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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 Kennewick man: a 9300-year-old caucasian skeleton in north america?The town of Kennewick, Washington, has lent its name to this ferociously controversial skeleton. It all began when the local sheriff asked anthropologist J. Chatters to take a look at a partially buried skeleton found on the shore of the Columbia River. (Ref. 1) "From head to toe, the bones were largely intact. The skeleton was that of a man, middle-aged at death, with Caucasian features, judging by skull measurements. Imbedded in the pelvis was a spearhead made of rock." Chatters initially thought he had merely a "pioneer" who had met an untimely death in the Wild West! "The real stunner came last month [June 1996], after bone samples were sent to the University of California at Riverside for radiocarbon dating. The conclusion: the skeleton of the 'pioneer' is 9,300 years old." (Ref. 2) Actually, the skeleton may well be that of a "pioneer" but one who came from the direction of the setting sun instead of the rising sun. Of course, it is perfectly all right for Asians to have crossed the Bering Strait into North America over 9,000 years ago, but a Caucasian raises scientific and emotional problems. "If Kennewick Man were actually Caucasian, it would be a startling discovery. So far, all of ...
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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 Greenwich Late Time When J. Brink recently visited the Old Greenwich Observatory, in England, he saw a flag hanging on the building giving the longitude of the site, which by definition is 0 0' 0". The flag also announced that: "The Next Millennium Starts Here." Why is this in error? Answer below. (Brink, Johan; "Greenwich Late Time," New Scientist, p. 59, October 19, 1996) LONGITUDE FAUX PAS The next millennium (the year 2001 or 2000, depending upon your mind-set) really begins where all days begin: at the International Date Line, longitude 180 . From Science Frontiers #109, JAN-FEB 1997 . 1997-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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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 Too Much Order In The Early Cosmos Astronomers are becoming accustomed to the idea that many nearby galaxies are concentrated in spherical shells separated from one another by about 400 million light years. This onion-skin geometry is inferred from the fact that galactic red shifts cluster around specific values; that is, they are quantized. Since red shifts are held to be proportional to distance in the expanding universe paradigm: Voila! We have shells! This evidence of nearby cosmic order does not seriously disturb cosmologists, because in the nearby galaxies we are seeing that portion of the universe that is billions of years old. In other words, nearby there has been enough time for some degree of order to have evolved out of the primordial chaos of the Big Bang. Now though, "deep" surveys of galaxies, looking much farther back in time, still show clustered red shifts -- not the expected increasing chaos required by theory. Although the surveys are incomplete, astronomers are discomfited by this early lumpiness. Their theories say that there was not enough time for galaxies to organize themselves into sheets, shells, and skeins. If further "deep" probings of the cosmos confirm this redshift clustering, we may need a new evolutionary scenario. Good bye Big Bang and expanding universe! (Vogel, Gretchen; "Goodness, Gracious, Great Walls Afar," Science, 274:343, 1996. Vergano, D.; "New ...
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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 Biology Heavy Paleontology vs. DNA. The so-called Cambrian Explosion has been the subject of two SF items (SF#60/187 and SF#85/ 187). A paleontological fact of life is that all known body plans (phyla) seem to have evolved suddenly -- within a few million years -- after the onset of the Cambrian period some 545 million years ago. Evolutionists are understandably uncomfortable with such a high rate of evolutionary innovation. Nothing like the Cambrian Explosion appears in the hundreds of millions of years of geological strata that followed. So rapid was speciation during the Cambrian Explosion that doubt is cast upon the accepted mechanisms of evolution: slow, stepwise accumulation of mutations plus natural selection. (Refs. 1 and 2) But G.A . Wray and colleagues seem to have rescued Darwinism. They have analyzed the DNA sequences of seven genes found in living animals. Assuming that these genes mutate at constant rates and working backwards in time, they calculate that animal diversification (i .e ., when chordates diverged from invertebrates) actually began about 1 billion years ago, rather than about 545 million years ago. This expansion of the time frame gives accepted evolutionary processes much more time to innovate and create all those new body plans. The evolutionists are pleased. The paleontologists, however, are in a quandry. They see nothing -- or very little -- in the Precambrian fossil ...
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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 Biology Lite A coughing tree "The New Zealand Herald reported that hundreds of people are flocking off to a 3,400-year-old maidenhair tree southeast of Beijing, China, to hear the tree make a coughing sound at night. According to the Beijing Evening News, the tree makes the unusual sound several times during the night and resembles an old man coughing. "The tree is nearly 83 feet (25 m) high and nearly 50 feet (15 m) in circumference and is regarded as a living fossil. As many as 1,000 people at a time have visited the tree to witness the phenomenon since it was first reported April 5th. Speculation abounds as to what causes the coughing sound at night, but no reasonable explanation has yet been presented." (Anonymous; "Coughing Tree Attracts Hundreds," World Explorer , 1:6 , no. 8, 1996) Synchronicity and death. In category BHF35 in Humans II , we cataloged several cases where identical twins died almost simultaneously. We can add the following to that collection: "Identical twins John and William Bloomfield lived their entire 61 years together in Australia and died only minutes apart, on Sunday. Both John and William suffered heart attacks." (Anonymous; "Twins Die," Saginaw News, May 22, 1996. Cr. B. Kingsley via COUD-I .) Reference. For more on the book: ...
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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 Wind-driven Ice Sheets In Death Valley Scientists generally scoff at Forteana as beneath their dignity to investigate. But the mysterious moving rocks on Racetrack Playa in Death Valley have lured them out of their ivied halls. We quote from the abstract of a report seen in the mainstream journal Geology . "Sharply angular boulders as large as 320 kg [700 pounds] sit on the Racetrack Playa, Death Valley, California; trails leading to them indicate that the rocks have moved large distances. The process has never been witnessed. Although high winds and a wetted surface seem necessary, controversy persists about the need for other conditions, especially ice sheets. On the basis of experiments with a wetted Racetrack surface (soft mud about 3 cm deep), we find the effective coefficient of friction to be surprisingly high, about 0.8 . Movement by wind alone of moderate-sized (20 kg) rocks with cubic shape requires sustained winds close to the ground of about 80 m/s (about 180 mph). Larger flat-lying rocks require much higher winds." The authors of this paper, J.B . Reid, Jr., et al, precisely mapped a large number of the enigmatic tracks. Their maps revealed many "mated pairs" of rocks, whose curving tracks matched near their origins to within a few centimeters, even though the tracks were separated by up to 830 meters (over 0. ...
