Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

Pre-Viking tunic found on glacier as warming trend aids archaeology

Posted: March 23, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
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Alister Doyle / Reuters

Marianne Vedeler of Norway’s Museum of Cultural History shows off a 1,700-year-old tunic in the mountains of southern Norway.

Reuters

OSLO — A pre-Viking woolen tunic found beside a thawing glacier in south Norway shows how global warming is proving something of a boon for archaeology, scientists said on Thursday.

The greenish-brown, loose-fitting outer clothing — suitable for a person up to about 5 feet, 9 inches tall (176 centimeters) — was found 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) above sea level on what may have been a Roman-era trade route in south Norway. Carbon dating showed it was made around the year 300.

“It’s worrying that glaciers are melting, but it’s exciting for us archaeologists,” Lars Piloe, a Danish archaeologist who works on Norway’s glaciers, said at the first public showing of the tunic, which has been studied since it was found in 2011.

A Viking mitten dating from the year 800 and an ornate walking stick, a Bronze Age leather shoe, ancient bows, and arrowheads used to hunt reindeer are also among 1,600 artifacts found in Norway’s southern mountains since thawing accelerated in 2006.
“This is only the start,” Piloe said, predicting many more finds.One ancient wooden arrow had a tiny shard from a seashell as a sharp tip, revealing intricate craftsmanship.

Receding glaciers
The 1991 discovery of Otzi, a prehistoric man who roamed the Alps 5,300 years ago between Austria and Italy, is the best-known glacier find. In recent years, other finds have been made from Alaska to the Andes, many because glaciers are receding.

The shrinkage is blamed on climate change, stoked by human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

The archaeologists said the tunic showed that Norway’s Lendbreen glacier, where it was found, had not been so small since 300. When exposed to air, untreated ancient fabrics can disintegrate in weeks because of insect and bacteria attacks.

Oppland County Council via Reuters

A view over a valley in the mountains of south Norway where a 1,700-year-old loose-fitting tunic was found.

“The tunic was well-used — it was repaired several times,” said Marianne Vedeler, a conservation expert at Norway’s Museum of Cultural History.

The tunic is made of lamb’s wool with a diamond pattern that had darkened with time. Only a handful of similar tunics have survived so long in Europe.

Climate’s impact
The warming climate is having an impact elsewhere.

Patrick Hunt, a Stanford University expert who is trying to find the forgotten route that Hannibal took over the Alps with elephants in a failed invasion of Italy in 218 B.C., said the Alps were unusually clear of snow at the level of 2,500 meters last summer.

Receding snows are making searching easier.

“I favour the Clapier-Savine Coche route (over the Alps) after having been on foot over at least 25 passes including all the other major candidates,” he told Reuters by e-mail.

The experts in Oslo said one puzzle was why anyone would take off a warm tunic by a glacier.

One possibility was that the owner was suffering from cold in a snowstorm and grew confused with hypothermia, which sometimes makes suffers take off clothing because they wrongly feel hot.

More about climate change and history:

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters.

Zoe: A Virtual Talking Head That Can Express Human Emotions

Posted: March 21, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
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– Scientists are making a lot of progress in the area of artificial intelligence.

We have previously seen examples of robots like Nico that can learn how to become self-ware.

Researchers are also working on the first ever Super-Turing computer based on Analog Recurrent Neural Networks. A Super-Turing machine should be as adaptable and intelligent as the human brain.

Now, a group of researchers just announced they have successfully developed Zoe, a digital talking head which can express human emotions on demand with “unprecedented realism” and could herald a new era of human-computer interaction.

According to the developers, this virtual “talking head” can express a full range of human emotions and could be used as a digital personal assistant, or to replace texting with “face messaging”.

The lifelike face can display emotions such as happiness, anger, and fear, and changes its voice to suit any feeling the user wants it to simulate. Users can type in any message, specifying the requisite emotion as well, and the face recites the text. According to its designers, it is the most expressive controllable avatar ever created, replicating human emotions with unprecedented realism.

