Dental Detectives Reveal Diet of Ancient Human Ancestors

Paranthropus robustus, a dead-end branch of the early human family tree, has been described as a “chewing machine” that was mostly jaws and not much brains. … Using lasers to vaporize tiny particles of tooth enamel, researchers in the United States and Great Britain analyzed the chemical makeup of 1.8-million-year-old fossil teeth from four individuals unearthed in the Swartkrans cave site in South Africa. …Based on the types of carbon isotopes preserved in the P. robustus fossils, the team concludes that the diminutive primates had a surprisingly varied and flexible menu.

Their seasonally adapted diet may have included fruits, seeds, roots, tubers, and even insects.

The findings contradict the long-held theory that P. robustus was a dietary specialist that chomped solely on low-quality plants … Scientists had long cited this theory to explain why the bipedal primate went extinct 1.5 to 1 million years ago, arguing that the human ancestor couldn’t cope with food scarcity in Africa’s changing environment. – natgeo

I really don’t see how anyone can ignore the evidence for human evolution. Check out our human family tree. How many have heard of Homo ergaster? How about Homo heidelbergensis?

Libraries in the sand reveal Africa’s academic past

TIMBUKTU, Mali (Reuters) – Researchers in Timbuktu are fighting to preserve tens of thousands of ancient texts which they say prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the European Renaissance.

Private and public libraries in the fabled Saharan town in Mali have already collected 150,000 brittle manuscripts, some of them from the 13th century, and local historians believe many more lie buried under the sand.

The texts were stashed under mud homes and in desert caves by proud Malian families whose successive generations feared they would be stolen by Moroccan invaders, European explorers and then French colonialists.

Written in ornate calligraphy, some were used to teach astrology or mathematics, while others tell tales of social and business life in Timbuktu during its “Golden Age,” when it was a seat of learning in the 16th century.

“These manuscripts are about all the fields of human knowledge: law, the sciences, medicine,” said Galla Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a library housing 25,000 of the texts.

“Here is a political tract,” he said, pointing to a script in a glass cabinet, somewhat dog-eared and chewed by termites. “A letter on good governance, a warning to intellectuals not to be corrupted by the power of politicians.” – yahoo

Archaeologists unveil calendar of pre-Colombia cultures

The oldest and largest known Mexican moon calendar was shown to the public by archaeologists and authorities on Monday (November 6) at the ruins of Tamtoc in San Luis Potosi near the Gulf of Mexico.

The massive 27-tonnes stone calendar is a product of the Huasteca culture, dating back to 600 B.C. Mexican archaeologist Guillermo Ahuja came across the artefact in February 2005 and he spent 19 months cleaning and restoring it with a crews before showing it to a general audience.

The seven-metre long, 4.2 metre tall find is adorned with pre-Colombian figures representing fertility, water, life, nature and death. Feminine figures with water flowing from their heads represent the beliefs of a culture that considered water the essence of life.

The importance of the discovery lies in its age because it means that the Huastecas may have been a contemporary of the Olmecs, considered until now the oldest group in the region and the predecessor of all the important Mesoamerican cultures such as Mayas or the Aztecs. – zeenews

I’m not sure what this tall guy has to do with the calendar story, but it is a great picture.

The Case of Earth’s Incredible Shrinking Field

Earth?s magnetic field has been monitored carefully since the 1830s, when the German polymath Karl Friedrich Gauss invented a way to measure its intensity. Since then, the field has decayed at the ?startling rate of about 5 percent per century …. British geophysicist David Gubbins and his colleagues have [examined] data hidden in the logbooks of ships that navigated the planet?s oceans in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. The results have allowed Gubbins to build a remarkable picture of the behavior of Earth?s magnetic field in the centuries before detailed measurements were possible. …

It turns out that measurements of the direction of the field relative to the position of the sun were common between 1590 and 1840. ?Mariners made extremely accurate measurements, because their lives depended on it,? says Gubbins. Over the past 20 years or so, he and others have been mining this data from the many thousands of ships? logs that have survived in museums and archives, an endeavor that has occupied a steady flow of graduate students. Gubbins says there are 50 000 measurements alone in the records of the British East India Company, which had a monopoly on sea trade between Britain and India for much of the period that interests him.

