Tag: mark (page 2 of 8)

UK Scientists: Aliens May Have Sent Space Seeds To Create Life On Earth

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comScientists in the U.K. have examined a tiny metal circular object, and are suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.Don't be fooled by the size of the objec...

View Article Here Read More

Will new ruling finally free Lolita after 40 years in captivity at Miami Seaquarium?

February 5, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from seattletimes.com

A decision to list the captive orca Lolita for federal protection is expected to set the stage for a lawsuit from advocates seeking the whale’s release.

By Hal Bernton

Seattle Times staff reporter

A Puget Sound orca held for decades at Miami’s Seaquarium will gain the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act, a move expected to set the stage for a lawsuit from advocates seeking the whale’s release.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Wednesday the decision to list Lolita as part of the southern resident killer whales of Puget Sound, which already are considered endangered under the federal act.

Whale activists, who petitioned for this status, have long campaigned for Lolita’s return to Puget Sound. They hope the listing will provide a stronger legal case to release Lolita than did a previous lawsuit that centered on alleged violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act.

“This gives leverage under a much stronger law,” said Howard Garrett of the Whidbey Island based Orca Network, which hopes a San Juan Island cove will one day serve as the site for Lolita to re-enter the wild.

NOAA Fisheries officials on Wednesday described their decision in narrow terms, which set no broader precedents. It does not address whether Lolita should be released from the Seaquarium.
“This is a listing decision,” said Will Stelle, the NOAA Fisheries regional administrator for the West Coast. “It is not a decision to free Lolita.”

Aquarium officials have repeatedly said they have no intention of releasing the orca.

“Lolita has been part of the Miami Seaquarium family for 44 years,” said Andrew Hertz, Seaquarium general manager, in a statement.

“Lolita is healthy and thriving in her home where she shares habitat with Pacific white-sided dolphins. There is no scientific evidence that ... Lolita could survive in a sea pen or the open waters of the Pacific Northwest, and we are not willing to treat her life as an experiment.”

Orcas, also known as killer whales, are found in many of the world’s oceans. The southern resident population, which spends several months each year in Puget Sound, is the only group listed in the U.S. under the Endangered Species.

The three pods in the population were reduced by captures by marine parks between 1965 and 1975, NOAA says. Among them was a roundup in Penn Cove where seven whales were captured, including Lolita.

The southern resident pods now number fewer than 80. Possible causes for the decline are reduced prey, pollutants that could cause reproductive problems and oil spills, according to NOAA Fisheries.
Under the Endangered Species Act, it is illegal to cause a “take” of a protected orca, which includes harming or harassing them.
Wednesday, NOAA officials said holding an animal captive, in and of itself, does not constitute a take.

Orca activists are expected to argue in their lawsuit that Lolita's cramped conditions result in a prohibited take.

There is “rising public scorn for the whole idea of performing orcas,” said Garrett, who hopes Seaquarium will decide to release Lolita without a court order.

But NOAA officials still have concerns about releasing captive whales, and any plan to move or release Lolita would require “rigorous scientific review,” the agency said in a statement.
The concerns include the possibility of disease transmission, the ability of a newly released orca to find food and behavior patterns from captivity that could impact wild whales.

NOAA said previous attempts to release captive orcas and dolphins have often been unsuccessful and some have ended in death.

Garrett said the plan for Lolita calls for her to be taken to a netted area of the cove, which could be enlarged later. She would be accompanied by familiar trainers who could “trust and reassure her every bit of the way,” he said.

The controversy over releasing captive whales has been heightened by the experience of Keiko, a captive orca that starred in the 1993 movie “Free Willy,” about a boy who pushed for the release of a whale.

In 1998, Keiko was brought back to his native waters off Iceland to reintroduce him to life in the wild. That effort ended in 2003 when he died in a Norwegian fjord.

Garrett, who visited Keiko in Iceland in 1999, said he was impressed by the reintroduction effort, and that there was plenty of evidence that Keiko was able to catch fish on his own.

