how simple a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roasted chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. And all that is required to feel that here and now is happiness, is a simple and frugal heart."

In this famous scene, Basil ~ learning from Zorba how to enjoy life in all of its beauty and tragedy ~ asks Zorba to teach him to dance.

Click here for more about the book.

Click here for more about the film.

Want Premonitions? Loosen Up

2010-08-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

In his fascinating new book, Larry Dossey ~ a physician who strives to bring scientific understanding to the realm of spirituality ~ discusses the nature of premonitions, focusing on recent research into their nature and causes. His book is The Power of Premonitions, and one of my favorite parts is Dossey’s advice to those who want to be more open to premonitions:

So here’s my advice for those who wish to be premonition-prone: court difference, variety, and ambiguity in your life. Relax and let go. Don't try too hard. Give up your pet ideas of how the world should work. Dabble in poetry; play with metaphors; shun literalism. Avoid habits, ruts, and routines. Make a place for variety, risk, novelty, playfulness, generosity, and mystery in your life. As Rumi advises, “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” Don‘t be too attached to results, because this will lead to an attempt to control and manipulate outcomes, which is toxic to the openness and flexibility you are seeking. If you do these things, you will probably discover that the universe meets you more than halfway, perhaps with premonitions as its calling card.

Seems to me to be a good recipe, in general, for leading a richer, more fulfilling and more interesting life.

Triskaidekaphobia Has Several Ancient Sources

2010-08-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

Norse god Loki from 17th century Icelandic manuscript.

For sufferers of triskaidekaphobia ~ dread of the numeral 13 ~ last Friday was the 2010’s most unlucky day. But it was the only Friday the 13^thfor the entire year, while 2009 had nine of them, the highest number of Friday the 13ths possible on the Gregorian calendar.

National Geographic News explores the topic in an article quoting from the book Holiday Folklore, Phobias and Fun by folklore historian Donald Dossey. In his book, Dossey explores both the origins of the unlucky sentiments regarding the number 13 and of Fridays.

According to National Geographic News:

Dossey traces the fear of the number 13 ~ aka, triskaidekaphobia ~ to a Norse myth about 12 gods having a dinner party at Valhalla, Norse mythology's heaven. In walked the uninvited 13th guest, the mischievous god Loki. Once there, Loki arranged for Hoder, the blind god of darkness, to shoot Balder the Beautiful, the god of joy and gladness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow. "Balder died, and the whole Earth got dark. The whole Earth mourned. It was a bad, unlucky day," Dossey said.

There is also a biblical reference to the unlucky number 13. Judas, the apostle said to have betrayed Jesus, was the 13th guest to the Last Supper.

As for Friday, it's well known among Christians as the day Jesus was crucified. Some biblical scholars believe Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit on Friday. Perhaps most significant is a belief that Abel was slain by his brother Cain on Friday the 13th.

Meanwhile, in ancient Rome, witches reportedly gathered in groups of 12. The 13th was believed to be the devil.

Some people are so paralyzed by Friday the 13th superstitions that they refuse to fly, buy a house, or act on a hot stock tip, the article states. "It's been estimated that $800 or $900 million is lost in business on this day because people will not fly or do business they would normally do," said Dossey.

Click here for the National Geographic article.
This post originally appeared on my Ancient Tides blog.

2010-08-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

Number 29 ~ THE ABYSMAL

The Abysmal repeated.

If you are sincere, you have success in your heart,

And whatever you do succeeds.

Through repetition of danger we grow accustomed to it. Water sets the example for the right conduct under such circumstances. It flows on and on, and merely fills up all the places through which it flows; it does not shrink from any dangerous spot nor from any plunge, and nothing can make it lose its own essential nature. It remains true to itself under all conditions. Thus likewise, if one is sincere when confronted with difficulties, the heart can penetrate the meaning of the situation. And once we have gained inner mastery of a problem, it will come about naturally that the action we take will succeed. In danger, all that counts is really carrying out all that has to be done ~ thoroughness ~ and going forward, in order not to perish through tarrying in the danger.

Cosmic Rays Striking Earth in Puzzling Pattern

2010-08-12T19:01:00.000-07:00

IceCube "skymap" showing varied cosmic ray intensity.

Cosmic rays ~ energy particles thought to originate in distant dead stars ~ are bombarding Earth in a pattern scientists find puzzling. They're are not arriving uniformly from all directions, but in an overabundance from one part of the sky and scarcity from another.

This odd pattern was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory still under construction in Antarctica and intended to detect other exotic particles called neutrinos.

“IceCube was not built to look at cosmic rays ~ they are considered background,” University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Rasha Abbasi tells LiveScience. “However, we have billions of events of background downward cosmic rays that ended up being very exciting.”

Previous studies have found a similar lopsidedness in the sky over the Northern Hemisphere, but this was the first time scientists saw that the pattern extended to the southern sky visible from Antarctica.

“At the beginning, we didn't know what to expect,” Abbasi adds. “To see this extending to the Southern Hemisphere sky is an additional piece of the puzzle around this enigmatic effect ~ whether it's due to the magnetic field surrounding us or to the effect of a nearby supernova remnant, we don't know.”

Click here for the article.
Click here for similar 2008 NASA article.

