219 results found.
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 127: Jan-Feb 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Some Funny Things Happened On The Way Around The World Weird things happen in the weightlessness of an orbiting spacecraft. In the many videos shot aboard the Space Shuttle s, we are treated to tools, even gently oscillating globules of water, floating aimlessly in midair. Even stranger are the effects of microgravity on humans and other life forms. Astronauts, for example, when they first arrive in orbit, sometimes perceive their world to be upside-down regardless of their orientation. Their nervous systems were apparently thrown for a loop when the force of gravity was cancelled out. These illusions disappear later in the mission. Speaking of loops, consider the medaka. This fish is the only vertebrate to have mated and laid eggs that developed into offspring in microgravity. Said offspring are doomed to lives of somersaulting swimming. (Wassersug, Richard J.; "Life without Gravity," Nature, 401:758, 1999.) Comment. Could there be a connection to the nervous affliction of tumbler pigeons? See BBB8 in Biological Anomalies: Birds. From Science Frontiers #127, JAN-FEB 2000 . 1997 William R. Corliss ...
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... everyone bandies about. To illustrate, humans have only 46 chromosomes, while the great apes all have 48. The 1.5 % figure doesn't hint at this significant difference. Next, take a look at chromosome #9 in humans and the great apes. Chromosome bandings are different enough to raise further suspicions about the 1.5 % figure. (Gibbons, Ann; "Which of Our Genes Make Us Human?" Science, 281:1432, 1998.) Comments. It is easy to see how gross comparisons of DNA might miss important details. The popular "DNA-hybridization" method simply mixes together strands of DNA from the two species being compared. These are allowed to combine, and then they are heated to see how much temperature is required to force them apart. Chromosome numbers and bandings have little if any effect on these crude comparisons of the bare DNA strands that have been stripped from their genes and chromosomes. The significance of all this transcends the comparisons of humans and chimps. Modern taxonomy of all life forms depends increasingly upon DNA comparisons rather than upon morphology. If DNA comparisons can be as misleading as they are in humans and chimps, those textbook family trees that are supposed to tell us how life evolved may also be giving us an erroneous history of life. To underscore the problem, sometimes DNA genetic differences do not result in big morphological changes. For example, Three-toed Woodpeckers hammer on trees all over the northern reaches of North America and Eurasia. These birds all look alike and interbreed freely. Yet, some ...
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... pieces of marvelously clear yellow-green glass -- not just any glass but ultra-pure glass, 98% silica. As often the case, Clayton was not the first to come across the now-famous Libyan Desert Glass or LDG. Prehistoric humans had made knives and other sharp-edged tools from it; the ancient Egyptians had carved a scarab from LDG and deposited it in Tutankhamen's tomb. But Clayton and the ancients did not recognize the scientific implications of their discovery. LDG is the purest natural silica glass ever found. Over a thousand tons of it are strewn across hundreds of kilometers of bleak desert. Some of the chunks weigh 26 kilograms, but most LDG exists in smaller, angular pieces looking like shards left when a giant green bottle was smashed by colossal forces. Pure as it is, LDG does contain tiny bubbles, white wisps, and inky black swirls. The whitish inclusions consist of refractory minerals, such as cristobalite. The ink-like swirls, though, are rich in iridium, which is diagnostic of an extraterrestrial impact -- meteorite or comet. The iridium leads to the heart of the LDG problem: Where did this immense amount of widely dispersed glass shards come from? Was it really created during the searing, sand-melting impact of a cosmic projectile? This is how today's catastrophists would have it? At least three "minor" problems bedevil the accepted impact theory. The surface of the Great Sand Sea shows no sign of a giant crater. Neither do microwave probes deep into the sand by satellite radar ...
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... - if you are normal. But some people are abnormal. Recall from SF#125, the savant who could tell at a glance that 111 matches littered the floor without counting each individually. He grasped 111-ness! At the other end of the scale, Signora Gaddi cannot even distinguish that 20 is greater then 10. She cannot use the telephone or catch numbered busses. Facts involving numbers above four are a mystery to her. Even when there are four or fewer objects, she must count them one-byone. Nevertheless, Gaddi's intelligence and social skills are normal. She lost her number-savvy when she suffered a stroke that apparently short-circuited that number module over her ear. Are other mammals equipped with number modules? No one knows. And what forces encouraged the human brain to sprout a few extra cells on the inferior parietal lobule; that is, the number module? Did the sense of fiveness give some mutant ancient humans superiority over less-evolved humans? Finally, what factors pushed the number module's capacity to 111 in that savant, or is the savant's talent intrinsic to all of us but somehow suppressed? (Dahaene, Stanislas; "Counting on Our Brains," Nature, 401:114, 1999. Motluk, Alison; "True Grit," New Scientist, p. 46, July 3, 1999.) From Science Frontiers #126, NOV-DEC 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 122: Mar-Apr 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Earth Hums More Loudly In The Afternoons It has been known for almost a century that large earthquakes set the earth to ringing like a bell. In SF#118, we reported that the planet also "hums" when there have been no earthquakes. Just what forces stimulate this seismic humming of the earth-as-a -whole is still a matter of conjecture. Actually, "hum" is a poor choice of words. The period of these vibrations ranges from 3 to 8 minutes, which puts them in the range of infrasound. Recently, N. Suda of Nagoya University has found a clue suggesting that thunderstorms may excite these very-lowfrequency vibrations. Suda and his colleagues analyzed the seismic records at four seismically quiet locations around the globe and discovered that the hum is loudest between noon and 8 PM local time. The quietest period is from midnight to 6 AM. These are the same time frames when thunderstorms are most active and quiet. It's circumstantial evidence, but it makes sense. (Kerr, Richard A.; "Earth Seems to Hum along with the Wind," Science, 283:321, 1999.) Comment. Infrasound in the atmosphere may originate from storms thousands of miles away and from strong winds blowing across mountain crests. It appears that the earth is an immense, spherical aeolian harp! From Science Frontiers #122, MAR-APR 1999 . 1999-2000 ...
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... Time Hallucination Duplication in Time Men-in-Black Black helicopters [X ] Pyramid Power PLD OUT-OF-THE-BODY EXPERIENCES Out-of-the-Body Experiences (OBEs) OBEs under Morbid Conditions PLS HALLUCINATIONS STIMULATED BY MECHANICAL DEVICES Visual Hallucinations Stimulated by Crystal Balls and Similar Devices Auditory Hallucinations Stimulated by Tape Recorders and Similar Devices Odd Perceptions Optical Illusions [PIB] PP PSYCHIC BIOLOGY PPA ALLERGY AND ASTHMA Allergies Asthma PPB BODILY PARAMETERS AFFECTED BY THE MIND Temperature Odor Heart Rate Physical Performance Reflexes Alpha-Rhythm Visual Perception Color Blindness Deafness Fatigue Sleep Physical Size (Breast Size) Luminosity Auras [PLG] PPC CANCER AND THE MIND Cancer Onset Cancer Remission PPD DEATH Willed Death Suicide Twin Effect Birthday Phenomenon PPE PREGNANCY False Pregnancy Couvade Labor Onset Birth Defects PPG GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS (PSYCHOLOGICAL "FORCES) Hypnotism Faith and Prayer Healing Charms, Snakestones, Elixirs Imaging and Visualization Touch Therapy (Laying-on-of-Hands Placebos Stress and Depression Will Power Media Suggestion Yoga Meditation Voodoo, Curses, Hexes Belief Systems (Christian Science) Prophecy Homeopathy Acupuncture Mental Exaltation Unknown (" Miracle" Cures) Dreams Telepathy PPI IMMUNE SYSTEM Immune System PPM MIGRAINE Migraine PPP PAIN Pain Relief Phantom-Limb Phenomena Sympathetic Pain Fire-Walking PPS SKIN DISEASES AND PHENOMENA Stigmata and Psychosomatic Bleeding Blister Raising through Hypnosis Wart Removal Skin Electrical Properties Skin-Writing/Autographism Allergy Tests Eczema Patch Tests and Hypnosis PPT DENTAL HEALTH Caries and the Mind PPW WOUND-HEALING AND BLEEDING Wound Healing Bleeding PPX BODY CHEMISTRY Histamine Release Hemoglobin Response Poison Tolerance PS PSYCHOKINESIS PSB MENTAL CONTROL OF BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES Control over Microorganisms Control over Plants ...
