Eric's Believe it or not ~

Story : The bride was beautiful

2012-02-11T13:37:00.003+08:00

Story summary:

The photo set is of 21 year old Katie Kirkpatrick, a cancer sufferer, getting married. She is pictured getting chemotherapy, then putting on her earrings while her shoulder blades jut painfully out from her backless wedding dress. In a particularly poignant shot, she is shown resting her head on the back of a chair while the festivities go on.

Katie Kirkpatrick,held off cancer to celebrate the happiest day of her life. Katie had chased cancer, once only to have it return-to clog her lungs and grab hold of her heart. Breathing was difficult now, she had to use oxygen. The pain in her back was so intense it broke through the morphine that was supposed to act as a shield. Her organs were shutting down but it would not stop her from marrying Nick Godwin, 23, who was in love with Katie since 11th grade.

An oxygen tank accompanied Katie at her wedding, and she was wheeled, not walked down the aisle. Along with diamond earrings, she also wore an insert in her nose for oxygen. The caption accompanying this photo montage states that Katie died five days after her wedding, and reminds the reader not to live a complicated life.

This remarkable photo set was taken on January 11, 2005. Before her wedding, Katie had already suffered from organ failures and was dependent on morphine to make life bearable. She also had to endured hours of chemotherapy a day.

Her battle with cancer began in 2002 on Valentine's Day, when she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Katie was just a freshman at college then. She kept on studying, but suffered another setback in '03, when she was diagnosed not just with "an inoperable lung tumour", but one wrapped around her pulmonary artery. Katie could have given up then, but she didn't, opting to even take part in a cycling fundraiser for cancer patients the year after. Another year after that, she got married.

In a world where material items and tangible goals are all that matter, it is a struggle every day to remember that it is the intangible things in life that matter most. Take a moment each day to think of all the love you receive in your life - then give it back, just like Katie did.

Katie didn't lose her battle to cancer - she beat it by doing everything she wanted to, with all her heart.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Katie Kirkpatrick, left, and Nick Godwin, wait for the nurse to come and start Katie's treatment at McLaren Regional Medical Center in Flint on the morning of January 12, 2005. Nick Godwin works night shift as a Lapeer County Sheriff's deputy and took Katie to the medical center right after a night's work, three days before their wedding. Katie is tired from not being able to sleep at night because of her pain and Nick had worked a night shift.

Katie Kirkpatrick, 21, holds some of her daily medication for several minutes before taking them as she waves in and out of sleep because of the morphine she takes while sitting in the livingroom of the familly home in Metamora on January 11, 2005. Katie has cancer of the lungs.

Katie is in a lot of pain in the days leading to her wedding taking morphine and numerous medications to help her. Niki Kirkpatrick,right, took a leave of abscence from work so she can take care of her daugther Katie who now needs constant assistance.

Nick Godwin, 23, left, takes a moment of rest while his bride Katie Kirkpatrick, right, gets an intravenous procedure to reduce the amount of fluids her body is retaining at McLaren Regional Medical Center in Flint on January 12, 2005. Nick Godwin who works night shift as a Lapeer County Sheriff's deputy took Katie to the medical center after a night's work, three days before their wedding.

Katie Kirkpatrick walks past a photograph of herself when she was homecoming queen at Lapeer East High School where she also was a co-valedictorian. the photograph sits on a table in her familly's home livingroom in Metamora on January 11, 2005.

Katie Kirkpatrick, puts on some hearings a few minutes before walking down the aisle to marry Nick Godwin, who she had known since 11th grade, at Church of Christ in Hazel Park on Saturday January 15, 2005.

Katie Kirkpatrick and Nick Godwin,, cuddle up for a moment while waiting for the wedding photographer to get ready after getting married

Dave Kirkpatrick gives the thumbs up to his new son in law while admiring the couple with his wife Niki Kirkpatrick, right, after Nick and Katie got married at Church of Christ in Hazel Park

Katie Kirkpatrick Godwin, right, gets serenaded by her new husband Nick Godwin, and his best men during the wedding party on the dance floor

Katie Kirkpatrick Godwin, center, rests for a few moments during her wedding party. Katie was exhausted. Her face looked as white as her gown.

Five days later, Katie died. She did not let sickness stop her from living, take away the hope or faith that made her believe she had a future. She had a lovely wedding and she had love and she gave love and love doesn' t die. And that is how Katie beat cancer.

Hantu Jepun – one of the many mysterious military spirits

2012-02-08T13:29:00.002+08:00

By Susan Tam | Yahoo! Malaysia Newsroom – Sun, Feb 5, 2012

Paranormal researcher Arwin John's take on spirits is that spirits emit electromagnetic waves that could be detected with specially designed instruments.

A firm believer in science, and a brave man, Arwin who is the founder of Malaysian Paranormal Research, tells Yahoo! Malaysia of his own encounter with the spiritual kind at a Chinese cemetery in Gunung Rapat. During an investigation in the middle of the night, he saw a little girl who vanished into thin air once he realised she wasn't human.

He now works with an affiliate in Germany, studying the phenomenon on how spirits exist and how he and the team could make contact with the afterlife.

"We find that when spirits die, some times they are still anchored to their physical memory," he explained, which is a likely explanation of one of the more famous ghosts in Malaysia, the spirit of Japanese soldiers.

Ghost of the Japanese past

The ghost of the Japanese soldier or Hantu Jepun refers to wandering spirits of dead Japan military personnel, who was once stationed in Malaysia, and around the Southeast Asian region during World War 2.

These spirits are often seen wandering in full uniform, bearing arms or swords, or in a more terrifying state - walking around headless or carrying its head. The spirits tend to appear in buildings, cemeteries and hostels which were once used as Japanese bases.

At times, sightings of the Hantu Jepun are described as scenes of Japanese soldiers lining up in formation or marching to attention.

This explains the sounds of marching boots in most, if not all of the Hantu Jepun stories shared by the Malaysian community as well as those who encounter the spirits all across Southeast Asia.

Some people believe that the appearance of this ghost evokes feelings of loneliness, death, cruelty, torment and fear

Old sites and sounds

Colonial buildings are common places where the spirits of Japanese soldiers roam.

Take the Malay College Kuala Kangsar in Perak as an example. The school is known to be a former site of Japanese occupation. A marching platoon could be heard in the field and sounds of dragging chains across the corridors.

These old sites are known to be places for executions, where Japanese soldiers behead their prisoners.

Other institutions that are known to have experienced ghostly encounters of the Hantu Jepun are Victoria Institution and former Bukit Bintang Girls School, now the site of popular Pavillion shopping mall, on along Jalan Bukit Bintang in Kuala Lumpur.

And in Singapore, a well-known university was known to have put up signs to warn its students of ghosts of Japanese soldiers, marching throughout corridors and turning lights on and off in different classrooms or halls.

Military in nature

A marine called Albert F, shared his experience at the Clark Marine Base, on how he came across what he thought was the ghost of a Japanese soldier.

He wrote that he was patrolling alone at a section of the weapons storage areas and saw a human-like figure standing by a utility pole. Albert said he knew no one else was on duty that night and called his based to confirm that.

"They said none - I was the only one in the area. I called back and announced I have an intruder in the area. I started to move on the intruder.

"When I yelled out for the intruder to stop, the person came out entirely from the side of the utility pole and started heading away from me, not really running, but he seemed to be floating away from me," he wrote.

Albert shot a signal flare to shed light on the open field to see his intruder, but he saw nothing. The person had disappeared.

Wandering soldiers

E. Kho, 35-year-old sales manager shared her experiences with Yahoo! Malaysia, describing how she came across spirits of the military kind.

They were not Japanese soldiers, but they were the navy crew that died on the Cheonan Ship in 2009. The 1,200-tonne ship capsized after a mysterious explosion caused it to sink.

"I was in Seoul the day the government organised a memorial service for the officers and soldiers that died in the accident.

"I could feel their presence and even see some of them in full uniform, wandering around.

"It was a sad moment, because I could sense that these spirits did not even know they have died and were wandering restlessly outside Seoul City Hall," she recalled.

Fourth potentially habitable planet is discovered

2012-02-05T17:54:00.001+08:00

~ NASA handout image from 2009 shows a view of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster.

International astronomers said on Thursday they have found the fourth potentially habitable planet outside our solar system with temperatures that could support water and life about 22 light-years from Earth.

The team analyzed data from the European Southern Observatory about a star known as GJ 667C, which is known as an M-class dwarf star and puts out much less heat than our Sun.

However, at least three planets are orbiting close to the star, and one of them appears to be close enough that it likely absorbs about as much incoming light and energy as Earth, has similar surface temperatures and perhaps water.

The new rocky planet, GJ 667Cc, orbits its star every 28.15 days -- meaning its year equals about one Earth month -- and has a mass at least 4.5 times that of Earth, according to the research published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," said Guillem Anglada-EscudÃ© who was with the Carnegie Institution for Science when he conducted the research but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen in Germany.

The theory about water, however, cannot be confirmed until astronomers learn more about the planetâs atmosphere.

Other planets circling the same star -- which is part of a three-star system -- could include a gas-giant and an additional super-Earth with an orbital period of 75 days, but more observations are needed to confirm that.

Some experts have been skeptical that M-class dwarf stars could have planets that support life because they are too dim and tend to have lots of solar flare activity which could send off lethal radiation to nearby planets.

And even though this star, GJ 667C, has a much lower abundance of elements heavier than helium, such as iron, carbon, and silicon -- the building blocks of terrestrial planets -- than our Sun, astronomers are intrigued by the possibilities.

"This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy," said co-author Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz.

"The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets."

French astronomers in May last year confirmed the first exoplanet, Gliese 581d, to meet key requirements for sustaining life. It is a rocky planet about 20 light-years away.

Swiss astronomers reported in August that another planet, HD 85512 b, about 36 light-years away seemed to be in the habitable zone of its star.

The US space agency NASA confirmed its first such planet late last year, Kepler 22b, about 600 light-years away.

Source : AFP News – Fri, Feb 3, 2012

5 of the biggest unsolved mysteries in physics

2012-02-02T00:11:00.002+08:00

~ We've learned so much from science, bet there's plenty we still don't understand

The mysteries of the universe are as vast and wide as existence itself. Throughout history, mankind has searched and struggled to find the answers tucked away inside the universe and everything we see around us. As Deep Thought said in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."

True, we have yet to come up with the answers to life, the universe, and everything — but oh do we have questions! Solving these mysteries may help to explain not only the creation of the universe, but also how it works, why it works, and possibly how it will end.

1. The Higgs boson

~ The hunt for the elusive Higgs particle continues

The Higgs boson is a hypothetical particle whose accompanying field is believed to be accountable for giving all other fundamental particles their mass. It is also the only elementary particle theorized in the Standard Model — the closest thing modern physics has to a "theory of everything" — that has not yet been actually observed through experiments. Why the difficulty proving this particular particle's existence? The Higgs boson has such a rapid decay that its appearance in the world is ineffably brief. Instead, physicists look for evidence of the particle's decay itself through experimentation.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has been working to find the elusive particle via experiments at the Large Hadron Collider — the world's largest and most ambitious particle accelerator. By accelerating particles at the LHC to near the speed of light and then smashing them into each other, scientists have recently been able to estimate that they will likely find the signal for the particle somewhere around the mass of 115 to 130 GeV. Now that we know where to look, we're likely to find out sooner than later whether the Higgs boson exists or not — and for physicists around the world, that'll be exciting news either way.

If the Higgs boson does exist, we may finally be able to build a complete picture not only of how the universe works, but why its works the way it does. If it does not exist, the entire scientific community must to go back to the drawing board and begin investigating a new description of our physical universe.

2. Gravity and the mysterious graviton

~ The drop of an apple led to one of the greatest mysteries in history

We've all heard the story of how Newton's observation of an apple falling out of a tree led to his formulation of the law of gravitation. We also know that gravity is the always-attractive force that acts between objects. What you might not know, however, is that gravity is one of the most fundamental yet weakest forces in the universe — so weak, in fact, that the physics world has yet to be able to explain precisely how it works.

Sure, we are quite positive of gravity's existence — drop something and it crashes to the floor, easy enough — but if gravity is a force, according to the Standard Model, it must also have its own accompanying particle. The accompanying particle in question is called the graviton. Gravitons are tiny, massless particles that somehow tug on every bit of matter in the universe. Mysteriously, they are able to do this while being ridiculously weak on the planetary scale yet uncommonly strong in relation to, say, two positively charged protons. We don't know why it acts differently on planets versus elementary particles — heck, we don't even know how to detect them, although we have made various attempts to date.

Since the scientific community has yet to come up with a concrete way to detect the graviton particle, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) was doing research between 2009 and 2011 to look for wave-like evidence of gravity. Scientists thought they could detect ripples in space-time that are thought to be caused by the acceleration of mass, but by the time the experiment was shut down, they had yet to find anything. There are facilities that have the equipment to continue the experiment, but they are currently focused on solving the Higgs issue. Sadly, even if the Higgs boson is found, it still won't shed much light on the gravity quandaries that still remain.

3. Dark matter

~ We think dark matter exists, but proving it is the hard part

Dark matter is a mysterious sort of glue that not only holds galaxies together but is theoretically responsible for their creation. It was initially hypothesized in 1933 to explain mathematical discrepancies while calculating the mass of galaxies; essentially, more matter is required to hold galaxies together than we can see. Since then, we haven't learned a whole heck of a lot more about dark matter.

In fact, we seem to know more about what itisn't than what it is. We know it isn't antimatter. We also know it isn't dark clouds of normal matter. Many physicists believe that it accounts for about 83% of the matter in the universe — even though we've yet to prove it exists!

The tricky thing with dark matter is that we can't detect it directly; it's invisible. Dark matter only reveals itself through its gravity, so we must instead measure it through its interaction with normal matter. Currently, there are two conflicting experiments being conducted in attempts to confirm the existence of dark matter.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) detector at the Soudan Mine in Minnesota is searching for weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, whose discovery could resolve the dark matter problem. Even though dark matter is expected to be everywhere, it is estimated that some WIMPs may pass through an entire galaxy without interacting with any normal matter, making discovery very difficult. Although scientists have not yet detected WIMPs directly, they have found significant evidence that they exist.

In direct conflict with these findings, the experiment XENON100 at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy has so far yielded only negative results in regards to WIMPs. That isn't to say that WIMPs don't exist, merely that they are harder to detect than scientists had previously presumed.

4. Faster-than-light travel

~ Some of Einstein's theories have crumbled with time, but what about lightspeed travel …

Admit it — if you've ever watched Han Solo and Chewie take the Millennium Falcon to light speed, or stared in awe the first time you saw the Starship Enterprise jump to maximum warp, you've wanted to see faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Surprising all of us, last year it almost seemed possible. The Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus (OPERA), another experimental instrument operating at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, is in part looking at whether or not particles called neutrinos may be able to break this cosmic speed limit.

This highly sophisticated instrument has given results leading some to believe that they have caught neutrinos moving faster than light. A set of neutrinos was sent from CERN's lab in Geneva through the Earth and then observed at the OPERA lab under Sasso Mountain. The entire trip was recorded to have taken under 3 milliseconds, 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have taken.

Needless to say, there are many who have their doubts. Proving faster-than-light travel exists would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which states that the speed of light (186,282 miles per second, or 671 million miles per hour) is a cosmic constant and that nothing can travel faster than this limit — a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe.

If FTL travel is in fact possible, it opens the door to the possibility of time travel as well. Don't get too excited — there won't be any quick hops to the future in your DeLorean to pick up the next lotto numbers or buy a Gray's Sports Almanac from a local thrift shop. If neutrinos are traveling faster than light, though, they could theoretically arrive somewhere before they departed, so communication to the past may be a possibility. If we could somehow take advantage of this, you could make your alternate past self wealthy by sending a message encoded in neutrinos to invest heavily, for example, in Google stock at the time the company first went public.

But then again, if one can send a message to the past, we must also say goodbye to relativity and causality as we know them. Since cause would no longer need to procede effect, before and after would cease to have meaning. People would retire before graduating from grade school, and eventually, the universe as we know it would cease to be. Speaking of which...

5. How will it all end?

~ A planetary collision is just one of the many theories as to how we'll meet our demis …

Assuming the standard model is true, our universe's end will likely all come down to one of three theories, each of which depends upon three things: the shape of the universe, how much dark energy is contained within it, and how the densities of dark energy will respond to the expansion of the universe.

There are believed to be three possible shapes of the universe: an open universe, a flat universe, and a closed plane of space-time.

In an open universe (think of a gigantic, saddle-shaped object), the universe is likely to experience the Big Freeze. In this scenario, the universe will continue to expand until matter has stretched incredibly thin, the stars have all burnt out, galaxies have ceased creating new stars to replace them, and all mass as we know it has ceased to exist. Everything will become dark and cold. The universe won't so much as end as it will simply fizzle out, settling into a silent and lonely slumber at absolute zero.

Another possibility for universal armageddon is the Big Rip. Not as dependent on the shape of the universe as much as the amount of dark energy contained within it, this model implies that the acceleration of the universe will continue to increase without slowing, and the dark energy will become so strong that it will overwhelm the other elemental forces. Galaxies, suns, and planets alike will begin tearing themselves apart, all ending in a gravitational singularity — a place in which the standard rules of physics and relativity no longer apply.

Somewhat less unsettling is the theory of the Big Crunch, in which the universe will continue to expand until matter begins to slow the rate of expansion. Once slowed enough, the expansion will eventually come to a halt and begin to retract. Everything — planets, suns, galaxies, black holes, even the indestructible iPad 7000 — will all come crashing back together, culminating in a Big Crunch: essentially the opposite of the Big Bang that kicked our universe off in the first place. The bright side here is that the crunch is thought to be succeeded by yet another Big Bang and the creation of a whole new universe. Unfortunately, of the three, the Big Crunch is currently the least favored hypothesis within the physics community — meaning our dreams of an endlessly cycling universe of birth, destruction, and rebirth may end up being relegated to the realm of science fiction.

[Image credits: David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Lucas Taylor, Richard Massey/NASA/ESA, Lynette Cook/Gemini Observatory/AURA]

This article was written by Jordan Goodson and originally appeared on
Tecca | Today in Tech @ 1 Feb 2012

I CAN GUESS YOUR PHONE NUMBER !!

2012-01-16T15:40:00.003+08:00

If your handphone number is 91234567 (example for Singapore handphone)
~ Ignore the 1st number "9" ...this puzzle is using the remaining 7 numbers which is 1234567 for this case...try it....

Step 1 : enter "123"(your 1st 3 digit)
Step 2 : x 80
Step 3 : +1
Step 4 : x 250
Step 5 : + "4567" (your last 4 digits)
repeat Step 5 1 more time
Step 7 : - 250
Step 8 : Divide by 2
What did you get ?? Bingo !!

How To Never Lose in Tic Tac Toe When You Start

2012-01-16T15:20:00.000+08:00

Trick Dice Hack!

2012-01-16T14:59:00.000+08:00

Always roll a 7 ??? It is possible...here's how to do it !

Cloud comes down to interact with man (UAE)

2012-01-16T14:26:00.003+08:00

This is one of the strangest videos I've ever seen. I'm betting you'll say the same. Now, I'm not saying it couldn't be faked, but if it is it's very well done. And what if it's not?

I had a Palestinian friend translate the Arabic. Here's what she said:

Yes the man is in a dessert area and the cloud starts to fall. Hes amazed that this is happening and keeps saying "god is one" . He mentions "you might believe me or you might not.." Also when he had the other guy take the phone and capture him , he was saying how he can reach through it. When he comes back to tape he says this is one of life's world wonders.

Spoiler !!...DO NOT scroll down until you have finished watching the TOP video...

This MAY explains it !!

Someone put soap into the water fountain ....

10 Unsolved Mysteries

2012-01-16T13:30:00.001+08:00

Mass Bird and Fish Deaths in Arkansas a Cause for Concern?

2012-01-06T16:06:00.001+08:00

By: Lauren Williams | Posted: January 3, 2011

Like the scene out of some horror movie, about 5,000 blackbirds dropped dead New Year's Eve in Beebe, Ark., littering the ground with bird carcasses. If that's not weird enough, over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of dead drum fish have been found floating in the Arkansas River, in an area about 125 miles from Beebe.

The folks at Jezebel joke that this is the beginning of a biblical plague, but scientists say the bird deaths were most likely caused by severe weather conditions, and the fish could also have died because of drastic weather or maybe just disease. Still, the last way we want to start 2011 is with creepy, mysterious mass animal deaths.

The return of Arkansas' mass bird deaths

2012-01-06T16:04:00.002+08:00

By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – Mon, Jan 2, 2012

Ominously, scores of blackbirds once again fell from the sky above a small southern town on New Year's Eve. But this time, intentional mischief may be to blame

Here we go again? Last New Year's Eve, some 5,000 blackbirds dropped from the sky in Beebe, Ark., a small town about 35 miles from Little Rock. The subsequent media frenzy fueled plenty of dire apocalyptic theories. This weekend, the New Year once again brought scores of dead blackbirds to Beebe. Here, a concise guide to the seemingly eerie coincidence:

~ For the second New Year's in a row, flocks of blackbirds, disoriented by local fireworks, flew into buildings and trees, their dead bodies littering an Arkansas town.

Why did the birds die last year?
The conventional wisdom says: Fireworks. The celebratory explosions unexpectedly caused the birds to become disoriented and "fly all over the place," according to Arkansas officials. Birds slammed into buildings, telephone poles, and trees, according to state officials.

Why were blackbirds specifically afflicted?
They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Beebe is home to a large roost of blackbirds. The birds, who don't usually fly at night, have poor vision in the dark. That makes them particularly vulnerable to mishaps after being unnerved by fireworks.

And this year?
Fireworks were again involved, but this year's spooking seems to have been premeditated. Officials say the roughly 200 dead birds appear to have been the victims of an intentional crime. "We know that there was evidence of fireworks set off in the middle of the roost, and it wasn't a coincidence," reads an Arkansas Game and Fish Commission statement. Indeed, says one resident. "We started hearing the fireworks going off, and some gun shots going off in the air, and it really seemed like people were trying to recreate last year's New Year's."

Does everyone buy that explanation?
No. Plenty of people are doggedly interpreting this year's incident as yet another sign of the apocalypse. Indiana pastor Paul Begley, for one, remains convinced that the bird deaths prove God is fulfilling the Hosea prophecy, in which humanity is punished for its many sins. "It's time to listen to the word of the Lord," he says.

More Than 100,000 Fish Die Miles From Site Of Arkansas Bird Deaths

2012-01-06T15:57:00.001+08:00

Written by NewsOne Staff on January 3, 2011 11:38 am

Arkansas — First birds dropped dead from the skies, now thousands of fish have died in Arkansas.Officials are investigating what may have killed some 100,000 fish in the Arkansas River in the northwestern section of the state, authorities said on Sunday.

Deceased drum fish littered 20 miles of the river near Ozark, Keith Stephens of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission told CNN. The dead fish were first found on Thursday, and fisheries officials are conducting tests to understand what killed them.

“The fish kill only affected one species of fish,” Stephens said. “If it was from a pollutant, it would have affected all of the fish, not just drum fish.”

This fish mystery took place more than 125 miles from the town of Beebe, where officials are still trying to determine what caused 5,000 blackbirds to suddenly fall from the sky on New Year’s Eve.

From NYDailyNews

Hantu Penanggalan

2012-01-06T15:51:00.000+08:00

By Susan Tam | Yahoo! Malaysia Newsroom – Tue, Jan 3, 2012

~ Hantu Penanggalan

A flying head with long hair and dangling stomach sac and intestines.
This is the image of the most horrifying type of vampire known in Malay and Indonesian folklore - the Hantu Penanggalan, a vampire that thirsts for the blood of a newborn baby.

The demon — described as a ghostly head dismantled from its body gets its name from the root word "tanggal", which means to disengage.
There are different versions of how her head was separated from her body, but all versions share the same story about her origin - the Hantu Penanggalan was a result of a beautiful woman dying at childbirth.

Two versions of how the separation process or "penanggalan" happens.
The first involves the death of a beautiful woman after becoming disengaged or "tanggal" from her baby during childbirth. Mediums and black magic practitioners would dig up bodies of these women to create the Hantu Penaggalan.
"The medium or bomoh will use the blood of the dead mother to call or seru its spirit to form this vampire," University Malaya's associate professor Datuk Zainal Abidin Borhan told Yahoo! Malaysia in an interview.

The Malay animism expert explained that the medium or bomoh could become masters of the Hantu Penanggalan if they made yearly offerings to it.
This vampire could appear as an ordinary woman in the day, and turn into the ghastly being by nightfall. Some believed she disguised herself as a midwife to give her access to newborns.

The second dismantling process or "penanggalan" takes place when the woman's head becomes disengaged from her body when she turns into a Hantu Penanggalan.
Carol Laderman, author of Wives and Midwives: Childbirth and Nutrition in Rural Malaysia, wrote that there were two accounts on how the vampire's head separated from her body.

The first involved a woman studying black magic with the devil or syaitan. She was taught how to disengage her head to fly around and hunt for women in labour.
The second was about a woman who desired supernatural powers and was told to bath naked in a large wooden vat of palm wine or vinegar. The practice of bathing naked was unheard of in a traditional Malay village, because women were expected to bath with a sarong to maintain modesty.

