358 results found.
... , will be contradicted by many of the phenomena listed in this Outline. For example, the following paradigms that presently dominate scientific thinking are her considered to be at risk: The expanding universe The Big Bang origin of the universe Neo-Darwinism (specifically, evolution via random mutation and natural selection) That genomes are the complete blueprint for lifeforms Plate tectonics/continental drift Special and General Relativity View Cart Buy online via PayPal with MC/Visa/Amex 296 pages, softcover, $17.95, 244 illus., Jan 2003. ISBN 0-915554-45-3 , 7x10". Biology Catalogs For a full list of biology subjects, see here . Biological Anomalies: Humans I: A Catalog of Biological Anomalies Sorry, Out of print This volume, the first of three on human biological anomalies, looks at the "external" attributes of humans (1 ) Their physical appearance; (2 ) Their anomalous behavior; and (3 ) Their unusual talents and faculties. Typical subjects covered: Mirror-image twins * The sacral spot * The supposed human aura * Baldness among musicians * Human tails and horns * Human behavior and solar activity * Cycles of religiousness * Cyclicity of violent collective human behavior * Handedness and longevity * Wolf-children * The "Mars Effect" * Telescopic vision *Dermo-optical perception * Hearing under anesthesia * Human navigation sense * Asymmetry in locomotion * Sex-ratio variations Comments From Reviews: "All I can say to Corliss is carry on cataloging". New Scientist View Cart Buy online via PayPal with MC/Visa ...
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... re-revised 100 years ago. Back in 1900, a geologist risked his reputation by suggesting that Arizona's Meteor Crater was an impact structure. It had to be volcanic or perhaps due to a steam explosion! 50 years ago. In 1950, a geologist risked his reputation by suggesting that large impact structures existed; that is, bigger than 10 kilometers in diameter. 0 years ago. Today, geologists converse blithely about 100-kilometer structures buried beneath the Yucatan and Chesapeake Bay. They are, however, exceedingly chary about long chains of impact structures. Those eight craters in a row. Geologists are questioning whether the eight structures stretching from Kentucky to Kansas (mentioned in SF#105) are all impactcaused. In a letter to Astronomy. A. Goldstein asserts that only three are impact craters; the other five are cryptoexplosion structures; that is, due to internal activity of some sort. However, Goldstein adds that there are actually three additional structures on this long line in Kentucky. (Goldstein, Alan; "Multiple Strike Stricken," Astronomy, 24:20, July 1996) Comment. Even if eight of the eleven structures on the line are cryptoexplosive in origin, one has to wonder why these are all lined up. A long line of weakness in the crust? Meanwhile, in Africa. 1994 radar images from the Space Shuttle have revealed a chain of three suspicious circular structures in the Sahara of northern Chad. Largely buried in sand, each is about 12 kilometers in diameter. Only one of these structures has been studied at ground level ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 133: JAN-FEB 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Roads of Easter Island When the Fourth Dynasty Egyptians set about building the Great Pyramid, they built a stone-paved road from the Giza Plateau to the dock on the Nile where barges arrived from quarries upriver. The road's hard, smooth surface eased the task of hauling the huge blocks of limestone and granite to the construction site. Three thousand years later, the Easter Islanders faced a similar transportation problem in moving their huge stone heads -- some weighing as much as 90 tons -- from the quarries to stone platforms (ahu) on the coast, where the monstrous heads would stare out across the empty Pacific. Much has been written about how the more than 800 stone heads were dragged from the quarries by brute force and then erected on the ahu. Thor Heyerdahl and others have even managed to duplicate some phases of the operation. However, the voluminous Easter Island literature is not as forthcoming about the roads the natives built to accelerate this Ethic traffic. The Easter Island roads have turned out to be as curious as the statues themselves. During the summer of 2000, geologist C.M . Love and a crew of 17 students excavated sections of the three main roads that carried statue traffic. Parts of these roads were actually carved into the island's bedrock-lava flows mainly. Strangely, the roads were not flat but V- and U-shaped in cross section. They averaged 3 ...
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... about 18 minutes before petering out." A comment by P.J . Herring of the Southampton Oceanography Centre followed. "A quite extraordinary account of phosphorescent wheels occurring in one of the places where they are most often seen. In the 200, or so, cases of this phenomenon reported in the last 100 years, never have so many wheels been described so close together, nor has there been any association with wind change. I am very intrigued but at a complete loss to explain how the wheels were produced." (Greig, N.J .; "Bioluminescence," Marine Observer, 66:62, 1996) Reference. The amazining variety of bioluminescent displays is cataloged in GLW in our catalog: Lightning, Auroras. To order, visit: here . This three-wheel system shows the phenomenon more completely. Imagine the whole sea covered with scores of these spinning wheels! These three wheels were seen in the Gulf of Thailand, on April 24, 1953. From Science Frontiers #106, JUL-AUG 1996 . 1996-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... . They ranged from one (for 1) to 3,972,999,029,388 (for 200). [That of a computer is itself worthy of mention!] Here is the order that Ramanujan perceived: Starting with 5, the number of partitions for every seventh integer is a multiple of 7, and starting with 6, the number of partitions for every 11th integer is a multiple of 11. Moreover, similar relationships occur where the interval between the chosen integers is a power of 5, 7, or 11 or a product of these powers. Ramanujan was able to prove that these curious patterns also hold for all higher numbers beyond 200. Ramanujan's discovery came as quite a surprise to the world of mathematics, as did the strange roles of the three adjacent prime numbers 5, 7, and 11. Recently, though, K. Ono has gone beyond Ramanujan and proved that there are really an infinite number of relationships like the three found by Ramanujan. (Peterson, Ivars; "The Power of Partitions," Science News, 157:396, 2000.) From Science Frontiers #132, NOV-DEC 2000 . 2000 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ancient history, mythology and astronomy. Lobster . The journal of intelligence and political conspiracy (CIA, FBI, JFK, MI5, NSA, etc) Homeworking.com . Free resource for people thinking about working at home. ABC dating and personals . For people looking for relationships. Place your ad free. ...