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... Jupiter's Decametric Radiation AJL JUPITER'S REMARKABLE GALILEAN SATELLITES AND RING AJL1 Pre-Voyager Sightings of Jupiter's Ring AJL2 Io's Bizarre Physical Makeup AJL3 Io's Anomalously Energetic Volcanos AJL4 Ganymede's Grooved Terrain AJL5 Europa's Lineaments AJL6 Temporary Disappearance of Ganymede AJW JOVIAN ATMOSPHERIC PHENOMENA AJW1 Periodicities of Jovian Atmospheric Features AJX TRANSIT AND OCCULTATION PHENOMENA AJX1 Distorted Shapes of Galilean Satellites in Transit AJX2 Hot Satellite Shadows AJX3 Dark Transits of Galilean Satellites AJX4 Double Shadows of Io AJX5 Limb Phenomena during Occultations and Transits AJX6 Post-Eclipse Brightening of Io AJX7 Discrepancies in Predictions of of Eclipses and Transits AJX JUPITER'S MAGNETIC FIELD AJX1 Offset Magnetic Field AL THE MOON ALB THE MOON'S ORBITAL ANOMALIES ALB1 Earth-Moon Instability ALB2 Discrepancies in the Moon's Ephemeris ALB3 Nongravitational Forces and Earth-Moon Acceleration Discrepancies ALB4 Earth-Moon Acceleration Incompatible with Moon's Origin in Earth Orbit ALE LUNAR GEOLOGY PROBLEMS ALE1 Asymmetrical Distribution of Maria and Large Basins ALE2 Sinuous Rilles and Formations Resembling Terrestrial Water-Formed Features ALE3 The Lunar Rays ALE4 Lunar Features Seemingly Shaped by Ice ALE5 Swirl Markings ALE6 Anomalous Red Formations ALE7 Layered Structures ALE8 Lunar Glasses ALE9 Nonrandom Distribution of Lunar Craters ALE10 Unexplained Minor Surface Features ALE11 Large-Scale Asymmetries in in Composition ALE12 Dark-Haloed Lunar Craters ALE13 Local Concentrations of Radioactivity ALE14 Scarcity of Dust and Meteoric Material ALE15 Young Lunar-Surface Ages ALE16 Local Concentration of Volatiles ALE17 Lunar Soils Older Than Associated Rocks ALE18 Problems in Dating Lunar Rocks and Soils ALE19 Compositional Differences between Earth and Moon ALE20 Apparently Anomalous Long Term Persistence of Craters ALE21 Alignment of Mascons ...
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... Foetuses of Their Twins Human Pheromones Correlated with Beauty Pixies and the Williams Syndrome Change of Eye Color with Age Skin Color Correlated with Weather Male Fertility Correlated with Finger Length Anomalous Sound Production The Devil's Spot and Witch Pricking BHB ANOMALOUS HUMAN BEHAVIOR BHB1 Apparently Irrational Human Behavior BHB2 Similarities in the Behaviors of Identical Twins Reared Apart BHB3 Correlation of Disturbed Human Behavior and Solar Activity BHB4 Correlation of Disturbed Human Behavior and Lunar Phase BHB5 Correlations of Disturbed Human Behavior, Stormy Weather, and Infrasound BHB6 Correlation of Human Behavior and Climate and/or Season of the Year BHB7 Unusual Behavior Induced by Rhythmic Stimuli [BHH8, PBH] BHB8 Cyclicity of Violent Collective Behavior BHB9 A Relationship between Number of Wars and Number Killed BHB10 Correlation of Economic Activity with Solar Activity BHB11 Correlation of Economic Activity with the Lunar Tidal Forces BHB12 Correlation of Economic Activity with Solar-System Configurations BHB13 Periodicities in Various Economic Parameters BHB14 Human Culture: An Enigma of Evolution BHB15 Cycles of Religiousness BHB16 "Flock Behavior" in Human Groups BHB17 The Evolution and Persistence of Altruism BHB18 The Evolution and Persistence of Homosexuality BHB19 Unusual Human Sexual Activity BHB20 The Puzzle of Human Handedness BHB21 Handedness and Longevity BHB22 Handedness and Health BHB23 Handedness and Mathematical and Verbal Abilities BHB24 The Uniqueness of Bipedalism BHB25 Human Asymmetry in Locomotion BHB26 Wolf-Children BHB27 Eminence Correlated with Time of Birth BHB28 General Eminence Correlated with Planetary Position BHB29 Eminence in Sports Champions Correlated with the Position of Mars; the "Mars Effect" BHB30 Cultural Creativity Correlated with Solar Activity BHB31 Cultural Flowering Correlated with Climate BHB32 Eminence and Order of Birth BHB33 Periodicity in the Population of Living Eminent People ...
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... GRAVITATIONAL PHENOMENA GGF VARIATIONS IN GRAVITY Nontidal Variations of the Gravitational Field Periodic Changes in Gravity GGH MAGNETIC HILLS Spook Hill and Kin GH PHENOMENA OF THE HYDROSPHERE GHC UNUSUAL PHENOMENA OF WATER SURFACES GHC1 Foam Strips on Inland Waters GHC2 Streaks, Slicks, Calm Patches GHC3 Stratified Typhoon Waves GHC4 Sudden Whitening of Dead Sea GHC5 Dead Water and Slippery Seas GHC6 Bulging River Surfaces GHC7 Swiftly Traveling Surface Disturbances GHC8 Honeycomb Appearance of Flowing Water Remarkable Convection Patterns in Ponds Long Lines of Microorganisms on the Ocean Surface Massive Foam Accumulations Storm Footprints on the Ocean as Seen from Orbit Remarkable Falling and Rising Lake Levels Parting of the Red Sea Reversal of Niagra Falls and Related Phenomena GHG GEYSERS, PERIODIC WELLS, BLOWING CAVES GHG1 Geysers at Sea GHG2 Geysers and Blowing Wells Correlated with Weather Phenomena GHG3 Geysers and Intermittent Wells Correlated with Tidal Forces GHG4 Cold-Water Geysers and Periodic Springs and Wells [GHQ6] Hydrothermal Earthquake Precursors Hydrothermal Explosions Effect of Earthquakes upon Geyser Activity GHS THE BEWILDERING VARIETY OF TIDES GHS1 Sun-Dominated Tides GHS2 Sea and Lake Seiches... GHS3 Spectacular Tidal Bores GHS4 Diurnal, Triple, and Quadruple Tides GHS5 Long-Period Tides of Unexpected Strengths GHS6 Tides That Precede the Moon Extraordinary Tsunamis Tsunami Cycles GHT OCEAN TURBULENCE AND CIRCULATION PHENOMENA GHT1 Extraordinary Deep Circulation Events GHT2 Sonar-Detected Subsurface Oceanic Structures GHT3 Nonvolcanic Underwater Eruptions GHT4 Anomalous El Ninos GHT5 The Guinea Tide GHT6 Energy Transfer to Hurricanes GHT7 Oceanic Rings and Eddies GHT8 Large-Scale Oceanic Chemical Anomalies Deep-Sea Storms Curious Drifts Gas-Hydrate Blowouts Great Whirlpools and Vortices The Gibraltar Dam Oceanic Megaplumes Gulf-Stream Reversal Oceanic Dead Zones Organized Structures in ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 123: May-Jun 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Storm-Swept Cosmos Snug and comfy beneath our insulating atmosphere and magnetosphere, we muse glibly about voyages to the stars and wonder whether extraterrestrials may already have established galactic civilizations. What we often ignore is the fact that forces and energies almost beyond our comprehension course through the cosmos. Even the Starship Enterprise could not really survive out there. Three cautionary tidits will illustrate the hazards as well as our ignorance of them. "What could possibly accelerate a single subatomic particle to such a high speed, 99.99999999999999999999 percent that of light, that it would smash into the earth's atmosphere with the energy of a hard-hit tennis ball? If you don't have a clue you're not alone. These particles are ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which are billions of times more energetic than the run-of-the-mill cosmic rays that continuously bombard earth's atmosphere." (Anonymous; "Space Streakers," Astronomy, 27:34, March 1999.) "The most powerful explosion ever ever observed -- a deep space eruption detected in January -- released in just seconds a burst of energy equal to billions of years of light from thousands of suns. Researchers say in studies to be published today that the explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, occurred 9 billion light years from earth. What caused the explosion is a mystery." (Anonymous ...
