Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Why the FBI Is Investigating a 91-year-old Former Nuclear Engineer | Vocativ

Why the FBI Is Investigating a 91-year-old Former Nuclear Engineer | Vocativ

Earliest Image of Jesus Christ Believed Found in Egyptian Tomb

Earliest Image of Jesus Christ Believed Found in Egyptian Tomb

On Line Images


From NASA:
https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7632/

Spaceship near gas giant.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1995914&section_id=&genre_id=3&page=2&np

High port over an airless waterless planet.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1995186&section_id=&genre_id=3&page=4&np

Spaceship in a nebula.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1994932&section_id=&genre_id=3&page=5&np

Mideivel Tavern (empty).
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1985344&section_id=&genre_id=6&page=5&np

Celtic Burial Ground (with Stones)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1968089&user_id=578157&member&np


Medieval musician.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1979286
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/full.php?member&image_id=1983949

Roman/Egypitian Scenes
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/browse.php?user_id=3033

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Vargr Personality Source Material (from Dogs)

six basic types:
http://www.fl-k9.com/personalities.htm

List of dog breeds:
http://www.justdogbreeds.com/dog-breeds.html

Methane-spewing Microbe Blamed in Earth's Worst Mass Extinction - Scientific American

Methane-spewing Microbe Blamed in Earth's Worst Mass Extinction - Scientific American

A microbe that spewed humongous amounts of methane into Earth's atmosphere triggered a global catastrophe 252 million years ago that wiped out upwards of 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land vertebrates.
The scale of this calamity made the one that doomed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago - a six-mile wide asteroid smacking the planet - seem like a picnic by comparison.
The implicated microbe, Methanosarcina, is a member of a kingdom of single-celled organisms distinct from bacteria called archaea that lack a nucleus and other usual cell structures.

Different article on same subject:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-single-act-evolution-nearly-wiped-out-all-life-earth-180950341/?no-ist

Sunday, March 30, 2014

‘Death stars’ in Orion wreak havoc on planets before they even develop | Science Recorder

‘Death stars’ in Orion wreak havoc on planets before they even develop | Science Recorder:

Protostars that lie within 0.1 light years of an O-type star are likely to have their cocoons of dust and gas completely removed in a mere few million years.

Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/death-stars-in-orion-wreak-havoc-on-planets-before-they-even-develop/#ixzz2xUcYHtCQ


Poison gas in star's planetary system hints at a violent collision - latimes.com

Poison gas in star's planetary system hints at a violent collision - latimes.com



In a young, nearby solar system, scientists have discovered giant clouds of poison gas -- the smoking gun from a violent encounter, astronomers say. Based on massive amounts of carbon monoxide gas around the star Beta Pictoris, either two Mars-sized planets slammed into each other with catastrophic results, or hordes of comets are crashing into one another at an astounding rate.
The findings, published by the journal Science, could help provide an up-close look at how stars and their planetary systems form and evolve.
Beta Pictoris lies about 63 light years away and is only about 20 million years old, with a dusty disc of debris circling the star -- the remains that didn’t coalesce to form planets, moons, asteroids and other rocky objects. It has at least one planet, a gas giant that’s several times Jupiter’s mass and sits roughly nine times as far from its home star as Earth sits from our sun.


http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-beta-pictoris-star-planet-gas-collision-comets-carbon-monoxide-20140307,0,1884709.story#ixzz2vNyOkBQ6





The Archaeology of the Stars - NYTimes.com

The Archaeology of the Stars - NYTimes.com

The star, SMSS 0313-6708, is presumably very old, perhaps the oldest yet identified. The astronomers who found it estimate that it formed over 13 billion years ago. 

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Hubble Witnesses Mysterious Breakup of Asteroid : Discovery News

Hubble Witnesses Mysterious Breakup of Asteroid : Discovery News:


Hubble has observed some weird things since it was launched in 1990, but this is probably one of the strangest.
In September 2013, the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky surveys spotted a mysterious object in the asteroid belt, a region of rocky debris that occupy the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Follow-up observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii resolved three separate objects within the fuzzy cloud. It was so strange that Hubble mission managers decided to use the space telescope to get a closer look.
And what they saw has baffled and thrilled astronomers in equal measure.
Hubble resolved the slow-moving debris of an asteroid that is in the process of breaking up. The asteroid, designated P/2013 R3, hasn’t hit anything, as the fragments are moving too slow — it just seems to be falling apart. This is unprecedented, never before has an asteroid been seen disintegrating to this degree in the asteroid belt.

