Excerpt from paranormal.lovetoknow.com By Michelle Radcliff The Bermuda Triangle is an area of mostly open ocean located between Bermuda, Miami, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The unexplained disappearances of hundreds of ships and air...
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| The oldest samples are sedimentary rocks that formed 3.2 billion years ago in northwestern Australia. They contain chemical evidence for nitrogen fixation by microbes.R. Buick / UW |
Excerpt from
washington.edu
A spark from a lightning bolt, interstellar dust, or a subsea volcano could have triggered the very first life on Earth.
But what happened next? Life can exist without oxygen, but without plentiful nitrogen to build genes – essential to viruses, bacteria and all other organisms – life on the early Earth would have been scarce.
The ability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support more widespread life was thought to have appeared roughly 2 billion years ago. Now research from the University of Washington looking at some of the planet’s oldest rocks finds evidence that 3.2 billion years ago, life was already pulling nitrogen out of the air and converting it into a form that could support larger communities.
“People always had the idea that the really ancient biosphere was just tenuously clinging on to this inhospitable planet, and it wasn’t until the emergence of nitrogen fixation that suddenly the biosphere become large and robust and diverse,” said co-author Roger Buick, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. “Our work shows that there was no nitrogen crisis on the early Earth, and therefore it could have supported a fairly large and diverse biosphere.”
The results were published Feb. 16 in Nature.
The authors analyzed 52 samples ranging in age from 2.75 to 3.2 billion years old, collected in South Africa and northwestern Australia. These are some of the oldest and best-preserved rocks on the planet. The rocks were formed from sediment deposited on continental margins, so are free of chemical irregularities that would occur near a subsea volcano. They also formed before the atmosphere gained oxygen, roughly 2.3 to 2.4 billion years ago, and so preserve chemical clues that have disappeared in modern rocks.
Even the oldest samples, 3.2 billion years old – three-quarters of the way back to the birth of the planet – showed chemical evidence that life was pulling nitrogen out of the air. The ratio of heavier to lighter nitrogen atoms fits the pattern of nitrogen-fixing enzymes contained in single-celled organisms, and does not match any chemical reactions that occur in the absence of life.
“Imagining that this really complicated process is so old, and has operated in the same way for 3.2 billion years, I think is fascinating,” said lead author Eva Stüeken, who did the work as part of her UW doctoral research. “It suggests that these really complicated enzymes apparently formed really early, so maybe it’s not so difficult for these enzymes to evolve.”
Genetic analysis of nitrogen-fixing enzymes have placed their origin at between 1.5 and 2.2 billion years ago.
“This is hard evidence that pushes it back a further billion years,” Buick said.
Fixing nitrogen means breaking a tenacious triple bond that holds nitrogen atoms in pairs in the atmosphere and joining a single nitrogen to a molecule that is easier for living things to use. The chemical signature of the rocks suggests that nitrogen was being broken by an enzyme based on molybdenum, the most common of the three types of nitrogen-fixing enzymes that exist now.
Molybdenum is now abundant because oxygen reacts with rocks to wash it into the ocean, but its source on the ancient Earth – before the atmosphere contained oxygen to weather rocks – is more mysterious.
The authors hypothesize that this may be further evidence that some early life may have existed in single-celled layers on land, exhaling small amounts of oxygen that reacted with the rock to release molybdenum to the water.
“We’ll never find any direct evidence of land scum one cell thick, but this might be giving us indirect evidence that the land was inhabited,” Buick said. “Microbes could have crawled out of the ocean and lived in a slime layer on the rocks on land, even before 3.2 billion years ago.”
Future work will look at what else could have limited the growth of life on the early Earth. Stüeken has begun a UW postdoctoral position funded by NASA to look at trace metals such as zinc, copper and cobalt to see if one of them controlled the growth of ancient life.
Other co-authors are Bradley Guy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, who provided some samples from gold mines, and UW graduate student Matthew Koehler. The research was funded by NASA, the UW’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory, the Geological Society of America and the Agouron Institute.
