The Incredible Shrinking Pain, and other Brain Hacks

From Boston.com “Hack your brain“.

DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn’t it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? … All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn’t a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn’t real – tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

How Old Are The Stars?

… If the stars are born and die according to certain measurable factors, then analyzing those factors might help to design a “clock” that can be used to establish the age of any star.

Currently, according to scientists, we can accurately determine the age of our own Sun and no other star, because we can study it in great detail and ‘stardust’ from within the solar system can be brought to Earth and analyzed. As consensus viewpoints state, that makes the Sun’s age a fundamental model to calibrate readings from other stars and determine their ages.

Recently, NASA announced the Kepler Mission, built to explore extrasolar planetary systems with a Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) science package. One result that astronomers hope to gain from Kepler is ultraprecise brightness measurements of nearby solar-type stars that will enable an analysis of lowest-order stellar oscillations. This technique is known as “asteroseismology,” the name derived from “helioseismology,” or the study of wave propagation inside the Sun. Analysis of the oscillations are expected to reveal the state of the core of a star, which is the part that is thought to change most in structure as the star ages by fusing hydrogen into helium. By combining this information with other data like mass and chemical composition, it is thought possible to say how old the star is.

However, there is a problem. Present understanding of stellar aging relies on studying globular clusters of thousands of stars in the Milky Way. It was accepted that such stars were formed together and share the same composition and age. But the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that the stars have multiple populations of stars with different compositions.

Again, as the Electric Universe model points out, astronomers are taking a model of the Sun that has difficulty in explaining some of the most obvious features of the Sun and applying it to other stars. As the Electric Star hypothesis reveals: “there is no reason to attribute youth to one spectral type over another. We conclude that a star’s location on the HR diagram only depends on its size and the electric current density it is presently experiencing…its age remains indeterminate regardless of its mass or spectral type. This is disquieting in the sense that we are now confronted by the knowledge that our own Sun’s future is not as certain as is predicted by mainstream astronomy. We cannot know whether the Birkeland current presently powering our Sun will increase or decrease, nor how long it will be before it does so.” We do not know the age of our own Sun! …

via How Old Are The Stars? | Thunderbolts.

The earth’s magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study

The earth’s climate has been significantly affected by the planet’s magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming.

“Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth’s magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics,” one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal. He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a reconstruction of the prehistoric magnetic field 5,000 years ago based on data drawn from stalagmites and stalactites found in China and Oman.

The results of the study, which has also been published in US scientific journal Geology, lend support to a controversial theory published a decade ago by Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, who claimed the climate was highly influenced by galactic cosmic ray (GCR) particles penetrating the earth’s atmosphere. Svensmark’s theory, which pitted him against today’s mainstream theorists who claim carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for global warming, involved a link between the earth’s magnetic field and climate, since that field helps regulate the number of GCR particles that reach the earth’s atmosphere.

“The only way we can explain the (geomagnetic-climate) connection is through the exact same physical mechanisms that were present in Henrik Svensmark’s theory,” Knudsen said.

“If changes in the magnetic field, which occur independently of the earth’s climate, can be linked to changes in precipitation, then it can only be explained through the magnetic field’s blocking of the cosmetic rays,” he said. The two scientists acknowledged that CO2 plays an important role in the changing climate, “but the climate is an incredibly complex system, and it is unlikely we have a full overview over which factors play a part and how important each is in a given circumstance,” Riisager told Videnskab.

via The earth’s magnetic field impacts climate: Danish study.

Argentina: UFOs over lake seen by multiple witnesses

Argentina is in the middle of a massive UFO flap, with sightings occurring virtually on a daily basis. Much of this activity centres on the town of Victoria in the Entre Rios province.

One of the most recent sightings occurred on January 2 2009 starting at around 11pm. Witnesses are reported to have seen at least three UFOs. The first emerged from the body of water known as Laguna Del Pescado and then sped towards the fields surrounding the regional city of Victoria. A second large white light then appeared in the sky, parallel to the moon, before turning west and speeding upwards away from earth. Finally another light then appeared and did the same-the lights ranged in colour from white, blue, red orange and yellow.

The UFOs were seen by multiple witnesses from a number of viewpoints and police were contacted. One witness noted that they did not behave like Chinese lanterns, flares or fireworks but rather like controlled craft. A photograph taken of one of the objects appears above.

This is hardly the first incident concerning Laguna Del Pescado and Los Rios Province in Argentina. Numerous high profile UFO sightings have been reported over the years as well as a series of suspicious cattle mutilations. There are also reports of a crashed UFO in 1992 that was witnessed by local farmers and cleaned up by the military.

There is a UFO Museum in Victoria which contains a unique metallic substance supposedly taken from the crash site that turns translucent when photographed and causes mobile phones to break! Local Argentinean ufologists have even scanned the area around Laguna Del Pescado with magnetic receivers and while they found irregularities they found nothing conclusive. However the local UFO museum’s director Ms Silvia Perez is fairly convinced that a UFO base exists in the area, possibly submerged under Laguna Del Pescado.

For another fascinating UFO related story unfolding in the Southern Hemisphere click here

via All News Web – Argentina: UFOs over lake seen by multiple witnesses.

The still looks like the WASP: