2482 results found.
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 84: Nov-Dec 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Current Treads In The North Pacific We are a bit hestitant about including still another eyebrow-raising item, but the source here is Eos, a weekly publication of the American Geophysical Union, and the story is irresistible! It all began when the container ship Hansa Carrier , enroute from Korea to the U.S ., encountered a fierce storm and lost 21 40-foot-long containers to the sea. "Approximately 80,000 Nike brand shoes were lost overboard on May 27, 1990, in the north Pacific Ocean ( 48 N, 161 W). Six months to a year later, thousands of shoes washed ashore in North America from southern Oregon to the Queen Charlotte Islands...We have gathered beachcomber reports and compared the inferred shoe drift with an oceanographic hindcast model and historical drift bottle returns. This spill-ofopportunity provided a calibration point for the model. Computer runs for 1946-1991 suggested that drift of floatable material across the northeast Pacific Ocean for May 1990-January 1991 was farther south than the mean of forty-five simulations." Route of the floating shoes Well, we can tweak the model a bit; but the authors added a postscript: "As we were finishing this article, we received reports of shoes arriving at the northern end of the Big Island of Hawaii. These shoes appear to have followed the California current southward, and then traveled westward." (Ebbesmeyer ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 84: Nov-Dec 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Cat**cats Clever cat Tales about clever animals abound, but the following is too good to pass up. It seems that C.G . Martin, residing in Stoke-on-Trent, had to trap a feral cat. He wrote as follows: "Although I have made an adequate living as a mechanical design engineer, it took me a couple of minutes to work out how to position the various rods and links to set and bait the trap, which done, I observed from a concealed position. The cat duly arrived, studied the trap suspiciously from different angles, retired, sat and contemplated. Then, after less time than it had taken me to work it out, she entered the trap purposefully, placed her paws underneath the trip plate, took the food and backed out." (Martin, C.G .; "Clever Cat," New Scientist , p. 53, August 29, 1992.) An even cleverer cat Yes, it's true that cats can circumvent our specially designed traps, but we did not realize that they also knew their aerodynamics. "Why is it safer for a cat to fall from a 32-storey building than from a seven-storey building? .. .. . "Just ask scientific and medical reporter Karl Kruszelnicki, whose theory is based on a study of 150 cats that plummeted from windows at different heights. " ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 89: Sep-Oct 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A ROBOT'S MYSTERIOUS DISCOVERY A cross-section of the Great Pyramid looking west. The King's Chamber is #1 on the diagram, the Queen's Chamber is #8 , the ventilation shafts are #6 . The arrow marks the location of the newly discovered "door" and possible chamber. (Adapted from: W. R.; Pyramid Odyssey , 1978 A German roboticist, R. Gantenbrink, was hired to clean out the debris clogging the 8-inch-square "ventilation" shafts in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Remotely controlling a robot resembling a miniature tank, Gantenbrink subsequently explored the cleared shafts. Finding nothing worth noting there, he requested permission to send the robot crawling up a similar shaft in the Queen's Chamber below. Early archeologists had already plumbed this shaft with long pipes and had concluded that it ended after about 9 feet. Gantenbrink's robot, using its camera eye, found that this shaft did not end where expected but instead veered upward at a 45 angle. Climbing the incline, the robot found that the texture of the limestone walls changed from the rough-hewn, locally quarried limestone to the highly polished tura limestone often found in the entryways of tomb chambers. "At the end of the polished section was what appears to be a door, made of the same tura limestone and with tongue-and- ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The milky sea a.k .a . "white water"June 1854. South of Java. Aboard the American clipper Shooting Star . Captain Kingman reporting: "The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky...appeared as black as if a storm was raging. The scene was one of awful grandeur; the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world." We selected this account of the milky sea phenomenon because of its vivid verbiage -- something absent from the modern reports: "August 13, 1986. Northwest Indian Ocean. The entire sea surface took on an intense white glow which was not unlike viewing the negative of a photograph." The milky sea is a rather common phenomenon. In fact, the British Meteorological Office has established a Bioluminescence Database, which presently contains 235 reports of milky seas seen since 1915. P.J . Herring and M. Watson have employed this Database in a review paper on these impressive displays. Geographical plotting of the reports shows a strong concentration in the northwest Indian Ocean (see figure). Seasonally, there is a strong peaking in August and a secondary blip in ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A Curious Sighting September 29, 1991. Winchester, Eng land. A wet day, but the rain had stopped and the wind velocity dropped. The 'subject' is a B. Brumpton. His actual words are in single quotes, as told to B. Hayes: "A high easterly breeze was blowing along New Road which runs eastwest and is about 400 yards long. The subject was 30 yards from the western end facing east. He first noticed the 'object' at approximately 150 yards, at which his reaction was that he was 'seeing things'. The object 'filled the highway', so this suggests a width of eight metres or so. It was 'on the ground' and 'round-topped', suggesting to me a hemisphere. The 'object' was a 'mass of mist' and 'looked very wet'. It seemed to 'roll' toward the subject at a speed that he estimated at 30 m.p .h . However, his estimate of halfa-minute for travelling 150 yards gives a speed of 20 m.p .h . Let us not forget that time is difficult to estimate after an event. "The object emitted a noise 'like very heavy rain pounding on the road', except that it was not raining at the time, and the subject became concerned about 'getting soaked'. Also, the 'mist' ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Tangled-tails tales "Rat kings" have always been a favorite Fortean pheomenon. They are clusters of rats whose tails have somehow become knotted or glued together. Naturalists also find "squirrel kings" in the wild. However improbable these "kings" may seem, new cases keep coming to the fore. Here follows the first of two, as recounted in the Fortean Times; "The first incident occurred in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1989. As 16-yearold Crystal Cresseveur set off for church around midday on Sunday 24 September, she noticed a commotion in the hedge outside her house, it was a writhing furry bundle of six young squirrels all squeaking at once. At first she thought they were playing but she soon realized they were in a panic, and as they pulled in all directions at once they had become firmly stuck among the trunk of the bushes. She called her father, Paul, and their neighbour, Charles Kootares, and with help from the growing crowd of onlookers, managed to extract the frantic cluster from the hedge." In this case, the squirrels' tails could not be disentangled, and the poor animals were put to sleep. The second incident occurred in Baltimore on September 18, 1991. Here, the squirrels' tails were tangled and stuck together by tree sap, hair, and nesting debris. (Anonymous; "Tangled Tales," Fortean Times, no. 63 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Rethinking Aids The columns of SF have frequently publicized the heresy of P. Duesberg, who holds that the so-called AIDS virus, HIV, is not the sole cause of AIDS. Echoing many of Duesberg's assertions is biochemist and immunologist R.S . Root-Bernstein. He points out that: "People all over the world are getting AIDS without being exposed to or infected with HIV." Root-Bernstein continues with: "The implications of this revelation are truly astounding. Essentially there are only three possibilities. The HIV may really be there, but everyone has missed it. This is un-likely, since many of the researchers reporting HIV-negative cases of AIDS are the top HIV experts in the world. Another possibility is that there is a new virus that everyone has missed. This is again unlikely given the huge amount