Ancient "Giant Virus" Revived From Siberian Permafrost

Ancient "Giant Virus" Revived From Siberian Permafrost:


Amazingly, even after more than 30,000 years embedded in ancient permafrost, when Claverie and Abergel exposed amoebas in their lab to the virus, they found that the virus was still active and quickly infected the host cell. "We use amoeba on purpose as a safe bait for capturing viruses. We then immediately verify that they are not able to infect animal/human cells," stressed the researchers.

A ring system detected around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

A ring system detected around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo : Nature : Nature Publishing Group:


Hitherto, rings have been found exclusively around the four giant planets in the Solar System1. Rings are natural laboratories in which to study dynamical processes analogous to those that take place during the formation of planetary systems and galaxies. Their presence also tells us about the origin and evolution of the body they encircle. Here we report observations of a multichord stellar occultation that revealed the presence of a ring system around (10199) Chariklo, which is a Centaur—that is, one of a class of small objects orbiting primarily between Jupiter and Neptune—with an equivalent radius of 124  9kilometres (ref. 2). There are two dense rings, with respective widths of about 7 and 3 kilometres, optical depths of 0.4 and 0.06, and orbital radii of 391 and 405 kilometres. The present orientation of the ring is consistent with an edge-on geometry in 2008, which provides a simple explanation for the dimming3 of the Chariklo system between 1997 and 2008, and for the gradual disappearance of ice and other absorption features in its spectrum over the same period45. This implies that the rings are partly composed of water ice. They may be the remnants of a debris disk, possibly confined by embedded, kilometre-sized satellites.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Mystery of planet-forming disks explained by magnetism

Mystery of planet-forming disks explained by magnetism

"The starlight-intercepting material lies not in a halo, and not in a traditional disk either, but in a disk atmosphere supported by magnetic fields," said Turner. "Such magnetized atmospheres were predicted to form as the disk drives gas inward to crash onto the growing star."
Read more at http://www.tgdaily.com/space-features/89456-mystery-of-planet-forming-disks-explained-by-magnetism#Dsz2CQbqP57Ze2cy.99

Scientists: ‘Nutcracker Man’ dined mainly on tiger nuts two million years ago | Science Recorder

Scientists: ‘Nutcracker Man’ dined mainly on tiger nuts two million years ago | Science Recorder

Paranthropus boisei, dubbed “Nutcracker Man” because of its big strong jaws and large flat molar teeth, lived in East Africa between 2.4 million and 1.4 million years ago during the Pleistocene epoch.

An early hominin, it’s the largest of the Paranthropus genus, also known as robust australopithecines.
Scientists have long debated the question of what Nutcracker Man ate and why it had such powerful jaws. While such jaws indicated a diet of hard food such as nuts, the flat teet appeared to be made for consuming soft foods. At the same time, the type of damage to the tooth enamel pointed to contact with something abrasive.

Now, a new study published in the online journal PLoS One suggests that our early human relative lived mainly on a diet of edible grass bulbs called tiger nuts, along with assorted side dishes of fruit, grasshoppers, and worms.


Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/scientists-nutcracker-man-dined-mainly-on-tiger-nuts-two-million-years-ago/#ixzz2qEnqHsmV

Stone Age people may have battled against a zombie apocalypse

Stone Age people may have battled against a zombie apocalypse | MNN - Mother Nature Network:

Archaeologists working in Europe and the Middle East have recently unearthed evidence of a mysterious Stone Age "skull-smashing" culture, according to New Scientist. Human skulls buried underneath an ancient settlement in Syria were found detached from their bodies with their faces smashed in. Eerily, it appears that the skulls were exhumed and detached from their bodies several years after originally being buried. It was then that they were smashed in and reburied separate from their bodies.
 
According to Juan José Ibañez of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, the finding could suggest that these Stone Age "skull-smashers" believed the living were under some kind of threat from the dead. Perhaps they believed that the only way of protecting themselves was to smash in the corpses' faces, detach their heads and rebury them apart from their bodies.
 
