STRANGE SCIENCE

[anansi]

Did the ancients tried to fly?

Is the Baghdad battery real?

What are those strange round balls found in South Africa?

A 75,0000 yrs old megalithic calender in Southern Africa?

What is the truth about Atlantis?

Welcome to Strange science



Today, we fly an old, old airplane. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.

The ancient bird models in the Cairo Museum were all pretty similar. Only one in the set was wrong. It was made of sycamore wood -- a little thing with a 7-inch wingspan. In 1969 Khalil Messiha, an Egyptian doctor and amateur student of bird models, noticed it. It stood out for him because he saw it through the eyes of his childhood. He recalled the shapes and forms he'd worked with when he'd built model airplanes. This wasn't a bird at all. It was a model airplane, and that wasn't possible.

The other birds had legs. This had none. The other birds had painted feathers. This had none. The other birds had horizontal tail feathers like a real bird. Perhaps that was the most important thing. Birds don't have to be stable in flight because they can correct their direction. But a model airplane needs a vertical rudder to keep it moving straight. This strange wooden model tapered into a vertical rudder. One can also see that the wing has an airfoil cross-section. It was all aerodynamically correct. Too much about the model was beyond coincidence. Messiha's brother, a flight engineer, reproduced it in balsa wood and launched it. It flew. It really flew!

The model was dug up in Sakkara a hundred years ago. Sakkara is a site of ancient ruins, but this model is more recent. It's from the 3rd century BC, from an age of invention that followed the death of Alexander the Great. That so-called Hellenistic period gave us gears, screws, plumbing, control valves, Euclidian geometry, Archimedes, and Ptolemy's astronomy.

And so, it seems, it also produced a modern concept of flight. 1800 years later Leonardo da Vinci was still trying to invent flapping-wing airplanes and corkscrew-driven helicopters. But here, an Egyptian had produced something with all the features of a modern sailplane.

Did anyone actually build a large version of this thing? Well, no one could have come this close to the real shape of flight without working on a larger scale. This little wooden model could hardly exist unless someone had worked with large, light models, or even with man-carrying versions.

Archaeologists have looked in vain for a prototype. A large model light enough to fly would be too delicate to stand the ravages of 2300 years. The original -- if it ever was -- has long since joined the desert dust. Whatever form this Egyptian airplane might have taken, it has long since returned to the world of dreams and imagination from which it first came.

I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern (I. van Sertima, ed.). New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, pp. 92-99.
www.uh.edu/engines/epi328.htm

[anansi]

ADAM'S CALENDAR

These mysterious ancient ruins consist of dwellings, forts, temples roads, irrigation systems and agricultural terraces that cover thousands of square kilometres. It is our estimate that more stone went into building these features than went into building all of the Egyptian pyramids. It is an archaeologist’s dream that will unveil even greater and more mysterious secrets in years to come.



There is an overwhelming consensus by scholars, academics and even mystics that southern Africa is the cradle of humankind and that this is where the first humans walked the Earth before migrating to the distant corners of our planet. Through the study of mitochondrial DNA in females, geneticists found evidence that points to a time when the first humans suddenly appeared on Earth, reigniting the ongoing debate about the ‘missing link’. Their calculation show that the common ancestor to all humans appeared somewhere between 180,000 and 360,000 years ago. She was affectionately called Mitochondrial Eve.

But the first signs of human intelligence and consciousness only appeared around 75,000 years ago, when the Khoisan people of southern Africa, sometimes also referred to as Bushmen, started leaving behind an array of spectacular cave paintings all over this part of the continent. Finely crafted beads and bracelet fragments found in a cave at Blombos in the Western Cape, South Africa, show that these early humans had already developed a feel for the arts and crafts around 80,000 years ago. Until recently, this was the only real link we had to the cradle of humankind in southern Africa and its earliest inhabitants.

Southern Africa holds some of the deepest mysteries in all of human history. Although much has been written about the first humans who appeared in this part of the world, we have found very little evidence of their activity, what they did and what kind of lives they led.

The re-evaluation of some of these ancient stone ruins of southern Africa has led us further back in time than ever before. Could these stone ruin be the remains of the earliest human settlements on Earth?



www.makomati.org/

[anansi]

Martian Life? Martian Civilization?