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... It sinks like a rock without even sending a distress signal. Another ship has been devoured by a rogue wave. Giant solitary waves are usually preceded by deep troughs. as seen in this sketch of a vessel in the notorious A gulhas Current off the coast of South Africa. (From: Earthquakes. Tides....) Just between 1969 and 1994. 60 supercarriers were lost due to sudden flooding. Of this number, 22 were apparently swallowed by rogue waves. The rogue waves appear unexpectedly. They dwarf all surrounding waves. For a long time, the rogues were said to be just chance additions of two smaller waves. But they are too big and occur too frequently to be statistical flukes. In addition, statiticians have trouble in accounting for the fabled and feared "three sisters" -- three massive waves in succession. Consequently, scientists have retreated to a now-familiar refuge: nonlinear effects. They show mathematically how small perturbations in a physical system can lead to huge consequences -- on paper at least.. (Lawton, Graham; "Monsters of the Deep," New Scientist, p. 28, June 30, 2001.) Comments. Somehow, as insinuated above, blaming monstrous waves on non-linear effects is not very satisfying in our cause-and-effect world. Twenty-two huge vessels swallowed up by giant waves! Yet, we never see notices of such events in the papers! A small tanker oil spill gets much more media attention. From Science Frontiers #137, SEP-OCT 2001 . 2001 ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 133: JAN-FEB 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Strange Snow Sculptures The most familiar snowflakes are those feathery, six-armed dendritic crystals. However, snow sometimes falls as needles and plates. In GWP3 in Tornados, Dark Days..., we also catalog three observations of conical snow. These conical forms seem to be aggregates of tapered needles of ice. However, none of the foregoing shapes can surpass in strangeness the "snowflake" in the accompanying illustration. Here we see the hexagonal symmetry retained in column form and again in the plates at each end of the icy dumbbell. What those peculiar iceworms projecting from the plates are is anyone's guess. (Kaiser, Jocelyn; "Snow Up Close," Science, 289:503, 2000. Comment. It is difficult enough to explain the formation of the common six-armed flakes; the worm-terminated dumbbells are even more puzzling. What sort of mechanism in the atmosphere can scuplt such complex shapes in prodigious quantities? From Science Frontiers #133, JAN-FEB 2001 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ancient history, mythology and astronomy. Lobster . The journal of intelligence and political conspiracy (CIA, FBI, JFK, MI5, NSA, etc) Homeworking.com . Free resource for people thinking about working at home. ABC dating and personals . For people looking for relationships. Place your ad free. ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 130: JUL-AUG 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects There are More Pyramids in Sudan than All of Egypt The kingdom of Cush (or Kush) flourished south of Egypt along the Nile from the Eighth Century B.C . to the Fourth Century A.D . Here the rulers of Cush built some 228 pyramids, three times as many as the Pharaohs managed to pile up! We rarely hear or see anything of these strange, steeply pointed structures. They are usually less than 100 feet high and not as impressive and mysterious as those farther north beyond the Aswan Dam. The Sudanese pyramids are smaller, steeper, and more recent than those to the north in Egypt. The Cushite kingdom's passion for pyramids was probably acquired in the Eighth Century B.C ., when it actually ruled Egypt for a few years until the Assyrians pushed its armies back south in 671 B.C . With them, the Cushites took the pyramid idea, Egyptian art forms, and hieroglyphics. They liked pyramids so well that the Cushite rulers kept on building them until the kingdom's demise in 350 A.D . -- some 2,000 years after the Egyptians had abandoned this form of architecture altogether. There is nothing in the Cush pyramids that can be called anomalous. It's just so surprising to learn there are so many of them and that they are so neglected in the TV documentaries. The Cush empire did leave us one enigma: an alphabetical ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 137: SEP-OCT 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Ashen Light Of Venus Closing The Book Scientists are understandably delighted when they believe they have definitively and indisputably explained one of Nature's many mysteries. They can then finally "close the book" on the phenomenon. Sometimes, though, the book is slammed shut prematurely or unjustifiably. Also, as it often happens, closing one book opens another and the new one is even harder to close. Below, we present three examples where finality (closed books) seems to be proclaimed too quickly. On occasion, the night side of Venus (which goes through phases like the moon) seems to glow softly and subtly. For some 350 years, keen-eyed observers have seen this phenomenon through their telescopes. Nevertheless, the effect is so elusive that many astronomers doubt its physical reality. Additionally, it is easy to doubt the existence of the ashen light because good explanations are as elusive as the light itself. During the past decade, two scientific nails have also been driven into the ashen-light coffin: Spectrographic studies of the upper atmosphere of Venus do detect some nighttime air glow, but it is much too weak to account for the abundant telescopic observations from earth. The Cassini spacecraft did not detect any high-frequency radio noise typical of lightning when it passed close to Venus in 1998 and 1999. This put an end to the surmise that the ashen light was due to rapid, widespread lightning occurring ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 136: JUL-AUG 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Were The First Americans Australians?Ask this question in a college class in archeology and you'll surely receive an "F "! Everyone knows that the first inhabitants of the New World filtered across the Bering Land Bridge and eventually worked their way all the way down to the tip of South America. Perhaps so, perhaps no. Conceivably some venturesome Australian seafarers could have island-hopped across the South Pacific or taken a polar route (as the Vikings did in the north) when the world was warmer. Radical as this notion seems, three classes of evidence hint that Australians may have set foot on South American shores more than 10,000 years ago. Human fossils. As revealed in SF#118, an 11,500-year-old human skull found in Brazil possesses features of South Sea Islanders rather than Asians. Stone artifacts. Scrapers and other simple stone artifacts from Los Toldos Cave in Patagonia, dated as 12,000 years old, are suspiciously similar to late-Pleistocene tools in Australia. (Ref. 1) Cave paintings. At Los Toldos and especially another Patagonian site called Estancia La Maria, there is distinctive artwork virtually identical to some from Australia. Specifically, this artwork consists of "hand negatives" (silhouettes of the artists' hands) and spiral and circular drawings composed of little spots. (Ref. 1) Additionally, a remarkable and entirely distinct form of Australian art ...
