An odd array of 30 newly released images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal planetary systems in the making.
The blobs and smudges, as astronomers described them, sit in the widely photographed Orion Nebula. Each object is known as a proplyds, or protoplanetary discs, and could be forming planets as you read this.
Among the images is one astronomers called a "space jellyfish." Its odd shape is created by shock waves that form when a wind of particles from a nearby massive star collides with the material of the proplyd.
The Orion Nebula is known to be a hotbed of star formation. Our own sun might have developed in a similar dense cloud of gas and dust, before being kicked out to its current lonely existence.
[leftovers from a new star ]
In the nebula, newborn stars emerge from the nebula's mixture of gas and dust, and the proplyds form around them. The center of a disc, which is rotating, heats up and becomes a new star, but remnants around the outskirts of the disc attract other bits of dust and clump together, astronomers explained.
[ hot star soup ]
Each developing planetary system has its own look. Some of the discs appear face-on, and others edge-on. Some have emerging jets of material.
Visible to the naked eye under very dark sky conditions, the Orion Nebula has been known since ancient times and was first described in the early 17th century by the French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. At 1,500 light-years away, it is the closest star-forming region to Earth.
[ the crab nebula ]
The new collection of photographs will help astronomers better understand the planet-formation process, researchers said in a statement today.
Somewhere Out There Beneath The Pale Moon Light Dept.
Scientists Spot Nearby 'Super-Earth'
[ http://www.liveleak.com ]
(CNN) -- Astronomers announced this week they found a water-rich and relatively nearby planet that's similar in size to Earth.
While the planet probably has too thick of an atmosphere and is too hot to support life similar to that found on Earth, the discovery is being heralded as a major breakthrough in humanity's search for life on other planets.
"The big excitement is that we have found a watery world orbiting a very nearby and very small star," said David Charbonneau, a Harvard professor of astronomy and lead author of an article on the discovery, which appeared this week in the journal Nature.
The planet, named GJ 1214b, is 2.7 times as large as Earth and orbits a star much smaller and less luminous than our sun. That's significant, Charbonneau said, because for many years, astronomers assumed that planets only would be found orbiting stars that are similar in size to the sun.
Because of that assumption, researchers didn't spend much time looking for planets circling small stars, he said. The discovery of this "watery world" helps debunk the notion that Earth-like planets could form only in conditions similar to those in our solar system.
"Nature is just far more inventive in making planets than we were imagining," he said.
In a way, the newly discovered planet was sitting right in front of astronomers' faces, just waiting for them to look. Instead of using high-powered telescopes attached to satellites, they spotted the planet using an amateur-sized, 16-inch telescope on the ground.
There were no technological reasons the discovery couldn't have happened long ago, Charbonneau said.
The planet is also rather near to our solar system -- only about 40 light-years away.
Planet GJ 1214b is classified as a "super-Earth" because it is between one and 10 times as large as Earth. Scientists have known about the existence of super-Earths for only a couple of years. Most planets discovered by astronomers have been gassy giants that are much more similar to Jupiter than to Earth.
Charbonneau said it's unlikely that any life on the newly discovered planet would be similar to life on Earth, but he didn't discount the idea entirely.
"This planet probably does have liquid water," he said.
Thar She Blows Dept.
Scientists Capture Tsunami On The Sun
[ http://www.discoveryon.info ]
In what is a surprising discovery, scientists have found tsunami-style towering waves that race across the face of the Sun.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory provided a tantalizing glimpse of a solar wave about 12 years ago, but it took the three-dimensional view from NASA’s STEREO solar probes to nail it.
“It came as a surprise to us when we started seeing these waves expanding,” said Joseph Gurman, a solar physicist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center .
The waves, which are comprised of plasma, appear at the base of the corona, a couple of thousand kilometres above the surface of the sun.
They rise quickly from a central point and spread out in a circular pattern millions of kilometres in circumference.
Scientists, using the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), confirmed the existence of solar waves in February 2009 when a sunspot erupted, sending a cloud of gas into space and a 100,000-kilometre-high tsunami sprinting across the surface of the sun at about 900,000 kilometres per hour.
The twin STEREO satellites recorded the wave from two positions, giving researchers a three-dimensional view of what had happened.
“The satellites allowed us to determine without doubt the true nature of the wave,” said lead researcher Assistant Professor Spiros Patsourakos, with George Mason University.
The waves are associated with flares and solar storms known as coronal mass ejections, which spew billions of tons of plasma and embedded magnetic fields from the sun’s corona into interplanetary space.
Plasma that encounters earth’s magnetosphere can trigger powerful geomagnetic storms that can interfere with Global Positioning System radio signals, satellites and other technologies.
Studying how the waves grow and travel should give scientists fresh insights into the sun’s magnetic environment, according to Gurman.
“Monitoring for waves also should allow solar physicists to pinpoint the source of coronal mass ejections that may be heading toward earth,” said Simon Plunkett, with the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC.
Ring Around The Rosies Dept.
Saturn's Mysterious Hexagon
[ http://news.softpedia.com ]
In the early 1980s, as the Voyager probe was passing by Saturn, it noticed one of the most peculiar space structures that experts had ever seen. The formation, which is roughly hexagon-shaped, is still a mystery for astronomers. Theories as to its origins abound, but none of them has managed to make itself established and widely accepted in the international scientific community. The hexagon encircles Saturn with a diameter roughly equal to two Earths, Space reports. The Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around the gas giant since 2004, has recently been able to photograph the structure again.
Most likely, scientists seem to believe, the structure is a cloud-generated formation, which is able to endure for many years. The jet stream that is thought to be responsible for the creation of the hexagonal clouds keeps flowing at the planet's north pole, the experts say. It is estimated at this point that the jets are capable of slamming into the clouds at speeds exceeding 220 miles per hour (100 meters per second). The clouds were imaged for the last time more than 30 years ago, as the last spring began on the surface of Saturn.
“The longevity of the hexagon makes this something special, given that weather on Earth lasts on the order of weeks. It's a mystery on par with the strange weather conditions that give rise to the long-lived Great Red Spot of Jupiter,” California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Cassini imaging team associate Kunio Sayanagi, who has been a part of the new investigation, says. He adds that, 15 years after the original Voyager photos were captured, the Saturnine north pole was enveloped in darkness.
Unlike its predecessor, the new space probe benefits from a better viewing angle, which allows it to position itself better for observing the Hexagon. It also carries massively improved scientific payloads, including high-resolution cameras and spectrometers, which allow it to collect as much information as possible about its targets, while using limited means. The new photos were taken in infrared, and reveal that the cloudy structure is still in place, and also very extended within the gas giant's atmosphere.
“Now that we can see undulations and circular features instead of blobs in the hexagon, we can start trying to solve some of the unanswered questions about one of the most bizarre things we've ever seen in the solar system. Solving these unanswered questions about the hexagon will help us answer basic questions about weather that we're still asking about our own planet,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) atmospheric scientist Kevin Baines concludes. JPL is managed by Caltech, in Pasadena.
The Making Of Moonpies Dept.
Indian Scientists Detect Signs Of Life On Moon
[ http://www.dnaindia.com ]
Bangalore: Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) are on the brink of a path-breaking discovery. They may have found signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.
They believe so because scientific instruments on India's first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon's surface, Surendra Pal, associate director, Isro Satellite Centre (Isac), said at the international radar symposium here on Friday.
Organic matter consists of organic compounds, which consists of carbon -- the building block of life.
[ the moon in color ]
It indicates the formation of life or decay of a once-living matter.
Pal said the signatures were relayed back to the Bylalu deep space network station near Bangalore by the mass spectrometer on board the Indian payload, the moon impact probe (MIP), on November 14, 2008.
The relay of data happened moments before it crashed near the Moon's south pole. The MIP was the first experiment of the Chandrayaan-1 mission, which was launched on October 22, 2008.
Pal, however, did not elaborate, but concluded saying "the findings are being analysed and scrutinised for validation by Isro scientists and peer reviewers".
"It is too early to say anything," said the director of Isro's space physics laboratory R Sridharan, who is heading the team of MIP data analysis and study. He, however, did not deny the finding.
DNA later inquired with other senior Chandrayaan-1 mission scientists, who not only confirmed the finding, but gave further details.
"Certain atomic numbers were observed that indicated the presence of carbon components. This indicates the possibility of the presence of organic matter (on the Moon)," a senior scientist told DNA.
Interestingly, similar observations were made by the US's first manned Moon landing mission, the Apollo-11, in July 1969, which brought lunar soil samples back to Earth. But due to a lack of sophisticated equipment then, the scientists could not confirm the finding.
However, traces of amino acids, which are basic to life, were found in the soil retrieved by the Apollo-11 astronauts.
The Chandrayaan-1 scientists, at present, are analysing the source of origin of the Moon's organic matter. "It could be comets or meteorites which have deposited the matter on the Moon's surface; or the instrument that landed on the Moon could have left traces," a senior space scientist said.
"But the presence of large sheets of ice in the polar regions of the Moon, and the discovery of water molecules there, lend credence to the possibility of organic matter there," he said.
That's Armageddon Dept.
The End.
In books and film, fascination with the apocalypse continues.
[ http://www.boston.com ]
How do you like your apocalypse - scrambled, over easy, or sunny side down?
The movies have always been drawn to the End of the World as We Know It. The first disaster film was arguably 1912’s “Night and Ice,’’ a re-creation of the sinking of the Titanic released within months of the actual event, and by the late silent era, the period of “Metropolis’’ (1927) and “Noah’s Ark’’ (1928), buildings were toppling and the planet was flooding with epic vigor. We like to watch the end-times from a comfy seat. It makes us feel warm and rosy when the lights come up and we’re still here.
Roland Emmerich knows this. In “Independence Day’’ (1996), “The Day After Tomorrow’’ (2004), and now “2012,’’ the German-born filmmaker has destroyed civic landmarks and unleashed the furies of nature, all to give audiences a vicarious thrill. They’ve repaid him in kind: “2012’’ is a box-office three-ring circus that has grossed $590 million worldwide to date.
One is tempted to wonder how audiences would respond to a movie that shows what the day after the end of civilization might look like. Oh, wait, it’s here: “The Road,’’ John Hillcoat’s stark, uncompromising adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) crossing a devastated post-apocalypse America. The Weinstein Company has released the film to appreciative reviews and 100-plus theaters, where it is doing solid business without approaching anything near the maximum volume of “2012.’’
[ the road ]
And why should it? Mainstream audiences rarely want to contemplate the slow, entropic winding down of humanity unless filmmakers toss in a few excellent explosions and maybe a babe or two. The history of apocalypse in the cinema is split between the bang and the whimper, the good news (humanity survives!) and the very, very bad, and it’s worth pondering why one gets the grosses while the other mostly just gets respect.
At the very bottom is the weird human itch to envision our own extinction - mass death from which we, as spectators, are happily excused. Apocalypto-fiction has roots as old as storytelling. What’s the Book of Revelation but a phantasmagoric disaster movie divided into seven visions (call them sequels) with budget-busting sequences like the Battle of Armageddon and special-effects jaw-droppers like the Seven-Headed Beast with Ten Horns?
[ biblical end times ]
Catastrophe fiction confirms our sense of helplessness, especially during times of social anxiety, which is pretty much always. A 1933 Paramount production titled “Deluge,’’ thought to be lost until a print was discovered in Italy in 1981, envisioned Depression-era New York City swamped by a massive tidal wave. The landmark 1936 British film “Things to Come’’ visualized H.G. Wells’s futuristic tale of war, plague, and resurgent civilization, crystallizing the hopes and fears of the pre-WWII years. “When Worlds Collide’’ (1951) imagined humanity’s desperate efforts to get off Earth before a meteor hit: A stark metaphor for nuclear threat.
There you have the four horsemen of the apocalypse genre: flood, global combat, pandemic, and a big rock from outer space. Along with alien invasions and home-grown monsters like Godzilla (another nuke metaphor), they are the cinematic staples by which we imagine our own destruction.