“The naysayers predicted that as soon as he got into the (Icelandic) waters he would die, and wild orcas would kill him,” Garrett said. “He proved that 180-degrees wrong. He loved it.”

Mark Simmons, who for two years served as director of animal husbandry for the Keiko-release effort, has a different view. He says Keiko never was able to forage for fish on his own, and that he continued to seek out human contact at every opportunity.

Simmons wrote a book called “Killing Keiko,” that accuses the release effort of leading to a long slow death for the orca, which he says lacked food and then succumbed to an infection.

“It’s not really the fact that Keiko died, but how he died,” Garrett said Wednesday.

View Article Here Read More

10 Mysterious Biblical Figures No One Can Explain

February 3, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

listverse.com

The canonical Bible is filled with mysterious characters, many of whom drop in for a cameo, do their thing, and then slide out, never to be heard from again. Some are merely extras, but some have a contextual presence that begs further examination. And some are, well, just weird.

10 Melchizedek

Probably the single most mysterious figure in the Bible, Melchizedek was a priest-king of Salem (later known as Jerusalem) in the time of Abram (Abraham), suggesting a religious organization, complete with ritual and hierarchy, that predated the Jewish nation and their priestly lineage from the tribe of Levi. He is only portrayed as active in one passage, although he is alluded to once in Psalms, and several times in the New Testament’s Epistle to the Hebrews.
Some Jewish disciplines insist that Melchizedek was Shem, Noah’s son. He is thought of, in Christian circles, as a proto-messiah, embodying certain traits later given to Christ. New Testament writings assert that Christ was “a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek,” indicating an older and deeper covenant with God than the Abrahamic-Levite lineage.
Hebrews 7, though presents him in a more unusual light. In verses 3 and 4:
“Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life; but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually. Now consider how great this man was, unto whom even the patriarch Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils.”
Not only do these verses grant Melchizedek a hierarchical level above the most important Jewish patriarch, they assign him mystical qualities. Some take this to mean an earlier incarnation of Christ. Others see it as an ancient manifestation of the Holy Spirit. His identity, role, and theological function have long been debated.
The paucity of scriptural references have added to the mystery, making him a somewhat spectral figure. As such, newer spiritual traditions, as well as New Age quacks, have taken liberties with his persona. Gnostics insisted he became Jesus, and he is cited as a high-level priest in Masonic and Rosicrucian lore. Joseph Smith wrote that he was the greatest of all prophets, and Mormons still trace their priesthood back to him. The Urantia, a 20th-century pseudo-Bible that claims to merge religion, philosophy, and science, insists he’s the first in an evolutionary succession of deification manifestations, with Abraham being his first convert.
There is even a school of thought that Melchizedek is a title or assumed character name, sort of a theological 007, played by a series of Judeo-Christian James Bonds.

The lore of Melchizedek is confusing but deep and fascinating. Apocryphal books give us more details, some cryptic, some relatively mundane. The Second Book of Enoch is particularly informative, insisting Melchizedek was born of a Virgin. When his mother Sophonim (the wife of Noah’s brother Nir) died in childbirth, he sat up, clothed himself, and sat beside her corpse, praying and preaching. After 40 days, he was taken by an archangel to the Garden of Eden, protected by angels and avoiding the Great Flood without passage on Uncle Noah’s ark.

9 Cain’s Wife

Cain was, according to Genesis, the first human ever born. He later killed his younger brother Abel in a hissy fit over his sacrifice of meat being more favored than Cain’s sacrificial fruit basket. God put a mark on Cain and cursed the ground he farmed, forcing him into a life as a wandering fugitive.

That part of the story is fairly well known. Later, though, we read that he settled in the Land of Nod, and, all of a sudden, he has a wife. Absolutely nothing else is mentioned about her. We don’t even know where she came from. In fact, the question of where Cain got his wife, when his immediate family were apparently the only people in the world, has sent many a perceptive young Sunday schooler down the road of skepticism.