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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 Riddles Of The Sphinx Riddle 1. The body of the Sphinx, which is obviously lionesque, is in bad shape compared to the head. The head we see today is human with a pharaoh's headdress. The head's workmanship is excellent and comparable to that seen in the nearby Great Pyramid. The Sphinx's body, on the other hand, is highly eroded, even though it was completely buried under sand for centuries. This severe erosion led R.M . Schoch to proclaim that the Sphinx is actually thousands of years older than the Giza pyramids, much to the annoyance of conventional Egyptologists. (SF#79) Be that as it may, no one denies that the Sphinx's head and body are quite different. Riddle 2. The head of the Sphinx seems too small for the body. None of the many other sphinxes carved by the ancient Egyptians show such an error of proportion. To answer both riddles, R. Waters suggests that the original Sphinx was actually carved as a complete lion several millennia before the Giza pyramids were erected. It was these later pyramid builders -- those master craftsmen in stone -- who recarved the head into human form, necessarily reducing its size relative to the body. (Waters, Richard; "The Lion King," Fortean Times, p. 54, no. 91, October 1996) Comment. Waters is not the first to ...
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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. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Circles of contention A NAZCA ZODIAC? Cracks in the kaimanawa-wall story? Astronomy The crstalline universe Martian life: act ii Biology Nannobacteria: life on a different scale Is oliver a "humanzee"? Cichlids punctuate equilibrium Sparrows at play Geology Did a methane burp down twa800? A METEOR IMPACT OR EARTH SLUMP? Geophysics Unusual circulating cloud object Unidentified light Psychology "PLANETARY VISIONS" DURING NDEs Mathenatics http://www.aros.net/angio/pistuff/piquer Alphamagic squares ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Alphamagic Squares Not everything in SF is profound or anomalous, although we hope most of the items are at least interesting. Magic squares, we think, are endlessly fascinating. They exist in forms that verge on the unbelievable. You can even construct large magic squares from smaller magic squares. Nevertheless, the fact that alphamagic squares exist in large numbers is unexpected. Alphamagic squares come in pairs. The first member of the pair consists of a magic square in which the numbers are spelled out letterwise, as in this example: five twenty-two eighteen twenty-eight fifteen two twelve eight twenty-five The numbers add up to 45 in all rows, columns, and diagonals. The square is "magic" in words. The second member of the pair is formed by counting the number of letters in each word of the first square, thus: 4 9 8 11 7 3 6 5 10 This square is also magic, adding up to 21 in all directions! Just a fluke, you say? Not so. You can even construct alphamagic squares in different languages. In his column in Scientific American, I. Stewart provides examples in French, German, Welsh, and even Swahili! In German, there are no less than 221 alphamagic squares using numbers under 100. (Stewart, Ian; "Alphamagic Squares," Scientific American, 276:106, January 1997.) Comment. The "deep ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers 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 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Nannobacteria: life on a different scale Who ever heard of nannobacteria until those tiny, worm-like objects were photographed inside that putative Martian meteorite ALH 84001? It turns out that these very tiny cells (only 0.1 - 0.4 micrometers in diameter) are everywhere on earth, but it seems that virtually no one knows about them. The furor over ALH 84001 has underscored professional and public ignorance of nannobacteria. Some scientists have asserted that bacteria could never be as small as those "objects" seen in the greatly magnified photos of ALH 84001. This claim led R.L . Folk to fire off a letter to Science that began with these two sentences: "Enough! As one of the discoverers of mineralized nannobacteria on Earth*, I must come to their defense. They are so abundant in samples I have studied that I believe they may make up most of the Earth's biomass." Folk reports that nannobacteria are found just about everywhere: hot-spring waters, decaying leaves, even blood. Nannobacteria are key players in the earth's surface chemistry, precipitating a host of minerals and acting symbiotically to precipitate organic hard parts. (Folk, Robert; "In Defense of Nannobacteria," Science, 274:1288, 1996.) Comment. Ignorance of nannobacteria is not surprising. One needs a scanning electron microscope to see them. * See: Folk, R.L ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Cichlids Punctuate Equilibrium In those pesky cichlid fish of African lakes we may be seeing punctuated evolution during an actual punctuation. Responding to the article in SF#108 on the Lake Victoria cichlids, A. Mebane called our attention to Lake Malawi. While the Lake Victoria cichlids seem to have evolved a profusion of species in a space of about 12,500 years, those cichlids in Lake Malawi may have done the same in only a century or two. T. Goldschmidt advances this evenmore-abbreviated time scale in his book Darwin's Dreampond . In it, he discusses how the water level of Lake Malawi fell more than 120 meters during the 1800s -- an exceptionally dry period in Africa. Today, the Lake is again high and once more host to isolated rocky islands, each with its own unique complement of cichlid fish; each island has species found nowhere else in the lake. Where did all these species come from, considering that their little islands were bone dry just a century ago? Goldschmidt writes: "Cichlids that inhabited these exposed rocks would have suffocated, unless they had already left for wetter climes. Yet today, species that do not exist anywhere else can be found near almost every rocky island. From an orthodox point of view, the most plausible explanation for this is quite surprising: many color forms as well as biological species developed over a period of less than two hundred years." This ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Did a methane burp down twa800?The potential for methane eruptions from offshore sediments to sink ships and down aircraft was proposed by W.D . McIver way back in 1982, in the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. (SF#25/208) The source of methane-gas releases (" burps") is the rapid decomposition of methane hydrate, which exists in prodigious quantities in offshore sediments. Some geologists have estimated that there is twice as much methane in methane-hydrate deposits as in all terrestrial natural-gas fields. What makes methane hydrate potentially lethal is its instability. Landslides and small quakes can release huge plumes of methane bubbles into the ocean and thence into the atmosphere. Ships might founder in the lowdensity froth of bubbles, and aircraft might be adversely affected, too. This is where TWA800 comes in. R. Spalding, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories has been monitoring mysterious atmospheric explosions and believes that some of these detonations are consistent with the atmospheric ignition of huge methane plumes. (Other detonations are due to meteors.) Spalding proposes the following scenario: The ocean floor releases a massive methane gas