What seems crucial to the commercial success of these films is that their disasters dwarf the people they kill and thus turn life-size agony into ant-farm entertainment. Does watching “2012’’ or the recent “Knowing’’ - films in which billions of tiny digital humans perish screaming while entire cities slide flaming into the sea - remind us of our own mortality or does it underscore our privileged invincibility? A bit of both, perhaps: We don’t get to play God, but we do sit at His side as He hurls the thunderbolts. (And how remarkable that only the sinners and the ethnic get hit.)
[ cosmic demolition ]
By contrast, what’s crucial to the artistic success of millennial fiction is that it brings us up close and personal, with little time for heroics. “The Road’’ has no stomach for crowd-pleasing disaster porn. Both novel and film sum up the apocalypse in a one-sentence fragment - “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions’’ - and whether that betokens nuclear war, a meteor strike, or something worse is immaterial and up to you. What matters is the image of a father and son holding humanity’s spark in their hands while everything around them tries to blow it out.
We’ve been here before, in literature and elsewhere, especially after Hiroshima forced us to contemplate the very real Armageddon we could bring upon ourselves. In 1949, George R. Stewart’s wondrous little novel “Earth Abides’’ imagined how one man and the small community that grows around him might recover from a virus that has wiped the earth of humankind. In its path have followed dystopian literary visions of writers from Margaret Atwood (“Oryx and Crake’’ and the new “Year of the Flood’’) to Tama Janowitz (the forthcoming “They Is Us’’); dire nuclear-winter warnings (the 1983 ABC movie “The Day After,’’ which attracted a record TV audience); and no end of “last man on Earth’’ dramas typified by Will Smith in “I Am Legend’’ (2007) or Charlton Heston in “The Omega Man’’ (1971), both adaptations of the same Richard Matheson novel.
[ last man on earth ]
Even these can turn into pop entertainments, of course - who hasn’t fantasized about being the last person standing in New York City? - and the viral zombies of 2002’s “28 Days Later’’ or the demolition derby of 1980’s “The Road Warrior’’ lead us right back into sensationalism. A hit post-apocalyptic video game series like “Fallout’’ is “The Road’’ for thumb-jockeys: an action-oriented response to unthinkable calamity and thus just another useless - but fun! - fantasy.
On the other hand, there are arthouse apocalypses like Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 “Shame,’’ in which Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow’s marriage falls apart under the stress of an unnamed invasion, or Michael Haneke’s coolly staggering “Time of the Wolf’’ (2003), which surveys the complete breakdown of society through the numbed eyes of one French family. Profoundly compassionate and ruthlessly unsentimental, “Wolf’’ is the one day-after movie that refuses to let audiences off the hook.
[ time of the wolf ]
The implication of all these films, including “The Road,’’ is that we need to think, and think hard, about the consequences of our actions and attitudes. Not exactly box office. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite of where a movie like “2012’’ wants to take us as it knocks down monuments and sends us home thrilled senseless.
Do we need both? The shuddering joy of watching the world go boom and the necessary dread of surveying the damage? The entertainment that offers release and the dire prophecy confirming our worst fears? It’s worth asking when the next wave of Apocalypse Now washes over us - when Denzel Washington walks his own post-disaster road in January’s “The Book of Eli’’ or when the NBC miniseries “Day One’’ launches shortly after - what exactly we’re cheering on and where we fit in the game.
To Be Continued Dept.
Does Death Exist? New Theory Says 'No'
[ http://www.huffingtonpost.com ]
Many of us fear death. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. We associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die. But a new scientific theory suggests that death is not the terminal event we think.
One well-known aspect of quantum physics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states that each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the 'multiverse'). A new scientific theory - called biocentrism - refines these ideas. There are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe. Death does not exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling - the 'Who am I?'- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn't go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?
Consider an experiment that was recently published in the journal Science showing that scientists could retroactively change something that had happened in the past. Particles had to decide how to behave when they hit a beam splitter. Later on, the experimenter could turn a second switch on or off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle did in the past. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it is you who will experience the outcomes that will result. The linkages between these various histories and universes transcend our ordinary classical ideas of space and time. Think of the 20-watts of energy as simply holo-projecting either this or that result onto a screen. Whether you turn the second beam splitter on or off, it's still the same battery or agent responsible for the projection.
According to Biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think. Wave your hand through the air - if you take everything away, what's left? Nothing. The same thing applies for time. You can't see anything through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the tools for putting everything together.
Death does not exist in a timeless, spaceless world. In the end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso" (an old friend) "has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us...know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Immortality doesn't mean a perpetual existence in time without end, but rather resides outside of time altogether.
This was clear with the death of my sister Christine. After viewing her body at the hospital, I went out to speak with family members. Christine's husband - Ed - started to sob uncontrollably. For a few moments I felt like I was transcending the provincialism of time. I thought about the 20-watts of energy, and about experiments that show a single particle can pass through two holes at the same time. I could not dismiss the conclusion: Christine was both alive and dead, outside of time.
Christine had had a hard life. She had finally found a man that she loved very much. My younger sister couldn't make it to her wedding because she had a card game that had been scheduled for several weeks. My mother also couldn't make the wedding due to an important engagement she had at the Elks Club. The wedding was one of the most important days in Christine's life. Since no one else from our side of the family showed, Christine asked me to walk her down the aisle to give her away.
Soon after the wedding, Christine and Ed were driving to the dream house they had just bought when their car hit a patch of black ice. She was thrown from the car and landed in a banking of snow.
"Ed," she said "I can't feel my leg."
She never knew that her liver had been ripped in half and blood was rushing into her peritoneum.
After the death of his son, Emerson wrote "Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature."
Whether it's flipping the switch for the Science experiment, or turning the driving wheel ever so slightly this way or that way on black-ice, it's the 20-watts of energy that will experience the result. In some cases the car will swerve off the road, but in other cases the car will continue on its way to my sister's dream house.
Christine had recently lost 100 pounds, and Ed had bought her a surprise pair of diamond earrings. It's going to be hard to wait, but I know Christine is going to look fabulous in them the next time I see her.
No Spring Chicken Dept.
World's Oldest Known DNA Discovered
[ http://news.discovery.com ]
It won't make Jurassic Park a reality, but scientists have discovered 419 million-year-old DNA intact inside ancient salt deposits.
The genetic material, the oldest ever found, belongs to salt-loving bacteria whose ancestors may have been among the first life forms on Earth.
Scientists have previously recovered similar genetic material from the Michigan Basin, the same region where the latest discovery was made. But the DNA was so similar to that of modern microbes that many scientists believed the samples had been contaminated.
Not so this time around.
A team of researchers led by Jong Soo Park of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, found six segments of identical DNA that have never been seen before by science. Their work appears in the December issue of the journal Geobiology.
"We went back and collected DNA sequences from all known halophilic bacteria and compared them to what we had," Russell Vreeland of West Chester University in Pennsylvania said. "These six pieces were unique."
The team's finding reshuffles the family tree for salt-loving bacteria, organisms that trace their ancestors back to the dawn of life.
The first representative of the group, Halobacterium salinarum, was found living on a salt-cured buffalo hide in the 1930s. Scientists assumed it was a modern species, but the team's work has shown that H. salinarum is in fact a close genetic relative of bugs that lived between 121 and 419 million years ago.
Vreeland tracked down the origins of the buffalo skin and found that the salt probably came from a mine in Saskatchewan.
Rocks in the mine formed when a sea dried up around 300 million years ago, and Vreeland suspects those first H. salinarum spent the entire time living inside tiny brine-filled defects in salt crystals, waiting for the right moment to re-emerge.
It's a bold claim, but evidence suggests the creatures may be nature's Rip Van Winkles, hunkering inside salt deposits for eons until natural forces -- or in this case, humans -- bring them back to the surface.
"There is better and better evidence that these organisms can somehow survive for these amazing amounts of time," and then repopulate in the planet's vast saltwater basins whenever conditions allow, Melanie Mormile of Missouri University of Science and Technology said.
Salt-loving bacteria living underground have likely survived several mass extinctions, Vreeland said, only to re-seed the planet with life as conditions improved.
"It's a perfect example of how it's not just organisms staying alive, but how Earth has a way of keeping itself alive," he said.
Pass Me The Leg Of Stan Dept.
Controversial Signs Of Mass Cannibalism
[ http://www.wired.com ]
At a settlement in what is now southern Germany, the menu turned gruesome 7,000 years ago. Over a period of perhaps a few decades, hundreds of people were butchered and eaten before parts of their bodies were thrown into oval pits, a new study suggests.
Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues. A social and political crisis in central Europe at that time triggered various forms of violence, the researchers suspect.
“Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says. Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals.
Herxheim offers rare evidence of cannibalism during Europe’s early Neolithic period, when farming first spread, the researchers report in the December Antiquity. Artifacts found at Herxheim come from the Linear Pottery Culture, which flourished in western and central Europe from about 7,500 to 7,000 years ago.
Two archaeologists who have studied human bones unearthed a decade ago at Herxheim reject the new cannibalism hypothesis. In a joint statement to Science News, Jörg Orschiedt of the University of Leipzig in Germany and Miriam Haidle of Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt say that Boulestin’s evidence better fits a scenario in which the dead were reburied at Herxheim following dismemberment and removal of flesh from bones. Evidence of ceremonial reburial practices has been reported for many ancient societies.
If further work confirms large-scale cannibalism at Herxheim, “this would be very surprising indeed, simply in terms of the scale involved,” remarks archaeologist Rick Schulting of the University of Oxford in England.
Until now, the only convincing evidence of Neolithic cannibalism came from 6,000-year-old bones in a French cave, Boulestin holds. A 1986 report concluded that the remains of various animals and at least six people were butchered and discarded there. Again, Orschiedt and Haidle say, reburial rather than cannibalism may explain those findings.
Herxheim was first excavated from 1996 to 1999, yielding remains of a large structure, pottery and what appeared to be two parallel ditches encircling the settlement. Closer inspection revealed that the ditches had been formed by overlapping pits that had been dug over several centuries, apparently not exclusively to hold the dead.
Initial excavations of these pits yielded deposits of large numbers of human and dog bones.
Work from 2005 to 2008 — led by Andrea Zeeb-Lanz and Fabian Haack of the archaeology division of Germany’s Directorate General for Cultural Heritage — unearthed additional human bones, mainly skulls and limb bones bearing incisions. Remains of an estimated 500 people have been found so far.
Pottery resting among the bones accumulated over no more than a few decades, the researchers say. Some pieces came from Neolithic sites located 400 kilometers from Herxheim.
The pits that surrounded Herxheim provided no protection from invaders but may have marked a symbolic boundary for a ceremonial settlement, Boulestin proposes. At first, Boulestin’s team, like Orschiedt and Haidle, thought that the dead were brought to Herxheim for ceremonial reburial.
But Boulestin and his colleagues’ opinion changed after they analyzed 217 reassembled human bones from one deposit, representing at least 10 individuals.
Damage typical of animal butchery appears on the bones, including that produced by a technique to separate the ribs from the spine, the scientists say. Heads were skinned and muscles removed from the brain case in order to remove the skullcap. Incisions and scrapes on jaws indicate that tongues were cut out.
Scrape marks inside the broken ends of limb bones indicate that marrow was removed.
People most likely made the chewing marks found near intentionally broken ends of hand and arm bones, Boulestin says.
Ongoing work at Herxheim has found signs of cannibalism on the bones of hundreds of other individuals, with only a few exceptions, he adds.
But proving that ancient Europeans consumed human body parts “is nearly impossible,” Orschiedt and Haidle assert. The absence of lower jaws and skull bases from the new Herxheim material favors a reburial scenario, the researchers say, in which these components were ritually removed before skulls were placed in pits.
Boulestin’s notion of a Neolithic social and political crisis rests on generally accepted evidence of massacres of dozens of people at three central European sites approximately 7,000 years ago. Other regional settlements, including Herxheim, were abandoned around that time.
Planned chemical analyses of bones from Herxheim will indicate whether some individuals grew up eating foods from distant regions, a sign that they were transported to the site. Such evidence would support either a cannibalism or reburial hypothesis.
It’s not yet clear that a widespread crisis actually affected early Neolithic peoples, comments archaeologist Nick Thorpe of the University of Winchester in England.
