61 results found.
... , 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. Their large sizes imply that they are probably close to the missing crater mentioned above. Still unresolved is whether they were originally puddles of molten rock near the elusive crater or local ejecta analogous to volcanic bombs. (Ref. 1) Is the "age paradox" finally resolved? Some Australian geologists have stratigraphically dated the Australasian tektites as being just a few thousand rather than 770,000 years old. (SF#8 ) The 770,000-year figure is derived from the presence of Australasian microtekites at the Brunhes-Matuyama magnetic reversal and is, therefore, a "magnetostratigraphic" date. Recent excavations by now seem to confirm R. Fudali's assessment that all tektites and microtektites in the Australasian strewn field are definitely 770,000 years old. (Ref. 3) References Ref. 1. Taylor, S.R .; "Tektites: Some Unresvolved Problems," Meteoritics and Planetary Science , 32:4 , 1997. Ref. 2. Schnetzler, C.C . and McHone, J.F .; "Source of Australasian Tektites: Investigating Possible Impact Sites in Laos," Meteoritics and Plane tary Science , 31:73, 1996. Ref. 3. Fudali, R.; "The Stratigraphic Age of Australites Revisited," Meteoritics, 28:114, 1993. Comment ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 15 May 2017 - URL: /sf115/sf115p10.htm
... leather-like shrunken left lung in the case of Webb. All the bones were reduced to ash from the neck to the midthigh. "In both cases the blackened skulls and untouched lower portions of legs remained. Webb's right arm was also intact. She had been incinerated on the floor with her arm outflung from her torso, hence its survival. "As in the case of Thomas, furniture in Webb's room, which had commenced to burn, stopped burning due to the lack of oxygen. Yet again a complete human torso was reduced to ash in an atmosphere too devoid of oxygen to support the continued combustion of readily combustible materials." Heymer considers this last fact very strange. Further, he claims that in these cases the usual pattern of human burning was reversed. Normally, the extremities are consumed, leaving a charred but recognizable torso. Here, only the extremities remain and the torso is gone! (Heymer, John; "A Burnt-Out Case?" New Scientist, p. 68, May 19, 1988.) Reference. Many additional examples of SHC can be found in BHC7 in our catalog: Biological Anomalies: Humans II. A description of this book is located here . From Science Frontiers #58, JUL-AUG 1988 . 1988-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 62: Mar-Apr 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects DANCING TO THE COMETS' TUNE "When planetary scientists examine one kind of meteorite rich in iron, the H-chondrites, they find that the meteorites' ages do not spread evenly through time. Instead, the ages seem to cluster at 7 and 30 million years." Astronomers have hitherto been content to attribute these clumped ages to collisions among the meteorites' parent bodies - the asteroids - which ply periodic orbits. However, S. Perlmutter and R.A . Muller, at Berkeley, point to the apparent 26- to 30-million-year periodicities of three terrestrial phenomena: Biological extinctions in the fossil record, Magnetic field reversals, and Terrestrial-crater ages. Could there be a connection between the clumped meteorite ages and these terrestrial phenomena? Perlmutter and Muller propose that all of these phenomena are the consequence of periodic storms of comets that invade the inner solar system from the direction of the Oort Cloud of comets that purportedly hovers at the fringe of the solar system. These comets not only devastate the earth but also collide with the asteroids, knocking off those bits and pieces we call meteorites. (Anonymous; "Do Meteorite Ages Tell of Comet Storms?" Astronomy, 17:12, January 1989.) Comment. Unanswered above is the question of why comet storms should be periodic. One hypothesis is that Nemesis, the so-called Death Star, a dark companion of our sun, lurks out ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 63: May-Jun 1989 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Life Currents In Space A few of the hundreds of meteorites picked up in the Antarctic wastes have chemical properties consistent with a Martian origin. Calculations, too, support the notion that a large meteoric impact could propel bits of the Martian surface into space where, statistically speaking, a tiny fraction would be captured by the earth's gravitational field. Some of these would fall to earth; others would remain in orbit. Now, the reverse scenario has been investigated numerically. S.A . Phinney and colleagues at the University of Arizona have calculated what would happen to small chunks of the earth's crust if a large meteor impact excavated a 60milewide crater. "Phinney's group used a computer to calculate where 1,000 particles would go if ejected from Earth in random directions, moving about 2.5 kilometers per second faster than the minimum speed necessary to escape. Of the 1,000 hypothetical particles, 291 hit Venus and 165 returned to Earth; 20 went to Mercury, 17 to Mars, 14 to Jupiter and 1 to Saturn. Another 492 left the solar system completely, primarily due to gravitational close encounters with either Jupiter or Mercury that 'slingshot' them on their way." (Eberhart, Jonathan; "Have Earth Rocks Gone to Mars?" Science News, 135:191, 1989.) Comment. One implication from the preceding analysis is that terrestrial bacteria and spores could well ...