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... soon as rain started to fall." (Smedley, R.; "Corposants," Marine Observer, 69:55, 1999.) Comments. The corposant's six-fold symmetry is like that of snowflakes. Strange as it may sound, they may be a connection. First, recall what J. Maddox once wrote about snowflakes in Nature. "But the symmetry of the whole crystal, represented by the exquisite six-fold symmetry of the standard snowflake, must be the consequence of some cooperative phenomenon involving the growing crystal as a whole. What can that be? What can tell one growing face of a crystal (in three dimensions this time) what the shape of the opposite face is like?" (SF#38) The speculation is that electrical forces may control the long-range symmetry of snowflakes as well as the unusual six-fold symmetry of the corposant described above. It's a thought anyway. The word "corposant" is said to be derived from the Latin for "bodies of the saints." It seems that the corpses of some of the saints have been luminous! (See BHA22 in Humans I .) From Science Frontiers #124, JUL-AUG 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 127: Jan-Feb 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Natural Stone Spheres Whenever we see nearly perfectly wrought stone spheres in natural settings, we usually jump to the conclusion that they have been shaped by human hands. We assume that natural forces are too erratic to sculpt such neat geometrical solids. This stance is sometimes justified, as confirmed by the hundreds of precisely executed stone spheres found in the jungles of Costa Rica. Nature herself, however, is often an expert craftswoman. Some concretions are beautifically spherical, so are some spheres fashioned in volcanic calderas. In Utah, though, southeast of Cleveland, in a formation called the Molen Reef, there are literally millions of stone spheres of more mysterious origin. E. Hansen described these in a recent issue of the Ancient American. "The spheres range in size from as small as a baseball to over 10 feet in diameter. The bigger ones are more perfectly round than smaller examples. After a lifetime of trying to form a theory of how these were formed, I can only throw up my hands in surrender! They are clearly formed as mud on a lake bottom, because when two touch, one will indent the other, or both will be equally distorted. The mud simply hardened over time into sandstone." (Hansen, Evan; "Stone Spheres of the American West," Ancient American, no. 29, p. 31, 1999.) Comment. Smaller lithified "mudballs" (usually under 1 ...
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... Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Anomalous Sky Flash December 28, 1980. In the South At antic. "At approximately 2245 GMT on a moonless night the entire ship and immediate surrounding area were illuminated by what can be best described as a great camera flash. The flash was bluish-white and a small bolt of lightning appeared to be centered just above the vessel's samson posts. No noise was heard and the flash lasted only a second. The sky was clear at the time and stars of all magnitudes were clearly visible. The only clouds that could be seen were two or three small cumulus clouds; one of these was above the vessel and the others were moving towards us from the south, our course being l42 (T ) and the wind being S'E , force 3. The cloud above the vessel was at a height of about 600 feet." (Rutherford, N.W .C .; "Unidentified Phenomena," Marine Observer, 51:186, 1981.) Comment. This was obviously not ordi nary lightning, but the small cloud and small bolt of lightning indicate some sort of anomalous electrical discharge. The literature contains many other reports of bright sky flashes that cannot be attributed to meteors, heat lightning, or other sources. Reference. Entry GLA14 in Lightning, Auroras contains additional examples of all-sky flashes. This Catalog volume is described here . From Science Frontiers #21, MAY-JUN 1982 . 1982-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Hardball for Keeps Connecticut "Boat" Cairn "High"-tech Farming At Tiahuanaco Astronomy The Cosmological Atlantis Mysterious Bright Arcs May Be the Largest Objects in the Universe Too Many Short-period Comets Quantized Galaxy Redshifts The Fossil Record and the Quantization of Life! Biology Whales and Seafloor Pits Strange Patterns in Another Oceanic Habitat Lunar Magnetic Mollusc Monarchs Slighted -- sorry! Did We Learn to Swim Before We Learned to Walk? How Cancers Fight Chemotherapy The Melanic Moth Myth Chain of Crevicular Habitats? Feathered Flights of Fancy Geology Why Are Antarctic Meteorites Different? More on the Soviet Plume Events Geophysics Sympathetic Lightning Ball Lightning Burns A Rayed Circle on A Shed Wall Magnetic Precursors of Large Storms On the Trail of the Fifth Force Psychology Do You Hear What I Hear? Mind-bending the Velocity Vectors of Marine Algae ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 101: Sep-Oct 1995 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Death waves and seebars A comprehensive, 12-page article on seiches appeared in the July/August issue of American Scientist, and it was awash with curious observations. A seiche (pronounced "saysh") is a rhythmic rocking motion of a body of water that has been disturbed by natural forces, such as sudden weather changes and, especially, earthquakes. A famous example of the latter seichedriving force occurred on March 27, 1964, when the Great Alaskan Earthquake sent seismic waves rippling around the globe. Fourteen minutes after this quake, the tremors reached the U.S . Gulf coast and triggered numerous seiches in bays, harbors, canals, bayous, etc. Some crest-to-trough waterlevel oscillations reached 2 meters in amplitude. Startling though these seiches were to Gulf fishermen, most seiches are wellexplained. Bodies of water that are mostly enclosed have natural frequencies of oscillation or "sloshing," just as do coffee cups and bathtubs. The Alaskan quake just operated on a larger scale than a bump to your coffee cup! Short-period oscillations in the tidal record from Puerto Princesa, Palawan Island, Philippines. These are coastal seiches, but hardly "death waves"! So far, so good. But there are exists an interesting -- and sometimes dangerous -- class of related events that affects open coastal waters. The Irish call them "death waves." In the Baltic, they are ...
