Beyond Nature

Were the Amityville hauntings cynical media manipulation? Is levitation possible? Has Earth been visited by UFOs from other realms? All these questions, and more, are considered in 100 Strangest Mysteries. Paranormal investigator Matt Lamy documents in detail the numerous phenomena and events which can be termed 'mysterious' and cannot be dismissed as mere hysteria or wild imaginings.

Divided into themed sections, the book includes:

The Beast of Bodmin ? whether it is an escaped exotic pet, a feral cat or something more sinister, it certainly causes concern for inhabitants of its local area

Area 51 ? conspiracy theorists believe it is a centre for the U.S. government's investigations into UFO activity, whilst others consider it to be 'only' a military air base

Ley lines and other energy fields ? are they sacred sites going back thousands of years or modern New Age notions?

The Holy Grail ? dismissed by organized religion, thought by some to have been a chalice brought to Britain by Joseph, many consider it to be nothing more than a romantic Arthurian legend

# Publisher: Metro Books; 2007 edition edition (2007)
# ISBN-10: 0760791929
# ISBN-13: 978-0760791929

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NASA has launched a probe into orbit high above the earth to study the distant edge of the solar system where hot solar winds crash into the cold outer space.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was launched at 17-45 GMT on Sunday, according to images broadcast live by the U.S. space agency.

The small probe was deployed on a Pegasus rocket which dropped from the bay doors of a Lockheed L-1011 jet flying at 12,000 metres over the southern Pacific Ocean near the Marshall Islands.

“The count went really smooth… and everything appears to be going well,” NASA assistant launch manager Omar Baez said shortly after the launch.
The IBEX is on a two-year mission to take pictures and chart the mysterious confines of the solar system — including areas billions of kilometres from earth.


Remote region

The small, stop-sign-shaped probe is equipped with instruments that will allow it to take images and chart, for the first time, a remote region known as the interstellar boundary, where the solar system meets interstellar space. The area is a vast expanse of turbulent gas and twisting magnetic fields.


“The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into earth’s orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous,” David McComas, IBEX principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas, said.

The only information that scientists have of this distant region is from the twin Voyager 1 and 2 probes, launched in 1977 and still in service today.

The two probes have travelled past the inner solar system, where the planets are, and on their way to its farthest edge.

In December 2004 Voyager 1 reached an area that scientists describe as the “termination shock” zone, where solar winds crash into the gas of interstellar space, marking the boundary of the solar system.


Fascinating

“The Voyager spacecraft are making fascinating observations of the local conditions at two points beyond the termination shock that show totally unexpected results and challenge many of our notions about this important region,” said Mr. McComas.


In 2007 Voyager 2 reached the heliosheath — the area where the termination shock begins — and on its current path and speed, should reach the heliopause in 2010. The heliopause constitutes the boundary between solar winds and interstellar winds.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) remains in regular contact with the two probes, which return data recorded by their particle detectors.

By 2020, however, contact with Voyager probes will be lost because of the weakening of their plutonium generators.


Revealing images

IBEX, armed with two very large aperture single pixel “cameras” that measure energetic neutral atoms, is to produce images of the region that will allow scientists for the first time to better understand what happens where the solar system meets the galaxy.



The mission will also study cosmic radiation, which has a negative impact on human health and space exploration. The IBEX probe weighs about 462 kg and is shaped like an octagon. It measures a mere 52 cm high and 97 cm across.

The Pegasus put the IBEX in a low orbit some 96 km above the earth. The IBEX spacecraft’s own solid rocket motor will then carry the probe into a much higher altitude orbit of around 200,000 miles, NASA said in a statement.

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In 1996 the controversial discovery of what appeared to be Martian fossils in a meteorite from Antarctica ignited a furor in the scientific community.

The idea that a rock billions of years old was flung into space with traces of life aboard was intoxicating, fueling thoughts of panspermia -- the idea that all life on Earth could have originated on Mars or some other alien planet.


Twelve years on, scientists still debate whether the tiny structures are Martian or not, or even fossils. But now a new study has shown it's possible for traces of life to survive a punishing interplanetary journey.

Frances Westall of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and a group of researchers attached a 2-centimeter-thick rock to the heat shield of a Foton M3 space capsule.

Nestled between the shield and rock was a layer of the hearty bacteria Chroococcidiopsis, commonly found in the harshest deserts on Earth.

When the capsule hit Earth's atmosphere, the rock was heated to at least 3,056 degrees Fahrenheit (1,680 degrees Centigrade). Most of it burned away, leaving only 8 millimeters of material behind. What was left was a gooey, melted white crust of quartz.

The rock's original structure -- along with visible microfossils -- was preserved at the core.


"This is a great positive result in searching for traces of extra-terrestrial life on meteorites," Westall said. "If ever Martians fossils land on Earth, we should be able to see them."

The desert-dwelling organisms were not so lucky, however.

Westall said the screws that held the rock to the heat shield loosened during re-entry, allowing temperatures between the shield and the rock to climb to between 570 and 930 degrees Fahrenheit (300 and 500 degrees Centigrade).