 

Meet Zoe, digital talking head and interface of the future. The virtual talking head, “Zoe”, uses a basic set of six simulated emotions which can then be adjusted and combined. (Credit: Toshiba Cambridge Research Lab / Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge)

The system, called “Zoe,” is the result of a collaboration between researchers at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. Students have already spotted a striking resemblance between the disembodied head and Holly, the ship’s computer in the British sci-fi comedy, Red Dwarf.

Appropriately enough, the face is actually that of Zoe Lister, an actress perhaps best-known as Zoe Carpenter in the Channel 4 series, Hollyoaks. To recreate her face and voice, researchers spent several days recording Zoe’s speech and facial expressions. The result is a system that is light enough to work in mobile technology, and could be used as a personal assistant in smartphones, or to “face message” friends.

 

The framework behind “Zoe” is also a template that, before long, could enable people to upload their own faces and voices, but in a matter of seconds, rather than days.That means that in the future, users will be able to customise and personalise their own, emotionally realistic, digital assistants.

If this can be developed, then a user could, for example, text the message “I’m going to be late” and ask it to set the emotion to “frustrated.”

Their friend would then receive a “face message” that looked like the sender, repeating the message in a frustrated way.

“This technology could be the start of a whole new generation of interfaces which make interacting with a computer much more like talking to another human being,” Professor Roberto Cipolla, from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, said.

“It took us days to create Zoe, because we had to start from scratch and teach the system to understand language and expression. Now that it already understands those things, it shouldn’t be too hard to transfer the same blueprint to a different voice and face.”

 

Holly, in the British sci-fi comedy, Red Dwarf is an “intelligent” computer. Holly’s user interface appears on ship screens as a disembodied human head on a black background, and can also be downloaded into a watch worn.

As well as being more expressive than any previous system, Zoe is also remarkably data-light. The program used to run her is just tens of megabytes in size, which means that it can be easily incorporated into even the smallest computer devices, including tablets and smartphones.

It works by using a set of fundamental, “primary colour” emotions. Zoe’s voice, for example, has six basic settings — Happy, Sad, Tender, Angry, Afraid and Neutral. The user can adjust these settings to different levels, as well as altering the pitch, speed and depth of the voice itself.

By combining these levels, it becomes possible to pre-set or create almost infinite emotional combinations. For instance, combining happiness with tenderness and slightly increasing the speed and depth of the voice makes it sound friendly and welcoming. A combination of speed, anger and fear makes Zoe sound as if she is panicking. This allows for a level of emotional subtlety which, the designers say, has not been possible in other avatars like Zoe until now.

“Present day human-computer interaction still revolves around typing at a keyboard or moving and pointing with a mouse.” Cipolla added.

“For a lot of people, that makes computers difficult and frustrating to use.

In the future, we will be able to open up computing to far more people if they can speak and gesture to machines in a more natural way. That is why we created Zoe — a more expressive, emotionally responsive face that human beings can actually have a conversation with.”

© MessageToEagle.com

Quantum Mechanics & Telepathy – Is Everything Connected?

Posted: March 3, 2013 by phaedrap1 in Science, Spirituality
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Do you believe in the power of telepathy? Many ordinary people accept telepathy as true and some say they even had telepathic experiences themselves.

However, most scientists still remain skeptic and say there is no conclusive evidence supporting such claims.

Nonetheless, there are hard-core scientists who maintain it is vital to conduct more research into the subject. To dismiss something because we do not have an explanation for it, is not a good scientific approach.

“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,” said Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS).

“There is doubt because we don’t have a good explanation for it yet, “Radin added.

Dean Radin, who is author or coauthor of over 200 technical and popular articles, a dozen book chapters, and several books including the bestselling The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds is convinced telepathy is real and suggests that quantum mechanics may ultimately provide an explanation how mind to mind communication works.

 

“Can we sense what’s happening to loved ones thousands of miles away? Why are we sometimes certain of a caller’s identity the instant the phone rings?

Do intuitive hunches contain information about future events? Is it possible to perceive without the use of the ordinary senses?

Many people believe that such “psychic phenomena” are rare talents or divine gifts. Others don’t believe they exist at all.

But the latest scientific research shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread, and are an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in.