of retroviral research that has been performed in the past decade on AIDS patients. Finally, these may be the cases that demonstrate that AIDS can be produced by the types of synergistic, multifactorial assaults on the immune system that Joseph Sonnabend and I have been proposing for years." Although most AIDS researchers are still wedded to the theory that HIV is the sole and only cause of AIDS, cracks in the stonewalling are beginning to appear. In fact, C.A . Thomas, Jr., formerly a Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard, has organized the Group ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Did barnard & mellish really see craters on mars?The answers are "No" and "Probably," respectively. Well, so what? Everyone knows from spacecraft photos that Mars is definitely peppered with craters; and who are Barnard and Mellish anyway? E.E . Barnard was one of the great American telescopic observers. J.E . Mellish was an amateur astronomer and a protege of Barnard. Both men may have seen Martian craters; Barnard at Lick Observatory in the early 1890s, and Mellish at Yerkes in 1915. These early dates are what make this story interesting, because prior to the Mariner-4 flyby of Mars in 1965, anyone claiming to have seen craters on Mars would have been labeled a crackpot. Just a mere three decades ago, planetary catastrophism was a ridiculous notion. Barnard never dared publish his drawings of Martian craters for fear of ruining his reputation. Mellish was not so reticent. He wrote and lectured widely on his anomalous observations. No one believed him because his observaconflicted with reigning paradigms. Once the paradigm shifted and craters on other planets were legitimized, astronomers looked back and wondered if Barnard and Mellish really did see craters. After all, nobody else had, although several reknowned astronomers had drawn networks of canals they had definitely seen. Some of Barnard's early sketches of Mars surfaced in 1987. They show known volcanos and the huge canyon complex called Valles Marineris, but ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Flat-faced chephren not sphinx!J.A . West, mentioned above, holds that the Sphinx was not built by the pharaoh Chephren circa 2500 BC. Rather, the revisionists say, it was constructed some 5000 years earlier by predecessors of the "classical" Ancient Egyptians. Adding fuel to the controversy is a reconstruction of the Sphinx's visage by F. Domingo, top forensic artist of the New York Police Department. Domingo traveled to Egypt to measure first-hand the exact dimensions of the statue's facial features. When Domingo compared the Sphinx's profile as it probably appeared originally with the profile of Chephren taken from a statue in the Cairo Museum, there was scant resemblance. (West, John Anthony; "The Case of the Missing Pharaoh," New York Times, June 27, 1992. Cr. J. Covey) But the story doesn't end there. Orthodontist S. Peck responded to the Times article suggesting an even more radical notion: "The analytical techniques he [West] and Detective Frank Domingo used on facial photographs are not unlike methods orthodontists and surgeons use to study facial disfigurements. From the right lateral tracing of the statue's worn profile a pattern of bimaxilliary prognathism is clearly detectable. This is an anatomical condition of forward development in both jaws, more frequently found in people of African ancestry than in those from Asian or Indo-European stock. ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 82: Jul-Aug 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Warm, wet, fertile mars Mars may not be orbited by huge artificial satellites of alien provenance, but its geological history is looking more and more as if could have supported or perhaps still does support life. "A large number of anomalous landforms on Mars can be attributed to glaciation, including the action of ice and meltwater. Glacial landscapes are concentrated south of lat -33 and in the Northern Plains suggesting vast Austral and Boreal ice sheets. Crater densities on the glaciated terrains indicate that the final glacial epoch occurred late in Martian history. Thus, Mars may have had a relatively warm, moist climate and dense atmosphere much later than previously believed." (Kargel, Jeffrey S., and Strom, Robert G.; "Ancient Glaciation on Mars," Geology, 20:3 , 1992.) If Mars was warm and wet not too long ago, as implied above, perhaps life did gain a foothold there through either independent invention or, perhaps, through seeding by template-carrying comets or meteorites. P.J . Boston et al have investigated one possible Martian ecosystem: "We have reexamined the question of extant microbial life on Mars in light of the most recent information about the planet and recently discovered nonphotosynthetic ecosystems on Earth -- deep sea hydrothermal vent communities and deep subsurface aquifer communities. On Mars, protected subsurface niches associated with hydrothermal activity could have continued to support life even after surface conditions ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects "ALREADY, NOW, WE ARE FORGOTTEN ON THOSE STELLAR SHORES" *Humans have many ways to predict the future: animal entrails, Tarot cards, and the Copernican Principle. The Copernican Principle, in particular, leads to all sorts of profound prophecies. The Copernican Primciple states that the earth does not occupy a special place in the cosmos. To this we add Darwinism, which asserts that, in the realm of biology, human origin is not special either; i.e ., we enjoy no special place among life forms. Building upon these two general "beliefs," J.R . Gott, III, proceeds to estimate the longevities of various observables, such as the lifetime of a particular species. What follows is a long, highly technical computation of various probabilities, such as the evolution of intelligent life in the universe. All this (and there is a lot of it) leads to the following: "Making only the assumption that you are a random intelligent observer, limits for the total longevity of our species of 0.2 million to 8 million years can be derived at the 95% confidence level. Further consideration indicates that we are unlikely to colonize the Galaxy, and that we are likely to have a higher population than the median for intelligent species." Why won't we colonize the Galaxy? Not because we are not able to, Gott says, but because " ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 82: Jul-Aug 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Phobos Mystery Object On March 28, 1989, Russian ground controllers suddenly and unexpectedly lost contact with their spacecraft that was shadowing the Martian moon Phobos. The last close-up photo of Phobos snapped by the spacecraft contained "an object which shouldn't have been there." Naturally, this Phobos Mystery Object (PMO) was quickly dubbed a UFO by some. It was even speculated that the Russian mission had been deliberately terminated by aliens! Such a scenario dovetailed neatly with the old speculations that Phobos is actually an artificial satellite of Mars, which is being used as a base of operations by someone or something. The final photo of Phobos, taken in infrared light just three days before the communication failure, reveals the outlines of both Phobos and the PMO. All surface detail is washed out, as is common in infrared photographs. If the PMO was at the same distance as Phobos itself, it would be about 2 kilometers wide and 20 long. Its surface brightness is the same as that of Phobos. The sides of the PMO are perfectly parallel; it is rounded at both ends; the end towards Phobos narrows slightly; the other end seems to have a slight protrusion. Since the PMO does not appear to have a metallic surface and displays no antennas or other indicators of artificiality, it is reasonable to ask whether it might be some natural phenomenon. One possibility is that the PMO image is only ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Meteoric "dust bunnies"All around the world, watching through the long nights, is a band of dedicated meteor observers -- mainly amateur astroomers. Collectively, they record many meteor showers and fireballs; all quite respectable astronomical objects. But sometimes fuzzy, rapidly moving luminosities appear, as in the following paragraph written by J.S . Gallagher: "Diffuse luminous objects moving at angular velocities similar to those of meteors were observed during over 200 hours of meteor watching in 1991. They fell in three broad categories: arcs, patches, and 'meteors' similar in appearance to comet comas. Though I at first dismissed the possibility of their being related to meteors, I reconsidered this relation after eliminating other possible causes such as reflections from aircraft lights and tricks