423 results found.
... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 6: February 1979 Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues Last Issue Next Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Contents Archaeology The Pecked Cross Symbol in Ancient America Inscribed Stone From Tennessee Necropolis Astronomy Venus Has Uncertain Pedigree Unearthly Life on Mars Supermasses That Come and Go Has the Universe's Missing Mass Been Found? Geology Earth, the Magic Top Geophysics Positive Ion Emission Before Earthquakes May Affect Animals Strange High-level Haze in the Arctic Humps of Particles in the Gulf Stream Psychology Some Highly Focussed Minds Stacked Deck in Esp Experiment ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 122: Mar-Apr 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Ghost Galaxies "Small ghost galaxies, devoid of stars but harboring dense clumps of invisible matter, may outnumber the entire population of luminous galaxies in the universe." If ghost galaxies contain no stars at all, how do we know they are there? By extrapolation! In recent years, astronomers have been able to detect dwarf galaxies lit by just a few luminous stars. These faint, miniscule galaxies are kept from flying apart by the gravitational pull of invisible dark matter. In fact, the density of dark matter in dwarf galaxies is a hundred times that in our bright, normal-size Milky Way. Further, the more dwarfish and dimmer a galaxy, the denser its dark matter and the more of them there are in the universe. Now for the promised extrapolation. J. Kormendy and K.C . Freeman take things one step further, concluding that the universe is flooded with sub-dwarf galaxies that are thick with dark matter, and without enough luminous stars for us to see them in our telescopes. These ghost galaxies are only 1/10,000 as massive as the bright galaxies like the Milky Way but much more common. (Cowen, R.; "Tiny Galaxies Have Hearts of Darkness," Science News, 155:38, 1999.) Comments. If the universe if awash in ghost galaxies, why don't we bump into them occasionally? Maybe we have! Another ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 124: Jul-Aug 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A New Cosmology In the April 1999 issue of Physics Today -- certainly a mainstream publication, but occasionally daring -- we find a long, technically deep article outlining a new cosmology that jettisons the Big Bang and even redshifts as infallible measures of cosmological distances. It should come as no surprise that the authors are G. Burbidge, F. Hoyle, and J.V . Narlikar. They propose a quasi-steady-state universe to replace the hot Big Bang. It is easy to itemize narrow, specific problems bedeviling the Big Bang, but the three "boat-rockers" listed above also have an important philosophical bone to pick with modern astronomers and cosmologists. "The theory departs increasingly from known physics, until ultimately the energy source of the universe is put in as an initial condition, the energy supposedly coming from somewhere else. Because that "somewhere else" can have any properties that suit the theoretician, supporters of Big Bang cosmology gain for themselves a large bag of free parameters that can subsequently be tuned as the occasion may require. "We do not think that science should be done in that way. In science as we understand it, one works from an initial situation, known from observation or experiment, to a later situation that is also known. That is the way physical laws are tested. In the currently popular form of cosmology, by contrast, the physical laws are regarded as ...