Albert Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance” — the way two objects remain connected through time and space, without communicating in any conventional way, long after their initial interaction has taken place. Could a similar entanglement of minds explain our apparent psychic abilities? Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, believes it might.

Radin is deeply disappointed that psychic phenomena is not been treated as a serious subject.

 

“To demonstrate the unbalanced nature of extreme skeptic-ism, let’s consider the case of telepathy.Cynics wring their hands, lamenting that the apocalypse is near because the general public believes in extrasensory perception (ESP).

They assume that this widespread belief is a sign of mass mental deterioration because science has declared ESP to be impossible.

Why is it impossible?

Because psychic phenomena violate unspecified Laws of Science, and therefore all claims about such events must be hopelessly flawed or fraudulent.”

I am not impressed by this argument because the history of science is replete with confident proclamations about all sorts of impossible things, and most of those proclamations have proven to be hilariously or poignantly wrong.

Unfortunately, the authorities’ declarations do not merely provide historical entertainment, they have also significantly impeded scientific progress as very few scientists are willing to risk the wrath of the mainstream.

As a result, in the educated Western world we find ourselves in the bizarre state of affairs where the mere study of certain common experiences is essentially forbidden, ” Radin writes in his article “Thinking about telepathy”.

Radin thinks quantum mechanics can solve the mystery of telepathy and he is not the first scientists to suggest this.

 

Can quantum mechanics shed more light on telepathy?

The great psychologist Gardner Murphy, president of the American Psychological Association and later of the American Society for Psychical Research, urged his fellow psychologists to become better acquainted with modern physics.

Murphy wrote in 1968: “… the difficulty is at the level of physics, not at the level of psychology. Psychologists may be a little bewildered when they encounter modern physicists who take these phenomena in stride, in fact, take them much more seriously than psychologists do, saying, as physicists, that they are no longer bound by the types of Newtonian energy distribution, inverse square laws, etc., with which scientists used to regard themselves as tightly bound.… psychologists probably will witness a period of slow, but definite, erosion of the blandly exclusive attitude that has offered itself as the only appropriate scientific attitude in this field.

The data from parapsychology will be almost certainly in harmony with general psychological principles and will be assimilated rather easily within the systematic framework of psychology as a science when once the imagined appropriateness of Newtonian physics is put aside, and modern physics replaces it.”

“I have little doubt that the scientific worldview will eventually expand to comfortably accommodate those experiences we now call psychic.

We’ll need a view of nature that pro-vides a solid theoretical basis for why some things, some-times, are more interconnected through space and time than are accounted for by classical models of the world. We’ll need a science in which the most recalcitrant curmudgeons agree that such ‘nonlocal’ correlations are a well-established ingredient of established physics. Of course, we already have such a science. The central mystery in quantum mechanics is precisely why some things, sometimes, are more connected through space and time than are accounted for by classical, common sense concepts,” Radin says.

“The deeper reality suggested by the existence of entanglement is so unlike the world of everyday experience that until recently, many physicists believed it was interesting only for abstract theoretical reasons.

They accepted that the microscopic world of elementary particles could become curiously entangled, but those entangled states were assumed to be fleeting and have no practical consequences for the world as we experience it. That view is rapidly changing.

Scientists are now finding that there are ways in which the effects of microscopic entanglements “scale up” into our macroscopic world.

Entangled connections between carefully prepared atomic-sized objects can persist over many miles. There are theoretical descriptions showing how tasks can be accomplished by entangled groups without the members of the group communicating with each other in any conventional way.

Some scientists suggest that the remarkable degree of coherence displayed in living systems might depend in some fundamental way on quantum effects like entanglement. Others suggest that conscious awareness is caused or related in some important way to entangled particles in the brain. Some even propose that the entire universe is a single, self-entangled object.

What if these speculations are correct? What would human experience be like in such an interconnected universe?

 

How can we learn more about a deeper reality?

Would we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance? Would such experiences evoke a feeling of awe that there’s more to reality than common sense implies?

Could “entangled minds” result in the experience of your hearing the telephone ring and somehow knowing – instantly – who’s calling? If we did have such experiences, could they be due to real information that somehow bypassed the usual sensory channels, or are such reports mere delusions? Can psychic or “psi” experiences be studied by science, or are they beyond the reach of rational understanding? ” Radin writes in his book Entangled Minds.