"[The bacteria] were carbonized," she said, "so it's a negative result for the idea of panspermia, but we'll have to run the experiment again."

"This certainly does not disprove the idea of panspermia," David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute said.


For life on Mars to make it to Earth, it would have to survive a perilous interplanetary crossing. Scientists have calculated that the first stage -- launching off the surface with debris created by a meteorite impact -- is survivable.

Little is known about the long journey through the vacuum of space, but microbes living inside rock could be protected enough to make the trip.

Then comes re-entry. If life were to survive the heat of rocketing through Earth's atmosphere at 12-15 kilometers per second (33,000 mph), it would still have to live through the impact. At this point, no one knows if it can.

"This is a piece in the puzzle of the origin of life, and the distribution of life in the solar system," Kring said of the team's research. "If life did originate on Earth and was transferred elsewhere in the solar system, it would be interesting to everyone to know that, and vice versa -- if life began on Mars and simply propagated better on Earth, that would be interesting, too."

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Whether it took the Earth 4.5 billion years to get to where it is today (or a mere seven days), destroying it might take a lot less time. Take a look at these spell-bounding new ways of destroying our Earth and how far man can reach from today's perspective.

10. Total existence failure

You will need: nothing

Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occurring are considerably greater than a googolplex to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.

Utter, utter rubbish.


9. Gobbled up by strangelets

You will need: a stable strangelet

Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilizing machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.

A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are pretty much zero.

Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.


8. Sucked into a microscopic black hole

You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.

Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time.


7. Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction

You will need: 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter

Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take some considerable time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible - and much easier - simply to "flip" 2.5 trillion tons of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.

Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.

How hard is that?

The gravitational binding energy of a planet of mass M and radius R is - if you do the lengthy calculations - given by the formula E=(3/5)GM^2/R. For Earth, that works out to roughly 224,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules. The Sun takes nearly a WEEK to output that much energy. Think about THAT.

To liberate that much energy requires the complete annihilation of around 2,500,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That's assuming zero energy loss to heat and radiation, which is unlikely to be the case in reality: You'll probably need to up the dose by at least a factor of ten. Once you've generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc^2) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a thousand pieces.

Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500. Of course, if it does prove possible to manufacture antimatter in the sufficiently large quantities you require - which is not necessarily the case - then smaller antimatter bombs will be around long before then.


6. Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation

You will need: a light bulb

Method: This is a fun one. Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also suggests that the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. Therefore, vacuum energy could prove to be the most abundant energy source of any kind. Which is where you come in. All you need to do is figure out how to extract this energy and harness it in some kind of power plant - this can easily be done without arousing too much suspicion - then surreptitiously allow the reaction to run out of control. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.

Slightly possible.

Earth's final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size.

Earliest feasible completion date: 2060 or so.

Source: "3001: The Final Odyssey," by Arthur C. Clarke


5. Sucked into a giant black hole

You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641.
Method: after locating your black hole, you need get it and the Earth together. This is likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole, though for best results you'd most likely move both at once.

Very difficult, but definitely possible.

Earth's final resting place: part of the mass of the black hole.

Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be available until AD 3000, and add at least 800 years for travel time. (That's in an external observer's frame of reference and assuming you move both the Earth and the black hole at the same time.)

Sources: "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy," by Douglas Adams; SPACE.com


4. Meticulously and systematically deconstructed

You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 2*10^32J

Method: Basically, what we're going to do here is dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time, and boost the whole lot of it into orbit. Yes. All six sextillion tons of it. A mass driver is a sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun, which was once proposed as a way of getting mined materials back from the Moon to Earth - basically, you just load it into the driver and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. We'd use a particularly powerful model - big enough to hit escape velocity of 11 kilometers per second even after atmospheric considerations - and launch it all into the Sun or randomly into space.

Alternate methods for boosting the material into space include loading the extracted material into space shuttles or taking it up via space elevator. All these methods, however, require a - let me emphasize this - titanic quantity of energy to carry out. Building a Dyson sphere ain't gonna cut it here. (Note: Actually, it would. But if you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?) See No. 6 for a possible solution.

If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out into space, we already have done.

Earth's final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder scattered across the rest of the Solar System.

Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tons of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.


3. Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument

You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it... perhaps Mars

Method: Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING. The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can manage. The result: an absolutely spectacular collision, resulting hopefully in Earth (and, most likely, our "cue ball" too) being pulverized out of existence - smashed into any number of large pieces which if the collision is hard enough should have enough energy to overcome their mutual gravity and drift away forever, never to coagulate back into a planet again.

A brief analysis of the size of the object required can be found here. Falling at the minimal impact velocity of 11 kilometers per second and assuming zero energy loss to heat and other energy forms, the cue ball would have to have roughly 60% of the mass of the Earth. Mars, the next planet out, "weighs" in at about 11% of Earth's mass, while Venus, the next planet in and also the nearest to Earth, has about 81%. Assuming that we would fire our cue ball into Earth at much greater than 11km/s (I'm thinking more like 50km/s), either of these would make great possibilities.