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... NSF-supported scientists have discovered the presence of an ancient conduit deep in the Earth's mantle beneath Brazil. "The conduit appears to have remained geographically fixed with respect to the overlying continent despite thousands of kilometers of South American plate motion. This observation runs contrary to a major tenet of plate tectonic theory -- that the motion of lithospheric plates is essentially independent of flow in the upper mantle beneath the plates -- and implies that the upper mantle and the overlying South American continent have remained coupled since the breakup of the Gondwanaland super-continent and opening of the South Atlantic Ocean some 120 million years ago. This result also implies that large-scale convection in the mantle may be responsible for the motion of the great continental plates, such as South America, where the driving
force for plate motion has not been well understood." (Dybas, Cheryl; NSFNEWS Digest 54, November 8, 1995. Cr. D. Swaner. NSF= National Science Foundation. The cyber-address for the NSFNEWS Digest is:
[email protected] The computerless may read more in: VanDecar, John C., et al; "Seismic Evidence for a Fossil Mantle Plume beneath South America and Implications for Plate Driving
Forces," Nature, 378:25, 1995. From Science Frontiers #103, JAN-FEB 1996 . 1996-2000 William R. Corliss
...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 93: May-Jun 1994 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Giant Crystal At The Heart Of The Earth Geophysicists have been forced to consider this possibility because of two anomalies: Seismic waves from earthquakes pass through the earth's core faster when they travel parallel to the earth's axis than when they travel in the plane of the equator. The transit time difference is 2-4 seconds. Apparently, the earth's core is not perfectly spherical or its properties are different in different directions. The natural vibration or "ringing" frequencies of the earth are "split," that is, instead of a series of single "tones" we detect a series of closely paired frequencies. This is symptomatic of a core that is anisotropic; that is, its properties are different in different directions. J. Tromp, of Harvard, may have de-anomalized both sets of observations with a single theory: "For the shape of the core alone to explain the observations, he says, the shape of the inner core would have to be very unrealistic. Instead, he claims that the inner core behaves like a giant asymmetric crystal, aligned with the Earth's axis so that seismic waves travel faster in that direction. Tromp's analysis fits neatly with suggestions that the inner core is made of a high-pressure phase of iron in which the atoms are close-packed in hexagons, because such a 'sigma' phase is anisotropic." But, ...
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... you wonder why mainstream science advised that Sheldrake's book, A New Science of Life , be BURNT! Well, there was a lot of smoke but the theory survives. Nature, in fact, is full of observations, such as parallel evolution, that support the idea of morphic resonance. And in the laboratory, a few brave souls are conducting experiments that seem to confirm the theory more directly. "Using a novel laboratory approach, researchers at Yale University have been able to create a morphogenetic effect after stimulating only 100 subjects. They employed a series of trivial paper-and-pencil tasks (such as "Put an X in any one of the four boxes shown below"). Experimenters tallied how an initial group of 100 students responded to these tasks. Then they forced a second group of 100 students to respond to the tasks in a set manner (" Put an X in the third box below"). Finally, they presented the same tasks to a third group of 100 students, allowing them to complete them, as with the first group, however they wished." Results showed that in one task the third group had been unknowingly influenced by what the second group had been forced to do! This was interpreted as evidence of morphic resonance. (Anonymous; "New Evidence for Morphogenetic Field," Venture Inward , p. 10, September/October 1994.) Comment. There can be no doubt that morphogenetic fields do exist. Ever since they first made the pages of Science Frontiers in 1981 (SF#16), we ...
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... . 99: May-Jun 1995 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Did darwin get it all right?Believe it or not, the above title appeared in Science rather than the Creation Research Society Quarterly. (We never thought we'd see the day!) And right beneath, in large type, is: "The most thorough study yet of species formation in the fossil record confirms that new species appear with a most un-Darwinian abruptness after long periods of stability." In the article that follows, R.A . Kerr reviews several recent studies of fossil bryozoans and snails. Some of these painstaking dissections of the fossil record were carried out by scientists initially committed to Darwinian gradualism. Even these researchers have been forced to acknowledge that much biological evolution proceeds not in minute steps but by large jumps or saltations. Such abrupt speciation is tough enough to explain, but even more daunting are those species untouched by change over millions, even hundreds of millions of years. Indeed, the major characteristic of the fossil record and, therefore, earth life as a whole, has been stasis rather than speciation, despite all manner of asteroid impacts and climatic traumas. Nevertheless, many biologists think that species are somehow frozen in time by environmental forces that keep them from straying from their little niches. This being so, paleontologist D. Jablonski, University of Chicago, asks: If stability is the rule, how do you get large-scale shifts in morphology? How do you get from funny little Mesozoic mammals ...
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... didn't have supercomputers but they were able to incorporate into their theory much more than physics and cosmology. Below, E.G . McClain provides some insight into ancient Sumerian thinking: "In ancient Mesopotania,music, mathematics, art, science, religion, and poetic fantasy were fused. Around 3000 B.C ., the Sumerians simultaneously developed cuneiform writing, in which they recorded their pantheon, and a base-60 number system. Their gods were assigned numbers that encoded the primary ratios of music, with the gods' functions corresponding to their numbers in acoustical theory. Thus the Sumerians created an extensive tonal/arithmetical model for the cosmos. In this far-reaching allegory, the physical world is known by analogy, and the gods give divinity not only to natural forces but also to a 'supernatural,' intuitive understanding of mathematical patterns and psychological forces." To understand the role of musical theory in modeling the cosmos, one must realize that it involves: "the definition of intervals, the distance between pitches, by ratios of integers or counting numbers." For the ancient Sumerians music was a tool that helped them describe the cosmos. (McClain, Ernest G.; "Musical Theory and Ancient Cosmology," The World and I , p. 371, February 1994. Cr. L. Ellenberger) Comment. Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians were (supposedly) just emerging from barbarism. What did they need all this musical and mathematical modeling for? Why did their sophisticated analytical talents evolve at all? They would seem to ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 98: Mar-Apr 1995 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Nobel gossip!Have you heard that: Alfred Nobel originally planned to use his fortune for the construction of crematoria all over Europe, but opposition from the Catholic Church forced him to find another way to use his money; thus, the coveted prizes? And that Nobel never established a prize for mathematics because his wife had had an affair with a mathematician? (Griffith, John; "Smoke Scheme," New Scientist, p. 48, January 14, 1995) From Science Frontiers #98, MAR-APR 1995 . 