Bone Flutes Reveal Earlier Human Music

Recently discovered flute made of bird's bone.

Discovery of bone flutes dating back some 40,000 years is leading researchers to conclude that human creativity evolved earlier than originally thought.

Researchers were studying a modern human settlement called Geißenklösterle in southern Germany when they came across the flutes, one made from ivory of a mammoth, the other from the bones of a bird.

According to LiveScience.com:

"These results are consistent with a hypothesis we made several years ago that the Danube River was a key corridor for the movement of humans and technological innovations into central Europe between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago," study researcher Nick Conard, of Tübingen University, said in a statement. 

The researchers radiocarbon-dated bones found in the same layer of the archaeological dig as the flutes. This carbon dating uses the level of radioactive carbon, which is naturally occurring in the world and decays predictably into nonradioactive carbon, to estimate the age of organic materials. 

They found the objects were between 42,000 and 43,000 years old, belonging to the Aurignacian culture dating from the upper Paleolithic period. So far, these dates are the earliest for the Aurignacian and predate equivalent sites from Italy, France, England and other regions.

Results indicate that humans entered the Upper Danube region before an extremely cold climatic phase around 39,000 to 40,000 years ago, researchers said.

 Click here for the article.

New Findings Extend Mayan Calendar

Mayan numbers on the wall stretch 7,000 years into the future.

The recent discovery of an underground Mayan workshop in the dense Guatemalan jungle is important for two reasons: one, the murals and other wall painting are all surprisingly well preserved; and two, calendar fragments show that the Mayan calendar does not end this year.

According to NPR:

Writing in the journal Science, the scientists say the murals confirm what Mayan archaeologists have been saying for years: The Mayan calendar does not predict the end of time in 2012, as some New Age prophets have argued. In fact, the murals register future time stretching far beyond 2012. 

Archaeologist William Saturno from Boston University compares Mayan calendars to a car's odometer. "If we're driving a car," Satruno says, "we don't anticipate that at 100,000 miles the car will vanish from beneath us. We know that it will reset to zero, and the next 10th of a mile we go we'll have another number to look at." 

What these Mayan timekeepers were doing was simply marking the passage of time from past to future, but in discrete intervals.

The buried room apparently was a workshop used by scribes or astronomers working for a Mayan king. The paintings depict the king and members of his court. The numbers mark important periods in the Mayan calendar.

 Click here for the article.

Synesthesia Enables Seeing of Auras

For the first time, a scientific explanation has been presented of the human aura, an energy field of luminous radiation surrounding a person as a halo ~ imperceptible to most people.

Now, researchers in Spain have found that many of the individuals claiming to see the aura of other people actually experience the neuropsychological phenomenon known as “synesthesia.” In synesthetes, the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected ~ synesthetes can see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people with a particular color.

According to Medical Press:

In neurological terms, synesthesia is due to cross-wiring in the brain of some people (synesthetes); in other words, synesthetes present more synaptic connections than "normal" people. 

"These extra connections cause them to automatically establish associations between brain areas that are not normally interconnected,” professor Gómez Milán explains. Many healers claiming to see the aura of people might have this condition.  

The University of Granada researchers remark that "not all healers are synesthetes, but there is a higher prevalence of this phenomenon among them. The same occurs among painters and artists, for example.”

The study was conducted by the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology Óscar Iborra, Luis Pastor and Emilio Gómez Milán, and has been published in the prestigious journal Consciousness and Cognition.

Click here for the complete article.

Is Moore's Law Stumbling?

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku believes Moore’s Law ~ the influential maxim predicting the exponential increase in computing power ~ is finally breaking down. He’s talking about the so-called law stating the number of transistors that can be fit on a computer chip will double every two years, resulting in periodic increases in computing power.

According to Kaku:

…in about ten years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore’s Law. In fact, already, already we see a slowing down of Moore’s Law. Computer power simply cannot maintain its rapid exponential rise using standard silicon technology. Intel Corporation has admitted this.