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... limestone blocks to the Giza Plateau, some South Americans were toting basketball-size rocks in bags woven from reeds to a site called Caral, located 23 kilometers from Peru's Pacific coast. While the Egyptians piled their weighty blocks neatly into pyramids, the South Americans simply dropped their stones, reed bags and all, onto crude but growing piles. When finished, the largest "rock pile" at Caral contained 7 million cubic feet of rocks and had assumed the shape of a pyramid (or platform mound) four stories high (60 feet) and covering an area 500 by 450 feet. This was probably the first monumental architecture in the New World; and it was constructed some 800 years earlier than mainstream archeologists had expected. In fact, Caral boasts six large platform mounds, three sunken plazas, and many impressive buildings. Layout of the Coral site in Peru. For all its precocious architecture, Caral is a "preceramic" site; that is, it was built before the advent of pottery in South America. Caral was "officially" discovered in 1905, but it was neglected by both archeologists and grave robbers because there were no artifacts to collect and nothing worth stealing. No one recognized its great age until recently. Today Caral is recognized as the work of the first complex society in the New World. (Solis, Ruth Shady, et al; "Dating Cara a Preceramic Site in the Supe Valley on the Central Coast of Peru," Science, 292:723, 2001. Maugh, Thomas M., II; "Scientists Say Peruvian ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 134: MAR-APR 2001 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Bigfoot Mile-high, But Light-years From Acceptance Colorado is not prime Bigfoot country. Most Bigfoot reports come from the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, enough Bigfoot sightings, hearings, and footprints have accumulated in the Rockies for the Denver Post to print a lengthy review of the Bigfoot phenomenon. The article identifies three Colorado hotspots: (1 ) Leadville, where the Little Creek Monster was reported as early as the 1880s; (2 ) the southern San Juan Mountains; and (3 ) Pike National Forest. A few reports even come from the plains east of the Front Range. Coloradans have reported seeing the animals walking along a stream below Loveland Pass, drinking from a pond in the Lost Creek Wilderness, running after deer in the Roosevelt National Forest, chasing cars near Gypsum and roaring at hikers, campers and fishermen in various locations. The reports have come from scientists, wildlife biologists and elk hunters. Surely, this enough to convince everyone of Bigfoot's reality. Not so! To recognize Bigfoot officially scientists must have a living specimen, a corpse, or at least an good skeleton. They do not. Even though there are thousands of Bigfoot sightings recorded continent-wide plus hundreds of casts of huge footprints, these are not enough. Just as with UFOs and sea monsters, fraud and misidentification abound in that field of endeavor called "cryptozoology." However, bigfoot researchers do have one advantage over ...
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... sensors and its information processing center, if it possesses one? (Stewart, Ian; "Spiral Slime," Scientific American, 283:116, November 2000.) This question becomes more difficult to answer when we learn that slime molds can display rudimentary intelligence in the sense that they can solve mazes in their search for food. They are not as clever as rats, but they do optimize their travels through the maze. (Nakagaki, Toahiyuki, et al; "Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism," Nature, 407:470, 2000.) Biofilms. Down near the bottom of life's ladder dwell the bacteria. Their genomes must be miniscule and gray matter is not to be found. Nevertheless, some bacteria band together to form biofilms. Biofilms are three-dimensional, complex structures composed of innumerable, specialized bacteria all working together. W. Costerton at Montana State University imagines what a biofilm would look like if one were bacterium-size. If you found yourself in a biofilm, you'd be going along a channel full of water, like the canals in Venice, and up from the bottom of the channel, on either side, would be these slime towers. The channels would be bringing in oxygen and nutrients. and removing waste. And within each building, so to speak, some of the bacteria would be cooperating with each other, making one compound and passing it along to the next. It's at least as complicated as a tissue. and possibly as a city. (Chicurel, Marina; " ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 129: MAY-JUN 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Sound of Shapes The ability of some humans to determine the pitch of a musical note in the absence of a reference note (" perfect pitch") has been a favorite topic in Science Frontiers (SF #99 , #102 , and #111 ). It now seems that the human ear-brain combination can also discern the shapes and dimensions of thin, vibrating plates by the sound they make. In one type of experiment, conducted by A.J . Kunkler-Peck (Brandeis University) and M.T . Turvey (University of Connecticut), subjects gave surprisingly accurate estimates of the heights and widths of three different vibrating plates. The plates were concealed behind a screen, but the subjects could remotely control a striker. In further experiments, other subjects could distinguish between the sounds of circular, rectangular, and triangular plates. (Anonymous; "Listen to the Shapes," Science News, 157:171, 2000.) Comment. We all know from experience that small, thin plates produce higher pitched sounds that larger plates. How-ever, the ability to assign accurate dimensions without some training is surprising. The same can be said for the identification of shapes. Who, for ex-ample, has been exposed to vibrating, triangular-shaped plates in ordinary life? Could we be dealing here with another innate talent that, like perfect pitch, seems to have no adaptive ...
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... Subjects From Nature's Atelier One of geology's more fascinating mysteries concerns the formation of concretions. Concretions are structures within rock that differ in form and/or composition from the matrix. Often, they form around an impurity of some sort, say, a tiny fossil. If concretions were all nicely spherical or crystalline in shape, we might be able to explain them as we do with the oyster's pearl and winter's snow-flake. Unfortunately for the theorists, concretions usually come in bizarre shapes -- shapes an avant garde sculptor might appreciate. Not only do concretions come in weird geometries but they may be replicated in prodigious numbers, like the famous Kimmeridge "coal money." Additionally, some flint concretions are arrayed in thick chalk beds in amazingly regular three-dimensional arrays that tax the ingenuity of any theorist. To illustrate the extremes of nature's inorganic-chemical imagination, we now provide some illustrations from a recent two-part article in Rocks & Minerals and one of our catalog volumes. (Dietrich, R.V .; "Carbonate Concretions,' Rocks & Minerals, 74:266 and 74:335, 1999. ESA3 in Neglected Geological Anomalies.) Carbonate concretions (" imatra stones") from Finland. Virtually identical concretions occur in the Connecticut River Valley. Vertical lines of flint concretions in chalk cliffs near Norfolk, England. Presumably the 3-dimensional array continues in the unexposed matrix behind the visible lines. (From: Neglected Geological Anomalies ) Mace-shaped sand concretions from Mt. Signal Tower, ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 132: NOV-DEC 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Viking Mooring-Stone Saga Sails On One of the more fascinating types of North American artifacts is the so-called Viking mooring stone. It has been impossible to ignore them in past issues of this newsletter. ( SF#69 and SF#113 ) The latter issue displays a photograph of three of the unique triangular holes characteristic of the "mooring stones" drilled into a boulder resting in a North Carolina stream bed. North Carolina is hardly Viking country no matter how receptive you are to claims of an early and extensive Norse presence in North America. After all, the interior of North Carolina is hundreds of miles from L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, and nowhere near the site of the infamous Kensington Stone in Minnesota. Yet, several hundred of these Viking mooring stones have been found all the way from Canada south to Missouri. Most, however, are clustered in Minnesota. For those unfamiliar with this unusual artifact, it is the curious triangular holes that are diagnostic of the Viking mooring stones. These holes are essentially identical everywhere: an inch across, 4-5 inches deep, triangular in cross section, with neatly rounded corners. The saga is reviewed in our catalog Ancient Infrastructure . Cross section of one of the strange triangular holes found in boulders. Note the rounded corners. Drillers and purpose are unknown. Our purpose here is to flag a recent article in Ancient American that tells of the ...