"When a man came upon her unexpectedly, she was so startled that, on trying to escape, she slipped and kicked her chin with such force that the skin split around her neck. Her head was tied to the intestines and separated from her body and flew off. Her internal organs' twinkled like fireflies through the night," wrote Laderman.

Malay folklore believers find that the Hantu Penanggalan usually sits on a roof or a tall tree, surveying the area for a child to be born. You could spot her if you happen to pick up the smell of vinegar.

~ Hantu Penanggalan - arguably the scariest demon in Malaysian folklore

Trapping or killing the Hantu Penanggalan is not easy, but Malay folklore believers suggest several practical measures to destroy this terrifying woman-vampire.

Ask any midwife (who is not a Hantu Penanggalan herself) on how to deter this vampire and they would tell you to keep knife or scissors nearby a newborn infant. The vampire fears sharp metal instruments as her entrails could get caught in them.

New mothers were advised to have a midwife who was skilled with chants that could be used to protect the infant from this vampire. The midwife would have to prepare a concoction made out of rice, salt, diced turmeric, tamarind and soot. Together with a special chant, this would prevent the mother and child from being victims.

Other remedies offered by the Malay community was to place sharp and thorny pineapple plants under the houses of women in labour, or scatter thorny Mengkuang leaves in the surrounding areas of homes of new mothers. The Hantu Penanggalan's dangling intestines would get caught in the thorny leaves and once captured, you could kill the Hantu Penanggalan with a machete.

If you're braver, follow the Hantu Penanggalan to find out where her body is. Before her head could return to the body, pour pieces of broken glass into the cavity, these bits of glass would cut her intestines when her head returns.

'Oily men’ strike fear in Malaysian village

2012-01-04T10:19:00.003+08:00

Reported By Jeanette Tan | Yahoo! Newsroom – 4 Jan 2012

Residents of a village in Selangor, Malaysia are on the lookout for what they say are two supernatural beings that have been terrorising their homes and families.

Known as orang minyak or “oily men”, the creatures are said to be human-shaped and sized, but are dressed only in their underwear and appear to be covered from head to toe in shiny black oil.

The beings were first brought to light by P. Ramlee’s 1956 film entitled Sumpah Orang Minyak (The Curse of the Oily Man), and were featured again in a 2007 local production going by their namesake, but the villagers of Kampung Laksamana in Gombak, Selangor, are convinced there is truth to this phenomenon.

Malaysian newspaper The Star reported that since just before the Christmas period, villagers have told of numerous sightings of the creatures. Over the Christmas period, the paper reported that some 200 people patrolled the village streets, many of whom brandished parangs (machetes) and axes.

Residents, it reported, have also vowed to continue their nightly patrols until the two creatures are caught.

One resident who spoke to the paper, 33-year-old Aslam Khan, who claimed to have seen both the orang minyak, described one to be tall, stocky and bald, and the other to be thin and curly-haired.

“It was breathing really loudly, like a cow,” Aslam said, relating one occasion where he spotted the bald orang minyak hiding behind the water tank of a house in the wee hours of the morning.

“It was black and shiny,” he continued. “When I shone my light on it, the thing stuck out its head to look back at me. Before I could do anything, it climbed up the roof and disappeared.”

Legend has it that orang minyak are humans who practice dark arts, either because they made deals with the devil in exchange for personal wishes or were forced into doing so after botched black magic rituals. They are supposedly required to rape anywhere between 40 and 99 virgins, whom the orang minyak are said to be able to recognise, before being liberated from their circumstances, or in order to hold up their end of the deals, depending on which story you read or movie you watch.

Another Malaysian daily, the Sinar Harian, reported that encounters with an orang minyak compelled a family to move out of their house after being tormented by it over five days.

36-year-old Kamal Bahari Satar told the Sinar Harian that his sister-in-law saw the “apparition” inside and outside their house, adding that only female members of the family were able to see it.

It apparently locked some of his family inside the house on Christmas eve, and he said that they saw a “black heap” beneath their kitchen table.

“When other residents poked it with a bamboo stick, we could see blood stains,” he told the daily, adding that police also found black footprints outside their house that evening.

Islamic faith healers who spoke to The Star said that orang minyak douse their bodies in oil in order to assist with camouflage and evade capture, and cannot use violence to do so, only magic.

“It also keeps on coming back to the same place to taunt the people and show off its abilities,” said Darussalam healer Ustaz Ismail Kamus, who also told the paper that they tend to take a few months to learn the magic that is involved, but an orang minyak that has mastered the black magic will be able to walk through walls and vanish into thin air.

Previous sightings of orang minyak in Malaysia, however, have turned out to have less to do with the supernatural than with human foibles. A Yahoo! Malaysia report relates how in September last year, residents in the Taman Pinggiran Batu Caves, located just two kilometres away from Kampung Laksamana, captured a man who was disguised as an orang minyak. Police later arrested the imposter, whom the report said was believed to be a black magic practitioner.

The villagers have since filed a police report and sought help from alternative healers, including a bomoh, reported The Star. They also organise nightly prayer sessions seeking protection from the evil “spirits”.

They say this episode might be a blessing in disguise, however, as residents have rallied together against the creatures despite differing political differences.

Office worker K Paramisavam told The Star that he never really spoke to his neighbours before this, saying, “At the most, I would just acknowledge them (in the past). Now I actually talk and get to know them. The ‘neighbourly’ spirit has been enhanced by these happenings.”

Possible UFO in Kansas ,USA ?

2011-12-22T12:09:00.001+08:00

Residents of Cowley County, Kansas caused a sensation last week when they captured video of the military towing a concealed object on a flatbed truck down US Highway 77. It wasn't long before a wave of speculation hit, claiming the object was a UFO.

Depending on the angle from which you spotted it, the 30 foot-wide mysterious craft appeared to be saucer-shaped. It was so large that local law enforcement had to remove roadside signage so it could pass through. But it was covered in a tightly concealed tarp, making any further examination impossible.

~ Dec.13, 2011

A closer look...

Mexico Mayan region launches apocalypse countdown

2011-12-22T11:25:00.002+08:00

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Seize the day.

Only 52 weeks and a day are left before Dec. 21, 2012, when some believe the Maya predicted the end of the world.

Unlike enthusiasts of other doomsday theories who suggest putting together survival kits, southeastern Mexico, the heart of Maya territory, plans a yearlong celebration.

Mexico's tourism agency expects to draw 52 million visitors by next year only to the regions of Chiapas, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Campeche. All of Mexico usually lures about 22 million foreigners in a year.

It's selling the date, the Winter Solstice in the coming year, as a time of renewal. Many archeologists argue that the 2012 reference on a 1,300-year-old stone tablet only marks the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar.

"The world will not end. It is an era," said Yeanet Zaldo, a tourism spokeswoman for the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, home to Cancun. "For us, it is a message of hope."

Cities and towns in the Mayan region on Wednesday will start the yearlong countdown. In Chiapas the town of Tapachula on the Guatemalan border will start a countdown on an 8-foot digital clock in the main park exactly a year before the mysterious date.

In the nearby archaeological site of Izapa, Maya priests will burn incense, chant and offer prayers.

In the tropical jungle of Quintana Roo, between the resorts of Cancun and Playa del Carmen, people are putting messages and photos in a time capsule that will be buried for 50 years. Maya priests and Indian dancers will perform a ritual at the time capsule ceremony.

Yucatan state has announced plans to complete the Maya Museum of Merida by next summer.

"People who still live in Mayan villages will host rites and burn incense for us to go back in time and try to understand the Mayan wisdom," Zaldo said.

The Maya reputation for wisdom has people taking the alleged prediction seriously.

The Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D., had a talent for astronomy

Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and they wrote that the 13th Baktun ends on Dec. 21, 2012.

The doomsday theories stem from a stone tablet discovered in the 1960s at the archaeological site of Tortuguero in the Gulf of Mexico state of Tabasco that describes the return of a Mayan god at the end of a 13th period.

Believers have taken the end-of-the world fears to the Internet with hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs.

"The Maya are viewed by many westerners as exotic folks that were supposed to have had some special, secret knowledge," said Mayan scholar Sven Gronemeyer. "What happens is that our expectations and fears get projected on the Maya calendar."

Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia compares the supposed Mayan prophecies to the "Y2K" hype, when people feared all computer systems would crash when the new millennium began on Jan. 1, 2000.

For some reason, Gronemeyer says, people have ignored evidence that dates beyond 2012 were recorded.

The blogosphere exploded with more speculation when Mexico's archaeology institute acknowledged on Nov. 24 a second reference to Dec. 21, 2012, on a brick found at other ruins.

"Human beings seem to be attracted by apocalyptic ideas and always assume the worst," Gronemeyer said.

It's all a bit frustrating for serious Mayan researchers whose field has made huge strides in recent years.

"This new historical and archaeological knowledge is so much more interesting and mind-blowing than the fantastical claims about Maya prophecies one sees on TV, books or on the Internet," David Stuart, a specialist in Mayan epigraphy at the University of Texas at Austin, said in an email to The Associated Press. "We're dealing with thousands of newly deciphered texts and trying to weave together a coherent picture of Maya history and culture, which to me is as exciting as it gets."

While the 2012 hype might increase interest in the Maya, "that will probably be offset by the long and difficult effort ahead to correct the ubiquitous lies and misconceptions, even after 2012 has come and gone," he wrote.

Jonnie Channell of Albuquerque, New Mexico, says that 2012 "is going to be one of those things where people are definitely going to have to plan," not because of impending apocalypse, but because hotel rooms in the Maya region are probably going to be full.

Channell, who owns Maya Sites Travel Services, is surprised that she already has 24 reservations for three tour packages she is offering to major Mayan ruin sites in the week leading up to the solstice.

She named one "Beginning the New Calendar Era Under the Yucatan Stars."

"We put together these tours, and we've got lots of signups, and people are excited about it," she said. "If anybody think it's going to be the end of the world, then they better stay home."

By ADRIANA GOMEZ LICON | AP – Wed, Dec 21, 2011
Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson contributed to this report

First Earth-sized planets found beyond solar system

2011-12-21T21:24:00.001+08:00

~ An artist's rendering shows a planet called Kepler-20e in this handout released December 20, 2011.

Article By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Astronomers have found a pair of Earth-sized planets orbiting a star similar to the sun, though neither are believed to be suitable for life, scientists on NASA's Kepler telescope team said on Tuesday.

The discovery follows confirmation earlier this month of a super-Earth sized planet, called Kepler-22b, that circles the right distance from its parent star for liquid water to exist on its surface. Water is believed to be a key ingredient for life.

"Kepler-22b has the right temperature, but it is too big. (The planets) we're announcing today are just the right size, but too hot," astronomer David Charbonneau with Harvard University, told reporters during a conference call.

"But you can bet that the hunt is on to find a planet that combines the best of both worlds, a true Earth twin," he said.

The newly discovered planets, called Kepler-20e and 20f, have at least three gas-giant siblings, one of the larger planetary systems found to date.

But the family is nothing like our solar system, where rocky worlds like Venus, Earth and Mars are grouped together closer in toward the sun while gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are segregated in the outer regions.

The two Earth-like and three Neptune-sized planets in the Kepler-20 family are interspersed and all orbit closer to the parent star than our solar system's innermost planet, Mercury.

"Rocky planets and gas giants happily mingle together. This is the first time we've seen anything like this," Charbonneau said.

Kepler-20e and 20f, which are believed to be too hot for liquid water, probably are not habitable - at least not today.

"If Kepler-20f was formed with water, which I think is likely, then it could have held on to its water for several billions of years ," said astronomer Linda Elkins-Tanton with the Carnegie Institute in Washington D.C.

"And that means that this planet could have been habitable in the past for a long period," she said.

The system is located about 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.

Light travels at about 299,337 km per second.

(Editing by Kevin Gray and Sandra Maler)

Treasure hunters eye huge silver haul from WWII ship

2011-09-28T14:56:00.003+08:00

Source from AFP News :

When the SS Gairsoppa was torpedoed by a German U-boat 70 years ago, it took its huge silver cargo to a watery grave. US divers are working to recover what may be the biggest shipwreck haul ever, valued at some $210 million.

Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration on Monday confirmed the identity and location of the Gairsoppa, and cited official documents indicating the British ship was carrying some 219 tons of silver when it sank in 1941 in the North Atlantic some 300 miles (490 kilometers) off the Irish coast.

Valued then at 600,000 pounds, the silver today is worth about $210 million, which would make it history's largest recovery of precious metals lost at sea, Odyssey said.

"We've accomplished the first phase of this project -- the location and identification of the target shipwreck -- and now we're hard at work planning for the recovery phase," Odyssey senior project manager Andrew Craig said in a statement.

"Given the orientation and condition of the shipwreck, we are extremely confident that our planned salvage operation will be well suited for the recovery of this silver cargo."

Recovery is expected to begin next spring.

After a competitive tender process the British government awarded Odyssey an exclusive salvage contract for the cargo, and under the agreement Odyssey will retain 80 percent of the silver bullion salvaged from the wreck.

The 412-foot (125-meter) Gairsoppa had been sailing from India back to Britain in February 1941 bearing a cargo of silver, pig iron and tea, and was in a convoy of ships when a storm hit. Running low on fuel, the Gairsoppa broke off from the convoy and set a course for Galway, Ireland.

It never made it, succumbing to a German torpedo in the contested waters of the North Atlantic. Of the 85 people on board, only one survived.

The Gairsoppa came to rest nearly 15,400 feet (4,700 meters) below the surface, where for decades it was lost to the world. A previous effort to locate the shipwreck failed.

Odyssey found it relatively quickly, and insists the depth of the site won't prevent a full cargo recovery.

"We were fortunate to find the shipwreck sitting upright, with the holds open and easily accessible," Odyssey chief executive Greg Stemm said.

"This should enable us to unload cargo through the hatches as would happen with a floating ship alongside a cargo terminal."

Odyssey is a world leader in deep-ocean exploration and has numerous shipwreck hunting projects in process around the globe.

In May 2007, it announced it had found half a million silver coins and hundreds of gold objects from a ship they code-named the "Black Swan," which went down in 1804 in the Atlantic off the Strait of Gibraltar. The find is being contested by Spain, which claims the trove.

In the latest operation, the firm recently conducted remotely operated vehicles from its main ship, the Odyssey Explorer, to inspect the Gairsoppa wreck. It acquired still and video imagery from the site which were used to confirm the identify and evaluate the condition of the ship.

~ Handout image courtesy of the Odyssey Marine Exploration shows a stern compass of the SS Gairsoppa on the top of the poop deck

Photographs released by the company show clear details of the Gairsoppa, including a ladder leading to the forecastle deck, a waist-high compass used by the helmsman, even the hole in the steel hull blown open by the torpedo.

~ Graphic on the last voyage of the SS Gairsoppa, torpedoed by a German U-boat in World War II, carrying 219 tons of silver. Florida-based company Odyssey Marine Exploration is working to recover the treasures.

The find highlights the influential role that modern technology has come to play in the business of finding shipwrecks, with vastly improved sonar equipment, global positioning systems and advanced deepwater robots that scour the world's oceans for booty.

UNESCO estimates there are some three million shipwrecks worldwide, with billions of dollars in sunken treasures and priceless knowledge that can be recovered from the depths of the ocean, including vast amounts of naturally occurring copper, silver, gold and zinc deposits waiting to be discovered

"The majority of the world's ocean floor has not yet been explored," said Odyssey president Mark Gordon, who told AFP that the discovery at some 4,700 meters (15,400 feet) beneath below the ocean's surface is a treasure trove for companies like his.

"We know more about the surface of the moon than we know about the deepest parts of the oceans. It's exciting to be working at depths like these and to be among the pioneers of deep ocean exploration in this unexplored frontier."

Japan noodle museum opens doors

2011-09-23T11:03:00.001+08:00

Japan's Nissin Foods opened a cup noodle museum on Saturday charting the history of the speedy snack where visitors even get the chance to create their own tasty version.

About 500 adults and children queued up before the museum opened in the port city of Yokohama near Tokyo with celebrity guests ranging from a former prime minister to a retail business tycoon.

"We opened this place... as a factory that gives children experience and a museum for corporate activities," Nissin Foods Holdings president Koki Ando said.

Ando, whose late father Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles more than half a century ago, said visitors could knead flour, roll out noodles, steam and fry them to make chicken ramen which is then put into bags.

Children in aprons set to work making noodles under the watchful gaze of guests including former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, Japanese premier from 2001-2006.

In another area of the museum called "My Cup Noodle Factory", visitors can design cups, put dried noodles in them and pick toppings and broth for their own versions of cupped meals -- with the potential to create more than 5,000 different versions.

The museum exhibits packages of Nissin instant noodles from around the world over the decades and houses restaurants that serve food such as Vietnamese pho noodles and pasta from Italy.

There are giant cup noodle containers in the museum for children to play in.

Momofuku Ando, the man credited with inventing instant noodles, took a lower-profile role in the business at the ripe old age of 95 in 2005, the year Nissin supplied vacuum packed instant noodles or "Space Ram" to a Japanese astronaut aboard a US space shuttle.

Ando died of acute heart failure in 2007.

The businessman, born in 1910 in Taiwan under Japanese occupation, entered the food business when Japan was hungry after World War II and invented the world's first instant noodles, chicken ramen noodles sold in bags, in 1958.

He launched the cupped version in 1971 with a pre-cooked slab of noodles in a waterproof styrofoam container.

Ando saw his invention stocked on the shelves of convenience stores around the world.

As the products were widely replicated, more than 95 billion servings were consumed around the globe in 2010, according to the Japanese instant noodles manufacturers' association.

Ando said he was inspired to develop the product when he saw a long line of people waiting to buy soup noodles at a black market stall in post-war Japan.

"Peace prevails when food suffices," he was quoted as saying.

The museum is Nissin's second devoted to instant noodles after one opened in the western Japan province of Osaka in 1999.

The multi-storey Yokohama museum has a total floor space of 10,000 square metres (107,600 square feet) -- three times bigger than the Osaka museum.

By Yoshikazu Tsuno | AFP News – Sat, Sep 17, 2011

Hiroshima bomb impact

2011-09-21T08:56:00.000+08:00

Amazing Timelapse of Earth

2011-09-21T08:34:00.001+08:00

Science educator James Drake built this amazing timelapse video from the perspective of the International Space Station as it flew over North and South America.

He created this video by downloading a series of 600 photographs that were available online at the Gateway to Astronomy Photograph of Earth, and then stitching them together into a complete video.

Amazing volcanic activity seen from space

2011-09-21T08:17:00.001+08:00

This May 23, 2006, photo released by NASA shows the eruption of Cleveland Volcano, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, as photographed by an Expedition 13 crew member on the International Space Station. The image captures the ash plume of the very short-lived eruption.

Photo Courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center

Japanese girl delighted by bottle found in Hawaii

2011-09-21T08:09:00.002+08:00

By MARI YAMAGUCHI , Sep 18, 2011

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese teenager expressed her gratitude Sunday after a U.S. sailor in Hawaii found a bottle she had tossed into the sea off Japan's southern coast as a child, and said she was delighted to be reconnected with her old classmates as a result.

Saki Arikawa, 17, said she had almost forgotten about the bottle and initially couldn't believe it was found after five years.

In a telephone interview with The Associated Press from her hometown in Kagoshima, she said "it's a miracle" the bottle was found. "It's incredible," she said.

The clear glass bottle was found Thursday by Navy Petty Officer Jon Moore during a beach cleanup at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai island.

~ U.S. Navy electrician's Mate 2nd Class Jon Moore removes a message from a bottle sent from Kagoshima, Japan more than five years ago

The bottle contained four origami cranes — symbols of peace in Japan — as well as a photo of Arikawa's elementary school class and a note dated March 25, 2006, and signed by Arikawa saying she wanted it to be "a graduation memory."

~ A photo of 6th grade students from Kagoshima, Japan found in a bottle by Petty Officer Jon Moore during a cleanup on a beach at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai Island

News of the bottle's recovery reconnected more than a dozen of her old classmates, now studying at different high schools, and their elementary school homeroom teacher for a reunion Saturday. Arikawa says she now wants to further expand the circle of friendship.

"Thanks to the bottle, some of us could get together and had a great time," she said. "Now I'd like to meet the person who kindly saved my bottle."

The bottle was one of five she tossed into the ocean in 2006 as her sixth-grade class graduated from Kokubu Elementary School in Kagoshima. She and her 31 classmates dropped five bottles each, including the one that turned up last week.

Three other bottles had previously been recovered, including two in Alaska and a third at another location in Hawaii.

The Navy said Moore was among 40 base personnel and 16 students and faculty from a Kauai school who picked up beach trash in observance of International Coastal Cleanup Day.

200-year-old letter by Raffles on Singpore

2011-09-20T11:20:00.003+08:00

By Philip Lim @ 19/9/2011

A nearly illegible letter from almost two centuries ago is kept in a dim, cold room in downtown Singapore accessible only to a privileged few via an electronic swipe card.

In flowing script dated June 9, 1819, Singapore's colonial founder Stamford Raffles described the island's formative days as a regional trading port in the Malay archipelago, and it turned out to be prophetic.

"The Settlement I had the satisfaction to form in this very centrical and commanding station has had every success ... our Port is already crowded with shipping from all the native Ports in the Archipelago," he wrote.

~ letters from centuries ago displayed in a room that is home to the Rare Materials Collection (RMC) of Singapore's National Library.

The letter, as well as some 7,000 other items in the room, form the Rare Materials Collection (RMC) of Singapore's National Library, offering a more intimate look into the past of what is now one of the world's busiest ports.

"The history textbook doesn't cover everything," senior librarian Ong Eng Chuan told an AFP reporter who was allowed briefly into the chamber.

"The RMC gives you an interesting perspective of Singapore, from a small fishing village to an international trading port," Ong told AFP.

"It offers an interesting window for the generation now to look into Singapore, and how it has developed into the current place that it is now."

Stepping into the RMC may seem rather underwhelming at first as nondescript boxes containing books and documents sit neatly on shelves with no indication of their historical importance.

The boxes -- made from acid-free paper -- as well as the 18-20 degree celsius (64-68 degree Fahrenheit) temperature, 50-55 percent humidity and dim lighting are necessary to prevent the collection from degrading, Ong said.

People allowed to handle the documents have to wear gloves.

"Some of our hands might have sweat, and the moisture is not good for the paper," he said.

~Senior librarian Ong Eng Chuan flipping through the pages of old newspaper Syonan Sinbun, on display in the Rare Materials Collection (RMC) of Singapore's National Library

Physical access to the RMC is strictly limited on a "case-by-case basis," with librarians routinely referring people asking to view the collection to digital versions posted on the library's website.

Anyone asking to see the real collection needs a pretty good reason.

"Seeing the actual item has an X factor that can make it more interesting for the people, but we have to balance the need to preserve the item and the need to provide access to the content," Ong said.

Publications kept by the RMC include European travelogues from as early as 1577, biographical accounts of daily life in Malaya and even love poems and cookbooks from a hundred years ago.

"The Mem's Own Cookery Book" -- meant for the wives of British administrators who established colonies around Asia at the time -- features recipes to suit the tastebuds of homesick Englishmen.

Recipes for spinach soup, roast hare and pigeon mingle with tips for more adventurous fare like jungle deer curry and sheep head broth.

In contrast, the "Hikayat Abdullah," an 1849 biography of the father of modern Malay literature Munshi Abdullah, offered a unique perspective often missing from records largely penned by Western authors, librarian Ong said.

"It offers an Asian perspective in contrast to the accounts you see from the East India company's records and the memoirs written by those officials," he stated.

In the biography, Abdullah praises Raffles -- who had employed him as a translator -- but offered a less than complimentary description of British sailors who docked in his hometown Malacca, now part of Malaysia.

"To see an Englishman was like seeing a tiger, because they were so mischievous and violent... At that time I never met an Englishman who had a white face, for all of them had 'mounted the green horse', that is to say, were drunk," he wrote.

"So much so that when children cried their mothers would say, 'Be quiet, the drunken Englishman is coming,' and the children would be scared, and keep quiet."

John Solomon, a postgraduate student from Australia's University of New South Wales, accessed the RMC twice for his research on 19th-century transmarine convicts sent to Singapore.

"As a historian, I enjoy being able to physically handle material from the period. It gives the past this powerful sense of immediacy and presence," he said.

"Being in contact with the physical material also makes me realise that Singapore's story is not merely an account of economic and social policies but is also enmeshed in the everyday struggles and triumphs of individuals from vastly different circumstances."

Japanese Tsunami Viewed From A Car

2011-09-19T09:54:00.003+08:00

Yu Muroga is a Japanese driver. It was his tour took place when the earthquake March 11, 2011. Like most people of his area, he did not feel threatened by the tsumani, as it was far enough from the coast. So he continued to drive and do its job. The HD camera mounted on the dashboard has not only captured the shock but also the moments that followed, where many drivers were stranded by the waters of the tsunami.

Note : The "Dancing" man at the road junction is due to EARTHQUAKE (ground shaking)

Visible Only From Above, Mystifying 'Nazca Lines' Discovered in Mideast

2011-09-19T09:26:00.001+08:00

By Owen Jarus | LiveScience.com – Thu, Sep 15, 2011

The giant stone structures form wheel shapes with spokes often radiating inside. Here a cluster of wheels in the Azraq Oasis. CREDIT: David D. Boyer

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.

They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.

Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across. [See gallery of wheel structures]

"In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.

Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use.