Telepathy, Radin says, looks something like quantum entanglement: When things are correlated at a distance without energy transferred between the two points.

“We don’t have an explanation, but you can almost see a road map for how an explanation could come about,” Radin said. “At least it’s no longer seen as impossible.”

So perhaps everything is connected and quantum mechanics does offer evidence supporting telepathy…

© MessageToEagle.com

New Book Suggests Return from Death Possible

Posted: March 2, 2013 by phaedrap1 in News, Science
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Dr. Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor and the director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, has written a new book discussing ways in which people can be resuscitated after they previously would have been considered clinically dead.

Parnia’s book, “Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death,” was recently featured on the Today show. “The advances in the last 10 years have shown us that it’s only after a person dies that they turn into a corpse, that their brain cells start to die,’’ Parnia told host Savannah Guthrie.

“Although most people think this takes place in only four or five minutes, we now know that actually brain cells are viable for up to eight hours … We now understand that it’s only after a person has turned into a corpse that their cells are undergoing death, and if we therefore manipulate those processes, we can restart the heart and bring a person back to life.”

LIST: 10 Crazy Things to Do When You’re Dead

Parnia’s suggestion is not new; in fact, as researcher Jan Bondeson notes in his 2001 book “Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear,” “In 1787 the French doctor Francois Thierry published a book in which he stated his conviction that most people did not die until some time after the onset of traditional signs of death.”

To make sure that the “dead” had really irrevocably passed on, Thierry suggested that all major cities in France should have special “waiting mortuaries,” in which the recently deceased would be laid out in rows on floors or tables and carefully watched by monitors who would wander among the corpses looking for signs of anyone coming back to life.

It was only at the point in which the bodies would begin bloating and putrefying (along with the appearance of maggots and flies) that the corpse would finally be considered dead enough and sent for burial. There is no record of the job turnover rate in the waiting mortuary attendant profession, but it was likely high.

NEWS: Neuroscientist Says He Experienced Life After Death

Throughout most of history, medical knowledge of anatomy has been poor and indirect, partly because of fear and taboos against cutting open corpses. Finding the boundary between life and death has concerned humans for millennia; fears of premature burial obsessed many in the Victorian era and in fact some caskets were equipped with tubes and equipment leading to the surface so that bells and flags could be raised to alert groundskeepers in case the “dead” awoke.

Public uncertainty about the line between life and death (and fear of premature burial) was widespread, as Bondeson notes: “By the early nineteenth century, the danger of premature burial had become one of the most-feared perils of everyday life, and a torrent of pamphlets and academic theses were dedicated to this subject by writers all over Europe.

In almost every country, literature on this gruesome topic was readily available, ranging from the solemn medical thesis and the philanthropic call for more waiting mortuaries to pamphlets written by fanatics who claimed that more than 1/10th of humanity was buried alive …”

Compounding the problem, often even the truly dead would not stay buried: in the 1700s and 1800s theft from graveyards was common in London, and grave robbers were making a profit digging up bodies and selling them to anatomists.

Near-Death Experience?

Some have suggested that Dr. Parnia is talking about proof of life after death or near-death experiences, but in fact he is simply stating what many doctors have known for decades: Consciousness does not suddenly stop when the heart stops beating and the line between life and death remains murky, even today.

The question is not, as a poll linked to the Today story asked, “Whether people can be brought back from the brink” of death when their heart stops beating; clearly the answer is yes. The question — at least in near-death experience research — is instead whether people can be brought back (without catastrophic and irreparable brain damage) after clinical brain death, and the answer to that seems to be no.

NEWS: Hell Helps Keep Society Safe

A 2011 article, published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by neuroscientist Dean Mobbs of the University of Cambridge and Caroline Watt at the University of Edinburgh, found that “near-death experiences are the manifestation of normal brain function gone awry, during a traumatic, and sometimes harmless, event.”