Whatever actually happened at Herxheim, facial bones were smashed beyond recognition, “giving an impression of the destruction of individual identity, a kind of psychic violence against the person,” Thorpe says.
Everything Better Down Where It's Wetter Dept.
Lost City Of Atlantis Discovered? Grainy Images Show City-like Formations At The Bottom Of The Caribbean
[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk ]
A group of 'undersea archaeologists' have become the latest to claim they have uncovered the lost city of Atlantis.
The scientists - who have refused to identify themselves - have released a series of images taken beneath the Caribbean.
They insist the snaps show what appear to be the ruins of a city that could pre-date Egypt's pyramids, which appeared after 2600BC.
They even told a French newspaper that one of the structures appears to be a pyramid.
Now the anonymous group wants to raise funds to explore the secret location where the images were taken.
They would not reveal the exact location, however, saying only that it was somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.
The claims have raised eyebrows on the internet, though sceptics refrained from debunking them entirely - just in case.
The legend of Atlantis, a city of astonishing wealth, knowledge and power that sank beneath the ocean waves, has fascinated millions.
Time and time again hopes have been raised that the lost city has been found - only for those hopes to be dashed against the evidence (or lack thereof).
Its location - or at least the source of the legend - remained a tantalising mystery.
In 1997, Russian scientists claimed to have found Atlantis 100 miles off Land's End.
In 2000 a ruined town was found under 300ft of water off the north coast of Turkey in the Black Sea.
The area is thought to have been swamped by a great flood around 5000BC, possibly the floods referred to in the Old Testament.
[ click to enlarge ]
In 2004 an American architect used sonar to reveal man-made walls a mile deep in the Mediterranean between Cyprus and Syria.
In 2007 Swedish researchers claimed the city lay on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, which was submerged in the Bronze Age.
And as recently as February of this year, what appeared to be grid-like lines that resembled city streets were spotted on Google Earth - in the ocean off the coast of Africa.
Sadly Google itself quickly debunked the suggestion, explaining that the lines were left by a boat as it collected data for the application.
'Bathymetric (sea-floor) data is often collected from boats using sonar to take measurements of the sea-floor,' a spokesman said.
'The lines reflect the path of the boat as it gathers the data.'
To Tell The World I'm Yours By Heck Dept.
The Mohenjo-Daro Necklace
[ http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com ]
The unexplained act of Mortimer Wheeler, the famous archaeologist has raised many eyebrows in India and Pakistan. A mysterious necklace coupled with the superstition of his wife, Margaret, has bestowed upon an Indian family one of the priceless finds of the Indus Valley civilization.
[ wheeler ]
In 1950, five years after Brigadier Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler married (for the third time) Margaret Norfolk, he gifted his wife a unique seven-stranded bronze-metal necklace of great antiquity. The couple was on a visit to Simla then. This being the beautiful hill-station in North India where they had been married five years ago. Margaret proudly showed the necklace to a close Indian lady friend explaining that Mortimer believed the necklace would bring him luck. “Third time lucky!” was what Mortimer had said when he gave her the necklace referring to his two earlier marriages to Tessa who died in 1936, and Mavis de Vere Cole, whom he had divorced in 1942 for cheating on him. Later in 1954, Mavis also served a prison sentence, having attained notoriety for shooting Lord Vivian in the abdomen with a revolver.
Two years later in 1952, after Mortimer was knighted, Margaret (for reasons not known) gifted the necklace to her Indian lady friend. The Indian lady believed Margaret nursed a superstition that the artifact should not leave the subcontinent. “It has been lucky for both him and Leslie. I think it has served its purpose,” was all that Margaret explained. Leslie Alcock was Mortimer’s assistant at the Mohenjo Daro excavation site (Moen-jo-daro being Sindhi for “the mound of the dead”) when the necklace was discovered.
Had Mortimer declared this discovery, the necklace should have been the property of the Archaeological Department of Pakistan along with the figures of the Dancing Girl and the King Priest (Brahmana priest), pottery, toys, seals, tools, weapons and many other such artifacts unearthed at Mohenjo Daro. Today it is a private possession of a family in Simla.
What is unique about this necklace is that it is at least 4500 years old, Mortimer Wheeler having discovered it in an earthen pot in the REM 1 “granary” area of the Mohenjo Daro excavation site of the Indus Valley Civilization, now in Pakistan.
Interesting details about the necklace
The ancient city of Mohenjo-daro was built around 2600 BCE and believed to have been abandoned around 1900 BCE. Even by modest estimation the age of the necklace would be over 3900 years old, but according to Mortimer more likely to be about 4500 years old, based on the pottery fragments and the level of the dig-site it was discovered from. This places it among the oldest necklaces in the world. The necklace has an S-shaped clasp with seven strands, each over 4ft long, of bronze-metal bead-like nuggets connecting each arm of the “S” in filigree. Each bead is less than the size of a pepper-seed and has many facets. Each strand has between 220 to 230 nuggets and there are about 1600 nuggets in total. The necklace weighs about 250 gms. An article about this necklace was reported in The Hindu newspaper in India, dated January 13, 1996. In 2002, a price of 80,000 British pounds was offered for the necklace by a private UK collector. Since its ownership had so far not been claimed by Pakistan, he had hoped to purchase the antique necklace for his personal collection, but the old Indian lady refused to part with it. The Mohenjo Daro Necklace was exhibited during the Dubai festival in 2006, and recently at an antique exhibition in New Delhi raising speculation once again that it might be available for purchase. For reasons of propriety the name of the owner was withheld.
Post-Traumatic Stress Dept.
Mengele Stole My Kidney: Auschwitz Survivor Reveals Why He Avoided Doctors For 64 Years
[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk ]
Heart specialists have saved the life of an Israeli man who refused to visit a doctor for 64 years - and learned the terrible secret of his mistrust of the medical profession.
When Yitzchak Ganon, 85, came around from the anaesthetic at the hospital near Tel Aviv he was informed he only had one kidney.
'I know,' he replied. 'The last time I saw the other one it was pulsating in the hand of a man called Josef Mengele. He was a doctor too.'
[ doctor doom ]
Mr Ganon revealed to his stunned family why he never visited a doctor since he was freed from the death camp of Auschwitz in January 1945.
None of them knew of his suffering there at the hands of the infamous Mengele.
A Greek Jew, he was deported along with his mother and father and five brothers and sisters to Auschwitz in 1944.
His father died en-route, his mother and siblings were gassed within hours of arrival.
But he was chosen by Mengele, the diabolical SS doctor who met every transport that arrived so he could pick human guinea pigs for his horrific experiments.
Tattooed on his lower left arm with the number 182558, Mengele - known to his victims as the 'Angel of Death' - had Mr Ganon strapped to an operating table.
'He cut into me, without anesthetic,' said Mr Ganon.
'The pain was indescribable. I felt every slice of the knife. Then I saw my kidney pulsating in his hand. I cried like a madman, I cried out the prayer; “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one...”
'And I prayed to die, that I might not suffer this agony any more.'
[ radiation experiments ]
But Mengele, whose quest was to eventually clone perfect SS-supermen for his Fuehrer, had not finished with him.
'After the operation I was given no painkillers and put to work,' he said. 'I cleaned up after the other bloody operations carried out by Mengele.'
Six months later, Mengele called for him again. He was immersed in a tub of freezing water and intermittently inspected by Mengele who said he wanted to check on how his lungs were functioning.
'Then I was selected for gassing because my body was no longer any use to them,' he said.
He was the 201st man sent to the gas chambers one morning - but it was full after 200. 'That saved my life,' he said. 'I was then sent back to the camp.'
He went back to Greece when Auschwitz was liberated, was reunited with one brother and one sister who survived the SS round-ups, and emigrated to Israel in 1949.
His family were puzzled about his reluctance to see doctors down the years. Every cold, infection, bruise, cut and sickness he encountered he dealt with himself.
His wife Ahuva said: 'Whenever he was sick he would deny it, claiming he was just tired.'
Then came the heart attack a month ago and the enforced visit that revealed the secret he had carried around for so long.
Now with a pacemaker in his heart, he says; 'I guess I cheated death a second time. But this time it was doctors helping me instead of the other way round.'
[ angel of death relaxes in brazil ]
Mengele escaped after the war to South America and was supported by his wealthy family and old Nazi comrades for many years before he drowned in Brazil in 1979 after suffering a massive stroke while swimming.
Gremlins In The Kremlins Dept.
Official: KGB Chief Hitler's Remains Destroyed
[ http://www.cnn.com ]
Moscow, Russia (CNN) -- The remains of Adolf Hitler were burned in 1970 by Soviet KGB agents and thrown into a river in Germany on direct orders from the spy agency's chief, a top Russian security official said this week.
The head archivist of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) -- the successor to the former Soviet Union's KGB -- confirmed for the first time the chain of events that led to the disposal of Hitler's body, and who ordered the operation, in an exclusive interview with Russia's Interfax news agency.
Gen. Vasily Khristoforov told Interfax in an interview published Monday that previously secret documents show that KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with prior consent from the Soviet Communist Party leadership, ordered a top secret operation to destroy the remains of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, Nazi Germany's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels; and Goebbels' entire family.
Khristoforov said according to the documents, Andropov's decision to destroy the remains of the Nazi leaders and their family members was motivated by the fears of the KGB and Soviet Communist Party leadership that Hitler's burial site could become a place of worship for supporters of fascist ideas.
Neither the FSB nor Khristoforov were immediately available to comment on the secret documents, when asked by CNN.
The operation, code-named "The Archives," was carried out by a group of special KGB agents in Magdeburg, East Germany, where the bodies had been secretly buried February 21, 1946, on the territory of a Soviet military facility, Khristoforov said.
Two protocols were compiled after the operation was carried out on April 4, 1970, the general said. The first documented the opening of a grave that contained the remains of the Nazi leaders and their family members, and the other one detailed their physical destruction.
"The remains were burnt on a bonfire outside the town of Shoenebeck, 11 kilometers away from Magdeburg, then ground into ashes, collected and thrown into the Biederitz River," the second document reads, according to Khristoforov.
The bodies of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels family had been discovered by the Soviet Army in May 1945. The bodies of Goebbels and his wife were found May 2 in the garden of Nazi Germany's Reich Chancellery. The bodies of the couple's children were recovered the next day, and the corpses of Hitler and Braun were discovered May 5 in a crater from an artillery shell outside his bunker in Berlin.
According to historical accounts, Hitler's death was a combination of a suicide by gunshot and cyanide poisoning on April 30, 1945, when the Soviet Army entered the Nazi Germany capital.
In early June of that year, the Soviets buried the bodies in a forest near the town of Rathenau, Germany. Eight months later, they secretly re-buried the remains in the Soviet Army's garrison in Magdeburg.
But in March 1970, the Soviets decided to abandon the garrison and pass it over to the East German civilian authorities.
As long as the burial place of the Nazi leaders was in the territory of a Soviet garrison, it could be kept secret and barred from strangers. But following relocation of the Soviet Army unit, the decision was made not to rebury Hitler's remains but to burn them, Khristoforov explained, calling it "perhaps a reasonable decision" given the circumstances.
Khristoforov said that all that remains of Hitler's corpse are fragments of his jawbone and skull, items that are kept in Russia.
The general said the Russian FSB has no doubts that the bone fragments are genuine. No other fragments of the German dictator exist in other countries, he said.
"Hitler's jaw is kept at the FSB archives, and the fragments of Hitler's skull are at the State Archive. There are no other parts of Hitler's body apart from these samples seized on May 5, 1945.
"Everything [else] that remained of Hitler was burnt in 1970," he added. "Those fragments are ... the only documented evidence of Hitler's death, which is why they are kept at the Russian FSB Central Archive as being particularly valuable."
Commenting on recent media reports that archeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni and genetics professor Linda Strausbaugh of the University of Connecticut expressed doubts about the authenticity of the parts of Hitler's skull, Khristoforov said, "The U.S. researchers did not file such requests [for taking DNA samples] with the Russian FSB Central Archive.
"But even if you take the fragments kept in our custody, it is unclear what these data can be compared with."