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.
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| Image Credit: hkeita/Shutterstock |
Excerpt from venturebeat.com
By Vivek Wadhwa
The good news is that governments no longer have a monopoly on space exploration. In two or three decades, we will have entrepreneurs taking us on private spaceflights to the moon. That is what has become possible.
What has changed since the days of the Apollo moon landings is that the cost of building technologies has dropped exponentially. What cost billions of dollars then costs millions now, and sometimes even less. Our smartphones have computers that are more powerful than the Cray supercomputers of yesteryear — which had strict export controls and cost tens of millions of dollars. We carry high-definition cameras in our pockets that are more powerful than those on NASA spacecraft. The cameras in the Mars Curiosity Rover, for example, have a resolution of 2 megapixels with 8GB of flash memory, the same as our clunky first-generation iPhones. The Apollo Guidance Computer, which took humans to the moon in 1966, had a 2.048 MHz processor — slower than those you find in calculators and musical greeting cards.
The same technologies as are available in the United States and Europe are available worldwide. Innovation has globalized.
I met Team Indus while I was in Mumbai to speak at INK last November. When they told me they were competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. I didn’t take them seriously because I had seen their counterpart in Silicon Valley, Moon Express, which has the support of tech moguls such as Naveen Jain. How could a scrawny little startup in Bangalore take on Naveen Jain, former NASA engineer Bob Richards, and NASA itself, I thought. The Moon Express team is a force of nature, has the advantage of being on the NASA Ames Research campus, and has been given R&D worth billions of dollars by NASA.
Team Indus was also up against Astrobotic, which is a spinoff from the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, and Israel-based SpaceIL, which has the backing of the country’s top research institutes.
The company’s win blew my mind. Even though the subject of my INK talk was how Indian entrepreneurs could help change the world, I didn’t think it was already happening.
(See my Jan. 1 story on the Indian tech scene and watch this talk to learn more: Why India shouldn’t be succeeding but is.)
The Bangalore-based startup was founded by former I.T. executive Rahul Narayan and four of his friends: an Air Force pilot, a marketing executive, an investment banker, and an aerospace engineer. None of the team had experience in building spacecraft or robots, yet they were able to build technology that could navigate to the moon.
Narayan says he expects completion of his space mission to cost around $30 million. Moon Express chief executive Bob Richards estimates $50 million. These numbers are higher than the $20 million prize that they hope to win. But both see far greater opportunities: They hope to be pioneers in what could be a trillion-dollar industry. Richards is looking to mine the moon for minerals and bring them back to Earth. Each payload could be worth billions.
The Google Lunar XPRIZE has 26 teams competing from around the world. Collectively, they will spend in the hundreds of millions of dollars on their efforts. For them, it is not all about winning the contest; many of the losers will still commercialize their space technologies or put their knowledge to use in other fields. This is the power of such competitions. They lead entrants to spend multiples of the offered purse on innovative solutions. And they motivate people outside the industry, such as Narayan, to enter it with out-of-the-box thinking.
Innovation prizes are not new. In fact, a number of celebrated historical feats were made possible, in part, by the desire to win these prizes. In the 1920s, New York hotel owner Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize to the first person to fly non-stop between New York and Paris. Several unsuccessful attempts were made before an American airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh won the competition in 1927 with his plane, The Spirit of St. Louis.
Lindbergh’s achievement made him a national hero and a global celebrity. And it sparked the interest and investment that led to the modern aviation industry.
That is what I expect will come of the Lunar XPRIZE. And that is why I am looking forward to booking my round-trip ticket to the moon one summer in the 2030s.
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| The eye can detect light at wavelengths in the visual spectrum. Other wavelengths, such as infrared and ultraviolet, are supposed to be invisible to the human eye, but Washington University scientists have found that under certain conditions, it’s possible for us to see otherwise invisible infrared light. Image: Sara Dickherber |
Excerpt from
news.wustl.edu
By Jim Dryden
Any science textbook will tell you we can’t see infrared light. Like X-rays and radio waves, infrared light waves are outside the visual spectrum.