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... King Solomon's legendary gold lines." After being startled by the introductory paragraph, it is anticlimatic to discover that the explorer in question is G. Savoy. He states that he has found three tablets, each weighing several tons, measuring about 5 x 10 feet. The site is a cave near Gran Vilaya, in the Peruvian Andes. Engraved on these hefty tablets are inscriptions that appear to be Phoenician or Semetic hierogly phics. (Anonymous; "Mysterious Tablets Found in the Andes," San Francisco Chronicle, December 7, 1989. Cr. J. Covey.) Comment. Combining this item with the preceding one, there is an implication that advanced Peruvian civilizations may have benefited from contact with early voyagers from the Old World! Or did the traffic begin in the reverse direction? From Science Frontiers #67, JAN-FEB 1990 . 1990-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... flight. So, how did the marvelously crafted wings of birds, insects, and mammals evolve in infinitesimal steps? Biologists, including Darwin himself, have long puzzled over this. Stephen Jay Gould in a recent article explores a currently favored way of circumventing the negligible additional survival value of half a wing, or even 90% of a wing. This solution (? ) maintains that protowings were not "intended" for flight at all but were developed initially as aerodynamic stabilizers, thermoregulatory systems, sexual attractors or other functions requiring large areas. Gould describes the experiments of Kingsolver and Koehl in which protowings were modelled and tested for their thermoregulatory and flight values. Surprisingly, there was a sharp transition, as the size of the protowing increased, from good thermoregulation but poor flight capability to the reverse -- good flight capability and poor thermoregulation. In other words, a structure developed for one purpose, if enlarged, might be useful for something else! (Gould, Stephen Jay; "Not Necessarily a Wing," Natural History, 94:14, October 1985. See also: Lewin, Roger, "How Does Half a Bird Fly?" Science, 230:530, 1985.) Comment. The work of Kingsolver and Koehl, though doubtless of high quality, does not come to grips with the fact that a wing for flight is a highly sophisticated combination of skeleton, feathers, membrane, muscles, nervous system, control system, aerodynamic design, etc. -- most of which have nothing to do with thermoregulation. Are the flying crustaceans mentioned on ...
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... those that were tough and aggressive. Nevertheless, as the Cambrian began, some single cells suppressed their mutual antagonisms and formed partnerships. Thus were born the first metazoans -- the multicellular species. The road was now open to the evolution of what we term "higher" life forms. But before really complex organisms could evolve, the selfish, aggressive characteristics inherited from the ancestral single-cell species had to be tamed. Unfortunately, some of the controls that evolved -- and which we have inherited -- do not always work. Conversely, they sometimes work too well. J.M . Saul has described how the appearance of cancer in complex multicellular organisms may be the consequence of the failure of biochemical controls evolved to curb cell aggression: "Such failure may be seen as reversion to ancestral cellular behavior, or as failure of a cell with a monocellular heritage to perform metazoan tasks for which it was not originally designed. In such instances, the resultant types of wild and indiscriminate proliferation and variation would resemble pathologies classified as 'cancer.'" Furthermore, Saul speculates, overcontrol could lead to autoimmune diseases: "Within the individual metazoan, excessive antiproliferation measures would have occasionally resulted in focussed attacks against specialized classes of "innocent" cells, producing pathologies describable as 'autoimmune.'" (Saul, John M.; "Cancer and Autoimmune Disease: A Cambrian Couple?" Geology , 22:5 , 1994.) From Science Frontiers #94, JUL-AUG 1994 . 