Obviously a smaller rock would do the job, you just need to fire it faster. A 10,000,000,000,000-tonne asteroid at 90% of light speed would do just as well. See the Guide to moving Earth for useful information on maneuvering big hunks of rock across interplanetary distances.

Pretty plausible.

Earth's final resting place: a variety of roughly Moon-sized chunks of rock, scattered haphazardly across the greater Solar System.

Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500, maybe?


2. Eaten by von Neumann machines
You will need: a single von Neumann machine

Method: A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. Create one of these that subsists almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminum and silicon, the major elements found in Earth's mantle and core. It doesn't matter how big it is as long as it can reproduce itself exactly in any period of time. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of potentially sextillions of machines. Technically your objective would now be complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough then you can command your VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort, so be sure to include this in your design.

So crazy it might just work.

Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.

Source: "2010: Odyssey Two," by Arthur C. Clarke


1. Hurled into the Sun

You will need: Earthmoving equipment

Method: Hurl the Earth into the Sun. Sending Earth on a collision course with the Sun is not as easy as one might think; even though you don't actually have to literally hit the Sun (send the Earth near enough to the Sun (within the Roche limit), and tidal forces will tear it apart), it's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which merely roasts it for four months in every eight. But careful planning can avoid this.

This is impossible at our current technological level, but will be possible one day, I'm certain. In the meantime, may happen by freak accident if something comes out of nowhere and randomly knocks Earth in precisely the right direction. Earth's final resting place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: Via act of God: 25 years' time. Any earlier and we'd have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.

Source: "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers," by Grant Naylor.

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The riddle of Atlantis is among the greatest of the world's unsolved mysteries. Where, for a start, was the exact site of this huge island civilization? did it really, as early historians reported, vanish from the earth in a day and a night? Small wonder that since the earliest times scholars, archaeologists, historians, and occultists have kept up an almost ceaseless search for its precise whereabouts. Beginning with the Greek philosopher Plato's first description of the lost land that was apparently "the nearest thing to paradise on Earth," this chapter examines in detail the basic evidence for the existence and cataclysmic destruction of Atlantis.

(Note: Plato was not the first one to know about Atlantis. He was the first to describe it in detail. Pythagoras taught Plato what he knew)

Of all the world's unsolved mysteries, Atlantis is probably the biggest. Said to have been a huge island continent with an extraordinary civilization, situated in the Atlantic Ocean, it is reported to have vanished from the face of the earth in a day and a night. So complete was this devastation that Atlantis sank beneath the sea, taking with it every trace of its existence. Despite this colossal vanishing trick, the lost continent of Atlantis has exerted a mysterious influence over the human race for thousands of years. It is almost as though a primitive memory of the glorious days of Atlantis lingers on in the deepest recesses of the human mind. The passage of time has not diminished interest in the fabled continent, nor have centuries of skepticism by scientists succeeded in banishing Atlantis to obscurity in its watery grave. Thousands of books and articles have been written about the lost continent.


It has inspired the authors of novels, short stories, poems, and movies. Its name has been used for ships, restaurants, magazines, and even a region of the planet Mars. Atlantean societies have been formed to theorize and speculate about a great lost land. Atlantis has come to symbolize our dream of a once golden past. It appeals to our nostalgic longing for a better, happier world; it feeds out hunger for knowledge of mankind's true origins; and above all it offers the challenge of a genuinely sensational detective story.

Today the search for evidence of the existence of Atlantis continues with renewed vigor, using 20th century man's most sophisticated tools in the hope of discovering the continent that is said to have disappeared around 11,600 years ago. did Atlantis exist, or is it just a myth? Ours may be the generation that finally solves this tantalizing and ancient enigma.

~Atlantis~

" is said to have been the nearest thing to paradise that the earth has seen. It was a consortium of Concentric Islands as shown in fig. Fruits and vegetables grew in abundance in its rich soil. Fragrant flowers and herbs bloomed n the wooded slopes of its many beautiful mountains. All kinds of tame and wild animals roamed its meadows and magnificent forests, and drank from its rivers and lakes. Underground streams of wonderfully sweet water were used to irrigate the soil, to provide hot and cold fountains and baths for all the inhabitants. - There were even baths for the horses.

The earth was rich in precious metals, and the Atlanteans were wealthier than any people before or after with gold, silver, brass, tin, and ivory, and their principal royal palace was a marvel of size and beauty. Besides being skilled metallurgists, the Atlanteans were accomplished engineers. A huge and complex system of canals and bridges linked their capital city with the sea and the surrounding countryside, and there were magnificent docks and harbors for the fleets of vessels that carried on a flourishing trade with overseas countries.


Whether they lived in the city or the country, the people of Atlantis had everything they could possibly want for their comfort and happiness. They were a gentle, wise, and loving people, unaffected by their great wealth and prizing virtue above all things. In time, however, their noble nature became debased. No longer satisfied with ruling their own great land of plenty, they set about waging war on others. Their vast armies swept through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean region, conquering large areas of North Africa and Europe.