His team's studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the structures may have been used for or what meaning they held. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]

Fascinating structures

Kennedy's main area of expertise is in Roman archaeology, but he became fascinated by these structures when, as a student, he read accounts of Royal Air Force pilots flying over them in the 1920s on airmail routes across Jordan. "You can't not be fascinated by these things," Kennedy said.

Indeed, in 1927 RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an account of the ruins in the journal Antiquity. He reported encountering them over "lava country" and said that they, along with the other stone structures, are known to the Bedouin as the "works of the old men."

Kennedy and his team have been studying the structures using aerial photography and Google Earth, as the wheels are hard to pick up from the ground, Kennedy said.

"Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make out something of a pattern but not very easily," he said. "Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes sharply into focus what the shape is."

The designs must have been clearer when they were originally built. "People have probably walked over them, walked past them, for centuries, millennia, without having any clear idea what the shape was."

(The team has created an archive of images of the wheels from various sites in the Middle East.)

What were they used for ?

So far, none of the wheels appears to have been excavated, something that makes dating them, and finding out their purpose, more difficult. Archaeologists studying them in the pre-Google Earth era speculated that they could be the remains of houses or cemeteries. Kennedy said that neither of these explanations seems to work out well.

"There seems to be some overarching cultural continuum in this area in which people felt there was a need to build structures that were circular."

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said.

In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy's team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East.

The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. "On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn't struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out," Kennedy said.

Cairns are often found associated with the wheels. Sometimes they circle the perimeter of the wheel, other times they are in among the spokes. In Saudi Arabia some of the cairns look, from the air, like they are associated with ancient burials.

Dating the wheels is difficult, since they appear to be prehistoric, but could date to as recently as 2,000 years ago. The researchers have noted that the wheels are often found on top of kites, which date as far back as 9,000 years, but never vice versa. "That suggests that wheels are more recent than the kites," Kennedy said.

Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy, told Live Science in an email that she agrees these structures can be referred to as geoglyphs in the same way as the Nazca Lines are. "If we define a 'geoglyph' as a wide sign on the ground of artificial origin, the stone circles are geoglyphs," Sparavignawrote in her email.

The function of the wheels may also have been similar to the enigmatic drawings in the Nazca desert. [Science as Art: A Gallery]

"If we consider, more generally, the stone circles as worship places of ancestors, or places for rituals connected with astronomical events or with seasons, they could have the same function of [the] geoglyphs of South America, the Nazca Lines for instance. The design is different, but the function could be the same," she wrote in her email.

Kennedy said that for now the meaning of the wheels remains a mystery. "The question is what was the purpose?"

Awesome Paris Lighting

2011-09-19T09:19:00.001+08:00

A chance photo taken from the window of an apartment captures an amazing moment.

Massive 20m deep crater opens up in German town

2011-09-19T09:16:00.000+08:00

An aerial view of a large crater that appeared in the early hours in the central German town of Schmalkalden, November 1, 2010. A huge crater measuring 30 by 40 metres (98 by 131 feet ) has opened up in the middle of a residential estate early in the morning on Monday, according to local police. No one was reported hurt in the incident

Residents in the German town of Schmalkalden probably had the shock of their lives when they opened their bedroom curtains as a giant crater had formed overnight.
There is no injuries but forcing the evacuation of 25 people.This huge hole caused by landslide or impact by meteor hit ? The experts are now still investigating..

Stormy weather @ USA

2011-09-19T09:07:00.000+08:00

Lightning flashes east of the Las Vegas Strip during a thunderstorm early on 13 September 2011.

Shanghainese women change attire on train

2011-09-19T08:55:00.001+08:00

By Fann Sim – Wed, Sep 14, 2011

Photos and videos of Shanghainese women undressing and changing their clothes on the train have surfaced on the Internet.

On 22 August, a netizen caused a stir after uploading photos and videos of a girl on Shanghai's Metro train. The video detailed a girl stripping down to her underwear and changing clothes inside the train cabin.

Netizens believed that she was either late for work or doing it for a publicity stunt as the clothes she changed into looked like a uniform for cosplaying purposes.

The woman changed into a "uniform" that looks like it's for cosplaying purposes.

Some have said that such an act is immoral and very unsightly to look at while others disagreed with the public outcry.

A Chinese user wrote, "What's the big deal? Society's development should mean more diversity/pluralism. If it's always traditional ideas, we won't keep up with the times/fashion. Does everyone still remember the 80s, where peeping (into) the ladies would result in being sentenced to death? Now that we think about it, wasn't that going too far?"

US astronomers find planet with two Suns

2011-09-18T16:16:00.000+08:00

US astronomers said Thursday they have discovered the first planet that is orbiting two Suns, much like the fictional home of Luke Skywalker featured in Star Wars.

Skywalker's native planet of Tatooine was hot and desert-like, but this planet, called Kepler-16b, is a freezing cold world about the size of Saturn, orbiting two parent Suns in a near perfect circle about 200 light years away.

The planet was glimpsed with the US space agency's Kepler space telescope, which monitors the brightness of 155,000 stars, according to the research published in the journal Science.

"This discovery is stunning," said co-author Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.

"Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality."

While astronomers have previously glimpsed planets they believed were orbiting two stars, they had never before seen one actually passing in front of its two Suns so this discovery offers the first proof.

"Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a circumbinary planet -- a planet orbiting not one, but two stars," said co-author Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"Once again, we're finding that our solar system is only one example of the variety of planetary systems nature can create."

If there were people on Kepler-16b, they could relax to the view of a double sunset, but such a scenario is highly unlikely due to the planet's extreme frigid surface temperature of -100 to -150 Fahrenheit (-73 to -101 Celsius).

The chill is likely due to the fact that even though the planet has two Suns which it orbits every 229 days at a distance of 65 million miles (105 million kilometers), they are smaller and cooler than our single Sun.

One of Kepler-16b's Suns is 20 percent as massive as ours, and the other is 69 percent as massive.

While the planet orbits them, the two Suns dance with each other in an "eccentric 41-day orbit," the study said.

The study was led by Kepler scientist Laurance Doyle of the California-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute.

AFP News – Fri, Sep 16, 2011

NASA’s Cassini orbiter snaps unbelievable picture of Saturn

2011-09-11T11:52:00.000+08:00

Science fiction movies have spoiled us on high definition views of our planetary neighbors, but real-life photographs with equal jaw-dropping potential are exceedingly rare. That's what makes NASA's awe-inspiring snapshot of Saturn (hi-res version here) such a stunning piece of eye candy.

Taken by NASA's Cassini robotic orbiter, the shot was captured from the dark side of Saturn as the Sun's bright rays illuminated every piece of dust and debris circling the planet. Cassini has offered astronomers a never-before-seen look at Saturn and revealed more information about the planet than any craft before it. The craft has taken so many pictures of the ringed wonder that they were recently made into a short flyby film that looks like it was created by George Lucas rather than a robotic space explorer.

The Cassini probe was launched in 1997 and took a further 7 years to reach Saturn's orbit. The total cost of its overarching objective of studying the ringed planet stands at a staggering $3.26 billion. However, the wealth of information it has wrought — including amazing pictures like the one above, and recordings of massive lightning storms on the planet — have already made it one of the best investments in space exploration. Hopefully Juno — which began a 5-year trek to Jupiter just last month — will bring us some equally stunning shots of Saturn's neighbor.

Article By :Mike Wehner, Thu, Sep 8, 2011

Dead NASA satellite will soon plummet to Earth

2011-09-11T11:47:00.001+08:00

A dead NASA satellite will soon fall to Earth, but the space agency says there is very little chance that a piece of it will hit someone.

NASA says the 20-year-old satellite will probably fall sometime between late September and October. Pieces of it could land anywhere in the six inhabited continents in a worldwide swath from south of Juneau, Alaska, to just north of the tip of South America. NASA scientists estimate a 1-in-3,200 chance a satellite part could hit someone. Most of it will burn up after entering Earth's atmosphere.

The 6-ton (5.4-metric ton) Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) ran out of fuel in 2005 and will fall uncontrolled out of orbit. Only about 1,200 pounds (544.32 kilograms) of metal should survive, NASA said.

This satellite is far smaller than the 135-ton (123-metric ton) Russian space station Mir, which fell to Earth in 2001 or the 100-ton (91-metric ton) Skylab that fell in 1979. Mir fell into the South Pacific, while Skylab hit the Indian Ocean and parts of sparsely populated western Australia. Because two-thirds of the Earth is ocean, space debris usually hits water

"Things have been re-entering ever since the dawn of the Space Age; to date nobody has been injured by anything that's re-entered," said NASA orbital debris chief Gene Stansbery. "That doesn't mean we're not concerned."

NASA now has a rule that the chance of any of its satellites hitting someone has to be more than 1 in 10,000. But UARS, which measured chemicals in the air, was launched in 1991 before that rule was adopted. The agency usually tries to put dead satellites into "a graveyard orbit" or steer them down to the ocean, Stansbery said. But there was not enough fuel in this one to fire engines that would move it to a higher orbit or steer it down safely.

The 1-in-3,200 odds of being hit pertain to any of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. But any one individual's odds of being struck are about 1 in 21 trillion.

Space debris bigger than 5 tons (4.5 metric tons) does not often fall to Earth. But this will be the third time this year for something that big to reach Earth, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard University astrophysicist who tracks objects in orbit.

The UARS satellite travels over a large band of Earth, avoiding only areas close to the poles. NASA calculates that when the satellite does fall it will scatter pieces over a 500-mile (800-kilometer)-wide region.

Stansbery said the agency doesn't know exactly when and where those will fall because it depends on the orientation of the satellite in the atmosphere, solar storm activity and other variables.

There probably is no hazardous material left in the falling pieces, but people should not touch any fallen satellite parts just in case, he said.

NASA will be tracking the satellite on a weekly and later daily basis until it falls.

Article by :SETH BORENSTEIN - AP Science Writer | Sep 9, 2011

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AFP News – Sat, Sep 17, 2011

US satellite may crash back to Earth Sept 23: NASA

This undated NASA image shows a conceptual image of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), launched in September 1991, by the space shuttle Discovery.

A 20-year-old satellite that measured the ozone layer is expected to crash back to Earth late next week, but NASA said it still does not know where it will fall.

The US space agency stressed that the risk to public safety from the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is "extremely small," and said that most, but not all, of the gear will burn up on re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

"Re-entry is expected Sept. 23, plus or minus a day. The re-entry of UARS is advancing because of a sharp increase in solar activity since the beginning of this week," NASA said in a brief update on its website on Friday.

"Safety is NASA's top priority," it added, noting that throughout history, there have been "no confirmed reports of an injury resulting from re-entering space objects."

The decommissioned satellite could land anywhere between 57 degrees north latitude and 57 degrees south latitude, a vast swath of populated territory. Predictions will only get more precise as the landing approaches.

The UARS satellite was sent into orbit in 1991 by the space shuttle Discovery.

The 35 by 15 foot (three by 10 meter) spacecraft weighed 13,000 pounds (5,900 kilograms) and toted 10 scientific instruments for measuring wind, temperature and ozone chemistry. It was officially decommissioned in 2005.

"Although the spacecraft will break into pieces during re-entry, not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere," NASA said.

"It is impossible to pinpoint just where in that zone the debris will land, but NASA estimates the debris footprint will be about 500 miles (800 kilometers) long," the space agency said.

It also urged anyone who comes across what they believe may be space debris not to touch it, but to call authorities for assistance.

The Strangest Alien Planets

2011-08-22T10:01:00.002+08:00

By SPACE.com Staff @ 17 May 2011

The Smallest

Credit: NASA

This artist's concept of Kepler-10b shows the smallest known exoplanet, announced in January 2011.

The Former Champ

Credit: ESO/L. Calcada

Gliese 581 e used to hold the title of smallest alien planet. However, it was dethroned in January 2011, with the announcement of Kepler-10b.

The Biggest

Credit: Jeffrey Hall, Lowell Observatory

The largest exoplanet ever discovered is also one of the strangest and theoretically should not even exist, scientists say. Dubbed TrES-4, the planet is about 1.7 times the size of Jupiter and belongs to a small subclass of so-called puffy planets that have extremely low densities. The planet is located about 1,400 light years away from Earth and zips around its parent star in only three and a half days

Closest Alien World to Us

Credit: NASA, ESA, G.F. Benedict (University of Texas, Austin)

Epsilon Eridani b orbits an orange Sun-like star only 10.5 light years away from Earth. It is so close to us telescopes might soon be able to photograph it. It orbits too far away from its star to support liquid water or life as we know it, but scientists predict there are other stars in the system that might be good candidates for alien life.

Volcanic Nightmare

Credit: ESO/L. Calcada

This planet, CoRoT-7b, was the first confirmed rocky world outside our solar system, but it doesn't look like a particularly pleasant place to live. It is tidally locked to its parent star, sees hellish 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 degrees Celsius). It may also rain rocks and be the core of a vaporized gas giant.

Multiple Sunsets Like Tatooine

Credit: NASA/JPL's Planetquest/Caltech

Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine in Star Wars had two suns, but that’s paltry compared to a Jupiter-like planet 149 light-years from Earth. This planet has three suns, with the main star similar in mass to our own sun. The triple-star system is known as HD 188753. Like Tatooine, the planet there is likely pretty hot – it orbits very close to the main star, completing one orbit every 3.5 days.

Coldest and Farthest From Us

Credit: ESO

With a surface temperature of -364 degrees Fahrenheit (-220 degrees Celsius), the extrasolar planet known as OGLE-2005-BLG-390L b is likely the coldest alien world. It is about 5.5 times as massive as Earth and thought to be rocky. It orbits a red dwarf star about 28,000 light-years away, making it the most distant exoplanet currently known.

Hottest World

Credit: ESA/NASA/Frederic Pont, Geneva University Observatory

A planet called WASP-12b is the hottest planet ever discovered (about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2,200 degrees Celsius), and orbits its star closer than any other known world. It orbits its star one every Earth day at a distance of about 2 million miles (3.4 million km). WASP-12b is a gaseous planet, about 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter, and almost twice the size. It is 870 light-years from Earth

Super-Earth

Credit: ESO

Astronomers are finding many worlds now in a category of worlds called Super-Earths, which are between 2 and 10 times the mass of our own Earth. Some scientists think such worlds could be more susceptible to forming the conditions for life because their cores are hot and would be conducive to geological upheaval through volcanism and plate tectonics

Oldest Alien Planet

Credit: NASA and H. Richer (U. British Columbia)

The oldest known planet is a primeval world 12.7 billion years old that formed more than 8 billion years before Earth and only 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery suggested planets are very common in the universe and raised the prospect that life began far sooner than most scientists ever imagined.

The Youngest Known Exoplanet

Credit: NASA

The youngest exoplanet yet discovered is less than 1 million years old and orbits Coku Tau 4, a star 420 light-years away. Astronomers inferred the planet’s presence from an enormous hole in the dusty disk that girdles the star. The hole is 10 times the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun and probably caused by the planet clearing a space in the dust as it orbits the star.

The Puffiest

Credit: David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

A planet lighter than a ball of cork is one of the puffiest alien planets known to date. Called HAT-P-1, the planet is about half as massive as Jupiter but about 1.76 times wider-or 24 percent larger than predicted by theory. It could float in water, if there was a tub large enough to hold it.

Super Neptune

Credit: David A. Aguilar, CFA

While Neptune has a diameter 3.8 times that of Earth and a mass 17 times Earth's, the new world (named HAT-P-11b) is 4.7 times the size of Earth and has 25 Earth masses. The newfound world orbits very close to its star, revolving once every 4.88 days. As a result, it is baked to a temperature of around 1100 degrees F.
The star itself is about three-fourths the size of our Sun and somewhat cooler.

Tilted World

Credit: NASA. ESA, amd G. Bacon (STScI)

Most planets orbit in a plane that corresponds to their parent star's equator. But XO-3b orbits with a crazy tilt of 37 degrees from its star's equator. The only other known example of such an oddly angled orbit was Pluto, until its demotion
to dwarf planet status. There is, however, a planet known to orbit backwards around its parent star.

Fastest Planet

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Schaller (for STScI)

SWEEPS-10 orbits its parent star from a distance of only 740,000 miles, so close that one year on the planet happens every 10 hours. The exoplanet belongs to a new class of zippy exoplanets called ultra-short-period planets (USPPs), which have orbits of less than a day.

Waterworld

Credit: David A. Aguilar, CFA

The extrasolar planet GJ 1214b is a rocky planet rich in water that sits about 40 light-years away. It orbits a red dwarf star. It is the only known "Super-Earth" exoplanet — worlds that have masses between Earth and Neptune — with a confirmed atmosphere. The planet is about three times the size of Earth and about 6.5 times as massive. Researchers think it is likely a water world with a solid center.

Atmosphere Detected

Credit: ESA, NASA and G. Tinetti

Astronomers have been able to detect the atmospheres around several exoplanets, including HD 189733b – one of the first alien words to have its atmosphere sniffed to determine its composition. Glowing methane, which can be produced naturally or be a biological byproduct, has been detected on the planet.

Endangered World

Credit: CARREAU/ESA/Nature

When astronomers observed WASP-18b, they may have seen it in the cosmic moment before its death. This planet, possibly an ill-fated world, whips around its star in less than one Earth day. Scientists think that this speed coupled with the planet's heft yields strong gravitational tugs that can alter the planets orbit. If the planet orbits faster than its star spins, it should gradually be moving inward towards its sun, and its doom.

Most Habitable

Credit: ESO

One of the several planets within the Gliese 581 star system, called Gliese 581 d, may be one of the most potentially habitable alien worlds known. It is about 8 times the mass of Earth, and located in an orbit just right for liquid water to exist on the surface. Water is a key ingredient for life as we know it. Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star 20.5 light-years from Earth

Densest Planet

Credit: ESO/OAMP

One of the densest exoplanet to date is a world known as COROT-exo-3b. It is about the size of Jupiter, but 20 times that planet’s mass, making it about twice as dense as lead. Scientists have not ruled out that the COROT-exo-3b may be a brown dwarf, or failed star.

10 Wildest Tries to Contact Aliens

2011-08-22T09:27:00.003+08:00

By InnovationNewsDaily Staff
@ 05 May 2011

Since we have developed the technology, we’ve been sending messages into space ― from scientists, rock stars, students, politicians ― in the hopes that someone or something will hear them and respond. That practice of broadcasting is known as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). Here are some of the messages that we have beamed into the cosmos in an attempt to get E.T.'s attention.

The Arecibo message

Credit: Cornell University

Beamed out 37 years ago, the Arecibo message is still the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space. It was sent from Cornell University’s Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

The transmission was aimed at the globular star cluster M13. The cluster is roughly 21,000 light-years from us, near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, and contains approximately a third of a million stars.

Researchers worked together to create a message that contained basic information about Earth and the life it contained. It including a graphic of the Arecibo telescope, our solar system, human DNA, a stick figure of a human, and some of the biochemicals of earthly life.

The message took only three minutes to transmit, and so far, we haven’t heard back.

Pioneer 10 and 11

Credit: NASA

Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to reach Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond the solar system toward other stars. Soon afterward, Pioneer 11 followed its exact flight pattern, and presumably they’re still going, though we have lost contact.

Knowing that these two crafts would make it so far into space and would be traveling for years to come, NASA attached plaques to both Pioneer 10 and 11 with information about Earth.

The 6- by 9-inch gold anodized plaques were bolted to the spacecrafts’ frames; they depict a man – whose right hand is raised as a sign of good will – and woman. In addition, they show the layout of our solar system, as well as our sun’s position relative to a number of pulsars are shown, so that our location can be triangulated from fixed points in space. The hope is that the beings who find it can figure out whence the probe came.

Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to reach Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond the solar system toward other stars. Soon afterward, Pioneer 11 followed its exact flight pattern, and presumably they’re still going, though we have lost contact.

Knowing that these two crafts would make it so far into space and would be traveling for years to come, NASA attached plaques to both Pioneer 10 and 11 with information about Earth.

The 6- by 9-inch gold anodized plaques were bolted to the spacecrafts’ frames; they depict a man – whose right hand is raised as a sign of good will – and woman. In addition, they show the layout of our solar system, as well as our sun’s position relative to a number of pulsars are shown, so that our location can be triangulated from fixed points in space. The hope is that the beings who find it can figure out whence the probe came.

Voyagers’ golden record

Credit: NASA

Four years after Pioneer 11 was launched, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent out to explore Jupiter and Saturn, and NASA decided to take their message to the next level.

Voyager 1 and 2 contain a “time capsule” that, according to NASA, was “intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.” The Voyager message is carried on a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

After the section that contains the sounds of Earth, the record’s creators included a 90-minute section of music that includes both Eastern and Western classics as well as a selection of ethnic music from all over the planet.

The Voyager spacecrafts left our solar system in 1990, and it will be 40,000 years before they make it close to any other planetary system, so we still have a while to wait before we get a return message.

“A Message from Earth”

Credit: Bebo

While Facebook seems to be the social network that has achieved everything, the honor of being the first one to try to network with extraterrestrial intelligence goes to Bebo, which sent out “A Message from Earth” in 2008.

Some 501 photos, drawings and text messages from the site’s 12 million users were transmitted by the National Space Agency of Ukraine's RT-70 radar telescope, which is normally used to track asteroids. The messages were sent to the planet Gliese 581C, which is 20 light-years from Earth, in the hope they would reach intelligent alien life.

Bebo users submitted their messages as part of a competition, and 501 were translated into a binary format, so they could be sent the 120 trillion miles to the Gliese 581C. According to the competition, the messages could cover any range of topics. They should be reaching their destination in 2028.

Cosmic Calls 1 and 2

Credit: S. Korotky

Cosmic Call 1 and Cosmic Call 2, pictograms broadcast from Moscow toward various star systems, featured the “Interstellar Rosetta Stone.”

The “rosetta stone,”developed by Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumans, was based on mathematical and scientific concepts believed to be universal. The hope was that any alien life form that intercepted the calls would be able to use it to decipher the messages.

The calls were sent out by Alexander Zaitsev, of the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow to sunlike stars within 70 light-years. The first Cosmic Call was beamed toward four separate star systems, 16 Cyg A, Gliese 777, HD 178428 and 15 Sge. The second, reached out to five stars, including 55 Cancri, which is home to a complex planetary system.

The second message also included 50 personal messages from individuals including David Bowie and elementary students from the Ukraine.

The Teen-Age Message

Credit: Farnea via Flickr

In addition to the Cosmic Calls, Zaitsev had his hand in the Teen-Age Message, which was a transmission put together by students from all across Russia.

The TAM transmission was sent out in six sessions in August and September 2001 from the Evpatoria Deep Space Center. It was transmitted to six nearby sunlike stars, some of them with at least one planet.

Like the Arecibo message, TAM had digital information, but Zaitsev and the students decide to include that information in analog format as well, to “compensate for the uncertainty of which is more easily understood by extraterrestrials.”

TAM included personal greetings, messages about Earth, and music that was made with a theremin – the electronic instrument used to make the eerie sounds from 1950s science fiction B-movies.

Doritos commercial

Credit: Doritos

In a 2008 publicity campaign, radars in the Arctic Circle broadcast six hours of a repeating Doritos commercial. Surprisingly, it has not made us targets of an alien attack.

The ad was directed toward a solar system in the Ursa Major constellation, which is only 42 light-years away from Earth. This system has a “habitable zone,” which scientists believe could be host to an Earth-like planet and extraterrestrial life.

The EISCAT European space station on the Norwegian island of Svalbard sent the message using its array of radars. It was sent as an MPEG file coded into 1s and 0s. Researchers agreed that the message would look just like a random series, but they hoped that through its repetition, extraterrestrials would identify the message as intelligent.

RuBisCo message

Credit: U.S. Department of Energy

On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the original Arecibo message, MIT biology fellow and artist Joe Davis sent the genetic code for the plant enzyme RuBisCo into space.

RuBisCo, which is essential for photosynthesis, is the most abundant protein on Earth, which is why Davis selected it to represent life on Earth.

According to Peter Weigele of New England Biolabs, “The choice of this molecule for broadcast communicates the central importance of our sun in sustaining life as well as an implicit understanding of the role of [carbon dioxide] in our biogeochemical systems. This is a message that is both timely and timeless – for the universe and here on Earth!”

This was also the first transmission that required the aid of an iPhone. When Davis arrived at Arecibo, the encoder normally used to modulate the beam was out of commission, so he used his iPhone as an improvised source to get the new coded message modulated into the 1,000-foot-wide dish’s 2-million-watt radio beam.

“Hello from Australia”

Credit: HelloFromEearth/Cosmos Magazine

In 2009, Australia’s Cosmos magazine took a cue from Bebo and reached out to its readers to create a goodwill message to transmit through space.

The magazine’s website collected text-message-length sentiments from people all over the world. The first came from Kim Carr, Australia’s minister for innovation, industry, science and research. It said: “Hello from Australia on the planet we call Earth. These messages express our people’s dreams for the future. We want to share those dreams with you.”

It was sent from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex to the planet Gliese 581d ― a planet in the same system as Gliese 581c, which was the recipient of “A Message from Earth.” Australia’s message should be arriving just a year later, in 2010.(original text puts 2029?)

Kepler DVD

Credit: NASA

In keeping with its earlier messaging practices, NASA included a DVD with the Kepler spacecraft two years ago.

The Kepler was specifically designed to search our region of the Milky Way galaxy for other habitable Earth-size and smaller planets. If by chance it did find life, it had a message.