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... archeologist, claims that rock carvings in Petroglyph Provincial Park were etched by European explorers circa 800 BC rather than by Native Americans. One petroglyph, for example, depicts a Viking-like ship almost identical to those carved on a rock near Boslund, Sweden. There are also abstract symbols like those used by Northern Europeans in the same time frame. (Anonymous; "Did Vikings Pay Early Visit?" Baltimore Sun, August 13, 1999.) Comment. Kelley's observations certainly bolster B. Fell's claims in his book America B.C . that Europeans made landfall in North America long before Columbus set sail. Early Chinese. Perhaps Chinese adventurers beat the Europeans to the New World. At a symposium in Anyang, China, M. Xu Hui (Texas Christian University) presented 56 matching sets of characters found in both the Americas and China. "They so closely resemble the 3,000-year-old Shang Dynasty characters for the sun, sky, rain, water, crops, trees, and astronomy that if they had not been found in America, Chinese experts would have classified them automatically as pre-221 B.C . Chinese script." (Rennie, David; "Carvings Link Chinese with American Indians," Chicago SunTimes , August 31, 1999. Cr. J. Cieciel.) Early Australians. A new BBC documentary entitled Ancient Voices proclaims that the first settlers of the New World were from Australia and Melanesia. Skulls thought to be 9,000-12,000 years old have been unearthed in Brazil with ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 124: Jul-Aug 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Measuring Spirituality!" The connection between matter and spirit has been debated for millennia. The central mystery is that certain material objects (human beings) contrive to be conscious and to possess a spiritual dimension. This implies that matter itself has some rudimentary spiritual character." From this opening paragraph, D. Jones advances his thesis by assuming that the spiritual world occupies the same space as the material world. The two "worlds," though are usually only very weakly coupled. However, during the 12-billionyear history of the universe they have had ample time to come into thermodynamic equilibrium. In other words the average temperatures of the material and spiritual worlds are equal; i.e ., 3 K, the same as the microwave background. It is, of course, this low average temperature of the spiritual world that accounts for the chill felt when a spiritual entity (ghost) enters a room and is coupled to the material world. Continuing on this tack, Jones now plans to measure whether holy relics and other material objects with high spiritual value cool faster than non-spiritual objects. He also hopes to work with biological materials, specifically the human brain, which is the seat of consciousness and spiritual thought. Human brains, particularly those of holy men, should be tightly coupled to the cold spiritual world. These human brains should cool much faster than, say, a sirloin steak. Speculating even further ...
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... No. 139: Jan-Feb 2002 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects White Mars?Earth is called the "blue planet" by virtue of its thin veneer of blue ocean water. Mars is now red because of its endless vistas of reddish soil and rocks, But most planetary scientists now insist that Mars was once blue, too. It was drained by gushing rivers and supported a vast ocean. The planet's many channels and layered deposits seem to prove Mars was, like Earth, once a water-rich planet. We like to think this way because we so much want to find life on our sister planet, and to us water is life! Not so fast! says N. Hoffman from La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. According to his hypothesis, water has had little or no importance in shaping the Martian landscape. Instead, his 'White Mars' model contends that the gurgling, frothing and sometimes explosive venting of carbon dioxide gas from beneath the surface created the features. Outrageous as Hoffman's hypothesis is, it is supported by several significant observations that seem to deny a watery Mars. The Mars Global Surveyor has not detected any carbonate minerals that should have been created when water interacted chemically with the planet's CO2 atmosphere. Surface photos fail to show the fine networks of tributaries that should have fed the larger drainage features if water were the agent of erosion. There is no evidence of large lakes or reservoirs at the heads of the so-called "flood channels ...
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... , A. Evans, was on a north-south beach. "It was a glorious day with some broken cloud over the land but none out to sea. Over the period between 3.00 and 6.00pm, a total of five jets passed overhead, all leaving vapour trails. Two showed a very interesting phenomenon, because while the vapour trails extended eastwards, the trails were continued westwards in front of the planes as dark lines which stretched all the way to the horizon. It was as if the plane was running on an aerial railway. I think it significant that only two of the planes showed this phenomenon as I suspect it was heightdependent. At this time the sun was high and shining from the south-southwest." J.O . Mattsson, Lund University, surmised that the black streaks in front of aircraft were shadows of the condensation trails behind the two planes. The shadows were cast forward ahead of the planes upon the hazy, though cloudless, atmosphere above the ocean. (Evans, Alun; "Condensation Trail Shadows," Weather, 53:371, 1998.) Comment. Since the sun was high in the sky, it is difficult to visualize how a the vapor-trail shadow could be cast directly ahead of the aircraft. Hummm! We suppose that the vapor trails acted like those sunset clouds that produce crepuscular rays. The geometry, though, is a bit different. Digitized sketch of contrail phenomenon. Apparently, the contrail's shadow was projected on the misty atmosphere ahead of the aircraft. From Science Frontiers ...