of vision. Their meteor-like behavior suggested that perhaps these events might be caused by clouds of exceedingly small meteoroids, visible only because of their numbers and compact grouping. Because such a formation would be unlikely to be maintained long in space, it appeared necessary that the particles involved must have maintained some weak physical contact until just prior to becoming visible. Perhaps some type of 'cosmic dust bunny,' disrupted by air resistance, might be the cause of these events." These moving patches of light also resemble the "auroral meteors" cataloged under GLA3 in Lightning, Auroras, Nocturnal Lights. Physically, they might be related to the small, icy ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Folie a deux involving a dog!The term "folie a deux" is used to describe an induced psychosis; it is usually reserved for human-human interfaces. Folie a deux generally occurs when two or more people are very close emotionally. But some people living alone do develop close emotional bonds with their pets, and apparently, vice versa: "Ms. A, an 83-year-old widow who had lived alone for 15 years, complained that the occupant of an upstairs flat was excessively noisy and that he moved furniture around late at night to disturb her. Over a period of 6 months, she developed delusionary persecutory ideas about this man. He wanted to frighten her from her home and had started to transmit 'violet rays' through the ceiling to harm her and her 10-yearold female mongrel dog. Ms. A attributed a sprained back and chest pains to the effect of the rays and had become concerned that her dog had started scratching at night when the ray activity was at its greatest. For protection, she had placed her mattress under the kitchen table and slept there at night. She constructed what she called an 'air raid shelter' for her dog from a small table and a pile of suitcases and insisted that the dog sleep in it. When I visited Ms. A at her home, it was apparent that the dog's behavior had become so conditioned by that ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Auroral Sounds March 13, 1989. This night on a cattle ranch in South Dakota, L. Hasselstrom was dazzled by waves of blue auroral light sweeping up from the horizon and meeting at a focal point nearly directly overhead. As the sky blazed, with the blue waves and crimson streamers, she heard: ". .. a distant tinkling, like bells. It came again, louder, just as a curtain of green light swept the entire width of the sky from north to south. Each time green flushed the sky, the bells rang, the sound softening to a gentle tinkle as the light died." (Hasselstrom, Linda; "Night of the Bells," Readers Digest , p. 185, April 1992. Cr. J.B . Dotson.) Comment. Note the correlation of the sound with the green portion of the aurora. July 29, 1990. On Coll Island in Centennial Lake, 120 kilometers west of Ottawa. Watching an auroral display, L.R . Morris heard the sound of the aurora: "It was a faint but distant windlike sound; which, by process of elimination, could not be accounted for by any phenomenon other than the aurora." (Anonymous; "Auroral Sounds," Sky & Telescope , 83:105, January 1992. Cr. D. Snowhook.) Comment. Auroras have been heard for centuries, but they "shouldn ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Seashore Seiches At many spots around the world, sealevel rises and falls with periods of only a few minutes -- much shorter than the common semidiurnal tides and much longer than wind-generated waves. These oscillations of the water surface are termed "seiches." Two fundamentally different kinds of seiches have been noted in the recent literature. The first variety is transitory and can be set into motion by weather disturbances and earthquakes. The second is permanent and a bit more mysterious. Let's take transitory seiches first September 17, 1992. Anglesey, England. At about 0700 in the morning: "I was on the beach at Trearddur on western Anglesey, when an acquaintance drove down the beach towing a fishing boat. He launched the boat in about six inches of water and we then engaged in conversation for a couple of minutes. Turning to the boat, we were amazed to find that it was high and dry about 20 metres from the water's edge. Small flatfish, mainly immature brill, could be seen stranded and flapping in the wet sand. About a minute later, the sea started to return and quickly rose up the beach beyond where the boat had originally been launched. An hour later, the oscillation in sea level was still taking place. I determined that the period was just over three minutes and the amplitude just under one metre, the latter measured with reference to a half-submerged ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page
Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Rayed Ball Lightning Hits Plane The following material is "reprinted" from CompuServe's Aviation Special Interest Group (AVSIG), with the permission of J. Baum. (Cr. E. Kimbrough) For the uninitiated, we are dealing with a computer bulletin board here! Subject: #235852-Ball Lightning From: Jeff Baum (PHX)
[email protected] To: Emory Kimbrough [TCL]
[email protected](X ) "On 8 January 1992 we were in MSP [Minneapolis/St. Paul] ready for pushback at sunrise. Weather was sleet squalls, temperature of + 2 degrees C (35 degrees F), ceiling of indefinite 100 obscured, visibility of about 1 and mile variable. We deiced and taxied for the active 11L, airborne in 8 minutes after deicing had ended. The First Officer was flying that leg. Climbing through about 900 feet ABL, this incandescent sphere approximately 10 cm (6 inches) in diameter surrounded by a, what I called, plasma cloud of bluish white approx 1 to 1 and meter (3 to 4 feet) in diameter with bright white 'rays' similar to a fireworks explosion formed just forward and to the left of the radome. We contacted this within second on our left side, just aft of the attach seam of the radome (namely about in line with my left foot). With this contact
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Eusocial Beetles The best-known eusocial animals are the ants, termites, and naked mole rats. As As biological observations accumulate, the phenomenon is being found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. The following quotation extends eusociality to the beetles and (in case you wondered) defines "eusociality": "The weevil Austroplatypus incompertus lives in galleries in the heartwood of Eucalyptus trees. Colonies are initiated by solitary fertilized females and, when mature, manifest the three phenomena which characterize eusociality: overlapping generations, cooperative brood care and division into reproductive and sterile (unfertilized) castes. Each colony contains one fertilized and five or so unfertilized adult females, the job of the second group being to deal with predators and to extend and maintain the galleries." (Anonymous; "Sociable Beetles," Nature, 356:111, 1992.) Comment. Eusociality is somewhat of a puzzle in evolutionary theory because one must ask how the phenomenon arises, when it requires some individuals to forswear reproduction and thus give up the chance to pass their genes directly on to progeny. Explanations of such extreme altruism generally state that the nonbreeders are really helping to pass some (or even all) of their genes on by supporting the colony, for they are usually closely related to the breeding female. From Science Frontiers #81, MAY-JUN 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 85: Jan-Feb 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Two Tsumani Tales Only a few years ago astronomical catastrophism was denied as a major factor in geological change. Now one reads everywhere of huge terrestrial impact craters, iridium layers, and tektite deposits. Even so, one necessary consequence of 70% of the large impacts has been neglected until recently: the giant tsunamis and marine incursions that must have swept over the coasts of the continents following impacts at sea. This oversight is now being rectified. 