Bede Griffiths on the Power of Surrender

2010-08-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

In this 3-minute video, Bede Griffiths (1906-1993) relates his profound experience of surrender, loss of fear, and gaining of unconditional love ~ a condition he believes exists within each of us. He studied at Oxford under C.S. Lewis, became a Benedictine monk and priest and moved to India in the 1950s to build a monastery. In India, he also aligned himself with Hindu beliefs and became a proponent of Vedanta-inspired Christianity. His teachings have inspired millions ~ including me ~ for nearly a half-century.

"Face" on Mars Now Shown to be Just Rocks

2010-08-09T19:06:00.000-07:00

New close-up of rocky outcropping that created the "face."

A massive shape on the surface of Mars in the likeness of a human face spawned countless conspiracy theories in recent decades, but modern technology now confirms it is simply a large, rocky hill in a Martian desert.

Back in July, 1976, the famous "face" photo was taken by the American Viking 1 Orbiter. Within days, enthusiasts were convinced the face was man-made or had been built by Martians aeons ago as part of an ancient civilization. There were many theories about the presence of the human-like face, and nearly all concluded that NASA was part of a huge cover-up to conceal the face’s true origins.

Now a new photo ~ taken with NASA’s high-definition HiRISE camera and released last week ~ reveals the craggy rock formations that create the effect of human features.

According to the London Mail:

This is the closest-ever image of the famous outcrop which should, once and for all, scotch the conspiracy theorists who believe that the 'face' is conclusive evidence of intelligent life on Mars.

Today's image was taken by HiRISE from on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which can pick out incredible detail from 300 kilometres above the planet’s surface. The rocky formation is known as a mesa, a large rocky outcrop with a flat top and steep, cliff-like sides. The Face’ mesa is in the Cydonia region and is a couple of miles long and a few hundred feet high.

. . . NASA even added to the theory by referring to the picture's human likeness in the caption it added to the photo when it first released it to the general public. The outcrop looked a little like a face, complete with eyes, nose and mouth, because of the angle of the sun and its cratered surface, and NASA happily pointed this fact out.

Seeing human faces in inaminate objects is known as "pareidolia" and is why so many people see what they believe is the face of Jesus in tea leaves, clouds and even burnt toast, the Mail pointed out. Carl Sagan believed humans are 'hard-wired' to find human faces wherever possible as part of our survival instinct.

Smaller photo shows the famous Martian "face."

Click here for the complete article and a video.

Lake-Chain Plan Would Convert Deserts to Cities

2010-08-08T08:56:00.000-07:00

Artist's conception of a chain of desert lakes.

A plan to convert millions of square miles of earth's desert into inhabitable land is being developed by Shimizu Corporation of Japan. Called the “Aqua-Net,” the plan calls for a string of manmade lakes to be built across earth’s arid regions, giving rise to a network of new cities.

According to PhysOrg.com:

The idea involves the building of interconnected lakes in the desert. These 18-mile-diameter lakes would be connected by canals fed from the ocean. The lakes would include built islands that could serve as homes for cities teeming with people. Supposedly, this would work because water from the lake would cool the cities, making them livable. There would also be arable land, theoretically, after this cooling above the desert lake islands. The cities would be powered by satellite power stations, and by the sun.

Of course the plan is not without substantial challenges:

One of the biggest draw backs is that the lakes would be filled with seawater. While the salt water would provide the opportunities for water-based wildlife, and even for biomass development, it doesn't provide much opportunity for drinking. However, Shimizu plans that the some of the water would be desalinated, and thus made fit for human consumption and for irrigation of crops.

Shimizu is a large construction firm currently involved with a plan called the “Luna Ring” to build a wreath of solar cells around the moon to generate electricity and send it to earth via microwave transmission.

Click here for the complete article.

'Spacequakes" Disrupting Earth's Magnetic Field

2010-08-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

Spacequakes contribute to auroras in the night sky.

Called “spacequakes,” bursts of plasma flying off of the sun are disrupting Earth’s magnetic field with the strength of a sizeable earthquake, according to new scientific evidence.

“The total energy in a spacequake can rival that of a magnitude 5 or 6 earthquake,” Evgeny Panov of the Space Research Institute in Austria tells the Christian Science Monitor. He is first author of a paper reporting the results of a study on spacequakes in the April 2010 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

NASA’s THEMIS space probes discovered the precursors of spacequakes in 2007. According to the Monitor:

The action begins in Earth's magnetic tail, which is stretched out like a windsock by the million-miles-per-hour solar wind. Sometimes the tail can become so stretched and tension-filled, it snaps back like an over-torqued rubber band. Solar wind plasma trapped in the tail hurtles toward Earth.

On more than one occasion, the five THEMIS spacecraft were in the line of fire when these “plasma jets” swept by. Clearly, the jets were going to hit Earth. But what would happen then? The fleet moved closer to the planet to find out.

“Now we know," said THEMIS project scientist David Sibeck of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. “Plasma jets trigger spacequakes.”

Research shows that the plasma jets crash into Earth’s geomagnetic field some 18,600 miles above the equator. The impact sets off a rebounding process, in which the incoming plasma actually bounces up and down on the reverberating magnetic field. The first bounce is a big one, followed by bounces of decreasing amplitude as energy is dissipated in the carpet.

Click here for the complete article.