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... , 1524, but the weather refused to cooperate with the planets. Humanity survived nicely. This does not mean that historical upheavals are never correlated with planetary conjunctions. If a society believes strongly enough in the power of the stars and planets to shape human destiny, events may be correlated with the heavens. Such was the case in ancient China. In China, the "Mandate of Heaven" concept has been used since ancient times as both a framework for history and a guide to future actions. The basic idea is that Heaven awards ruling power to a sage-king because of his virtue. His descendants remain as Earthly deputies until they become corrupted, whereupon outraged Heaven gives signs in the sky that the Mandate has passed on to a different sage-king to continue the cycle. Three transfers of the Heavenly Man-date marked the beginnings of the Hsu, Shang, and Chou Dynasties. In fact, the tightest grouping of the five visible planets in the period from 3,000 B.C . to 5,000 A.D . (8 ,020 years!), occurred, on February 26, 1953 B.C ., when they were aligned in a 4.33 arc. This was seen by the Chinese power brokers as a celestial command to begin a new social order. Thus was born the Hsu Dynasty. Similar, but looser, conjunctions ushered n the Shang Dynasty (December 20, L576 B.C .) and Chou Dynasty (May 28. L059 B.C .) . So, astrology can influence human destiny ...
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... at a comet composed mainly of ice and dust. How could a comet emit X-rays? When a German-American team of scientists proposed taking a peek at Hyakutake with ROSAT, scientific eyebrowns were raised. What a waste of observing time! At the most, the team thought they might pick up a smudge of weak X-rays where dust grains flying off Hyakutake collided with dust grains normally present in interplanetary space. The team did get ROSAT to take a look, and what the satellite saw ignited a controversy. Some 50,000 kilometers in front of the comet was a bright crescent of X-rays, 100 times brighter than the brightest "smudge" the team of scientists had hoped for. This was completely unexpected. All astronomers could do was come up with three rather unconvincing theories: (1 ) Solar X-rays were absorbed and reemited by the comet (Xray fluorescence); (2 ) Cometary material emitted X-rays when bathed in the solar wind; and (3 ) Charged particles were somehow accelerated by a magnetic field compressed by the comet's bow wave in the solar wind. Nobody is particularly happy with any of these theories. (Hecht, Jeff; "Comet Bids Farewell with Blaze of X-rays," New Scientist, p. 18, April 20, 1996. Glanz, James; "Comet Hyakutake Blazes in X-rays," Science, 272:194, 1996) Comment. Serendipity has struck again! Imagine all the phenomena we are missing because we know they can't happen! ...
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... do before sunset because they too felt the approaching storm. At 16 UT the first raindrops fell. A weak shower of rain followed, and then loose-structured 20-mm-diameter discs of ice. Soon afterwards what was to be 30 minutes of "sky fire" set in. Stone-like pieces of ice streamed to the ground, very heavily and violently. Some of the hailstones were the size of a nut or plum. Within minutes a white carpet covered the plateau of Padis at an altitude of 1200 metres (3900 feet), and the air grew very cool. The landscape was covered by a milky-white veil of fog which rose from the cold ground to a height of 1 to 1.5 metres to embrace the whole dolomite plateau. Then for three minutes the hailstorm paused, before restarting! It lasted for 55 minutes, and it was in these freezing conditions that I began studying and classifying the pieces or balls of ice. See author's sketches of the remarkably varied shapes of hail. (Kosa-hiss, Attila; "Hailstorm at Padis-Plateau, Romania," Journal of Meteorology, U.K ., 25:96, 2000.) Comment. The perennial question is: What mechanism in a hailstorm generates untold millions of copies of a suite of different, often complex, ice shapes? Some of the hailstones that fell in the storm. Of particular interest are the pyramids (5 , 6), the discs with transparent centers (12), and the "badminton balls" (15) ...
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... makes new proteins in the process of putting the memory back into long-term storage. The fact that new proteins are made means that the memory has been transformed permanently to reflect each person's life experiences---not the memory itself. (Blakesley, Sandra; "Brain-Updating Machinery May Explain False Memories," New York Times, September 19, 2000. Cr. D. Phelps) Ruminations. This all sounds reasonable, but it assumes that memory is stored in a protein medium of some sort. It is hard to imagine how, say, the multiplication table, can be recorded on a protein "hard drive." Are the bits representing the multiplication table encoded in a line of proteins of different types or in their sequence or, perhaps, their three-dimensional configurations? Does anyone really know what our brain's hard drive looks like? Maybe memory is hologrammic. And when a memory is pulled off the mind's hard drive, how is the information conveyed to the central processing unit, assuming there is one? Is it all done through nervous impulses, or are proteins transferred bodily. This computer analogy is probably incorrect. Nature is probably cleverer than PC makers! The demonstrable fact is that human memory is malleable, and this seems anomalous in terms of the evolution paradigm. Wouldn't the survival of an organism be better served by permanent, accurate memories of past events? From Science Frontiers #133, JAN-FEB 2001 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ...