Moore’s Law, introduced by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 was never a law in any scientific sense. As others have pointed out, given Intel’s dominance in the chip industry for much of the period in which Moore’s Law has applied (or appeared to), there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy angle in which the dominant industry player sets the pace for its own benefit.

Click here for the complete article.

Meditators' Brains Process Info Faster

New research at UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro-Imaging indicates that people who meditate have larger amounts of gyrification ~ the “folding” of the cortex ~ than non-meditators, and this enables their brains to process information faster.

"Rather than just comparing meditators and non-meditators, we wanted to see if there is a link between the amount of meditation practice and the extent of brain alteration," Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA lab, told ScienceDaily. "That is, correlating the number of years of meditation with the degree of folding."

According to ScienceDaily.com:

The meditators had practiced their craft on average for 20 years using a variety of meditation types -- Samatha, Vipassana, Zen and more. The researchers applied a well-established and automated whole-brain approach to measure cortical gyrification at thousands of points across the surface of the brain.  

They found pronounced group differences (heightened levels of gyrification in active meditation practitioners) across a wide swatch of the cortex, including the left precentral gyrus, the left and right anterior dorsal insula, the right fusiform gyrus and the right cuneus. 

Perhaps most interesting, though, was the positive correlation between the number of meditation years and the amount of insular gyrification.

Luders cautions that while genetic and other environmental factors could have contributed to the effects the researchers observed, "The positive correlation between gyrification and the number of practice years supports the idea that meditation enhances regional gyrification."

Click here for the complete article.

Swirls Across the Earth's Oceans

This NASA video shows the effects of wind on the oceans' surfaces over a two-year period, creating entrancing curls and swirls worthy of a Van Gogh painting.

According to NPR:

Most of the surface currents in the ocean are shaped by wind. In this visualization from the folks at NASA, the ocean is rich with lazy spirals that move in great circular sweeps (called "gyres") clockwise in the northern hemisphere, counterclockwise in the south. Think of the ocean surface here as a reflection of the winds above, a kind of watery mirror, though the spinning of the Earth, tugs of sun and moon and obstruction of continents play a part.

Click here for the article.

Cause-and-Effect and Magical Thinking

Our sense of cause-and-effect leads us to put credence into magical thinking, according to psychology writer Matthew Hutson, whose book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking was released this week.

Even the practice of voodoo ~ especially inserting pins into figurines to inflict pain or bad luck ~ gains strength because of the way we associate our actions with certain results. "When you do some symbolic action or perform some symbolic ritual, you tend to think it will bring about what it symbolizes," Hutson says.

According to Life’s Little Mysteries.com: 

In a recent experiment, psychologists monitored people’s perspiration levels as they cut up a photograph of a cherished childhood possession. Unsurprisingly, destroying a representation of their childhood made the participants sweat. One possible explanation for the clammy palms is that our brains have difficulty separating appearance with reality, Hutson said. 

A voodoo doll (or picture of your baby blanket) conjures in your head the thought of the actual person or object it represents, and so the mere thought of the person or object being harmed makes you feel like he or she, or it, really is being. 

Another possibility is that we get confused by the fact that, in the real world, causes are often similar to their effects. A big bolt of lightning causes a big crack of thunder. Red crayons draw red lines. Children look like their parents. "So we may then expect that if we perform some action, then some effect similar to the action will be caused," Hutson said.

Though it's important for us to be cognizant of real-world similarities between causes and effects, it inadvertently spurs magical thinking. While most of us consider ourselves to be rational, the research suggests remnants of the magical thinking we evolved with will invariably affect our thoughts.

Click here for the complete article.

What Happens to You in a Black Hole?

Black holes are so massive they deform space and time, so dense their centers are called "points at infinity," and are absolutely black because even light can't escape them. 

So what would happen if you were sucked into one?

If you were to step into a black hole, your body would most closely resemble "toothpaste being extruded out of the tube," says Charles Liu, an astrophysicist who works at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium.