100,000 BP. The South Pacific. A longstanding geological enigma of the New South Wales coastline is the curious distribution of sand dunes. Those headlands less than 40 meters high have lost most of their dunes, leaving only raw, unweathered rock. On the other hand, the higher headlands have retained these dunes. Australians B. Young and T. Bryant hypothesize that a tsunamis 40 meters high swept the lower headlands clean about 100,000 years ago. They can even plot the incoming wave's direction, because a few remnants of the coastal dunes still cling to the southwest corners of the headlands along the NSW coast south of Newcastle. In their scenario, the tsunamis came from the northeast, smashed into the Solomons, southeastern Australia, and northeastern New Zealand. The Great Barrier Reef protected northeastern Australia from the full force of the wave. Young and Bryant favor a Hawaiian landslip as the initiator of the tsunamis, but acknowledge that an asteroid impact could also have done ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects More Mouse Engineering Shortly after writing in SF#79 about the "Ancient Greek Pyramids" and the Saharan mice that construct small pyramids of pebbles to extract moisture from the air, we serendipitously ran across the following: " Australian Native Mice . The species P. chapmani builds low mounds of pebbles over its burrow systems, and P. hermannsburgensis may use these mounds after they are constructed. The pebbles are of a uniform size and cover a large area, often a meter in diameter. The pebbles are probably collected both by excavation and from the surface. Some local mammalogists believe these are used as dew traps. Since the air around the pebbles warms more rapidly as the sun rises than do the pebbles themselves, dew forms on the pebbles by condensation. As the areas in which these mounds are found are quite dry, except after a heavy rain, these dew traps solve the problem of water shortage. Local farmers use the many pebble mounds for mixing concrete. It is believed that the ancient people of the Mediterranean region used a dew trap method comparable to that of P. chapmani ." (Nowak, Ronald M.; "Australian Native Mice," Walker's Mammals of the World , Baltimore, 1991, p. 820.) Comment. Now we must decide between at least three possibilities. Since the Australian native mice and Saharan mice are many thousands of miles apart, we have: (1 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 85: Jan-Feb 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Geomagnetic Storms And Human Health Psychiatric admissions. Since the work of T. Dull and B. Dull in 1935, other studies have reinforced the suspicion that solar activity and the resultant geomagnetic activity are associated with human health problems. Here is the abstract of the latest study found: "Numbers of first admissions per month for a single psychiatric unit, from 1977 to 1987, were examined for 1829 psychiatric inpatients to assess whether this measure was correlated with 10 parameters of geophysical activity. Four statistically significant values were 0.197 with level of solar radio flux at 2800 MHz in the corresponding month, -0 .274 with sudden magnetic disturbances of the ionosphere, -0 .216 with the index of geomagnetic activity, and -0 .262 with the number of hours of positive ionization of the ionosphere in the corresponding month." (Raps, Avi, et al; "Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LXIX. Solar Activity and Admission of Psychiatric Inpatients," Perceptual and Motor Skills , 74:449, 1992.) Comment. The above correlations are significant, but who knows how these parameters operate on the human body? Cancer recurrence. Another possible health correlation was explored by H. Wendt in a paper presented atthe 1992 European meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, in Munich. In this paper, Wendt claimed a correlation between the incidence of cancer recurrence and geomagnetic storm activity. Hopefully, further details will soon ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Whale falls: stepping stones across the ocean abysses Unique biological communities flourish at widely separated "oases" on the deepsea floors, where hydrothermal vents supply the energy and chemicals necessary for life. Here are found free-living bacteria, tube worms, molluscs, and several other species that prosper without the benefit of photosynthesis. These chemosynthetic, thermal-vent communities are separated by thousands of kilometers of sea-floor "desert." Yet, the species involved are similar worldwide and must, at some time, have crossed these wide, forbidding expanses. One possible mechanism for this mysterious dispersion came in 1987, when the research submersible Alvin chanced upon the remains of a 21-meter whale at a depth of 1,240 meters off California's coast. The whale's skeleton was covered with bacterial mats like those at the hydrothermal vents. Also sustained by the carcass were mussels, snails, and worms; all in all, a community much like those at the vents. Furthermore, many of the species partaking of the whale's energy and chemical resources are not normally found in that part of the Pacific. Subsequently, more "whale falls" with attached biological communities were found elsewhere. Calculations suggest that whale falls are more common that one might suppose -- perhaps occurring with average spacings of only 25 kilometers. They could very well be the stepping stones that allow hydrothermal vent communities to disperse across the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects That's the way the universe bounces What follows is a chain of ideas (perhaps "speculations" is a better word) that was recently unleashed by L. Smolin in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (9 :173). At stake here is the very nature of Nature herself. We begin with the notion of anthropic cosmology, in which the physical constants of the universe are identified as having just the "right" values to allow the existence of stars, planets, carbon compounds, and the other ingredients of human life. (Just why this state of affairs prevails is a question rarely addressed!) Adherents of anthropic cosmology hold that our "human-friendly" universe is just one of many universes populating a larger metauniverse. These "other" universes are thought to have different values of the fundamental physical constants (viz., the mass of the proton) and, in consequence, wildly different forms of life. In nonhuman universes, there could even be entities for which our word "life" is inadequate. The second idea is that of an oscillating universe. In this concept, universes expand just so far and then collapse back into the "singularities" (i .e ., black holes) from which they arose. Then, Phoenix-like, they bounce back and reexpand into new universes -- ones with slightly different physical constants. These rebounding universes are in a sense ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 85: Jan-Feb 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Singing Caterpillars Actually, the singing caterpillars are not particularly tuneful. They really generate a vibration that is transmitted through the material they are resting on. You and I cannot hear caterpillar songs, but some ants can, and they are attracted to these insect sirens. The singing caterpillars belong to the Lycaenidae, which include such butterflies as the hairstreaks and blues. It is not only the singing or vibrating of this group of caterpillars that makes them remarkable, it is the complexity of their symbiotic relationships with several species of ants and a plant. Since both the ants and the caterpillars favor the Croton plant, they could well meet by chance, but the caterpillars' singing serves to accelerate contact. Once met on the Croton plant, a fascinating triangle is completed. Player 1. The Croton plant provides nourishment to the caterpillars through both its leaves and specially evolved nectaries (nectar-producing organs), but receives nothing in return. The ants also dote on the nectaries, but they at least protect the plant from all herbivorous insects except the singing caterpillars. Player 2. The ants get food from both the Croton plant and the caterpillars. The latter have evolved extrudable glands called "nectary organs." For their part of the bargain, the ants protect the caterpillar from predatory wasps, just as they defend the Croton plant from its enemies. Player 3. The caterpillars, though seemingly benign, are the heavies in this ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 88: Jul-Aug 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects There never was a "crater"!Humans favor tales with beginnings and endings, perhaps because we are mortal ourselves. The universe must, we suspect, have been created either naturally or supernaturally, and it will end either according to the Laws of Thermodynamics or by fiat on Judgment Day! Some scientists, though, see other possibilities. In 1948, F. Hoyle, H. Bondi, and T. Gold proposed that the universe had no beginning and was, therefore, infinitely old. Originally, they hypothesized that, as the universe expanded, new matter was continuously created, and thus the density of matter stayed about constant in time. This Steady State Universe was kicked around for a while but ultimately consigned to the cosmological wastebasket. Now, the idea is being revived as the prevailing Big Bang Universe runs into problems, which have been documented perhaps too thoroughly in past issues of SF. The revised steady state model has