Unlike the messages from Pioneers 1 and 2 and the Voyager golden record, these messages came from the public. For six-month period, tens of thousands of people submitted messages explaining why the Kepler mission was important. These were then recorded on the DVD, which was attached to the spacecraft.

The spacecraft is still going, so there is still a chance that the message may be discovered.

Bejing Olympic Card Stack

2011-08-10T10:46:00.000+08:00

World Record cardstacker Bryan Berg has recreated the Bejing Olympic Village using 140,000 playing cards.

Uploaded by diagonaluk on Aug 14, 2008

Blood-red lake mystery is getting a lot of attention

2011-08-10T00:33:00.002+08:00

"A West Texas lake that is almost completely dried up has left a small mystery, a pool of water that's so red it looks like blood" ~ kxan on Aug 3, 2011

Profile of man's face in Cloud in Nashville TN

2011-08-10T00:00:00.003+08:00

"This is picture I took in Nashville of a Storm System, which had clouds that morphed into a Wonderful profile of a bearded man!" ~ InfillNashville @ Aug 2011

Love forever, Vonnie - 53-Year-Old Love Letter Delivered To University

2011-07-18T09:17:00.003+08:00

Love Letter Arrives 53 Years Late Man receives letter postmarked Feb. 20, 1958, signed, "Love forever, Vonnie."

53-year-old love letter finally on way to intended recipient

Since a love letter was written to Clark C. Moore 53 years ago, he has married twice, fathered 21 children, retired as a teacher, converted to Islam and become a Muslim cleric.

In fact, the letter--addressed to Moore when he was a student at Pennsylvania's California University--should now be addressed to Muhammad Siddeeq, as he changed his name years ago when he converted to Islam, the Pittsburg Tribune-Review's Jason Cato writes.

A university mail worker found the opened love letter only last week. It was signed by "Vonnie" and said "I still miss you as much as ever and love you a thousand times more," according to Reuters. Vonnie asked why the object of her affection hadn't called her before he went back to college, but signed the note "Love Forever." National news outlets publicized the discovery, and a Pittsburgh friend recognized Siddeeq's former name and contacted him, according to the Observer-Reporter.

The 74-year-old now lives in Indianapolis and is waiting with mixed emotions for the letter to arrive in his mailbox.

"I'm curious, but I'm not sure I'd put it under the category of 'looking forward to it,'" he told the Tribune-Review.

He and Vonnie married later that year, in 1958, and had four children before divorcing. Vonnie, reached by the paper, said she was upset the letter had been released and did not want her last name known. The couple no longer speak.

Siddeeq told the Observer-Reporter that the romantic piece of mail is "just a testament of the sincerity, interest and innocence of that time."

A Lost World? Atlantis-Like Landscape Discovered

2011-07-12T13:51:00.002+08:00

By Wynne Parry
LiveScience.com – Mon, Jul 11, 2011

Buried deep beneath the sediment of the North Atlantic Ocean lies an ancient, lost landscape with furrows cut by rivers and peaks that once belonged to mountains. Geologists recently discovered this roughly 56-million-year-old landscape using data gathered for oil companies.

"It looks for all the world like a map of a bit of a country onshore," said Nicky White, the senior researcher. "It is like an ancient fossil landscape preserved 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the seabed."

So far, the data have revealed a landscape about 3,861 square miles (10,000 square km) west of the Orkney-Shetland Islands that stretched above sea level by almost as much as 0.6 miles (1 km). White and colleagues suspect it is part of a larger region that merged with what is now Scotland and may have extended toward Norway in a hot, prehuman world.

History beneath the seafloor

The discovery emerged from data collected by a seismic contracting company using an advanced echo-sounding technique. High pressured air is released from metal cylinders, producing sound waves that travel to the ocean floor and beneath it, through layers of sediment. Every time these sound waves encounter a change in the material through which they are traveling, say, from mudstone to sandstone, an echo bounces back. Microphones trailing behind the ship on cables record these echoes, and the information they contain can be used to construct three-dimensional images of the sedimentary rock below, explained White, a geologist at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The team, led by Ross Hartley, a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, found a wrinkly layer 1.2 miles (2 km) beneath the seafloor — evidence of the buried landscape, reminiscent of the mythical lost Atlantis.

The researchers traced eight major rivers, and core samples, taken from the rock beneath the ocean floor, revealed pollen and coal, evidence of land-dwelling life. But above and below these deposits, they found evidence of a marine environment, including tiny fossils, indicating the land rose above the sea and then subsided — "like a terrestrial sandwich with marine bread," White said.

The burning scientific question, according to White, is what made this landscape rise up, then subside within 2.5 million years? "From a geological perspective, that is a very short period of time," he said.

The study appear on July 10 2011 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Power Shadow !

2011-07-12T13:35:00.000+08:00

Owl leaves perfect imprint on window

2011-07-12T13:33:00.000+08:00

An owl was left in a flap after crashing into a window, leaving a near perfect print of itself on the glass.

Sally Arnold returned home to Kendal, Cumbria, and found the huge imprint complete with eyes, beak and feathers on her bedroom window.

She said: "Our first concern was for the welfare of what we suspected was an owl and we opened up the window to check if it was still around.

"Fortunately, there was no sign of the bird and we can only assume that it had flown away probably suffering from a headache."

The silhouette was left by the bird's "powder down" - a substance protecting growing feathers.

Experts from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) confirmed the bird was most likely a tawny owl because of its size and shape and the fact that they appear in gardens more regularly than others.

Val Osborne, head of the RSPB's wildlife inquiries team, said: "We don't very often see an imprint of a bird that's flown into a window that's this clear and where it's pretty obvious exactly what kind of birds it is.

"This would have been very uncomfortable for the bird but thankfully it looks like it survived as Mr and Mrs Arnold couldn't find it anywhere close by.

"Sadly, many birds aren't so lucky."

By Press Association , 12/7/2011

20110616關鍵時刻之第51區？(Area 51)

2011-07-07T14:15:00.006+08:00

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World most Dangerous walk path ...

2011-07-07T13:40:00.000+08:00

動物星球頻道【真實美人魚：科學的假設】Animal Planet ~ Truth of Mermaids

2011-07-07T13:38:00.002+08:00

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2011-6-9關鍵時刻 : 真實美人魚：科學的假設

2011-07-07T13:15:00.003+08:00

這是迪馬博士於1991年在「南非」外海撈獲的 "類似人魚骨骸"，由於當地、當時美國和南非有演習活動，根據調查得知有一個聲納壞掉產生了爆炸現象，致使附近很多魚類在那樣的情況下死亡。當時在附近補撈到一條大白鯊魚，就在剖開大白鯊魚肚之後發現了很多不明的屍塊。後來迪馬博士前往南非的一所大學，找了一位「人類學研究專家」來共同研究並進行復原，經過斷層掃瞄之後有了很嚇人的發現，這一種生物可能和人類有很親的血緣關係。

把所有資料做一個「復原圖」之後，才科學假設這一種海中不明生物和人類可能有很親的血緣關係。因為臉型非常貌似「納美人」的不明生物，他的眼窩很深有共鳴腔(可以發出很強的生物聲納作為溝通之用)、靠手游泳、骨盆腔底下有兩條腿的構造(曾經在海底是用腳走路的)，這是很值得地球人類瞭解、研究、及傳遞的新資訊.......在此分享給大家。

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Spotted #16 : A body of mermaid ??

2011-07-07T13:13:00.001+08:00

Image of ancient mammoth or mastodon found on bone

2011-06-29T21:13:00.000+08:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some of the earliest Americans turn out to have been artists. A bone fragment at least 13,000 years old, with the carved image of a mammoth or mastodon, has been discovered in Florida, a new study reports.

While prehistoric art depicting animals with trunks has been found in Europe, this may be the first in the Western Hemisphere, researchers report Wednesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

They hunted these animals, Stanford explained, and "you see people drawing all kinds of pictures that are of relevance and importance to them."

"Much of the real significance of such finds is in the tangible, emotional connection they allow us to feel with people in the deep past," said Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not part of the research team.

Cave paintings showing animals have been found in Texas, but those were dated to about 4,000 years ago, much more recent than the newly found carved bone.

The bone fragment, discovered in Vero Beach, Fla., contains an incised image about 3 inches long from head to tail and about 1 3/4 inches from head to foot.

This undated handout photo provided by the Smithsonian Institution shows a carved image, at least 13,000 years old, found in Vero Beach, Fla.

Article By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID - AP Science Writer | AP – Fri, Jun 24, 2011

美國為何不再登月 ?

2011-05-23T04:00:00.001+08:00

美國真的有登陸月球嗎還是另有隱情

We never went to the MOON (美国人从未登录月球 )

2011-05-23T03:57:00.000+08:00

美国人一直宣称他们登上过月球，可是登月火箭为什么连个图纸也没有留下？3个宇航员为什么在登月之前突然死亡？火箭降落月球产生的巨大的反推力把登月舱下面的土都吹得干干净净，可为什么下登月舱时留下人类一大步的脚印？那个脚印真的存在吗？

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New book says USSR was behind Roswell UFO

2011-05-21T20:55:00.001+08:00

By Claudine Zap

Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that's already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it--maybe.

According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored "Area 51," the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre-looking, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the news would cause widespread panic in the U.S.

The story gets even stranger: The leader of the USSR had apparently been inspired by the 1938 radio adaptation of the HG Wells story "War of the Worlds," produced by Orson Welles. The broadcast triggered panic in some listeners who tuned in and mistook it for a real-life alien invasion. (Though later students of the episode claim that the media of Welles' day vastly exaggerated the scale of public alarm over the broadcast.)

And those ET-looking aviators? They were scientific experiments created by the "Angel of Death," Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, for the USSR after the war. The flight was piloted remotely, according to accounts in the book, and was filled with a crew of "alien-like children."

According to Jacobsen's source, a retired engineer who was put on the project in 1978, the look of the human experiments could explain the alien conspiracy theories: "They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes."

Is any of this true? There's no way to prove it. Documents surrounding the Roswell incident are still classified--as is virtually all information related to the mystery spot.

Still, lack of proof hasn't exactly stopped the book from sparking speculation on the media circuit and on the Web. In the last day, Yahoo! searches skyrocketed 3,000 percent for "area 51 book." And the tome is penned not by a crackpot conspirator, but a respected journalist.

Even the New York Times gives her credence, writing in its review: "Although this connect-the-dots UFO thesis is only a hasty-sounding addendum to an otherwise straightforward investigative book about aviation and military history, it makes an indelible impression. 'Area 51' is liable to become best known for sci-fi provocation."

But sci-fi provocation may be all the book generates. After all, without the government coming out and saying what happened back in 1947, even if there was no conspiracy, the stories of the "Roswell Incident" will remain just that.

You can watch "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart about interview Jacobsen about her claims below

The Daily Show
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'Dead alien' found in Siberian snow

2011-05-21T20:47:00.001+08:00

It may just be an elaborate hoax, but a video has surfaced showing the body of an alien found dead in snow in Siberia.
The slender, badly damaged corpse was found lying on a bed of snow with its head to one side and mouth slightly open, the Daily Mail reported.

The video, posted on April 17 on YouTube, has already had over 100,000 views and showed the body of the unidentified "creature".

Irkutsk, Russia is apparently a known UFO hotspot, and UFO believers think the body was left behind by alien visitors after an accident, or was missed in a clean-up by the Russian government as part of some sort of alien cover-up.

Dozens of UFO sightings are reported every year in the area, and only last month there were reports of an unidentified object hurtling into the nearby Irkutsk region of Siberia.

"We couldn't believe it when we saw it. And what was spooky is that there was no sign of the spaceship. Perhaps that was taken away and the body overlooked," said Igor Molovic, one of the pair that uploaded the video.

However, not everyone is a true believer.

Some believe it is actually a carefully crafted model of an alien's body, and not the real deal.

However, many UFO lovers still believe.

"It's so lame how people always get thrilled by having another excuse to shout 'Fake! fake!' every time something weird shows up. Unless proven otherwise, this is in fact plausible," posted one user.

Another said; "If this is fake - then they are masters at models/puppets. I think it's real - one of the very few, great vid."

source:Yahoo! India News – Wed, Apr 20, 2011

New life-supporting planet discovered?

2011-05-21T20:40:00.001+08:00

Topic : Is the Rocky Alien Planet Gliese 581d Really Habitable?
By Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer,
Space.com | SPACE.com – Wed, May 18, 2011

A rocky alien planet called Gliese 581d may be the first known world beyond Earth capable of supporting life as we know it, a new study suggests.

Astronomers performing a new atmospheric-modeling study have found that the planet likely lies in the "habitable zone" of its host star — that just-right range of distances that allow liquid water to exist. The alien world could be Earth-like in key ways, harboring oceans, clouds and rainfall, according to the research.

This conclusion is consistent with several other recent modeling studies. But it does not definitively establish that life-sustaining water flows across the planet's surface.

The new study assumes that Gliese 581d, which is about seven times as massive as Earth, has a thick, carbon-dioxide-based atmosphere. That's very possible on a planet so large, researchers said, but it's not a given. [Video: Life-Sustaining "Super Earth" Gliese 581d]

The Gliese 581 system: Worlds of possibilities

Gliese 581d's parent star, known as Gliese 581, is a red dwarf located 20 light-years from Earth, just a stone's throw in the cosmic scheme of things. So far, astronomers have detected six planets orbiting the star, and Gliese 581d is not the only one intriguing to scientists thinking about the possibility of life beyond Earth.

Another planet in the system, called Gliese 581g, is about three times as massive as Earth, and it's also most likely a rocky world. This planet received a lot of attention when its discovery was announced in September 2010, because it's located right in the middle of the habitable zone. That makes 581g a prime candidate for liquid water and life as we know it — if the planet exists.

Some researchers question the analysis used to discover the planet, and say they cannot confirm 581g in follow-up studies. The planet's discoverers, however, are standing by their find. [The Strangest Alien Planets]

Gliese 581d orbits outside of 581g, far enough away from its star that researchers first thought it too cold for life when it was originally discovered in 2007. But a strong greenhouse effect may warm 581d up substantially, perhaps enough to support liquid water.

That's the tentative conclusion of the new study, as well as several other recent studies by different research teams that also modeled Gliese 581d's possible atmosphere.

Modeling an alien atmosphere

The planet Gliese 581d receives less than a third of the solar energy that Earth does from our sun, and it may be tidally locked (a situation in which one side of the world always faces its sun — a permanent day — and the other faces away, producing eternal night).

After Gliese 581d's discovery, it was generally believed that any atmosphere thick enough to keep the planet warm would become cold enough on the night side to freeze out entirely, ruining any prospects for a habitable climate, researchers said.

The research team tested that possibility in the new study, developing a new kind of computer model that simulates alien planets' atmospheres and surfaces in three dimensions. The model is similar to those used to study climate change on Earth.

When the team ran the model, they found that Gliese 581d probably can indeed host liquid water if it has a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. Even though the planet is relatively far away from its dim red dwarf parent star, it could be warmed by a greenhouse effect, with daytime heat circulated around the planet by the atmosphere.

The team, led by scientists from the Laboratoire de Métrologie Dynamique (CNRS/UPMC/ENS/Ecole Polytechnique) at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, France, published their results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The work remains speculative.

To determine conclusively if Gliese 581d is truly habitable, future work will probably have to detect and characterize its atmosphere directly. And that is likely years off, since it requires the development of new and advanced telescopes. Human-made probes won't be getting to the planet anytime soon; with current technology, it would take spacecraft hundreds of thousands of years to make the 20-light-year trek

Bioluminescent algae at Camp Cooinda on the Gippsland Lakes in eastern Victoria

2011-03-10T17:30:00.004+08:00

A man stands still as others splash algae-laden water behind him.

Lake Lights Up at Night

What happens to lakes in an area hit by forest fires and floods? Some will glow in the dark.

For a cluster of lakes in Australia's eastern Victoria, the combination of the fire and then the rain washed ash and nitrogen-rich soil into the water. The Gippsland Lakes experienced a rise in sea level. That caused the lakes to mix with sea water, which also raised the salinity.

This recipe led to the introduction of a species of algae called Noctiluca scintillans, commonly known as "sea sparkle." The bioluminescent brew gave the water a nocturnal glow.

Bioluminescent algae in eastern Victoria
Bioluminescent algae, Noctiluca Scintillan, in waves lapping at a beach on the Gippsland Lakes. This was a 1.5 hour exposure

Bioluminescent splash

Algae lights up shore

Bioluminescent algae in eastern Victoria

Bioluminescence -- when a living organism lights up at night -- is a natural phenomenon. Australian photographer Phil Hart caught the eerie light of the lakes and shared his snaps.

The shutterbug runs Night Sky Photography workshops in Australia, where he teaches the art of capturing images like these.

Photo courtesy Phil Hart/www.philhart.com

Sir Victor Goddard travelled from 1935 to future (1939 ?)

2011-03-02T10:54:00.000+08:00

In 1935, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard of the British Royal Air Force had a harrowing experience in his Hawker Hart biplane. Goddard was a Wing Commander at the time and while on a flight from Edinburgh, Scotland to his home base in Andover, England, he decided to fly over an abandoned airfield at Drem, not far from Edinburgh. The useless airfield was overgrown with foliage, the hangars were falling apart and cows grazed where planes were once parked. Goddard then continued his flight to Andover, but encountered a bizarre storm.

In the high winds of the storm's strange brown-yellow clouds, he lost control of his plane, which began to spiral toward the ground. Narrowly averting a crash, Goddard found that his plane was heading back toward Drem. As he approached the old airfield, the storm suddenly vanished and Goddard's plane was now flying in brilliant sunshine.

This time, as he flew over the Drem airfield, it looked completely different. The hangars looked like new. There were four airplanes on the ground: three were familiar biplanes, but painted in an unfamiliar yellow; the fourth was a monoplane, which the RAF had none of in 1935. The mechanics were dressed in blue overalls, which Goddard thought odd since all RAF mechanics dressed in brown overalls. Strange, too, that none of the mechanics seemed to notice him fly over. Leaving the area, he again encountered the storm, but managed to make his way back to Andover.

It wasn't until 1939 that that the RAF began to paint their planes yellow, enlisted a monoplane of the type that Goddard saw, and the mechanics uniforms were switched to blue. Had Goddard somehow flown four years into the future, then returned to his own time?

'TIME-TRAVELER' BUSTED FOR INSIDER TRADING

2011-03-02T10:28:00.003+08:00

Andrew Carlssin is another person who claimed that he's a time traveler. He was reportedly arrested in January 2002 for SEC violations for making 126 high-risk stock trades and being successful on every one. As reported, Carlssin started with an initial investment of $800 and ended with of over $350,000,000 in just 2 weeks...had drew the attention of the SEC(Security and Exchange Commission )

Later reports suggest that after his arrest, he submitted a four-hour confession wherein he claimed to be a time traveler from 200 years in the future. He offered to tell investigators such things as the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and the cure for AIDS in return for a lesser punishment and to be allowed to return to his time craft, although he refused to tell investigators the location or workings of his craft.

Here's the story :

NEW YORK -- Federal investigators have arrested an enigmatic Wall Street wiz on insider-trading charges -- and incredibly, he claims to be a time-traveler from the year 2256!

Sources at the Security and Exchange Commission confirm that 44-year-old Andrew Carlssin offered the bizarre explanation for his uncanny success in the stock market after being led off in handcuffs on January 28 2003.

"We don't believe this guy's story -- he's either a lunatic or a pathological liar," says an SEC insider.

"But the fact is, with an initial investment of only $800, in two weeks' time he had a portfolio valued at over $350 million. Every trade he made capitalized on unexpected business developments, which simply can't be pure luck.

"The only way he could pull it off is with illegal inside information. He's going to sit in a jail cell on Rikers Island until he agrees to give up his sources."

The past year of nose-diving stock prices has left most investors crying in their beer. So when Carlssin made a flurry of 126 high-risk trades and came out the winner every time, it raised the eyebrows of Wall Street watchdogs.

"If a company's stock rose due to a merger or technological breakthrough that was supposed to be secret, Mr. Carlssin somehow knew about it in advance," says the SEC source close to the hush-hush, ongoing investigation.

When investigators hauled Carlssin in for questioning, they got more than they bargained for: A mind-boggling four-hour confession.

Carlssin declared that he had traveled back in time from over 200 years in the future, when it is common knowledge that our era experienced one of the worst stock plunges in history. Yet anyone armed with knowledge of the handful of stocks destined to go through the roof could make a fortune.

"It was just too tempting to resist," Carlssin allegedly said in his videotaped confession. "I had planned to make it look natural, you know, lose a little here and there so it doesn't look too perfect. But I just got caught in the moment."

In a bid for leniency, Carlssin has reportedly offered to divulge "historical facts" such as the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden and a cure for AIDS.

All he wants is to be allowed to return to the future in his "time craft."

However, he refuses to reveal the location of the machine or discuss how it works, supposedly out of fear the technology could "fall into the wrong hands."

Officials are quite confident the "time-traveler's" claims are bogus. Yet the SEC source admits, "No one can find any record of any Andrew Carlssin existing anywhere before December 2002."

By CHAD KULTGEN @ March 19, 2003

This is where the story takes another strange twist. While waiting arraignment in jail Carlssin just disappeared. What's even more surprising is that the story disappeared as well. No newspaper or media reports followed up on the original story. Repeated phone calls and emails to both the SEC and the FBI failed to even acknowledge the arrest of Carlssin.

Mary Celeste - Dec 1872

2011-02-23T17:10:00.007+08:00

In December 1872, the merchant ship The Mary Celeste was found drifting deserted in the mid Atlantic Ocean. She was a ghost ship with no sign of her captain or the eight crew aboard, but mysteriously, her cargo of 1700 barrels of pure alcohol was intact in her hull. The mystery of her plight has stood for 135 years, baffling scientists, historians and mariners.

Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife and daughter, and six crewmembers were all gone - vanished into the most mysterious of maritime tales. What happened to Mary Celeste after this unsolved and baffling enigma?Now a descendant of the ship's captain has a look at evidence that throws some fascinating new light on what really happened

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Part 4 & 5 video missing (will upload if found..)

The following 2 video shows a possible secenio why the crew left in a haste :

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The secret since..May 1861 ....it all started as AMAZON :

The Last Voyage of the Mary Celeste - 1884

Brian's Views on Time Travel and Interdimensional Voyages

2011-02-22T19:50:00.002+08:00

Time travel is no longer regarded as strictly science fiction. For years the concept of time travel has been the topic of science fiction novels and movies, and has been pondered by great scientists throughout history. Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity can be used to actually prove that time travel is possible. Government research experiments have yielded experimental data that conclusively illustrate that fast moving aircraft have traveled into the future.

This phenomenon is due to the principal of time dilation, which states that bodies moving at high velocities experience a time that ticks slower than the time measured at zero velocity.3 Not as much time elapses for a moving body as does for everything else. Phenomena known as wormholes and closed timelike curves are possible means of time travel into the future and the past.4 Traveling into the past is a task which is much more difficult than traveling into the future.

This feat has not yet been accomplished -to our knowledge- and its theory involves complicated scenarios of tears in four dimensional space-time, and traveling near the speed of light. Obstacles which prevent our hubris attempts to cheat time include our inability to move even close to the speed of light, and finding a source of energy as powerful as an exploding star. Simply because the proposal of time travel is backed by scientific theory, is no reason to expect that it is easily achievable. Numerous arguments are proposed that that prevent time travel into the past. Both common sense and scientific fact can be used to paint scenarios that become serious obstacles. Not to fear, we have all the time in the world to overcome these minor limitations.

Imagine if you will, that you are one of the people sill alive today that was born prior to 1903, when the first airplane took flight. When you were young the idea of flying would probably have been quite exciting. Some scientists believe that we may presently be living through an identical scenario. The thing that would be so exciting however, would not be flight, but time travel.

Leading scientists believe that our children will live to once again see the impossible become routine. Professor Michio Kaku of the University of New York believes that space flight may one day unlock the secret of time itself. This will require the development of spacecraft that can travel at speeds on the order of two hundred million meters per second, that’s about four hundred and fifty million miles per hour. Craft traveling at this speed will take us near the speed of light, where time actually slows down. This is what’s known as time dilation. Einstein’s theories predict that the faster a spacecraft moves, the slower time ticks inside of it. Imagine that a rocket ship takes off from earth and approaches the speed of light. If we were to watch it from earth with a very powerful telescope as it traveled away from us, we would see everyone inside the ship as being frozen in time. To us their time would slow down, but to them nothing would change! This has been measured in the laboratory and on location using atomic clocks, aircraft, satellites and rockets.
It is proven that time slows down the faster you move.

In 1975 Professor Carol Allie of the University of Maryland tested Einstein’s theory using two synchronized atomic clocks. One clock was loaded on a plane and flown for several hours, while the other clock remained on the ground at the air base. Upon return, the clock on board the plane was found to be ever so slightly slower that the one on the ground. This was not due to experimental error, and has been repeated numerous times with the same result. This difference in time is even more pronounced in satellites such as the space station. This is because these objects are traveling at speeds much faster and for much longer periods than possible in an airplane. The faster an object moves, the more time is distorted.

Now that we know that it is possible to travel into the future by moving at great speeds, the next problem is how to travel in time a respectable amount without having to sit in a fast moving spaceship for years. This problem is solved by the theoretical existence of what are know as closed timelike curves, and wormholes.

Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity combine three-dimensional space with time to form four dimensional space-time.2 Space-time consists of points or events that represent a particular place at a particular time. Your entire life thus forms a sort of twisting, turning worm in space time! The tip of the worm’s tail would be your birth and its head is the event of your death. The line which this worm creates with its body is called that object’s worldline. Einstein predicts that worldlines can be distorted by massive bodies such as black holes. This is essentially the origin of gravity, remember. Now if an object’s worldline were to be distorted so much as to form a loop that connected with a point on itself that represented an earlier place and time, it would create a corridor to the past! Picture a loop to loop track that smashes into itself as it comes back around. This closed loop is called a closed timelike curve.

Timelike means that the body under consideration experiences time that increases in one direction along its worldline.Princeton University physicist John A. Wheeler, and Kip S. Thorne of Cal. Tech. have shown that a closed timelike curve is one way to create a kind of shortcut through space-time called a wormhole.

Wormholes are holes in the fabric of four dimensional space-time, that are connected, but which originate at different points in space and at different times. They provide a quick path between two different locations in space and time. This is the four dimensional equivalent of pinching two pieces of a folded sheet of paper together to make contact across the gap. Distortions in space cause the points separated by the gap to bulge out and connect. This forms a wormhole through which something could instantaneously travel to a far away place and time.4 No more problems of traveling in a rocket ship for years to get into the future! This is essentially what was written about in "Alice in Wonderland’s Through the Looking Glass." Her looking glass was a wormhole that connected her home in Oxford, with wonderland.

All she had to do was climb into her looking glass and she would emerge on the other side of forever. In reality however, it would require a much more elaborate scheme to create a wormhole that connects two different points in space-time. First it would require the construction of two identical machines consisting of two huge parallel metal plates that are electrically charged with unbelievable amounts of energy. When the machines are placed in proximity of each other, the enormous amounts of energy -about that of an exploding star- would rip a hole in space-time and connect the two machines via a wormhole. This is possible, and the beginnings of it have been illustrated in the lab by what is known as the Casimir Effect. The next task would be to place one of these machines on a craft that could travel at close to the speed of light. The craft would take one machine on a journey while it was still connected to the one on earth via the wormhole. Now, a simple step into the wormhole would transport you to a different place and a different time.

Wormholes and closed timelike loops appear to be the main ways that time travel into the past would be possible. The limitation on this time travel into the past is that it would be impossible to travel back to a time before the machine was originally created. Although the aforementioned theories of general relativity are consistent for closed timelike curves and wormholes, the theories say nothing about the actual process of traveling through them. Quantum mechanics can be used to model possible scenarios, and yields the probability of each possible output. Quantum mechanics, when used in the context of time travel, has a so-called many-universe interpretation. This was first proposed by Hugh Everett III in 1957.3 It encompasses the idea that if something can physically happen, it does in some universe. Everett says that our reality is only one of many equally valid universes. There is a collection of universes, called a multiverse. Every multiverse has copies of every person, structure, and atom. For every possible event, every possible outcome is said to be played out on a different universe. This interpretation of quantum mechanics is quite controversial however, but does elicit the notion that it may be impossible to travel backward in time to our own universe or dimension. One must consider what past would be the destination of a time traveler.

The notion that time travel could link parallel universes, has been anticipated in science fiction novels, and is even depicted in the popular television series "Sliders." In this program, a "sliding machine" creates a wormhole that links two parallel dimensions. Each week the group of "sliders" jump into the wormhole and emerge in the same place and time, but a different dimension. They can run into their other selves and experience a reality that has yielded a vastly different society than their own. The interesting thing is that the stuff of science fiction, can be deduced from existing physical theory. All the claims made about time travel are consequences of basic scientific laws and standard quantum mechanics.

The proposal of time travel is backed by scientific theory, but that is not enough to make it realistically possible. Numerous arguments are proposed that that prevent time travel into the past. Both common sense and scientific fact construct serious obstacles. A major argument against time travel into the past is called the autonomy principle, better know as the grandfather paradox. This paradox is created when a time traveler goes back in time to meet his or her grandfather. Now upon their introduction it would be possible to change the course of events that lead up to your grandfather and grandmother marrying. You could tell him something about a family secret to convince him you are who you say you are, and he may proceed to tell his soon to be wife. She may in turn doubt his sanity and have him committed. Thus your grandparents would never have your mother, and therefore you couldn’t be born! But then how could you have ever existed to travel back in time if you don’t exist? You would have had to have been created via autonomy. The next question would be, if your mother was never born, then when you return to the future would anything you did in your life exist? Or would you, your friends, your home etc. never have existed? This is clearly an inconsistency paradox that would rule out time travel, yet interestingly enough the laws of physics do not forbid such excursions. The multiverse concept eradicates the problem of the autonomy principal, because it allows time travel to the past, but to a different universe. You would meet the person who was your grandfather in your universe, but never married your grandmother in his universe. In the universe that you traveled to, you never existed.

Another argument of impossibility is called the chronology principal. This principal states that time travelers could bring information to the past that could be used to create new ideas and products. This would involve no creative energy on the part of the "inventor." Imagine that Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, the most influential and successful artist of the 20th century, were to travel back in time to meet his younger self. Assuming he stays in his correct universe, he could give his younger self his portfolio containing copies of his paintings, sculptures, graphic art, and ceramics. The young version of Picasso could then meticulously copy the reproductions, profoundly and irrevocably affecting the future of art. Thus, the reproductions exist because they are copied from the originals, and the originals exist because they are copied from the reproductions. No creative energy would have ever been expended to create the masterpieces! 3 This chronology principal rules out travel into the past.

A notion that was once nothing more than science fiction, is now a concept that’s becoming reality. Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity can be used to actually prove that time travel is possible, and research has shown that fast moving craft can travel into the future. Time dilation is the easiest method because it merely requires high velocity motion to experience time travel.3 Phenomena known as wormholes and closed timelike curves are possible means of time travel into the future and the past.4 Traveling into the past is a task which is much more difficult however. Its theory involves complicated scenarios of tears in four dimensional space-time, energy equivalent to that of an exploding star, and traveling near the speed of light. Both common sense and scientific fact can be used to paint scenarios that become serious obstacles. Yet even these hindrances can be explained away! If the multiverse concept is reality, then most present ideas of time travel are based on a false reality. If time travel is completely impossible then the reason has yet to be discovered

References

1) Bagnall, Phil , "Where have all the time travelers gone?" New Scientist July 6 1996, v151

2) Deutsch, David, & Lockwood, Michael , "The quantum physics of time travel," Scientific American March 1994, v270

3) Parsons, Paul , "A warped view of time travel," Science October 11 1996, v274

4) "How to murder your grandfather and still get born," The Economist January 20 1996, v338

Source:http://brianbosak.com*
a brian creation - created 8/10/97, updated 3/16/01
*This site was used by the TV show "NOVA" on PBS CH11 Chicago

STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine

2011-02-21T20:52:00.003+08:00

All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast

Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.

But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.

To see what that means, let's imagine we're doing a bit of normal, everyday car travel. Drive in a straight line and you're travelling in one dimension. Turn right or left and you add the second dimension. Drive up or down a twisty mountain road and that adds height, so that's travelling in all three dimensions. But how on Earth do we travel in time? How do we find a path through the fourth dimension?

Let's indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveller, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy.

Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. We wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, we think they are. What's more, we've even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they're too small to see. Wormholes are very tiny. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time. You might find it a tough concept, but stay with me.

***********************************************************************
A wormhole is a theoretical 'tunnel' or shortcut, predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, that links two places in space-time - visualised above as the contours of a 3-D map, where negative energy pulls space and time into the mouth of a tunnel, emerging in another universe. They remain only hypothetical, as obviously nobody has ever seen one, but have been used in films as conduits for time travel - in Stargate (1994), for example, involving gated tunnels between universes, and in Time Bandits (1981), where their locations are shown on a celestial map
***********************************************************************

Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it's easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it's also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.

Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through - but here's where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.

Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I'm not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet.

Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster Now, I realise that thinking in four dimensions is not easy, and that wormholes are a tricky concept to wrap your head around, but hang in there. I've thought up a simple experiment that could reveal if human time travel through a wormhole is possible now, or even in the future. I like simple experiments, and champagne.

So I've combined two of my favourite things to see if time travel from the future to the past is possible.

Let's imagine I'm throwing a party, a welcome reception for future time travellers. But there's a twist. I'm not letting anyone know about it until after the party has happened. I've drawn up an invitation giving the exact coordinates in time and space. I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will be around for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information on the invitation and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible.

In the meantime, my time traveller guests should be arriving any moment now. Five, four, three, two, one. But as I say this, no one has arrived. What a shame. I was hoping at least a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door. So why didn't the experiment work? One of the reasons might be because of a well-known problem with time travel to the past, the problem of what we call paradoxes.

Paradoxes are fun to think about. The most famous one is usually called the Grandfather paradox. I have a new, simpler version I call the Mad Scientist paradox.
I don't like the way scientists in movies are often described as mad, but in this case, it's true. This chap is determined to create a paradox, even if it costs him his life. Imagine, somehow, he's built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past

***********************************************************************
Hawking in a scene from Star Trek with dinner guests from the past,
and future: (from left) Albert Einstein, Data and Isaac Newton
***********************************************************************
Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He's now dead. So who fired the shot? It's a paradox. It just doesn't make sense. It's the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares.

This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe - that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can't make themselves impossible. If they could then there'd be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I'm sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.

In the end, I think a wormhole like this one can't exist. And the reason for that is feedback. If you've ever been to a rock gig, you'll probably recognise this screeching noise. It's feedback. What causes it is simple. Sound enters the microphone. It's transmitted along the wires, made louder by the amplifier, and comes out at the speakers. But if too much of the sound from the speakers goes back into the mic it goes around and around in a loop getting louder each time. If no one stops it, feedback can destroy the sound system.

The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound. As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won't last long enough to be of use as a time machine. That's the real reason no one could come back in time to my party.

Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.

But the story's not over yet. This doesn't make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time's current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at diff erent speeds in diff erent places and that is the key to travelling into the future. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago. He realised that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up. He was absolutely right. And the proof is right above our heads. Up in space.

This is the Global Positioning System, or GPS. A network of satellites is in orbit around Earth. The satellites make satellite navigation possible. But they also reveal that time runs faster in space than it does down on Earth. Inside each spacecraft is a very precise clock. But despite being so accurate, they all gain around a third of a billionth of a second every day. The system has to correct for the drift, otherwise that tiny di fference would upset the whole system, causing every GPS device on Earth to go out by about six miles a day. You can just imagine the mayhem that that would cause.

The problem doesn't lie with the clocks. They run fast because time itself runs faster in space than it does down below. And the reason for this extraordinary e ffect is the mass of the Earth. Einstein realised that matter drags on time and slows it down like the slow part of a river. The heavier the object, the more it drags on time. And this startling reality is what opens the door to the possibility of time travel to the future.

Right in the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years from us, lies the heaviest object in the galaxy. It is a supermassive black hole containing the mass of four million suns crushed down into a single point by its own gravity. The closer you get to the black hole, the stronger the gravity. Get really close and not even light can escape. A black hole like this one has a dramatic e ffect on time, slowing it down far more than anything else in the galaxy. That makes it a natural time machine.
I like to imagine how a spaceship might be able to take advantage of this phenomenon, by orbiting it. If a space agency were controlling the mission from Earth they'd observe that each full orbit took 16 minutes. But for the brave people on board, close to this massive object, time would be slowed down. And here the e ffect would be far more extreme than the gravitational pull of Earth. The crew's time would be slowed down by half. For every 16-minute orbit, they'd only experience eight minutes of time.

~ Inside the Large Hadron Collider

Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be travelling through time. Imagine they circled the black hole for five of their years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more than they had.
So a supermassive black hole is a time machine. But of course, it's not exactly practical. It has advantages over wormholes in that it doesn't provoke paradoxes. Plus it won't destroy itself in a flash of feedback. But it's pretty dangerous. It's a long way away and it doesn't even take us very far into the future. Fortunately there is another way to travel in time. And this represents our last and best hope of building a real time machine.

You just have to travel very, very fast. Much faster even than the speed required to avoid being sucked into a black hole. This is due to another strange fact about the universe. There's a cosmic speed limit, 186,000 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. Nothing can exceed that speed. It's one of the best established principles in science. Believe it or not, travelling at near the speed of light transports you to the future.

To explain why, let's dream up a science-fiction transportation system. Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a superfast train. We're going to use this imaginary train to get as close as possible to the speed of light and see how it becomes a time machine. On board are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it's circling the Earth over and over again.

To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth pretty fast. Seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it. Instead, let's say it gets close, just shy of that ultimate speed. Now something extraordinary happens. Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world, just like near the black hole, only more so. Everything on the train is in slow motion.

This happens to protect the speed limit, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine a child running forwards up the train. Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn't she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no. The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time onboard.
Now she can't run fast enough to break the limit. Time will always slow down just enough to protect the speed limit. And from that fact comes the possibility of travelling many years into the future.

Imagine that the train left the station on January 1, 2050. It circles Earth over and over again for 100 years before finally coming to a halt on New Year's Day, 2150. The passengers will have only lived one week because time is slowed down that much inside the train. When they got out they'd find a very diff erent world from the one they'd left. In one week they'd have travelled 100 years into the future. Of course, building a train that could reach such a speed is quite impossible. But we have built something very like the train at the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Deep underground, in a circular tunnel 16 miles long, is a stream of trillions of tiny particles. When the power is turned on they accelerate from zero to 60,000mph in a fraction of a second. Increase the power and the particles go faster and faster, until they're whizzing around the tunnel 11,000 times a second, which is almost the speed of light. But just like the train, they never quite reach that ultimate speed. They can only get to 99.99 per cent of the limit. When that happens, they too start to travel in time. We know this because of some extremely short-lived particles, called pi-mesons. Ordinarily, they disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer.

It really is that simple. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we'd need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.

The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy. But gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances. In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth. A similar situation to the spaceship that orbited the massive black hole.

After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future.

The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It's a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.

By STEPHEN HAWKING on 3rd May 2010
source :http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html#ixzz1Eb6YPxUT

Bermuda Triangle, Between Myth and Reality

2011-02-21T16:51:00.001+08:00

Scientists often find it difficult to examine the many mysterious phenomena that occur in this world. One of the many strange phenomena that are very confusing, and still the study is the Bermuda Triangle. How true nature? Are the phenomena can be explained rationally?

Overview of Bermuda.

The word “Bermuda” means the seventh month of the year Qibthi. But an American scientist who came from Puerto Rico suggests that the meaning of “Bermuda” in ancient languages spread across the region contains the meaning of Bermuda Beach Light. This is because the devil occupies the area and stated that he is the god of Light and God of the Enlightenment.

Bermuda Islands Area of about 53 square kilometers with a population reached 70,000 inhabitants. The capital is a city called Hamilton. The entire area of Bermuda is a group of islands totaling 347 atoll (coral reef islands) with several small bays.

The whole archipelago is situated in the Atlantic Ocean. Located approximately 930 km from the United States. A very strange thing is the whole island is numbered 347, only 20 islands are inhabited. Residents here regard it as a colony of ghosts and spirits of children who became Lord Satan.

Along with the entry of British rule in 1684 AD, go Christianity, although not initially accepted but then the shamans regard it as a branch of their religion or new Shari’a which fits with the times. Since 1968, the island was turned into several autonomous state separate from British rule.

The phenomenon is horrible
Bermuda Triangle is a term first coined by an American author, Vincent Judith. He said “Verily, there is an area which covers a triangular area of East Coast Florida – Puerto Rico and Bermuda islands.

If a straight line drawn from the three nampaklah a triangle of interconnected so-called Bermuda Triangle. Bermuda Triangle mystery emerged as a difficult disclosed until now. Because of that many people call it as Satan’s Triangle, Triangle of Death, and the graveyard of the Atlantic.

Mysterious events continue with the many ships and planes which disappear when entering the Bermuda Triangle area. Surprisingly, the loss of ships and aircraft never left marks and signs that can be investigated.

Events loss of ships and planes were still ongoing, some of which are as follows:

-In 1947, C-45 aircraft lost in a distance of 150 km of the Bermuda Triangle.

-In 1948, Theodore-4 aircraft which has lost four booster engines and 31 people on board.

-The same year the DC-3 aircraft and its passengers disappeared, amounting to 32 people without leaving a trace.

-In 1949, Theodore 4 second aircraft also disappeared without a trace.

-In 1950, the U.S. large aircraft “Globe Master” U.S. Air Force’s missing without a trace.

-The same year the American freighter-55 Sandra, which has a length of more than a hundred yards away without leaving a trace.

-In 1952, the British aircraft carrier “York” with 33 people on board disappeared without a trace.

-In 1954, U.S. amphibious aircraft type Lockheed lost with all on board without leaving a trace.

-In 1956, U.S. amphibious aircraft type P5M Martin lost with all crew members without a trace.

-In 1962, aircraft fuel filler type KB-50 U.S. Air Force’s missing without a trace.

-In 1963, the U.S. Navy carrier vessel owned by Silver Queen which length is 130 meters away with all its passengers without leaving a trace.

The same two-year training aircraft and supplies of U.S. Air Force type Stratoo disappeared without a trace.

-In 1968, military aircraft types YC-122 transport aircraft modified to disappear without a trace.

-In 1970, the French-owned transport plane “Milton Patreds” disappear along with all people and goods available.

-In 1973, the German transport plane owned by “Anita” is 20,000 tons dead weight lost with 32 passengers without a trace.

-In 1974, the aircraft lost the war at a distance of 900 miles southwest of the Azores islands, the United States.

The events of the loss of ships and planes continue each time, even in times of diminishing now because there is no longer the crossing and close to the Bermuda Triangle area as a caution in the aviation and shipping traffic.

Secera Geographically, the Bermuda Triangle is the western Atlantic Ocean, possibly shaped like a triangle that is located near the southeast coast of America. Area stretching from Bermuda in the north to South Florida. Direction near the Bahamas through its Eastern Puerto Rico to the west latitude 40o, then back to Bermuda.

No wonder if the Bermuda Triangle got a lot of nicknames that are very scary. Almost all ships and aircraft that disappeared can not provide signals or relationship in which the supernatural forces that enveloped make all the equipment and the interface moves irregularly and died instantly.

Genius People and the solutions

Many scientists conduct research in an effort to find a solution and find logical reasons for what happened affairs. Came the dozens of books that define the number of ships and aircraft which disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle area is scary.

Among the most famous is the book LES DE EL TRIANGULO BERMUDA essay Potlar John Charles Berlitz, a writer and researcher who has four books and everything is a business solution to the mystery. His books include: faster than the elevator, the trip without end, the dream of humanity, and stepping period.
But a researcher from the American, Evan Sunderson concluded that cases lost in the Bermuda Triangle because of the whirlpool or in other terms “vulnerable spots”, because the Bermuda Triangle area is a meeting between hot and cold currents flow.

Various water flow in the opposite direction it leads to the top and bottom. Sunderson also convinced that a strong movement opposed it flows and is affected by differences in degrees of heat which resulted in a magnetic vortex which is the cause of all this tragedy.

But the theory is rejected for dillandasi Sunderson argument which asserts that no water flows in the opposite effect on the earth’s magnetic sea. Also Sunderson theory does not interpret how the role of similar places called “grave evil” in the mainland.

Places where it is on the North Pole, South Pole, the northern desert area and in the Northwest region of India. Later, even this theory fails in interpreting the particulars why found the wreckage of many ships and without any human corpse.

Supra natural Views
There are theories that explain and interpret what is happening in the Bermuda Triangle. The theory states that because all it is because of the spirits who were tortured in the wild there, especially the ghost of the negroes who persecuted. Then explain that there are millions of spirits roaming in the area, namely at the beginning of the period of slavery in America when they were transported by ship from Africa to America.

The founder of this theory is a British psychologist Kennets Machol. He believes the spirits do not like to hurt or scare people, but they tried to reveal himself to tell people that they are spirits who do not die naturally. Machol also sure to give a special prayer to calm the spirits of those curious.
Just as the theory Machol, a retired priest who has been named Oumand opinion that the Bermuda Triangle phenomenon is a phenomenon caused by supernatural spirits curious number that used to die unnaturally.

In spite of it all, we believe that the mysterious phenomenon that occurs in the world is certainly not immune from how we react to it and from what angle we view it. But we also must remember that all life belongs to the Creator. Unseen things are difficult to understand, but for God, it is part of His creation scenario.

source:http://amazingnotes.com/2010/12/14/bermuda-triangle-between-myth-and-reality/
By: Andri On 14 Dec 2010

John Titor's Time Machine C204

2011-02-21T15:55:00.004+08:00

How would you introduce yourself if you were a time traveler? John Titor began with his mission and machine, straight up. At first you think "sure, sure" but then a close look at the design suggests it just might be possible if the things some physicists believe about the relationships between time and gravity in the vicinity of singularities are true.

posted June 21, 2001 19:38
at http://communities.anomalies.net/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=9&t=000024 (Note : Link no linger works)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Titor
Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 78
Greetings. I am a time traveler from the year 2036. I am on my way home after getting an IBM 5100 computer system from the year 1975.
My "time" machine is a stationary mass, temporal displacement unit manufactured by General Electric. The unit is powered by two, top-spin, dual-positive singularities that produce a standard, off-set Tipler sinusoid.

I will be happy to post pictures of the unit.

John provided several graphic images to corroborate his statements, which are reproduced below :

Fig. 1: Scan from the technical manual. Some of the other graphics more fully refer to the device as a General Electric Army Model C204 Gravity Distortion Time Displacement Unit.

Fig. 2: Scan from the technical manual. Looks like it might be a scan from a photocopy of a printed photograph, which would reproduce pretty terribly like this.

Fig. 3: Scan from the technical manual. This should be compared with Fig. 4 below, which is presumably a scan from a different page, which has some slight differences. They each show a diagram of the field shapes and time vectors produced by the unit during operation.

Fig. 4: Scan from the technical manual. Notice the three event horizon labels at the bottom are mislabelled 11, 12, and 13, where in the page above they are labelled 10, 11, 12 and correspond to the legend. Note that this graphic includes the dimensions of 6 (vertical safe distance 6 meters), 7 (mass offset 5 meters), 8 (rear mass distribution 8 meters), and 9 (forward mass distribution 11 meters).

Interpretation of Fig. 4 legend above:
1 Dual singularities in kerr field
2 Output of negative time field
3 Output of null time field
4 Output of positive time field
5 X-ray venting zone
6 Vertical safe distance (6 meters)
7 Mass offset (5 meters)
8 Rear mass dist. (8 meters)
9 Forward mass dist. (11 meters)
10 Negative time event horizon
11 Null time event horizon
12 Positive time event horizon

Fig. 5: Scan from the technical manual. Unfortunately some of the legend is unreadable. Below the graphic I have recreated what I believe the text to read.

Interpretation of Fig. 5 legend above :
1 Singularity drive housing
2 Singularity magnetic field coil
3 Magnetic field generator/regulator
4 Electron mass injector manifold
5 Electron regulator
6 Electron (generator?)
7 Singularity (status sensor?)
8 Singularity cooling housing
9 Singularity cooling pump
10 Singularity cooling supply
11 Gravity sensor unit
12 Battery supply

posted 01-29-2001 01:37 PM
at http://communities.anomalies.net/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=9&t=000024
John Titor
Member
Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 78
Although the documents posted were printed from a computer printer, is it really that hard to believe that manual typing is just a bit more common in thirty years? After the war, many things like manual printing machines, bicycles, sailboats and hand tools were valued a great deal. I have noticed more people in California are installing wood burning stoves.

I realize my claims are a bit ridiculous but my intent is not really to be believed. However, if I had an opportunity to talk to a time traveler, I might ask questions like: How exactly does the singularity sensor measure the expansion of the inner event horizon or why does the reality of multiple worlds support the religious dogma that there are no good or bad people just good and bad desicions or what were the political motivations that changed the U.S. Constitution?