1995-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 100: Jul-Aug 1995 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Weird Icicles Prism-like vertical icicle growing from a birdbath in Sussex, December 21, 1992. The British journal Weather has published two more photos of upside-down icicles. We reproduce one that is typical of the genre. [Another growing at an angle from a birdbath is sketched on SF#79.] In the formation of such icicles, liquid water is somehow forced upward from a reservoir through a central channel. As it reaches the top, it freezes. If this is indeed the mechanism, why do these upside-down icicles usually form crystal-like prisms with flat sides? (Bjørbaek, Gustav; "Unusual Ice Formations," Weather, 50:188, 1995.) Delightfully, the plot becomes more twisted with a beautiful horizontal helical icicle that was photographed in New Zealand. This truly strange icicle looks like a horizontal bedspring 6 inches long and 2 inches wide. There are eight complete turns in the helix. It has grown several times from a hairline crack in a handrail support which fills with water during a rainstorm. (Dowden, Richard, et al; "Helical Icicle," Weather, 49:435, 1994.) From Science Frontiers #100, JUL-AUG 1995 . 1995-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... There was some unusual and selective damage in the town and even in the village 20 km from the epicenter. Azimuth distribution of hurled frozen soil from the crater and damage had four lobes. But, on the other hand, a tree 10 m from the epicenter was undamaged. There was no damage on the ground level at a distance up to about 1 km from the crater (only ground swing and jerking), but several high suspended electric wires were torn off. At large distances, there was unusual damage at the ground level, and even water pipes at a distance up to 15 km from the epicenter were torn off. During the explosion, in closed and undamaged rooms, in most cases different things flew with soft landings, and even some people were transported by a unknown force. Hollow plastic toys and electric lamp bulbs exploded. Inner windows were smashed while outer ones were undamaged. At a distance of about 10 km from the main crater, two more pits in the ground appeared simultaneously with the main crater. Soil was hurled, and there were light phenomena." (Ol'khovatov, A. Yu.; personal communication, March 1994. Russian references cited by Ol'khovatov were: Izvestiya , p. 8, November 17, 1993; and Izv. AN USSR Earth Phys , 27:606, 1991.) From Science Frontiers #93, MAY-JUN 1994 . 1994-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... three researchers, though, continued their labors at Steens Mountain and have now offered additional, even more impressive data. They now find that the geomagnetic field probably shifted as much as 6 in a single day. Their work has been carried forward so professionally and meticulously that other scientists are finding their conclusions harder and harder to dismiss. Instead, the search is on for explanations of the rapid field changes. Three possibilities have been advanced -- all of them unpalatable to geophysicists: The Steens Mountain rocks are not faithful recorders of the main geomagnetic field. Should this be actually so, the whole field of paleomagnetism, including plate tectonics, is undermined, for it depends upon similar measurements. The earth's molten core can change rapidly, at least in some regions, in response to forces still unrecognized. This, of course, is not really a satisfying "explanation." The dynamo theory of the origin of the geomagnetic field is incorrect. (Coe, R.S ., et al; "New Evidence for Extraordinarily Rapid Change of the Geomagnetic Field during a Reversal," Nature, 374:687, 1995. Merrill, Ronald T.; "Principle of Least Astonishment," Nature, 374:674, 1995.) Reference. More puzzles of the geomagnetic field are provided in: Inner Earth. For details, visit: here . From Science Frontiers #101 Sep-Oct 1995 . 1995-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 98: Mar-Apr 1995 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Some Shaky Observations Back in SF#65, we offered an item on how wood turtles stomp the ground to force earthworms out of their burrows. (When humans do this -- and they do -- it is called "grunting for worms!) Other animals also use vibrations for communication and, rather surprisingly, for cutting leaves. Malaysian tree frogs. Zoologists already knew that Puerto Rican white-lipped frogs use vibrations to communicate amongst themselves. The Malaysian tree frog can now be added to the list of substrate vibrators. The female will sit on a reed or small sapling and tap out a "come-hither" message with her toes. The message goes forth in minute seismic waves. The males detect these vibrations and proceed, sometimes in great numbers, to the source of the vibrations, and the species is thereby perpetuated. (Mestel, Rosie; "Courting Tree Frogs Make the Earth Move," New Scientist, p. 8, December 10, 1994.) Leaf-cutting ants. Leaf-cutting ants neatly excise penny-size pieces of leaves and tote them back to their fungus gardens. J. Tautz and colleagues, University of Wurtzburg, noted that the ants chirped as they sliced at the leaves with their jaws. With a little instrumentation, they discovered that during each chirp both ant and leaf vibrated at about 1,000 hertz. The vibration apparently rigidizes soft leaf tissues and ...
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... cannot say where the very grim reaper came from. (Gibbons, Ann; "The Mystery of Humanity's Missing Mutations," Science, 267:35, 1995.) Comment. The hand that wiped the slate clean, or nearly so, might have been a meteor impact, a pandemic, the Ice Ages, a flood, volcanism, etc. Whatever it was, it seems to have largely spared Africa. The chimps and gorillas there apparently did not pass through the bottleneck. Even more interesting is the observation that the DNA of Subsaharan Africans does shows more variability and therefore seems older than that from humans elsewhere on the planet. (See BMG9 in our catalog volume: Biological Anomalies: Humans III.) Or perhaps Subsaharan DNA only seems older because it was not forced through that bottleneck. There are implications here for the African Eve theory. From Science Frontiers #100, JUL-AUG 1995 . 1995-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Plane Weirdness Made Plain In SF#93, under the title: "Just Plane Weird," we questioned the long-term persistence of trailing vortices from aircraft wingtips. Could such vortices actually maintain their integrities for several minutes and thus produce the curious tubes of misty air and flapping sounds observed at the end of the Los Angeles airport runway? The answer seems to be YES, as confirmed below: "Wingtip vortices have a core diameter of 20 to 40 feet and, as they trail behind each wingtip, remain approximately two wingspans apart. Why don't they enlarge in radius and dissipate? The rapid acceleration at the outer edge of the vortex produces low pressure in the core, and this pressure differential creates enough centrifugal force to hold the system tightly together for three to seven minutes. After that, friction takes its course, breaking these stubborn twisters apart into mere turbulence." The rest of this article deals with how light aircraft can avoid these sometimes deadly horizontal "twisters." (Manningham, Micah D.; "Wake Turbulence," Private Pilot , p. 69, June 1994. Cr. W.A . Welch) From Science Frontiers #94, JUL-AUG 1994 . 1994-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... ) Circa December 11, 1935. British Guiana (now Guyana). Only five years after the Brazilian event, a large bolide apparently smashed into the jungle of Guyana. Buried in the library stacks, we found a mostly forgotten trio of reports on the 1935 event in a 1939 issue of The Sky, predecessor of Sky & Telescope. The articles suggest that the devastated area "may equal or exceed that of the great Siberian meteor of 1908." The bolide and apparent impact area were observed by a gold prospector, a Dr. G. Davidson. Davidson testified: "About 10:30 in the morning we climbed to the top of the mountain in order to get a panorama of the surrounding country. We could see some areas that had been swept down by some great force, trees twisted off some 25 feet above the ground. We tried to enter one of these areas but the bush was in such a tangle that we had to give it up." (Ref. 3) Photographs accompanying the articles confirm some of the devastation. 1995. Northeastern Brazil. "Scientists in Brazil's northeastern state of Piaui are baffled by a crater that was punched into the tropical rain forest shortly after witnesses reported seeing a bright light streak across the sky. Researchers are uncertain whether the crater, 16 feet wide and 32 feet deep, was left by a meteorite or a piece of a comet. Physicist Paulo Frota of the University of Piaui believes it was caused by a block of ice from a comet because the surrounding vegetation is not burned and the crater ...