jettisoned the idea of continuous creation in favor of many discrete "creation events," which will doubtless be called "little bangs." They also fill space with small metallic needles which absorb microwaves and reemit the uniform microwave background. The new theory needs more work, but Hoyle and his colleagues write in the June 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal: "This paper is not intended to give a finished view of cosmology. It is intended rather to open the door to a new view ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Biological Evidence For Two Very Early New World Contacts Talking turkeys? Did the Vikings ship American turkeys back to Europe circa 1010 AD from their reputed colonial foothold in Massachusetts? Some radical archeologists think so, pointing to two old depictions of turkey-like birds from Precolumbian Europe. The upper figure was painted on a wall in Schleswig Cathedral about 1280. The lower sketch is reputed to be from the Bayeux Tapestry, which dates back to 1066-1077. (Anonymous; "Talking Turkey," Fortean Times, no. 61, p. 27, February-March 1992.) Comment. The Bayeux Tapestry turkey, in particular, questionable. In fact, a careful search has not found it! See: SF#103. An archeological hot potato! Mangaia is a small volcanic island in the Cook Island group. During the excavation of a rock shelter on this island, large fragments of sweet potato were discovered. These were subsequently carbondated at about 1000 AD. "The prehistoric transferral of this South American domesticate into Polynesia obviously raises issues of cultural contact between the coast of South America and the Polynesian Islands. In our view, the most likely transferrors would have been the seafaring Polynesians, on a voyage of exploration to South America and return." (Hather, Jon, and Kirch, P.V .; "Prehistoric Sweet Potato ( Ipomoea batatas ) from Mangaia Island, Central Polynesia," Antiquity, ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 81: May-Jun 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Computer confirms crossing!Exodus states quite clearly that the Red Sea parted allowing Moses and the Israelites to escape the pursuing soldiers of the Pharaoh. This may not have been as miraculous as we learned in Sunday school. "Because of the peculiar geography of the northern end of the Red Sea, researchers report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, dated last Sunday, that a moderate wind blowing constantly for about 10 hours could have caused the sea to recede about a mile and the water level to drop 10 feet, leaving dry [? ] land in the area where many Biblical scholars believe the crossing occurred." Some artists and movie makers have portrayed huge walls of water being held apart by a supernatural force, but it seems that the Biblical account may have been more accurate after all: "The Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground." ( Exodus ) If the wind has shifted suddenly, the displaced waters might well have returned quickly to inundate the Egyptian army. (Maugh, Thomas H., II; "Red Sea May Have Parted, Scientists Say," Denver Post, p. A1, March 14, 1992.) Noncomment. Any editorial comment would be misinterpreted by someone, so ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A New Class Of Solar System Objects For decades astronomers have suspected and searched for Planet X, a large body beyond Neptune swinging slowly about the sun and gravitationally perturbing Neptune's orbit. Planet X has never been found, but somewhere out there are some pretty hefty bodies, as described by T. Van Flandern: "The discovery of a second miniplanet beyond Neptune, 1993 FW, augments the discovery of 1992 QB1 last fall. Both objects are believed to be in the 200-300-km-diameter range, with magnitudes between 2324, distances at discovery between 40-45 AU, and low inclinations.... Although the discoverers of these two objects hailed them as the first representatives of the elusive 'Kuiper belt' of comets, other theoreticians have confirmed that the line of reasoning leading to the suggestion of such a belt is spurious. That fact, combined with the absence of any comet-like characteristics in these two new objects, their relative size as compared with any other known comet, and their unusually red coloration, seem to make them the first-discovered members of a new class of solar system bodies. Since the searches leading to their discovery have examined only 1.5 out of tens of thousands of square degrees of sky wherein such objects might be discovered, it seems a reasonable conjecture that thousands of additional similar objects will ultimately be found. In short, it appears at this ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Ancient romans in texas?If one searches long enough and hard enough, one can discover hints that just about any ancient culture you care to name set foot in the New World well before the Vikings and Columbus. Old coins, inscriptions, language concordances, and the like are taken by many as proofs that Egyptians visited Oklahoma, the Chinese moored along the Pacific coast, the Celts toured New England, and so on. Now, according to Professor V. Belfiglio, the ancient Romans had Texas on their itineraries. Belfiglio's evidence is fourfold, and so are mainstream criticisms: Roman coins found in Texas . The most convincing example came from the bottom of an Indian mound at Round Rock. This mound is dated at approximately 800 AD. Skeptics suppose that the coin was dropped on top of the mound in recent times and was carried to the bottom by rodents and tree roots. Hmmm! The remains of a shipwreck . Circa 1886, the wreck of an unusual ship was found in Galveston Bay. Belfiglio says this ship's construction is typically Roman. Nautical experts doubt this. but they will admit that real Roman craft were perfectly capable of sailing to Texas. The remains of an ancient bridge . Also in Galveston Bay, the timbers of an old bridge were found under 15 feet of sediment. A similar divergence of opinion prevails here. Language concordances . Belfiglio has pointed out many similarities between Latin and ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Missing: 500,000 tons of copper A grooved maul used by ancient miners of Michigan copper ore. (S . Braker) For some 1800 years, beginning abruptly about 3000 BC, some industrious peoples mined ore equivalent to 500,000 tons of copper from Michigan's Isle Royale and Keweenaw Peninsula. Who were these mysterious miners, and what happened to all all that copper? It certainly hasn't been found in the relics of North American Indians. And where was the ore smelted? About all the unidentified miners left behind are some of the crude tools they used to pound out chunks of ore from their pit mines (5000 pit mines on Isle Royale alone). Outside of some cairns and slabrock ruins, there is little to help pin down these miners. Mainstream archeologists attribute all these immense labors to a North American "Copper Culture" -- certainly not to copper-hungry visitors from foreign shores. Admittedly, many copper artifacts have been dug up from North American mounds, but only a tiny fraction of the metal the Michigan mines must have yielded. Curiously, North American Indian mounds have contained copper sheets made in the shape of an animal hide. Called "reels," their function, if any, is unknown. The reels do, however, resemble oddly shaped copper ingots common in European Bronze Age com merce. Their peculiar shape earned these ingots the name "oxhydes." They ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A PIECE 'A HEAVEN!August 1980. Hawley, Pennsylvania. On an early summer evening, P.W . Becker, a census taker, was sitting in his car consulting a map. The car was parked on a dead-end street. No people or other cars were in sight. "Suddenly there was a horrific bang and the car rocked. A missile from the sky lay in plain view, square in the center of my car's hood. .. .. . "I cautiously got out to examine the fallen object. Tiny pieces had broken off, but it was largely intact and measured four to five inches across. I smelled it -- yes, it still carried a faint scent -- of pizza! It was a slice of pizza, solid as a rock and stone cold. This was no ordinary meteorite. I thought of God feeding the Israelites manna from heaven, but God knows I prefer pepperoni. This was plain, tomato and cheese, on a thin crust." (Becker, Peter W.; "Manna or Meteorite?" Sky and Telescope, 86:7 , August 1993.) Comment. After you stop laughing, recall that many accounts of fish falling from the sky mention that they are frozen. Hummm. Perhaps a whirlwind whipped through a pizzeria! Reference. Over the centuries, many strange objects have been reported to fall from the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 104: Mar-Apr 