Fig. 6: Scan from the technical manual. Shows layout of major external components and defines the Main and Steering singularities. Notice they are located fore and aft of the time distortion field, which direction is delineated by the prominent black and yellow tape (here black and white).

posted 14 October 2000
at http://www.anomalies.net/time_traveler/irc.html
TimeTravel_0 : As it turns out...
TimeTravel_0 : If you encounter a black hole that is spinning and has an electrified field, you will not be killed passing through its massive gravitational fiuelds.
TimeTravel_0 : regreting asking yet>
Yareisa : no
TimeTravel_0 : Ok
wyrmkin_37 : no
Yareisa : I'm hooked
TimeTravel_0 : In about a year...
G° : is this the omeg point theory?
G° : omega?
TimeTravel_0 : CERN will discover some very odd things as a result of their high energy experiments.
TimeTravel_0 : in about a year.
TimeTravel_0 : from your point of view.
wyrmkin_37 : cern?
TimeTravel_0 : in Geneva.
Yareisa : particle accelerator
wyrmkin_37 : oh
TimeTravel_0 : They will accidently create microsingularities.
G° : makes things go round and hit each other...
TimeTravel_0 : Which will evaporate very quickly.
wyrmkin_37 : one in texas?
TimeTravel_0 : and create a massive ammount of X-ray and Gamma rays.
TimeTravel_0 : It will puzzle them for a while.
TimeTravel_0 : Until they figure out how to add and elcrtical charge and capture these strange odd and massive particles in a magnetic field.
wyrmkin_37 : they shoot electrons at the speed of light.......see what they bust up into
TimeTravel_0 : Yes.
G° : still with you...
wyrmkin_37 : quarks
TimeTravel_0 : If you bombard a singularity with electrons...
TimeTravel_0 : you can alter the size of its event horizon.
TimeTravel_0 : and thus its gravitational field.
TimeTravel_0 : By overlapping these fileds from two singularities...
TimeTravel_0 : you can travel forward and backward through time.
TimeTravel_0 : Its actuallyu quyite simple.
wyrmkin_37 : i follow now
TimeTravel_0 : Thats noit the hard part.
G° : didn't tipler say there was no event horizon?
TimeTravel_0 : No..he said it was possible to approach a massive gravitationl field from certain angles and not get squished.
G° : oh, sorry
wyrmkin_37 : lol
TimeTravel_0 : Actually...Im not really a physisit.
G° : but you know all about this stuff... is that why you were picked?
TimeTravel_0 : I specialize in 20th century history and my grandfather builds computers.
wyrmkin_37 : what base?
TimeTravel_0 : Hmmm....you drive a car and know how to change the oil don;t you?
TimeTravel_0 : I am based in Tampa Fl.
G° : actually, only just.. LOL
wyrmkin_37 : chas, afb
TimeTravel_0 : McDill
wyrmkin_37 : kewl
G° : sorry?
G° : in english?
wyrmkin_37 : zoomies
Yareisa : thats english?!
G° : you airforce wyrm?
wyrmkin_37 : yes
G° : your not working on a time machine are you?
G° : come here for guidance...
wyrmkin_37 : no just came in for chat
TimeTravel_0 : Altering gravity is not the hard part.
G° : LOL
Yareisa : go on...
TimeTravel_0 : Detecting gravity is the hard part.
TimeTravel_0 : I will tell you a littlke story.
TimeTravel_0 : When time travel was invented.
TimeTravel_0 : They built prototypes that would go back in time for a split second and then return.
TimeTravel_0 : They had sensors and cameras on them.
TimeTravel_0 : ...and they never returned.
G° : and forwards as well? how about a single jump forwards?
TimeTravel_0 : It was later discovered that the machines were ending up about 15 miles away and 3000 fett in the air.
TimeTravel_0 : feet
G° : doh!
TimeTravel_0 : The Earth was rotating away from them.
wyrmkin_37 : synchroniaztion please
TimeTravel_0 : A system had to be invented that would "hold" the machine to the Earth.
TimeTravel_0 : Its called VGL.
TimeTravel_0 : Its based on very sensative clocks and gravity sensors.
TimeTravel_0 : It stops the time distortion machine if radical changes in gravity are detected.
wyrmkin_37 : mechanical or electronic clocks
TimeTravel_0 : You wouldn't want to end up inside a mountain or under water...would you?
TimeTravel_0 : Cesium.
wyrmkin_37 : oh
G° : isn't all this classified? surely your suppoed to keep it secret whilst in the past?
TimeTravel_0 : LOL!!!
TimeTravel_0 : I know you think Im nuts...come on.
TimeTravel_0 : Who would believe me?
G° : just asking?
TimeTravel_0 : It my best defense.
wyrmkin_37 : isnt celsium a higher class of quartz? dont know
G° : but we don't have long to find out if you are or not
TimeTravel_0 : Besides...do you know how big a hole 2 sigularites make when their magnetic filed colpases?
G° : won't be long before CERN (?) make the discovery
TimeTravel_0 : Thats right.
G° : no
TimeTravel_0 : Welll....either do I. But I don;t want to know.

posted 01-29-2001 01:37 PM
at http://communities.anomalies.net/cgi-bin/bbs/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=9&t=000024
John Titor
Member

Registered: Jan 2001
Posts: 78
By using two microsingularites in close proximity to each other, it is possible to create, manipulate and alter the Kerr fields to create a Tipler gravity sinusoid. This field can be adjusted, rotated and moved in order to simulate the movement of mass through a donut-shaped singularity and into an alternate world line. Thus, safe time travel.

Fig. 7: Detailed device schematic, presumably another scan from the technical manual but that is uncertain. Unfortunately the legend is missing for all the numbered labels, or we could go a lot farther in analyzing the circuitry.

Fig. 8: Appears to be a scan of a black and white photo of the device. Not from http://www.anomalies.net/time_traveler/john.html however, but from Pamela.

Fig. 9: Photo of the unit in the car (Corvette). The device appears to have been moved to the passenger's side. If it weighs 500 pounds as John said, moving it would be some feat.

Fig. 10: Bent laser light.

Description purportedly from John.
This is a picture taken in the fall of 2035 during my training. It shows my instructor beaming a handheld laser outside the vehicle during operation. The beam is being bent by the gravitational field produced outside the vehicle by the distortion unit. The beam is visible through smoke that is coming from his cigar.

Fig. 11: Photo of the unit in a vehicle. This appears to not be a Corvette, John mentioned somewhere that he swapped the Corvette for a truck. That looks like a shotgun in the front center.

Fig. 12: A second photo of the unit in the truck. Paint colors match, the padded cushion in the foreground appears to be the same as in Fig. 11, and there is the same white box to the left of the unit in both photos.

Fig. 13: Third photo of the unit in the truck. The several objects in the foreground appear to have not been moved, but the light is different as if this photo were taken at a different time of day than Fig 12. There is a red glow reflecting off the instruction label which could possibly be an indicator lamp. Could the unit be turned on? Possibly it's in some kind of testing or maintenance mode or maybe it's reflecting light from outside the vehicle. The glow appears to be coming from a button labelled 'emergency disconnect' (#5) in Fig. 6. But it could also be coming from the 'emergency view screen' (#4) shown in Fig. 6 if that is perhaps a red LED display.

Fig. 14: John's unit insignia. Supposedly the design is based on the field patterns of the time distortion device, reminiscent of Figs 3 and 4 above. It's probably unwise to try to infer too much from it since it's just a logo design.

Time Travel experience
pamela
Member posted 05 November 2000 03:29
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Questions for timetravel_0 with permission to post.
Pamela:
by the way can you tell me what it feels like to time travel? when you are in the process of doing it what does it feel like and what do you see and hear. you made mention that you had to get use to the fields. Do you see a bright flash of light?

Timetravel_0:
Interesting first question. The unit has a ramp up time after the destination coordinates are fed into the computers. An audible alarm and a small light start a short countdown at which point you should be secured in a seat. The gravity field generated by the unit overtakes you very quickly. You feel a tug toward the unit similar to rising quickly in an elevator and it continues to rise based on the power setting the unit is working under. At 100% power, the constant pull of gravity can be as high as 2 Gs or more depending on how close you are to the unit. There are no serious side effects but I try to avoid eating before a flight.

No bright flash of light is seen. Outside, the vehicle appears to accelerate as the light is bent around it. We have to wear sunglasses or close our eyes as this happens due to a short burst of ultraviolet radiation. Personally I think it looks like your driving under a rainbow. After that, it appears to fade to black and remains totally black until the unit is turned off. We are advised to keep the windows closed as a great deal of heat builds up outside the car. The gravity field also traps a small air pocket around the car that acts as your only O2 supply unless you bring compressed air with you. This pocket will only last for a short period and a carbon sensor tells us when it's too dangerous. The C204 unit is accurate from 50 to 60 years a jump and travels at about 10 years an hour at 100% power.

You do hear a slight hum as the unit operates and when the power changes or the unit turns off. There is a great deal of electrical crackling noise from static electricity.

Source and special thanks to :http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/TimeMachine.cfm

Time Travel: John Titor's Startling Predictions

2011-02-21T15:42:00.003+08:00

Time Travel: John Titor's Startling Predictions Is it possible to travel back in time? A man calling himself John Titor claims it is. In fact, Titor says that he is a time traveler from the year 2036. These pronouncements and others were made on various Internet forums and chat rooms from November 2000 to March 2001, ending when Titor went back to the future—or so the story goes. Since then a cult industry has sprung up, attracting the attention of tens of thousands of Web surfers, both true believers and naysayers.

Why are you posting messages on the Internet?

JOHN TITOR: I’ve been trying to alert anyone to the possibility of a civil war in the United States. To see it unfold is very interesting. I realize no one will actually believe me, and I’m not sure you should.

Tell us how the war started. Who was involved? Who won?

Civil war in the United States will start in 2005. The conflict flares up and down, but the year 2008 was a general date when everyone realized the world they were living in was over.

Time Travel: John Titor's Startling Predictions When the civil conflict got worse, people generally decided to either stay in the cities and lose most of their civil rights under the guise of security, or leave the cities for more isolated and rural areas. The conflict consumed everyone in the U.S. by 2012 and ended with a very short World War III.

How can we survive the war?

If you want to survive the coming conflict, learn to let fear keep you alive. Too many of you turn off the life-saving natural instincts and premonitions when it’s convenient. The same person who has five dead-bolt locks on their door will think nothing about getting into a parking-garage elevator with a total stranger. If you want to live, keep your eyes open.

How does your time machine work?

The basics of time travel will begin for you at CERN in about a year when they announce their ability to create microsingularities, and end in 2034 with the building of the first “time machine.” The unit I have is called a GE C204 gravity-distortion unit. It’s about 5-feet-long and 2-feet-by-2-feet square. The C204 unit is accurate from 50 to 60 years a jump and travels at about ten years an hour at 100% power.

During operation the C204 is usually placed inside a vehicle. The gravity field generated by the unit overtakes you very quickly. You feel a tug toward the unit similar to rising quickly in an elevator, and it continues to rise based on the power setting. Outside, the vehicle appears to accelerate as the light is bent around it. After that, it appears to fade to black and remains totally black outside the vehicle until the unit is turned off.

Can you travel to a place and time of your choice?

The distortion unit has operational limits. The unit I have begins to “break away” at about 60 years. In other words, if I wanted to go back 2,000 years and meet Christ, there is a good chance I would end up on a worldline where he was never born.

What would happen if you met yourself in another timeline?

Nothing would happen. The universe is made up of infinite worldlines where everything is possible and has a 100% chance of happening. Therefore, there are no paradoxes. The Everett-Wheeler Model is correct. [There exist parallel universes in which anything that can happen does happen.] It has always surprised me why that concept is so hard for people to imagine and accept. I have met or seen myself twice on different worldlines. I was born in 1998; so the other “me” is two [years old] on your worldline.

How does your original worldline differ from ours?

The fact that I’m here makes it different. I would guess the temporal divergence between this worldline and my original is about 2%. Of course, the longer I am here, the larger that divergence becomes from my point of view. I get home by going back before I arrived and then going forward to 2036. If I go forward to “your” 2036 now, it would probably look nothing like mine. Under multiple-world theory, there are an infinite number of “homes” that I could return to that don’t have me there. I can never get back to the exact worldline I left, but I can get back to a worldline that is so close, no one would know the difference.

Why do people travel in time?

The reason we use time travel in 2036 is to get information or items that would be helpful in 2036. Right now most of our practical missions are from 1960 to 1980. I was sent to 1975 to get an IBM computer system called the 5100. It was one of the first portable computers made with the unique ability to read older IBM programming languages. We need the system in 2036 to “debug” various legacy programs that are used in larger mainframe computers.

Can you tell us what 2036 is like?

In 2036 I live in Florida with my family, and I’m currently stationed at an Army base in Tampa. I was born in 1998; so I do share some childhood memories with all of you. Life is centered more on the family and then the community. I cannot imagine living even a few hundred miles away from my parents. People spend more time talking to each other and their neighbors. I’ve noticed the same effect here when the power goes off.

There is a lot more personal trust and less paranoia. There is no large industrial complex creating masses of useless food and recreational items. Food and livestock are grown and sold locally. People spend much more time reading. Religion is taken seriously, and everyone can multiply and divide in their heads.

What can you tell us about our immediate future?

Since I will eventually be leaving this worldline, I could easily tell you all sorts of things that would happen in the next few years. Unfortunately, your worldline is already 2% different from mine, and there’s no way to give you absolute facts about future events. When the day comes for my “prediction” to be realized, it may happen or it may not. In fact, the information I give you will allow someone to affect the outcome based on the prediction itself. If what I say does happen, then your ability to judge your environment is crippled by your acceptance of me as a prophet. If I am wrong, then everything I have said that might possibly have made you think about your world in a different way is suddenly discredited. I do not want either. You are able to change your worldline just as I am. Can you stop the civil war before it gets here? Sure. Will you do it? Probably not.

What are the major health concerns in the future?

A great many people are still dying from CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease]. I want to emphasize how devastating this disease will be for you in the future. We only eat meat that we raise ourselves. Do not eat or use products from any animal that is fed and eats parts of its own dead. The “Mad Cow” story here is yet to begin.

What does time travel do to religion?

Since every possible outcome, event and possibility is happening and will happen, then all good and all evil must balance out in the universe. After the reality of multiple worlds sank into our collective thought, the one basic change to all religious dogma is the concept that good and evil does not exist as an organized force in our lives, nor can it be used as a useful way to judge what God may think of a situation.

Good and evil are personal experiences that can only guide what we do as individuals and how we relate to others. This outlook also makes it impossible for me to judge any other person or event. Since we cannot see the entire universe as God sees it, we will never be gods or be capable of accurately judging anything outside of ourselves. My actions can only be judged as good and bad by me and my God.

Does the ability to know what’s going to occur help convince people you’re a time traveler?

Consider that you are a time traveler who goes back in time to the first week of February 1970, and you are confronted with the same problem. What do you remember right now about the second week of February 1970?

Naturally, the conflict in Vietnam and the Middle East came up, but as someone has already stated here, that wouldn’t be any more convincing than it is now. I suppose I could predict the failure of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, but since time travel is ridiculous, I would be blamed for sabotage.

What surprises you the most about our time period?

I like the incredible freedom you have, but I see it as a trap. The cost is the loss of your sense of connection with family and community. Yes, you can self-actualize your ambitions, but at what cost to the people around you or yet to be born? The incredible availability of art, literature and limitless resources is hardly taken advantage of as you sit in front of your TVs every day.

What would our government do if they found you?

I would probably end up in a nice little padded cell while they poked at my machine with a screwdriver. I’m really not that worried. First, they would have to believe in time travel; and second, stupidity and greed are fairly predictable. In my experience, evil may be powerful, but it isn’t very bright.

How did you feel about the President in 2005 and 2009?

The President or “leader” in 2005 tried desperately to hold the country together, but many of their policies drove a larger wedge into the Bill of Rights. The President in 2009 was interested only in keeping his/her power base.

Do you think that war is immoral?

I disapprove of murder. Man as a species is incapable of changing his nature through will alone, and war is a tool of biology. The ability for war sleeps in each one of us, and we must decide what we will do before it awakens. As for morality, again I point to the universal balance of good and evil. For every worldline where there is peace, there is a worldline that has destroyed itself.

It sounds as if you think a war would benefit us.

I have an example that’s closer to my situation: You are a time traveler who wishes to go back in time to 1941 because your grandparents live close to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. You realize you can’t stop the war, but you may be able to help them prepare for it. Strangely, December 7 comes and goes with no sneak attack. As the war in Europe rages on, Japan fails to join the Axis power, there is no war in the Pacific, and the United States remains neutral. Then you watch as Germany begins to develop the atomic bomb all by itself. What would you do?

As far as war goes, I have faith you are quite capable of starting one all by yourself. I am hard pressed to accept any criticism of my outlook on that subject. Personal responsibility, determination, honor, friendship and self-reliance are not just words we fantasize about in the future. I watch every day what you are doing as a society. While you sit by and watch your Constitution being torn away from you, you willfully eat poisoned food, buy manufactured products no one needs and turn an uncaring eye away from millions of people suffering and dying all around you.

Perhaps I should let you all in on a little secret. No one likes you in the future. This time period is looked at as being full of lazy, self-centered, civically ignorant sheep. Perhaps you should be less concerned about me and more concerned about that. I think a war would be good for you and your society. I don’t want to stop it, nor would I if I could.

Is there anything you want us to know before you return to 2036?

One very disturbing thing I have noticed about your society is your blind acceptance of what you are told. Do you really think the news industry doesn’t have an agenda? Do you really think those hamburgers you stuff into your body are safe?

Do you really think your government is telling you the truth? What proof do you have of any of that?

I often hear, “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?” Quite frankly, you all scare the hell out of us. In trying to help you, we put ourselves at great risk, and there’s really no point to it. Since worldlines, outcomes and events are infinite, we have better things to do.

TIME ON HIS SIDE?

Despite John Titor's repeated assertion, "My goal is not to be believed," the Internet is rife with skirmishes between ardent disciples and skeptics. Here are the main bones of contention:

In 2000 Titor declared, "The basics for time travel start at CERN in about a year." Six months later, news stories emerged announcing that scientists at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland were confident that its new atom-smasher would create mini-black holes, the same kinds of singularities John Titor claimed to use. As Titor was posting, it was known that CERN's colossal particle-accelerator would soon be brought online and that scientists there intended to make artificial black holes.

In 2001 Titor said there would be a "devastating" breakout of Mad Cow in the U.S., leading to widespread death from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human variant of the brain-wasting malady. In 2003 the USDA announced the first documented case of Mad Cow in the U.S. amid claims that the government was suppressing the true extent of the problem. On that note, Johns Hopkins researchers have recently estimated that 10% of Alzheimer's cases may actually be CJD. Debunkers say that a wave of Mad Cow wouldn't have been hard to predict, since Europe's epidemic was already under way, and it was just a matter of time before it hit the U.S.

Titor maintained that he went back to 1975 to retrieve a vintage IBM 5100 computer that had a secret code-reading capability, which IBM kept under wraps. A former company programmer has since confirmed that the 5100 had an interface between the assembly code and the emulator beneath it, allowing programmers access to all IBM code. The function was allegedly suppressed to protect it from competitors. Some have speculated that John Titor is simply an IBM programmer with inside knowledge.

In 2001 Titor forecast that China was "pretty close to putting a man in orbit; it shouldn't surprise you if they do that soon." In October 2003 China became the third nation to put an astronaut into Earth orbit.

Titor implied that weapons of mass destruction would not be found in Iraq. "Are you really surprised that Iraq has nukes now, or is that just BS to whip everyone up into accepting the next war?" he wrote in early 2001. Of course, he's not the only one who thought it was BS from the beginning, but this Titor posting preceded both 9/11 and any public discussion of an invasion of Iraq.

Titor predicted "a series of Waco-like incidents," but didn't say anything about 9/11. Some speculate that this omission was because the coming civil war and subsequent nuclear world war dwarfed an event like 9/11. "Does anyone today talk about the sinking of the Reuben James?" asked one post. Titor did say that there were occurrences he refused to warn about. Plus, divergence between worldlines could mean that he didn't know about 9/11, since it never happened on his worldline. Some have also pointed out that John Titor was simply using a reference point that people were already familiar with-in this case the Branch Davidian inferno in Waco.

Titor carefully pointed out that, according to the many-worlds theory, if his predictions don't come true, it just means that our worldline is slightly different from his and that ours can change at any time.

Some physicists have said that Titor's time machine would not work since he did not have enough mass to create the microsingularity he claimed he had. Titor countered by saying that the theory of general relativity works for mass too and that his double-singularity only simulated the effects of a black hole. Time travel doesn't need a total theory anyway, he wrote; it just needs to use the parts of quantum theory that work in the real world.

Some physicists maintain that John Titor's time machine would never be able to overcome Hawking Radiation, which would fast exceed tolerable levels and cause the singularity to explode. John responded in 2001 that Hawking Radiation could be adequately controlled. In 2004 Stephen Hawking himself conceded that he was wrong about his black-hole paradox and that black holes might allow information within them to escape after all.

In 2003 Duke University physics professor Robert G. Brown posted a spirited refutation of John Titor's physics, focusing primarily on the impossibility of Titor carting around mass-heavy black holes in an automobile and shooting them up with electrons. Brown makes a strong case that Titor's physics and engineering claims are preposterous.

The picture of the bent laser that Titor posted online is a fake, some experts insist. If the gravity outside the car were bending it, as Titor claimed, then all the light would be bent, not just the laser. Titor never addressed this issue, apparently since the paradox was pointed out after his supposed return to the future.

Representing John Titor's supposed family is Larry Haber, a pricey entertainment lawyer based in Celebration, Florida. Also the location of the headquarters of the John Titor Foundation, Celebration is a master-planned community on Disney-owned real estate outside Orlando. Haber, one of Celebration's first residents, has been a Disney attorney. Some suspect that Haber or his teenage son may have originally propagated the hoax as a merchandising scheme or as a way to bring traffic to TimeTravelInstitute.com, where Titor's first postings appeared. Interestingly, the Web site originally had the same bulletin board administrator as the town of Celebration. Oliver Williams (the current editor of JohnTitor.com and compiler of our accompanying interview) is also suspected of being the supposed time traveler, using the John Titor Foundation as a cover

source:http://www.think-aboutit.com/Misc/TimeTravelJohnTitor.htm
Article compiled by :OLIVER WILLIAMS

*******************************************************************************

TITLE:JOHN TITOR VALIDITY TEST BASED ON PREDICTION OF CIVIL WAR BY 2004-2005

PURPOSE: This document outlines five of the more significant predictions made by a person calling himself John Titor who claimed to be a military time traveler from 2036. ("Titor" is believed to be shorthand for Time Traveler and not his real last name). These predictions are compiled here and formally copyrighted as proof of their existence at this time so that they may be used to either give credence to, or invalidate, predictions 1 through 4 based on whether or not prediction 5 (civil war in America) comes true.

PREDICTIONS:

1. Primary interest and concern surrounds Mr. Titor's prediction of a global nuclear war in 2015 that will destroy most of the major cities in the United States and many around the world, kill a large fraction of the world's population, and leave the environment contaminated with massive amounts of long-lived radionuclides. By 2036 when civilization has begun to regroup, we of today will be known as the generation that had it all, but threw it away.

2.Microsingularities (mini black holes) will be created soon at a particle collider, and physicists will eventually learn how to build time machines using two of them at a time. It is already expected by some physicists that particle energies will be high enough to create microsingularities at CERN's Large Hadron Collider when it begins operation in 2007, but Mr. Titor did not say exactly where and when they would be discovered. The Titor-specific part of this prediction is that microsingularities can and will be used to build time-travel machines.

3. The multiple-worlds theory is true, and there somehow exists an infinity of universes where somewhere each choice possible gets actualized, as new "worldlines" constantly spin off from one another. Similar wordlines may be thought of as alternate realities in which details may vary slightly if one is not too far from another, but some worldlines may diverge drastically apart. Apparently as Mr. Titor's time machine operates it navigates through these alternate realities, and time travelers try to stay as close to possible to their original worldline, the success of their efforts being measured in percent divergence from their original worldline. We are just a few percent divergence away from Mr. Titor's original worldline, he says. According to Mr. Titor, while he believes we are headed for and will experience the same major disasters he knows from his history, we still have the power to alter our reality as we choose: we do have free will. Because there are an infinity of universes where all different choices are played out anyway, it therefore wouldn't harm anything if we did take steps to intelligently modify our future, and that is also why Mr. Titor felt he could do no harm by slightly modifying this reality by revealing himself here. He mentioned some small divergences he's noticed, such as books not written and sports events won by other teams, which he says is normal for divergence of a few percent, and that some divergence is inevitable (he can never return to the exact same worldline he left in 2036, but he can come very close).

4. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) will be epidemic by 2036 and it is spread by eating the meat of animals infected with related diseases such as BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as Mad Cow Disease). CJD is a horrible and fatal brain-deteriorating disease for which there is no treatment or cure, presently believed to be caused by a prion (an abnormal isoform of a host-encoded protein, with no RNA or DNA). Mr. Titor expressed astonishment that people are so careless about the food they routinely ingest; apparently CJD has a latent period of 10 to 30 years, which means (if Mr. Titor was not a fraud) that many people are probably unwittingly contracting the disease today who will become victims of the CJD epidemic. We're ignorant meat eaters.

5. Civil war in the United States will begin in 2004 or 2005, as the result of increasingly oppressive police state tactics like warrantless searches and other violations of American civil liberties. It will become common for people to have their doors kicked in and homes violently invaded by police looking for evildoers. The Gestapo-style oppression of innocents by an increasingly oppressive and murderous government will be worst in the cities, so many people will seek refuge in the countryside, but police will soon enough seek them out there too. Civil war will emerge as a more or less continuous series of military sieges and confrontations resembling the Ruby Ridge and Waco police massacres of 1992 and 1993, and it will begin by 2004 or perhaps 2005 (it might not be obvious in the beginning what's actually happening). As time goes on the civil war will become more and more a continuous conflict between paranoid government forces headquartered in the cities, against perceived or imagined threats in the rural civilian population. The American government will wage war against its own citizens, winning most of the battles, but the battling will drag on for years. In the nuclear war of 2015 our cities will be primary targets, so the civil war will end then in favor of the rurals when the government and its domestic armies are destroyed. In this way the nuclear war will be regarded by the survivors as a good thing.

SIGNIFICANCE:

At the time of John Titor's telling of his story via the Web and IRC (internet relay chat) in 2000 and 2001, and even by the time of this document's copyright in 2003, the prospect of civil war in America seems an outlandish prediction. Surely it is so farfetched that only a genuine time traveler or very good fortune teller could forsee it at this time. If a civil war in America does validate prediction 5, a reasonable person ought to consider that Mr. Titor was not a fraud and that nuclear war is very likely to occur in 2015. In that case it will remain possible (though still not probable) to prevent nuclear war, but only if we are able to face the evidence and respond appropriately so that things can be turned around from their present course.