Their research also busts another myth: that people have “returned from the dead” — if by dead you mean clinical brain death. No one has survived true clinical death (which is why the experiences are called “near-death”).  Many people have been revived after their heart stopped for short periods of time — around 20 minutes or more — but anyone revived from brain death would be permanently and irreparably brain damaged and certainly unable to report their experiences.

“The idea of surviving clinical brain death is mythical,” Watt said.

In the plant world, the question of point of death is even more ambiguous: Does a flower die the moment it is cut from the plant, or does it die over the course of several days? A tree cut into pieces it will surely not survive, though a tree uprooted by a storm may live for weeks or months. Obviously at some point the plant becomes too dessicated to be viable, but identifying that exact moment of “death” is difficult or impossible.

Despite modern technology, the point of death in humans and other animals remains elusive.

By Benjamin Radford

Scientific explanation of color healing

Posted: March 2, 2013 by phaedrap1 in Science, Spirituality
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•    Light, sound, heat, magnetism, color, and electrical energies are all different forms of one source of energy and they differ in manifestation only in the rate of vibration. 

•    Visual light and color have a measurable vibration or energy.  Just like x-rays, radio waves and TV waves.

 

•    Each color of the rainbow has its own vibration rate.

 

•    The vibration or energy of the colors flows though the body, each affecting one of the seven nerve centers or Chakras which correspond directly to the body’s endocrine glands and cause the glands to secrete hormones.  These hormones then affect our different states of bodily functions, consciousness and personality.

 

•    Each color passing through the different Chakras has definite qualities and attributes.

 

•    Disease is nothing more than a disharmony of vibration or energy in one’s being that brings on an imbalance in a glandular function or in the functioning of the mind.

 

•    Meditation, positive affirmation and Color therapy can help change the vibration and reprogram the subconscious and conscious minds to re-establish balance in the body, mind and spirit.

How to use color therapy

•    Color Chakra charging – Visualize the clear color permeating the entire chakra area spinning clockwise – facing from the outside of the body, (red for root or first chakra, orange for sexual or second chakra, yellow for solar plexus or third chakra, green for heart or fourth chakra, blue for throat or fifth chakra, indigo for third eye or sixth chakra, white for crown or seventh chakra, and gold for the spiritual or eighth chakra about 18″ above the head).  As the light spins imagine it throwing out all imbalance and impurities.  Then expand the color to engulf the entire body and note how that particular color feels.  Continue with each chakra until color is clear and pure before moving up to the next chakra.  Start with the root chakra and progress to the spiritual chakra.  The last chakra should turn into a fountain of pure gold sparkles flowing over the entire body and expanding outward.

 

•    Meditation and visualization – in a calm, meditative state visualize the color indicated flooding the imbalanced area before and during the meditation.

 

•    Color Breathing – Imagine and breathe white light through the top of the head – 2 minutes.  Then red, yellow or orange as being drawn up from the earth through the soles of the feet – 2 minutes or blue, violet or indigo as coming down from the atmosphere – 3-4 minutes, green through the navel – 2 minutes.  Finish with white light – 2 minutes.

 

•    Lights – Use 100 watt colored bulbs (do not use ultra-violet bulb) or colored filter paper over white bulb.  Red, orange or yellow – 3-10 minutes.  Blue, indigo or violet – 15-30 minutes.  Once or twice a day, directed on bare skin – cover all other parts.  When in doubt, under expose.

 

•    Solarized Water Directly expose water to sun in appropriate colored glass or cover clear glass with colored filter paper.  Place ice cube in glass – when the ice cube has melted upon exposure to the sun, the water is charged.  The longer the water remains exposed – the stronger is its potency.  Water should be sipped.

 

•    Diet – Increase intake of the foods indicated by the color if dis-ease.

 

•    Gems – Gems may be worn or applied locally or may be placed in water, alcohol or oil for 7 days.  Remove gem.  mix 1 drop of the fluid with water or milk and drink.

 

•    Clothes or Cloth – Wear or apply directly to imbalanced area.

 

•    Decor – Room can be painted or accessorized with required color.

     Rainbow Healing

 

•    The Rainbow is the Universal Symbol of Love.  Just looking at a Rainbow gives one an inner sense of comfort and love.