Some have posited a mysterious other tribe of people, maybe created after Adam and Eve, maybe even another race or species. But the standard response is that Adam and Eve had many other sons and daughters to populate the Earth. The only way to keep the human race going would be to mate with siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins.

In fact, though the Holy Bible is silent on her identity, the apocryphal Book of Jubilees tells us exactly who was Cain’s wife: his sister Awan, who bore his son Enoch.

8 Joseph Barsabbas

After Judas Iscariot turned in his resignation by selling out his boss, Jesus’s disciples rushed to fill the open position and bring the number back up to a more theologically apt 12. The remaining disciples, including the newly convinced Thomas, looked over the candidates from the 120 or so adherents who followed Jesus. Then they cast lots to pick who would fill the position.

It went to Matthias, a fairly mysterious character himself. We don’t know where he came from or his previous occupation. Some think he was actually the diminutive Zacchaeus, the tax collector who climbed a sycamore tree to get a better glimpse of Jesus’s ride on the donkey.
The man who lost out was Joseph Barsabbas, also known as Joseph Justus. We know nothing solid about him, even less than we know about Matthias.
There is, however, one bit of interesting speculation. A list of names presented in Mark 6:3 includes some of Christ’s earliest and most loyal adherents. One of these is a man named Joses, and another is James the Just. Biblical scholar Robert Eisenman suggests that James carried on Jesus’s work, and the writer of the Book of Acts assigned him an alias to minimize his importance.

7 The Beloved Disciple

In the Gospel of John, several references are made to “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” This particular favorite is present at the Last Supper, the crucifixion, and after the resurrection. The writer of the Gospel of John even states that the testimony of this disciple is the basis for the text. But there is considerable debate over the identity of this mystery figure.
The most obvious nominee is John the Apostle, one of Christ’s inner circle of 12 and the namesake of the Gospel. But none of the 12 apostles were present at the crucifixion, so that crosses him off the list. Lazarus, resurrected by Christ, is also considered. He seems to have been present at the cited events and is referred to specifically, in the story of His death and resurrection, as “he whom Thou lovest.”
Mary Magdalene, Judas, Jesus’s brother James, or an unnamed disciple, possibly even a Roman or governmental official, have all been considered. There is even a school of thought that John is an interactive gospel, with the reader being the beloved disciple.

6 Simon Magus

“Simony” is the selling of church position or privilege. It is named for Simon Magus, or Simon the Magician, who makes only a brief appearance in the Bible, in Acts 8:9–24. Simon has since become synonymous with heretical thought, and religious exploitation.
He is presented as a powerful magician with a large following of in Samaria, who converts to Christianity and wishes to learn from apostles Peter and Phillip. When he sees the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues and an ecstatic spiritual state, he offers the men money if they will give him the secret to passing these gifts to others. They are not amused.
Apocryphal texts reveal quite a bit more, like his alleged ability to levitate and even fly, emphasizing that he was something akin to a cult leader in his hometown. It is suggested that his conversion is more for economic purposes than spiritual, and he set himself up as a messianic figure himself, competing for the Jesus dollar with his own homespun theology.
He is thought by some to be a founder of Gnosticism, a patchwork of various religious systems that relied heavily on Judaic and Christian symbolism.

5 Onan

Not unlike Simon Magus, Onan’s brief appearance inspired a name for a particular action.
He was the second son of Abraham’s grandson Judah, the patriarch and namesake of one of the 12 tribes of Israel. His older brother, Er (yes, just “Er”) was “wicked in the sight of the Lord,” so God killed him. What he did to deserve such an execution remains a mystery.
Tradition at the time dictated that Er’s widow, Tamar, become Onan’s wife. Onan had to impregnate her to keep the lineage alive, but he was not as wild about the idea. Maybe it was the thought of impending fatherhood, or Tamar just wasn’t his type. So, taking matters into his own hands, he committed the first recorded act of coitus interruptus. Or, as Genesis 38:9 so poetically put it: “And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.” God was displeased and slew Onan.
The whole tale gets even more sordid. Onan had a younger brother, Shelah. Customarily, he would have been next in line to impregnate Tamar, but Judah forbade it. Tamar, rather than graciously accepting forced spinsterhood, seduced Judah and (became pregnant) by the old man. Judah fathered twins Zerah and Perez, the latter of whom was listed by Matthew as an ancestor of Jesus’s earthly father Joseph...
Some have even suggested that Onan’s death warns that sex is meant only for purposes of reproduction, and not for pleasure.

4 Nicodemus

Nicodemus was a member of the Sanhedrin, a council of men who ruled on Jewish law and governance. He became a friend, follower, and intellectual foil for Jesus, whose egalitarian teachings often ran counter to the Sanhedrin’s rigid decrees. He was also a Pharisee, a leader within the Jewish community who toadied up to the Roman government at the time of Christ’s arrest and subsequent crucifixion.
He is mentioned three times in the New Testament, all in the Gospel of John. He subtly defends Jesus as the Pharisees discuss His impending arrest. Later, he helps prepare Jesus’s body for burial, indicating he had become an adherent to Christ and His teachings.
The first time he is mentioned, however, is in dialogue with Jesus, and these conversations reveal some of the most important aspects of Christian theology, such as the notion of being “born again” and the most famous reference to the divinity of Christ, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
This detailed conversation explores the divide between the Old Covenant’s dogmatic and exclusive Jewish Law and the New Covenant’s spiritually inclusive concepts. But for a vital contributor to such an important passage of the New Testament, Nicodemus remains a mysterious figure. Some scholars have suggested he may be Nicodemus ben Gurion, a Talmudic figure of wealth and mystical power. Christian tradition suggest he was martyred, and he is venerated as a saint. His name has come to be synonymous with seekers of the truth and is used as a character in many works of biblically inspired fiction.

3 James The Just

He is considered, next to Paul and Peter, the most important apostolic figure in the Church’s history. The Book of Acts specifically names him the head of the Christian church in Jerusalem, and he is frequently cited, both scripturally and apocryphally, as being consulted by both Paul and Peter. So who is he?
Traditionally, he is thought of as Jesus’s brother (or, more precisely, His half-brother). Jesus is listed, in the Gospels, as having siblings, some younger than Him. One was named James.
But James was a common name, and there are several mentioned in the Bible. Two of the 12 disciples were named James, but both are listed as having different fathers than Jesus, and neither went on to become James the Just. James the son of Zebedee went on to be known as James the Great, and James the son of Alphaeus was called James the Less.
It is known that he was a contemporary of Jesus, although he seems to have had no real inner-circle status during Christ’s ministry. The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas says Christ Himself designated James to lead the movement upon His death. The Apostle Paul initially seems respectful, even subservient, to “James the Lord’s brother,” calling him a “pillar” of the movement, even though he was later to disagree with him on matters of doctrine.
Some, though, have suggested the “brother” designation was spiritual, rather than physical. St. Jerome, among others, suggested that the doctrine of perpetual virginity indicated James could be a cousin, which, given the tribal associations and clannishness of the Jewish community of the time, seems valid. Such a relationship would indicate a certain social proximity without necessarily being a true sibling.

2 Simon The Zealot

Of Christ’s 12 disciples, none are more mysterious than Simon the Zealot. His name was meant to differentiate him from Simon Peter and has come to symbolize, for some, that he was a member of a similarly named political movement that advocated Jewish defiance to Roman law. Some have speculated that he acted, within Christ’s inner circle, as a political adviser. His presence then indicated that Jesus had a revolutionary political agenda.
The truth is much less exciting. The “Zealot” movement did not take place until long after the time that Christ would have given Simon his sobriquet, and there has never been any serious evidence that Simon, despite the designation, was a political radical. The name, and the word upon which it is based, did not take on those aggressive undertones until the movement itself was in full swing. More than likely, Simon was given his name because of intense spiritual devotion, rather than any radical political stance.
Nothing else is known of him, at least not with any surety. The Catholic Encyclopedia mentions him as possibly being a brother or cousin of Jesus, with no real evidence. The Eastern Orthodox tradition says he developed his zeal when Jesus attended his wedding and changed water into wine. Some legends say he was martyred; the philosopher Justus Lipsius somehow got it into his head that he was sawed in half.

