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Archaeologist: Bones found in Turkey are probably those of Cleopatra’s half-sister

Posted: February 27, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
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Long-buried bones and a missing monarch. Add some historical notoriety and modern technology and you have a heck of a captivating, science-driven story.

Just this month, it was announced that bones found under a parking lot in Leicester, England, belonged to King Richard III. DNA evidence, according to the lead archaeologist at the excavation, proved this “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

For Hilke Thur, a Vienna-based archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, a similar quest awaits empirical closure. The locale is more exotic – western Turkey – and the evidence is much more difficult to analyze: The bones in question are a bit more than 2,000 years old.

She will cover this and other aspects of her work in a March 1 lecture at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh.

The title: “Who Murdered Cleopatra’s Sister? And Other Tales from Ephesus.”

In a recent interview, Thur discussed…

What took her to Ephesus

“I’m an architect as well as an archaeologist, and Ephesus – a large and important city on the coast of Asia Minor centuries before it became part of the Roman Empire – has long been one of the biggest archaeological sites. It is the main excavation of the Austrian Archaeological Institute.

“I was a student when I started working there in 1975, and have based a great deal of my career around the site. From 1997 to 2005, I was assistant director of the Ephesus excavations.

“An English engineer directed the first archaeological digs there in 1869, but since 1895, only Austrian-led projects have permission to do that, though Turks sometimes have excavations. I’d like to add that it’s quite an international team there, with researchers from all over the world.

“My specialty is interpreting buildings and monuments. The excavations of one monument, The Octagon, began in 1904. In 1926, a grave chamber was found inside The Octagon. The skeleton inside it has been interpreted to be that of a young woman about age 20.”

What thickened the plot

“When I was working with the architecture of The Octagon and the building next to it, it wasn’t known whose skeleton was inside. Then I found some ancient writers telling us that in the year 41 B.C., Arsinoe IV – the half-sister of Cleopatra – was murdered in Ephesus by Cleopatra and her Roman lover, Marc Antony. Because the building is dated by its type and decoration to the second half of the first century B.C., this fits quite well.

“I put the pieces of the puzzle together.”

The eight-sided clues

“In antiquity, ordinary people were not buried within the city. That privilege was only for special people – those with an aristocratic background, or people who did special things for their city. So the body must have belonged to a special person. Also, the skeleton was of a woman.

“Then there is the shape of the building. While The Octagon exists only as ruins today, its pieces have been photographed. The images were digitized and ‘virtually rebuilt’ on a computer. The shape of the building, an imperial grave monument, resembles the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The lighthouse, destroyed centuries ago, was built at Alexandria, on the Egyptian coast, by the Ptolemy dynasty from which Cleopatra and Arsinoe IV were descended.

“The center portion of the lighthouse tower was octagonal, which was quite unusual at the time.”

Forensic evidence

“The site of The Octagon has a grave chamber. It was opened in 1926, but the opening was very small, and no one entered it until later on.

“The skull had been removed for tests; it disappeared in Germany during World War II. But there are photos of the skull, and notes written down by those who examined it.

“In 1985, the back side of the chamber became accessible, and I re-found the skeleton – the bones were in two niches. The body was removed and examined. The bones were found to be those of a woman younger than 20 – 15 or 16, perhaps.

“The revised age was used for arguments against my theory of the body belonging to Arsinoe IV, but those arguments didn’t find anything to disprove my theory.

“This academic questioning is normal. It happens. It’s a kind of jealousy.”

What would prove her theory

“They tried to make a DNA test, but testing didn’t work well because the skeleton had been moved and the bones had been held by a lot of people. It didn’t bring the results we hoped to find.

“I don’t know if there are possibilities to do more of this testing. Forensic material is not my field.

“One of my colleagues on the project told me two years ago there currently is no other method to really determine more. But he thinks there may be new methods developing. There is hope.”