 

•    Psychology and medical processionals are re-discovering the fact that love of self and others has amazing healing qualities for the body, mind and spirit.

 

•    When the exact cause of the disease is unknown, it is believed that by visualizing and breathing the Rainbow on the imbalanced area, the body will instinctively pull from it the vibration or energy it needs for the healing.

 

•    Because everyone is vibrating at a different rate, it may be advisable to visualize the Rainbow and allow the body to make the correct choice of color.

              Red

Root, Coccygeal, Reproductive organs Chakra

 

Characteristics: Stimulating, warming, alkaline, Yang, magnetic, non-electric, negative.

 

Qualities: Strength, power, life, vitality, self-knowledge, introspection.

 

 

Complimentary Color: Blue

 

Stone: Ruby

 

Musical Note: Middle C

 

Fragrance: Sandalwood

 

System: Reproductive

 

Gland: Gonads

 

Emotional Dis-ease: Selfishness. hatred. anger, greed, cruelly, bully nature, over impulsiveness, depression, fear.

 

Physical Dis-ease: Stomach gas, constipation, tumors, boils, pimples, poor appetite, chills, anemia, bronchial asthma, bronchitis, colds, tuberculosis, eye trouble, heart disease, fevers, pneumonia, bladder, circulation, hemorrhoids, reproductive organs.

 

Foods: Red-skinned fruits and vegetables, cherries, red currants, red plums, strawberries, radishes, red cabbage, beets, red peppers, tomatoes, watercress, watermelon, meat.

     Orange

Spleen, Sacral, Bladder, Pancreas Chakra

 

Characteristics: Stimulating, warming, alkaline, Yang, magnetic, non-electric, positive.

 

Qualities: Optimism, self-confidence, enthusiasm, courage, self-discipline, prosperity.

 

Complimentary Color: Violet

 

Stone: Pearl

 

Musical Note: D

 

Fragrance: Mandarin

 

System: Urinary/Elimination

 

Gland: Spleen/Pancreas

 

Emotional Dis-ease: Insensitive to others, suspicion, insecurity, lack of trust, condemnation of faults of others, cruel, racial prejudice, selfish pride, power-seeking, manipulative of others, tendency to cling to past

 

Physical Dis-ease: Anemia, skin trouble, circulatory problems, respiratory stimulant, removes cramps, muscle spasms, induces vomiting, relieves gas, development of bones, physical energy, increases pulse rate, asthma, bronchitis, colds, epilepsy, tumors, rheumatism, emphysema, gall bladder, kidney, pancreas

 

Foods: Most orange skinned fruits and vegetables, peaches, tangerines, cantaloupe, mangos, persimmons, apricots, oranges, pumpkins, carrots

            Yellow

Navel, Solar Plexus, Lumbar, Liver, Stomach Chakra

 

Characteristics: Stimulating, warming, alkaline, Yang, magnetic, non-electric, negative

 

Qualities: Joy, mental power, happiness, intellectual, gaiety

 

Complimentary Color:  Purple/Violet

 

Stone: Coral

 

Musical Note: E

 

Fragrance: Grapefruit

 

System: Digestive

 

Gland: Adrenals

 

Emotional Dis-ease: Fearful, shame, anger, jealousy, ignorance, desire, worldliness, despondency, despair, mentally and verbally aggressive, critical, egotistical, depression.

 

Physical Dis-ease: indigestion, constipation, diabetes, eczema, bile, pancreas, energizes muscles, nerve builder, mental and nervous exhaustion and depression, liver trouble, purifies blood stream, kidney, piles, rheumatism, bones, spine, stomach, spleen.

 

Foods: golden corn, yellow peppers, yams, parsnips, banana squash, lemons, bananas, pineapples, marrow, grapefruit, honeydew melon, most yellow-skinned fruits and vegetables.

 

     Green

Heart, Dorsal, Thymus Chakra

 

Characteristics: Calming, neutral, cooling, soothing, positive.