1 Og

Cited twice specifically, but alluded to frequently in general terms, the Nephilim were a race of violent giants that lived in the pre-Flood world at the same time as humanity. Were they, as some suggest, the offspring of demons and human women? Fallen angels themselves? Or simply the descendants of Seth mentioned in the Dead Sea scrolls, a tribe of cranky cases cursed by God for their rebelliousness? Regardless, they evolved and became known by other names, like the Raphaim, and frequently battled humans for land and power.
The most storied of them was Og, the King of Bashan. He was killed, along with his entire army, and his kingdom was ransacked. All of the survivors—men, women, and children—were put to death, and the strongest and most powerful line of Nephilim descendants was eliminated. Some Nephilim bloodlines continued to do battle with the Israelites, though they were becoming less powerful and dying out. One tribe, the Anakim, allied themselves with the human tribes in Philistia. Goliath was thought to have been one of the last few descendants of the Nephilim.
Goliath’s height is given in the earliest manuscripts as 275 centimeters (9′). That’s hardly as awe-inspiring as the creature laying in Og’s bed, which measured, according to Deuteronomy, 400 centimeters (13′ 6″). That’s basically Yao Ming sitting on Shaquille O’Neal’s shoulders.
Biblically, descendants of the Nephilim could not have survived the Flood, even though Og and other giants are post-Flood figures. Some biblical literalists have attributed their later existence to the descendants of Noah’s family hooking up, once again, with demons. Or, being fallen angels and not human, they did survive the flood.
Jewish tradition gets deeper into information about the Nephilim and their descendants, going against the grain of the biblical account. It tells of Og booking passage on the Ark by promising to act as a slave to Noah and his family. Other accounts have him hanging on to the side of the Ark and riding the flood out rodeo-style.

View Article Here Read More

Astronomers find ancient solar system more than double ours in age

January 31, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

The ancient solar system Kepler-444Excerpt from seattletimes.com By MARCIA DUNN AP Aerospace WriterA newly discovered solar system -- with five small rocky planets -- makes ours look like a baby.An international team of astronomers ann...

View Article Here Read More

Why Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy’ Calls Evolution ‘Undeniable’ and Creationism ‘Inane’

January 26, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Gazing at galaxy clusters like Abell 2218, it's hard to imagine how we fit into the cosmos. Evolution can help with that, says Bill Nye.

Photograph by NASA, ESA, and Johan Richard (Caltech, USA)

Darwin's theory explains so much of the world, from bumblebees to human origins, says the Science Guy.

Excerpt from

National Geographic

By Jane J. Lee

With a jaunty bow tie and boyish enthusiasm, Bill Nye the Science Guy has spent decades decoding scientific topics, from germs to volcanoes, for television audiences. Last February, the former engineer defended the theory of evolution in a televised debate with young-Earth creationist Ken Ham, a vocal member of a group that believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Nye's decision to engage Ham kicked up plenty of criticism from scientists and creationists alike.

The experience prompted the celebrity science educator to write a "primer" on the theory of evolution called Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. In his new book, Nye delights in how this fundamental discovery helps to unlock the mysteries of everything from bumblebees to human origins to our place in the universe.

Who do you hope will read this book?

Grown-ups who have an interest in the world around them, people coming of age who have an interest in science, people who still want to know how the world works.

This is the big concern of mine with respect to the organization Answers in Genesis and Ken Ham and all those guys: their relentless, built-in attempts to indoctrinate a generation of science students on a worldview that is obviously wrong.

I worry about these kids—they're part of my society. We can't raise a generation of students who don't understand the fundamental idea in all of life science, any more than you want to raise a generation of kids who don't understand chemistry or physics or arithmetic.