It's remotely possible that the hard cold proof provided by this document may sufficiently alter our worldline to prevent nuclear calamity, but it's more likely that only a modest number of individuals will take heed of an early warning even in the face of its validation. Denial can allow people to believe in whatever they want to believe in, and people who do not become aware of John Titor's story until after civil war has begun may quite rationally tend to disbelieve that this information existed much sooner and not fabricated after the fact, unless they have some proof of it.

source:http://johntitor.strategicbrains.com/CopyrightProof.cfm

Planet could be 'unrecognizable' by 2050, experts say

2011-02-21T15:35:00.000+08:00

WASHINGTON (AFP) - – A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.

The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.

To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.

The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.

But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies.

People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.

It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.

"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet," Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.

Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.

"For 20 years, there's been very little investment in family planning, but there's a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices," said Bongaarts.

"We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning," said Casterline.

Kayakers snap best-ever photo of ‘Loch Ness Monster’

2011-02-21T15:26:00.003+08:00

Does this photo prove once and for all that England’s famed Loch Ness monster really exists? (Photo: Tom Pickles and Sarah Harrington)

Nothing puts a damper on a serene afternoon’s kayaking like the sight of a primeval sea monster.

That was the rude lesson for Tom Pickles and Sarah Harrington, who’d taken their watercraft out on the foggy waters of Lake Windermere, only to encounter what appeared to be “an enormous snake” swimming by.

“It was petrifying and we paddled back to the shore straight away. At first I thought it was a dog and then saw it was much bigger and moving really quickly at about 10 mph,” the 24-year-old Pickles told The Telegraph.

“Each hump was moving in a rippling motion and it was swimming fast. Its skin was like a seal’s but its shape was completely abnormal—it’s not like any animal I’ve ever seen before.”

But what did Pickles and Harrington expect? Didn’t they know that Lake Windermere is reputedly the home of the British version of the Loch Ness monster? In the past five years, sojourners on the lake have reported eight sightings of a Nessie-like serpent.

But the kayaking couple rallied from their shock and snapped the clearest photo of the Windermere “monster” since the sightings began. A journalism professor and his wife inaugurated the recent spate of Nessie-esque encounters on the lake back in 2006 reporting they had seen a “giant eel” somewhere between 15-20 feet long.

Ever since then, researchers have set out upon the lake with sonar equipment, in pursuit of “Bow-Nessie,” as the creature’s British compatriots like to call it. But so far, their efforts haven’t borne fruit.

Of course, people in Scotland have reported sightings of the Loch Ness Monster since 1933, and even with dramatic advance sonar and video technology, Loch Ness research teams have likewise been unable to turn up any credible scientific evidence of its existence.

Even its most noted hunter, Robert Rines, recently gave up his quest to find the beast after trying for nearly 40 years. “Unfortunately, I’m running out of age,” the 85 year-old Rines said last year when he announced he was calling it quits.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ian Winfield, a lake ecologist at the University of Lancaster, told The Sun he thinks the mysterious appartition people are seeing in Lake Windermere is merely a really big catfish.

But all of this speculation overlooks the central mystery in the latest sighting: Why on earth would a couple go kayaking on an English lake in the middle of February?

By Brett Michael Dykes (from Yahoo! blog “The Upshot”)
Source:yahoosingapore – February 20th, 2011

Some of the Loch Ness Monster - Hoax Photos or Real ? :

RMS Titanic: April 1912

2011-02-18T11:55:00.005+08:00

On the night of April 14th, 1912, the R.M.S Titanic, bound from Southampton to New York, on her Maiden Voyage, collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The iceberg ripped open the first 5 compartments and the Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15th, taking the lives of 1,517 men, women and children. ONLY 710 survived that night.

* It is 269m long (4 x the length of boring 747 plane) can carry 3547 Passengers and crew (fully loaded):

* Took 3 years to build where 8 contruction workers died

* 1st class is 60 pounds (which is today's 4000 pounds equivalent)

* 3rd class is cheapest at 2 pounds ( only 1 way)~ which is about 2 weeks of salary for a general un-skill worker

Staterooms (840 total):

First Class: 416
Second Class: 162
Third Class: 262
Plus 40 open berthing areas

* The designer was so confident that Titanic is "un-sinkable" ...they only placed 20 life boat on board...which could only carry half the capacity (for 1178 px). Each boat can carry about 65 seats.There were 20 boats in all: 14 lifeboats, each designed to carry 65 passengers; 2 emergency boats, each with a capacity of 40 passengers; and 4 Engelhardt (collapsible) boats, each capable of carrying 47 passengers.

* Captain is 62 years old vetern Captain Smith (24 years of experience)

* 10 April 1912 , 12 noon ...Titanic set off 1st time (Maiden voyage) to the ocean..There are 2227 Passengers and crews on board

* The 2 look outs only saw the coming ice berg with their naked eye 37 seconds before the actual impact..as they do not have access to bino which are locked away accidentally..

* 11.40pm (close to mid night) hit into the ice berg side...

* Within 1 hours ...5 compartments are flooding over 4m high...(Safety feature can only hold up to 4 comaprtments!)

* 1.45am ...the last life boat was lowered...the power failed and light goes out from Titanic...The date is 14 April 1912

* 1517 people died in the titanic disaster,only 710 people survived out of 2227 people in total aboard. Although the Carpathia picked up 711 survivors, one of these died en route to New York and was counted among the casualties, reducing the total number of survivors to 710

This is the story of Titanic...The real reason, why titanic was lost to the sea.
Mystery solved....Watch the 3 parts series..

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

1940 Time Traveller

2011-02-17T18:29:00.006+08:00

It’s the short description for the photograph shown at the virtual Bralorne Pioneer Museum, from British Columbia, Canada. A photograph from November 1940 was alleged to show a time traveller.

It was claimed that his clothing and sun glasses were modern and not the style worn in 1940. The man with what appears to be very modern sunglasses seems to be wearing a stamped T-shirt with a nice sweater, all the while holding a portable compact camera!

Internet people reached to the obvious conclusion: it’s a time traveller caught on camera on 1940! Finally, we have proof!

This is the original photograph :

~ Reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood, November 1940

Logic explaination of Hoax ?
No time traveler. Those sunglasses already existed in the 40s. Observe the guy....his sunglasses have sideblockers, fashion glasses introduced in the 40s. Besides, his T shirt has a front sewed letter, another usual thing from the cllege football teams back then. The camera looks like a 40s photo camera. So this guy is well fit into the 40s era.
~ ciscotie

The truth ?

Further research proved that the modern appearance of the man may not have been so modern - The style of sunglasses first appeared in the 1920s and in fact Barbara Stanwyck can be seen wearing a similar pair in the film Double Indemnity three years later. On first glance the man is taken by many to be wearing a modern printed T-Shirt but a closer look shows it looks to be a sweater with a sewn on emblem, the kind of clothing regularly worn by sports teams of the period. The remainder of his clothing would also have been available at the time however are far more casual than those worn by the other individuals in the photograph.

Is Time Travel Possible?

2011-02-17T18:14:00.001+08:00

There may be no other concept that captures the imagination more than the idea of time travel -- the ability to travel to any point in the past or future. What could be cooler? You could jump into your time machine to go back and see major events in history and talk to the people who were there! Who would you travel back to see? Julius Caesar? Leonardo da Vinci? Elvis? You could go back and meet yourself at an earlier age, go forward and see how you look in the future... It's these possibilities that have made time travel the subject of so many science fiction books and movies.

It turns out that, in some sense, we are all time travelers. As you sit at your desk, doing nothing more than clicking your mouse, time is traveling around you. The future is constantly being transformed into the past with the present only lasting for a fleeting moment. Everything that you are doing right now is quickly moving into the past, which means we continue to move through time.

Ideas of time travel have existed for centuries, but when Albert Einstein released his theory of special relativity, he laid the foundation for the theoretical possibility of time travel. As we all know, no one has successfully demonstrated time travel, but no one has been able to rule it out either.

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explores the possibilities.

How To Time Travel ~ Introduce worm hole

2011-02-17T18:13:00.000+08:00

Late for school? A meeting? Just take a wormhole-you'll be there before you know it.

John Titor & Time Travel

2011-02-17T16:10:00.006+08:00

John Titor自稱是2036年的美國軍人。John Titor自稱受軍部指揮，5年前經時光機回到2000年我們的世界，進行軍事任務之餘，於2000年11月2日至2001年3月 24日期間，在網上不同之留言板發布之預言(未來人 John Titor 9大預言)一一皆準之後，John Titor立即成為網上最熱預言家！

John Titor appears on the internet in November 2000. He claims to be US a US Army Captain from the year 2036 on a mission to the year 1975. He says that he has stopped in the year 2000 for "personal reasons" and he distributes a manual for the General Electric C240 Time Displacement Unit.

Time machine:

Titor described the time machine on several occasions. In an early post, he described it as a "stationary mass, temporal displacement unit powered by two top-spin, dual positive singularities", producing a "standard off-set Tipler sinusoid". The earliest post was more explicit, saying it contained: * Two magnetic housing units for the dual micro singularities * An electron injection manifold to alter mass and gravity micro singularities * A cooling and X-ray venting system * Gravity sensors, or a variable gravity lock * Four main cesium clocks * Three main computer units

According to the posts, the device was installed in the rear of a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette convertible and later moved to a 1987 truck having four-wheel drive.

Titor further claimed that the "Everett-Wheeler model of quantum physics" was correct. This model, better known as the many-worlds interpretation, posits that every possible outcome of a quantum decision actually occurs in a separate "universe". Titor stated that this was the reason the grandfather paradox would not occur; following the logic of the argument, Titor would be killing a different John Titor's grandfather in a timeline other than his own.

Historian for alleged time traveler John Titor, Oliver Williams reviewed the facts of the remarkable case, and related some of Titor's past predictions to recent news stories. Titor's story has been pieced together from posts he made on Internet discussion boards beginning in November 2000 and ending in March 2001. He claims to have traveled to 1975 from the year 2036 (a period recovering from the devastation of World War III)-- to find an IBM computer that was needed to fix something in his time.

Williams believes that we could be living in an alternate reality that was changed by Titor's visit in 1975. Specifically, he did something to stop Y2K from happening, said Williams. According to the timeline Titor shared, America entered a Civil War between 2005 and 2010, then became involved in a global war which culminated in a nuclear exchange in 2015. By 2036, the population had been reduced by one third, society is more agrarian and the US capitol is in Nebraska. The country is divided up into five main areas, with states having more control.

Williams noted that the upcoming research at CERN may lead to unexpected breakthroughs in time travel-- and that Titor had posted comments connecting experiments at CERN to the development of time travel. Williams has created several podcasts related to the Titor story, which can be viewed on You Tube.

Oliver Williams is the website editor for the time travel story of John Titor. He first saw John Titor's internet postings in the fall of 2002. After reading many of the sites where John was discussed, it amazed Oliver as to how much polarization and confrontation John's posts caused. Oliver soon realized that part of the problem was that there was no one place where all the posts could be easily seen. In early 2003, Oliver gathered the posts that John had left online and edited them into a single web site. The website also contains email and news events that point to subjects John spoke about. Oliver doesn't know if John Titor was a real time traveler or not, but, he says, what still amazes him about the posts is their ability to draw you in, question your sanity for thinking it might be real, and then scare you to death after seeing events unfold as John had said.

Note:Oliver Williams is the founder for http://www.johntitor.com

More detail...
http://www.johntitor.com

A Brief Summary of the John Titor Phenomenon

Although there is debate over the exact date it started, on November 02, 2000, a person calling themselves Timetravel_0, and later John Titor, started posting on a public forum that he was a time traveler from the year 2036.

One of the first things he did was post pictures of his time machine and its operations manual. As the weeks went by, more and more people began questioning him about why he was here, the physics of time travel and his thoughts about our time. He also posted on other forums including the now non-existent Art Bell site. In his posts John Titor entertained, angered, frightened and even belittled those who engaged him in conversation.

On March 21, 2001, John Titor told us he would be leaving our and returning to 2036. After that, he was never heard from again. Speculation and investigation about who John Titor was and why he was online continues to this day.

Although it may be easy to dismiss all this as science fiction, most people who read his posts agree that there is something very haunting about John Titor and what he said. In addition, and open to more debate, he also made a series of predictions and comments that eerily seem to be coming true

Original Forum discussion :

Questions :

John Titor, A serious reply please. When you determine the time to which you want to travel do you "dial in" the date to which you want to go, can you "jump" to a new date, say in 1000 year increments. Can you "sample" the time period by stopping only for a few moments before continueing your trip and can you take passengers with you????? please answer honestly.
~ Posted by Vanessa Bunn on 01-31-2001 03:41 PM

Why would you want a IBM 5100 I can find them at auctions for next to nothing, i think they were the first 286 CPU's.
Why didn't you stop in this year first and by one.Well I have a good question for you in 2036 do you still use toliet paper to wipe your ass.
~ Posted by Charles Moltrup on 01-31-2001 09:02 PM

John Titor,
A serious reply please. When you determine the time to which you want to travel do you "dial in" the date to which you want to go, can you "jump" to a new date, say in 1000 year increments. Can you "sample" the time period by stopping only for a few moments before continueing your trip and can you take passengers with you????? please answer honestly.
~ Posted by Vanessa Bunn on 01-31-2001 03:41 PM

Here's the reply...

The distortion unit reaches its target destination by using very sensitive gravity sensors and atomic clocks. The basic unit of calculation is the second. So yes, in a sense you do “dial in” in a date and the computer system controls the distortion field. At maximum power, the unit I have is capable of traveling about 10 years an hour.

Unfortunately, time travel is not an exact science. There is inherent error and chaos in the computers ability to make accurate calculations. Based on the current technology of the clocks and sensors, distortion units are only accurate to about 60 years or so. So no, in 2036, we are unable to travel back 1000 years due to the error rate in the system. The divergence between the worldline of origin and the target worldline would be too great. If one were to try and travel back that far, history would look nothing like what you would expect.

The unit has mass limits but the 204 is capable of transporting about three people and equipment. I don’t think you would like 2036 very much.
~ Posted by John Titor on 01-31-2001 07:13 PM

The 5100 had a very simple and unique feature that IBM did not account for and decided it was not in their best interest to advertise (which in hindsight was not very smart). This accidental feature was thus removed from any future desktop computers. In order to take advantage of this feature, the 5100 I have now required a couple of special “tweaks” that had to be done by one of the software engineers in 1975. Anyone who is familiar with this feature and was told to keep their mouth shut about it will be able to tell you what it is.

Yes we still have toilet tissue and some people still suffer from extreme anal fixation.

I have noticed and gotten used to the act of verbal conflict as a cathartic entertainment. I don’t totally understand it but I take no offense by it either. Perhaps we could just arm wrestle some day and still be able to have a pleasant conversation.

The year 2008 was a general date by which time everyone will realize the world they thought they were living in was over. The civil war in the United States will start in 2004. I would describe it as having a Waco type event every month that steadily gets worse. The conflict will consume everyone in the US by 2012 and end in 2015 with a very short WWIII.

The source of power for the C204 that allows it to distort and manipulate gravity comes from two microsingularities that were created, captured and cleaned at a much larger and “circular” facility. The dual event horizons of each one and their mass is manipulated by injecting electrons onto the surface of their respective ergospheres. The electricity comes from batteries. The breakthrough that will allow for this technology will occur within a year or so when CERN brings their larger facility online.

Perhaps it would have been clearer to state that the math has been around since 1970. I would urge you to examine the properties of Kerr black holes and Tipler cylinders. An actual working prototype was first tested in 2034. On my worldline, time travel is not a public recreation but we are all aware that it exists. You may be disappointed to know that the ability to manipulate gravity is not the technical challenge that had to be overcome. Miniaturizing the clocks and sensors, creating clever ways to vent x-rays and creating a computer system dependable enough to calculate the changes required to the field were the main challenges. There are no missing pieces…just missing energy levels and a few very interesting subatomic particles.
~ Posted by John Titor on 02-01-2001 08:36 AM

Reply:
The distortion unit reaches its target destination by using very sensitive gravity sensors and atomic clocks. The basic unit of calculation is the second. So yes, in a sense you do “dial in” in a date and the computer system controls the distortion field. At maximum power, the unit I have is capable of traveling about 10 years an hour.

Unfortunately, time travel is not an exact science. There is inherent error and chaos in the computers ability to make accurate calculations. Based on the current technology of the clocks and sensors, distortion units are only accurate to about 60 years or so. So no, in 2036, we are unable to travel back 1000 years due to the error rate in the system. The divergence between the worldline of origin and the target worldline would be too great. If one were to try and travel back that far, history would look nothing like what you would expect.

The unit has mass limits but the 204 is capable of transporting about three people and equipment. I don’t think you would like 2036 very much.
~ John Titor on 01-31-2001 07:13 PM

Last posting by John Titor on 24/3/2001:
Posted by John Titor on 03-24-2001 06:19 PM

I will be leaving this worldline shortly and this will be my final post. There are only a handful of people who will know exactly when I will be leaving and I’m sure they will let you know when I’m gone.

In the last few days I have found your choice of topics quite interesting and from an objective viewpoint I think it collectively answers one of your own questions, “If time travel is real, where are all the time travelers?” In the past, I have stated that quite frankly, you all scare the Hell out of me and I’m sure other temporal drivers would feel the same. But now I have an expanded explanation with two examples.

A while ago (on one of the posts), I related an experience I had with my parents while we were driving down a highway. Every now and then, we would pass someone who was in obvious distress with their vehicle. I was amazed that so many people could pass them by without stopping to help. Their explanation was fear. The risk of helping someone was too great and with today’s technology, they probably had a cell phone anyway. If they didn’t, the walk to a gas station would be good for them and teach them a lesson for running out of gas.

The other example is the plight of the homeless. When you pass them as individuals on the street I see the way people selectively choose an alternate path to avoid them.

Those two examples best define why time travelers do not show themselves. In trying to help you, we put ourselves as great risk and there’s really no point to it. We know the nature of time dictates that traveling between “exact” worldlines is impossible. Therefore, the only results we will see will be the ones we stay to see. Since worldlines, outcomes and events are infinite, we have better things to do. When I arrive in the “new” 1998 worldline on my way home I could easily start all of this again and continue to go through the same conversations with all of the same people. However, I already know you won’t pay any attention or believe me because we’ve already been through it on this worldline. Besides, I think the walk to the gas station will do you some good.

************************************************************************************

The following are the last questions I saw before my “going home” post. I apologize for not being able to get to all of them.

ROBERT:

((Do most of the people of that time die out, especially ones that currently have health problems?))

Yes, and people are still dying and a great deal of them are passing from CJD. As I said, with my very first few posts almost 6 months ago, I want to emphasize how devastating this will be. I believe two people are confirmed dead in Colorado from CDJ from surgical instruments. Ahhhh, the power of cheese. Milk does a body good and beef is what’s for dinner!

Me: “No, I have not tried any fast food. Thinking about where the food came from, how it was shipped and treated absolutely terrifies me. I have tried to tell people about CJD disease and it seems to be “catching on” in Europe.”

Me: Do not eat or use products from any animal that is fed and eats parts of its own dead.

Me: The “Mad Cow” story here is yet to begin...

((Is it possible that sometime in your future or in your present time that time travel will be commonplace?))

Yes, that is absolutely possible and eventual.

((Have any of the scientists of your time discovered any new planets, possibly ones with life?))

Not that I’m aware of.

((Has the bandwidth of the Internet increased greatly?))

Yes.

((And finally, one last question...how did Texas fare during the war?))

Texas is still there but Spanish is a lot more popular.

DAN:

((How does time travel affect our future (no pun intended) exploration of the universe? It seems that the greatest obstacles in our way right now are a matter of energy (propulsion technology) and economic feasibility. It seems to me that time travel technology could neatly takes care of both.))

There is a great deal of debate about trying to use a distortion unit to “travel” to the moon. The experiment would require very precise calculations that would allow the VGL system to find a theoretical path to the moon on a different worldline. The only problem is there is no way to communicate with anyone if the experiment should succeed. In other words, it’s possible to do it but only the people on the receiving end could take advantage of it.

DAVID:

((My oldest son wanted me to ask if you have any siblings.))

No, I am an only child.

((Also, are you still planning on broadcasting your departure via a broadcast over the Internet? That would be quite interesting.))

My father will be videotaping the departure. I appreciate Rick’s offer but my primary concern is the anonymity of my family. In addition, my departure will be in a somewhat public place and I do not want to draw additional attention to myself. At no fault of his own, I would also submit that Rick’s involvement would not add any credibility to the event.

((Is there still an NCAA basketball tournament in 2036, and if so, has it expanded from its current 64-team format?))

Yes, we still play basketball but I am not a fan and can’t comment on its organization.

ALBERT:

((Interesting anyway, hoped you used some of the links.
Thanks.))

Yes I did, thank you.

JOE:

((You say that you wear some kind of flight suit like coveralls when you are time traveling and that you experience 2 g's for 6-8 hrs. How is it possible to withstand that kind of g-force for such a long period without the use of an anti-g suit?))

The average human can take 2 G’s without too much difficulty. Blackout occurs at about 8 or 9 Gs and redout occurs at negative 3 Gs.

((I know you must be physically trained for space travel, but you should also have the benefit of equipment to help you out.))

We are encouraged to stay physically fit.

EMMETT:
In an effort to address Emmett’s comments, (and in all fairness) the following posts are out of context and not in order. If I’m not a real time traveler I would suggest that Emmett is at a disadvantage on his tactics to “expose” me.

If I present a picture of a sea monster to you and I claim it's real you are forced to argue its validity on the basis of the evidence that I present or create. Under these circumstances, you can’t win. If you look at the picture and argue that sea monsters should have more teeth or their incisors are not in proportion to the amount of fish they eat, it’s easy to ask you how you know so much about sea monsters if they don’t exist. Granted, you could point to dinosaur skeletons and make comparisons. But I can still say, its not a dinosaur, it’s a sea monster. In fact, I could even “whip” up some tooth marks on a piece of petrified wood and prove to you don’t know anything about sea monsters.

((I realize that you haven’t given “all of the technical details” of the device…so, the reparte has been fun. But your device, as described, simply won't work.))

If you don’t have all the details, how do you know it doesn’t work?

((Honestly, I’m not upset about any of this…and the only emotion involved for me is joy. This is fun! It really is.)

Joy?

Emmett drew the following assumptions from our conversation and I don’t believe I said any of them.

((The universe that you described, that is, one where mass is accelerated to light speed and forms a singularity doesn’t exist.))

((1. As you accelerated to light speed in your machine you and your machine formed a black hole.))

((2. From your perspective as you accelerated to light speed every other object in the universe formed a black hole due to your relative velocities))

((Take a close look at the technical drawing. Look especially at the left and right end perspectives. Not the same - very poor quality CAD for a billion dollar project.))

A billion? How do you know it’s a CAD drawing?

((If you have contact with Boomer please attempt to verify the elapsed time (on his internal chronometer) for his trip from 2036 to 1975. I need that data for a calculation.))

The first leg takes me to 1998. I think I said that quite a few times.

((He also said that the mass of the singularities is that of a "small mountain".))

If that were true, the unit could not be moved. I only refrenced the mass of a small mountain in one of our physics conversations. In fact, I believe I said the mass for the singularities in the distortion unit was much smaller.

((The last time I checked the physics I didn't see an "on-off" switch for a black hole or any other singularity.))

Me neither. I don’t believe I said you could turn it on or off.

((At 2 g acceleration you will be traveling just a tad faster than a Chevy pick-up in short order (about one year to reach light speed).))

This is the one that really disappoints me. Even you should know that Einstein’s thought experiment in the isolated elevator was based on the idea that the effects of acceleration and gravity are the same. I never said acceleration had anything to do with how the unit operates.

((Does it really make sense that his handlers would authorize a personal vacation with their billion-dollar machine?))

I’m looking at my orders and I don’t see the word vacation on it anywhere. You had my hopes up for a moment. Interesting how quickly a billion-dollars has become a fact now.

((And, though he's never said that he hasn't let anyone else come close to the machine, who took the picture of his two hands in one of the photos?))

When did I say that? I’ll have to let Pamela explain the laser pointer picture. She may already have posted the email I sent earlier.

Here are a few other comments I found interesting:

((The answer to the question, "How does a person born in 1998 use the language...?" is - who knows?))

I agree. How would you know?

((The two yellow caution tapes on the device are misaligned. Sloppy workmanship.))

I’ll have to point that out to my “handlers” when I get back.

((I suppose that if you were interested in verification of Boomer's science that you could go right to the source, Dr. Frank Tipler, Tulane University, for an interview.))

He’s a very pleasant gentleman. I highly recommend his book, The Physics of Immortality. I believe I made reference to this earlier.

((…what would prevent we, the enemy state, from returning the machine to 2036 with a suitcase nuclear device onboard?))

This is the second time I've seen a reference to the unit as a weapon. I would submit that the people of this worldline have nothing to fear from me. What would you do with the unit?

((J.C. …I like the way Darby thinks))

Now there’s an endorsement.

For more information on black holes and sigularities, I did find this site.

http://www.rdrop.com/users/green/school/primordi.htm

In your opinion, what is the smallest mass that can form a singulairty? Even Hawking suggested primordial singularities were created at the Big Bang. Were there planets (or half planets) around to form them then?