plume, which rapidly rises to the surface and ascends into the atmosphere. The lighter-than-air methane cloud gains altitude, mixing with oxygen and thereby gaining explosive poten tial. An electrical disturbance -- possibly caused by the rising cloud itself or a lightning strike - ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A METEOR IMPACT OR EARTH SLUMP?November 22, 1996. The Honduras-Guate mala border. About 10:10 PM, the residents of this area observed a red-andyellow fireball moving east-to-west. The bolide's passing was marked by a loud detonation. From this information, one would bet heavily that this was simply a routine meteor detonation caused by the heat generated during entry into the atmosphere. The next morning, however, people discovered a landslide covering several acres on the slopes of Cerro Negro, a mountain 14 kilometers from San Luis. Did the meteor slam into the mountain overnight? So far, investigators have not been able to decide whether the landslide is just gravity-slumping on the slope or a disturbance created by the night's meteor. One observer believes he can see traces of a crater some 50 meters wide. Experts from the U.S . and Canada plan to examine the site in detail. (Anonymous; "A Hit in Honduras?" Sky and Telescope, 93:12, March 1997.) From Science Frontiers #110, MAR-APR 1997 . 1997-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Unusual Circulating Cloud Object July 24, 1996. Malborough, South Devon. About midnight on this date, E. Netley and his wife observed a most peculiar cloud formation. It was so well-formed and precisely organized that Netley felt that the term "cloud object" was appropriate. Even so, he was confident that the apparition represented a natural phenomenon. "Natural" probably, but certainly the strangest cloud we have encountered in 30 years of literature research. The evening of July 23 was warm and a bit humid, with a modest breeze blowing in from the ocean. Netley and wife first saw the "cloud object" from a distance of about a kilometer; they eventually walked to within 400 meters of the phenomenon. The "object" consisted of a slowly rotating ring of thin, vertically oriented clouds. (See figure.) The cloud ring was 80-100 meters across and seemed to rotate in a horizontal plane at the rate of about one revolution per minute. As though this were not strange enough, the rotating "cloud object" itself moved in a larger circle 8-10 times the diameter of the "cloud object." The "cloud object" took 4-5 minutes to complete a trip around the larger circle. The phenomenon lasted for about an hour before dissipating. (Netley, Edward; "Unusual Circulating Cloud Object," Journal of Meteorology, U.K . ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects "PLANETARY VISIONS" DURING NDEs (Top) Global nuclear arsenal in thousands of warheads. (Bottom) number of peace-keeping missions. It is difficult to move from the universe of hard objective facts into the shadowy world of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). Nevertheless, NDEs have elements of consistency across a wide spectrum of percipients. Mainstream scientists always explain NDEs in reductionist terms: they are merely the consequence of physiological changes taking place in the dying person's brain. Parapsychologists are more open-minded. They wonder if being near death breaks down a barrier separating the everyday, objective world from a spiritual one. If their intuition is correct, there is the thought that, by breaching this barrier during NDEs, the percipients might transcend our usual confines of time and space. At these moments, "planetary visions" beyond the moment might occur; that is, prophecy! Before chucking this issue of SF, "hard" scientists should recognize that the foregoing surmise can be tested, not as rigorously as measuring the electron's charge, but still a test of sorts. K. Ring has collected testimonies of these so-called "planetary visions" from individuals who had been clinically dead for more than 10 minutes, but who were subsequently revived (obviously!). Typical of Ring's collected testimonies was this from a 17-year-old NDE percipient: "I was informed ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Unidentified Light November 20, 1995. North Atlantic. Aboard the m.v . Uruguay Express enroute Santos to Bilboa. "At 0230 UTC a very bright light was noted on the port side about 50 from the bow, it lasted for about 5 seconds and then disappeared. "Knowing of no bright star in that position, the observers checked the area with binoculars and saw two small lights which were as bright as a star of very small magnitude, travelling at a very fast rate and at a steady distance from each other. No navigation lights were seen. One light then disappeared and the other changed course upwards before disappearing about 3 seconds later, neither object left a trail." The sky was cloudless and visibility was good. The vessel was about 200 miles south of the Cape Verde Islands. (Chiappara, H.; "Unidentified Light," Marine Observer, 66:186, 1996.) Comment. Another maddening, elusive, UFO-like sighting, of which there are many from similarly reliable sources. One wonders what caused the initial "very bright light." Reference. Many similar mysterious lights are cataloged under GLM2 in Lightning, Auroras. Book description here . From Science Frontiers #110, MAR-APR 1997 . 1997-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects http://www.aros.net/angio/pistuff/piquery At this Web site you can enter your Social Security Number (or telephone number, etc.) and discover if it appears among the first 1.25 million digits of pi. Perhaps when God was designing the Universe and was contemplating what the value of pi should be, he put your number somewhere in this transcendental number! (Anonymous; New Scientist, p. 64, January 4, 1997.) Comment. Of course, pi has as many digits as you care to compute (at least we think it does!) If your number is not among the first 1.25 million digits, it will certainly appear somewhere later. It's just that you are not first in line! From Science Frontiers #110, MAR-APR 1997 . 1997-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 110: Mar-Apr 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Circles Of Contention No, this is not about crop circles, although these are easily as controversial -- at least among anthropologists. The story broke last September (1996), in Sydney, Australia, and has been simmering ever since. We have let the story cook for a while, hoping to get some confirmation of the dates involved. This will have to come later. These "circles of contention" are engraved on tall boulders (about 2 meters high on average) arranged in arcs hundreds of meters long at a site the aborigines call Jinmium. Jinmium is located near the western boundary of Australia's Northern Territory. The circles are obviously the work of humans. There are thousands of these etchings all told. Dimensions: 2-3 centimeters across and about half as deep. No one doubts that the Jinmium site is ancient. Judging from the sediments that cover the lowest circles, these engravings are about 60,000 years old. If this date survives scrutiny, the Jinmium carvings will be the oldest human art on the planet -- twice as old as anything found in Europe. No wonder the circles have created a stir. Actually, though, a larger issue is at stake. In the sediments around the engraved boulders, anthropologists have discovered what seem to be even-more-ancient signs of human activity: stone tools stratigraphically dated at 116,000 and 176,000 years. The ...