How and when did you first encounter creationism?

About 20 years ago. I was a member of the Northwest Skeptics, which is the Seattle-based skeptics organization. We met people who insisted that the Earth was 6,000 years old. The inanity took my breath away. When you understand anything about astronomy or have just a rudimentary understanding of radioactivity, the Earth is patently not 6,000 years old. It's silly.

It's been said that a good way of convincing people of something is to appeal to their emotions. What do you think?

That's my business! In the book, I purposely spend a lot of time in the first person. The reason is, we find stories compelling. Stories are how we remember things, how we organize things.

By telling a story in the first person, it's hard to dismiss. If I say, "I remember the time I met Ivan the gorilla," it's really difficult for the listener or reader to go, "No, you don't!"

When you say, "I feel," it's really hard for the reader to say, "No, you don't." Yes, I do. I did a lot of that in the book...

Picture of a sweat bee pollinating a deadly nightshade flower

A fascination with bees and flight drew a young Bill Nye into the world of science and evolution.

Photograph by Mark W Moffett, National Geographic

Picture of the Earth seen from the International Space Station

One of the most fundamental ideas in explaining life on Earth is the theory of evolution, says Nye.

Photograph by NASA Earth Observatory

View Article Here Read More

Kepler Space Telescope Finds More Earth-like Planets ~ Learn how to join the search

January 8, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from
waaytv.com

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has been hunting the cosmos for exoplanets since March of 2009. In its nearly five years of searching the stars, it has found thousands of possible candidates. Scientists recently verified the thousandth planet Kepler had found, and even more exciting, they announced that Kepler had found three more Earth-like planets.
Those three planets bring Kepler's Earth-like planet count to a total of eight. In order to qualify as "Earth-like," these exoplanets must be less than twice the size of the Earth and orbit their own sun within the habitable zone. This "Goldilocks zone" is a belt in solar systems where it's neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist.

"Each result from the planet-hunting Kepler mission's treasure trove of data takes us another step closer to answering the question of whether we are alone in the Universe," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “The Kepler team and its science community continue to produce impressive results with the data from this venerable explorer."

The Kepler team has also found super-Earths and gas giants like Jupiter around other stars. NASA artists compiled retro-style travel posters from three discovered planets.

Kepler finds planets by watching distant stars for fluctuation in light. If the light hitting the telescope drops dramatically and then returns to normal levels, chances are a planet came in between the star and Kepler. Scientists can analyze the data and light filtered by the candidate planet's atmosphere to make guesses at the size, mass and composition.

"With each new discovery of these small, possibly rocky worlds, our confidence strengthens in the determination of the true frequency of planets like Earth," said co-author Doug Caldwell, SETI Institute Kepler scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. "The day is on the horizon when we’ll know how common temperate, rocky planets like Earth are.”

The space telescope actually has two crippled stabilizing gyros. But instead of giving up on the mission, engineers are using pressure from photons emitted by the sun to stabilize the telescope. The first space telescope looking for alien worlds is literally balancing on a sunbeam to continue its mission, and that's not science fiction, that's science fact.

Citizen scientists can also participate in the mission. The website PlanetHunters.org contains catalogs of data from K1, the original Kepler mission, and K2, the extended mission making use of the sun to balance the telescope. The K2 data has been sorted through, but Planet Hunters still needs help sifting through the K1 data.
The website's instructions read:

"As the planet passes in front of (or transits) a star, it blocks out a small amount of the star’s light, making the star appear a little bit dimmer. You’re looking for points on the light curve that appear lower than the rest. When you spot a potential transit, mark each one on the light curve."

View Article Here Read More

Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time

January 7, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from nature.com
By Zeeya Merali

Many researchers believe that physics will not be complete until it can explain not just the behaviour of space and time, but where these entities come from.