The Atlanteans were poised to strike against Athens and Egypt when the Athenian army rose up, drove them back to Gibraltar, and defeated them. Hardly had the Athenians tasted victory when a terrible cataclysm wiped out their entire army in a single day and night, and caused Atlantis to sink forever beneath the waves. Perhaps a few survivors were left to tell what happened. At all events, the story is said to have been passed down through many generations until, more than 9200 years later, it was made known to the world for the first time."


~Plato's Hypothesis~

The man who first committed the legend to paper was the Greek philosopher Plato, who in about 355 B.C. wrote about Atlantis in two of his famous dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. Although Plato claimed that the story of the lost continent was derived from ancient Egyptian records, no such records have ever come to light, nor has any direct mention of Atlantis been found in any surviving records made before Plato's time. Every book and article on Atlantis that has ever been published has been based on Plato's account; subsequent authors have merely interpreted or added to it.

~Questions Raised~

Why, ask the scholars, are there so many remarkable similarities between the ancient cultures of the Old and New Worlds? Why do we find the same plants and animals on continents thousands of miles apart when there is no known way for them to have been transported there?

How did the primitive peoples of many lands construct technological marvels, such as Stonehenge in Britain, the huge statues of Easter Island in the Pacific and the strange sacred cities of the Andes? Were they helped by a technically sophisticated race that has since disappeared?

Above all, why do the legends of people the world over tell the same story of an overwhelming natural disaster and the arrival or godlike beings who brought with them a new culture from a far? could the catastrophe that sank Atlantis have sent tidal waves throughout the glove, causing terrible havoc and destruction?

And were the 'gods' the remnants of the Atlantean race - the few survivors who were not on or near the island continent when it was engulfed?


Map of Atlantis by the 17th-century German scholar Athanasius Kircher. Kircher based his map on Plato's description of Atlantis as an island west of the Pillars of Hercules - the Strait of Gibraltar - and situated Atlantis in the ocean that has since been named after the legendary land. Unlike modern cartographers, he placed south at the top of the map, which puts America at the right.

Even without Plato's account, the quest for answers to these mysteries might have led to the belief by some in a 'missing link' between the continents - a land-bridge populated by a highly evolved people in the distant past. Nevertheless, it is the Greek philosopher's story that lies at the heart of all arguments for or against the existence of such a lost continent.

I have collected some useful info/sites which provide exaggerated info on these mystic questions:

Timaeus by Plato

Critias by Plato

The Wave that destroyed Atlantis - by Harvey Lille

Atlantis: the Myth - by Alan G.Hefner.

Atlantis Evidence Found in Spain and Ireland

The Sunken Kingdom by Peter James

Mystery of Atlantis - Legend or Fact


A Rare Documentary on Atlantis:-

Running time:- 8 minutes.

Suggestions from you are greatly entertained.

Please Comment below so that we can improve on the previous one and present ourselves in a more sophisticated way. Your Comment is an impetus to us.

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Mayans - The Mayan Calendar is something profoundly different than just a system to mark off the passage of time. The Mayan Calendar is above all a prophetic calendar that may help us understand the past and foresee the future. It is a calendar of the Ages that describes how the progression of Heavens and Underworlds condition the human consciousness and thus the frames for our thoughts and actions within a given Age.

The Mayan Calendar is not predicting the end of the world 2012, but the start of a new era; the golden age.

The Mayan civilization predicted that on December 21, 2012 something will happen to the world we know. Something will happen that will change our civilization, value systems and the way we know human civilization forever.

What does that means? What did the Mayan see through their spiritual wisdom?

According to scientists and technologists something strange is happening behind the scene. The terrestrial and solar polar reversal peaks are coming within three weeks of that day, December 21, 2012. Innumerable UFOs are scouting our skies regularly and increasing as we approach that day. The tectonic plate shifts, underwater volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and Tsunamis are increasing at rates never seen before. The solar flares are increasing. The earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere are experiencing strange disturbances. The numbers of typhoons and cyclones have increased many folds. The number of floods and droughts has increased beyond imaginations in the last ten years.

Scientists who look beyond conventional science point out that that the Hyperspace that contain our Universe is also showing signs that something strange is happening in our universe. The multidimensional time research is showing that a parallel universe may be predicting strange effects.

According to some scientists it is possible that another Universe is slowly starting to claim a spatial dimension in our physical Universe. It is also possible that we will face major calamities because of the polar reversal in the Sun and in Earth. If that happens, it is possible that the hyperspace has to adjust the suction force known as gravity and Electromagnetic force fields to keep the earth and the solar system intact.

The biggest clue to what will happen comes from astrophysicists. There is a big possibility that the simultaneous polar reversal in earth and sun will throw the solar system out of whack. That will cause massive upheaval in the earth. At that point of time, the extraterrestrials will officially show up and put “cosmic seat belts” around us as they apply the superpower of the Hyperspace to bring the solar system back to what it is today.

According to think tanks, this has happened before. The extraterrestrials take care of the earth and the solar system whenever the solar system faces challenges like that.