According to LiveScience.com:

"First of all, you approach the speed of light as you fall into the black hole. So the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time," Liu said. "Furthermore, as you fall, there are things that have been falling in front of you that have experienced an even greater 'time dilation' than you have. So if you're able to look forward toward the black hole, you see every object that has fallen into it in the past. And then if you look backwards, you'll be able to see everything that will ever fall into the black hole behind you.  

"So the upshot is, you'll get to see the entire history of that spot in the universe simultaneously," he said, "from the Big Bang all the way into the distant future."

Liu also explains the effects of other universal forces such as relativity on the hapless person who would encounter a black hole.

Click here for the complete description. 

Historian Concludes Jesus Did Exist

Christ as imagined by Rembrandt

The debate over whether Jesus actually existed in an historical sense is large, with much intensity on both sides of the question. That’s why I find it especially interesting when a self-proclaimed agnostic who also happens to be a leading biblical scholar decides to take a bold position.

Yes, says Bart Ehrman. Jesus did exist.

Ehrman, historian and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and author of several best-sellers relating to the Bible, recently published Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, which investigates the historical evidence regarding the existence of Jesus.

Ehrman says there is a large contingent of people claiming that Jesus never did exist, and he calls them the mythicists.

"It was a surprise to me to see how influential these mythicists are," Ehrman says. According to them, Jesus was never mentioned in any Roman sources and there is no archeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. Even Christian sources are problematic – the Gospels come long after Jesus' death, written by people who never saw the man. 

"Most importantly," he explains, "these mythicists point out that there are Pagan gods who were said to die and rise again and so the idea is that Jesus was made up as a Jewish god who died and rose again."

In his book, Ehrman marshals all of the evidence proving the existence of Jesus, "Paul knew Jesus' brother, James, and he knew his closest disciple, Peter, and he tells us that he did," Ehrman says. "If Jesus didn't exist, you would think his brother would know about it, so I think Paul is probably pretty good evidence that Jesus at least existed," he says.

Ehrman builds a technical argument and shows that one of the reasons for knowing that Jesus existed is that if someone invented Jesus, they would not have created a messiah who was so easily overcome.

Click here for the NPR article and audio discussion.

Workplace and Schools Favor Extroverts

Introverts make up a third to a half the population, yet our schools and workplaces are designed for extroverts. This point is driven home with impact in “Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking, where author Susan Cain says: “And we're living with a value system that I call the New Groupthink, where we believe that all creativity and productivity comes from an oddly gregarious place.”

“Picture the typical classroom,” she writes on CNN.com. “When I was a kid, we sat in rows of desks, and we did most of our work autonomously. But nowadays many students sit in "pods" of desks with four or five students facing each other, and they work on countless group projects ~ even in subjects like math and creative writing.

“Kids who prefer to work by themselves don't fit, and research by educational psychology professor Charles Meisgeier found that the majority of teachers believe the ideal student is an extrovert ~ even though introverts tend to get higher grades, according to psychologist Adrian Furnham,” she continues.

“The same thing happens at work. Many of us now work in offices without walls, with no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers,” Cain writes. “And introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though the latest research by the management professor Adam Grant at Wharton shows that introverted leaders often deliver better results. They're better at letting proactive employees run with their creative ideas, while extroverts can unwittingly put their own stamp on things and not realize that other people's ideas aren't being heard.”

Click here for the complete article.

Reality Mirroring Sci-Fi More and More

From NPR:

When Hollywood imagines the future, from Logan's Run to Avatar, it tends to picture living spaces as sterile and characterless, without any cultural clues to the person who lives there. No record library, no DVDs, no Hemingway on bookshelves ... often no bookshelves.  

And here we are, catching up to that vision of the future. Sales of physical books dropped 30 percent last year, while e-book sales more than doubled. Sales of DVDs fell during that same period, while online streaming rose. And in 2011, for the first time, digital music downloads overtook sales of CDs. It's as if we're deciding en masse that when it comes to the arts and entertainment, we can do without the actual object that is the object of our affection. Who needs real-world clutter in an age when everything streams?  