“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, describing what sounds like a pitch for a science-fiction film. But for Van Raamsdonk, a physicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, this scenario is a way to think about reality. If it is true, he says, “everything around us — the whole three-dimensional physical world — is an illusion born from information encoded elsewhere, on a two-dimensional chip”. That would make our Universe, with its three spatial dimensions, a kind of hologram, projected from a substrate that exists only in lower dimensions.

This 'holographic principle' is strange even by the usual standards of theoretical physics. But Van Raamsdonk is one of a small band of researchers who think that the usual ideas are not yet strange enough. If nothing else, they say, neither of the two great pillars of modern physics — general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space and time, and quantum mechanics, which governs the atomic realm — gives any account for the existence of space and time. Neither does string theory, which describes elementary threads of energy.

Free podcast

Zeeya Merali discusses some of the theories that are trying to explain the origins of space and time.

Van Raamsdonk and his colleagues are convinced that physics will not be complete until it can explain how space and time emerge from something more fundamental — a project that will require concepts at least as audacious as holography. They argue that such a radical reconceptualization of reality is the only way to explain what happens when the infinitely dense 'singularity' at the core of a black hole distorts the fabric of space-time beyond all recognition, or how researchers can unify atomic-level quantum theory and planet-level general relativity — a project that has resisted theorists' efforts for generations.

“All our experiences tell us we shouldn't have two dramatically different conceptions of reality — there must be one huge overarching theory,” says Abhay Ashtekar, a physicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Finding that one huge theory is a daunting challenge. Here, Nature explores some promising lines of attack — as well as some of the emerging ideas about how to test these concepts...

View Article Here Read More

Why We Didn’t Float Away: A Look at the Planetary Alignment Hoax

January 4, 2015 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from natureworldnews.comYou probably heard about it. After all, satirical content site Daily Buzz Live earned itself a whopping two million Facebook shares and 11,000 tweets with this latest trending fake news. An article claimed that on the...

View Article Here Read More

Comet lander: Camera sees Philae’s hairy landing

November 18, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

This collection of images was acquired when Rosetta was about 15km above the surface of 67P Excerpt from bbc.com By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC NewsHigh-resolution pictures have now been released of the Philae pr...

View Article Here Read More

Dark matter may be massive & collide with Earth every billion years

November 10, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from zeenews.india.com A new study has revealed that no evidence has been found that dark matter is made of tiny exotic particles, and it might be more massive.Researchers from Case Western Reserve University found that dark matter ...

View Article Here Read More

Are these angels watching over a family while cruise ship sinks? Greg Giles

November 8, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

The Italian luxury liner Costa Concordia as she lists and sinksWhile viewing this presentation which documents the sinking of the Italian luxury liner Costa Concordia after she struck an underwater obstruction on the 13th of January 2012, a tragedy w...

View Article Here Read More

Former Lockheed Martin engineer said he spoke with aliens — and has pictures to prove it ~ Video

November 5, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Former Lockheed Martin engineer Boyd Bushman

Boyd Bushman, who passed away in August, said it takes 45 years for aliens from the planet Quintumnia to reach Earth — and they are divided into 'wranglers' and 'rustlers.'
A former Lockheed Martin engineer showed off his pictures of aliens this summer that he claims to have obtained through conversations with extraterrestrial life.

Boyd Bushman, who died in August at the age of 78, claimed some of the aliens were 230 years old and that there are “American citizens who are working on UFOs 24 hours a day.”

He spoke with independent aerospace engineer Mark Q. Patterson shortly before his death, and Patterson posted the interview to YouTube in October.

Bushman reportedly served as a senior research engineer for Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Texas Instruments and Hughes Aircraft and talked about his experience at Area 51, the U.S. Air Force base in southern Nevada that’s been the subject of alien folklore.
Bushman describes the aliens as being 4 1/2-to-5-feet tall and have long fingers, webbed feet and come from a planet known as Quintumnia. It takes only 45 years for them to travel to Earth, he said.

The former engineer even gave them an assignment: photograph the planets as they make the voyage to Earth — and he claimed to have those photos. He said they travel using UFOs that are 38 feet in diameter while 18 of the aliens now work with facilities in the United States.