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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 Something Strange Is Going On!Where? "Everywhere, of course," is the answer of any anomalist worth his or her salt. Especially, though, something strange in going on with prime numbers. In an homage to the revered mathematician P. Erdos, who died September 20, 1996, D. Mackenzie mentioned a theory Erdos published in 1940 with M. Kac. This theory states that a plot of the number of prime factors of very large numbers forms a bell curve -- almost as if these numbers were "choosing" their prime factors at random. Alluding to a assertion Einstein is said to have made, Erdos commented: "God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers." (Mackenzie, Dana; "Homage to an Itinerant Master," Science, 275:759, 1997.) Cross reference. The distribution of prime numbers is more than strange, see the plot in SF#42/332. What do prime numbers have to do with the real world? Are math and natural science really separate, unlinked disciplines? Pythagoras, 2,500 years ago, decided that: "All is number." He may be right. A strange connection seems to exist between prime numbers and quantum physics. On one side of the chasm that supposedly separates math from physics, we have the prime numbers and the Riemann zeta ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 111: May-Jun 1997 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology Ancient entertainments Tobacco and cocaine in ancient egypt An anasazi ley line? Astronomy Extraterrestrial handedness Biology Circaseptennial rhythm in ear growth Life on different scales Chromosome choreograph Is perfect pitch favored by natural selection? Carnot creatures Geology Methane burps and gas-hydrate reservoirs Why some sands sing, squeak, and boom Geophysics White streak from a tv set Exotic seismic signals Psychology Malleable memories Math & Physics Levitation and levity! Something strange is going on! ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 107: Sep-Oct 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Rock-Based Life Virtually all biology textbooks insist that all terrestrial life ultimately depends upon sunlight for its survival. The ecosystems clustered around the deep-sea vents and the bacteria found in deep aquifers demonstrate that the sun is not essential to life -- chemical energy does just fine. In fact, the domain of chemosynthetic life has now been extended to a Romanian cave that has apparently been almost completely sealed off from surface influences for 5.5 million years. Air does leak in through tiny cracks, and water partially fills the cave. What is most remarkable in this sunless, sealed ecosystem is its biodiversity: 48 animal species, including 33 brand-new species. The roster includes isopods, a millipede, a centipede, a water scorpion, and a leech. Of course, bacteria and fungi thrive there, too. In contrast to unsealed caves, where insects, bats, and other sources of food filter in from the surface, life in the Romanian cave seems to derive entirely from hydrogen sulfide present in the cave's rocks. This compound is consumed by microorganisms, which are then grazed by cave occupants higher up the food chain. A NASA scientist has called Movile cave a "Mars analog site." And indeed it might be, for Mars has plenty of rocks and subsurface water. (Skinrud, E.; "Romanian Cave Contains Novel Ecosystem," Science News, 149: 405, ...
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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 Rogue wave smashes the queen elizabeth ii September 11, 1995. North Atlantic. Aboard the Queen Elizabeth II enroute from Cherbourg to New York. During this crossing of the Atlantic, the Queen Elizabeth II had to change course to avoid Hurricane Luis. Despite this precaution, the vessel encountered seas of 18 meters with occasional higher crests. At 0400 the Grand Lounge windows, 22 meters above the water, stove in. But this was only a precursor. "At 0410 the rogue wave was sighted right ahead, looming out of the darkness from 220 , it looked as though the ship was heading straight for the white cliffs of Dover. The wave seemed to take ages to arrive but it was probably less than a minute before it broke with tremendous force over the bow. An incredible shudder went through the ship, followed a few minutes later by two smaller shudders. There seemed to be two waves in succession as the ship fell into the 'hole' behind the first one. The second wave of 28-29 m (period 13 seconds), whilst breaking, crashed over the foredeck, carrying away the forward whistle mast. .. .. . "Captain Warwick admits that sometimes it can be difficult to gauge the height of a wave, but in this case the crest was more or less level with the line of sight for those on the bridge, about 29 m above the surface; additionally, the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 112: Jul-Aug 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Cold-Fusion Pro-Fusion It has been three years since we last reported on cold fusion. (SF#95) Cold fusion is an anomaly if there even was one, because mainstream science vigorously excludes the phenomenon from its journals, such as Science. It is even characterized as "pseudoscience." Nevertheless, in a 1996 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, E. Storms required 59 pages to review properly recent work on cold fusion. Based on more than 190 studies (his bibliography runs for 12 pages), Storms reveals just how seriously some "rogue" scientists view cold fusion as a real phenomenon and future energy source. Reflecting the antagonism of the "hotfusion" community, the U.S . expenditures on cold fusion probably do not exceed $1 million/year; Japan, in contrast, spends about $100 million/year. Cold fusion was not interred elsewhere around the planet and is quite healthy. In Storms' own words: "Evidence for large and reproducible energy generation as well as various nuclear reactions, in addition to fusion, from a variety of environments and methods is accumulating. The field can no longer be dismissed by invoking obvious error or prosaic explanations." (Storms, Edmund; "Review of the 'Cold Fusion' Effect," Journal of Scientific Exploration, 10:185, 1996.) More recently, the Wall Street Journal commented derogatorily about cold ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 121: Jan-Feb 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects B-24 SIGHTS "CIRCLES OF LIGHT"The still-unexplained balls of light (" foo fighters") seen by Allied pilots over wartime Germany were duplicated in the Pacific. In addition, strange "circles of light" followed American aircraft. The following paragraphs were taken from the "Weekly Intelligence Summary," Headquarters, Eastern Air Command, South East Asia. June 1, 1945. "A B-24 of the 11th Bomb Group on a snooper mission over Truk during the early morning hours of 3 May 1945, encountered what may prove to be as baffling a phenomena (sic) as the balls of light seen by the B-29s while over the Japanese mainland. (Excerpted From Hq. AAF, POA, Air Intell. Memo No. 4, 8 May 1945.) "The B-24 first observed two red circles of light approaching the plane from below while still over the Truk atoll. One light was on the right and the other was seen on the left of the B-24. The light on the left side turned back after one and one half hours. The one on the right remained with the bomber until the B-24 was only 10 miles from Guam. From the time that the B-24 left the atoll, the light never left its position on the right side. It was reported by the crew members as sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 112: Jul-Aug 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects You May Become What You Eat When we scarf down a hamburger, we ingest bovine DNA. The textbooks say that this alien DNA is destroyed during digestion. Otherwise, it might "somehow" be incorporated into our own DNA, leading in time to our acquisition of some bovine characteristics! You'll recall that cannibals thought to acquire the virtues of their slain enemies by grabbing a bite or two! But this all sounds pretty farfetched, doesn't it? Maybe not. When W. Doerfler and R. Schubbert, at the University of Cologne, fed the bacterial virus M13 to a mouse, snippets of the M13's genes turned up in cells taken from the mouse's intestines, spleen, liver, and white blood cells. Most of the alien DNA was eventually rejected, but some was probably retained. In any event, alien DNA in food seems to make its way to and survive for a time in the cells of the eater. (Cohen, Philip; "Can DNA in Food Find Its Way into Cells?" New Scientist, p. 14, January 4, 1997.) Comment. We are only half-kidding when we ask if food consumption could affect the evolution of a species. After all, our cells already harbor mitochondria, which are generally admitted to have originally been free bacteria that were "consumed" by animal cells. The process even has a name ...