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... that go to make up our history;" i.e ., the long history of parapsychological research. [? ?] Instead, Beloff suggests that a paranormal phenomenon actually represents a "violation of the natural order." Nature, he says, reacts to these rents in the fabric of the cosmos by healing them just as our bodies heal wounds. The more robust the phenomenon, the more strenuously nature reacts, apparently almost completely ignoring the "weak" phenomena. (Beloff, John; "Lessons of History," American Society for Psychical Research, Journal, 88:7 , 1994.) Comment. We could add to Beloff's list of phenomena: UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, crop circles, cold fusion, infinite-dilution results, the fifth force, windshield pitting, ancient astronauts, and polywater, to name a few. We predict that the scientific community will not countenance these "violations" of natural order any more than it welcomed Sheldrake's morphogenic fields! From Science Frontiers #93, MAY-JUN 1994 . 1994-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... the sun is about to rise would see first of all two well-recognized phenomena: the solar corona (even though the solar disc is still well below the horizon) and the zodiacal light (sunlight reflected from interplanetary dust). In addition, the astronaut would detect a glow along the horizon itself, as in the illustration. Since the moon is virtually airless, there should be none of those gas molecules and suspended dust particles that cause the sunsets and sunrises that we admire so much here on earth. Still, there must be something suspended above the moon's surface to scatter light from the sun still located just below the horizon. The best guess is that lunar dust particles are ionized by solar radiation and are repelled upwards from the surface and hang there suspended by electrostatic forces. But no one really knows for certain the cause of the glow. (Cowen, R.; "On the Horizon: Clementine Probes Moon Glow," Science News, 145:197, 1994.) Reference. Anomalous lunar horizon glows are cataloged in ALO11 in our catalog: The Moon and the Planets. For details, visit here . From Science Frontiers #93, MAY-JUN 1994 . 1994-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... by mimicking an unpalatable species, as with mimics of the Monarch Butterfly. That is, there seems to be no evolutionary advantage to looking alike. (Miller, Julie Ann; BioScience, inside front cover, March 1994. Miller's editorial remarks are based upon a later article by H.F . Nijhout, who also supplied the photographs. Nijhout's article explains how butterfly wing patterns may have evolved.) Comment. Cases of remarkable mimicry also occur among geographically separated species. For example, the North American Meadowlarks are dead ringers for the African Yellow-throated Longclaw. "Convergent evolution" names the phenomenon but doesn't tell how or why long chains of random mutations can come up with the same designs where there seems to be no "guidance" by the forces of natural selection. Perhaps genomes contain "subprograms" for those patterns and structures often used in biology. Of course, Sheldrake's idea of "morphic resonance" also applies here! From Science Frontiers #95, SEP-OCT 1994 . 1994-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... the whole science of biology is his sentence: "The discovery that cells use biochemical systems to change their DNA in response to physiological inputs moves mutation beyond the realm of 'blind' stochastic events and provides a mechanistic basis for understanding how biological requirements can feed back onto genome structure." (Shapiro, James A.; "Adaptive Mutation: Who's Really in the Garden?" Science, 268:373, 1995.) Comment. Random mutation has been a linchpin of Neo-Darwinism because it is "scientific"; that is, non-supernatural. We see in adaptive mutation that other scientific mechanisms may indeed exist that make biological evolution more than just a plaything of chance. Furthermore, since some species (You know who you are!) can modify environmental forces, these species can, in principle, control their own evolution -- for good or bad -- and may in fact be doing just that. *SF#xx = Science Frontiers #xx. From Science Frontiers #100, JUL-AUG 1995 . 1995-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 120: Nov-Dec 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Force Is With Them The communication loop between earthbased ground stations and interplanetary spacecraft allows extremely accurate measurements of the radial velocities of these distant man-made machines. As these spacecraft hurtle toward the fringe of the solar system, the visible sun dwindles to a small, bright point, and its gravitational field falls off as the inverse square of the distance. At least that is what is supposed to happen. Four far-flung spacecraft, (Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Ulysses, and Galileo are experiencing a mysterious decelerating force not encompassed by the Law of Gravitation. It's a tiny force, but it seems to be real. Making it even more puzzling is the fact that it is decreasing according to the inverse of distance from the sun rather than the inverse square. Is it a non-solar force? Is it "new" physics? Or maybe just an artifact of the spacecraft and ground-based equipment? The fact that four spacecraft feel its tugging suggests the force is real. But the motions of the distant planets do not seem to be affected by it. So, everyone is perplexed. (Schilling, Govert; "Spacecraft Motions Puzzle Astronomers," Science, 281:1581, 1998. Seife, Charles; "If the Force Is with Them...," New Scientist, p. 4, September 12, 1998. Browne, Malcolm; "After Study, ...
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... The spinning-egg water-sprinkler. It is generally known that you can separate fresh eggs from hard-boiled eggs by spinning them like a top. If they are hard-boiled they will spin on one of the ends. The fluid contents of fresh eggs, however, will slosh around and prevent top action. O.K .! this is not very curious, so we'll place a hard-boiled egg in a flat pan containing a thin layer of water and give it a spin. Not only does the egg spin on end but a layer of water creeps up the side of the egg. When the water is about half way up the side of the egg it breaks up into droplets and sprays out horizontally like a rotating lawn sprinkler. No mysterious forces are involved, nor are there spooky quantum mechanics effects. The major forces operating are gravity, centrifugal force, and adhesion between the egg surface and the water. As the film of water creeps up the egg, the centrifugal force increases and overcomes the force of adhesion. Then, water droplets spray outward. (Gutierrez, Gustavo, et al; "Fluid Flow up the Wall of a Spinning Egg," American Journal of Physics, 66:442, 1998.) Creating fluid corners in kitchen sinks. When a smooth column of water from your kitchen faucet hits the sink, it flows out radially. At a calculable radius, its height suddenly rises. This smooth, circular ridge is called a "hydraulic jump." Here, some of the kinetic energy of the ...
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... Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects More Disorder Here Produces Order There Physicists use the word "entropy" to describe the well-observed tendency of the universe to run down; that is, become more disorderly. In some situations, though, the increase in disorder (entropy) in one part of the universe can create order elsewhere. For example, if you add tiny plastic spheres of two sizes to salty water, you will not get a uniform mixture. Instead the larger spheres will pack together into tightly ordered crystaline shapes (representing more order) while the smaller spheres become more disordered. It is like watching cream unstir itself from coffee. It smacks of magic, but it is all within the laws of thermodynamics. This strange "force" exerted by entropy may explain some puzzling biological phenomena, such as the expulsion of nuclei from mammalian red blood cells before they enter the bloodstream as sacks of hemoglobin. The idea being that the increasing entropy of the proliferating hemoglobin molecules (analogous to the smaller spheres) is maximized when the nuclei (large spheres) are squeezed out of the cells altogether. (Kestenbaum, David; "Gentle Force of Entropy Bridges Disciplines," Science, 279:1849, 1998.) Comments. The red-blood-cell example presented in the article is on shaky ground, because while mammalian red blood cells do lack nuclei those of birds and reptiles retain theirs. (See BMC6 in Mammals II .) In the above context, the origin of life (more order) anywhere in ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 117: May-June 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Accelerating Universe Many laymen are uncomfortable with the idea that the entire universe originated at an infinitesimal point and is now expanding away from this cosmic navel. Many astronomers are equally disturbed by the recent discovery that all these fleeing stars and galaxies are not being reined in by the force of gravity. In fact, observations of distant supernovas indicate that this exodus of matter is actually speeding up. Some universal repulsive force, it