In April 2000, a fragment of what was presented as Hitler's skull, complete with a bullet hole in it, was first displayed in Moscow at a World War II exhibition.
At the time, Sergei Mironenko, head of the Russian State Archives, told CNN that he is absolutely confident that the skull was authentic, and that there are many documents the Russian archives also put on display along with the skull to support that.
"Those documents provide convincing proof that all those speculations that Hitler could have survived and escaped, that he could have had plastic surgery, are absolutely groundless. He was a totally depressed man who was incapable of making political or any other kinds of decisions. He understood that his bunker, the crater [where he was found dead], would become his last refuge. And that's exactly what happened," Mironenko said.
Udder Disaster Dept.
Boob Flash Nearly Fatal
[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]
[ girl going wild ]
A New Zealand teenager's stunt of flashing her breasts in the middle of a street went awry when one driver became so distracted he drove into her.
Cherelle Dudfield, 18, said she had been "egged on" by a friend in Invercargill in September.
She tried to run from the car but could not avoid it, rolling over the bonnet and hitting the windscreen, police said. She was not injured.
She was fined NZ$275 ($200; £120) for disorderly behaviour.
Duty solicitor John Fraser said that while Dudfield's actions had been "stupidity in the extreme", there was a question of whether the driver could have been more careful, the Southland Times newspaper reported.
However, Mr Fraser conceded the driver could have been distracted.
The Taste Is Gonna Move Ya Dept.
Exploding Bubble Gum Kills Student
[ http://www.independent.co.uk ]
A Ukrainian chemistry student was killed chewing explosive bubble gum that tore off half of his face.
A police spokeswoman said the 25-year-old accidentally dipped the gum into explosives he was using for studies.
She said Vladimir Likhonos mistook the powder for the citric acid he often added to increase the gum's sour taste.
The spokeswoman said Mr Likhonos, from the town of Konotop in north-east Ukraine, blew off his jaw and most of the lower part of his face.
She said on the table where he had been working police found about 100 grammes of the suspected explosive, a powder that resembles citric acid but has yet to be identified.
"Anybody could have mixed them up," she said.
Medical workers who arrived on the scene attempted to treat his injuries but were unable to save him.
"Even some of our seasoned officers, who have seen a thing or two, even they were pretty badly shaken up by what they found," the police spokeswoman said.
No Country For Ol' Man's Best Friend Dept.
Wild Dogs Turn Green From 'Toxic Waste'
A pack of wild dogs have turned bright green after eating suspected toxic waste in Russia.
[ http://uk.news.yahoo.com ]
[ it ain't easy ]
The strays, thought to be former guard dogs, are said to scavenge for food at a tip on the outskirts of Yekaterinburg city.
A local resident said he thought someone was playing a practical joke when he saw the hounds in the snow.
"I go past those dogs every day," Alexei Bukharovsky said.
"They are usually reddish... but then I saw, running along the white snow, an almost completely emerald dog."
A police spokesman told local news service RIA Novosti that it is thought to be the result of illegal tipping.
"Either local residents or a factory have been dumping some kind of chemical waste there," the spokesman said.
The council has been asked to clean up the site.
Look To The Lamp Post Dept.
Mythical White Stag Found In The Forests Of Gloucestershire
[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk ]
White stags have long been associated with mythology and legend, an elusive yet magnificent beast.
King Arthur was left frustrated by his attempts to capture one, as were the Kings and Queens of Narnia, who chased the creature through the woods and found themselves tumbling out of a wardrobe.
But photographer Ken Grindle has managed to get a little bit closer, taking this picture of the animal in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire.
The majestic wild animal - long associated with mystery and good luck - was filmed by the wildlife enthusiast.
Ken, 66, has been filming and photographing wildlife in the area for the past six years - but had never seen a white stag.
'I was very surprised to see it,' he said.
'I was camped in a shelter and was really fortunate. It just strolled right in front of me and calmly wandered around.
'He is a beautiful creature and it's really nice to be able to show people who perhaps can't make it into woodland what beautiful animals roam out there.
'I was lucky to be able to get some footage of it as well as the battery on my camera was running out.
'I wasn't sure I'd actually got it until I got home.
'I take the pictures to share with everyone as a lot of people can't get out into the woods to see this.'
The Forest of Dean is thought to be home to an array of unusual and wild creatures including wild boar, big cats and white stags.
Retired builder Ken added: 'There's a lot of talk about big cats in the Forest and that really would be something to see.
'I managed to stand my ground when some wild boar came out into the path in front of me but it might be a bit different if I saw a big cat.'
Last year a white stag was spotted in the Scottish Highlands and was photographed by a member of a nature charity while she was on an expedition on the west coast.
Fran Lockhart, of the John Muir Trust, a charity which protects wild land, said she was "thrilled" to spot the majestic beast, which is closely identified with the unicorn.
In October 2007, a wild white stag was shot by poachers on the border between Devon and Cornwall, where horrified locals had known it by the name Snowy.
It was decapitated and its 300lb carcase found hanging from a tree in a yard.It is thought the stag's head, along with its antlers, had been claimed as a trophy and could be mounted and possibly sold for thousands of pounds.
White deer, closely identified with unicorns, have been potent figures in the mythology of many cultures.
It is said to be bad luck to kill one. According to the Scots legend, in 1128, David I, King of Scotland decided to go hunting on the Feast Day of the Holy Rood, against the wishes of his priest. While hunting he saw a huge white stag, or "hart", and while giving chase he was thrown from his horse.
The white hart charged forward to kill him, so David - son of Malcolm Canmore and St Margaret - called on God to save him. As the king grasped the hart's antlers, they miraculously turned in to a large cross, and the beast raised its head and vanished. Inspired by his vision, King David built a shrine to the Holy Rood - meaning Holy Cross - on the spot where the miracle occurred.
The ruin of Holyrood Abbey can still be seen today, at the foot of the Royal Mile next to Holyrood Palace. The White Hart Inn in Edinburgh's grassmarket, reputedly the oldest pub in the capital, took its name from the legend.
The Celts considered white stags to be messengers from the "other world" and their appearance was said to herald some profound change in the lives of those who encountered them.
In the Chronicles of Narnia, the White Stag is fabled to grant wishes to whoever catches him. And in the Arthurian legend, the white stag is the creature that can never be caught. King Arthur's repeatedly unsuccessful pursuit of the white stag represents mankind's quest for spiritual knowledge.
In Christianity a white stag was said to be instrumental in the conversion of the martyr Saint Eustace after he saw a vision of the animal that told him he would suffer for Christ.
Mondo Cane Dept.
Man Devoured By His Starving Dog
[ http://nz.news.yahoo.com ]
Westport police investigating the discovery of a decomposing body at a bush campsite were shocked to find most of the body had been devoured by a dog, a coroner's inquest in Greymouth has heard.
Regional coroner Richard McElrea said yesterday he would have dealt with the case in the privacy of his chambers but Douglas Arllington, a brother of the dead man, had concerns that warranted a public airing.
The remains of Charles Harold Arllington, 53, of Westport, were found on August 22 last year.
A reclusive man, Mr Arllington had been living in a tent amidst dense bush bordering a farm on Nine Mile Road, about eight minutes' drive from the Westport Post Office.
When a farmhand, Joshua McDonald, got sick of Mr Arllington's dog scavenging near the house he went to the campsite to remonstrate with him -- and instead discovered a collapsed tent and the remains of a body.
Detective John Cunneen said little but the torso and head remained of the man, and marks on the body were consistent with a dog having gnawed on it, the Greymouth Star reported.
Mr Arllington's dog Mojo had previously been chained up at the campsite.
Constable Denis Bergman, the first policeman on the scene, ascertained the identity of the dead man from medical appointment slips and a photograph found in a nearby vehicle. The photograph of a man and a woman was shown to Mr Arllington's daughter, who confirmed it was of her and her father.
The daughter said her father did not like people and preferred his own company. He had not looked well but was not one to let on if he had health concerns.
Mr Cunneen and detective sergeant Andy Oliver, of the West Coast police CIB, ruled that the death was not suspicious and left it to the uniformed branch to carry out the routine duties, such as taking control of the possessions and informing relatives.
However, in the Coroner's Court yesterday, Douglas Arllington decried the CIB investigation as "inadequate".
On a visit to the campsite in early September 2008, he picked up a femur bone -- which later proved to have come from his brother -- close to the site; 20m upstream he came across a gold mining site complete with sluice and settling pond that police did not know existed.
He alleged the police had rushed to an assumption of "natural causes" without asking family members whether his brother had any known enemies or had been murdered for his gold.
Police had acted on "hunches and assumptions", Douglas Arllington said.
This was rebutted by Mr Oliver, and the coroner said he was "satisfied appropriate judgment had been executed" by the CIB.
However, the coroner Mr McElrea said it was unfortunate a more thorough search of the area had not been carried out.
"It was fortunate Mr Douglas Arllington found the bone, but unfortunate that it was he who found it."
Forensic pathologist Martin Sage estimated that Mr Arllington had died of "unascertained causes" two to three weeks before his body was discovered.
Dr Sage said it was impossible to totally rule out foul play but he did not think that was the case.
He said the discovery of scattered remains was uncommon in New Zealand but many of his colleagues who had worked in countries with coyotes, dingoes and jackals had seen similar cases. However, most New Zealand cases of pets feeding on their masters occurred when the animals had been locked in the same room as the deceased person.
Mr McElrea found that Charles Arllington died between July 22 and August 8 of unascertained causes.
The court did not hear what breed of dog Mojo was or what had become of him since the gruesome discovery.
Hare There And Everywhere Dept.
Giant Pet Rabbit That Thinks He's A Dog
[ http://www.dailymail.co.uk ]
A pet rabbit has had an identity crisis after spending too much time with the family cocker spaniel and now believes he is a dog.
The Giant Poobah rabbit - also named Poobah - has gone barking mad and spends hours cuddled up with spaniel puppy Scout in his dog basket.
He has also started rejecting his green food and will only eat treats bought for Scout - including his wet dog food.
The confused rabbit has copied Scout's behaviour to such an extent that he even gets up on his hind legs and begs for snacks.
But Poobah has asserted himself as top-dog in the house and is piling on the weight from all the dog biscuits he is eating.
The three-year-old rabbit first began adopting the canine behaviour after Scout was introduced to the family home in Perranporth, near Newquay, Cornwall, eight months ago.
The furry friends both belong to 12-year-old schoolboy Keiran Kent.
Choirboy Keiran, a pupil at the independent Truro School, said: 'Poobah and Scout hit it off immediately.
'Their friendship blossomed and Poobah began emulating Scout eating his dog biscuits.'
Keiran's grandmother Heather Anderton said the rabbit had recently taken his strange behaviour a step further and begun trying to join in when Scout plays catch with a stick or ball.
Heather, 74, said: 'The rabbit is so funny he will actually go up on his hind legs and beg for biscuits like the dog. When Keiran is lying down on the floor he will go over and groom him.
'The problem is he's also taken-over the dog basket. If Scout is sat in there he will go and sit on top of him.
'He's eaten so much dog food he's got really big, so he's much bigger than Scout.
'We try to keep him on the dry food but he wolfs down dog biscuits and then just lies around the house, so he just keeps growing.
'Poobah even tries to get involved in the doggie games like catch but he gets tired much quicker than Scout.'
The family are still unsure of who should win the basket war and are looking into buying a second dog basket to appease their rabbit's strange behaviour.
Shutter Bugged Dept.
Monkeys Recognize Their Pals in Photos
[ http://news.yahoo.com ]
FRIDAY, Dec. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Monkeys can recognize photographs of other monkeys they know, proving that they can both detect differences in faces and figure out if they've seen them before, researchers report.
The study also shows that capuchin monkeys can decipher the two-dimensional nature of a photograph, the scientists authors noted.
The findings, reported by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, are published the week of Dec. 4 in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the study, the monkeys looked at four photos, including one of a monkey they knew. They also looked at another four monkey photos, including one of a monkey they didn't know.