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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 Heard Above Cayuga's Waters In 1934, Science printed several letters describing and speculating about the socalled "Seneca Guns". (Lake Seneca is one of New York State's Finger Lakes.) The locals and Indians of bygone days have repeatedly testified about the eerie, unexpected booms heard around the shores of Lake Seneca. It seems that the phenomenon is not restricted to this Finger Lake, for a letter from G. Kuchar describes a modern "bombardment" of "lake guns" heard at Lake Cayuga about 15 miles east of Lake Seneca. "In the early morning hours of August 8th, 1996 (maybe about 6:30 or 7:00 AM), I was awoken by what I thought were loud explosions of thunder. It was a very loud, abrupt sound, sort of like close-by thunderclaps except that they seemed somewhat distant and yet had no reverberations or rumblings. I went to the window which faced a large building across the way...The early morning appeared warm, humid, and overcast. The explosive "thunderclaps" happened again, a whole series of them, and they seemed to originate up in the air and to my right, but I could detect no flashes of light, and the blasts seemed to come at random points in the sky (which was not very visible to me because of the big building looming across the lawn). I couldn' ...
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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 Why did life take a left turn?Life-as-we-know-it is left-handed; that is, our amino acid molecules are levorotatory rather than the mirror-image dextrorotatory versions. Because humans "expect" symmetry in nature, it is taken for granted that everything else in the universe is split equally between leftand right-handed molecules. Earth life is just a fluke -- or is it? On September 28, 1969, organic-rich stones fell in Victoria, Australia. This was the Murchison meteorite, and it may carry a message. Over a decade ago, M.H . Engel and B. Nagy reported that the organic molecules in the Murchison meteorite were not split 50:50 between left- and right-handed versions. So contrary to expectations was this finding that most scientists assumed that the analysis was contaminated by terrestrial organic molecules. Now, M.H . Engel and S.A . Macko have refined the analytical techniques and apparently avoided any taint of contamination. Their conclusion: the Murchison amino acids still lean to the left. From all this arise several intriguing possibilities: Life on earth started split evenly between left- and right-handed amino acids, but was nudged to the left by the influx of organic-laden meteorites like the Murchison. Terrestrial life actually originated elsewhere in the universe where much matter is left-handed, including life, if ...
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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 Genes vs. memes Vital to the concept of "gene wars" (mentioned in SF#114) is the assumption that our destiny is controlled by "selfish genes" (or "selfish DNA"). The idea that evolution works only at the gene level has been championed by R. Dawkins, and today it dominates much evolution philosophy. However, this "genetic imperialism" is now being challenged by some scientists who insist that culture also affects an organism's evolution, be it a human or an insect. In fact, it was Dawkins himself who first proposed the term "meme" for the cultural counterpart of the gene. A meme, in other words, is an "element" of culture that can be passed along to progeny by imitation and/or cultural pressures. In reductionist thinking, environmental challenges are met by gene mutations plus natural selection. In meme theory, the same challenges are confronted by cultural changes (meme "mutation") plus natural selection. The meme approach is holistic rather than reductionist and is appealing because it allows us some control over our destiny. There are several phenomena in which some scientists profess to see memes overpowering the genes: Generations of female infanticide have led to more male births than female births. In dairy-farming societies, 90% of the population has the enzyme lactase that allows individuals to digest cows' milk. In other societies, 80% ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 121: Jan-Feb 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Is life a transitory phenomenon?We don't mean just life on earth, where it has hung on for a couple billion years, but life anywhere in the universe. Many cosmologists advance the socalled Anthropic Principle, which states that the physical constants of nature are honed to just the right values to make life possible. If the charge on the electron were a little less or the properties of carbon a bit different, life could not exist. The Anthropic Principle seems to imply that the universe was designed for earth life. But "design" is a bad word these days. It is redolent of purpose and a supernatural being. Suppose, though, that the Anthropic Principle is correct but only in our part of the cosmos and only for a little while. If the constants of nature are not really constant, life could be just a transitory phenomenon, flaring up here and there wherever conditions are ripe and the Anthropic Principle reigns. The cosmos as-a -whole might be lurching toward other goals or, perhaps, toward nowhere in particular. Enough philosophy! A team of Australian astronomers, led by J.K . Webb, has been trying to determine if the famous fine-structure constant of physics has really remained constant throughout the 12-billion years or so of the universe's history. The fine-structure constant is dimensionless and almost exactly equal to 1/137. (Why 137 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 121: Jan-Feb 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Oklo: An Unappreciated Cosmic Phenomenon In 1972, French scientists discovered that several natural concentrations of uranium ore had become critical and flared up some 2 billion years ago at Oklo, Gabon. The concentration and configuration of the natural uranium and surrounding materials at that time had been just right to sustain fission. In fact, the analysis of the nuclear waste in the burned rocks demonstrated that plutonium had also been created. This implies that natural breeder reactors are also possible, raising the possibility of hitherto unappreciated, long-lived heat sources deep in the earth, in the other planets, and inside some of the stars. Don't worry that the Oklo phenomenon might occur today on the earth's surface. The concentration of fissionable U-235 has fallen considerably in the last 2 billion years due to its radioactive decay. But, deep inside the earth and other astronomical bodies, nuclear criticality might still be possible due to different pressures, densities, etc. In a stimulating and generally overlooked paper in Eos, J.M . Herndon proffers four important natural phenomena that may involve natural fission reactors. Geomagnetic reversals . In the deep earth, where pressures and densities are high, natural nuclear reactors may generate intermittent bursts of heat -- just as they did at Oklo -- and thereby cause the earth's dynamo to falter and reverse. Planetary heating . Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune emit much more energy than ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 113: Sep-Oct 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A VANISHED PLANET?Almost every week, it seems, a new Texas-sized object is discovered in the outer solar system. In the inner solar system, however, some astronomers are finding "holes" where planets seem to have been ejected by unknown forces. D. Christodoulou, Louisiana State University, found one such "hole" serendipitously. He was studying how the sun and the planets might have condensed from the (hypothesized) cloud of primordial gas and dust. Factoring in gravity, rotation, and magnetic fields, he found the cloud condensing in concentric rings at just the right locations for protoMercury, proto-Venus, and proto-earth. The fourth ring, however, did not correspond to any existing planet, and the position of proto-Mars was off the mark. But the asteroids and outer planets fell rather neatly into place. The implication of these calculations is that some turmoil in the early inner solar system cast out one planet and dislocated Mars. (Hecht, Jeff; "Did Extra Planet Vanish into Outer Space?" New Scientist, p. 18, June 14, 1997.) Comment. These are sour notes in the "music of the spheres," but don't be overly concerned; these are just calculations based upon many assumptions. Calculated positions of rings of condensed dust and gas compared to actual planet locations. From Science Frontiers #113, SEP-OCT ...