 

Qualities: Love, balance, harmony, peace, brotherhood, hope, growth, healing, prosperity

 

Complimentary Color: Magenta

 

Stone: Emerald

 

Musical Note: F

 

Fragrance: Lime

 

System: Circulatory

 

Gland: Heart/Thymus

 

Emotional Dis-ease: Regret, overcome limiting attachments, overcome indecision, discouragement, hypocrisy, infirmities, egotism, covetousness, lustfulness, selfishness, envy, jealousy, superstition

 

Physical Dis-ease: Asthma, back disorders, colic, tuberculosis, muscle and tissue builder, aphrodisiac, disinfectant, induces calmness, sedative, exhaustion, hay fever, heart conditions, high blood pressure, laryngitis, venereal disease, ulcers, sleeplessness

 

Foods: Most green fruits and vegetables and leafy greens

             Blue

Throat, Cervical, Thyroid Chakra

 

Characteristics: Calming, cooling, soothing, Yin, acidic, nonmagnetic, electric

 

Qualities: Inspiration, creativity, spiritual understanding, faith, devotion, tranquility, peaceful

 

Complimentary Color: Red

 

Stone: Moonstone

 

Musical Note: G

 

Fragrance: Blueberry

 

System: Respiratory

 

Gland: Thyroid

 

Emotional Dis-ease: Reactive, aggressive, violent, restlessness, rigid, conservative, slowness to respond, resistance to change, difficulty communicating feelings, authoritarian, self-satisfying, self-righteous, oriented to past, fearful, timid

 

Physical Dis-ease: Ulcers, vomiting, worrying, fever, inflammations, itching, stings, burns, cuts, bruises, over excitement, irritation, introversion, underweight, baldness, cataracts, colic, diarrhea, epilepsy, insomnia, laryngitis, painful menstruation, headache, throat problems, colds, allergies, sore throat, skin, thyroid, toothache

 

Foods: Blue skinned fruits, blueberries, bilberries, plumbs, potatoes, asparagus, fish, veal

     Indigo

Brow, Frontal, Third eye, Thalamus, Pituitary Chakra

 

Characteristics: Calming, cooling, soothing, Yin , acidic, nonmagnetic, electric, positive

 

Qualities: Spiritual perception, intuition, wisdom, joy, light

 

Complimentary Color: Yellow

 

Stone: Diamond

 

Musical Note: A

 

Fragrance: Lotus

 

System: Autonomic Nervous

 

Gland: Pituitary

 

Emotional Dis-ease: Preoccupation of sensations, materialism, forgetfulness, inefficient, spaced out, preoccupation with future, introverted, undisciplined, lost in imagination, negative self-image

 

Physical Dis-ease: Mental disorders, parathyroid stimulant, thyroid depressant, arrests discharges, helps to reduce or stop excessive bleeding, purifies blood stream, anaesthetic, over activity and excitement, eyes, nose, ear ailments, appendicitis, asthma, bronchitis, convulsions, lung trouble, pneumonia

 

Foods: Use both blue and violet foods

            Violet

 

Crown, Louts Pineal Chakra

 

Characteristics: Calming, cooling, soothing, Yin, acidic, non-magnetic, electric, neutral

 

Qualities: Divine realization, humility, creative imagination, opens soul to the light

 

Complimentary Color: Yellow

 

Stone: Sapphire

 

Musical Note: B

 

Fragrance: Violet

 

System: Brain Synchronization

 

Gland: Pineal

 

Emotional Dis-ease: Preoccupation with sensations, materialism, forgetfulness, inefficient, spaced out, preoccupation with future, introverted, undisciplined, lost in imagination, negative self-image

 

Physical Dis-ease: Bladder trouble, concussion, cramps, promotes white blood cells, purifies blood, bone growth, calms insane, epilepsy, kidney, rheumatism, sciatica, skin problems, tumors, nervous disorders, scalp diseases

 

Foods: blackberries, purple grapes, beet tops, purple broccoli, eggplant.

Resource Books

 

Seven Mansions of Color

– Alex Jones

 

Color Therapy

– Dr. Reuben Amber

 

The Chakras

– C. W. Leadbeater

 

Energy Ecstasy

– Bernard Gunther

 

The Rainbow Man (for children)

– Shahastra

 

Vibrational Medicine

– Richard Gerber

execonn.com

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.”

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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

 

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+.

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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