Did Acoustics Arrange Stonehenge?

Placement of the monolithic stones at Stonehenge could be related to an acoustic phenomenon created when two pipers play the same note, according to a new theory from archaeoacoustician Steven Waller.

A person walking in a circle around the pipers hears the note's volume decrease at certain points where the two sound waves collide and cancel one another out. At these spots, it sounds as though a giant pillar is blocking the sound, Waller says.

According to New Scientist:

Perhaps, Waller proposes, the ancients thought these silent points were invisible walls from the spirit world. They may have then arranged Stonehenge and the stone circles like it as very physical, 40-tonne incarnations of these walls.  

To test whether the illusion holds true in real life, Waller took blindfolded volunteers out into an empty field and led them in a circle around two recorders that were playing the same note. Then he asked the volunteers to draw the space they thought they had walked through.  

All six of the volunteers drew a circle of pillars or archways between themselves and the recorders. 

"It's a very mystical phenomenon," Waller says, and would have been totally inexplicable to ancient people who didn't understand the physics of sound waves.

Click here for the article.

What's the Light from El Castillo?

Is it an image of the cosmic power of a Mayan temple? Is it a Photoshop image designed to fool gullible viewers? Or is it a glitch in Hector Siliezar’s iPhone? Nobody is really certain.

Siliezar took the photo in 2009 in a series of three photos as he attempted to catch a lightning strike above the El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza. A thunderstorm was overhead and lightning was beginning to flash.

His first two photos show nothing out of the ordinary. When he took the third photo, the vertical beam of light from the pyramid’s apex was undetected by the naked eye. Everyone he immediately showed the photo was amazed. Of course the photo now is making the rounds of Mayan calendar sites.

Click here for the complete article.

Click here for another article and video. 

Mount Shasta Long Shrouded in Mystery

When John Muir, the noted explorer of the American West, first spotted Mt. Shasta in in 1874 in northern California, he wrote: "I was 50 miles away, afoot, alone and weary, yet all of my blood turned to wine and I have not been weary since."

The picturesque 14,162-foot peak has long elicited such awe. It has been touted as the site of an energy vortex that allows passage into the metaphysical dimension, called the birthplace of a spiritual foundation whose adherents believe they can ascend to the eternal realm, and is said to be a hot spot for UFOs that hide in the clouds and enter the mountain's core through mystery portals.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

A tale written a few years later (after Muir’s account) by a teenager from Yreka, just northwest of the mountain ~ a story of advanced beings living in a crystal city beneath the mountain ~ cemented Shasta's otherworldly reputation.  

Newer to the repertoire are sightings of Bigfoot (the word serves as both singular and plural, like fish and sheep), believed by some to conceal themselves by passing into a fifth dimension.  

In 2008, the Mount Shasta Herald reported that five people claimed to have witnessed a jellyfish-like craft that hovered noiselessly over neighboring McCloud, with what appeared to be a fire raging inside it. 

"Mt. Shasta has always had a spiritual drawing, but it's getting more and more popular," says, Karen Anderson, a supervisor in a local visitors bureau, who estimated that a fourth of the area's tourists are drawn by the mountain’s unusual reputation.

Click here for the complete article.

Context of Our Existence on Earth

I'm a great fan of physicist Peter Russell, author of From Science to God and several other profound books. Here's a new video he just released on the composition of our universe and beyond, showing that we are "specks in infinity." For more of Peter's thoughts, writings and videos, visit his website.

String Theory May Explain Dimensions

We humans experience our universe in three dimensions, yet superstring theory claims there are 10 dimensions ~ nine spatial ones plus a dimension of time. Now some Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged from the original nine dimensions of space.

According to Discovery.com:

According to string theorists, there are the three full-sized spatial dimensions we experience every day, one dimension of time, and six extra dimensions crumpled up at the Planck scale like itty-bitty wads of paper. As tiny as these dimensions are, strings ~ the most fundamental unit in nature, vibrating down at the Planck scale ~ are even smaller.  

The geometric shape of those extra dimensions helps determine the resonant patterns of string vibration. Those vibrating patterns in turn determine the kind of elementary particles that are formed, and generate the physical forces we observe around us, in much the same way that vibrating fields of electricity and magnetism give rise to the entire spectrum of light, or vibrating strings can produce different musical notes on a violin.  

All matter (and all forces) are composed of these vibrations -- including gravity. And one of the ways in which strings can vibrate corresponds to a particle that mediates gravity.

Scientists believe string theory could be used to explore the infinitely tiny point of our universe's birth.

Click here for the complete article.

Dreams Activate Brain As In "Real Life"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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"

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?

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

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

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

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

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.