Bordsen: 704-358-5251

Peru archaeologists find ancient temple in El Paraiso

Posted: February 26, 2013 by phaedrap1 in Monuments, News
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El Paraiso site
The temple was discovered in one of the wings of the main pyramid at the ancient site of El Paraiso

Archaeologists in Peru say they have discovered a temple at the ancient site of El Paraiso, near the capital, Lima.

Entry to the rectangular structure, estimated to be up to 5,000 years old, was via a narrow passageway, they say.

At its centre, the archaeologists from Peru’s Ministry of Culture found a hearth which they believe was used to burn ceremonial offerings.

With 10 ruins, El Paraiso is one of the biggest archaeological sites in central Peru.

The archaeologists found the structure, measuring 6.82m by 8.04m (22ft by 26ft), in the right wing of the main pyramid.

‘Interconnected civilisation’

They had been carrying out conservation work on the site on behalf of Peru’s Ministry of Culture when they came across the remains, which had been obscured by sand and rocks.

Archaeologists examine the remains of a hearth at the centre of a temple structure
The walls would have been 2.5m (8ft) high, but only about 70cm remain with the hearth at the centre

They said the temple walls were made of stone and covered in fine yellow clay which also contained some traces of red paint.

The archaeologists said the find suggests that the communities in the Late Pre-ceramic Age (3500 BC to 1800 BC) were more closely connected than had been previously thought.

Peru’s Deputy Minister for Culture Rafael Varon said the the temple was the first structure of its kind to be found on Peru’s central coast.

“It corroborates that the region around Lima was a focus for the civilisations of the Andean territory, further bolstering its religious, economic and political importance since times immemorial,” Mr Varon said.

Archaeologist Marco Guillen, who led the team which made the discovery, said the hearth gave insight into the civilisation which had used the site.

“The main characteristic of their religion was the use of fire, which burnt in the centre,” he told the BBC’s Mattia Cabitza in Lima.

“The smoke allowed the priests to connect with their gods,” Mr Guillen said.

The Paraiso settlement once supported a farming and fishing community numbering hundreds of people.

Our correspondent says thousands of ruins are thought to remain undiscovered, making Peru a treasure-hunting destination for archaeologists and looters alike.

BBC News

Flowers’ Sophisticated Method Of Communication

Posted: February 24, 2013 by phaedrap1 in Science
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MessageToEagle.com – In one of our earlier articles, we described the life of plants, their incredible ability to learn, make music, dislike human noise and even communicate!

According to yet another study we learn much more about the mysterious life of flowers.

Flowers’ methods of communicating are at least as sophisticated as any devised by an advertising agency, according to a new study, published today in Science Express by researchers from the University of Bristol.

 


However, for any advert to be successful, it has to reach, and be perceived by, its target audience.

The research shows for the first time that pollinators such as bumblebees are able to find and distinguish electric signals given out by flowers.

Flowers often produce bright colours, patterns and enticing fragrances to attract their pollinators. Researchers at Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, led by Professor Daniel Robert, found that flowers also have their equivalent of a neon sign – patterns of electrical signals that can communicate information to the insect pollinator. These electrical signals can work in concert with the flower’s other attractive signals and enhance floral advertising power.

 

Plants are usually charged negatively and emit weak electric fields. On their side, bees acquire a positive charge as they fly through the air. No spark is produced as a charged bee approaches a charged flower, but a small electric force builds up that can potentially convey information.

By placing electrodes in the stems of petunias, the researchers showed that when a bee lands, the flower’s potential changes and remains so for several minutes.

Could this be a way by which flowers tell bees another bee has recently been visiting? To their surprise, the researchers discovered that bumblebees can detect and distinguish between different floral electric fields.

Also, the researchers found that when bees were given a learning test, they were faster at learning the difference between two colours when electric signals were also available.

How then do bees detect electric fields? This is not yet known, although the researchers speculate that hairy bumblebees bristle up under the electrostatic force, just like one’s hair in front of an old television screen.

 

Gerbera hybrida; bottom: Clematis armandii) showing a composite of immediately before and after application of charged powder paint. The pattern of powder deposition reveals the shape of the electric field.
The discovery of such electric detection has opened up a whole new understanding of insect perception and flower communication.