But an international team of researchers co-led by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that under certain conditions, the retina can sense infrared light after all.
Using cells from the retinas of mice and people, and powerful lasers that emit pulses of infrared light, the researchers found that when laser light pulses rapidly, light-sensing cells in the retina sometimes get a double hit of infrared energy. When that happens, the eye is able to detect light that falls outside the visible spectrum.
The findings are published Dec. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Online Early Edition. The research was initiated after scientists on the research team reported seeing occasional flashes of green light while working with an infrared laser. Unlike the laser pointers used in lecture halls or as toys, the powerful infrared laser the scientists worked with emits light waves thought to be invisible to the human eye.
“They were able to see the laser light, which was outside of the normal visible range, and we really wanted to figure out how they were able to sense light that was supposed to be invisible,” said Frans Vinberg, PhD, one of the study’s lead authors and a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at Washington University.
Vinberg, Kefalov and their colleagues examined the scientific literature and revisited reports of people seeing infrared light. They repeated previous experiments in which infrared light had been seen, and they analyzed such light from several lasers to see what they could learn about how and why it sometimes is visible.
“We experimented with laser pulses of different durations that delivered the same total number of photons, and we found that the shorter the pulse, the more likely it was a person could see it,” Vinberg explained. “Although the length of time between pulses was so short that it couldn’t be noticed by the naked eye, the existence of those pulses was very important in allowing people to see this invisible light.”
Robert Boston
Kefalov’s team developed this adapter that allowed scientists to analyze retinal cells and photopigment molecules as they were exposed to infrared light. The device already is commercially available and in use at several vision research centers around the world.
Robert Boston
Frans Vinberg, PhD (left), and Vladimir J. Kefalov, PhD, sit in front of a tool they developed that allows them to detect light responses from retinal cells and photopigment molecules.
New reports of further evidence for dark matter have been greatly exaggerated. Yesterday, researchers working with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion cosmic ray detector attached to the International Space Station, reported their latest data on a supposed excess of high-energy positrons from space. They contended—at least in a press release—that the new results could offer new hints that they’ve detected particles of dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity binds the galaxies. But several cosmic ray physicists say that the AMS data are still perfectly consistent with much more mundane explanations of the excess. And they doubt AMS alone will resolve the issue.
The leader of the AMS team, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, takes care to say that the new results do not prove that AMS has detected dark matter. But he also says the data lend more support to that interpretation than to some others. "The key statement is that we have not found a contradiction with the dark matter explanation," he says.
The controversy centers on AMS's measurement of a key ratio, the number of antimatter positrons to the sum of positrons and electrons. In April 2013, AMS confirmed early reports that as the energy of the particles increased above about 8 gigaelectron Volts (GeV), that ratio, or "positron fraction," increased, even as the individual fluxes of electrons and positrons were falling. That increase in the relative abundance of positrons could signal the presence of dark matter particles. According to many theories, if those particles collide, they would annihilate each other to produce electron-positron pairs. That would alter the balance of electrons and positrons among cosmic rays, as the usual source such as the cloudlike remnants of supernova explosions produce far more electrons than positrons.
However, that interpretation was hardly certain. Even before AMS released its measurement of the ratio, astrophysicists had argued that the excess positrons could potentially emanate from an undetected nearby pulsar. In November 2013, Eli Waxman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues went even further. They argued that the excess positrons could come simply from the interactions of "primary" cosmic rays from supernova remnants with the interstellar medium. If so, then the positrons were just "secondary" rays and nothing to write home about.