1994-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Lansberry wrote of her personal NDE. It happened during angioplasty, when her heart stopped temporarily. Lansberry, a confirmed skeptic in such matters, has always maintained that the customary interpretations of NDEs are so much "tomfoolery." When she entered that famous NDE tunnel herself, she saw it close down around her as her heart stopped. Then, as the doctor brought her back, the tunnel opened up again and she saw a light at the tunnel's end, but it turned out to be only the light of the operating room. Lansberry asserts that there is nothing transcendental about the tunnel effect. She attributes the experience to the failure of neurotransmitters in the outer portion of her brain failing to fire, in effect creating a collapsing tunnel in her mind. Fortunately, her doctor reversed the effect. "When the tunnel closes," she wrote, we are dead." (Lansberry, Laura Darlene; "First-Person Report: A Skeptic's Near-Death Experience," Skeptical Inquirer, 18:431, 1994.) Comment. Perhaps Lansberry saw only what she wanted to see. That was enough of heaven for her! From Science Frontiers #95, SEP-OCT 1994 . 1994-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... human carnivores predominate. Where the tool marks overlap the tooth marks of other carnivores, the tool marks are mostly on top of the tooth marks. The gist of the tool-mark analysis is that humans got to the animals second -- after the non-human carnivores. In other words, ancient humans were probably meat scavengers -- opportunists rather than the noble hunters often portrayed. As a matter of fact, one characteristic of a scavenger species is its ability to cover wide areas with little expenditure of energy, like the vultures. Now, human bipedalism is pitifully poor for running down game but great for searching far and wide with minimum physical effort. Tooth-wear studies of ancient human skulls indicate that humans were vegetarians first and meat-eaters second. This situation was suddenly reversed when Homo erectus came along. Then, according to toothwear patterns, there was a shift to a mainly meat diet. This was also the time when human territory expanded greatly geographically. The reason for these changes is unknown. (Lewin, Roger; "Man the Scavenger," Science, 224:861, 1984.) From Science Frontiers #35, SEP-OCT 1984 . 1984-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... optical illusion that can afflict observers of the setting sun. It seems that the intense red light of the sun near the horizon can bleach the red-sensitive receptors in the retina so that an intent observer becomes temporarily color blind to red. When this happens, the observer sees the yellow part of the dispersed solar spectrum as being green (yellow minus red = green). The true green flash may never have appeared at all. (Seife, Charles; "Don't Let Your Eyes Deceive You," New Scientist, p. 5, June 5, 1998.) Comments. You are right! Blue lies beyond green in the spectrum. Much rarer than green flashes are blue flashes. Jules Verne even wrote a novel involving this famous phenomenon: Le Rayon Vert . Reversing the sequence, red flashes are sometimes observed as the bottom edge of the sun dips below a sharply-defined cloud deck. (From: Rare Halos...) From Science Frontiers #119, SEP-OCT 1998 . 1998-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... "Some fascinating thinking om the frontiers of science", Borderlands. 212 pages, hardcover, $19.95, 44 illus., 3 indexes, 1994. 311 references, LC 91-68541. ISBN 0-915554-29-1 , 7x10. Biology Handbook For a full list of biology subjects, see here . Biological Anomalies: Mammals I: A Catalog of Biological Anomalies Sorry, Out of print The first three biology catalogs deal with human anomalies. Here, we attend to the "other" mammals, and two volumes will be required This, the first, parallels Humans I in focusing on external attributes (1 ) physical appearance; (2 ) behavior; and (3 ) talents and faculties. Typical subjects covered: Mammal-marsupial parallelisms * Zebra stripe reversal * Marching teeth * Lunar effect on activity * Mammalian art and music * Rat and squirrel "kings" * Cetacean mass strandings * Mummified Antarctic seals * Navigation and homing * Soaring and parachuting * Mammalian engineering works * Deep-diving capabilities * Unusual vocalisations * Intelligence overshoot. [Picture caption: A yapok. A South American aquatic marsupial. The female possesses a watertight pouch. Strangely, the male also has a pouch !] View Cart Buy online via PayPal with MC/Visa/Amex 292 pages, hardcover, $21.95, 84 illus., 3 indexes, 1995. 546 references, LC 91-68541. ISBN 0-915554-30-5 , 7x10. Biological Anomalies: Mammals II: A Catalog of Biological Anomalies Sorry, Out of print Our ...
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