Gubbins has now combined these data with the paleointensity measurements to calculate that Earth?s field was probably stable prior to 1840, or at least decaying at a much slower rate than it is now.

So what caused the sudden decline after 1840? Gubbins says it is due to regions of reversed magnetic field flux appearing in the Southern Hemisphere in the late 18th century, probably as a result of small thermal changes in Earth?s core. The field?s abrupt drop is consistent with other studies, he says. Data from older rock analyses suggest that the intensity of Earth?s field has declined by as much as 40?percent over the past 2500?years, at an average rate of 1.6?percent per century. That?s much slower than the current rate… ?It?s just coincidence,? he says, ?that today?s period of rapid change began at about the time we became able to measure it.? – spectrum

RHAZ: The Military’s Radio Frequency/Microwave Hazard Assessment Tool

A long technology wish list from the Airforce includes a device

to determine a radio frequency or a microwave device?s efficacy and hazard potential … based upon IEEE C.95, AFOSH 48-9 and DoDI-6055.11.

The directed energy bioeffects web site is very interesting. Image: “3-dimensional anatomical model produced from images from the Visible Human Project (National Library of Medicine). Voxels are color coded for over 40 tissue types and assigned dielectric values.” (photo credit)

If, “there is no scientifically valid basis for the existence of a linkage between cancer incidence or promotion and RFEMF exposure.” (link) then what other hazards of RF exposure resulted in the permissible exposure limits (PEL)?

“The Radio Frequency/Microwave Hazard Assessment Tool (RHAZ) would be valuable for health physicists, bioenvironmental engineers in government, industry, and medicine on a world-wide basis. Measurement of compliance for emissions from cellular phone towers is an example of an emerging commercial application.”

4th Edition of the Radiofrequency Radiation Dosimetry Handbook and the IEEE C.95 exposure guideline

REFERENCES: 1. International EMF Dosimetry Project (http://www.brooks.af.mil/AFRL/HED/hedr/int_emf.html)
2. Durney CH, Massoudi H and Iskander MF (1986): Radiofrequency Radiation Dosimetry Handbook (Fourth Edition), USAFSAM-TR-85-73, USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, Brooks Air Force Base, TX 78235.

KEYWORDS: Directed Energy, Radio Frequency Radiation, Microwave Radiation, Dosimetry

Searching for ‘our alien origins’

In July 2001, a mysterious red rain started falling over a large area of southern India. Locals believed that it foretold the end of the world, though the official explanation was that it was desert dust that had blown over from Arabia. But one scientist in the area, Dr Godfrey Louis, was convinced there was something much more unusual going on.

Not only did Dr Louis discover that there were tiny biological cells present, but because they did not appear to contain DNA, the essential component of all life on Earth, he reasoned they must be alien lifeforms.

“This staggering claim is that this is possibly extraterrestrial. That is a big claim I know, but all the experiments are supporting this claim,” said Dr Louis. His remarkable work has set in motion a chain of events with scientists around the world debating the origin of these mysterious cells.

The main reason why Dr Louis’s ideas have not been immediately laughed out of court is because they tie in with a theory promoted by two UK scientists ever since the 1960s.

Space qualified

The late Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe have been the champions of “Panspermia”, the idea that life on Earth originated on another planet. They speculate that life was first brought here on the back of a comet. Over the last decade, Panspermia is being taken ever more seriously. – bbc

Bacteria seem to me to be born space travellers

Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe

As I said years ago, “If bacteria from comets are the true source of life on Earth and if the evolution of bacteria to ‘higher’ forms over billions of years resulted in human life, then we are all ‘extraterrestrial’ results of a massive bacterial infection of outer space! This idea is almost too funny to be wrong.” – Xeno on Panspermia.

