The Mysterious Stone Balls of Costa Rica

In the 1930s, tens of spherically shaped stones were discovered in the jungle of Costa Rica. The stone balls were found by workers who were clearing a jungle area for banana plantations. They did not know what the objects were and almost 80 years later we still don’t know.

The balls were found in the delta of Terraba River, near the towns of Palmar Sur and Palmar Norte. Almost immediately after their discovery, the balls were dispersed throughout Costa Rica. They were transported by train and landed up in different markets where people would buy them as lawn ornaments. A couple of them can be seen in the U.S., at the museum of the National Geographic Society in Washington and in a courtyard near the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Some stone balls have definitely been loaded in the wagons with difficulty. All present the same shape, spherical, but their sizes differ from small examples no bigger than tennis balls to some 2 meters high and weighing almost 16 tones. Their sizes are not achieved naturally; in fact there are clear clues which suggest that the stone balls were made by humans.

Scientists attributed the spherical stones to the Aguas Buenas culture which dates from 200 BC to 800 AD. Other stones found together with various gold ornaments can date after 1000 AD. They were probably made by the ancestors of the natives who populated the region at the time of the Spanish conquest, but nobody knows for sure. Of course, as many other historical mysteries, Costa Rica’s stone balls have been attributed to the civilization of Atlantis. – dailyancient

More photos here.

Man, 66, records 2 holes-in-one in same round

For somebody who’d been playing golf 50 years and never had a hole-in-one, Bob Hickey got the hang of it quickly. The 66-year-old Grayling man used a 7-iron to card his first-ever ace Thursday on the 167-yard 10th hole at Marsh Ridge in Gaylord. Then Hickey used an 8-iron to ace the 147-yard 17th hole. According to a 2000 Golf Digest article cited by the Traverse City Record-Eagle, the odds of one player making two holes-in-one during the same round are 67 million to 1.  – yahoo

Can you identify this expired animal?

found here.

Update: Elizabeth Barbeiri said her family saw it about a mile east of Gurney’s Inn in Montauk, July 14. And Ryan Kelso, via iPhone, said he spotted it — alive! — in the Montauk dunes. “It looked about the size of an average fox, gray in color, eyes like a mole, hairless and was breathing quite heavily,” he wrote – newsday

Below is not a turtle without a shell, it is a soft shelled turtle. They don’t look alike and according to one person a turtle’s shell is attached to its backbone so you can’t remove the shell without opening all its guts.

If it is a decaying dog, why does it seem to have a beak like a bird?  Here’s another photo:

UPDATE: 08/02/2008
Following this lead we looked into “eerie” Plum Island and contacted Dr. Larry Barrett, Center Director of Plum Island Animal Disease Center, who was kind enough to supply his take:

“It is impossible to accurately identify the species of animal from the photo. There is no scale from which to judge its size. Additionally, when a body has had prolonged exposure to water and predators, it can be altered or appear different from its normal form. If we had the actual body, we could tell you what it is; however, from viewing a canine tooth in the picture, we could guess it may be a cat or a raccoon. I can state categorically that it is not associated with the work performed at Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC). PIADC serves as the nation’s first line of defense against foreign animal diseases of livestock by identifying such diseases through diagnostic testing and by developing vaccines to protect livestock from those diseases.”

The mystery thickens … or does it? Steven T. Papa, a Senior Endangered Species/Federal Projects Biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has told Plum:

“Based on these higher resolution photos, it appears to be a raccoon based on estimating overall ear length to body length ratio in the photos to measurements found in the literature, as well as lower jaw and front leg characteristics.

This is the best I could do without seeing the ‘animal.’” – hamptons

Update 10.21.2010: Emma posted this a while ago, but I just took a close look. I looked at a lot of racoon skulls and I’d buy it being a raccoon if the poor animal lost part of it’s front jaw and large front teeth, resulting in the “beak” appearance.