"NASA has made a startling discovery that points to the possibility that a primitive form of microscopic life may have existed on Mars more than three billion years ago. The research is based on a sophisticated examination of an ancient Martian meteorite that landed on Earth some 13,000 years ago.

The evidence is exciting, even compelling, but not conclusive. It is a discovery that demands further scientific investigation. NASA is ready to assist the process of rigorous scientific investigation and lively scientific debate that will follow this discovery.

I want everyone to understand that we are not talking about 'little green men.' These are extremely small, single- cell structures that somewhat resemble bacteria on Earth. There is no evidence or suggestion that any higher life form ever existed on Mars.

The NASA scientists and researchers who made this discovery will be available at a news conference tomorrow to discuss their findings. They will outline the step-by-step 'detective story' that explains how the meteorite arrived here from Mars, and how they set about looking for evidence of long-ago life in this ancient rock. They will also release some fascinating images documenting their research."

www.solarviews.com/eng/marslif6.htm
That was 20yrs ago

Evidence for life on Mars may be staring us in the face

THE footprint of life on Mars may have been plain to see all along in the sulphurous minerals that litter the planet's surface. What's more, the next Mars lander should be able to detect the evidence.

No mission to Mars has ever found complex carbon-based molecules, from which life as we know it is built. But sulphur is everywhere on Mars - it is more abundant there than on Earth - and it could contain one of the signatures of life. On Earth, the activity of some microbes converts one class of sulphur-containing compounds, the sulphates, into another, the sulphides. The microbes prefer to work with the lighter sulphur-32 isotope, so the sulphides they produce are relatively deficient in the heavier isotope, sulphur-34. Planetary scientists have long wondered whether we could use this pattern to discern signs of life on Mars. Now the prospects for this technique look better than ever.

John Parnell of the University of Aberdeen, UK, and his colleagues found sulphides, apparently formed through microbial activity, permeating the rocks of Haughton crater in the Canadian Arctic (Geology, DOI: 10.1130/G30615.1). "It was amazing - it was everywhere," says Parnell, who pressed the case for investigating sulphur isotopes on Mars at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, last week.

An analysis of the crater's rocks indicates the sulphides were produced at temperatures above 70 °C. That suggests they formed shortly after the crater itself was created by a meteorite impact 39 million years ago, when water warmed by the impact would have circulated through the crater rocks.

Despite the passage of time, the signature of life at Haughton crater remains clear, with sulphur-34 depleted by 7 per cent in the sulphides compared with the sulphates. This suggests that such a signature is not easily erased, bolstering the chances that Martian rocks that were moist enough to harbour life long ago could still carry a detectable signature of life, says Parnell.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover will land on the Martian surface in 2012. It will carry a mass spectrometer that should be sensitive enough to see variations as small as 2 per cent in sulphur isotope abundances, says John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the lead scientist for the mission.

Sulphur is "definitely a promising candidate" to reveal signs of life on Mars, says David Des Marais of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who is also involved in the mission. "If there are big isotopic differences that would be very suspicious. The only way we know how to do that on Earth is with life."
www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527514.300-evidence-for-life-on-mars-may-be-staring-us-in-the-face.html

Now For The Strange Part the Martian Tunnels?



The Official JPL Explanation

David C. Pieri, Ph.D. Earth and Space Sciences Division of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has postulated that the "Martian Glass Tunnel Anomalies" are nothing more than simple Martian dune trains. I am not acquainted with Dr. Pieri and have no intention of impugning his reputation. He is after all a respected planetary scientist with years of experience in the field, and I am merely an individual with an interest in these subjects. Dr. Pieri makes an excellent point that the interpretation of satellite imagery can be ambiguous, especially for those individuals untrained in remote sensing applications. I do, however, feel that Dr. Pieri's judgment of these anomalies, based on only one image, posted on the Enterprise Mission web site, may have been premature. Additional data in the form of images from the Mars Global Surveyor has been located and would seem to support the hypothesis that these unusual features are something far more interesting and enigmatic than a mere sand dune.

Readers may wish to read our earlier analysis of MOC image m1501228d which addresses the apparent dichotomy between "Martian Dune Trains" and "Martian Glass Tunnel Anomalies". First let's revisit an image from our last installment.