However, AMS team researchers see two new features that are consistent with the dark matter interpretation, they reported online yesterday in Physical Review Letters. First, the AMS team now sees that after rising with energy, the positron fraction seems to level off and may begin to fall at an energy of 275 GeV, as would be expected if the excess were produced by colliding dark matter particles, as the original particles' mass would put an upper limit on the energy of the positron they spawned. AMS researchers say the leveling off would be consistent with a dark matter particle with a mass of 1 teraelectron volt (TeV). (Thanks to Albert Einstein’s famous equivalence of mass and energy, the two can be measured in the same units.)
Second, the AMS team measured the spectra of electrons and positrons individually. They found that the spectra have different shapes as energy increases. "It's really surprising that the electrons and positrons are so different," Ting says. And, he argues, the difference suggests that the positrons cannot be secondary cosmic rays produced by primary cosmic ray electrons, as such production should lead to similar spectra.
But some cosmic ray physicists aren't convinced. For example, in AMS's graph of the electron fraction, the error bars at the highest energies are large because the high-energy particles are so rare. And those uncertainties make it unclear whether the positron fraction really starts to drop, says Stéphane Coutu, a cosmic ray physicist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. And even if the positron fraction does fall at energies higher than AMS reported, that wouldn't prove the positrons come from dark matter annihilations, Coutu says. Such a "cutoff" could easily arise in positrons from a pulsar, he says, if the spatial region in which the pulsar accelerates particles is of limited size. All told, the new results are "probably consistent with anything," Coutu says.
Similarly, Waxman questions Ting's claim that the new data suggest the positrons aren't simply secondary cosmic rays. If that were the case, then the electrons and positrons would be coming from different places and there would be no reason to expect their spectra to be similar, Waxman says. Moreover, he notes, AMS's measurement of the positron fraction seems to level out just at the limit that he and colleagues predicted would be the maximum achievable through secondary cosmic rays. So, in fact, the new data support the interpretation that the positrons are simply secondary cosmic rays, he says. "To me this is a very strong indication that we are seeing cosmic ray interactions.”
Will the argument ever end? AMS is scheduled to take data for 10 more years, which should enable scientists to whittle down the uncertainties and extend their reach toward higher energies, Ting says. "I think we should be able to reach 1 TeV with good statistics," he says, and that should be enough to eventually settle the dispute. But Gregory Tarlé, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says, "I don't think that's a legitimate claim." Higher energy cosmic rays arrive at such a low rate that even quadrupling the data set would leave large statistical uncertainties, he says. So, Tarlé suspects, years from now the AMS results will likely look about as ambiguous they do now.
The leader of the AMS team, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, takes care to say that the new results do not prove that AMS has detected dark matter. But he also says the data lend more support to that interpretation than to some others. "The key statement is that we have not found a contradiction with the dark matter explanation," he says.
The controversy centers on AMS's measurement of a key ratio, the number of antimatter positrons to the sum of positrons and electrons. In April 2013, AMS confirmed early reports that as the energy of the particles increased above about 8 gigaelectron Volts (GeV), that ratio, or "positron fraction," increased, even as the individual fluxes of electrons and positrons were falling. That increase in the relative abundance of positrons could signal the presence of dark matter particles. According to many theories, if those particles collide, they would annihilate each other to produce electron-positron pairs. That would alter the balance of electrons and positrons among cosmic rays, as the usual source such as the cloudlike remnants of supernova explosions produce far more electrons than positrons.
However, that interpretation was hardly certain. Even before AMS released its measurement of the ratio, astrophysicists had argued that the excess positrons could potentially emanate from an undetected nearby pulsar. In November 2013, Eli Waxman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues went even further. They argued that the excess positrons could come simply from the interactions of "primary" cosmic rays from supernova remnants with the interstellar medium. If so, then the positrons were just "secondary" rays and nothing to write home about.
However, AMS team researchers see two new features that are consistent with the dark matter interpretation, they reported online yesterday in Physical Review Letters. First, the AMS team now sees that after rising with energy, the positron fraction seems to level off and may begin to fall at an energy of 275 GeV, as would be expected if the excess were produced by colliding dark matter particles, as the original particles' mass would put an upper limit on the energy of the positron they spawned. AMS researchers say the leveling off would be consistent with a dark matter particle with a mass of 1 teraelectron volt (TeV). (Thanks to Albert Einstein’s famous equivalence of mass and energy, the two can be measured in the same units.)