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Men Like Gods With the theft of the title from one of H.G . Wells' novels, we attend to an article that appeared in the London Times last summer. The article was based upon a paper written for the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society by Prof. E. Harrison. If, said Harrison, some properties of the universe had been just a tad different, our universe would be barren of stars, light, and of course life itself. He mentions such properties as the strength of gravity, the charge on the electron, and the speed of light. Why, he and many others have mused, are these critical properties so precisely adjusted so as to permit the existence of life -- and us? Harrison lists three answers: oThis is the way God wanted it to be. Further inquiry is unnecessary. oIf the universe were constructed any other way, we wouldn't be here to ask such silly, anthropomorphic questions! Some find this "anthropic principle" to be no answer at all. oOur universe was actually created and its properties fine-tuned by nonsupernatural entities of superior intelligence living in another universe. [These beings apparently get a kick out of manufacturing other universes, or perhaps it's a religious imperative for them!] Before you crumple up this issue of SF and hurl it at very high energy into a wastebasket, consider these two paragraphs from the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Band Of Turbulence That the ocean deeps also have their "weather" is evident in the following report. While reading it, be aware that it is only the surface manifestation of larger phenomenon which, like the bulk of an iceberg, is concealed from the observer. July 29, 1992. Equatorial Atlantic. Aboard the m.v . Enterprise enroute from Saldanha Bay to Las Palmas. "At 1930 UTC a bold linear echo was suddenly noted on the radar screen, as if from a singular, large swell wave running along a line bearing approximately 290 -110 and moving towards the ship in a south-southwesterly direction, see sketch. Although it was night-time, it was light enough to determine visually at a distance of about 1 n.mile, that it was not a large swell wave. At 1947 the vessel was passing through the echo which extended out to 4 n.mile on either side of it and, on observing the water around the ship with the aid of an Aldis lamp, it was noted that there was a great deal of turbulence present. The Enterprise , fully laden with iron ore, suddenly veered 6 to port of her heading of 325 , indicating the strength of the turbulence. The sea prior to this point was only slightly rippled by a light SW'ly wind, force 1-2 . The band of turbulence was approximately 20 m wide and the sea beyond ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 105: May-Jun 1996 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Darwinism in archeology!Archeologists were initially attracted to Pedra Furada, in northeastern Brazil, by the area's rich and colorful rock art, some of which would not be allowed on the Internet! But it is not the rock art that is controversial about Pedra Furada; it is the 595 pieces of quartz selected by French archeologist N. Guidon. These bits of stone closely resemble humancrafted choppers, scrapers, and cutting tools. Indeed, if they had been found in more recent deposits, they would have been judged "man-made" by everyone. The trouble is that Guidon has dated them at 50,000 BP - a date mainstream archeologists cannot swallow. Any New World dates earlier than 12,000 BP, maybe 20,000 BP for a few daring souls, have to be erroneous. How are the Pedra Furada chipped stones explained by mainstream archeologists? They are "geofacts, not artifacts. They were created when quartzite rocks were released by erosion and fell off cliffs to be smashed upon impact below. Gravity and not the human hand broke the quartz into pieces that just happen to look like prehistoric tools. F. Parenti, a coworker of Guidon, has tried to exorcise the geofact argument, which is used wherever tools are "too old", by showing that the 595 pieces of quartz have characteristics quite unlike those created by natural flaking. The doubters are unswayed. You see, despite ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Is the paranormal only a set of subjective experiences?Anomalists usually interpret paranormal phenomena as indications that our knowledge of the human mind and how it interacts with other minds and the socalled material world is sadly deficient. But some psychiatrists see paranormal phenomena as merely symptoms of mental disturbance and nothing esoteric at all. Such a view is supported by studies employing interviews with members of society at large. In a revealing but demystifying study of 502 residents of Winnipeg, C.A . Ross and S. Joshi found: (1 ) That so-called paranormal experiences are very common indeed, with 65.7 % of the interviewees reporting having had them. The most common were deja vu (54.6 %) , precognitive dreams (17.8 %) , and mental telepathy (15.6 %) . Many reported experiencing more than one of the 13 different types of paranormal phenomena included in the survey. But do survey statistics prove that such paranormal phenomena are truly objective? The real nature of paranormal experiences, according to Ross and Joshi, lies in the close ties these paranormal phenomena have with dissociative phenomena (i .e ., automatic writing), hypnotic phenomena, and childhood traumas. They theorize: "A model is proposed in which paranormal experiences are conceptualized as an aspect of normal dissociation. Like dissociation in general, paranormal experiences can be triggered by trauma, especially childhood physical or sexual abuse. ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Distressing near-death experiences (ndes)Noting that most NDEs are touted as involving "profound feelings of peace, joy, and cosmic unity," B. Greyson and N.E . Bush have collected much contrary testimony, which they organized into three categories: "( 1 ) Phenomenology similar to peaceful near-death experiences but interpreted as unpleasant, (2 ) A sense of nonexistence or eternal void, or, (3 ) Graphic hellish landscapes and entities." One of these testimonies, from Category 3, is worth reproducing here. The percipient was a woodworker with little interest in religion, although he was married to a "religious fanatic." He had been saving for a vacation for years, but just before they were about to leave, he was arrested for drunk driving and heavily fined, losing his license and vacation savings. Distraught, he tried to hang himself. He testified: "From the roof of the utility shed in my backyard I jumped to the ground. Luckily for me I had forgot the broken lawn chair that lay near the shed. My feet hit the chair and broke my fall, or my neck would have been broken. I hung in the rope and strangled. I was outside my physical body. I saw my body hanging in the rope; it looked awful. I was terrified, could see and hear, but it was different -- hard to explain ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Alien Meteors Meteors or shooting stars are usually considered to be small fragments that have been broken off the asteroids plying orbits between Mars and Jupiter. If this belief is correct, meteors darting into the earth's upper atmosphere would have speeds less than 260,000 kilometers per hour. Any objects with significantly higher velocities must come outside the solar system. It has, therefore, been unsettling to find that quite a few meteors hit our atmosphere at speeds much higher than 260,000 km/hr. Radar measurements of 160,000 meteors by A. Taylor and colleagues, at a New Zealand site, found that about 1% (1500 meteors) struck the atmosphere with velocities greater than 350,000 km/hr. These speedsters must come from beyond the solar system. The question arising is: Whence all this interstellar debris? One hint comes from the fact that the aliens appear to come from the direction in which the sun and its family of planets are traveling through interstellar space. Evidently, this interstellar medium is far from a vacuum; it is strewn with flotsam and jetsam -- but from what smashed planets, moons, and asteroids? (Samson, Alan; "Radar Traps Visitors from Outer Space," Dominion Sun Times (Wellington), April 25, 1993. (Cr. P. Hassall) From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 84: Nov-Dec 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects American Pygmies Today's anthropological texts say little about pygmies populating ancient North America, but a century ago, when tiny graves replete with tiny skeletons were discovered in Tennessee, controversy erupted. Were they the bones of pygmies or children of normal-sized tribes? The latter choice was made, and we hear no more on the subject -- at least on the standard academic