December 21st, 2012 - Modern astronomy can tell us a lot about the facts of where we will be in space at that time, where our planets will be, etc. The thing is that the ancient Mayans, Sumerians and the Egyptians knew about this long ago, and left their art recordings behind for us.

What do we know about this date? Well, we know that on that date, our the bodies in our solar system will all be in alignment. The Transit of Venus will occur once again due to Venus passing in front of the Sun. Our Sun will also be in the peak of its solar cycle, causing some groups to speculate that the magnetic poles of our Earth and possibly other planets could be shifted or reversed altogether.

Besides all this activity occurring in our Solar System, the solar system itself will be in perfect alignment with the elliptical plane of our Milky Way galaxy. It will be the first time this has occurred in gazillions of years.

Also, the area of space that our solar system will occupy at that time will be in the middle of a strange nebulous cloud that scientists have been studying and tracking for a few years now. We do not have a clear understanding of what the clouds effects could be on our Solar System and the Earth itself.

1) Our sun will be at the peak of a Solar hissy fit.
2) Our planets will be in alignment.
3) Our entire Solar System will be aligned with the elliptical plane of the galaxy.
4) We will be in the middle of a strange nebula.

Take this modern astronomical knowledge, and apply it to the ancient legends of our ancestors. The Mayans refereed to this period as the "Cycle of Civilization." They even accurately predicted these alignments to the date, thousands of years ago. And they chose to end their calender on this date. Not to restart it, but to END it.

No one can know for sure what will happen during the strange times of late 2012, but as the date draws nearer, we are certain to learn more.

Video:

This is a short film I found on Youtube made about the mayan calendar . They tried to explain who the mayans are and what the calendar is all about along with the mystery behind 2012.

Author of the Film: notarecordplayer

For more detailed clues and description visit:

• http://www.civilization.ca/civil/Maya/mmc06eng.html

• http://www.lost-civilizations.net/mayan-calendar-prophecies.html

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So when have you last seen a Science Fiction Movie where Travel to Future was just as boarding a Flight to Mumbai!!??? :D The other day I was searching for an Article regarding the Black Holes and Anti-matter and I stumbled upon this Article By Ted Bunn . In his article he mentions about the Travel To Future.. He talks about a Phenomenon an Illusion which we face when we try to look beyond the Horizon of the Black-Hole. This article raised one issue that caught my eye. Yes Iam talking about whether Time can be Considered as another Dimension?? Incidentally Einstein seems to have mentioned Time as a Dimension in his 'Theory of Relativity'. Now this has raised many doubts than it solved any!


CAN WE TRAVEL TO OUR FUTURE??? CAN WE PREDICT THE FORTHCOMING?? CAN I EVER CHANGE MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE?? WILL I BE ABLE TO SHARE MY LAND WITH DINOSAURS?? The answers to these strange questions may lie with the concept of the 'Time-Travel' becoming a FACT.

To make matters easy let me put an Article that rather compelled me not to think beyond Future...! :P

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Who doesn't want to know his future??? Its this instinct of man that brought the art of or rather the science of Fortune Telling into our existence. Well.. many of us might have wondered as how these fortune tellers actually make their so called prophesies! And sometimes they turn out to be true, but not many believe these Fortune Tellers.. even I don't for that matter. There are many a ways as how the fortune is told. Some resort to Palm Reading and some use Crystal balls while some turn to magic cards. Let us have a look at the Crystal Balls.

So What is a Crystal ball???

A crystal ball is a crystal or glass ball believed by some people to aid clairvoyance. It is sometimes known as a shew stone. A body of water, either in a container or on the ground, used for this purpose, is called a scrying pool.

History

Celtic tribes, known to exist in Britain as early as 2,000 B.C., were unified by a priesthood known as Druids. Druids are one of the earliest known peoples to have used crystals in divination. It's interesting to note that Druid religion had similarities to megalithic religion of an "earlier" Britain, thus it is possible the first use of crystal divination might have come from them.

Later, during central Europe's Medieval Period (500 – 1500 AD), seers, wizards, sorcerers, psychics, gypsies, fortune tellers, and all other types of diviners also used crystals to "see" into the past, present, or future.

Due to its transparent nature, a natural gemstone called Beryllium Aluminum Silicate (Beryl), was often used for alleged divination. Scottish Highlanders termed these objects "stones of power." Though early crystal balls were made from Beryl, they were later replaced by rock crystal, an even more transparent rock.

Scrying

The art or process of "seeing" is known as "scrying," whereby images are seen in crystals, or other mediums such as water, and are interpreted as meaningful information. The "information" gleaned then is used to make important decisions in one's life (i.e. love, marriage, finances, travel, business, etc).

When the technique of scrying is used with crystals, or any transparent body, it is known as crystallomancy or crystal gazing.

Crystal balls in State magic

Crystal balls are popular props used in mentalism acts by stage magicians. Such routines, in which the performer answers audience questions by means of various ruses, are known as "C. G." (Crystal Gazing) acts. One of the most famous C. G. performers of the 20th century, Claude Alexander, was often billed as "Alexander the Crystal Seer."