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... : "that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs." The apparent deep-seated oil source at Eugene Island and Gold's ideas make petroleum engineers wonder about a similar situation at the seemingly inexhaustible oil fields of the Middle East. "The Middle East has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. "Offthe-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says." (Cooper, Christopher; "It's No Crude Joke: This Oil Field Grows Even as It's Tapped," Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1999. Cr. C. Casale.) From Science Frontiers #124, JUL-AUG 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 125: Sep-Oct 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Power Of A Paradigm Powerful paradigms can stifle scientific research. The truth of this has become apparent at the Topper archeological site near Allendale, South Carolina. The dig was discovered back in 1981 when a local man, named Topper, led A. Goodyear (from the University of South Carolina) to a deposit of side-notched chert points. These artifacts are similar to 10,000-year-old points found elsewhere. Nothing anomalous so far! At depths of 80-100 centimeters, Goodyear came across fluted blanks from which the classic and distinctive Clovis points could be manufactured. This was the culmination of the dig; the archeologists picked up their trowels and headed for other sites. Why? Simply because everyone knew that there were no North American artifacts older than Clovis points. Dated at 10,800-11,200 radiocarbon years, Clovis points supposedly marked the earliest arrival of humans in the Americas. Digging deeper at the Topper site would have been a waste of time. In 1998, however, Goodyear had second thoughts. This was the time when the nothing-older-than-Clovis paradigm was being challenged by finds at Monte Verde, Chile. (SF#120) Goodyear decided to take his trowels back to the Topper site. "After some 40 cm of essentially barren deposits, the excavators began finding small flakes and microtools. The lower level, exposed over 28 square meters, ...
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... for the steady influx of icy comets comes from the geologists. They find that on and near the surface of the earth there is much more water and carbon than can be ascribed to the weathering of the earth's rocks. For example, the amount of carbon tied up in rocks (carbonates, etc.) is 600 times that now found in the combined atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Where did all this extra carbon come from? The same question can be asked about the earth's water inventory. Geologists have long assumed that this excess water and carbon came from the outgassing of volcanos. But recent quantitative estimates tell us that the volcanic sources are grossly inadequate. So are all other possible terrestrial sources. Therefore, some scientists, such as D. Deming, University of Oklahoma, have been looking spaceward. Deming ventures that extraterrestrial sources of water and carbon may be four or five orders of magnitude greater than suspected. Obviously, a steady bombardment of icy comets might fulfill Deming's requirements. Down the long eons of geological time, they could have filled the oceans and showered all that excess carbon onto the planet's surface. Deming ups the stakes in the icy-comet controversy when he links these fluffy snowballs to the well-known vagaries of life on earth. "The extraterrestrial influx rate may also act as the pacemaker of terrestrial evolution, at times leading to mass extinctions through climatic shifts induced by changes in accretion rates with concommitant disruptions of the carbon and nitrogen cycles. Life on earth may be balanced precariously between cosmic processes which ...