Based on your ability to draw conclusions about someone’s profile from their typed words I find it hard to believe you would make such errors in the syntax and meaning of the exact same words. Unfortunately, you have now maneuvered yourself into a position where I have the last word and our debate must has come to an end. Boomer isn’t a bad name and I sort of like it. Thanks TarBaby.

JAY:

((If there were an infinite number of realities, then there would necessarily arise a reality that somehow causes there to be no other realities. In fact, an infinite number of such realities would have to arise that cause there to be no other realities.))

Yes!! Excellent insight. I would have enjoyed a conversation on this.

I’m really going to miss my friend J.C. Although I did find a buried layer of truth and dedication in what his message was he never failed to make me smile in his attempt to make it. I couldn’t help but post a few choice comments he’s made over the last few months.

((Further more, my identity in the future would most likely be changed... Nevertheless, if you have been to the future, you know who I am. No doubt about that... ))

((Just start naming historical figures in your "time" or stop saying that you are a time traveler.))

((Hey, listen up... As a Time Traveler to the future my self, I have seen the uniforms. I have even put one on. Therefore, if TimeTraveler_0 can offer us a picture of his uniform as proof, I will verify it's legitimacy with the one I wore.))

((And about GW Bush, I don't know what to tell you. Although I have an uncle that looks like him.))

((How many times have I said to band Time Travel?))

(( And oh, that unknown variable, it's me. You didn't plan on encountering resistance. Especially a TimeTravelActivist. Hey this sounds more like something that would happen at the end of a Scobby Do cartoon. "You rotton kids..."))

(( So in retro-pects, I sense you have anger in me, for having morals and a sense of ethics on this issue of Time Travel.))

((What do you have to lose that you haven't already messed up already.))

((I mean no disrespect, but you don't seem to have the wisdom that I would expect someone from an advanced future would have. Your ideals are to liberal, much like in the 70's where things were all about Sex, drugs and free love. Nasty...))

((I have been trying not to attack anyone since my return. And look at you, you hypocrite. Calling me an "agitator."))

((Which is probably why so many people believe your story. But your not Anti-Time Travel like me. None of you have ever been manipulated by a Time Travelers plan for 21 years. Which is not to say they are, and you just don't know it.))

This one is my favorite.

((I'd just like to say, before John Titor, (A.K.A. TT_0 in the post where he's been taken out almost) that when he posts, he does a maneuver that focuses the question back to the receiver, as to have him think it's been answered, and to shut him up. (Which in fact, he just avoided answering it, by doing what he did). He does this very often, and I'd just wanted to point that out before he did it again.))

((By the way, not to be picky or anything. But I know how perfect you like to have things with your writing. I just wanted to point out that you misspelled CHOOSEN. It’s Chosen, with one O.))

((Some Yang will always exist to oppose some Ying.))

((A person doesn't have to be aggressive to be a @&^$#%. As you can tell, he's been using his superior intellect, to manipulate and control his agenda here. Or am I the only one who can see that?))

Here are a few other things I found in our general conversations which might be worth repeating:

Me: “By that time, it was pretty clear that we were not going back to what we had and the division between the “cities” and the “country” was well defined. My father made a living by putting together 12-volt electrical systems…”

I believe it was a few days ago I saw a news story about potential problems with power that “might” affect the entire United States. Where do you think they’ll turn it off first when push comes to shove?

Me: “ However, there are a great many “non lethal” weapon systems in development that turn out to be quite lethal.”
Anyone for microwave popcorn?

Me: If you push a farmer too far, they stop growing food and have nothing to do but hide in the woods and shoot back.”

Second Vermont Sheep Herd Seized
By Wilson Ring
Associated Press Writer
Friday, March 23, 2001; 10:42 a.m. EST
EAST WARREN, Vt. –– Federal agents early Friday seized a second flock of Vermont sheep suspected of having been exposed to a form of mad cow disease.

Friday, March 23 9:08 PM SGT
Britain extends culling of healthy animals to whole country
LONDON, March 23 (AFP) -
Britain stepped up its fight against foot-and-mouth disease Friday, announcing measures to slaughter animals throughout the country and not just in three targeted areas.

I also want to thank Pamela for helping me with the email and everyone else who asked intelligent and insightful questions. I have learned a great deal.

My parting thought revolves around something J.C. has been harping on since day one. No, I do not have a secret agenda but I have been paying a great deal of attention to your worldline. My interaction with you was not a direct mission parameter but it was a secondary mission protocol based on standing orders given to all temporal drivers. That secondary objective is basically to gather as much information about a worldline based on a set of observable variables when we first arrive. Your worldline met those conditions. What amazes me is why no one here wonders why Y2K didn’t hit them at all?

Bring a gas can with you when the car dies on the side of the road.

Farewell.
John

More detail on the original forum discussion posted on year 2001 :
http://www.anomalies.net/object/titororiginalpost.html

A dream encounter:

How hard would it be to not be prepared for a time you entered like John said he was not prepared for 2000?
you might be surprised.

I had this dream while John was here. I am only sharing it in parts because the dream made me realize it wouldnt really be that easy at all.

Me and a friend of mine got dropped off in the middle of my city back in time. We had to ask what year it was and not only the date which people looked at us very strange.

then it dawned on me we could have looked on the newspaper at the newspaper stand!
We had no idea how long we were going to be there.
My friend pulled out money and said "I have 100 dollars!."
I was happy until I saw 70 percent of it was the new money with the big heads. I said "Great, we cant use that here! it looks like fake money to the people of this time."

I examined the money.. all of it had dates on it after the time we were in except one 10 dollar bill. "we got 10 dollars."
I said. Then it dawned on me most clerks wouldnt look at the date of the bill and we could probably pass off the older looking money to eat with but the newer money would never work.

I was surprised at how very little I remembered about this time period and was looking at the clothing people were wearing as we passed them on the street.
I told my friend I couldnt really think of anything that happened during this time because I was too young. My friend couldnt even remember who the president was!
Then I was thinking while we were here I wanted to see myself.

We went to my parents house. I saw myself in the backyard I was only about 7 or so. I was reading a book. I wanted to see what would happen if I touched myself and I remembered in my dream John saying nothing happens.I wanted to see for myself. I approached myself calling out my name and extending my hand out introducing myself as her mothers friend. she took my hand and I shook it and held on for a second at the wonder of it all.I wasnt sure this was actually me.. I looked different from what I remembered but she responded to my name and it was my parents house. nothing happened... I was relieved."what are you reading?" I asked her. "science" she said. I looked at my friend and laughed."its me."
My other self looked so different than what I thought I remembered looking like. I tried not to stare at her.

Off hand I couldnt think of anything to tell her she was too young. I thought about all of the things in my life but would telling her make any difference? It was weird seeing another part of yourself. you kindof had compassion for it and cared for it. It was like seeing a little sister or something and not your real self. I decided to say nothing because she seemed happy.
And I was still shocked at just looking at her and thinking that it was a younger me. Did I behave this way? was I like this? I couldnt remember.
My friend decided they wanted to see their younger self also so we decided to take a bus.

I kept telling my friend we need to come up with a prediction or something so people would beleive us. But we both had lack of info. I thought about John in my dream and told my friend " Now I know how John felt! people were asking him who won the next hockey game and you can't even remember who the president was!" and we laughed.
We were thinking about how to convince my friends parents of who we were. and if they would beleive us or not.and what were we going to do if they didnt beleive us.
Since I pondered the thought that I looked a little different in this time I also pondered wether anything I told people would actually come true or not. I had no idea how far off this world was from my own. the world seemed slightly different. and I remembered a major event was more likely to happen than a trivial event... like ballgames won or lost.

We took the long bus ride to my friends house and started talking to the people on the bus who questioned our clothing. We finally ended up telling the people about Mad Cow disease since I studied alot about it after John had told me and I knew quite a bit to tell them.

One influential person said she would write her congressman right away and have it investigated. My friend looked at me with a worried look and I told the lady "Good!" because I was at a loss for words."Maybe it won't be in the U.S then in the future,"
When we got to my friends house I was wondering if the father had a computer.. I paused and looked at my friend. "the internet existed during this time....right?"
I was thinking of all the wonderful inventions that I could tell my friends parents would come in the near future. then I stopped myself wondering how or if it would effect the worldline.

then I woke up! But the dream made me realize how difficult it would really be if you were a real time traveler and you were not prepared for the time you were in.
-pamela

The True Story of the Philadelphia Experiment ~ Project Invisibility Oct 1943

2011-02-17T15:31:00.005+08:00

What is it all about ?

Part 1 of 5

Part 2 of 5

Part 3 of 5

Part 4 of 5

Part 5 of 5(Last)

More than 2000 Year Old Computer - The Antikythera Device

2011-02-17T14:21:00.001+08:00

Swiss Watch Found in 400-Year Old Chinese Tomb

2011-02-17T14:01:00.003+08:00

While some mysteries are occasionally solved, the majority tend to live on forever without the truth being revealed. One in the latter category concerns the recent discovery of a century-old Swiss watch discovered in an ancient Chinese tomb that has been sealed for more than 400 years.

How did it get there? This is the question haunting the archaeologists who discovered the Swiss watch in an ancient tomb in Shangsi, southern China, they believed had not been opened since its occupant’s funeral, which occurred during the Ming Dynasty (15-16th centuries).They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant's funeral. The Ming Dynasty - or the Empire of the Great Ming - was the was ruling dynasty in China from 1368 to 1644.

The miniature watch, which is in the shape of a ring, is thought to be barely a century old. The mysterious timepiece was encrusted in mud and rock and had stopped at 10:06 am. On the back of the watch, the word, ‘Swiss’ is engraved.

Its presence raises more questions than answers… like: Where did the watch come from? Could the watch/ring have been planted at the tomb, but if so, why and by whom?

The known facts do not really help in this case.

The Ming Dynasty did have its own unique age of watch making, but that does not explain why the word, 'Swiss’ on the back of the watch is engraved in English. In Geneva, Switzerland, other languages were more common, namely French and German.

In 1541 in Geneva, there was a ban on flashy jewelry, so the idea of a watch/ ring might make some sense, as a watch was considered practical and essential. Still, there is no record anywhere of ring/watches being popular in Europe until after 1780, which only deepens the mystery.

The dig has been suspended and researchers are currently awaiting the arrival of some experts from Beijing to help them unravel this most unsettling mystery.

Anyone know what time it is?

Watches were not around at the time of the Ming Dynasty and Switzerland did not even exist as a country, an expert pointed out.
The archaeologists were filming a documentary with two journalists when they made the puzzling discovery.

'When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with metallic sound,' said Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Museum.

'We picked up the object, and found it was a ring.

'After removing the covering soil and examining it further, we were shocked to see it was a watch,' he added.

By MDeeDubroff on 05-03-2009
http://www.weirdasianews.com

By Cher Thornhill on 18th December 2008
http://www.dailymail.co.uk

2011-02-03T09:27:00.002+08:00

UFO Captured On Camera Spotted Hovering Over Dome Of The Rock Temple Mount Jerusalem

UFO over Jerusalem 3 videos synchronized
The sighting reportedly occurred around 1:00 AM as the witnesses filmed from the promenade of Armon Hantziv in Jerusalem. The building in the distance that can be seen is the Temple of the Mount. As the video unfolds we can clearly see a bright light hovering down and then holding still above the temple before it finally drops quickly to the temple where it hovers for several seconds. At 0:32 the object suddenly flashes and then shoots up into the air rapidly. The camera then pans upward and then we can see four lights flashing independently. They are not - as it would seem - independent of one another. As it starts to move it's clear that the shape of the object they are attached to is a massive square. Giant floating rectangular craft have been reported recently in massive numbers by independent witnesses in different countries. You may recall in December of 2010 we covered the subject of the recent influx of rectangular UFO reports which were pouring in very differently than the more traditional triangular or disc shaped craft. As the video goes on the object rotates slightly and moves off camera
~ Rob1dotcom

Noah's Ark ..Does it ever exist ???

2011-01-28T14:22:00.006+08:00

From the movie :Evan Almighty

Noah's Ark found?

The truth ...??

Noah's Ark Discovered!

2011-01-28T13:23:00.004+08:00

This is a documentary about one of the most important discoveries in history. This should be more widely known and talked about.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Discovery of the real Noah's Ark

2011-01-28T13:01:00.000+08:00

Archaeologist Ron Wyatt and his team discover Noah's Ark! Extremely interesting to watch

The continuation and conclusion of Ron Wyatt's discovery of Noah's Ark! Conclusive evidence that shows the Great Flood is not a myth!

Hoard of 2,000-Year-Old Bronze Coins Found in Desert Oasis

2011-01-28T11:45:00.001+08:00

Published April 22, 2010
Associated Press

CAIRO — Archaeologists unearthed 383 bronze coins dating back to King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C. and was an ancestor of the famed Cleopatra, Egypt's antiquities authority announced Wednesday.

The statement said one side of the coins were inscribed with hybrid Greek-Egyptian god Amun-Zeus, while the other side showed an eagle and the words Ptolemy and king in Greek.

Founded by one of Alexander the Great's generals, the Ptolemaic Dynasty ruled Egypt for some 300 years, fusing Greek and ancient Egyptian cultures.

The coins were found north of Qarun lake in Fayoum Oasis 50 miles southwest of Cairo.

Other artifacts were unearthed in the area included three necklaces made of ostrich egg shell dated back to the 4th millennium B.C. and a pot of kohl eyeliner from the Ottoman Empire.

Has Noah's Ark Been Found on Turkish Mountaintop?

2011-01-28T11:42:00.003+08:00

A group of explorers from Hong Kong and Turkey believe they've made a discovery of Biblical proportions. The group say they have found the remnants of Noah's Ark, resting at 13,000 feet atop Mount Ararat. Previous ARK expeditions in decades past have also found evidence that suggested Noah's Ark may have come to rest on Ararat. However, until now, video evidence has been scant. Radio carbon dating, the researchers say, indicates this find is 4,800 years old. If true, THIS is the most significant historical discovery in human history. It will be very telling to see how this story plays out in the main stream media.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Published April 27, 2010
FOXNews.com

A group of Chinese and Turkish evangelical explorers say wooden remains they have discovered on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey are the remains of Noah's Ark.

The group claims that carbon dating proves the relics are 4,800 years old, meaning they date to around the same time the ark was said to be afloat. Mt. Ararat has long been suspected as the final resting place of the craft by evangelicals and literalists hoping to validate biblical stories.

Yeung Wing-Cheung, from the Noah's Ark Ministries International research team that made the discovery, said: "It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's Ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it."

There have been several reported discoveries of the remains of Noah's Ark over the years, most notably a find by archaeologist Ron Wyatt in 1987. At the time, the Turkish government officially declared a national park around his find, a boat-shaped object stretched across the mountains of Ararat.

Nevertheless, the evangelical ministry remains convinced that the current find is in fact more likely to be the actual artifact, calling upon Dutch Ark researcher Gerrit Aalten to verify its legitimacy.

“The significance of this find is that for the first time in history the discovery of Noah’s Ark is well documented and revealed to the worldwide community,” Aalten said at a press conference announcing the find. Citing the many details that match historical accounts of the Ark, he believes it to be a legitimate archaeological discovery.

“There’s a tremendous amount of solid evidence that the structure found on Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey is the legendary Ark of Noah,” said Aalten.

Representatives of Noah's Ark Ministries said the structure contained several compartments, some with wooden beams, that they believe were used to house animals.The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds none have ever been found above 11,000 feet in the vicinity, Yeung said.

During the press conference, team member Panda Lee described visiting the site. “In October 2008, I climbed the mountain with the Turkish team. At an elevation of more than 4,000 meters, I saw a structure built with plank-like timber. Each plank was about 8 inches wide. I could see tenons, proof of ancient construction predating the use of metal nails."

We walked about 100 meters to another site. I could see broken wood fragments embedded in a glacier, and some 20 meters long. I surveyed the landscape and found that the wooden structure was permanently covered by ice and volcanic rocks."

Local Turkish officials will ask the central government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site can be protected while a major archaeological dig is conducted.

The biblical story says that God decided to flood the Earth after seeing how corrupt it was. He then told Noah to build an ark and fill it with two of every animal species.

After the flood waters receded, the Bible says, the ark came to rest on a mountain. Many believe that Mount Ararat, the highest point in the region, is where the ark and her inhabitants ran aground.

Noah's Ark Hoax Claim Doesn't Deter Believers

2011-01-28T11:37:00.002+08:00

By Lauren Green

Published April 30, 2010
FOXNews.com

Earlier this week a group of Chinese Christians held a news conference to announce they were 99.9 percent sure they had found Noah's Ark — the boat the Bible says was built by God's most righteous man before a "sinful" human race drowned in the Great Flood.

Maybe the find on Mount Ararat in Turkey really is Noah's Ark. More likely, it isn't. But if it isn't, that won't stop Ark enthusiasts from believing it is out there somewhere.

Immediately in the wake of the news flash, experts weighed in to shoot it down. "The wood in the photos is not old enough" ... "There are no location pictures to verify the site" ... "No independent experts have looked at the data" ... "There's never been evidence of a great flood."

And the people voicing the loudest caution are biblical archeologists who believe the ark is real and that it can be found.

Dr. Randall Price, head of Judaic Studies at Liberty University, had been a cohort of the Noah's Ark Ministries International team until two years ago. He pulled out of the project, sensing they were being taken advantage of by Kurdish guides, who've turned Ark searching into a cottage industry.

"I think we can't rule out the possibility that this is a hoax, because a lot of the things that happen in that region of the world, and especially with the Kurdish guides that are involved, are designed to try to extract money from gullible people," Price said.

But he added: "I'm reserving my opinion at this point until I see how things are developing."

Dr. John Morris, lead archeologist at the Institute for Creation Research, says "I'm leaning towards that the Chinese people have been deceived."

Morris has led 13 expeditions to Mount Ararat looking for the ark. He knows the area well and says of the recent find, "At best, it is an elaborate deception."

Morris and Price were contacted by the Chinese team to take part in the press event, but they declined based on how little evidence they saw.

Professor Porcher Taylor at the University of Richmond says he, too, believes it is not Noah's Ark, because "they're digging in the wrong place on Mt. Ararat."

Taylor says satellite imaging of the region about a half mile away from where the Chinese group says they found the ark shows what has been called "the Ararat anomaly," an area that has intrigued the U.S. intelligence community for years.

"If the remains of Noah's Ark are on Mt. Ararat," Taylor says, "the only logical place would be at the Ararat anomaly site, and not at the site in these sensational claims made by this group."

A fundamental question separating scientific inquiry into Noah's Ark is: Is the account of the great flood in the Bible true, or is it a mythical legend?

Dr. Paul Zimansky, professor of archeology and ancient history at State University of New York at Stony Brook, says, "I think it has all the earmarks of a story, but in any case it isn't anything we can investigate as an archaeologist."

A catastrophic flood on Earth is spoken of in many ancient cultures: in Sumerian, Babylonian, Greek, Hindu, Gallic, Scandinavian and Chinese legends. Some even predate the Old Testament.

The odd thing, Zimansky says, is that even though there are written accounts of the flood in all these cultures, archaeologists have yet to find evidence of it.

If you take the Bible literally, Zimansky says, "this ark is going to be deposited in an archaeological context which would be a flood stratum. And it's not going to be a little flood stratum. It's going to cover the entire Earth. Well, no such flood stratum exists."

And that's where Morris disagrees with archaeologists like Zimansky.

"It all depends on your presupposition," says Morris. "I think they're looking at it through the wrong glasses."

Morris says a great flood would shape the landscape of the entire planet — carving out crevices like the Grand Canyon, even separating huge masses of land like the African and South American continents.

"Everything on earth gives evidence of the flood," Morris says.

That is why he is convinced something is up there on Mt. Ararat. He says there have been hundreds accounts from eyewitnesses saying they saw what looked like a big ship. Some of those accounts, he says, are from pilots who flew over the area during World War II. Considerable amounts of military data and ground-penetrating imaging have reported showing a shape of something manmade on the mountain.

Taylor is also convinced Noah's Ark is there, because of the Ararat anomaly's shape and size. "The boat-shaped Ararat anomaly and Noah's Ark both have a 6-to-1 length-to-width ratio," he says.

The Ark, depending on how you measure a cubit, could be anywhere from 450 to 600 feet long. The anomaly is 1,200 feet. But, Porcher says, scientists have debated for years the length of a cubit, which is thought to be the length of a man's forearm between the elbow and the tip of his finger. But whose elbow?

The Bible talks of "the Nephilim" (Genesis 6:1-4) being in the world at that time. The Nephilim were giants or a very large race. If a cubit was measured by the length of a very large man's forearm, Porcher says that would mean "the ark was much larger than previously thought."

Many experts have concluded from examining the photos that the images are of rock formations that strongly resemble the boat described in Genesis.

Whatever it is, it convinces Morris, and countless others, to keep returning to Mt. Ararat, hoping to find what their faith tells them can be found.

Noah's Ark...for real ..?

2011-01-28T11:32:00.002+08:00

A giant replica of Noah's Ark in Hong Kong. The ark is world's only full-scale model and was built following the description written in the Bible, according to the Hong Kong property developer who constructed it.

Man Builds Noah's Ark...A replica of Noah's Ark built by Johan Huibers @ Hollands

Lets take a tour to see what's inside...

'Goddess' appears in the clouds

2011-01-28T11:27:00.001+08:00

Guardian Angel Saves Woman From Car Crash

2011-01-28T11:23:00.001+08:00

Angel Fairy appears !

2011-01-28T11:14:00.004+08:00

A 14-year-old girl with a history of serious health issues lay dying of pneumonia in a hospital room but, as her mother waited for the girl to take her last breath, an image of bright light appeared on a security monitor.

Within an hour, the dying girl began a recovery that doctors are at a loss to explain.

Interview

Appear on top of power load pole

2011-01-28T11:08:00.001+08:00

Image of Praying Jesus Seen on the Satellite Map of Israel

2011-01-28T10:59:00.002+08:00

Evil Demon Face In The Sky

2011-01-28T10:53:00.000+08:00

Fairy sighting caught on CCTV

2011-01-28T10:44:00.002+08:00

Bizarre Blue Light Spiral Over Norway 09th Dec. 2009

2011-01-28T10:15:00.001+08:00

UFO / HALO Clouds

2011-01-28T10:01:00.002+08:00

Indonesia

Mexico

Moscow

Romania

Piano Appears on Sandbar in Miami's Biscayne Bay 1/26/2011

2011-01-28T09:01:00.004+08:00

Breaking News a grand piano was found on a sandbar in Biscayne Bay, Florida and no one seems to know who put it there!!

Why & How did a grand piano wash ashore in Miami, Florida?

Mystery solve ?

Researchers aim to resurrect mammoth in five years

2011-01-19T20:35:00.000+08:00

TOKYO (AFP) - – Japanese researchers will launch a project this year to resurrect the long-extinct mammoth by using cloning technology to bring the ancient pachyderm back to life in around five years time.

The researchers will try to revive the species by obtaining tissue this summer from the carcass of a mammoth preserved in a Russian research laboratory, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

"Preparations to realise this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, leader of the team and a professor emeritus of Kyoto University, told the mass-circulation daily.

Under the plan, the nuclei of mammoth cells will be inserted into an elephant's egg cell from which the nuclei have been removed, to create an embryo containing mammoth genes, the report said.

The embryo will then be inserted into an elephant's uterus in the hope that the animal will eventually give birth to a baby mammoth.

The elephant is the closest modern relative of the mammoth, a huge woolly mammal believed to have died out with the last Ice Age.

Some mammoth remains still retain useable tissue samples, making it possible to recover cells for cloning, unlike dinosaurs, which disappeared around 65 million years ago and whose remains exist only as fossils

Researchers hope to achieve their aim within five to six years, the Yomiuri said.

The team, which has invited a Russian mammoth researcher and two US elephant experts to join the project, has established a technique to extract DNA from frozen cells, previously an obstacle to cloning attempts because of the damage cells sustained in the freezing process.

Another Japanese researcher, Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, succeeded in 2008 in cloning a mouse from the cells of another that had been kept in temperatures similar to frozen ground for 16 years.

The scientists extracted a cell nucleus from an organ of a dead mouse and planted it into the egg of another mouse which was alive, leading to the birth of the cloned mouse.

Based on Wakayama's techniques, Iritani's team devised a method to extract the nuclei of mammoth eggs without damaging them.

But a successful cloning will also pose challenges for the team, Iritani warned.

"If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed (the mammoth) and whether to display it to the public," Iritani said.

"After the mammoth is born, we will examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors."

More than 80 percent of all mammoth finds have been dug up in the permafrost of the vast Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia.

Exactly why a majority of the huge creatures that once strode in large herds across Eurasia and North America died out towards the end of the last Ice Age has generated fiery debate.

Some experts hold that mammoths were hunted to extinction by the species that was to become the planet's dominant predator -- humans.

Others argue that climate change was more to blame, leaving a species adapted for frozen climes ill-equipped to cope with a warming world.

source:http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/

Mysteries of Corp Circles...

2011-01-03T04:58:00.001+08:00

Crop circles are one of the things no one can really explain, the government say there hoaxes but that explanation cannot be used for some of the crop circles out there.

Alien artifacts discovered underneath crop circles

2011-01-03T04:48:00.000+08:00

Stephen Hawkings' predict that Earth will be destroy by Alien UFO

2011-01-03T01:24:00.001+08:00

Recorded LIVE ....Artwork by Alien Lights

2011-01-03T01:19:00.000+08:00