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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 Carnot Creatures Photosynthesis is the ultimate source of energy for most of the life forms we recognize here on earth. Sure, there are also a few creatures that derive their energy by oxidizing the sulfides dissolved in the 400 water gushing forth from deep-sea vents. We will call them "geochemical creatures" to separate them from the "photosynthetic creatures" we are more familiar with. But, in principle at least, there could also be "Carnot creatures", whose metabolisms depend upon temperature differences like almost all human-built engines. Some bizarre animal, such as a meter-long tube worm, could plant one end on a hot rock surface and dangle the other in cold seawater to reject waste heat from its Carnot engine. Since thermodynamic-cycle efficiencies can approach 60% compared with only 10% for photosynthesis, evolution would have been remiss if it had not tried to evolve "Carnot creatures." For, as D. Jones comments below, Carnot creatures would be adaptable to many more habitats in the universe than photosynthetic creatures, which must have a sun with a very specific electromagnetic spectrum. "Many worlds, from distant 'brown dwarf' stars to the satellites of giant planets, may have internal heating but no effective 'Sun'. If Carnot life is possible, it may well have evolved in such dark and distant places -- making life abundant throughout the Universe. Indeed, our distant ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 112: Jul-Aug 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects From The Depths Of The Amazon Trawls lowered between 9 and 45 meters into the Amazon's muddy waters have brought up many bizarre fish never seen before. J. Lundberg and his team from the University of Arizona found two species of electric fish that subsist entirely on the tails of other electric fish. Some of the catfish are armorplated; others are transparent; another catfish is only 8 millimeters (1 /3 inch) long. Most interesting to taxonomists will be two separate species of electric fish that can be told apart only by the different patterns of electrical discharges they generate! What will trawls capture in the Rio Negro which is about 100 meters deep in one place? (Bille, Matthew A.; "Recent Discoveries: Fishing in South America," Exotic Zo ology , 4:1 , March/April 1997. Publication address: 3405 Windjammer Dr., Colorado Springs, CO 80920.) From Science Frontiers #112, JUL-AUG 1997 . 1997-2000 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 Acoustical "vision" underwater When we (and all eyed animals) see an object, we are detecting light reflected from that object. When underwater, though, our vision is limited because light does not travel far. Sound, however, does; and sound is reflected from objects just as light is. This is of course the basis of underwater sonar, in which a sound source replaces the sun or a diver's floodlight. But even without an active sound source, the ocean is full of sound. Waves, rain, and the sounds made by marine animals create a background of noise that "illuminates" objects, not directly, but from the environment in general. Using only this enveloping background sound, it is possible to create acoustical images of objects. "Vision" of this sort is equivalent to "facial vision" in blind humans, who can hear objects using the environmental sound reflected from them. J. Potter and his colleagues at the National University of Singapore have constructed an array of underwater microphones that detects "slices" of the acoustical environment around it. When processed by a computer, images of objects emerge by virtue of the background noise reflected from them. This group has also estimated the ability of dolphins to detect and process background noise. They suggest that dolphins should be able to "see" objects at least 25 feet away without even using their active sonar; that is, ...
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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 Bye-bye Mercury, and Maybe Mars During the 1950s, the campaign of mainstream science to discredit Velikovsky assured the public that the solar system was the epitome of stability -- wayward planets were impossible. Then along came chaos theory which implied that the flight of a butterfly in Brazil could, in principle, affect weather in Canada. In effect, a slight change in initial conditions could, in the fullness of time, have very large effects. Now, it is generally admitted that the solar system is chaotic after all. Each planet is subject to the tiny, butterfly-like gravitational tugs of the other planets, especially Jupiter. Given enough time, these gravitational nuances can result in the ejection of a planet from the solar system -- and may already have done so in the past! Mercury and Mars are the most vulnerable on a billion-year time scale. In the case of Mercury, its orbit will become more and more elliptical according to computer simulations. Eventually a close gravitational encounter with Venus is possible. This could send Mercury careening off into deep space. The probability of this happening is only 1 in a 1000 over 5 billion years, but it is not zero. Mars might likewise be ejected by a passing nudge from earth. However, this encounter could go the other way. Depending upon the celestial dynamics of the encounter, Mars might gravitationally fling earth out into the Galaxy, and ...
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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 Where Did They Come From?It appears more and more likely that South America was colonized earlier and separately from North America. Reason #1 is that the oldest recognized sites in North America are only 11,200 years old, while the Monte Verde site in southern Chile is now generally admitted to be 12,500 years old. Reason #2 is the distance gap of about 5,000 miles between the two sites. So far, there is no evidence of cultural continuity. The time gap is likely to enlarge in a huge quantum jump because of excavations at an intriguing green knoll at Monte Verde. Some 6 feet below its surface is a sedimentary layer containing charcoal in clay-lined pits and humanfractured pebbles. This sedimentary layer is carbon-dated at 33,000 years ago -- some 20,000 years before the ancestors of North America's Clovis people are said to have trekked across the Bering land bridge. (Wilford, John Noble; "Chilean Field Yields New Clues to Peopling of Americas," New York Times, August 25, 1998. Cr. M. Colpitts) New Clues. Just to the north of Monte Verde, on the coast of southern Peru, traces of a hitherto unknown, 11,000-year-old maritime culture have emerged. For short, the new site is called QJ-280 (for Quebrada Jaguay 280). QJ-280 is now ...