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... re not alone. These particles are ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which are billions of times more energetic than the run-of-the-mill cosmic rays that continuously bombard earth's atmosphere." (Anonymous; "Space Streakers," Astronomy, 27:34, March 1999.) "The most powerful explosion ever ever observed -- a deep space eruption detected in January -- released in just seconds a burst of energy equal to billions of years of light from thousands of suns. Researchers say in studies to be published today that the explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, occurred 9 billion light years from earth. What caused the explosion is a mystery." (Anonymous; "Blast's Light May Have Been Greater Than Rest of Universe," Baltimore Sun, March 26, 1999.) "Every day, the sun blows billions of tons of ionized gas, electrons and protons into space -- the "solar wind." Sometimes, especially near the solar maximum, this wind is punctuated by squalls and storms of dangerous highenergy particles." Two giant solar storms erupted in 1972. Luckily, they were sandwiched between Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions to the moon. If the astronauts had been caught on the lunar surface during one of these storms, they would probably have died. (Roylance, Frank D.; "Sun Puts Chill on Space Missions," Baltimore Sun, Apil 1, 1999.) From Science Frontiers #123, MAY-JUN 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... This may be the end of this decade-long debate. (Anonymous; "No Snow Show," New Scientist, p. 25, June 12, 1999.) Where water and vehicles run uphill. "Chinese scientists are baffled by a slope in north-western Gansu province where water runs up the incline rather than down, the official Xinhua news agency reported yesterday. "The 60-m -long slope at an angle of 15 degrees was discovered by Army officer Zhao Guobiao in a desert region of Yugur autonomous county, it said." Unpowered vehicles, too, are said to roll up this mysterious slope, just as they seem to at Spook Hill, Florida, and many other places. (SF#99 and earlier) Physics professor Fang Xiaoming from Lanzhou University, who investigated the phenomena, speculated that geomagnetism or changes in air pressure might explain the contrary flow of the water!! (Anonymous; "Water Flows Uphill on Gansu Slope," Singapore Sunday Times , November 8, 1998. Cr. C. Ginenthal) Comments. The gravity-defying phenomena at Spook Hill and all "magnetic vortices" that have been carefully investigated are definitely illusory. The road at Spook Hill slopes downward despite what our eye-brain computer tells us. Also pertinent is the uphill flow of water in irrigation channels. A sight to be seen in the American west. Of course the water loses some kinetic energy in the process. From Science Frontiers #125, SEP-OCT 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... drowned landscapes. A stone tool encrusted with barnacles and bryozoa were recovered from a drowned delta flood plain now 53 m below mean sea level. This is the first tangible evidence that the subaerial broad banks of the western North American Continental Shelf may have been occupied by humans in earliest Holocene and possibly late glacial time. (Fedje, Daryl W., and Josenhans, Heiner; "Drowned Forests and Archaeology of the Continental Shelf of British Columbia, Canada," Geology, 28:99, 2000.) Comment. A map in the referenced report reveals that 12,000 years ago broad stretches of land several hundred kilometers wide bordered Canada, Alaska, and Russia. Not only could this exposed land have encouraged entry into the New World (as long-theorized), but the universal 500-foot drop in sea level provides ample opportunity to speculate about Atlantis and other drowned cities of earlier cultures now lost in time. One can imagine vast human-occupied plains abutting the steep, exposed edges of today's continents, then fringed withgreat waterfalls hundreds of feet high as the continents' rivers scoured out the great submarine canyons on modern bathymetric maps. There are few, if any, reliable accounts of this segment of human history, although speculation is rife about an Osirian Age, ancient sea kings, and the like. Finally, one must ask what caused the rapid rise in sea level shown on the graph? Were melting ice sheets sufficient? From Science Frontiers #139, Jan-Feb 2002 . 2001 William R. Corliss Other Sites of Interest SIS . ...
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... a few words to say on this subject in his book Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order. "Thinking in terms of bits has allowed us to develop the field of computer science, in which we learn how to represent the world with patterns of information. So successful are our endeavors that some physicists and computer scientists believe that perhaps information is not a human invention but something as real, as physical, as matter and energy. And now a handful of researchers have come to believe that information may be the most real of all. Simulated creatures would have no way of knowing they are simulations, the argument goes. And, for that matter, how do we know that we are not simulations ourselves, running on a computer in some other universe? "Nature, it seems, has honed us into informavores so voracious that some can persuade themselves that there is nothing but information." (As quoted in: Science, 273:443, 1996) Comment. If we really are simulations, that "computer in some other universe" has taken great pains to also simulate millions of other species and their fossil records! (Could a cybergod do all this?) Fun to think about anyway. Come to think of it, Omar may have had it right when he wrote: "We are no other than a moving row of magic shadow-shapes that come and go." Well, maybe that's too far-fetched; but what about all those UFOs and their occupants; they are a bit shadowy ...