Dr Heather Whitney, a co-author of the study said: “This novel communication channel reveals how flowers can potentially inform their pollinators about the honest status of their precious nectar and pollen reserves.”

Professor Robert said: “The last thing a flower wants is to attract a bee and then fail to provide nectar: a lesson in honest advertising since bees are good learners and would soon lose interest in such an unrewarding flower.

“The co-evolution between flowers and bees has a long and beneficial history, so perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that we are still discovering today how remarkably sophisticated their communication is.”

 

 

 

© MessageToEagle.com

 

Vittorio Missoni’s Disappearance Gives Rise To New Fears Of Bermuda Triangles Worldwide

Posted: February 23, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News
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When ships and planes mysteriously vanish — sometimes without a trace — speculation runs wild.

Many worry about the conventional — pilot error, kidnapping and terrorism come to mind. And there are those who worry about the supernatural.

Acclaimed fashion designer Vittorio Missoni and five others boarded a twin-engine BN-2 Islander aircraft in the Los Roques island chain — pictured below — near Venezuela on Jan. 4. They were headed for Caracas and had only flown about 11 miles when they vanished into thin air.

losroquesislands

After hundreds of people in boats, planes and helicopters searched the area for days, no wreckage or debris of any kind was found, according to ABC News.

The mystery deepened when the only item that turned up was a bag that didn’t even belong to anyone on the Missoni flight. The bag, recovered on the nearby island of Curacao, was placed onto Missoni’s plane while its Italian tourist owner, caught a different flight out of Los Roques.

More recently, according to Vogue News, two bags belonging to Missoni were found on the island of Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles. A statement released by the Missoni family said that, a month and a half after Missoni’s plane vanished, “the case is not closed.”

Something else added more fuel to speculation that Missoni’s flight may have been deliberately diverted. According to ABC News, Missoni’s son, Ottavio, told an Italian newspaper that a puzzling text message was reportedly sent from the cellphone of Guido Foresti — one of the passengers on the missing plane — to Foresti’s son two days after they disappeared.

The younger Missoni told the newspaper the message said: “Call now. We are reachable.” No follow-up news has been reported about this.

So what happened to Missoni’s plane? Could foul play have been involved, in an area that has seen its share of kidnappings or hijackings by possible drug dealers?

The Guardian reports that unexplained plane crashes and disappearances have allegedly occurred over the last 10 years in the same geographic location between Caracas and the Los Roques chain of 350 islands, cays and islets covering an area of about 40 kilometers.

If any of this sounds even vaguely familiar, it’s probably because this area, dubbed locally as the Los Roques Curse, is not far from the infamous Bermuda Triangle — bordered by Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico — where people, planes and ships have vanished for decades.

Check out these specific Bermuda Triangle cases

Bermuda Triangle Disappearances
NOAA.gov

Stories of missing aircraft, and crewless or vanished ships fill the literature of the mysteries of seafaring and high-flying individuals who lost their lives from unexplained causes.

1918: The U.S.S. Cyclops, a World War I Navy vessel, is refueling ships in the south Atlantic Ocean. After stopping in Barbados, the ship, with more than 300 passengers and crew aboard, vanishes without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle.

1945: During a training exercise, five U.S. Navy planes disappear in the same Bermuda Triangle area. Adding more mystery to the incident, a search aircraft sent to find the lost planes also unexplainably vanishes.

1950: A Northwest Airlines flight — with 55 passengers and three crew members — is en route to Minneapolis from New York City when it apparently simply drops out of sight while passing over what’s known today as the Michigan Triangle.

1955: Nine ships disappear from an area of the Pacific Ocean about 60 miles south of Tokyo. Another ship sent to find them also vanishes. This has been dubbed The Devil’s Sea.