circuits. But a few reverberations are still detectable elsewhere. V.R . Pilapil, for example, asserts that the disputed Tennessee graves really did contain pygmy remains. Not only that, but he hypothesizes that the pygmies arrived in ancient times from southeast Asia, probably the Philippines, where today's diminutive Aetas live. To support his case, Pilapil recalls B. Fell's examination of the Tennessee skeletal material. Fell noted that: (1 ) The skull brain capacity was equivalent to only about 950 cubic centimeters, about the volume of a non-pygmy 7-yearold; (2 ) The teeth were completely developed and showed severe wear characteristic of mature individuals; and (3 ) The skulls were brachycephalic with projecting jaws. Fell had, in fact, described skulls very much like those of today's adult Philippine Aetas. Another line of evidence adduced by Pilapil involved the traditions of British Columbia tribes, which recognized a tribe of very small people called the Et-nane. More significant is the oral history of the ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 85: Jan-Feb 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Our Chemical Brain Is our brain merely a network of neurons pulsing with electrical signals -- like the circuits of a computer? Such is the accepted picture of the brain. Unquestionably the brain does rely in part upon the transmission of electrical signals for some of its operations, but it now appears that there is a complementary mode of communication that relies upon chemistry rather than electricity. While the fastest way to transmit signals in the brain seems to be along the neurons and across their points of contact, the synapses, other signals may travel -- a bit more slowly -- by what is termed "volume transmission." Volume transmission is like broadcasting radio waves in three dimensions, except that in the brain the radio waves are replaced by the diffusion of chemical signals. L.F . Agnati et al explain: ". .. our experiments have shown that neurons also release chemical signals into the extracellular space that are not necessarily detected by neighboring cells but by cells far away, in the same way hormones released by a gland into the bloodstream can have effects on cells far away. These processes occur on much longer time scales than does synaptic transmission, and they probably play a distinct role, perhaps regulating the brain's responses to synaptic signals. .. .. . "We might speculate that volume transmission is involved in the neuroendocrine system and the central autonomic system. Changes in the activity of the brain ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 82: Jul-Aug 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Perhaps they even reached oklahoma!The drawing reproduced below was made by C. Keeler when he visited the famous inscription-filled Anubis Cave. Some of the figures have Egyptian overtones, as remarked by D. and A. Buchanan: "This 'cave' (really a cave-like rock shelter located in Northwestern Oklahoma close to the Colorado line), as well as others like it in the vicinity, was first recorded by Gloria Farley after her visit to the site in June 1978. She especially remarked upon the Anubis figure you see here as well as the figure with the rayed head surmounting the "cube-in-perspective" or '3 -D Cube' (as some have called it). Besides the Egyptian motifs, she also noted the ogam-like strokes and a number of other apparent Celtic connections." Translation of the ogam by B. Fell indicated that the site was used for Celtic rites. (Buchanan, Donal, and Buchanan, Ann; "The Anubis Cave in Old World Iconography," ESRS Bulletin, 18:27, October 1991.) ESRS = Early Sites Research Society. Comment. Anubis was the Egyptian jackal god. It is the stylized figure in the top center of the drawing. Such interpretations are ignored by the archeological establishment, and almost all research on such sites is carried out by amateurs. From Science Frontiers #82, JUL-AUG 1992 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 87: May-Jun 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Amazons In The Sky No, we are not talking about the jet streams. Rather, we refer to the curious "filamentary structures" seen on water-vapor maps of the troposphere. (The troposphere is roughly the lower 10-20 kilometers of the atmosphere.) These filaments are many times longer than they are wide, and deserve to be called "rivers." These aerial streams of water vapor develop in regular patterns and persist as they are translated through the troposphere. It is the huge quantity of water vapor carried by these aerial rivers that make them worthy of note here. Especially remarkable is the river that frequently flows south from Brazil to east of the Andes and thence southeast into the Atlantic. "A typical flow in this South American tropospheric river is very close to that in the Amazon (about 165 x 106 kg sec-1 ). There are typically five rivers leading into the middle latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere and four or five leading into the Northern Hemisphere. The rivers persist for 10 days or more while being translated generally eastwards at speeds of 6 m sec-1 ." (Newell, Reginald E., et al; "Tropospheric Rivers?-A Pilot Study," Geo physical Research Letters , 19:2401, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #87, MAY-JUN 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 85: Jan-Feb 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Lures Of Mussels Mussels entrust their larvae to the vagaries of the waters in which they live. How, then, are mussels ever able to colonize rivers, whose currents would always sweep their larvae downstream? A pseudofish with tail, fins, and eye spot displayed by a mussel. "The riverine pioneers ran this roadblock by custom designing their baby mussels to hitchhike on fish. Kneehigh to a pinhead, the larval mussel, or glochidium, is nurtured by the thousands or millions in their mother's gills, and spewed in teeming puffs to the open waters. They cling as benign parasites to passing fish, and take a one- to three-week trip, drawing nutrients through their host's membranes and a free ride to new dwellings. They then drop to the bottom and begin their independent lives, some of which will span a half century or more. "Glochidia that do not hook up with a host fish are doomed. To cover these stakes, the pocketbook mussel and its relatives have evolved a fleshy appendage that flaps in the currents and, to a smallmouth bass, looks like a breakfast minnow. Taking the bait. the duped fish gets doused with glochidia. Another resourceful mussel sends its glochidia out in pulsating little packets resembling worms." (Stolzenburg, William; "The Mussels' Message," Nature Conservancy , p. 17, November/December 1992.) From Science Frontiers ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 90: Nov-Dec 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Lines Of Maser Spots Masers work like lasers, except they radiate microwaves instead of visible light. Natural masers have been found in the atmospheres of both earth and Mars as well as in interstellar space. They form in space when electromagnetic radiation falls upon dense molecular clouds, which then reradiate the energy at frequencies characteristic of the molecules, Armed with radio telescopes, astronomers can "see" masers as bright spots (" maser spots") in the radio sky. R. Norris and J. Whiteoak et al, at the Australia Telescope National Facility, while surveying just 16 regions of the Milky Way between 5,000 and 30,000 light years, detected a dozen intense methanol masers (6 .7 -12.2 gigahertz) arranged in lines. Early thinking is that these maser spots decorate the discs of gas clouds surrounding nascent stars. In other words, maser spots could be protoplanets. Given the small area of the sky sampled by Norris and Whiteoak, maser spots may be very common. (Dayton, Leigh; "Microwaves May Mark Position of Protoplanets," New Scientist, p. 16, July 10, 1993.) Questions. Whence all this interstellar methanol? And where does it all go when the protoplanets coalesce into planets? Could these molecular clouds also contain those other organic compounds necessary for the creation and development of life? If so, we can speculate that life may originate often and ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 82: Jul-Aug 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Can you guess where this quotation comes from?THE GRADUALIST'S DILEMMA "The basic article of faith of a gradualist approach is that major morphological innovations can be produced without some sort of saltation. But the dilemma of the New Synthesis is that no one has satisfactorily demonstrated a at the population genetic level by which innumerable very small phenotypic changes could accumulate