Extras

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India offers software support to unravel Big Bang secrets...
India also has its part to do for the worlds biggest experiment.. If all goes well, the experiment will unravel the mysteries of the universe, particularly the very moment that led to the creation of time and space, a la the Big Bang.

Despite not being a member of CERN, the European nuclear research organisation, India made a significant contribution as an observer state to the build-up of the $9 billion experiment. Scores of Indian scientists and other professionals in nuclear and other material sciences took part in select areas of setting up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine over the last 20 years.

The LHC is at the heart of the experiment that will contribute to the knowing of the unknown in the formation of the universe. “The privilege to participate in the 21st century’s biggest scientific experiment and the modest role played in setting up the LHC and experiments are indeed major achievements for India,” said Archana Sharma, staff scientist at CERN.

Built under 100 metres of rock and sandstone, the LHC is a giant machine that will work at full tilt by driving two beams of particles in clockwise and anti-clockwise directions around a specially constructed underground 27 km ring at almost the speed of light, i.e., 299,792,458 metres/second. Each beam will complete 11,245 laps of the machine per second.

When each particle — proton — collides with another proton coming in the opposite direction, it would result in a collision creating mass from energy via the famous Einstein equation in E = Mc2 — the mother of all creations of space.

“Within a second (after the Big Bang), the super-hot universe expanded and cooled dramatically, its temperatures falling from a few trillion to a few billion degrees,” observed Simon Singh, the author of the book Big Bang.

Scientists at CERN are now recreating that very second after all matter and energy, which were hitherto condensed, exploded at that very moment of the Big Bang. There are four major experiments that will be conducted at four points around the ring where the beams will be directed into head-on collisions and India is participating in the CMS experiment and the Alice experiment.

The CMS explores into the next developments in the world of physics, and more importantly, into the elusive Higgs boson particle — popularised as the God particle — that explains the origin of mass. The Alice experiment will study what happened when the super-hot universe expanded within a second after its creation 13 billion years ago, especially the protons, equivalent to hydrogen nuclei, reacted with other particles in a next few minutes to form light nuclei such as helium.

“The ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe was largely fixed within these first few minutes, and is consistent with what we see today,” said Singh.

The LHC will search for all those extra dimensions through giant detectors that will examine the shower particle debris. Besides, the experiment might also create “dark matter” which is currently present in the universe. Scientists had calculated that about 23 per cent of the universe is dark matter, 73 per cent dark energy and 4 per cent ordinary matter.

“It is once in a generation experiment, and for 20 years, all the fine details have gone into conceiving this gigantic experiment,” Archana Sharma told Business Standard. “For years to come, we will see several results emanating from this experiment at CERN that will advance the understanding of several unknown factors in universe,” she said.

Indian research establishments including the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bhaba Atomic Research Centre, Saha Institute, and Punjab University were involved in providing software and quality-testing services of detectors.

“To study and view the experiments from 70 million channels, you need awesome computing infrastructure and TIFR is involved in addressing some of the software requirements,” Sharma said, suggesting that India contributed about $25 million towards the LHC project.

The LHC project also generated some legal challenges and led to fears about the possible creation of a black hole that would wreck the planet. But the attempts to stop the machine from experimenting were dismissed in courts.

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Have you ever read any of Asimov's novels?? (The Robot series, The Robots and Aliens) . Ever wondered if there is any possibility in the near future that a person can actually get to another planet and if not investigate a case like Elijah, can at least explore the place and can one day share a meal with our counterparts! Is this possible?? Is there any life beyond the Planet Earth?? Is there a safe neighborhood out in the universe except Earth?? I feel that these questions are quite common , the very mention of the Alien and ET raises the eyebrows.

Imagine an Alien or lemme call it the 'ET' stepping down a Flying Saucer or UFO(Just as in the film ET) and walking straight to you..!!!! This very imagination is quite amazing, electrifying, terrifying or adventurous may be .. isn't it?? I do find myself lost in these thoughts sometimes when Iam alone starring the Night Sky , by the way sky looks quite beautiful! I wonder how an encounter with the Alien turns out to be like.. Would he/she look just as we do? Do they possess the same technology or are they any advanced?? Are they friendly or will they harm us( Just like any Alien that has so far been portrayed in the films)?? Its just an unquenchable thirst of we humans that has been keeping us busy over centuries trying to find out the existence of an outer world.

These are the kinds of questions Ken Nealson struggles with. A geo-biologist at the University of Southern California, Nealson is heavily involved in devising strategies for searching for extraterrestrial life. And his number one goal is to free himself and his colleagues from the confines of their own preconceptions about life.

"It seems to me the worst people to look for life are biologists," Nealson, also a senior scientist at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says. "Because theyre so darned sure of what life is that if it happened to be different, theyd miss it." Nealson admits this point of view isnt very popular with his colleagues. "Oh, they love me," he laughs. "At least I'm a biologist saying it, so they cant just claim I'm some mad physicist whos trying to take their funding away."