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... time of severe drought, which may be a clue to their purpose. Next, strip off the geoglyphs (trapezoids and such), and a seeming mishmash of straight lines survives. But most are not random when analyzed. Most converge spoke-like upon 62 or more "ray centers." Thus, the Nazca Plain seems to be a 3-page book: biomorphs, geoglyphs, and spoked ray-centers. They all overlap. It's all a gigantic Rorschach test; and different observers see different things! A Nazca biomorph (monkey with spiral tail) overlain by an abstract, unexplained geoglyph. See Book Supplement for still another Nazca figure. Of course, there are doodles on this 400-square-mile canvas that don't fit on any of the three pages. We'll have to ignore them for now. The archeoastronomers first tried to read something meaningful into the Nazca lines, but they were disappointed. Computer analyses revealed no significant connections with the rising and settings of heavenly bodies. Next, some tried to relate the biomorphs to the celestial sphere. Did a terrestrial bird figure point toward a bird-like grouping of stars? A few earth-sky bird connections are interesting in this regard, but generally the idea that the Nazca lines are a terrestrial zodiac has not panned out well. The geo-speculators have had more success. There are many "water" connections. The geoglyphs were drawn at the time of a great drought. The geoglyphs are often colocated with groups of subterranean aqueducts called "puquios," which ...
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... MIT maze-running rats were hooked up to equipment that recorded the neuron-firing patterns in the rats' hippocampus where memories are processed. The patterns were the same when the rats were dreaming and when running the maze during waking hours. From the patterns, it was even possible to tell exactly where a rat dreamed it was in the mazes. Whether the rats worked out better maze solutions in their dreams and thereby made their dreaming worthwhile could not be determined from the article. Simple memory-review does not seem to have much survival value. (Anonymous; "Lab Rats Found to Dream of Mazes, Researchers Say," Baltimore Sun, January 25, 2001.) Humans conceptualize and create while dreaming. A few anecdotes suggest that human dreaming may be innovative. The following three oft-told tales are truthfully no more convincing to a scientist than many UFO anecdotes. When carbon atoms danced through the dreaming brain of A. Kekule, they led the waking Kekule to conceive the structure of the benzene molecule. I. Lowe awoke from a dream one night, jotted down a few notes, and fell back to sleep. On waking, he could not decipher his scrawl. Happily, the next night the dream recurred. Lowe raced to his lab, performed the experiment outlined in his dream, and thereby developed a new theory of brain activity. In 1869, D. Mendeleyev was puzzling over the disparate properties of the 63 elements then known. Was there any pattern? One night he fell asleep and in a dream the elements fell into their proper places ...
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... astronomers never see UFOs." An Unusual Aerial Phenomenon by Clyde W. Tombaugh I saw the object about eleven o'clock one night in August, 1949, from the backyard of my home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I happened to be looking at zenith, admiring the beautiful transparent sky of stars, when I suddenly spied a geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light similar to the "Lubbock lights". My wife and her mother were sitting in the yard with me and they saw them also. The group moved south-southeasterly, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, their space of formation smaller, (at first about one degree across) and their intensity duller, fading from view at about 35 degrees above the horizon. Total time of visibility was about three seconds. I was too flabbergasted to count the number of rectangles of light, or to note some other features I wondered about later. There was no sound. I have done thousands of hours of night sky watching, but never saw a sight as strange as this. The rectangles of light were of low luminosity; had there been a full moon in the sky, I am sure they would not have been visible. (Signed August 7, 1957) (Swords, Michael D.; "Clyde Tombaugh, Mars, and UFOs," Journal of Scientific Exploration, 13:685, 1999.) From Science Frontiers #129, MAY-JUNE 2000 . 2000 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . Catastrophism, archaeoastronomy, ancient history, mythology and astronomy ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 128: MAR-APR 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Numberless Black Discs Somehow, the following observation was omitted from our catalogs on anomalous atmospheric phenomena -- perhaps because it was hard to classify! What do you think: UFOs or windblown debris? November 4, 1867. Chatham, England . On the afternoon of Monday the 4th, between the hours of three and four, I witnessed a very extraordinary sight in the heavens. I have not heard of any one hereabout having seen it. The facts are as follow: -- At the time above mentioned I was passing by the Mill by the Water-works Reservoir. On the gallery I noticed the miller uttering exclamations of surprise, and looking earnestly towards the west. On inquiring what took his attention so much, he said, "Look, sir, I never saw such a sight in my life!" On turning in the direction towards which he was looking, the west, I also was astounded -- numberless black discs in groups and scattered were passing rapidly through the air. He said his attention was directed to them by his little girl, who called to him in the Mill, saying, "Look, father, here are a lot of balloons coming!" They continued for more than twenty minutes, the time I stayed. In passing in front of the sun they appeared like large cannon shot. Several groups passed over my head, disappearing suddenly, and leaving puffs of greyish brown ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 128: MAR-APR 2000 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Ganymede Magnetic Paradox In December 1995, the Galileo space-craft was injected into orbit around Jupiter, thereby becoming the first known artificial satellite of this giant planet. In the five years that have transpired, Galileo has radioed back voluminous data about Jupiter itself and its four large Calilean satellites. These natural satellites have turned out to be a disparate bunch. Three have iron cores, but Callisto breaks the mold with an unusual core of mixed ice and rock. Europa probably possesses an ocean, and Callisto might also. Only one of Jupiter's large satellites, Ganymede, boasts a magnetic field. In fact, Ganymede is apparently the only satellite in the solar system to display an intrinsic, dipole magnetic field like the earth's . Although Ganymere's magnetic field is like that produced by a permanent bar magnet, its core is much too hot for permanent magnetism. Again like the earth, Ganymede's field is theorized to be generated by the convection of electrically conducting liquid in its core -- a dynamo of sorts. All well and good, but Ganymede is so small that it should have cooled off billions of years ago thereby freezing its metallic core. So then, whence its magnetic field? One way out of this box it to suppose that about a billion years ago Ganymede was circling Jupiter in an orbit that took it much closer to this ponderous planet. Then, Jupiter's powerful ...
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... . I had not been [there] for a couple of years. Everything was going as normal until I got down into the park. I took the "red" path which takes you right round the lakes. I had walked down to the old kennels when I saw what I can only describe as a glowing fog. I thought it must be some sort of peculiar weather phenomenon. I carried on skirting the lake but the "glow" was still there. I looked around for someone to confirm this odd scene with me but I was alone. I must admit I began to feel a little unnerved by it. I quickened back; the glow could still be seen except it had drifted out over the lake. It was about six feet (two metres) high and three feet (one metre) wide -- although not a column. Indeed, at one point I almost thought it looked like a figure. I have never seen such a peculiar sight in all my days, and only wish someone else had seen it, too. (Roland, Cynthia; "Peculiar Sight in Park," Journal of Meteorology, U.K ., 26:229, 2001.) Comment. It is the luminous feature of this phenomenon that makes it so interesting. Could it have been a will-o 'the-wisp? Or it might have been kin to the drifting, luminous "bubble" described in SF#102. From Science Frontiers #138, NOV-DEC 2001 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS ...