Shown here is an actual Martian dune train image from the Malin Space Science Systems image repository. A link to the original image is provided below.

mondovista.com/marsobjectx.html
For a more exotic explanation go below
www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http:



What do you think? don't be shy post your strange science stuff here also or just debunk the whole thing.

[anansi]

Russians intends to send Nuclear powered space ships to Mars


Things you should not do break-into govt computers

Former Canadian Defence Minister

[anansi]

Russian president asked to investigate alien claims

Richard Galpin
BBC News, Moscow


Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, leader of the Kalmykia region
Mr Ilyumzhinov made the claims in a TV interview

A Russian MP has asked President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate claims by a regional president that he has met aliens on board a spaceship.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalmykia, made his claim in a television interview.

MP Andre Lebedev is not just asking whether Mr Ilyumzhinov is fit to govern.

He is also concerned that, if he was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets.

The MP has written a letter to Mr Medvedev raising a list of his concerns.

In his letter he says that - assuming the whole thing was not just a bad joke - it was an historic event and should have been reported to the Kremlin.

He also asks if there are official guidelines for what government officials should do if contacted by aliens, especially if those officials have access to state secrets.

Mr Ilyumzhinov said in an interview on primetime television that he had been taken on board an alien spaceship which had come to planet Earth to take samples - and claims to have several witnesses.

He has been president of Kalmykia, a small Buddhist region of Russia which lies on the shores of the Caspian Sea, for 17 years.

The millionaire former businessman has a reputation as an eccentric character.

As president of the World Chess Federation, he has spent tens of millions of dollars turning the impoverished republic into a mecca for chess players - building an entire village to host international tournaments.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8662822.stm

[anansi]

robot conducts wedding in Tokyo



TOKYO – Almost everyone stood when the bride walked down the aisle in her white gown, but not the wedding conductor, because she was bolted to her chair.

The nuptials at this ceremony were led by "I-Fairy," a 4-foot (1.5-meter) tall seated robot with flashing eyes and plastic pigtails. Sunday's wedding was the first time a marriage had been led by a robot, according to manufacturer Kokoro Co.

"Please lift the bride's veil," the robot said in a tinny voice, waving its arms in the air as the newlyweds kissed in front of about 50 guests.

The wedding took place at a restaurant in Hibiya Park in central Tokyo, where the I-Fairy wore a wreath of flowers and directed a rooftop ceremony. Wires led out from beneath it to a black curtain a few feet (meters) away, where a man crouched and clicked commands into a computer.

Japan has one of the most advanced robotics industries in the world, with the government actively supporting the field for future growth. Industrial models in factories are now standard, but recently Japanese companies are making a push to inject robots into everyday life.

Honda makes a walking child-shaped robot, and other firms have developed them to entertain the elderly or play baseball. Kokoro, whose corporate goal is to "touch the hearts of the people," also makes giant dinosaur robots for exhibitions and lifelike android models that can smile and laugh. The company is a subsidiary of Sanrio Co., which owns the rights to Hello Kitty and other Japanese characters.

"This was a lot of fun. I think that Japanese have a strong sense that robots are our friends. Those in the robot industry mostly understand this, but people mainly want robots near them that serve some purpose," said bride Satoko Inoue, 36, who works at manufacturer Kokoro.

"It would be nice if the robot was a bit more clever, but she is very good at expressing herself," said new husband Tomohiro Shibata, 42, a professor of robotics at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in central Japan.

The I-Fairy sells for about 6.3 million yen ($68,000) and three are in use in Singapore, the U.S. and Japan, according to company spokeswoman Kayako Kido. It has 18 degrees of motion in its arms, and mainly repeats preprogrammed movements and sounds.

Gotta love the name of the robot I fairy... ;D
news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100516/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_robot_wedding

[anansi]

New military toys coming to a battle field or a protest near you

Imagine if this really works say good bye to oil spills

[anansi]

The original abduction story Barney and Betty Hill a New Hampshire couple who claimed abduction by aliens weather you beleive in Alien Ufos or not their story is compelling especially given the time a late 50ts mixed blk/wht couple.