All of the above cases involve ships or planes that mysteriously vanished and the explanations of those incidents may seem as diverse as the number of cases themselves:

  • Unexpected severe weather conditions
  • Pilot or captain error
  • Pirates or kidnappers
  • Methane gas buildups capable of sinking a ship without warning

Of course, disappearances in the infamous Bermuda Triangle and some other areas have come amid fears of UFOs, mysterious vortexes, time portals and sea monsters. To be sure, fear can play on any nervous traveler’s mind, but some disappearances just defy conventional explanations and fall in the murky category of unexplained phenomena.

Numerous smaller ships and planes have disappeared in the decades following the 1940s after often reporting disturbances causing compasses, radios and other instruments to malfunction.

And yet, according to the United States Coast Guard, the Bermuda Triangle is much ado about nothing.

“The Coast Guard does not recognize the existence of the so-called Bermuda Triangle as a geographic area of specific hazard to ships or planes,” the Coast Guard says on its website. “In a review of many aircraft and vessel losses in the area over the years there has been nothing discovered that would indicate that casualties were the result of anything other than physical causes. No extraordinary factors have ever been identified.”

Writing in Skeptoid.com, Brian Dunning says that “transportation losses inside the Bermuda Triangle do not occur at a rate higher than anywhere else, and the number of losses that are unexplained is also not any higher. Statistically speaking, there is no Bermuda Triangle.”

Since the 1990s, more than a dozen cases have been reported “in which small aircraft have either crashed, disappeared or declared emergencies while traveling through the area,” according to The Guardian. “In 2008, 14 people were killed when a plane making the same journey as Missoni’s crashed into the sea. No wreckage was ever found and only one body was recovered.”

Watch this news item comparing different areas of the world where people, planes and ships have vanished

Writing in Discovery News, noted skeptic Benjamin Radford points out that the Caribbean Sea has an enormous amount of boat and plane traffic.

“The only way to get to and from those islands is by boat or plane, and — like cars, boats or anything else — more traffic than average means more accidents and mishaps than average. If anything, it’s surprising there aren’t more crashes,” Radford wrote.

While The Bermuda Triangle is the most famous of areas around the world laying claim to causing people, planes and ships to vanish, there actually hasn’t been such a report from there for almost a decade.

Excerpt from a Learning Channel documentary about the Japanese Devil’s Sea

By Lee Speigel
Huffington Post

Bigfoot sighting along Neches River?

Posted: February 22, 2013 by phaedrap1 in Occult
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PORT NECHES — Chill bumps rise on David Arceneaux’s arms as he looked across Block Bayou at a line of trees about 100 yards away.

“I’m not crazy. I don’t do drugs and I’m not a drinker,” Arceneaux said before telling his tale of seeing not one but two Bigfoot-like creatures huddled together one December morning.

The Nederland native visits Oak Bluff Cemetery about once a month to clean the graves of a friend and a cousin, something he has done for years without incident. But on an overcast, windless day Arceneaux got the fright of his life.

“I heard a blood curdling scream and a lady nearby asked me if I was OK. I told her it wasn’t me,” Arceneaux said as he stood, uneasily, at roughly the same spot where he saw the creatures. “We walked over to the water and looked to the left then straight ahead.”

What he saw next amazed him. Two Bigfoot-like creatures who had been throwing rocks in the water looked across at him and the unknown female. One was standing next to a tree, arms around the trunk and the other was squatted down. As the second creature rose from the crouching position Arceneaux estimated the creature was about eight-foot tall. So he snapped a photo with his phone, he said.

“All of a sudden they started walking then running through the woods,” he said of the bipedal creatures. “When they began to run, the lady said ‘I’m leaving’ and left. I stayed a few more seconds and then thought there may be a way for them to cross here so I left, scared.”

Arceneaux said he could see the face of the creature “clear as day.” There was hair from the mouth down like a man and when the creature turned he could see hair hanging down its arm.

Disturbed by what he saw, Arceneaux went home and watched an episode of “Finding Bigfoot” but had to change the channel when they played an audio recording of Bigfoot — it was too real.

“This is my first time back here since December,” he said.

Arceneaux said he spoke to a game warden, describing the situation, and was told there had been other sightings along the Neches River. Calls placed to a local game warden was not returned by Tuesday afternoon.