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... -Term Periodicities in Sunspot Numbers ASO6 Solar Oblateness and Quadrupole Moment ASO7 Changes in the Rate of Solar Rotation ASO8 Changes in Solar Diameter ASO9 Correlation of Sunspot Numbers and Planetary Configurations ASO10 Radial Solar Oscillations ASX SOLAR ECLIPSE AND OCCULTATION PHENOMENA ASX1 Bailey's Beads ASX2 Visibility of the Moon's Limb during Solar Eclipses ASX3 Fingers of Light Projected on the Moon ASX4 Thin Pencils of Light Extending Far beyond the Corona ASX5 Exaggerated Notches in the Moon's Limb during Solar Eclipses ASX6 Pendulum Perturbations during Solar Eclipses ASX7 Spacecraft Signal Perturbations during Solar Occultations ASX7 Increases of Galactic Radio Noise during Total Solar Eclipses ASX8 Large Discrepancies between Calculated and Observed Eclipse Parameters ASZ SOLAR AND INTERPLANETARY MAGNETIC FIELD PHENOMENA ASZ1 Enhancements of the Interplanetary Magnetic Field ASZ2 Compatibility of Interplanetary Magnetic Field Measurements with an Electrically Charged Sun AT COSMOS ATB UNIVERSE DYNAMICS AND MASS DISTRIBUTION ATB1 The Existence of the Universe ATB2 The Low Mean Density of the Universe ATB3 An Angular Momentum-Mass Relationship for a Wide Range of Astronomical Objects ATB4 Evidence for Universal Rotation ATF COSMIC ANOMALIES DETECTED THROUGH RADIATION ATF1 Isotropy of Cosmic Background Radiation ATF2 Deviations of the Cosmic Back ground Radiation from the Blackbody Curve ATF3 The Existence of Cosmic Rays ATF4 The Isotropic Cosmic X-Ray Background ATF5 Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays ATF6 The High Flux of Low-Energy Antiprotons ATF7 Antineutrino Pulses ATF8 Apparent Absence of Appreciable Antimatter in the Observable Universe ATF9 Exceptional Increases in Cosmic Ray Intensity ATF10 Asymmetry of Infrared Background Radiation ATF11 Nondoppler Redshifts ATF12 Spectroscopic Evidence of Life in Space ATO OBJECTS IN INTERGALACTIC SPACE ATO1 Intergalactic Clouds AU URANUS AUB ORBITAL AND ORIENTATION PHENOMENA AUB1 Anomalous Inclination of Uranus' ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 122: Mar-Apr 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Is a singularity worse than a spinning cosmos?Whence the untold billions of stars and galaxies that brighten our night skies? From a "singularity," that's where -- from an infinitely small point in space. The Big Bang hypothesis requires this abandonment of common sense. Both mathematicians and cosmologists instinctively hate singularities. The latter have been trying to exorcise theirs for years. Recently, S. Carneiro, a Brazilian physicist, proposed a way to get rid of this natal singularity but retain the expanding universe. First, he assumes that the universe has been around for an indefinitely (infinitely?) long time, thereby eliminating the problem of origin. Furthermore, this universe was rotating. About 11 billion years ago this spinning universe was transformed into the expanding universe we see today via that clever cosmologists' ploy called a "vacuum phase transition." Carneiro shows how the rotation of the universe-as-a -whole was converted into overall expansion in a paper submitted to the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity . But even if all of Carneiro's equations check out, angular momentum still had to be conserved somehow during the phase transition. Simple! The angular momentum of the universe-as-a -whole was transferred to the spins of all the individual planets, stars, and galaxies. In fact, the angular momentum of each astronomical entity, according to Carneiro, is proportional to its (mass ...