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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 Three Views Of Mortality The death of matter. Physicists have maintained for over a century that the Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees that our universe with run down one day and that life must cease. This cold reductionist view is seconded by recent evidence that protons, long con sidered immortal, may after all decay. The consequences of proton decay are even more dismal than the dire predictions of thermodynamics: "Perhaps the most disturbing piece of speculation to come out of theoretical physics recently is the prediction that the whole universe is in decay. Not only do living things die, species go extinct, and stars burn out, but the apparently immutable protons in the nucleus of every atom are slowly dissolving. Eventually -- in more than a quadrillion years -- nothing will be left of the universe but a dead mist of electrons, photons, and neutrinos." (Flam, Faye; "Could Protons Be Mortal after All?" Science, 257:1862, 1992.) The death of memory. With increasing entropy and decaying protons on their minds, it comes as no surprise that physicists likewise believe that when one dies, that's it . An afterlife is impossible. How do physicists conclude this? In a letter to the American Journal of Physics, J. Orear proffered an interesting sort of "proof": "One such proof: human memory is stored in the circuitry of the brain and after death ...
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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 Early Life Surprisingly Diverse The three life forms sketched below are tiny microorganisms, not the worms they appear to be. They are thought to be bacteria, for they closely resemble modern cyanobacteria. What is most important about these fossilized micro-organisms is that they were found in the Apex chert of Western Australia. The Apex chert is designated Early Archean and assigned an age of 3.465 billion years [Four significant figures!]. It is rare to find any fossils at all in rocks this old, but apparently the Apex chert escaped most of the fossil-destroying metamorphism afflicting most Precambrian formations. Even more remarkable is the diversity of these suspected bacteria. J.W . Schopf reports finding no less than eleven different kinds so far--and our planet was only a few hundred million years old at the time the Apex chert was formed. Schopf's discoveries generate at least three questions: How could life have originated and diversified to such an extent in just a few hundred millions years? Why after such rapid diversification did these microorganisms remain essentially unchanged for the next 3.465 billion years? Such stasis, common in biology, is puzzling. If these microorganisms are really cyanobacteria, they would have released oxygen to the atmosphere. Is the standard assumption that the earth's atmosphere lacked oxygen until 2.2 billion years ago correct? (Schopf, J. William; "Microfossils of the Early ...
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... Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Checking Out Some Texas Ghost Lights Some members of the Houston Association for Scientific Thinking (HAST) have visited the sites of the famed Marfa Lights (West Texas) and the less-publicized Saratoga Lights (East Texas). With binoculars, telescopes, and road maps, it was fairly easy for them to ascertain that the Saratoga Lights were simply the headlights of automobiles traveling along Route 787. The Saratoga display is a bit eerie but not at all mysterious, according to HAST. The Marfa Lights turned out to be more impressive and, in consequence, quite a tourist attraction. The favorite viewing site is on Highway 90, 9 miles east of Marfa. HAST logged a total of 9 hours of observation there on three successive nights. All of the lights observed were easily attributed to cars traveling north from Presidio to Marfa. People at the viewing site who knew of the Presidio-Marfa road had no trouble identifying the lights as those of automobiles. But those unaware of the road called the lights mysterious. As for the frequent reports of Marfa lights cavorting and executing strange maneuvers, HAST thought they were probably due to low-flying aircraft in the neighborhood of the Chianti Mountains some 40 miles away. In fact, just such a plane was observed during a daylight trip to Shafter, a town near the mountains. Admitting that the Marfa Lights are indeed entrancing and even mildly mystical, the report closes (rather incongruously for an admittedly skeptical writer) with: "A reminder that caution must be taken ...
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... though, one more anecdotal report, and then we'll summarize two recent scientific efforts to elucidate these phenomena. July 28, 1993. 150 miles south of Panama. From an aircraft flying at 33,000 feet. "I and another pilot in the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 912 were watching and circumnavigating a large cumulonimbus cloud. About five times, a large discharge of lightning at the top of and within the cloud was followed by a vertical shaft of blue light that propagated from the top of the cloud upward to 100,000 ft. "The beam was very straight and the color distinctly different from the lightning. At the top of this shaft, the column fanned out just before its disappearance. All the occurrences were identical. At least one also was witnessed by three other American pilots about 30 min. behind us on the same route." (Hammerstrom, John G.; "Mystery Lightning," Aviation Week , 139:6 , August 30, 1993. Cr. J.S . Denn and D.K . Hackett.) July 1993. From an aircraft over the American Midwest. E. Wescott and D. Sentman, employing a very sensitive camera aboard a NASA DC8, recorded 19 unusual flashes over a thunderstorm. Each flash lasted less than 1/30 second. "The scintillations are estimated to be about 25 miles tall, 6 miles wide and more than 240 cubic miles in volume, according to Eugene Wescott and Davis Sentman. "Their shapes resemble resemble jellyfish, Wescott said. 'They appear brightest where they ...
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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 Hidden messages in genesis?Some can find cryptic meanings in the works of Nostradamus, others see messages in crop circles. Forget those sources! A better one has been around for millennia. Three researchers at the Jerusalem College of Technology and the Hebrew University have analyzed the text of Genesis using an analytical technique that can only be called "inspired". "By treating the text as an unbroken string of letters, and selecting sequences of equally spaced letters, three mathematicians discovered 300 hidden pairs of Hebrew words with related meanings in close proximity to one another. Some of the words involved people who lived and events that occurred long after the Torah was written. "The odds of the words occurring by chance? Less than one in 50 quadrillion, according to an article by Jeffrey Satinover in the October issue of Bible Review ." Satinover is a psychiatrist and lecturer on the relationship between science and religion. He commented: "I guess the bottom line is, if the research holds up and no flaw is found in the methodology, then I think the implication is clear that the authorship of Genesis is not human." Unsettling though the implications are to mainstream science, the research has made it past the usual critical hurdles into two scientific journals: Statistical Science and Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Scientists familiar with the work can only say that, "Something weird seems to be happening." We certainly agree! ...