Woman, 44, gives birth to her 18th child in Canada

A Romanian immigrant has given birth to her 18th child in British Columbia, making her the province’s most prolific mother in 20 years.

Proud dad Alexandru Ionce said Saturday that his 44-year-old wife, Livia, gave birth on Tuesday. Their daughter Abigail weighed in at seven pounds, 12 ounces.

“We never planned how many children to have. We just let God guide our lives, you know, because we strongly believe life comes from God and that’s the reason we did not stop the life,” said Alexandru Ionce.

The couple immigrated to Canada from Romania in 1990 and now live in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Their 17 other children range in age from 20 months to 23 years old. -phy

Portrait of Woman Revealed Beneath Van Gogh Painting

A previously unknown portrait of a woman by Vincent van Gogh has been revealed in a high-tech look beneath another of his paintings, it was announced today.

Scientists used a new technique to peer beneath the paint of van Gogh‘s “Patch of Grass.” Already it was known there was something there, likely a portrait of some sort. Van Gogh was known to paint over his work, perhaps as much as a third of the time.

Behind the painting, done mostly in greens and blues, is a portrait of a woman rendered in browns and reds.

The new technique is based on “synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy” and is said to be an improvement on X-ray radiography, which has been used to reveal concealed layers of other famous paintings. The new method measures chemicals in the pigments. Specifically, mercury and the element antimony were useful in revealing the woman’s face.

The work was done by researchers at Delft University of Technology in the the Netherlands and the University of Antwerp in Belgium, along with help from other institutions. – yahoo

‘Yeti hairs’ examined

The hunt for the mysterious Yeti – otherwise known as the Abominable Snowman – has frustrated scientists for decades.

Yesterday, scientists at Oxford Brookes University joined in the hunt after being given a number of hair strands taken from what is purported to be a Yeti-like creature in India.

The Brookes boffins used high-powered microscopes to analyse the samples found in the West Garo jungle of the north-eastern state of Meghalaya.

They compared the suspected Yeti strands to samples taken from primates, bears, dogs, yaks and humans, which were provided by the Natural History Museum in Oxford.

After the microscope tests have been carried out, the hairs will be sent away to a laboratory for DNA testing.

Dr Anna Nekaris, of the university’s anthropology department, said: “It’s exciting to be asked to take part in this research.

advertisement

<!–
OAS_AD(‘Frame2′);
//–>

“We put the hairs in clear nail varnish because that helps us to see them more clearly under the microscope.

“Hair cuticle patterns differ greatly from species to species when you look at them under a microscope. …

The hair was discovered earlier this year by BBC reporter Alastair Lawson, who went on an expedition to find the animal after a number of reported sightings.

A forestry officer had seen the creature in the same location and gathered the hair from the area where it had been standing.

Mr Lawson brought the hair back to England to be analysed and contacted Mr Redmond, who then linked up with scientists at Oxford Brookes.

Mr Lawson said: “The forestry officer said he had seen the Yeti two days in a row and persuaded a zoologist to come with him to collect the hairs.

“I’m not convinced that the Yeti exists, but we might have come across a primate that has not been discovered before. – oxford

Our garden was buzzed by a UFO!

BOB and Christine Bird were enjoying a lazy summer evening in their garden when they claim a UFO swooped low over their bungalow.

The astonished South Molton grandparents, their daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren, had been sitting in the back garden for about an hour before they spotted the “orange blob” slowly moving towards them at around 10pm on Saturday night.

“It started to slow down above us and it wasn’t that high up, at least it didn’t seem like it,” Christine, 57, told the Gazette.

“As it began to move over the house, my husband went indoors to get his camera. My daughter and I went to the front door and suddenly this ‘thing’ started to move.

“It went up at about a 40-degree angle and shot straight into the sky so fast. It was still quite light and you could actually see the orange colour getting smaller before it disappeared among the stars.