There are a number of organizations throughout the state that researches and documents Bigfoot sightings. Groups such as Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy and Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization. These groups strive to find evidence to scientifically prove the existence of the creature.

Jerry Hestand of Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy said there have been reports of sightings in the Big Thicket area and he has had personal experiences at the Lance Rosier Unit in the Thicket.

Hestand said one of the creatures entered his camp and growled at one of the dogs. The dog, he said, growled back but by the time the men jumped up from their tents the creature was gone. Hestand said the group was part of an episode of a Travel Channel show called Weird Travels in which Bigfoot vocalizations were played.

“There is a sound on the Internet called the Ohio howl,” Hestand said. “That’s exactly what we heard clearly and distinctly.”

 


Arceneaux said he did not come forward with his story sooner because he worried about what others would think of him. He has shown this photographic evidence — which was taken at a far distance with a cell phone — to friends and family and only had one person scoff. He will continue to research Bigfoot, he said, but remains wary of returning to the spot where the encounter occurred.

PAnews.com, Port Arthur, Texas

E-mail: mmeaux@panews.com

Twitter: MaryMeauxPANews

The Early Moon Was Wet – Scientists Say

Posted: February 19, 2013 by phaedrap1 in Science
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MessageToEagle.com – Traces of water have been detected within the crystalline structure of mineral samples from the lunar highland upper crust obtained during the Apollo missions, according to a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues.

The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallized from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early moon. The new findings indicate that the early moon was wet and that water there was not substantially lost during the moon’s formation.

The results seem to contradict the predominant lunar formation theory — that the moon was formed from debris generated during a giant impact between Earth and another planetary body, approximately the size of Mars, according to U-M’s Youxue Zhang and his colleagues.

 


Click on image to enlargeClose up view of Hadley Rille and the Apollo 15 traverse map. Credits: NASA

“Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the moon, the water is inferred to have been in the moon when it formed,” Zhang said. “That is somewhat difficult to explain with the current popular moon-formation model, in which the moon formed by collecting the hot ejecta as the result of a super-giant impact of a martian-size body with the proto-Earth.

“Under that model, the hot ejecta should have been degassed almost completely, eliminating all water,” Zhang said.

Over the last five years, spacecraft observations and new lab measurements of Apollo lunar samples have overturned the long-held belief that the moon is bone-dry.

 


Click on image to enlargeCalled the “Genesis Rock,” this lunar sample of unbrecciated anorthosite collected during the Apollo 15 mission was thought to be a piece of the moon’s primordial crust. In a paper published online Feb. 17 in Nature Geoscience, a University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues report that traces of water were found in the rock. Photo courtesy of NASA/Johnson Space Cente

In 2008, laboratory measurement of Apollo lunar samples by ion microprobe detected indigenous hydrogen, inferred to be the water-related chemical species hydroxyl, in lunar volcanic glasses. In 2009, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing satellite, known as LCROSS, slammed into a permanently shadowed lunar crater and ejected a plume of material that was surprisingly rich in water ice.

Hydroxyls have also been detected in other volcanic rocks and in the lunar regolith, the layer of fine powder and rock fragments that coats the lunar surface. Hydroxyls, which consist of one atom of hydrogen and one of oxygen, were also detected in the lunar anorthosite study reported in Nature Geoscience.

 

In the latest work, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy was used to analyze the water content in grains of plagioclase feldspar from lunar anorthosites, highland rocks composed of more than 90 percent plagioclase.

The bright-colored highlands rocks are thought to have formed early in the moon’s history when plagioclase crystallized from a magma ocean and floated to the surface.

The infrared spectroscopy work, which was conducted at Zhang’s U-M lab and co-author Anne H. Peslier’s lab, detected about 6 parts per million of water in the lunar anorthosites.

 

“The surprise discovery of this work is that in lunar rocks, even in nominally water-free minerals such as plagioclase feldspar, the water content can be detected,” said Zhang, James R. O’Neil Collegiate Professor of Geological Sciences.