rapidly to produce large changes: a process for the origin of the magnificently improbable from the ineffably trivial. This leads to skepticism about the microevolutionary approach. Perhaps, as Waddington put it: 'the real guts of evolution -- which is, how do you come to have horses and tigers, and things -- is outside the mathematical theory.'" Did you guess a creationist publication? Sorry! (Thomson, Keith Stewart; "Macroevolution: The Morphological Problem," American Zoologist, 32:106, 1992.) (And just the other day, we read that evolution was a proven fact!) From Science Frontiers #82, JUL-AUG 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 89: Sep-Oct 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Crop circles: a middle ground On one hand, mainstream scientists, when they deign to notice them at all, pronounce that all crop circles are the work of hoaxers, as in the article by J.W . Deardorff referenced below. On the other hand, several books and a flood of reports in fringe publications claim that the crop circles, particularly the complex ones, are evidence that extraterrestrial intelligences are attempting to communicate with us. There is also a middle ground upon which stands G.T . Meaden, a physicist, and a few other scientists. Meaden has summarized this third position in the following paragraph: ". .. we believe that the formation of real crop circles is a rare phenomenon resulting from the motion of a spinning mass of air which Professor Tokio Kikuchi has modelled by computer simulation and calls a nanoburst. This disturbance could involve the breakdown of an up-spinning vortex of the eddy or whirlwind type. On this theoretical model such a process leads to plain circles and ringed circles -- types which are known from pre-hoax times in Britain and other countries, and are the only species which credible eye-witnesses have seen forming. All other so-called crop circles reported in the media news in recent years are likely to be the result of intelligent hoaxing, while the so-called paranormal events to which Deardorff alludes are nothing but the consequence of poor observation and/or ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Math's mystery In extolling J. Barrow's new book, Pi in the Sky , T. Siegfried first reiterates a point made in past issues of SF, namely, that mathematics is a logical system and that we have no right to expect it is correspond structurely with a physical system. In other words, math and nature are fundamentally different entities. Nevertheless, as Barrow stated in a recent interview: "If we were just inventing mathematics from our everyday experience, we would find that it would work really rather well in those areas from which that intuition was gained. But we find almost the opposite...It works most powerfully and persuasively in areas that are farthest removed from the everyday experience that has led to it." Mathematics, for example, leads to verities in quantum mechanics far outside the realm of daily experience. Why is this so? The puzzle deepens when one discovers that there are different kinds of math based upon different forms of logic (as in Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries). Some brands of mathematics mirror reality better than others. Why? In trying to dispose of these "whys," both matematicians and scientists fall back on the anthropic principle with all its unsatisfying tautological overtones: ". .. the universe is the way it is because that's the way it has to be for anybody to be around to study it. And perhaps math works ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects An Electrical Virtuoso August 12, 1992. Conwy, Wales. Here is carefully observed case of ball lightning with rather spectacular side effects. Mrs. P. Stafford was looking through her front window: ". .. when she saw what she first thought was a 'ball of white fire', larger than a football, about 20 to 30 feet from her, travelling horizontally at a constant height up her drive. There was very heavy rainfall, perhaps with some hail, but no lightning or thunder. The ball was seen against the background of other houses and her view of it was not interrupted. It was round, opaque and predominantly white with some yellow, and surrounded by a blue, irridescent halo. She said it was reminiscent of a meteor or comet and the light from it was like that from a fluorescent tube. It was bright enough to be clearly visible in daylight and appeared to be spinning or rotating. It hit the oak tree, perhaps 12 or 13 feet away, in Mrs. Wignall's front garden, with a terrific crack and explosion. "The ball was in sight for about 10 to 15 seconds, and its appearance did not change until it struck the tree, whereupon it became smaller. It hit the trunk about half way up and split the bark and trunk, showering splinters of wood over a distance of about 50 yards. As it did so, it ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 80: Mar-Apr 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects First cold-fusion bomb?Possibly we are overreacting to the following event: "Cold fusion researchers are puzzled and worried by an explosion last week that killed one of their colleagues, a British electrochemist. A cold fusion 'cell' at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, blew up while Andrew Riley was bending over it, killing him instantly." Now small explosions in cold-fusion cells are not unknown. At the tops of some cells palladium-wire electrodes are exposed to oxygen and deuterium (heavy hydrogen) gases. If the palladium wires are not protected by films of water, the palladium can catalyze the explosive combination of the oxygen and hydrogen. This sometimes happens if a dry spot develops on a wire. Such detonations, though, cause little damage. The SRI explosion was much more powerful. The detonating cell (only 2 inches in diameter and 8 inches long), not only killed Riley but peppered three other researchers in the lab with debris. (Charles, Dan; "Fatal Explosion Closes Cold Fusion Laboratory," New Scientist, p. 12, January 11, 1992.) Comment. One cannot refrain from asking if the explosion involved only chemical energy. From Science Frontiers #80, MAR-APR 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 86: Mar-Apr 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Where did agriculture really begin?The archeological party line points to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. There, the authorities say that, about 10,000 years ago, humans suddenly learned how to sow and harvest such crops as wheat and barley. There, civilization really began. Or was it there? Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt. At this site, G. Hillman, of the Institute of Archeology, London, has found grinding stones and tubers. This site is dated at 17,000-18,000 years old. New Guinea highlands. J. Golson, formerly of the Australian National University, has found ditches and crude fields in this area. The implication is that humans were tending plants here between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. Buka Island, Solomons. While excavating Kilu cave, M. Spriggs and S. Wickler unearthed small flake tools with surfaces displaying starch grains and other plant residues. Evidently, these tools were used for processing taro. Further, the starch grains resembled those of cultivated rather than wild taro. Date: about 28,000 years ago. (Dayton, Leigh; "Pacific Islanders Were World's First Farmers," New Scientist, p. 14, December 12, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #86, MAR-APR 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 80: Mar-Apr 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Unidentified Light Strange optical phenomenon seen off the coast of Trinidad in 1991. January 13, 1991. Caribbean Sea. Aboard the m.v . Trinidad and Tobago . "At 0210 UTC whilst the ship was proceeding eastwards along the north coast of Trinidad, a relatively bright patch was noticed in the almost cloudless sky and was thought to be a cluster of stars. Its bearing was approximately 300 at an elevation of about 50 , and closer inspection through binoculars revealed a rather strange phenomenon, as shown in the sketch. "The bright patch was a perfect circle of a bright, light-blue colour and was transparent as stars could be seen through it. There was also a trail from the circle which looked like the track a disc would describe if it moved through an arc. This trail was also of light-blue colouration but was not nearly so bright as the circle. The entire phenomenon dissipated after about five minutes." (Knight, M.; "Unidentified Light," Marine Observer, 62:22, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #80, MAR-APR 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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