"This required monkeys to look at similar-looking faces and use their personal knowledge of group mates to solve the task," lead researcher Jennifer Pokorny, said in a university news release. "They readily performed the task and continued to do well when shown new pictures in color and in grayscale, as well as when presented with individuals they had never before seen in pictures, though with whom they were personally familiar."
According to the researchers, previously, there hasn't been evidence that nonhuman primates can look at two-dimensional images and understand they represent things and animals from real life.
Next Stop: The Moon Dept.
Cow Jumps Six Feet On To Roof
[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]
A cow has been caught jumping six feet on to a roof, after the owners thought they had been burgled.
Neighbour William de Cothi, 17, photographed the animal after he spotted it on the roof about six feet off the ground.
The Sixth Form student said: "I was looking out of my window when I saw the cow.
"At first I thought that it was an illusion and that it was in the background and not really on the roof.
"But after a closer look I could see it was actually on the roof."
The teenager added: "I have heard cows can jump quite high, so I think that is how it got up there.
"I got my family to come and look later and they laughed. It was absolutely amazing."
The house owner in Blagdon, Somerset, called police after getting home to find her roof seriously damaged and smashed tiles as she feared a burglar had tried to break in.
Local PC Ray Bradley said: "This was initially recorded on my figures as a burglary so I am glad I can take it off.
"If it wasn't for the door-to-door enquires and this photo we wouldn't have found out it was a cow responsible."
The Well Of Souls Dept.
Smithsonian Institute Accused Of Archeological Cover-Ups
[ http://strangeworldofmystery.blogspot.com ]
Most of us are familiar with the last scene in the popular Indiana Jones archeological adventure film RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK in which an important historical artefact, the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple in Jerusalem, is locked in a crate and put in a giant warehouse, never to be seen again, thus ensuring that no history books will have to be rewritten and no history professor will have to revise the lecture that he has been giving for the last forty years.
While the film was fiction, the scene in which an important ancient relic is buried in a warehouse is uncomfortably close to reality for many researchers. To those who investigate allegations of archaeological cover-ups, there are disturbing indications that the most important archaeological institute in the United States, the Smithsonian Institute, an independent federal agency, has been actively suppressing some of the most interesting and important archaeological discoveries made in the Americas.
[ the vatican ]
The Vatican has been long accused of keeping artefacts and ancient books in their vast cellars, without allowing the outside world access to them. These secret treasures, often of a controversial historical or religious nature, are allegedly suppressed by the Catholic Church because they might damage the church's credibility, or perhaps cast their official texts in doubt. Sadly, there is overwhelming evidence that something very similar is happening with the Smithsonian Institution.
[ the smithsonian institute ]
The cover-up and alleged suppression of archaeological evidence began in late 1881 when John Wesley Powell, the geologist famous for exploring the Grand Canyon, appointed Cyrus Thomas as the director of the Eastern Mound Division of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology.
[ john wesley powell ]
When Thomas came to the Bureau of Ethnology he was a "pronounced believer in the existence of a race of Mound Builders, distinct from the American Indians."
However, John Wesley Powell, the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, a very sympathetic man toward the American Indians, had lived with the peaceful Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin for many years as a youth and felt that American Indians were unfairly thought of as primitive and savage.
The Smithsonian began to promote the idea that Native Americans, at that time being exterminated in the Indian Wars, were descended from advanced civilisations and were worthy of respect and protection.
They also began a program of suppressing any archaeological evidence that lent credence to the school of thought known as Diffusionism, a school which believes that throughout history there has been widespread dispersion of culture and civilisation via contact by ship and major trade routes.
[ cyrus thomas ]
The Smithsonian opted for the opposite school, known as Isolationism. Isolationism holds that most civilisations are isolated from each other and that there has been very little contact between them, especially those that are separated by bodies of water. In this intellectual war that started in the 1880s, it was held that even contact between the civilisations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys were rare, and certainly these civilisations did not have any contact with such advanced cultures as the Mayas, Toltecs, or Aztecs in Mexico and Central America. By Old World standards this is an extreme, and even ridiculous idea, considering that the river system reached to the Gulf of Mexico and these civilisations were as close as the opposite shore of the gulf. It was like saying that cultures in the Black Sea area could not have had contact with the Mediterranean.
When the contents of many ancient mounds and pyramids of the Midwest were examined, it was shown that the history of the Mississippi River Valleys was that of an ancient and sophisticated culture that had been in contact with Europe and other areas. Not only that, the contents of many mounds revealed burials of huge men, sometimes seven or eight feet tall, in full armour with swords and sometimes huge treasures.
(Vangard note..>Eastern Indian texts say that at one time men lived thousands of years and grew very tall in direct proportion to their age, as does the Bible with the comment "and there were GIANTS in the earth in those days...")
For instance, when Spiro Mound in Oklahoma was excavated in the 1930's, a tall man in full armour was discovered along with a pot of thousands of pearls and other artefacts, the largest such treasure so far documented. The whereabouts of the man in armour is unknown and it is quite likely that it eventually was taken to the Smithsonian Institution.
In a private conversation with a well-known historical researcher (who shall remain nameless), I was told that a former employee of the Smithsonian, who was dismissed for defending the view of diffusionism in the Americas (i.e. the heresy that other ancient civilisations may have visited the shores of North and South America during the many millenia before Columbus), alleged that the Smithsonian at one time had actually taken a barge full of unusual artefacts out into the Atlantic and dumped them in the ocean.
Though the idea of the Smithsonian' covering up a valuable archaeological find is difficult to accept for some, there is, sadly, a great deal of evidence to suggest that the Smithsonian Institution has knowingly covered up and 'lost' important archaeological relics. The STONEWATCH NEWSLETTER of the Gungywamp Society in Connecticut, which researches megalithic sites in New England, had a curious story in their Winter 1992 issue about stone coffins discovered in 1892 in Alabama which were sent to the Smithsonian Institution and then 'lost'. According to the newsletter, researcher Frederick J. Pohl wrote an intriguing letter in 1950 to the late Dr. T.C. Lethbridge, a British archaeologist.
The letter from Pohl stated, "A professor of geology sent me a reprint (of the) Smithsonian Institution, THE CRUMF BURIAL CAVE by Frank Burns, US Geological Survey, from the report of the US National Museum for 1892, pp 451-454, 1984. In the Crumf Cave, southern branch of the Warrior River, in Murphy's Valley, Blount County, Alabama, accessible from Mobile Bay by river, were coffins of wood hollowed out by fire, aided by stone or copper chisels.
Either of these coffins were taken to the Smithsonian. They were about 7.5 feet long, 14" to 18" wide, 6" to 7" deep. Lids open. "I wrote recently to the Smithsonian, and received a reply March 11th from F.M. Setzler, Head Curator of Department of Anthropology (He said) 'We have not been able to find the specimens in our collections, though records show that they were received."
David Barron, President of the Gungywamp Society was eventually told by the Smithsonian in 1992 that the coffins were actually wooden troughs and that they could not be viewed anyway because they were housed in an asbestos-contaminated warehouse. This warehouse was to be closed for the next ten years and no one was allowed in except the Smithsonian personnel!
[ ivan t. sanderson ]
Ivan T. Sanderson, a well-known zoologist and frequent guest on Johnny Carson's TONIGHT SHOW in the 1960s (usually with an exotic animal with a pangolin or a lemur), once related a curious story about a letter he received regarding an engineer who was stationed on the Aleutian island of Shemya during World War II. While building an airstrip, his crew bulldozed a group of hills and discovered under several sedimentary layers what appeared to be human remains. The Alaskan mound was in fact a graveyard of gigantic human remains, consisting of crania and long leg bones.
The crania measured from 22 to 24 inches from base to crown. Since an adult skull normally measures about eight inches from back to front, such a large crania would imply an immense size for a normally proportioned human. Furthermore, every skull was said to have been neatly trepanned (a process of cutting a hole in the upper portion of the skull).
[ elongated skull ]
In fact, the habit of flattening the skull of an infant and forcing it to grow in an elongated shape was a practice used by ancient Peruvians, the Mayas, and the Flathead Indians of Montana. Sanderson tried to gather further proof, eventually receiving a letter from another member of the unit who confirmed the report. The letters both indicated that the Smithsonian Institution had collected the remains, yet nothing else was heard. Sanderson seemed convinced that the Smithsonian Institution had received the bizarre relics, but wondered why they would not release the data. He asks, "...is it that these people cannot face rewriting all the textbooks?"
In 1944 an accidental discovery of an even more controversial nature was made by Waldemar Julsrud at Acambaro, Mexico. Acambaro is in the state of Guanajuato, 175 miles northwest of Mexico City. The strange archaeological site there yielded over 33,500 objects of ceramic; stone, including jade; and knives of obsidian (sharper than steel and still used today in heart surgery). Jalsrud, a prominent local German merchant, also found statues ranging from less than an inch to six feet in length depicting great reptiles, some of them in ACTIVE ASSOCIATION with humans - generally eating them, but in some bizarre statuettes an erotic association was indicated. To observers many of these creatures resembled dinosaurs.
Jalsrud crammed this collection into twelve rooms of his expanded house. There startling representations of Negroes, Orientals, and bearded Caucasians were included as were motifs of Egyptians, Sumerian and other ancient non-hemispheric civilisations, as well as portrayals of Bigfoot and aquatic monsterlike creatures, weird human-animal mixtures, and a host of other inexplicable creations. Teeth from an extinct Ice Age horse, the skeleton of a mammoth, and a number of human skulls were found at the same site as the ceramic artefacts.
Radio-carbon dating in the laboratories of the University of Pennsylvania and additional tests using the thermoluminescence method of dating pottery were performed to determine the age of the objects. Results indicated the objects were made about 6,500 years ago, around 4,500 BC. A team of experts at another university, shown Jalrud's half-dozen samples but unaware of their origin, ruled out the possibility that they could have been modern reproductions. However, they fell silent when told of their controversial source.
In 1952, in an effort to debunk this weird collection which was gaining a certain amount of fame, American archaeologist Charles C. DiPeso claimed to have minutely examined the then 32,000 pieces within not more than four hours spent at the home of Julsrud. In a forthcoming book, long delayed by continuing developments in his investigation, archaeological investigator John H. Tierney, who has lectured on the case for decades, points out that to have done that DiPeso would have had to have inspected 133 pieces per minute steadily for four hours, whereas in actuality, it would have required weeks merely to have separated the massive jumble of exhibits and arranged them properly for a valid evaluation.
Tierney, who collaborated with the later Professor Hapgood, the late William N. Russell, and others in the investigation, charges that the Smithsonian Institution and other archaeological authorities conducted a campaign of disinformation against the discoveries. The Smithsonian had, early in the controversy, dismissed the entire Acambaro collection as an elaborate hoax. Also, utilising the Freedom of Information Act, Tierney discovered that practically the entirety of the Smithsonian's Julsrud case files are missing.
[ charles hapgood ]
After two expeditions to the site in 1955 and 1968, Professor Charles Hapgood, a professor of history and anthropology at the University of New Hampshire, recorded the results of his 18-year investigation of Acambaro in a privately printed book entitled MYSTERY IN ACAMBARO. Hapgood was initially an open-minded skeptic concerning the collection but became a believer after his first visit in 1955, at which time he witnessed some of the figures being excavated and even dictated to the diggers where he wanted them to dig.
Adding to the mind-boggling aspects of this controversy is the fact that the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, through the late Director of PreHispanic Monuments, Dr. Eduardo Noguera, (who, as head of an official investigating team at the site, issued a report which Tierney will be publishing), admitted "the apparent scientific legality with which these objects wer found." Despite evidence of their own eyes, however, officials declared that because of the objects 'fantastic' nature, they had to have been a hoax played on Julsrud!
A disappointed but ever-hopeful Julsrud died. His house was sold and the collection put in storage. The collection is not currently open to the public.
[ click for larger image ]
Perhaps the most amazing suppression of all is the excavation of an Egyptian tomb by the Smithsonian itself in Arizona. A lengthy front page story of the PHOENIX GAZETTE on 5 April 1909 (follows this article), gave a highly detailed report of the discovery and excavation of a rock-cut vault by an expedition led by a Professor S.A. Jordan of the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian, however, claims to have absolutely no knowledge of the discovery or its discoverers.