 

Lunar Ferroan Anorthosite 60025

At 4.5 billion years old, this anorthosite is approximately the same age as the Moon itself. Made mostly of plagioclase feldspar, it is thought to be a sample of the Moon\’s early feldspar crust. Collected by Apollo 16. Locality: Lunar Highlands, near Descartes Crater , NA. Credits: NASA
“It’s not ‘liquid’ water that was measured during these studies but hydroxyl groups distributed within the mineral grain,” said Notre Dame’s Hui. “We are able to detect those hydroxyl groups in the crystalline structure of the Apollo samples.”

The hydroxyl groups the team detected are evidence that the lunar interior contained significant water during the moon’s early molten state, before the crust solidified, and may have played a key role in the development of lunar basalts. “The presence of water,” said Hui, “could imply a more prolonged solidification of the lunar magma ocean than the once-popular anhydrous moon scenario suggests.”

The researchers analyzed grains from ferroan anorthosites 15415 and 60015, as well as troctolite 76535. Ferroan anorthosite 15415 is one the best known rocks of the Apollo collection and is popularly called the Genesis Rock because the astronauts thought they had a piece of the moon’s primordial crust. It was collected on the rim of Apur Crater during the Apollo 15 mission.

Rock 60015 is highly shocked ferroan anorthosite collected near the lunar module during the Apollo 16 mission. Troctolite 76535 is a coarse-grained plutonic rock collected during the Apollo 17 mission.

A paper titled “Water in lunar anorthosites and evidence for a wet early moon” was published online Feb. 17 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

King Tut’s Parents Were Cousins, Not Siblings: Researcher

Posted: February 18, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
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For all the popularity Tutankhamun enjoys today, key details about the ancient Egyptian pharaoh’s life, such as his parentage, have remained somewhat mysterious. While Akhenaten was known to be Tut’s dad, the identity of the boy king’s mother has remained elusive. But at least one archaeologist believes she was Nefertiti.

Recent DNA analyses from the mummies of Tut and his kin revealed that the boy king’s parents were siblings. Those results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in February 2010, pointed to the “heretic” king Akhenaten and one of his sisters as the mom and dad of Tut.

But researcher Marc Gabolde said in a talk at Harvard University last week that he believes King Tut’s mom was Akhenaten’s cousin Nefertiti, who was Akhenaten’s chief wife and the mother of six of his daughters.

Gabolde said the genetic closeness of Tut’s parents does not necessarily point to a brother-sister pairing. Rather, it could be due to three successive generations of marriage between first cousins, he said.

“The consequence of that is that the DNA of the third generation between cousins looks like the DNA between a brother and sister,” Gabolde said, according to the Harvard Gazette. “I believe that Tutankhamun is the son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, but that Akhenaten and Nefertiti were cousins.”

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, disputed Gabolde’s claim. Hawass, who led the 2010 JAMA study, told LiveScience in an email Friday (Feb. 15) that his team’s research showed that Tut’s mother was, like Akhenaten, the daughter of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye. Hawass added that there is “no evidence” in archaeology or philology to indicate that Nefertiti was the daughter of Amenhotep III.

Gabolde is the director of the archaeological expedition of Université Paul Valery-Montpellier III in the Royal Necropolis at el-Amarna, a city built on the banks of the Nile by Akhenaten, the son of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye who ushered in a brief period of monotheism in Egypt through worship of the sun disk, Aten.

King Tut was part of the 18th dynasty of the Egyptian New Kingdom, which lasted from about 1550 B.C. to 1295 B.C. He died in the ninth year of his reign, circa 1324 B.C., at the age of 19, leaving no heirs. Several ideas have popped up about possible diseases that may have wreaked havoc on his family as well as the cause of Tut’s early demise, with some evidence suggesting he died in part from malaria and bone abnormalities.

Megan Gannon, News Editor

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We’re also on Facebook & Google+.

Does Telepathy Between Couples?