seems, is operating on very large scales of distance. From an unknown somewhere energy is being added to all constituents of the cosmos. The universe is more than a cloud of debris flying away from the Big Bang's Ground Zero. Somewhere, perhaps beyond the ken of our primitive instruments, is a fount of energy of which we know nothing. All this is a serious challenge to our understanding of space, time, and matter. Cosmologists are now appealing to quantum mechanical "shimmers," to "X -matter," and to a property called "quintessence." (Glanz, James; "Exploding Stars Point to a Universal Repulsive Force," Science, 279:651, 1998. Also: Glanz, James; "Astronomers See a Cosmic Antigravity Force at Work," Science, 279:1298, 1998.) Comment. When theorists toss around terms like "X -matter" and "quintessence," you can be sure that the basic laws of the universe ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 119: Sep-Oct 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Cassowary, 1; Automobile, 0 Many birds are done in by fast-moving cars. The usual avian mode of retaliation involves defecation, especially on freshly washed and polished automobiles. On occasion, though, birds will use brute force. For example, keas (New Zealand parrots) consider it their duty to pry out the rubber gaskets around automobile windshields with their powerful bills. A cassowary can be even more forceful. Recently, a motorist near Cairns, Australia, was forced to stop by a sixfoot cassowary standing in the middle of the road. He edged the car forward slowly, but the huge bird stood its ground. Then, he blew his horn. Bad move! The cassowary objected by kicking the auto, pushing the radiator into the fan, which cut a hole in it. (Anonymous; "Feedback," New Scientist, p. 104, June 13, 1998.) Comment. The flightless cassowaries are armed with sharp toenails, with which they disembowel New Guinea natives who displease them. Besides disposing of obstreperous automobiles, cassowaries are said to catch fish by wading into streams, spreading out their wings, waiting, and then closing them on sheltering fish. (From: Biological Anomalies: Birds). From Science Frontiers #119, SEP-OCT 1998 . 1998-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 116: Mar-Apr 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects G: The Embarrassing Constant Of Nature Of the four fundamental forces of nature, gravity was the first to be discovered. Even the Neanderthals knew of it! That's hardly surprising; it's everywhere. Unfortunately, we don't know much more about it than the Neanderthals. Though it seems powerful when you trip and fall, gravity is the weakest of the fundamental four. In a helium nucleus, the force of repulsion between two protons is 1040 times the gravitational attraction between them. Weak though it may be, gravity controls the trajectory of a baseball, the motion of the planets, and the shape of our Galaxy. Physicists describe gravitation with Newton's Law of Gravitation, which incorporates the Gravitational Constant G. Here's where the embarrassment arises. Many other constants of nature, such as the charge on the electron, are known to eight significant figures. We only know G to three. What's worse, modern attempts to refine the measurement of G come up with wildly different answers. Torsion-pendulum experiments in the U.S ., Germany, and New Zealand are far apart in their G-measurements. And physicists are perplexed -- to put it mildly. Of course, G is hard to measure. Seismic waves from ocean surf hundreds of miles away can affect the experiments. If a colleague a few offices away brings in some boxes of books for his ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 108: Nov-Dec 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Earthquakes And Mima Mounds In a recent paper in Nature, P.B . Umbanhower et al described how they created regular geometric patterns in a layer of fine particles (only 0.15 mm in diameter) spread on a vibrating surface. At various forcing frequencies, they saw the layer of tiny brass spheres heap up into hexagonal honeycombs, circular piles, and even stranger shapes. (Umbanhower, Paul B., et al; "Localized Excitations in a Vertically Vibrated Granular Layer," Nature, 382: 793, 1996) Comment. Nothing anomalous here, you say? Quite right, but perhaps there is in this experiment an explanation of a long-recognized geological anomaly: The origin of the famed Mima Mounds found scattered by the thousands in various regions of the planet, such as Mima Prairie near Puget Sound, in Washington State. Actually, the demonstration of Umbanhower et al was preceded by a similar experiment back in 1990. In that year, A.W . Berg reported in Geology how he had covered a piece of plywood with a thin layer of fine sand (loess) and subjected the plywood sheet to impacts simulating earthquakes. Lo and behold, the sand rose up in an array of Mima Mound-like heaps. (See: SF#69 and p. 201 in the book Science Frontiers. This book is described here . Umbanhower, a physicist, probably doesn't read Geology ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 114: Nov-Dec 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The world's largest "playa-slider" furrow Most studies of playa sliders (" moving rocks") have been conducted at Racetrack Playa, near Death Valley, California. There one finds good-sized rocks at the ends of long tracks they have made when some force has propelled them across the flat playa surface. What has moved these rocks, some of which weigh 700 pounds? The current consensus holds that wind is the motive force, but that it is inadequate to move the rocks directly. Instead, the wind acts upon sheets of ice in which the rocks are frozen. As these sheets of ice are moved across the playa, the keels of the frozen-in rocks leave those curious trails that have intrigued Forteans for many decades. (SF#109) Playa sliders have also been found at Magdalenasmeer Playa in South Africa, and in Nevada and Tunisia. In a recent issue of Geology Today, C.C . Reeves, Jr., Texas Tech University, adds to the list a playa at Double Lakes, Texas. Of special interest at Double Lakes is not the rocks and other debris blown across the playa but a discarded hotwater tank. It, too, is a playa slider. It first left a trail a few hundred meters long when it was frozen in an ice sheet spigot down, with the spigot furrow quite obvious. The ice sheet then melted, and the tank ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 116: Mar-Apr 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Target: Greenland Reports of recent large meteors and suspicious craters are plentiful in back issues of this newsletter. (SFs #93, #102, #103, #110, to name a few) Here is another. December 9, 1997, Greenland. At 5:11 A.M ., crews of three trawlers at widely separated sites off south Greenland reported "a blazing fireball that turned night into day." At a distance of 100 kilometers (62 miles), the flash was compared to that from an atmospheric nuclear explosion. Danish officials dismissed the possibility of a surreptitious nuclear test. The U.S . Air Force stated that the object was neither a reentering spacecraft nor artificial space debris. Some seismic tremors also emanated from Greenland, so the impact of a large meteorite is suspected. Based on the visual sightings and a moving object caught on a parkinglot surveillance camera in Nuuk, Greenland's capital, the probable impact point is at 61 25' N., 44 26' W. Efforts to locate the meteorite will have to wait for favorable weather. The supposed meteor was not a small object. The Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen compared it to the Kap York meteor that fell south of Thule, Greenland, in prehistoric times. Pieces of this iron meteorite aggregating 50 tons have been collected. (Sawyer, Kathy; "Fireball a Mystery till Thaw," Charlotte Observer, December 22 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 115: Jan-Feb 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Tektite Mysteries Tektites are small glassy bodies found strewn on and near the surface in several regions of the world. They come in various shapes: droplets, buttons, even dumbbells. By general agreement, tekites are attributed to meteoric or cometary impacts that melt terrestrial rocks and splash liquid droplets into the atmosphere. There they are shaped by aerodynamic forces and solidify. This scenario is all very reasonable, but some nagging problems remain. Where-o -where is that crater? 770,000 years ago, a huge meteor hit somewhere on earth and strewed an immense batch of tektites and microtektites over fully 10% of our planet's surface (about 5 x 107 square kilometers). This is called the "Australasian strewn field." Such a recent cataclysm must have left a large and inescapable crater somewhere. The problem is that no one has yet found it. (Ref. 1) Many lines of evidence suggest that the missing crater is in Indochina. C.C . Schnetzler and J.F . McHone located four likely structures in Laos from Landsat images. However, visits to these areas found no evidence of an impact. (Ref. 2) So, this mystery persists. How were the Muong Nong tektites formed? Muong Nong tektites are unusually large (up to 24 kilograms), layered tektites. They are found in an area 1,000 kilometers in extent from Hainan Island to southern Indochina ...