In short: "Welcome," as Morpheus put it in The Matrix, "to the desert of the real."  

In that film, as you'll recall, people interact in a reassuringly cluttered but virtual reality. Actual reality is barren. No stuff at all. Nothing physical to establish that one person is different from another. It's a horror story in which humanity has abandoned all of what makes us human. This fear of losing ourselves as we lose our stuff — is it just a product of our experiences with technology? Well, if you look at science fiction from the past few decades, you'd certainly think so.

Click here for the complete NPR story.

Scientists Watch Antimatter Transform

Section of neutrino observatory under Mount Kamioka.

Researchers for the first time have observed electron antineutrinos turning into other types of particles ~ a phenomenon occurring more frequently than earlier thought.

A type of antimatter ~ which can annihilate matter on contact ~ electron antineutrinos are partner particles with electron neutrinos. (Other forms of neutrinos are muon and tau, each with its antimatter counterpart.)

According to LiveScience.com:

For years, all neutrinos were thought to weigh nothing at all, but recently scientists discovered they do have some mass, though it's less than one-millionth that of an electron. This mass, in fact, enables an especially bizarre habit neutrinos have of changing from one type to another, a phenomenon called neutrino oscillations.  

"This is a new type of neutrino oscillation, and it is surprisingly large," Yifang Wang of China's Institute of High Energy Physics, the co-spokesperson and Chinese project manager of the Daya Bay experiment, said in a statement. 

"Our precise measurement will complete the understanding of the neutrino oscillation and pave the way for the future understanding of matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe."

The finding offers the hope of helping answer one of the universe's most baffling questions: Why is everything made of matter, and not antimatter?

Click here for the complete article.

Reports of Strange Sounds from the Sky

There appears to be an upsurge recently in reports of strange sounds coming from the skies ~ sometimes a low rumble, other times a whine, thump or a melody. Because the nature of the sounds vary so much, researchers are having difficulties pinpointing their origins.

According to Discovery News:

There are a few things to keep in mind about these strange, ambient sounds; for one thing, there is virtually no place on the planet where noise pollution is not a problem. We live in a constant sea of background noise, most of it unnoticed until we start paying attention to all the sounds and focusing on them. 

Sources of indoor sounds are nearly endless, from faintly ticking clocks to air-conditioning to bubbling aerators in fish tanks. Outside the problem is far worse, with noise generated by countless sources including traffic; airplanes (seen and unseen); radios; lawnmowers and snowblowers; trains; highways; and high-tension lines. 

Then there are the many industrial sources of noise and vibrations, including power plants and any factories with large machines such as auto assembly plants and printing presses.

For example, a flood of reports concerning a rumbling midnight sound in Malaysia eventually was determined to be caused by machinery tests a palm-oil company was performing each night.

Click here for the complete article.

Multi-verse Linked to Perceptions of Time

How we perceive time has much to do with our ability ~ or inability, as the case may be ~ to perceive parallel universes. And the key to whole mystery might be time travel, according to Andrew Cleland and other quantum physicists at the University of California.

According to Fox News:

What does it all mean? Let's say you're in Oklahoma visiting your aunt. But in another universe, where your atomic particles just can't keep up, you're actually at home watching "The Simpsons." That may sound far-fetched, but it's based on real science. 

"When you observe something in one state, one theory is it split the universe into two parts," Cleland told FoxNews.com, trying to explain how there can be multiple universes and we can see only one of them.  

The multi-verse theory says the entire universe "freezes" during observation, and we see only one reality. You see a soccer ball flying through the air, but maybe in a second universe the ball has dropped already. Or you were looking the other way. Or they don't even play soccer over there.

Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and a popular author, accepts the scientific basis for the multi-verse ~ even if it cannot be proven.  "Unless you can imagine some super-advanced alien civilization that has figured this out, we aren't affected by the possible existence of other universes," Carroll told Fox News. But he does think "someone could devise a machine that lets one universe communicate with another."

Click here for the complete article. 

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.