Second, the AMS team measured the spectra of electrons and positrons individually. They found that the spectra have different shapes as energy increases. "It's really surprising that the electrons and positrons are so different," Ting says. And, he argues, the difference suggests that the positrons cannot be secondary cosmic rays produced by primary cosmic ray electrons, as such production should lead to similar spectra.
But some cosmic ray physicists aren't convinced. For example, in AMS's graph of the electron fraction, the error bars at the highest energies are large because the high-energy particles are so rare. And those uncertainties make it unclear whether the positron fraction really starts to drop, says Stéphane Coutu, a cosmic ray physicist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. And even if the positron fraction does fall at energies higher than AMS reported, that wouldn't prove the positrons come from dark matter annihilations, Coutu says. Such a "cutoff" could easily arise in positrons from a pulsar, he says, if the spatial region in which the pulsar accelerates particles is of limited size. All told, the new results are "probably consistent with anything," Coutu says.
Similarly, Waxman questions Ting's claim that the new data suggest the positrons aren't simply secondary cosmic rays. If that were the case, then the electrons and positrons would be coming from different places and there would be no reason to expect their spectra to be similar, Waxman says. Moreover, he notes, AMS's measurement of the positron fraction seems to level out just at the limit that he and colleagues predicted would be the maximum achievable through secondary cosmic rays. So, in fact, the new data support the interpretation that the positrons are simply secondary cosmic rays, he says. "To me this is a very strong indication that we are seeing cosmic ray interactions.”
Will the argument ever end? AMS is scheduled to take data for 10 more years, which should enable scientists to whittle down the uncertainties and extend their reach toward higher energies, Ting says. "I think we should be able to reach 1 TeV with good statistics," he says, and that should be enough to eventually settle the dispute. But Gregory Tarlé, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says, "I don't think that's a legitimate claim." Higher energy cosmic rays arrive at such a low rate that even quadrupling the data set would leave large statistical uncertainties, he says. So, Tarlé suspects, years from now the AMS results will likely look about as ambiguous they do now.
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, built in 1868, is considered a historical landmark in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It’s also rumored to be haunted, and its alleged resident ghost has a bizarre origin story.
In 1886, plans were made to construct a new tower for the church. Two Swedish stonemasons were hired for the job, but they both mysteriously disappeared before the tower was finished. Because of this setback, the tower went unfinished until 1927.
The problem was the unexplained eerie happenings that started to occur inside the church, along with sightings of a mysterious ghostly figure. Whenever construction was planned on the tower, workers often became too frightened to finish the job. The workmen were even granted permission to build a private isolated room to accommodate their ghostly friend.
Decades later, Reverend Eugene Todd was serving as pastor at St. Mark’s when he received a surprise explanation for these supernatural occurrences. He had been summoned to a nursing home in Denver, where an elderly dying patient had requested confession with him. The man claimed he was one of the two Swedish stonemasons who had mysteriously vanished while working on the church many years ago.
Apparently, the other stonemason had accidentally fallen to his death in the unfinished bell tower. His partner was terrified that he would be blamed for the death, so he decided to entomb the body under cement inside an unfinished wall section before fleeing the area. Although the missing stonemason’s body has never been found, many people found the old man’s story credible and believe that the stonemason’s ghost haunts the church.
The stroke of midnight is here. Prepare yourselves for a quantum leap in consciousness. …..What is next for us cosmically? The huge Mayan shift back in 2012 has definitely left us with something to think about, but is anyone really aware of just what that shift filled with subtle nuances entails? How do we identify with anything subtle in this not-so-subtle world?Why aren’t we seeing the effects of a shift in the world? Doesn’t it feel as if things have just gotten far w [...]
St. Francis Prayer
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