But here's the creepy thing: many of the 10,000-year-old skulls appear to have been separated from their spines long after their bodies had already begun to decompose. Why would this skull-smashing ritual be performed so long after individuals had died? Did they only pose a threat to the living long after their original burial and death?

Friday, March 7, 2014

Caffeinated 'Vomit Drink' Nauseated North America's First City

Cahokia existed near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers from about 1050 to 1350 in what is now in St. Louis, East St. Louis and the surrounding five counties, and inspired short-lived settlements as far away as Wisconsin. The core of this society, Greater Cahokia, had as many as 50,000 residents in its heyday living amidst earthen mounds, some more than 100 feet (30 meters) in height, making it the largest prehistoric North American settlement north of Mexico.

http://www.livescience.com/22136-caffeinated-black-drink-first-city.html

Caffeine-loaded black drinks apparently dominated the heartland of America earlier than once thought — a beverage neither coffee nor cola, but instead brewed from holly leaves, researchers say.

The ancient people may have downed the brew before ritual vomiting as part of purification ceremonies, the scientists added.

4,600-year-old step pyramid uncovered in Egypt | Fox News

4,600-year-old step pyramid uncovered in Egypt | Fox News: "In Photos: 'Alien' Skulls Reveal Odd, Ancient Tradition"

Archaeologists working near the ancient settlement of Edfu, in southern Egypt, have uncovered a step pyramid that dates back about 4,600 years, predating the Great Pyramid of Giza by at least a few decades.
The step pyramid, which once stood as high as 43 feet, is one of seven so-called "provincial" pyramids built by either the pharaoh Huni (reign ca. 2635-2610 B.C.) or Snefru (reign ca. 2610-2590 B.C.). Over time, the step pyramid's stone blocks were pillaged, and the monument was exposed to weathering, so today, it's only about 16 feet tall.
Scattered throughout central and southern Egypt, the provincial pyramids are located near major settlements, have no internal chambers and were not intended for burial. Six of the seven pyramids have almost identical dimensions, including the newly uncovered one at Edfu, which is about 60 × 61 feet. [See Photos of the Newly Uncovered Step Pyramid]
The purpose of these seven pyramids is a mystery. They may have been used as symbolic monuments dedicated to the royal cult that affirmed the power of the king in the southern provinces.

Surprising new class of “hypervelocity stars” discovered escaping the galaxy | Research News @ Vanderbilt | Vanderbilt University

Surprising new class of “hypervelocity stars” discovered escaping the galaxy | Research News @ Vanderbilt | Vanderbilt University:

“These new hypervelocity stars are very different from the ones that have been discovered previously,” said Vanderbilt University graduate student Lauren Palladino, lead author on the study. “The original hypervelocity stars are large blue stars and appear to have originated from the galactic center. Our new stars are relatively small – about the size of the sun – and the surprising part is that none of them appear to come from the galactic core.”

“It’s very hard to kick a star out of the galaxy,” said Holley-Bockelmann. “The most commonly accepted mechanism for doing so involves interacting with the supermassive black hole at the galactic core. That means when you trace the star back to its birthplace, it comes from the center of our galaxy. None of these hypervelocity stars come from the center, which implies that there is an unexpected new class of hypervelocity star, one with a different ejection mechanism.”

Astronomers say they've spotted lonesome planet without a sun - NBC News.com

Astronomers say they've spotted lonesome planet without a sun - NBC News.com

Eighty light-years from Earth, there's a world that's just six times more massive than Jupiter, floating all alone without a sun to keep it warm, astronomers reported Wednesday.
Such free-floaters have been reported before, but in the past, it hasn't always been clear whether these were orphaned planets or failed stars. This time, the scientists say they're sure it's a planet.

Prehistoric Dog Lovers Liked Seafood, Jewelry, Spirituality : Discovery News

Prehistoric Dog Lovers Liked Seafood, Jewelry, Spirituality : Discovery News

An analysis of ancient dog burials finds that the typical prehistoric dog owner ate a lot of seafood, had spiritual beliefs, and wore jewelry that sometimes wound up on the dog.