Posted: February 17, 2013 by phaedrap1 in Uncategorized
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Can these two read each other’s minds?Rick Gomez/Blend Images/Corbis

When Julie Beischel met Mark Boccuzzi at a conference and agreed to participate in an experiment on telepathy, she didn’t immediately tell him about the powerful connections she’d felt to him; after all, they were strangers.

Now married, however, Beischel and Boccuzzi credit telepathy for helping them meet and fall in love.

It was like nothing I had ever encountered,” Beischel said.

The data from the experiment backed up her perception, however, and the couple eventually asked Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) that conducted the summer study program, to marry them. Now, they are co-writing a book, Psychic Intimacy: A Handbook for Couples, that will highlight practical applications of telepathy for couples. In fact, they’ve suggested that Radin turn the experiment into a dating service.

The field of parapsychology can be tricky for scientists to navigate. At best, they’re known as a fringe group; at worst, they’re lumped together with astrologers and fortune tellers. NIH funding is hard to come by. People were often surprised that Beischel, a “hard-core” scientist with a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology, wrote a book about mediums.

But Beischel, Radin and many others are confident in their ability to answer most skeptics’ question affirmatively: Is telepathy real?

Radin tells the story of Hans Berger, the German who recorded the first human electroencephalogram (EEG) in 1924, who fell while riding a horse and was almost run over by a team of horses racing down the road inches from his head. His sister, many miles away, sensed the danger and insisted that her father send a telegram to find out what was wrong. She had never sent a telegram before, and the experience left Burger so curious that he switched from studying math and astronomy to medicine hoping to discover the source of that psychic energy.

About 100 years later, the explanation is still largely a mystery, but about 200 published experiments reveal mental connections that are “way beyond chance,” Radin said. Not knowing how it works, though, is uncomfortable for many scientists.

“Looking at the experiments and the data, it’s very clear something is going on,” Radin said. “There is doubt because we don’t have a good explanation for it yet.”

Still, even his most skeptical friends have shifted their thinking; while they may not believe it’s real, they no longer feel as strongly that it’s not, Radin said.

by Sheila M. Eldred

Newfoundland birds were the heart of extinct Beothuk nation’s religion, study says

Posted: February 17, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News, Spirituality
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Beothuk_drawing_contrast

 

Archeologists have shed stunning new light on the extinct Beothuk nation of Newfoundland, revealing through a study of carved pendants unearthed from coastal burial sites that the ill-fated people — who had inhabited the region for at least 1,000 years before the devastating arrival of Europeans in the 15th century — placed birds at the centre of their complex religious cosmology, believing the winged creatures were “spiritual messengers” that carried the souls of the dead to an “island afterlife.”

The remarkable revelations about the vanished culture, the 19th-century eclipse of which remains one of the central tragedies of Canadian history, are detailed in a paper published this week in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal by University of Alberta researcher Todd Kristensen and his U.S. co-author Donald Holly.

Kristensen told Postmedia News on Thursday that the project is particularly significant because it “gives us a glimpse into Beothuk minds. We can begin to see how the Beothuk viewed the world around them — their beliefs about death, the afterlife and the role of animals and spiritual helpers.”

He added that the study’s findings are important because “there aren’t any modern Beothuk people to say, ‘This is what we believed in, and this is the story that we should share.’ Archeologists are one of the few people who can tell the Beothuk story.”

After Anglo-Italian explorer John Cabot’s landmark voyage to Newfoundland in 1497, the indigenous Beothuk clashed with a succession of colonizers from Portugal, France and Britain in the centuries that followed.

The Beothuk may also have been the so-called “skraelings” who had violent encounters with Viking voyagers from Iceland and Greenland who briefly settled in northern Newfoundland — and then quickly retreated — around 1000 A.D.

Once numbering as many as 5,000 people, the Beothuk population was ravaged by diseases introduced to the future Canada by European settlers. An artistically gifted Beothuk woman named Shanawdithit, the last known survivor of her nation, died in St. John’s in 1829.

Notably, the new study points out, historical records show that Shanawdithit once referred to a “happy island” afterworld that figured prominently in the Beothuk’s little-understood belief system.