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... : May-Jun 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Nanobes Get used to this term! Of course you know about microbes. Well, nanobes are also life forms but so much smaller than microbes that they deserve the prefix "nano" (for 10-9 ) rather than "micro" (for 10-6 ). The smallest recognized bacteria, Myco plasma , lack cell walls and fall in the size range 150-200 nanometers. Nanobes are much smaller: 20-150 nanometers. But are nanobes really alive? A drill core recently extracted from a stratum of sandstone 3 kilometers deep off the coast of Western Australia was found to be infected with miniscule filamentous structures. P. Uwins and her colleagues at the University of Queensland believe these structures (" nanobes") are alive. They appear to grow and have cell walls. But skeptics assert that some lifeless chemical structures also grow. Others suspect contamination of the sample as it was raised to the surface and handled. Published photos of the nanobes look very much like the structures in the Martian meteorite ALH84001, which are claimed to be fossilized extraterrestrial bacteria. (SF#116) (Dayton, Leigh; "Tiny Wonders," New Scientist, p. 13, March 27, 1999.) Comment. R.L . Folk claims that so-called "nannobacteria" (100-400 nanometers) are ubiquitous on the earth. Few biologists believe that life forms can be this small, and they opt for lifeless mineral structures instead ...
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... Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects A Few Potential Ehes R.A . White, Founder/Director of the Exceptional Human Experience Network (EHEN), has spread out a fascinating smorgasbord of some 200 potential EHEs. We have room for only a quick snack: Accelerating thinking Aesthetic experience Conversion Ecstasy Enlightenment Gaia consciousness Guru/holy-person encounter Hyperacuity Inspiration Intuition Lucid dreaming Lucky hunches Meaningful coincidences Peace beyond understanding Peak performance Serendipity Soulmate experience Synchronicity World-Wide Web experience (White, Rhea A.; "List of Potential Exceptional Human Experiences," Exceptional Human Experience , 15:41, no. 1, June 1997.) Comment. Hard-core reductionists may complain that the listed experiences are "fuzzy." But are they fuzzier than those "ghost universes" or the newly predicted "sterile" neutrinos? From Science Frontiers #122, MAR-APR 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... of stars in our galaxy similar to the sun find that they emit super-flares about once every century. If our sun sent such a super-flare our way, the atmosphere would glow like a neon tube, our fleet of satellites would be fried, and half the protective ozone layer would disappear in a flash. Earth life would survive -- at least for a while. Our sun, it seems, is favored with anomalous stability, but no one knows why. We are simply lucky! (Seife, Charles; "Thank Our Lucky Star," New Scientist, p. 15, January 9, 1999.) Comment. We also live in a "lucky" galaxy. (See NOW WE KNOW WHY...later in this issue.) The universe is anthropic (i .e ., favoring humans) at all levels! From Science Frontiers #122, MAR-APR 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 124: Jul-Aug 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The 21-micron mystery The following phenomenon is rather technical and is observable only to those astronomers lucky enough to have an infrared spectrometer aboard a satellite. These privileged scientists "see" strange infrared shrouds centered at 21 microns draped around certain red giant stars. The feature of these infrared shrouds that makes the phenomenon worthy of our attention in SF is the width of the spectrum. It is so wide that it cannot be produced by single atoms or molecules. The shrouds must consist of complex molecules, possibly even solids. The infrared glows are so strong that the elements involved must be common in the universe, in all likelihood carbon and hydrogen. Speculators have fingered polymers, ball-shaped fullerenes, and "nanodiamonds"; i.e ., very tiny diamonds! The debate has scientists repairing to their laboratories where they are trying to find some substance with a spectrum that matches that of the mystery shrouds. (Hellemans, Alexander; "Labs Hold the Key to the 21-Micron Mystery," Science, 284:1113, 1999.) Comment. Are not biological materials rich in carbon and hydrogen? This reminds us of F. Hoyle's books: Lifecloud and Diseases from Space , wherein outer space is characterized as teeming with prebiotic molecules, bacteria, and even-more-bizarre life forms. From Science Frontiers #124, JUL-AUG 1999 . 1999-2000 William R. Corliss ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 125: Sep-Oct 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects Pre-Columbiana Pre-Columbiana is the title of a new journal focussing upon evidence for preColumbian contacts between the Old and New Worlds. Except for the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, such early visitations are denied by mainstream archeology. Yet, there are hints everywhere that both the Atlantic and Pacific were crossed frequently before Columbus set sail. One class of pre-Columbiana consists of linguistic, artistic, literary, and fossil evidence that distinctive New World plants were known in the Orient well before 1492. C.L . Johannessen, a geographer at the University of Oregon, demonstrates in a long article that both India and China knew and exploited a surprisingly wide range of American plants. For example, many carvings in Indian temples depict maize, which originated in the New World. A similar situation prevails for the sunflower and a many-seeded New World fruit called "annonas." Sunflowers and maize are also prodigious seed producers, suggesting that these three plants were valued as fertility symbols and may not have been consumed as food. The pre-Columbian Pacific was a twoway conduit for plants and even a few animals. For example, the Old World contributed black-boned chickens, cotton, and coconuts to the New World. As for China, Johannessen has gathered evidence for early Chinadestined Pacific crossings of maize, sunflowers, a squash, chili peppers, sweet potatoes, the yambean, and grain ...