The World Explorers Club decided to check on this story by calling the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., though we felt there was little chance of getting any real information. After speaking briefly to an operator, we were transferred to a Smithsonian staff archaeologist, and a woman's voice came on the phone and identified herself.
I told her that I was investigating a story from a 1909 Phoenix newspaper article about the Smithsonian Institution's having excavated rock-cut vaults in the Grand Canyon where Egyptian artefacts had been discovered, and whether the Smithsonian Institution could give me any more information on the subject.
"Well, the first thing I can tell you, before we go any further," she said, "is that no Egyptian artefacts of any kind have ever been found in North or South America. Therefore, I can tell you that the Smithsonian Institute has never been involved in any such excavations." She was quite helpful and polite but, in the end, knew nothing. Neither she nor anyone else with whom I spoke could find any record of the discovery or either G.E. Kinkaid and Professor S.A. Jordan.
While it cannot be discounted that the entire story is an elaborate newspaper hoax, the fact that it was on the front page, named the prestigious Smithsonian Institution, and gave a highly detailed story that went on for several pages, lends a great deal to its credibility. It is hard to believe such a story could have come out of thin air.
Is the Smithsonian Institution covering up an archaeological discovery of immense importance? If this story is true it would radically change the current view that there was no transoceanic contact in pre-Columbian times, and that all American Indians, on both continents, are descended from Ice Age explorers who came across the Bering Strait. (Any information on G.E. Kinkaid and Professor S.A. Jordan, or their alleged discoveries, that readers may have would be greatly appreciated.....write to Childress at the World Explorers Club at the above address.)
Is the idea that ancient Egyptians came to the Arizona area in the ancient past so objectionable and preposterous that it must be covered up? Perhaps the Smithsonian Institution is more interested in maintaining the status quo than rocking the boat with astonishing new discoveries that overturn previously accepted academic teachings.
Historian and linguist Carl Hart, editor of WORLD EXPLORER, then obtained a hiker's map of the Grand Canyon from a bookstore in Chicago. Poring over the map, we were amazed to see that much of the area on the north side of the canyon has Egyptian names. The area around Ninety-four Mile Creek and Trinity Creek had areas (rock formations, apparently) with names like Tower of Set, Tower of Ra, Horus Temple, Osiris Temple, and Isis Temple. In the Haunted Canyon area were such names as the Cheops Pyramid, the Buddha Cloister, Buddha Temple, Manu Temple and Shiva Temple. Was there any relationship between these places and the alleged Egyptian discoveries in the Grand Canyon?
We called a state archaeologist at the Grand Canyon, and were told that the early explorers had just liked Egyptian and Hindu names, but that it was true that this area was off limits to hikers or other visitors, "because of dangerous caves."
Indeed, this entire area with the Egyptian and Hindu place names in the Grand Canyon is a forbidden zone - no one is allowed into this large area.
We could only conclude that this was the area where the vaults were located. Yet today, this area is curiously off-limits to all hikers and even, in large part, park personnel.
I believe that the discerning reader will see that if only a small part of the "Smithsoniangate" evidence is true, then our most hallowed archaeological institution has been actively involved in suppressing evidence for advanced American cultures, evidence for ancient voyages of various cultures to North America, evidence for anomalistic giants and other oddball artefacts, and evidence that tends to disprove the official dogma that is now the history of North America.
The Smithsonian's Board of Regents still refuses to open its meetings to the news media or the public. If Americans were ever allowed inside the 'nation's attic', as the Smithsonian has been called, what skeletons might they find?
Secular Sensations Dept.
Effort To Remove Atheist From City Council
Conservatives Cite N.C. Constitution as Disqualifying Officeholders Who "Deny the Being of Almighty God"
[ http://www.cbsnews.com ]
(AP) Asheville City Councilman Cecil Bothwell believes in ending the death penalty, conserving water and reforming government - but he doesn't believe in God. His political opponents say that's a sin that makes him unworthy of serving in office, and they've got the North Carolina Constitution on their side.
Bothwell's detractors are threatening to take the city to court for swearing him in, even though the state's antiquated requirement that officeholders believe in God is unenforceable because it violates the U.S. Consititution.
"The question of whether or not God exists is not particularly interesting to me and it's certainly not relevant to public office," the recently elected 59-year-old said.
Bothwell ran this fall on a platform that also included limiting the height of downtown buildings and saving trees in the city's core, views that appealed to voters in the liberal-leaning community at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. When Bothwell was sworn into office on Monday, he used an alternative oath that doesn't require officials to swear on a Bible or reference "Almighty God."
That has riled conservative activists, who cite a little-noticed quirk in North Carolina's Constitution that disqualifies officeholders "who shall deny the being of Almighty God." The provision was included when the document was drafted in 1868 and wasn't revised when North Carolina amended its constitution in 1971. One foe, H.K. Edgerton, is threatening to file a lawsuit in state court against the city to challenge Bothwell's appointment.
"My father was a Baptist minister. I'm a Christian man. I have problems with people who don't believe in God," said Edgerton, a former local NAACP president and founder of Southern Heritage 411, an organization that promotes the interests of black southerners.
[ h.k. edgerton ]
The head of a conservative weekly newspaper says city officials shirked their duty to uphold the state's laws by swearing in Bothwell. David Morgan, editor of the Asheville Tribune, said he's tired of seeing his state Constitution "trashed."
Bothwell can't be forced out of office over his atheist views because the North Carolina provision is unenforceable, according to the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution. Six other states, Arkansas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, have similar provisions barring atheist officeholders.
In 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that federal law prohibits states from requiring any kind of religious test to serve in office when it ruled in favor of a Maryland atheist seeking appointment as a notary public.
But the federal protections don't necessarily spare atheist public officials from spending years defending themselves in court. Avowed atheist Herb Silverman won an eight-year court battle in 1997 when South Carolina's highest court granted him the right to be appointed as a notary despite the state's law.
[ herb silverman ]
Bothwell said a legal challenge to his appointment would be "fun," but believes his opponents' efforts have more to do with politics than religious beliefs.
"It's local political opponents seeking to change the outcome of an election they lost," said Bothwell, who's lived in Asheville nearly three decades and wrote the city's best-selling guide book.
Bothwell was raised a Presbyterian but began questioning Christian beliefs at a young age and considered himself an atheist by the time he was 20. He's an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville and he still celebrates Christmas, often hanging ornaments on his Fishhook cactus.
Bothwell said his spiritual views don't matter to most of his constituents. Bothwell is a registered Democrat but didn't run on a party ticket in the nonpartisan Council election.
Even if he can't force Bothwell out of office, Edgerton said he hopes a legal battle would ultimately force North Carolina's Legislature to determine the legality of the article of the Constitution.
"If the law is wrong, it is the obligation of the Legislature to say it's wrong," he said.
Provisions like North Carolina's tend to stay on the books because lawmakers would rather not spend time weeding-out outdated laws, said Duke University Law School Professor Joseph Blocher.
"I mean, there are state laws against spitting in the street," he said. "Why spend the time?"
But the battle is important to Silverman, who says there are scores of other atheist politicians afraid to "come out of the closet." He cited U.S. Rep. Pete Stark of California, the first and only congressman to publicly acknowledge he doesn't believe in God.
"We're trying to change our culture to the point where it's not political suicide," Silverman said.
A Little Prick Dept.
Brazil Boy Found With 40 Needles In 'Black Magic Rite'
[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]
Police said Roberto Carlos Magalhaes had confessed to sticking the sewing needles into the two-year-old boy, and had been arrested.
Mr Magalhaes said his mistress had told him ritually to kill the child to take revenge on his wife.
Doctors are set to begin operating on Thursday to remove some of the needles.
The toddler was taken to hospital in the north-eastern Bahia state by his mother, complaining of stomach pains and vomiting.
X-rays showed scores of sewing needles inside his neck, torso and legs. At least one had punctured a lung, another his liver.
'Revenge attack'
Police said Mr Magalhaes had broken down and confessed after being arrested.
"He did that for revenge, to get back at his wife," the police chief in the town of Ibotirama, Helder Fernandes Santana, was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
"His mistress told him to kill the child through a macabre ritual," Mr Santana said.
The boy's mother told police she suspected the child had been the victim of a black magic ritual after she found suspicious objects in the home she shared with Mr Magalhaes - her husband of six months - and her six children.
Doctors said most of the needles would be removed, but not the ones inside organs as their removal could cause more damage.
They said there were no signs of wounds on the boy.
Reports say the boy is in a serious condition, but that he has shown some improvement since being admitted to hospital on Sunday.
Future Episode Of CSI Dept.
Spiritualist Accused Over Killing
[ http://uk.news.yahoo.com ]
[ what's all this then? ]
A judge has set bail of 2.26 million US dollars (£1.38 million) for a British spiritual healer accused of killing a Las Vegas woman and stuffing her body in a rubbish bin.
Michael Lane, 37, is alleged to have hit 44-year-old Ginger Candela with a frying pan and strangled her after deciding during a meditation session that she should die, police documents show.
Originally from London, Lane - a motivational speaker who goes by the name of Chae Saville - appeared briefly in court on Wednesday to acknowledge that he understood the charges against him.
An evidence hearing session was set for January 11.
The accused was arrested on December 3 following the discovery days earlier of the victim's body stuffed in a bin in her garage in Las Vegas.
An arrest report released on Monday claims that Lane told officers he was compressing the victim's carotid arteries to help her achieve a deeper state of meditation when he decided to murder her. He then hit her with the pan before strangling her with an electrical cord, according to the report.
Police responding to a missing person's call on November 30 found Mrs Candela's house had been ransacked, with numerous items missing.
Authorities caught up with Lane a few days later in California.
Officers believe that he may have taken the victim's Chihuahua dog Gi Gi and given it to a random woman he met on the Las Vegas strip as he fled.
Detectives believe he may have befriended numerous women with the possible intention of defrauding them without their knowledge. He faces charges of murder and robbery with a deadly weapon, as well as one count of grand larceny auto in connection with Mrs Candela's death.
When East Meets West Dept.
Boy Has Arabic Script From The Koran Appear On Skin
[ http://www.news.com.au ]
A BOY has become a walking monument to Muslim faith after passages from the Koran started appearing on his skin.
Text in Arabic from the religious book started showing on the boy’s back, arms, legs and stomach, leaving doctors baffled.
They first started appearing shortly the baby was born, with “Allah” appearing on his chin, The Sun reports.
Doctors say the markings are a medical mystery, but deny the condition is a result of someone writing on the child’s skin.
The parents of the child initially hid the mysterious writings, but eventually took the boy to the doctor.
They say the old passages fade before new words appear roughly twice a week.
"Normally those signs appear twice a week - on Mondays and on the nights between Thursdays and Fridays," the mother said.
"Ali always feels bad when it is happening. He cries and his temperature goes up.
"It's impossible to hold him when it's happening, his body is actively moving, so we put him into his cradle. It's so hard to watch him suffering."
Since the holy markings were revealed, the boy became the focus of Muslim homage in his hometown province of Dagestan, in the south of Russia.
Trust A Burma Shave Dept.
Billboard Depicting Joseph, Mary In Bed Sparks Row
[ http://www.npr.org ]
A billboard at a New Zealand church depicting a downcast Joseph lying beside Mary in bed and the heading "God is a hard act to follow" provoked more than the intended reconsideration of the meaning of Christmas.
The sign was defaced by a paint-wielding vandal just hours after it was erected Thursday outside the St. Matthew-in-the-City Anglican church in Auckland, and triggered passionate and sometimes angry debate on talk radio and the Internet.
Church vicar Archdeacon Glynn Cardy said the billboard was intended to challenge stereotypes about the way Jesus was conceived and get people talking about the Christmas story.
"This billboard is trying to lampoon and ridicule the very literal idea that God is a male and somehow this male God impregnated Mary," said Cardy, who described his church as having very liberal ideas about Christianity.
"We would question the Virgin Birth in any literal sense. We would question the maleness of God in any literal sense," he said.