“Even now, what we all witnessed is so hard to believe that we can’t stop thinking and talking about it. – ndg

Diamonds May Have Been Life’s Best Friend On Primordial Earth

Diamonds may have been life’s best friend. Billions of years ago, the surface of these gems may have provided just the right conditions to foster the chemical reactions believed to have given rise to life on Earth, researchers in Germany report. … In a series of laboratory experiments, the scientists showed that after treatment with hydrogen, natural diamond forms crystalline layers of water on its surface, essential for the development of life, and involved in electrical conductivity. When primitive molecules landed on the surface of these hydrogenated diamonds in the atmosphere of early Earth, the resulting reaction may have been sufficient enough to generate more complex organic molecules that eventually gave rise to life, researchers say. – sd

Berry-pickers report sasquatch sighting in northern Ontario

Two Ontario women say they saw what might have been the legendary sasquatch in northwestern Ontario last week.

Helen Pahpasay and her mother were north of Grassy Narrows, Ont., about 230 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, to pick blueberries last Tuesday when they spotted a hulking figure from their truck at about 10 a.m. CT.

“It was black, about eight feet long and all black, and the way it walked was upright, human-like, but more — I don’t know how to describe it — more of a husky walk, I guess,” she told CBC News.

“It didn’t look normal.”

The creature seemed to spot them, then ran off into the woods, Pahpasay said. She and her mother debated chasing the creature to try to get a closer glimpse, but were so shaken they decided to abandon their berry-picking excursion and return home.

Others returned to the area later and found a large, six-toed footprint, Pahpasay said. “What do I think it was? Right now I’m not even sure what it was. But it really scared both of us,” she said.

“There’s been talk of Bigfoot, sasquatch. And I’m still not sure what it was, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Pahpasay says she and her mother aren’t the only people in the area with a sasquatch story. A couple of men from their community said they also saw the creature three years ago, she said, and a similar animal has been mentioned in old lore about the area.

“I’ve never believed it before, no. I’m not even quite sure what it still is today, even after what I’ve seen,” she said.

Sasquatch, an aboriginal word meaning “hairy giant,” refers to a large manlike creature some believe could be roaming woods from California up the West Coast and across Canada.

In April 2005, a ferry operator in Norway house, Man., captured on videotape three minutes of footage of what he said was a sasquatch. However, the video, which was shown on an American television network, was indistinct at best, failing to live up to its billing as “footage of the century.”

In 2006, several people in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan reported seeing a sasquatch-like figure in the woods around Flin Flon, Man.

Skeptics say it’s preposterous that a large mammal could have evaded detection in North America throughout history. Despite numerous alleged sightings, no one has ever produced concrete evidence such as skulls or bones, they argue, while footprints, film or photos can be manufactured. – cbc

Orangutans concoct plant-based soothing balm

Indonesian wild orangutans have demonstrated a certain degree of medicinal savvy by deploying naturally-occuring anti-inflammatory drugs to “treat aches and pains”, as the New Scientist puts it.

Four of the Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) were spotted by Cambridge University primatologist Helen Morrogh-Bernard in the Sabangau Peat Swamp Forest in Central Kalimantan preparing a “soothing balm”.

Back in 2005, Morrogh-Bernard watched as an adult female picked a handful of leaves from a plant, chewed them, and used saliva to produce a green-white lather. She then “scooped up some of the lather with her right hand and applied it up and down the back of her left arm, from the base of the shoulder to the wrist, just as a person would apply sunscreen”.

Morrogh-Bernard noted: “She was concentrating on her arm only and was methodical in the way she was applying the soapy foam. I knew this must be some form of self-medication.”

The orangutan finally ditched the leaves, which allowed Morrogh-Bernard to identify them as belonging to the genus Commelina. Significantly, orangutans don’t eat these plants as part of their normal diet, and local indigenous people are also aware of their anti-inflammatory properties.

Morrogh-Bernard has since clocked three other orangutans using their home-brew balm, saying it “links apes and humans directly”. While she said the former “may not have learnt how to apply the anti-inflammatory ointment from local people”, the opposite may be true. – register

We still have better brain surgeons.