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... Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Crystalline Universe Cosmologists think in the large. Billions of stars are nothing to them. The megaparsec (3 ,528,000 light years) is but a hop, skip, and jump. A pressing question for these cosmologists searching for the really big picture is whether there is any order in the distribution of galaxies, galactic clusters, and superclusters. The scale of organization of the universe is of critical importance because it is a measure of state of the cosmos when hydrogen atoms first condensed from the seething sea of ions following the Big Bang. The prevailing expectation has been that galactic clusters and superclusters should be distributed at random; that is, no order prevails at that scale. Recent redshift measurements, however, hint more and more forcefully that the huge superclusters of galaxies are almost as neatly arranged as the atoms in a crystal. A recent paper in Nature by J. Einasto et al puts a number on the spacing of the superclusters: "Here, using a new compilation of available data on galaxy clusters, we present evidence for a quasi-regular three-dimensional network of rich superclusters and voids, with the regions of high density separated by "120 Mpc [megaparsecs]. If this reflects the distribution of all matter (luminous and dark), then there must exist some hitherto unknown process that produces regular structure on large scales." (Einasto, J., et al; "A 120-Mpc Periodicity in the Three-Dimensional Distribution of Galaxy Superclusters," Nature, 385:139, ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 111: May-Jun 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Methane Burps And Gas-hydrate Reservoirs Readers will be forgiven for any skepticism they may harbor about methane burps from the sea floor bringing down TWA flight 800. (SF#110) The media have said little about the staggering quantities of methane and higher hydrocarbons locked up in frozen hydrates around the edges of the continents. Actually, the small methane burps are minor problems compared to the catastrophic climate changes that could be forced if just a small portion of the gases frozen under the sea floor were released into the atmosphere. Gas-hydrates are unimpressive when brought to the surface -- just dirty, fizzy ice. However, taken together, they contain more carbon than all the world's oil fields, perhaps much more. Most estimates fall between 1,700 and 11,000 billion tons, but there is one scientist who pegs these cold-storage carbon deposits at 4,100,000 billion tons. In comparison, human releases of carbon to the atmosphere via the burning of wood, gas, coal, and even the collective flatulence of all the planet's animals are trivial. Geological evidence confirms that past climate swings were associated with large injections of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans. A major contributor to these "carbon burps" may be decomposing methane hydrate. Until recently, climatologists have questioned the sizes of gas-hydrate deposits, but cores extracted from the Blake Ridge off the Carolina coast confirm ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 109: Jan-Feb 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Indeterminacy In Computers In SF#108, it was remarked that a chessplaying computer will sometimes make different moves when faced with identical boards. R.G . Everit responds that this is not really mysterious. The better chess-playing computers are actually designed to behave unpredictably when confronted by several moves of roughly equal promise. This feature makes it more interesting for human players. Everit also sets us straight in the matter of computer determinacy. "However, contrary to your basic assumption, most computers (even a home PC) can be forced to behave truly unpredictably. This cannot be done using the random-number generators supplied with the software, as these depend upon some mathematical formula and so are determined in advance, even if they appear to show no pattern. But if the machine has an internal clock readable by the programmer, he can determine the machine's choice depending upon the time required for some complex calculation, which will vary according to such factors as minute voltage variations and the aging of the machine's components. For example, the CDC 3600, on which I learned to program in 1975, had an accessible microsecond clock, and my program to calculate the first five perfect numbers* required about 15 minutes of run time; the last few digits of the exact number of microseconds required to run this program each time varied quite unpredictably. In other words, it was a random number, except ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 108: Nov-Dec 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Sunspots And Planetary Alignments Many scientists and laymen have noticed that the sunspot cycle and Jupiter's period are both about 11 years. This must be a coincidence, because the tidal forces exerted on the sun by distant Jupiter seem far too weak to disturb the sun's internal operations. (See details in ASO9 in The Sun and Solar System Debris.) Could it be that we are missing something, for there is some evidence that some planetary alignments also exert influence on the number of spots seen on the sun's face? In particular, the Uranus-Neptuneearth conjunction has been investigated by B. Payne, who wrote the following in Cycles: "Sunspots increase when two or more planets line up, an effect I have observed for more than a decade. During the last six years, Uranus and Neptune have been within a few degrees of each other. Their conjunction, which occurs every 137 years, is an ideal situation to validate the hypothesis that sunspot numbers are associated with planetary positions." Payne's lengthy analysis is omitted, but the essence of his study can be seen in the accompanying graph. He concludes: "The results clearly show that sunspot numbers increase markedly during Uranus-Neptune-Earth-sun alignments." (Payne, Buryl; "Sunspot Number Changes during Planetary Alignments," Cycles, 45:146, 1995) Comment. It will take a lot more than ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 120: Nov-Dec 1998 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology The pigeon-snaring mounds of tonga Pyramid stones not "cementitious" Where did they come from? Astronomy Bye-bye mercury, and maybe mars The force is with them Biology Why some like it hot Dog doctors Acoustical "vision" underwater Gaia as a super-superorganism Geology Spod logs Miles of floating forest Geophysics Bouncing ball lightning A BRIGHT FLYING OBJECT AND ANOTHER ENIGMATIC CRATER Psychology Are ufo abductions akin to ndes? Precognitive dreams Physics More quantum weirdness Mathematics The first digit phenomenon ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 118: Jul-Aug 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Monogrammic Determinism About 2 years ago (SF#108), we succumbed to the lure of "nominative determinism." The Feedback page of the New Scientist had been printing case after amusing case in which a person's occupation was described or suggested by his or her surname. A classic example is seen in a paper on incontinence published in the British Journal of Urology by J.W . Splatt and D. Weedon! Does a person's name exert a psychological force of the choice of a career? We have seen no formal studies of nominative determinism, but we have just discovered a closely allied phenomenon that has been scientifically investigated. We call it "monogrammic determinism.' An individual's monogram does not seem to be associated with his or her occupation but rather with longevity. People with monograms such as ACE, WOW, or GOD tend to live longer than those with monograms like PIG, RAT, DUD, or ILL. The study was conducted at the University of San Diego, where 27 years of California death certificates were examined. Only men were chosen because their initials did not change with marriage. They were divided into three groups: (1 ) those with "good" monograms; (2 ) those with "bad" monograms; and (3 ) a control group with "neutral" monograms. Those men bearing "good" monograms lived 4.48 years longer than those ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 116: Mar-Apr 1998 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Earthquake Weather Folklore reserves the term "earthquake weather" for the sultry, ominously uneasy period said to precede large earthquakes. Scientists have generally belittled suggestions that weather could have anything to do with the ponderous forces unleashed during a quake. Despite such authoritative pronouncements, many Californians, who have ample experience with seismic events, insist that quakes and weather are somehow connected. They may be right -- at least some of the time. In the five years following the 7.3 Landers earthquake of June 28, 1992, the frequency of smaller quakes has peaked reliably every September. However, before the Landers event, no such pattern is evident. One thought is that the average atmospheric pressure, which is lower in the summer months, reduces the downward pressure on the earth's crust enough to allow easier slippage along fault lines. This sounds reasonable, but why did this effect not occur before the Landers quake? The answer given is that perhaps the Landers event "sensitized" nearby faults! (Monastersky, R.; "California Shakes Most Often in September," Science News, 152:373, 1997.) Since the Landers event, Earthquakes in the weestern U.S . have been following an annual cycle. From Science Frontiers #116, MAR-APR 1998 . 1998-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... this in his book The Cosmic Code . (Ref. 3) References Ref. 1. Watson, Andrew; "Quantum Spookiness Wins, Einstein Loses in Photon Test," Science, 277:481, 1997. Ref. 2. Buchanan, Mark; "Light's Spooky Connections Set Distance Record," New Scientist, p. 16, June 28, 1997. Ref. 3. Browne, Malcolm W.; "Far Apart, 2 Particles Respond Faster Than Light," New York Times, July 22, 1997. Cr. M. Colpitts.) Comments. "Spookiness" is in the mind of the percipient. We don't usually think of gravity as spooky, but just what does draw two masses together? All action-ata-distance forces are spooky. Everybody is into "codes" these days, as if Nature herself (or God) is not speaking out directly and plainly. We have, for example: The Message of the Sphinx (G . Hancock and R. Bauval); The Bible Code (M . Drosin); and The Biotic Message ( W.J . ReMine). From Science Frontiers #114, NOV-DEC 1997 . 1997-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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