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... Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 122: Mar-Apr 1999 Issue Contents Other pages Home Page Science Frontiers Online All Issues This Issue Sourcebook Project Sourcebook Subjects The Earth Hums More Loudly In The Afternoons It has been known for almost a century that large earthquakes set the earth to ringing like a bell. In SF#118, we reported that the planet also "hums" when there have been no earthquakes. Just what forces stimulate this seismic humming of the earth-as-a -whole is still a matter of conjecture. Actually, "hum" is a poor choice of words. The period of these vibrations ranges from 3 to 8 minutes, which puts them in the range of infrasound. Recently, N. Suda of Nagoya University has found a clue suggesting that thunderstorms may excite these very-lowfrequency vibrations. Suda and his colleagues analyzed the seismic records at four seismically quiet locations around the globe and discovered that the hum is loudest between noon and 8 PM local time. The quietest period is from midnight to 6 AM. These are the same time frames when thunderstorms are most active and quiet. It's circumstantial evidence, but it makes sense. (Kerr, Richard A.; "Earth Seems to Hum along with the Wind," Science, 283:321, 1999.) Comment. Infrasound in the atmosphere may originate from storms thousands of miles away and from strong winds blowing across mountain crests. It appears that the earth is an immense, spherical aeolian harp! From Science Frontiers #122, MAR-APR 1999 . 1999-2000 ...
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... pockmarks on 6% of the sea floor. In other words, Tunguska might well have been---not an extraterrestrial impact---but a simultaneous outburst and detonation of natural gas from five closely spaced vents. The report continues with pro-andcon discussions, concluding that this outrageous hypothesis cannot be dismissed! (Kundt, Wolfgang; "Tunguska 2001," Meteorite, 7:25, November 2001.) Mirror matter is another new candidate as Tunguska's cause. This and other radical hypotheses, like the methane blowouts mentioned above, cannot be rejected perfunctorily because, even after 75 years and 35 expeditions to the mosquito-dominated Tunguska site, scientists have not uncovered any convincing evidence that a comet, meteorite, or asteroid was the culprit. R. Foot, University of Melbourne, has pointed out that, although mirror matter is widely believed to interact with normal matter only through gravitation, recent experiments suggest that mirror-matter electrons and protons may carry miniscule electric charges---just enough to cause a mirror-matter projectile to explode at a high altitude thereby creating the havoc observed in the normal matter exposed below at the Tunguska site. Of more than passing interest is the possibility that thousands of tons of mirror matter may permeate the Tunguska terrain to great depths---none of it detectable by any of our modern instrumentation. (Chown, Marcus; "What Lies Beneath?" New Scientist, p. 17, July 28, 2001.) From Science Frontiers #139, Jan-Feb 2002 . 2001 William R. Corliss ...
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