As a cautionary tale, Nealson points to the only previous mission to look for life on another planet. In 1976 two Viking landers arrived on the Red Planet, each outfitted with a miniature biological laboratory. Scoops of Martian soil were fed into a series of experiments, where they were exposed to a puff of humidity, or a drop of water, or a nutrient broth. If any microbes were present, the Viking biologists hoped, the instruments would detect their metabolic processes.

But the experiments didn't discover microbes, and Nealson says thats because they were based on the characteristics of Earthly life. Thats something he wants to avoid on future missions: "Id like to be one of the chorus of voices saying, Dont do this again."

But that doesn't mean Nealson wants to avoid Mars far from it. If anything, Mars has become even more alluring since the Mars Global Surveyor probe found signs that liquid water has recently flowed on the planets surface and may still exist underground.

More than anything, Nealson wants to send a new life-detection mission to the Red Planet. "If I get one thing done before I retire," Nealson says, "it would be to have a mission that went to Mars, because its the one place we probably can go in my lifetime that would do a serious attempt at what I would call non-Earth-centric life detection."

If you call that living

Even our understanding of terrestrial life is changing. Recently, scientists discovered a thriving community of microbes deep in a hot spring in Idaho. These microbes, ancient relatives of bacteria called Archea, make energy by combining hydrogen from rocks with carbon dioxide, and exist completely apart from the Sun. And yet, they may be as numerous as living things on Earths surface, an entirely independent biosphere within the crust of our planet.

And some researchers have speculated that the same kind of life may exist in the crusts of other planets, provided there is enough geologic activity to supply the necessary hydrogen. But designing a space mission with probes to look for such life, many hundreds of feet down, is too ambitious in the near term. Even so, the find reinforces a watchword for life-hunters: Expect the unexpected.[more...]

Robots rules of order

There's another pitfall for life-hunters:The desire to find what they're after. In 1996 NASA scientists claimed to have found evidence for fossil microbes inside a meteorite from Mars. The claim was extremely controversial, and since then most researchers have come to believe the features in the Martian meteorite can be explained by non-biologic processes. Nealson says the NASA team was seduced by their own data.This wasn't a bunch of amateurs; these were good people. Anybody can be fooled by their data; Ive been fooled by mine in the past." But the seduction, Nealson notes, was understandable.

"Almost everything they found was consistent with life," he says. "And when you find enough things that are consistent with life, you start feeling that you've found life. But theres a big difference between five or six things being consistent with life and five or six things needing life to explain their existence. That to me is the big difference: Is there anything there that absolutely couldn't be there if there wasn't life?"[more...]

Europa ocean cruise

Planetary scientist Chris Chyba of the SETI Institute in Palo Alto, California is also anxious to see the search for life on Mars resume. But he’s also focused on another alluring target -- Jupiter's moon Europa. Images from the Galileo spacecraft, with other data, have shown that there is probably an ocean of liquid water beneath Europa’s icy crust. It’s not an easy place to explore: Europa is some 400 million miles from Earth, and it lies deep within Jupiter’s powerful radiation belts, which pose a hazard to any spacecraft.

But planners have envisioned a number of possible missions, including orbiters and landers, to explore Europa. Some have proposed an ambitious mission to melt through the ice and deploy a "cryobot" in the ocean to hunt for life. But Chyba says, "That kind of mission is extremely far in the future. Maybe it will be this century; I hope so. I think it's a very distant mission."
"You probably don't have to fly a cryobot to, in effect, access the ocean," Chyba says. "What you've got to do is go to a spot where it looks as though liquid water from the subsurface has reached the surface. And we can already identify areas like that on the surface of Europa."

Be like Earth

When it comes to life on other solar systems, the statistics seem promising.Four decades ago, Chyba's colleague Frank Drake authored a now-famous equation that judged the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations, or any kind of life, based on the number of habitable planets thought to be orbiting other stars. Back then, that number was pure conjecture. But now, after discovering several dozen extrasolar planets, astronomers are on the verge of learning whether other solar systems like ours are scarce or plentiful."

My prejudice is that we're going to discover that our solar system is neither rare nor typical," Chyba says. "But it doesn't really matter what I think is going to happen. We're actually going to know. Probably this decade, we're going to know."That's because of the upcoming Kepler mission, which will search for Earth-like planets around 100,000 stars beginning in 2006. "We're about to have catalogs of other solar systems, the way we have catalogs of stars [today]," Chyba says.

Whether any of these other solar systems are home to living things is something scientists hope to answer without leaving home. With powerful telescopes, perhaps including space-based arrays of instruments, it might be possible to detect the presence of atmospheric gases typical of life.

"I think it's going to prove very difficult to do in a way that seems convincing," Chyba said. "That doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to do it."[more...]

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Why do we age?



Over the centuries, people have often wondered how it is that our bodies grow and develop from a tiny fertilized egg, to a newborn baby, to a young child, then a teenager and, finally, a young adult. A huge number of very complex changes within our bodies must happen perfectly in order to achieve this.