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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 Biogeology It is accepted that every cubic centimeter of the topsoil beneath our feet seethes with thousands of microorganisms. It is less well known that life's domain extends down much further. The hard rocks and strata of earth's crust -- seemingly sterile and inert -- are continuously being transformed by bacteria and other life forms. In fact, it was easy to find three examples of such processes from the literature collected from the past two months. Although the discoveries reported below may seem dull to anomalists ued to more exciting fare, it may well be that life from "inner space" has been and will be more important to humankind than life from "outer space," as implied in third item! Bacteria and placer gold. "Lacelike networks of micrometresize filiform gold associated with Alaskan placer gold particles are interpreted as low-temperature pseudomorphs of a Pedomicrobium -like budding bacterium. Submicron reproductive structures (hyphae) and other morphological features similar to those of Pedomicrobium occur as three-dimensional facsimiles in highpurity gold in and on placer gold particles from Lillian Creek, Alaska." In short, bacteria help create placer gold deposits. The author believes that bacterioform gold is widespread. (Watterson, John R.; "Preliminary Evidence for the Involvement of Budding Bacteria in the Origin of Alaskan Placer Gold," Geology , 20:315, 1992.) Microorganisms and iron deposits. At least 500 million years ago ...
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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 All roads lead to 123 "Start with any number that is a string of digits -- , say, 9 288 759 -- and count the number of even digits, the number of odd digits, and the total number of digits it contains. These are 3 (three evens), 4 (four odds), and 7 (seven is the total number of digits), respectively. Use these digits to form the next string or number, 347. If you repeat the process with 347, you get 1, 2, 3. If you repeat with 123, you get 123 again. The number 123, with respect to this process and universe of numbers, is a mathematical black hole." We have a black hole because we cannot escape, just as spaceships are doomed when captured by a physical black hole! You end up with 123 regardless of the number you start with. Other sorts of mathematical black holes exist, such as the Collatz Conjecture, but we must not fall into them because our printer awaits. (Ecker, Michael; "Caution: Black Holes at Work," New Scientist, p. 38, December 19/26, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #86, MAR-APR 1993 . 1993-2000 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 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. 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. 85: Jan-Feb 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Growth Spurts In Children Daily length measurements (in centimeters) versus age (in years) for a male infant showing growth spurts. Despite much anecdotal evidence and the convictions of many parents, biologists have not generally recognized the reality of short, sharp growth spurts on the order of 1 centimeter in a single 24hour period. Rather, the consensus has been that child growth was divided into three stages (infancy, childhood, adolescence), each characterized by different, but steady rates of growth. This conclusion was based upon annual and quarterly length measurements. However, when children are measured more often (weekly or daily), the growth curve is seen to be step-like rather than smooth, as in the accompanying illustration. Indeed, the mean amplitude of the growth spurts was found to be about 1 centimeter; and the duration of the spurts, about one day. These spurts punctuated long intervals of no growth. In infants, for example, 90-95% of their development is growth-free! (Lampl, M., et al; "Saltation and Stasis: A Model of Human Growth," Science, 258:801, 1992.) From Science Frontiers #85, JAN-FEB 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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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. 83: Sep-Oct 1992 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Crop-circle contest July 11-12, 1992. Buckinghamshire, England . On this dark night, in a barley field, 12 teams assembled in hopes of winning a $5 ,200 prize provided by the Koestler Foundation and the German Magazine PM. This sum was to be awarded to the best crop-circle hoaxers. First prize went to three engineers from a British helicopter company, who used rope, plastic piping, and a ladder suspended from a trestle. Close behind in the competition was American J. Schnabel, who, working all alone, required only a plank, some rope, and a small garden roller to produce a creditable, rather elaborate design. (Anonymous; "Circle Hoax Contest," Science, 257:481, 1992.) Comment. The quality of the best entries assures us that hoaxing is not to be discounted as a major factor in cropcircle studies. From Science Frontiers #83, SEP-OCT 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... 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 the spots (thought to be craters) do not coincide with any known craters. Unfortunately, Mellish's drawings ...
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... -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 a "trailed moonlet;" that is, ...
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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 A Picture Speaks Louder Than Words We hardly need more than the accompanying drawing to amplify our brief item (in SF#103) on that remarkable 7th. Century Mayan suspension bridge at Yaxchilan, in Mexico. Its three spans stretched 600 feet. The wooden deck was 10 feet wide and was suspended by large-diameter hemp ropes - probably bundles of six 1-inch ropes, according to modern calculations. The towers of the two bridge piers were 35 feet across and built up from large, flat stones (4 x 4 feet) set in bedrock. European engineers did not build a larger bridge until 1377! The following reference contains much more information. (O 'Kon, James A.; "Bridge to the Past," Civil Engineering , p. 62, January 1995. Cr. S. Jones) The precocious Mayan suspension bridge at Yaxchilan. Temples and other city buildings in background. From Science Frontiers #105, MAY-JUN 1996 . 1996-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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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. 87: May-Jun 1993 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The 50,000-year-old americans of pedra furada French archeologists (not American) have established to the satisfaction of most European archeologists (not American) that humans were present in Brazil at least 50,000 years ago. F. Parenti, with N. Guidon, presented their data at a recent Paris meeting. The main site studied was the sandstone rock shelter of Pedra Furada, which is one of several hundred painted rock shelters discovered in northeastern Brazil. Guidon began her work in 1978; Parenti, in 1984. The fourvolume, 7-kilogram report (actually Parenti's doctoral thesis) concentrates on three lines of evidence: A coherent series of 54 radiocarbon dates ranging from 5,000 to 50,000 years. Crudely flaked stones, some 6,000 of which are deemed of human manufacture, even when the most stringent criteria are applied. Many of these came from Pleistocene strata 50,000 years old or older. Some 50 Pleistocene "structures" consisting of artificial arrangements of stones, some burned, some accompanied by charcoal. These are likely ancient hearths. (Bahn, Paul G.; "50,000-Year-Old Americans of Pedra Furada," Nature, 362:114, 1993.) Comment. With the Brazil and Chile (Monte Verde) sites looking more and more convincing, it is reasonable to ask why even older sites have not been found in ...