“There are two groups of aliens,” he said, adding that they exist in a kind of “cattle ranch” on the planet. “They divide them into two groups. One group are wranglers, and the others are rustlers – the ones who are stealers of cattle. The two groups act differently. The ones that are wranglers are much more friendly, and have a better relationship with us."

Click to zoom

View Article Here Read More

First legal pot, now Colorado launches new voting experiment

November 1, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Excerpt from nypost.com

As Colorado goes Election Night, so goes the nation — maybe.
The Centennial State is clearly a barometer of President Obama’s falling popularity.

The man who began his meteoric rise as the Democratic presidential nominee in Denver’s stadium in 2008 has lost much of his luster with Colorado voters and appears to be bringing down other Democrats with him.

Polls show Republican Cory Gardner ahead by seven points in his race to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, and GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez is neck and neck with sitting Gov. John HIckenlooper.

But before Republicans pop the champagne corks, it’s worth considering the big wild card in this election.

Like the rest of Colorado’s roughly 3 million registered voters, I received my ballot in the mail about two weeks ago. This year will be the first that all Colorado voters received mail ballots, even without requesting them.

The potential for thousands more voters to cast ballots in what is usually a low-turnout midterm election could easily confound pollsters and politicos.

Conventional wisdom is that higher turnout favors Democrats — and the odds of higher turnout helping Dems in Colorado seem somewhat greater, given the demographics of the state.
Some 14 percent of eligible voters in Colorado are Hispanic. Obama improved his share of support among Colorado Hispanic voters from 61 percent in 2008 to 75 percent in 2012.

If mail ballots boost Hispanic voter participation by a few percentage points this year, it will likely redound to Democrats’ benefit. In a race as tight as the Colorado governor’s race, Hispanic voters could well determine the outcome.

But demographics don’t give the full picture. Since 2008, Democrats have benefited from a much stronger ground game that put operatives in the field to turn out their likely voters.

The effort wasn’t enough to stop populist Tea Party voters from boosting GOP fortunes in the 2010
congressional races, but Colorado was the exception. Democrat Michael Bennet won an open Senate race with just 30,000 more votes than his Republican opponent, Ken Buck.

The question in 2014 is whether mail balloting helps or erases the Democrats’ edge.

A New York Times analysis of Colorado mail ballots that had already been tallied 10 days out from the election seemed to give Republicans an advantage. Registered Republicans had mailed in ballots in higher numbers than Democrats, 42.8 percent to 32.3 percent.

But those trends may not continue. It could be that more Republicans simply cast their ballots early, which is where the Democratic ground game will come in handy.

Early voting makes it easier for “volunteers” — many of them paid political and union operatives — to go door to door to urge those who haven’t voted to do so.

Who is to stop “volunteers” from showing up with dozens of mail ballots collected from elderly voters or others who may have been pressured by union reps or family members to cast their votes?
Colorado will have regulations in place to limit the number of ballots a single individual can drop off at collection centers after 2015, but this year the possibility of ballot stuffing is real.

State election officials claim that the signature on the ballot envelope is their way to detect phony ballots. But the system hardly seems foolproof, requiring signatures to be scanned and matched against a database that may prove more cumbersome than anticipated.

Nov. 4 will be a test for Colorado — and for the nation — on this new experiment in democracy.

View Article Here Read More

Tag: mark (page 2 of 8)

UK Scientists: Aliens May Have Sent Space Seeds To Create Life On Earth

Astronomers find ancient solar system more than double ours in age

Kepler Space Telescope Finds More Earth-like Planets ~ Learn how to join the search

Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time

Free podcast

Comet lander: Camera sees Philae’s hairy landing

Dark matter may be massive & collide with Earth every billion years

Search Here

Please Support Us!

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Follow Us

Dimensional Bliss Facebook Page

Follow me on Twitter

Top Posts & Pages

Comments

Hours & Info

VISITORS TO THIS LIGHT GRID NODE

Help us Stay Online