Once we grow into our adult perfection, why can’t we just stay there? Why do we have to age?

And can we stop it?

Doctors and scientists used to take aging for granted. Scientists used to think that because aging was a natural process, there was no need to investigate it. Is it the wear and tear of the body that causes aging or the life span of a person is defined by his genetic structure?


You've heard it said many times before: "Youth is wasted on the young." Unfortunately, the trade-off for the life experiences and wisdom that comes with age is the gradual loss of youth and physical health. We're constantly reminded that "life's too short." Time eventually takes it toll, and the body simply doesn't work as well as it did before.

But what if that didn't have to be the case? Imagine what people could do with an extra decade or two of healthy years. Now how about an extra fifty? Hundred? Five hundred? Imagine accumulating wisdom and experience without the threats of disease and frailty. Imagine being able to stop aging and reverse its effects.

Sounds like a plot for a science fiction story? The truth is putting an end to aging isn't a far-off dream: it's quickly becoming a reality, according to speakers at ideaCity 2008. The conference, hosted and produced in Toronto by Moses Znaimer, featured the latest research on slowing and stopping the aging process. The goal: not just to increase human lifespan, but to increase the healthy years -- perhaps indefinitely. And the "cure" may be available sooner than you think. Here's what the speakers had to say:


Ray Kurzweil

Don't be fooled by appearances. On the outside, Ray Kurzweil looks like a baby boomer but on the inside he claims to be decades younger. Advances in science are paving the way for revolutionary treatments, and he plans to be around to take advantage of them.

Imagine being a "designer baby boomer". In his talk at ideaCity, Kurzweil outlined how the biotechnology revolution is changing the paradigm of medicine. New technology can design and simulate treatments, computers can simulate human intelligence and tiny robots (known as nanobots) and nanotechnology devices could soon be used to kill cancer cells or control insulin. Genes can be added or be "turned off" to prevent diseases. Organs and tissues will eventually be restored to their youthful state. He predicts the biotechnology revolution will peak around 2020 -- well within the grasp of today's Zoomers.

The challenge, Kurzweil argues, is getting through the next 15 years to reap the benefits. How? By slowing the disease and aging processes using the knowledge we have today. If you want to see the specifics, Kurzweil and co-author Terry Grossman outline their strategies in their book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. The book acts as a guide to the aggressive strategies you need to employ to retain your health, including regular exercise, managing stress, taking supplements and treating inflammation in addition to the chapters dedicated to a healthy diet.


Michael Rose

Imagine being in a dark factory with only a flashlight. That's how Michael Rose describes how we used to approach medicine: Try to detect the source (if you can see it) and correct the problem. The approach doesn't work well for the complex networks that make up the human body. However, genomics (e.g. the Human Genome Project and DNA mapping) has effectively "turned on the lights" to provide a better understanding of how components and systems work -- and where faults occur.

The problem is that our genome has an unfavourable vocabulary -- it tends towards what Rose calls "bad words" like cancer, Alzheimer's disease and heart disease. The solution is to find therapeutic treatments to rewrite these bad words in order to literally stop your genome from killing you. In the end, you'll have a longer life, but also a healthier and more robust constitution.

In his book, The Long Tomorrow -- How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging, Rose argues that there is no single "fountain of youth" or fabled "elixir of life", despite what the old legends say. Instead, the field of Nutrigenomics, the study of the relationships between nutrition and genes, will lead to nutritional supplements meant to protect health and put off aging.


Aubrey de Grey

"The first 1000-year-old is probably less than 20 years younger than the first 150 year old."

Say what?

In order to understand this statement, you have to stop thinking in straight lines. When it comes to life span, Aubrey de Grey, chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, sees exponential rather than linear increases. What starts as the doubling of small numbers (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc) soon explodes. The numbers almost sound too good to be true, but once the fundamental breakthroughs happen, then achievements will accelerate rapidly -- and so will life expectancy.

How will these miraculous numbers come about? De Grey argues that our metabolism causes damage on an ongoing basis. This damage eventually causes pathology (disease). What we need to do is prevent and repair damage at the metabolic level, and maintain our bodies to keep them in top shape. Damage can be repaired with engineering. This means getting rid of "junk" inside and outside of our cells, getting rid of excess cells, replacing lost cells and dealing with mutations.

In other words, repairing damage "buys time" until the next advances come along. Extending lives means saving lives, especially since more deaths are caused by aging than terrorism, war, accidents and natural disasters combined. It's not surprising that de Grey is a force behind getting people to understand the importance of this issue... and to do something about it.

For more information, check out de Grey's book, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, and the Methuselah Foundation website.

Overall, the ideas and methods may be different, but the speakers all seemed to agree on one thing: if you can maintain your health a little longer, you'll be able to benefit from the treatments when they become available. With all due respect to George Bernard Shaw, youth will no longer be wasted on the young, and aging will become a process of continued personal growth rather than decay.

Video :-

New aging research into living longer, disease prevention, quality of life, healthy lifestyles, longevity - conference keynote speaker Dr Patrick Dixon



Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time. Know More

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