Physics promises wireless power

The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today’s electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires.

The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.

Although the team has not built and tested a system, computer models and mathematics suggest it will work. … The answer the team came up with was “resonance”, a phenomenon that causes an object to vibrate when energy of a certain frequency is applied. … The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wireless energy transfer.

Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wireless energy transfer, but his most ambitious attempt – the 29m high aerial known as Wardenclyffe Tower, in New York – failed when he ran out of money.

HOW WIRELESS POWER COULD WORK?

1) Power from mains to antenna, which is made of copper

2) Antenna resonates at a frequency of 6.4MHz, emitting electromagnetic waves

3) ‘Tails’ of energy from antenna ‘tunnel’ up to 5m (16.4ft)

4) Electricity picked up by laptop’s antenna, which must also be resonating at 6.4MHz. Energy used to re-charge device

5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as not resonating at 6.4MHz

- bbc

I’ve heard that the reason Tesla’s wireless power idea was suppressed is that power companies could not figure out a way to get paid using that model.

Chocolate ‘cuts blood clot risk’

A small amount of dark chocolate a day can thin the blood and cut the risk of clots in much the same way as taking aspirin, US researchers have said. Researchers carried out tests on 139 “chocoholics” who were disqualified from another study because they could not give up their habit.

Previous research has suggested that chocolate is good for the heart. The study, by Johns Hopkins University, featured at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago. …

The Johns Hopkins team started out examining the effects of aspirin on platelets, the tiny solid particles in blood that clump together to form a clot. However, 139 people who signed up for the study were disqualified because they were unable to give up eating chocolate as required. Researchers have known for almost two decades that dark chocolate can lower blood pressure and has other beneficial effects on blood flow. – bbc

I have a little powdered cocoa every morning, without the sugar of course.

Space mirrors could create Earth-like haven on Mars

Mirrors in orbit around Mars could create Earth-like conditions on a small patch of the planet’s surface, according to a NASA-funded study. The extra sunlight would provide warmth and solar power for human explorers, but some experts say the mirrors may be hard to deploy.

Scientists and science-fiction authors have long dreamed of turning Mars into a more Earth-like planet for future human colonists. The process, called terraforming, involves thickening Mars’s atmosphere and increasing its temperature. But schemes to transform the entire planet would take centuries and would require enormous resources.

Now, Rigel Woida, an engineering student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, US, is investigating the possibility of “terraforming” just a small patch of the planet’s surface by focusing sunlight on it from orbiting mirrors.

He received $9000 to study the idea from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) in Atlanta, Georgia, US.

The concept calls for 300 reflective balloons, each 150 metres across, arranged side-by-side to create a 1.5-kilometre-wide mirror in orbit around Mars.

Balmy conditions

The mirror would focus sunlight onto a 1-kilometre-wide patch of Mars’s surface. This would raise the temperature in this patch to a balmy 20? Celsius (68? Fahrenheit) from Mars’s typical surface temperature of between -140? C and -60? C (-220? and -76? F).

The extra warmth would mean the astronauts would not need heavily insulated suits or living quarters, allowing them to work more easily. The extra sunlight would also boost power from solar cells. – newsci

Meanwhile, here on Earth, aliens in power have kept gas mileage down and have continued to deny global warming exists as they slowly heat up the Earth’s surface to prepare for the day they take over.

Secret’s out for Saracen sabres

DURING the middle ages, the Muslims who fought crusaders with swords of Damascus steel had an edge – a very high-tech one. Their sabres contained carbon nanotubes.

From about AD 900 to AD 1750, Damascus sabres were forged from Indian steel called wootz. Peter Paufler of the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and colleagues studied samples of a 17th-century sword under an electron microscope and found clear evidence of carbon nanotubes and even nanowires.

The researchers think that the sophisticated process of forging and annealing the steel formed the nanotubes and the nanowires, and could explain the amazing mechanical properties of the swords (Nature, vol 444, p 286). – newsci