On the billboard — painted to mimic the fresco style commonly used in church murals — Mary and Joseph are in bed side-by-side. Joseph is looking down. Mary, looking heavenward, appears sad. The caption reads: "Poor Joseph. God is a hard act to follow."
Auckland Catholic Diocese spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer said the billboard implied the Virgin Mary and Joseph had just had sex and was inappropriate, disrespectful and offensive to Christians.
"We would see a billboard like that being used by an anti-Christian group to actually poke fun at the divinity of Christ," Freer told National Radio.
Christ's conception was a profound theological question and the billboard would not "give rise to any intelligent discussion on the birth of Jesus," she said.
Many messages on the church Web site attacked the image, while others defended it.
"This billboard and your 'sermon' is a sacrilege," one visitor, identified as Karen, posted.
Another, identified as Andrew M, wrote: "I for one think this is an excellent billboard. Challenging and thought-provoking. Just what it was intended to be."
Cardy said he understood that some people were upset by the image but said he was disappointed the billboard had been defaced. He said he did not intend to take it down.
Divine Bovine Dept.
Holy Cow!
[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]
Here's Moses, a Jersey Holstein calf mix at Brad Davis and Megan Johnson's farm in Sterling, Connecticut, who has a white marking on its forehead in the shape of a cross
Do You See What I See Dept.
Jesus Appears In Local Woman's Photo Of Holy Land Site
[ http://www.wbir.com ]
It was Judy Mayes' first trip to the holy land.
"I took a lot of pictures, probably all together about 2,000 pictures."
She took snapshots of sacred places that she had read about in her Bible. Her pastor, Dean Haun of First Baptist Church in Morristown, takes a group to Israel every year.
"I call it a mission trip for yourself, because nothing causes your Bible to come alive more than a trip to Israel," Haun says. "You begin to walk where Paul walked, and where Jesus walked, and the disciples walked, and so it's an awesome thing."
One of the sites the group always visits is the Western Wall, the place where Jews pray today. That wall runs 25 feet down into a tunnel, which leads to the northern end.
"Every time I go, I always take groups through the tunnel, because it's the site that gets you the nearest to where the Jews believe the Holy of Holies was in the first and second temple."
To mark the holy spot, Pastor Haun led the group into a special song "Surely the Presence of the Lord is in This Place," followed by the scripture Psalm 93. It was a special moment, one that Judy wanted to remember.
So she snapped a picture of the tunnel.
"I didn't see anything," she says.
But when she returned to her hotel room later that afternoon, she noticed something about that picture she had taken in the tunnel.
"I was just paging through my pictures, and I saw that picture and I said, 'Sue come and look at this picture.'"
"She said, 'Wow. I believe it's Jesus.'"
"I was absolutely blown away when Judy showed it to me," Pastor Haun says. "The first thing I thought was 'Well, I think she's captured an angel.'"
But the closer Haun looked at the photo, he began to see images that were not just angelic.
"The seamless white robe, what appears to be blood on the side of the face coming down onto the robe, what appears to be a crown of thorns on the head of this figure," Haun said. "The only conclusion I can come up with is the Lord honored us by allowing us to see a glimpse of His presence."
Word of Judy's picture spread throughout the town of Jerusalem.
"People even came on our bus. They wanted to see the picture."
Avi, the group's Jewish tour guide, was amazed.
"When he saw the picture, he actually grabbed Judy's camera. I didn't think he was going to give it back," Haun says. "He grabbed the camera and was showing it to everyone and every place we went after that. He would come up and grab her camera and show the picture to people."
Avi was so moved by the picture that he went back to Jerusalem to visit the tunnel, after the picture was taken. He searched to make sure there was nothing in the tunnel that could have been confused as being an image of Jesus. Haun reports Avi says he found nothing.
"The Lord wanted us to know, to show that He was real, that He's coming back to me," Judy says. "I just want to show the picture to everybody."
Seeing Is Believing Dept.
Holy Crap It's Jesus!
Here Comes The Son Dept.
TOP JESUS HEADLINES FROM THE INTERNETS
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Jesus Says: "It Was Like, 'Oh, My God.'"
Material Witness Dept.
'Jesus-era' Burial Shroud Found
[ http://news.bbc.co.uk ]
A team of archaeologists and scientists says it has, for the first time, found pieces of a burial shroud from the time of Jesus in a tomb in Jerusalem.
The researchers, from Hebrew University and institutions in Canada and the US, said the shroud was very different from the controversial Turin Shroud.
Some people believe the Turin Shroud to have been Christ's burial cloth, but others believe it is a fake.
The newly found cloth has a simpler weave than Turin's, the scientists say.
The body of a man wrapped in fragments of the shroud was found in a tomb dating from the time of Jesus near the Old City of Jerusalem.
The tomb is part of a cemetery called the Field of Blood, where Judas Iscariot is said to have killed himself.
The researchers believe the man was a Jewish high priest or member of the aristocracy who died of leprosy, the earliest proven case.
They say he was wrapped in a cloth made of a simple two-way weave, very different to the complex weave of the Turin Shroud.
The researchers believe that the fragments are typical of the burial cloths used at the time of Jesus.
As a result, they conclude that the Turin Shroud did not originate from 1st Century Jerusalem.
The Turin Shroud has been the subject of much controversy.
Tests 20 years ago dated the fabric to the Middle Ages, but believers say the cloth bears the imprint of a man's face that is an authentic image of Christ.
That's All She Wrote Dept.
Ancient Book Of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All
[ http://www.sciencedaily.com ]
ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2009) — A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books.
Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature.
"The mystery is now solved from textual, chemical, and codicological (bookmaking) angles," said Mitchell, who first became intrigued by the codex when she saw it as a graduate student in 1982. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates that it is not a genuine Byzantine manuscript, but a counterfeit, she said, "made somewhere between 1874 and the first decades of the 20th century."
Mitchell said experts from multiple disciplines made the findings possible. "Our collective efforts have achieved what no single scholar could do -- give a comprehensive analysis of the composite artifact that is an illustrated codex. The data collected in this research process has given us an even deeper understanding of the exact process used by the forger," said Mitchell. "It will, we hope, assist ongoing scholarly investigation into and detection of manuscripts forged in the modern period."
Since 1937, when Edgar J. Goodspeed a University of Chicago biblical scholar, acquired the Archaic Mark, the manuscript has been an enigma. As early as 1947, scholars speculated about its authenticity. Because it is the closest of any known manuscript to the venerable 4th-century Codex Vaticanus for the text of Mark's Gospel, Mitchell said, it was believed to be "either a very important textual witness (from the 14th Century) or a forgery based upon some late 19th-century critical edition of the Greek New Testament incorporating the readings of the Vatican manuscript." The modern blue pigment in the illustrations, indentified in 1989, would support the latter, but Mitchell explained this finding was not definitive because the pigment could have come from a restoration effort on an earlier manuscript.
In 2006, the University of Chicago Library digitized the Archaic Mark, making it available to scholars worldwide (goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu) and stimulating renewed interest in it. The following year, in response to that growing interest in the mysterious manuscript, Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center, convened a committee to lead a complete and definitive examination of the material components of the Archaic Mark.
The Library commissioned materials analysis from McCrone Associates, and enlisted the aid of Abigail Quandt, a rare books expert and preservationist at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Last January, Joseph G. Barabe, a senior scientist at McCrone, took 24 samples of parchment, ink and a range of paints used in illustrations. Barabe analyzed the samples using an array of techniques -- polarized light; energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry; the scanning electron microscope for elemental analysis; X-ray diffraction; Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy; and Raman spectroscopy. Under microscopic analysis, Barabe and his colleagues found no evidence of retouching of any kind in the manuscript, disproving earlier suspicions of restoration attempts.
Barabe determined the Archaic Mark was created after 1874 -- using materials not available until the late 19th century -- on a parchment substrate dating from about the middle of the 16th century. Carbon dating determined the animal hide was from some time between 1485-1631.
The rest of the authentication team confirmed and helped interpret Barabe's findings.
Quandt carefully reconstructed the steps the modern forger took to produce the manuscript, from preparing the parchment, to the painting of images and inscription of text, as well as the application of the modern coating, cellulose nitrate. Quandt also identified specific ways in which its production defies usual Byzantine procedures, and she determined that the reused parchment contains no recoverable text underneath.
Mitchell completed the analysis with a study of the textual edition the forger had used. She confirmed and refined Stephen C. Carlson's proposal that the modern edition from which the forger copied the text was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann. Mitchell identified telltale readings in the Archaic Mark that arose from the original 1856 edition of Buttmann's critical text, reproducing errors later corrected in the flurry of collations of the famous manuscript Vaticanus between 1857 and 1867.
Mitchell, Barabe and Quandt have detailed these findings in a paper scheduled for February publication in the journal Novum Testamentum.
Derp Dept.
MEEP!
The Power Of The Meaningless
[ http://www.boston.com ]
A few weeks ago, Thomas Murray, the principal of Danvers High School, banned the word meep from his school. Parents and students were warned, by automated calls and e-mails, that saying (or even “displaying”) the word meep would be grounds for suspension.
Supposedly, students at Danvers were meeping in “disruptive” ways, and hadn’t responded to teachers’ and administrators’ requests to, well, quit it already, leading to the all-out ban. “It has nothing to do with the word,” Murray told The Salem Evening News. “It has to do with the conduct of the students. We wouldn’t just ban a word just to ban a word.”
News of the ban made for a moderately sized sensation, full of entertaining elements - a (possibly) overzealous principal (who also forwarded e-mails containing the word meep to the local police), Muppet references (meep, as we all know, is what the hapless lab assistant Beaker says, often as things explode and catch fire around him), Road Runner references (with learned commentary at blogs such as Language Log, where it was pointed out that the fleet-footed bird’s beep-beep sounds more like meep-meep, with a spectrogram to prove it), students wearing “FREE MEEP” T-shirts, and social media references (the students allegedly used Facebook to coordinate their meeping).
A large part of the joy of the story, though, is the word meep itself. If the principal had banned a different four-letter word, some run-of-the-mill obscenity, another nonsense word (Monty Python’s ni!, anyone?), or even a different silly word such as rutabaga or spork, the reaction probably wouldn’t have been so gleeful. The very sound of meep is cheering: The long-e sound forces the face into a smile (like saying cheese for a photograph), and research has shown that even a forced smile can result in an improvement in mood.
Since meep is “not even a real word” and “doesn’t mean anything in particular” (as Danvers students Mike Spiewak and Melanie Crane have said in interviews), it can be made to mean just about anything: UrbanDictionary.com lists more than 70 separate user-contributed entries for meep, showing a word that is so versatile that it “may be used to substitute swear words or greet a person hello.” Most of the UrbanDictionary entries are fairly innocuous - “the sound made when one’s nose is touched affectionately” and “a person that would prefer to do something boring while others have fun” - but many are unprintable.
The word’s versatility was also called out in Connie Eble’s Campus Slang report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in spring 2008, defined by students as “MEEP - /mip/ sound sequence that can in context have a range of meanings, e.g., greeting or farewell, expression of surprise or happiness, expression of pain, etc. From the Muppets.”
News stories and blog posts (and especially the commenters thereon) have picked up meep’s vagueness and mutability and enlarged upon it. Combine a blank slate like meep and the natural tendency of English to produce new words with suffixes and affixes (and then throw in a little paronomasia, or punning) and you have plenty of scope for meep-related fun. The students (meepsters or meepers) were supposedly planning a mass-meeping, at which people might get meeped, which of course would cause meep-ruption. Meep proved to be an excellent word for expressing disapproval of the ban - “Oh, for meep’s sake,” “Read it and meep,” - although one commenter at the popular discussion site MetaFilter felt the story merited the stronger “Jesus mept,” and another picked up on a popular conspiracy-theory trope with a rousing “WAKE UP MEEPLE!”
And the e-mails containing meep that Murray forwarded to the police? They may have been sent at the behest of members of the Facebook “MEEP” group (which currently has more than 5,000 members) who encouraged others to meep-roll the school administrators.