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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 Precognitive Dreams For her doctoral dissertation, M.S . Stowell completed a deep study of precognitive dreaming. She approached this subject about the only way one can, which is by interviewing people who claim to have had such dreams. Stowell interviewed five such claimants, and it is remarkable how many precognitive dreams they have had collectively. There are 51, and 37 of them have been confirmed as accurate. In addition, all five dreamers had precognitive experiences while awake. Many of these were also confirmed. It is important to bear in mind that it takes only one solid confirmation of precognition to shatter some sacred paradigms! Here, we might have a couple score of them! To give the reader the flavor of this type of parapsychological research, we select one dream that foresaw a plane crash. Here is how Elizabeth described her dream: "It starts out where I'm driving north on the freeway in [City]. Right about by [specific location], going north, heading for the [specific] Bridge, I look up and there's a big plane coming straight at me, and there's also an overpass right where I am. My initial reaction is that it's going to crash on and that I'm in trouble and instead a split second passes in which I realize that I'm going under it, under the overpass, and the plane will go right ...
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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 Stroke Changes Accent "A Scottish woman went to bed with a headache and woke up speaking with a South African accent instead of her usual lilting Scottish brogue, a British doctor said yesterday. "Doctors say she had a minor stroke and suffers from foreign accent syndrome, a rare condition in which patients acquire a different accent after suffering a stroke." (Anonymous; "A Rare Stroke Changes Accent," Baltimore Sun, October 14, 1997.) Comment. Assuming this Reuters dispatch isn't pulling our legs, that's a pretty peculiar syndrome! The woman must have been previously exposed to the South African accent and incorporated it in her memory. From Science Frontiers #115, JAN-FEB 1998 . 1998-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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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 Mounds Of Mystery Unlike many controversies in science, the debates over the origin of the Mima Mounds have been friendly. No one gets overly passionate over bizarre heaps of earth; the Mima Mounds are "fun phenomena." Nevertheless, the biggest of them on the Mima Prairie, near Little Rock, Washington, are very impressive. They are closely-packed, some 6-8 feet high and about 30 feet across. It's kind of eerie walking among them; but they are also fun to ride over in vehicles -- they create a sort of natural roller-coaster effect. There are thousands upon thousands of mounds on the Mima Prairie. Before farmers began leveling them, they stretched for more than 20 miles. If, as some have estimated, they are about 6,000 years old, they were originally twice as high before the elements wore them down. The big question is and always has been: How were these large heaps of churned-up sand, fine gravel, and decayed vegetable matter formed? One has to smile at the dominant theory: pocket! Sure! pocket gophers are bundles of digging energy, but each Mima Mound contains about 100 tons of soil. Multiply that figure by the thousands of mounds, and you begin to wonder about the gopher theory. Also counting against the gophers is the fact that no one has ever found gophers in the mounds, nor has a ...
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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 The hilina slump a.k .a . "the big crack"Huge chunks of the Hawaiian Islands have been sliding into the Pacific Ocean for hundreds of thousands of years. (SF#101) Geologists classify these slides as either "slumps" or "debris avalanches." Slumps move just a few inches a year but are prone to bigger, jerky adjustments. Debris avalanches are fast cascades of rocks and soil. In Hawaii, both varieties of movement can involve massive blocks of real estate. In the huge Nu'uanu debris slide, stone blocks 6 miles across tumbled 30 miles out to sea. Both slumps and debris slides may create colossal tsunamis. (Tsunamis are miscalled "tidal waves," but they have nothing to do with tides and do not behave like tides or wind-driven waves.) When large pieces of the Hawaiian Islands slip into the ocean, the entire Pacific Rim is smashed by the resulting tsunamis. In New South Wales, Australia, there is geological evidence that part of this coast was scoured by a Hawaiigenerated tsunami 100,000 years ago. The postulated wave started out about 375-meters ( -mile) high in Hawaii. By the time is reached Australia, it was about 40 meters high. (SF#85) Worse waves may be on tap. A 4,760 cubic mile chunk of the Big Island (Hawaii) is breaking away at the rate ...
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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 The black death and ccr5-delta 32 Plagues are not all bad, and the Black Death (bubonic plague) that swept into Europe from Asia in 1346 was no exception. It is now common knowledge that bacteria, insects, plants, and even humans can build up resistances to poisons, diseases, and antibiotics. Mutations are always occurring; some good, some neutral, some bad. It has been found that a human mutation designated CCR5-delta 32 confers immunity to AIDS if inherited from both parents. People carrying the CCR5-delta 32 mutation lack the receptors to which the AIDS virus must attach itself if it is to infect the person. What has all this to do with the Black Death? "Although the origin of the mutation is obscure, it appears to have suddenly become relatively common among white Europeans about 700 years ago. That increase suggests that something must have occurred about that time to greatly favor the survival of people carrying the mutation." What biological catastrophe decimated Europe 700 years ago? The Black Death. One-quarter to one-third of the Europeans succumbed between 1347 and 1350. The Black Death strongly modified the European gene pool, increasing the frequency of CCR5-delta 32. This mutation may not have had any direct effect on the plague itself. It may just be a quirk of fate that the survivors of the Black Death had a higher frequency of the CCR5-delta ...