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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 The Ktb Hole KTB = Kontinentales Tiefbohrprogramm der Bundesrepublik Deutschland If you could drop a pfennig down the KTB hole, it would take several minutes to hit bottom, for this research drill hole has now penetrated to 7.5 kilometers. It is the second deepest man-made hole, after the Soviet 12-km hole in the Kola Peninsula. Drilled solely for scientific purposes, the rocks and strata encountered by the KTB drill bits have forced the redrawing of German geological maps. The "real" subterranean world turned out to be quite different from that inferred from both surface indications and the seismic and electrical probing of the depths. Three specific surprises are worth mentioning: Temperatures in the drill hole rose far faster than predicted. The expected boundary (" suture") between two old tectonic plates thought to exist at 3 km according to surface geology had not yet appeared at 7.5 km. Most interestingly, crevicular structure (crevices and pores) existed at almost all depths, even though theory said they could not because of intense pressures. And these voids were filled with fluids. P. Keher, a KTB scientist, was amazed at what the drill found: "When I started 25 years ago, the idea was that the deeper you go into the crust, the drier it gets." (Kerr, Richard A.; "Looking -- Deeply -- into the Earth's Crust in Europe ...
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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 Einstein Questioned Aberration: The apparent angular displacement of the position of a celestial body in the direction of motion of the observer, caused by the combination of the velocity of the observer and the velocity of light. ( McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms ) An Abstract. Stellar aberration, discovered nearly three centuries ago by Bradley, was immediately recognized as a phenomenon owing to the velocity of the earth in its orbit around the sun. Einstein provided an explanation of aberration in his famous 1905 paper using his new relativity theory, and his explanation remains essentially without modification in many modern textbooks. Herein, we show that his explanation is very much in disagreement with measurement. (Hayden, Howard C.; paper to be published in Galilean Electrodynamics , vol. 4, no. 5, 1993.) A Comment. The essence of Prof. Hayden's main argument is that, if stellar aberration depended on the relative velocity between source and observer (as Einstein maintained), then each component of a spectroscopic binary star would have drastically different stellar aberration, contrary to observation. (Van Flandern, Tom; Meta Research Bulletin, 2:29, 1993.) From Science Frontiers #90, NOV-DEC 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... modern arboreal bird; i.e ., barbed feathers, asymmetrical flight feathers, etc. V. Morell quotes Feducci as saying, "Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earthbound feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that." (Feduccia, Alan; "Evidence from Claw Geometry Indicating Arboreal Habits of Archaeopteryx," Science, 259:790, 1993. Morell, Virginia; "Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms," Science, 259:764, 1993. Monastersky, R.; "Flight: A Bird Hand Is Worthy in the Bush," Science News, 143:87, 1993.) Comment. Unremarked in the three articles referenced above is a more serious anomaly that is highlighted by the many modern features of Archaeopteryx; for example, the lack of any transitional fossils between Archaeopteryx and its ancestors. Where are reptiles with crudely feathered, but somehow useful tails? From Science Frontiers #87, MAY-JUN 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... horizontal plane through a stacked pyramid the maximum pressure actually occurs in a ring of objects (apples) some distance from the pyramid's vertical axis. How come? (Watson, A.; "The Perplexing Puzzle Posed by a Pile of Apples," New Scientist, p. 19, December 14, 1991.) A theoretical analysis of the problem by J. Grindlay doesn't help much. He analyzed a two-dimensional pile of disks, as shown, and calculated that maximum bruising forces should occur at the outermost disks instead of at the center, (Grindlay, J.; "Bruised Apples," American Journal of Physics, 61:469, 1993.) Comment. Thus, common-sense expectations, experimental measurements, and theoretical calculations lead to three different results. Much more work needs to be done here. From Science Frontiers #88, JUL-AUG 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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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 Plants Of The Apes Many biologists are convinced that apes, bears, cats, and dogs eat plants -- many of them obviously distasteful -- in order to medicate themselves for diseases and parasites. What also seems likely, according to K. Strier, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is that some monkeys regulate their fertility by the judicious consumption of certain plants. Going even farther, K. Glander, Duke University, suggests that howler monkeys control the sex of their offspring through their diets. Glander divides howler monkey females into three groups. In the first are the high-ranking females that predominantly produce male offspring. This 'male-offspring' strategy favors these females because the males they produce tend to become dominant adults that will pass on more of the females' genes than would female offspring, who are limited in the number of infants they can engender in comparison to the males. Similar optimization strategies, according to Glander, induce middleranking females to produce mainly female progeny, and low-ranking females to birth almost all males. These howler monkeys seem to control the sex of their offspring pharmologically by selecting certain plants to eat. These plants, in turn, control the electrical conditions in the females' reproductive tracts to either attract or repel sperm carrying the male Y-chromosomes, which are thought to carry different electrical charges than the X-carrying sperm! (Lewin, Roger; "What ...
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... 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 ) independent mouse inventions; (2 ) mouse telepathy; or, worst of all, (3 ) an example of Sheldrake's morphic resonance! From Science Frontiers #81, MAY-JUN 1992 . 1992-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... but subtle subversion prevails here! First they attract the ants with their songs; then, they seduce them with nectar that is much more nutritious and attractive than that produced by the Croton plant. Finally, they chemically force the ants into defensive postures against predatory wasps by spraying them with a mesmerizing substance from special "tentacle organs" near their heads. Why is all this subversive on the part of the caterpillars? It appears that the caterpillars have invaded and undermined the normal ant-plant symbiosis -- a very common, mutually beneficial arrangement. The ants have been seduced into letting the caterpillars feast on the Croton plant, although the ant-plant compact originally required that the ants repel all herbivorous insects. What makes this tale of subterfuge so remarkable is that the caterpillars had to evolve three separate organs in order to accomplish it: (1 ) their vibratory papillae; (2 ) their nectary glands; and (3 ) their mesmerizing tentacle organs. (DeVries, Philip J.; "Singing Caterpillars, Ants and Symbiosis," Scientific American, 267:76, October 1992.) From Science Frontiers #85, JAN-FEB 1993 . 1993-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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