“We scoured historical documents and found a handful of sentences about Beothuk religion,” said Kristensen. “No one really knows what the Beothuk believed in.

“But we found out, surprisingly, that they ate a lot of birds, which was odd because we had thought that they lived mostly on caribou and seal. From there, we began to wonder that if birds were an important food, what other dimensions of Beothuk life might they show up in?”

Suddenly, fresh analyses of objects from Beothuk burials showed that most of the patterns etched in caribou-bone pendants had an unlikely source of inspiration: the webbed feet and feathers of seabirds.

“Sure enough, when we looked at those burials, we started to see bird shapes in their funeral goods,” said Kristensen. “Why depict seabirds when you’ve got bears and wolves and seals and whales? While a waddling sea duck might not appear to be a glorious animal, these birds were powerful to the Beothuk because they moved easily from one world to the next — water to air.”

Seabirds such as the arctic tern, black guillemot and the penguin-like great auk — once a plentiful source eggs and meat on Newfoundland, but which, like the Beothuk, was extinct by the mid-19th century — provided both “food and food for thought” for ancient island inhabitants, the authors state in the published study.

“Given the sheer presence of birds in the environment, their importance in Beothuk diet, and the unique role of birds in Beothuk activities — such as dangerous voyages to rookeries — we suggest that birds provided a plethora of source material for Beothuk belief systems,” argue Kristensen and Holly, a professor at Eastern Illinois University who spent four months at the U of A working on the study. “Notwithstanding the probable significance of other animals to the Beothuk, we suggest that seabirds commanded a prominent place in Beothuk ideology.”

They conclude that the Beothuk believed their souls required “help from animals that can move through those worlds” of water and air to reach their culture’s idea of heaven.

“We thought it was such a unique system,” added Kristensen. “But when you think about it, just about every culture in the world thinks about the afterlife place that’s either above or below us — heaven or hell — so we do compartmentalize our worlds in this kind of ladder of movement. The Beothuk did that the same way.”

rboswell@postmedia.com

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program

Posted: February 14, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
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Assyrian script
Unlike this Assyrian script, few ancient languages have a written record, which makes reconstructing them extremely difficult

A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.

Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages – the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.

To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.

The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Currently language reconstructions are carried out by linguists – but the process is slow and labour-intensive.

Dan Klein, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said: “It’s very time consuming for humans to look at all the data. There are thousands of languages in the world, with thousands of words each, not to mention all of those languages’ ancestors.

“It would take hundreds of lifetimes to pore over all those languages, cross-referencing all the different changes that happened across such an expanse of space – and of time. But this is where computers shine.”

Rosetta stone

Languages change gradually over time.

Over thousands of years, tiny variations in the way that we produce sounds have meant that early languages have morphed into many different descendents.

Dr Klein explains: “These sound changes are almost always regular, with similar words changing in similar ways, so patterns are left that a human or a computer can find.

“The trick is to identify these patterns of change and then to ‘reverse’ them, basically evolving words backwards in time.”

The scientists demonstrated their system by looking at a group of Austronesian languages that are currently spoken in southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia and the Pacific.

From a database of 142,000 words, the system was able to recreate the early language from which these modern tongues derived. The scientists believe it would have been spoken about 7,000 years ago.

They then compared the computer’s findings to those of linguists, finding that 85% of the early words that the software presented were within one “character” – or sound – of the words that the language experts had identified.

 But while the computerised method was much faster, the scientists said it would not put the experts out of a job.

The software can churn through large amounts of data quickly, but it does not bring the same degree of accuracy as a linguist’s expertise.

Dr Klein said: “Our system still has shortcomings. For example, it can’t handle morphological changes or re-duplications – how a word like ‘cat’ becomes ‘kitty-cat’.

“At a much deeper level, our system doesn’t explain why or how certain changes happened, only that they probably did happen.”

While researchers are able to reconstruct languages that date back thousands of years, there is still a question mark over whether it would ever be possible to go even further back to recreate the very first protolanguage from which all others evolved.

By Rebecca Morelle

Science reporter, BBC World Service

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