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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 Einstein In Free Fall We now describe two abstruse phenomena, one of which is well-recognized, the other which is suggested by quantum mechanics, but is yet unobserved. Both involve only tiny physical effects. Even so, we should remember that a linchpin of Special Relativity is the tiny advance of Mercury's perihelion. It was Mercury's miniscule orbital anomaly that helped overthrow Newtonian celestial mechanics. Now, quantum mechanics may, in turn, undermine Relativity. The gist of this introduction is that we have here tiny, hard-to-visualize phenomena that are so scientifically important that it is worthwhile trying to understand them. In the first abstruse phenomenon, quantum mechanical effects demonstrate that the laws of classical electromagnetism are flawed. According to the classical view, an electron cruising by an ideal solenoid (a tube with an internal magnetic field but none outside) should be unaffected; that is, the electron should not "feel" the confined magnetic field. But, in the quantum mechanical view, the "presence" of the electron is smeared out so that it penetrates the solenoid, and the electron is affected by the confined field. This has been demonstrated. A Los Alamos scientist, D. Ahluwalia, ventures that an analogous situation prevails with gravity. He notes that General Relativity predicts that a particle (or person) in free fall cannot distinguish this condition (weightlessness) from the situation in a hollow ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 112: Jul-Aug 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Sea turtles: from one end to the other Leatherback turtles are mysterious in several ways: flexible shell, warmbloodedness, etc. (See SF#76 for more.) Now, we add two more remarkable capabilities to their dossier. Precision navigation. The oily, flexible shells of leatherbacks have made it difficult for researchers to attach radio transmitters to the animals. Their very deep dives (over 1,000 meters) are also inimical to human instrumentation. But S.J . Morreale's group at Cornell have succeeded in attaching pressure-resistant transmitters to the shells on short tethers. This team was able to track female leatherbacks as they left their nesting beach in Costa Rica and headed southward, past the Galapagos, out into the open South Pacific. Surprisingly, all the leatherbacks plied a very narrow corridor each year of the experiment (1992-1995). In fact, the paths were almost for at least 2,700 kilometers southwest of the Galapagos. Highprecision navigation equipment is required here. Among the leatherbacks' "instruments" are probably sensors that detect the angle of the geomagnetic field, the length of daylight, and the identities of the oceanic currents encountered. There are probably other sensors and, of course, a brain to process all the signals; but virtually nothing is known about them. (Morreale, Stephen J., et al; "Migration Corridor for Sea Turtles," Nature, ...
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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 Broadside Against Small Icy Comets In a late-1997 issue, Geophysical Research Letters published a group of five papers that detailed five different lines of evidence that are inconsistent with the claim by L.A . Frank and J.B . Sigwarth that the earth is bombarded daily by 30,000 house-size icy comets. If such bombardment has really been occurring, scientists would have to rethink the origins of the earth's oceans, terrestrial life, and the formation of the solar system. No wonder the icy-comet hypothesis is strongly challenged! Three of the more interesting points made by this group of papers are as follows: Our moon could not escape the icy-comet bombardment. Roughly 1,000 craters 50 meters in diameter and splashes of debris 150 meters in diameter must occur each. There is no evidence that the moon is thus afflicted. Comets also carry the noble gases argon, krypton, and xenon. These gases should accumulate in the atmosphere as the comets disintegrate. The amounts of these gases actually measured are 10,000 times less than those the postulated bombardment would produce. The icy comets should break up near the earth and produce clouds of ice crystals. Sunlight reflected from such 30-ton clouds would be brighter than Venus and easily visible before they disperse. Such objects are rarely seen, implying that small icy comets do not exist in the numbers claimed. Preceding this series of five ...
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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 Glitches In The Terrestrial Conveyor Belt According to plate tectonics, the earth's continents are being transported -- very slowly -- on a subterranean conveyor belt of sorts. Although plate tectonics, nee continental drift, was ridiculed 50 years ago, it has been very successful in accounting for many geological phenomena. The theory is rarely challenged these days, but there are anomalies out there. "According to the simple plate-tectonic theory, the age of oceanic lithosphere is zero at a spreading oceanic ridge and increases with distance from the ridge. Thus the lithosphere of the central Atlantic, which current palaeogeographical reconstructions assure us began to open no earlier than 120 million years ago, has zero age at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and, supposedly an age of about 120 million years close to the land masses of Africa and South America at the appropriate latitude. Yet, Bonatti and others (Nature, v. 380, p. 518, 1996) have now recovered samples of 140-million-year-old pelagic limestones not even from the edges of the Atlantic but right in the middle of the ocean, close to the ridge. How can this be possible?" The only explanation (? ) seems to be that this errant chunk of crust got "trapped" in the middle of the Atlantic -- like a misdirected suitcase on an airport conveyor belt. (Anonymous; "Old Rocks near the MidAtlantic Ridge ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 113: Sep-Oct 1997 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Green Thunderstorms Anecdotes abound that exceptionally severe thunderstorms may appear to emit an eerie, sickeningly yellow-green light. Skeptics scoff at this notion. The excited observers were deluded, or they made it all up. This is, of course, the same knee-jerk response greeting UFO reports and accounts of many other anomalies. Thunderstorms, however, do have an objective existence. And it turns out that a few storm-watching meteorologists have also seen greenish thunderstorms. Such professional testimony is usually dismissed as due to the reflection of greenish ground vegetation by the storm clouds or, perhaps, the effects of sheets of hail preceding the storms. In 1995, F.W . Gallagher et al decided to settle the matter. They chased likely looking thunderstorms armed with a spectrophotometer. Many storms later, they proved, first of all, that some thunderstorms are definitely green. In fact, some gradually change from blue to green in the space of half an hour. Their ground observations, plus more spectrophotometer data taken from aircraft, refute the theory that the green color is from reflected vegetation. Hail may contribute to the green color but is not required. In sum, green thunderstorms really do exist, but no one yet knows where all the green comes from. (Gallagher, Frank W., III, et al; "Green Thunderstorms Observed," Amer ican Meteorological Society, Bulletin, 77:2889, 1996 ...
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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 More Sheldrake Heresy "In 20th century physics, the fact that the observer and the observed are linked is well established. In biology this is heresy." Thus spake Rupert Sheldrake, and he is absolutely correct. He was referring, of course, to that "spooky" prediction of quantum mechanics that the mere act of observing subatomic particles affects them. (See: "A Watched Atom Is an Inhibited Atom" in SF#67.) Sheldrake proposes extending the "observer effect" to biology. In effect, he suggests replacing the state of an atom with the state of the neurological connections within the human brain. All this technical jargon breaks down to a simple question: Can a person tell if he or she is being stared at? Before you leap ahead to the next item, which we assure you is not as highly charged with controversy, consider that Sheldrake has conducted thousands of tests that do seem to show the reality of the observer effect in biology. Sheldrake separates starer from staree by a glass window. The staree faces away from starer and is blindfolded. Prompted by a random-number generator, the starer stares or does not stare. The staree responds positively if he feels the starer's eyes locked on to the back of his head. The starees are right more than 50% of the time. In fact, some starees are particularly sensitive to stares and respond correctly up to ...
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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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