Of course, meep isn’t the first word of deliberate vagueness to catch on with those interested in tweaking authority. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, we know from the song, sounds “atrocious,” but what does it mean? (Whatever you want it to mean, said Mary Poppins.) Similarly, has anyone ever determined what was on the line when people on TV’s “Laugh-In” said: “You bet your sweet bippy”? Even the show’s hosts, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, were unsure - as they told The New York Times in 1968, “We don’t even know…they’re just funny.”
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, bippy, and meep all reinforce a truth about language that we rarely stop to think about: All words mean only what we all collectively agree they should mean, no more and no less. In Danvers, meep came to mean: “We’ll obey your rules when we feel like it.” And that, in the end, made it a dirty word.
Eye On The Sky Dept.
Memphis Pilot Spots Triangle UFO 'Size Of A Football Field'
[ http://www.examiner.com ]
A Tennesseee pilot watching departing traffic at Memphis International Airport reported seeing a triangle UFO with dull white lights on November 24, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) database.
The 8-year commercial pilot veteran said the object's lights were not blinking or strobing, and that it was silent. The pilot stated that the object was moving at between Mach 1 to Mach 1.5.
Sizing the object up with other known aircraft in the sky at the time, the pilot believes this object was "the size of a football field."
Reports appear to have increased on these large triangle crafts that are low to the ground. See Related Articles list for just a few recent examples.
Following is the unedited and uninvestigated report from MUFON. Please keep in mind that most UFO reports can be explained as something natural or manmade.
TN, I'm a pilot w/ based in MEM. I was watchiching departing traffic overhead, and noticed at approx. 290 degrees a diamond shape object with dull white lights travelling at approx Mach 1- 1.5 totally SILENT! MUFON Case # 20704.
As mentioned above, I was watching departing traffic from MEM looking North in the city of Cordova when I noticed a triangular shaped object travellint from East to West at approx. Mach 1- 1.5 (I have been a commercial pilot since 2001). The object had dull white lights that did not blink, had NO STROBES, and was COMPLETELY SILENT! I passed below some departing traffic, and in relation to the CRJ-200 that I was watching, it was the size of roughly a football feild. I do not drink, or use drugs...I have studied aircraft since the age of 4....I have never seen anything like this...It left me numb.
(please keep confidential) Did not even think to grab a camera...I was stuned.
Gremlins Of The Kremilns Part II Dept.
UFO Pyramid Reported Over Kremlin
[ http://www.telegraph.co.uk ]
A giant pyramid which appears to be a UFO hovering over the Kremlin has caused frenzied speculation in Russia that it is an alien spacecraft.
The object has been compared to an Imperial Cruiser in the Star Wars films and witnesses estimated it could be up to a mile wide.
Two film clips exist which appear to show the same object and footage has been repeatedly playing on Russian television news channels.
The shots, one taken at night from a car and one during the day, were both filmed by amateurs.
The 'craft' was said to have hovered for hours over Red Square in the Russian capital.
The clips of the 'invasion' have gone to the top of the country's version of YouTube.
The identity of the shape has not been confirmed. Russian reports ruled out a UFO but police refused to comment.
Nick Pope, a former Ministry of Defence UFO analyst, said it was "one of the most extraordinary UFO clips I've ever seen".
"At first I thought this was a reflection but it appears to move behind a power line, ruling out this theory."
A spokesman for aerospace journal Jane's News said: "We have no idea what it is."
SAN LUIS — Manuel Sanchez tucks his leathery hands into well-worn pockets and nods toward a cedar tree where, last month, he found his fourth mysteriously slaughtered calf in as many weeks.
"I have no idea what could do this. I wish I did," he says.
Four calves, all killed overnight. Their innards gone. Tongues sliced out. Udders carefully removed. Facial skin sliced and gone. Eyes cored away. Not a single track surrounding the carcasses, which were found in pastures locked behind two gates and a mile from any road. Not a drop of blood on the ground or even on the remaining skin.
In his life in the piñon-patched pastures where his father and grandfather raised cattle, the 72-year-old Sanchez has seen mountain lions and coyotes kill cattle, elk and deer. He's seen birds scavenge carcasses. He's heard of thieves slaughtering livestock in the field for their meat. He can't explain what he saw last month.
"A lion will drag its kill. Coyotes rip and tear flesh. These were perfect cuts — like with a laser or like a scalpel. And what would take the waste — all the guts — and leave the nice, tender meat?" Sanchez says, as he nudges his old Ford through rutted trails, rosary beads swinging from his rearview mirror. "No tracks. No blood. No nothing. I got nothing to go by. They don't leave no trace."
Every rancher who has reported similar cattle deaths — and there have been at least eight such deaths in southern Colorado this year — uses the same description.
"They just stripped this one," says Tom Miller, who in March was one of three ranchers near Trinidad who discovered mutilated cattle.
Cow raises the alarm
One morning, he went out to his concrete troughs to feed his herd of about 80 red and black Angus cows and calves. The herd was racing about. A cow that a week before had birthed a calf was bellowing, "raising all kind of devil," Miller says.
There by the trough — past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne — was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.
Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere.
"If anyone can show me how this happened, I will believe them. I know it's not coyotes, especially in one night. Only a human or something like that can cut the ears like that," says Miller, a 72-year-old rancher who was raised on the prairie bordering the Purgatoire River.
"If it was done by people, they sure went out of their way to bother and confuse me. And really, why? It doesn't make any sense."
Mysteriously mangled
Colorado Brand Inspector Dennis Williams came out and looked at Miller's calf. He lives next door; the calf would be the last of three strangely mutilated cattle that he would investigate in March of this year.
"I've heard about it. It was weird, to say the least. Totally unexplainable. To me, it looked like that calf had been dropped from a high distance, the way its hips were dislocated and all its broken bones," Williams says.
That same month, ranchers had called Williams to grisly scenes northeast of Aguilar and west of Weston to investigate mysteriously mangled cattle that had been seen healthy the day before.
To add to the weirdness, Sanchez, Miller and Mike Duran, who found a sliced Red Angus cow near Weston in March, have all experienced similar mutilations before. Sanchez lost cows in 2006 and 1993, Miller in 1997 and 1980, and Duran in 2000 and 1995.
"It's weird and unexplainable," says Duran, who lost a healthy 27-year-old Red Angus cow on March 8, her udder and rear end removed with what he describes as "laser cuts, like when somebody cuts metal with a torch."
Cops, like Williams and the ranchers, are stumped.
"We can't come up with anything," says Las Animas County sheriff's Deputy Derek Navarette, who investigated the Miller and Duran calves.
"We've seen these before and they are all kind of the same. No one has ever explained it. Northern New Mexico has had some of these same cases, and in those cases they never got any further than we did."
Predators ruled out
Chuck Zukowski of Colorado Springs investigated three of the eight mutilated cows in southern Colorado this year. The amateur UFO investigator and reserve deputy in El Paso County documents each scene, testing for radiation and scanning carcasses with ultraviolet light.
Despite his extraterrestrial inclinations, Zukowski's studies — found on his ufonut.com website — fall short of concluding anything paranormal. He seems certain all the animals he studied were killed and drained before they were sliced, which explains the lack of blood found near the animals.
The way the tongues were sliced off in straight lines back behind the teeth indicates it is not a predator kill, he says.
"I'm looking for obvious things," Zukowski says. "I don't like to say aliens did it. There are just too many unknowns. I like to lean on human intervention until I actually see a UFO come down and take a cow."
Sanchez is a salt-of-the-earth-type fellow who put three kids through college running cattle. Yet, he says he and his wife marveled at incandescent blue lights hovering over a ridge near his pastures in July and August. He declined to speculate about the lights.
"I just say the truth and that's what I saw," he says.
Duran, on the other hand, is willing to take the next step. He's looked at it from every angle, he says. If it wasn't human and wasn't a predator, he says, there's only one other option.
"I do believe it was UFOs. This universe is so big, a lot of people think we are the only ones here," he says, declining to guess why aliens harbor such bloody disdain for bovines.
"I bet there is something out there."
A history of ghostly butchery
The "Phantom Surgeons of the Plains," as they are known, have been slicing up Colorado cattle for decades. From the late 1960s to this year, the bloodless, trackless and isolated scenes all have been the same: bovines with ears, genitals, tongues, organs and udders neatly removed.
Worldwide, the incidents number more than 10,000. Colorado seems especially plagued. In 1975, ranchers on the state's Eastern Plains, particularly around southern Elbert County, reported more than 200 mysteriously mutilated cattle.
Theories abound, with some pointing to animal-sacrificing cults and others suggesting secretive government experiments and even military-guided laser beams. The alien conspiracy theory blossomed when inexplicably gored cattle were found adjacent to pastures with crop circles in Alabama. Other cases in New Mexico and Colorado involve tripod imprints in a circular area near the carcasses, suggesting the involvement of an atypical aircraft. Countless ranchers report "strange lights" in the sky around the time they find their sliced cattle.
Despite the theories, no mutilation has ever been thoroughly explained.
Colorado's dalliances with mysteriously mangled animals began with a horse named Snippy in 1967. Found in a defleshed, bloodless heap with her brain missing and neck bones cleaned gleaming white in September 1967 north of Alamosa, the 3-year-old Appaloosa is considered the pioneer of the unexplained mutilation phenomenon. Since Snippy, the paranormal-rich San Luis Valley under the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range has hosted hundreds of unsolved livestock deaths.
One For The Books Dept.
Guinness Book: Best Records Of The Decade
[ http://www.aroundglobe.net ]
Guinness World Records are searching for the people's choice of the decade. Having shortlisted a top 100 from every record set in several categories during the past 10 years they now want the public to vote online for the best.
1. The most rattlesnakes held in the mouth by their tails is 11 by Jackie Bibby. He held the snakes for 10 seconds on a German TV show in December last year
2.The ultimate in tattooing is represented by the chainsaw juggling, unicycling, sword-swallowing Lucky Diamond Rich (Australia, born New Zealand), who has spent over 1,000 hours having his body modified by hundreds of tattoo artists
3. The highest shallow dive measures 10.87 m (35 ft 8 in) and was achieved by Darren Taylor at the LA County Fairgrounds (FAIRPLEX), California, United States on 20 March 2009
4. Record for the heaviest vehicle pulled over a level 100 ft (30.48 m) course weighed 57,000 kg (125,680 lb) and was set by Rev. Kevin Fast (Canada) in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, on 12 May 2007
5. The most push-ups using the backs of the hands in one hour is 1,940 and was set by Paddy Doyle at Stamina's Boxing Self Defence Gym in Erin Go Bragh Sports Centre, Birmingham, UK, on 8 November 2007
6. The man with the most body piercings is John Lynch a.k.a. 'Prince Albert', who was counted as having 241 piercings, including 151 in his head and neck, in Hammersmith, London, on 17 October 2008
7. Melvin Boothe has the longest fingernails on a pair of hands, with a combined length of 9.85 m (32 ft 3.8 in), when measured in Troy, Michigan, USA on 30 May 2009
8. The largest commercially available hamburger is 84.14 kg (185.8 lbs) and is available for US$499 (£302.84) on the menu at Mallie's Sports Grill & Bar in Southgate, Michigan, USA, as of 30 May 2009
9. The longest distance traveled on a pogo stick. Ashrita Furman of Jamaica, New York, USA set a distance record of 37.18 km 23.11 miles in 12hr 27min on June 22, 1997 at Queensborough Community College Track, New York
10. The largest playing card structure. Bryan Berg constructed a free-standing house of cards that measured 7.86 m (25 ft 9.44 in) tall. It was completed on 15 October 2007 as part of the State Fair of Texas, in Dallas
11. He Ping Ping, the world's smallest man and Svetlana Pankratova, the woman with the longest legs in the world pose in Trafalgar Square, London on 16th September 2008
A Thousand Words Dept.
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Video Schmideo Dept.
Traveling The Known Universe At The Speed Of Light
Chaplin's Blooper Reel
Dancing Pedro
Hamas Children's Show: Jew Slaughter
Give Me That Christian Side Hug: Jesus Rap Explains Rules For Proper, Jesus-approved Hugging
Westboro Baptist Church: U.S. Fag Soldiers From A Fag Nation
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