Number of Homeowers Facing Foreclosure Rises

More homeowners than ever before are falling behind on their mortgage payments and sliding into foreclosure, according to figures released on Thursday, a sign that the country’s housing crisis is spreading through the ranks of previously stable borrowers.

About 5.4 million of the country’s 45 million home loans were delinquent or in some stage of the foreclosure process in the first three months of the year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. About 12.07 percent of all mortgages were delinquent or in foreclosure, up from 11.93 percent at the end of 2008.

Temporary halts on foreclosures imposed by lenders and mortgage underwriters have mostly ended, and banks are moving quickly against delinquent homeowners.

Housing specialists said the number of foreclosures would probably keep rising as more people lose their jobs or are forced to trade full-time work for part-time. Nearly six million jobs have been lost since the recession began a year and a half ago, and many economists expect the unemployment rate to rise to 10 percent from its current 8.9 percent.

More defaults by unemployed homeowners could shunt more houses onto an already saturated market, economists said, dragging prices down farther.

“We’re still caught in this vicious cycle,” said Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight. “These numbers were horrible, and they’re going to get worse. This problem’s going to be with us for a while.”

The wave of employment-driven foreclosures could pose new challenges to the administration as it tries to stabilize falling housing values and keep up to nine million families in their homes.

via Number of Homeowers Facing Foreclosure Rises – NYTimes.com.

Fossil Ida: extraordinary find is ‘missing link’ human evolution

Scientists have discovered an exquisitely preserved ancient primate fossil that they believe forms a crucial “missing link” between our own evolutionary branch of life and the rest of the animal kingdom.

The 47m-year-old primate – named Ida – has been hailed as the fossil equivalent of a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the critical early stages of primate evolution.

The top-level international research team, who have studied her in secret for the past two years, believe she is the most complete and best preserved primate fossil ever uncovered. The skeleton is 95% complete and thanks to the unique location where she died, it is possible to see individual hairs covering her body and even the make-up of her final meal – a last vegetarian snack.

“This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals; with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough who is narrating a BBC documentary on the find. “The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo.”

“This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years,” said Dr Jørn Hurum, the palaeontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil. “It tells a part of our evolution that’s been hidden so far. It’s been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there’s nothing almost to study.” The fossil has been formally named Darwinius masillae in honour of Darwin’s 200th birthday year.

It has been shipped across the Atlantic for an unveiling ceremony hosted by the mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg today. There is even talk of Ida being the first non-living thing to feature on the front cover of People magazine.

She will then be transported back to Oslo, via a brief stop at the Natural History Museum in London on Tuesday, 26 May, when Attenborough will host a press conference.

Ida was originally discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in the summer of 1983 at Messel pit, a world renowned fossil site near Darmstadt in Germany. He kept it under wraps for over 20 years before deciding to sell it via a German fossil dealer called Thomas Perner. It was Perner who approached Hurum two years ago.

via Fossil Ida: extraordinary find is ‘missing link’ human evolution | Science | guardian.co.uk.

Religion can’t explain this, yet there it is, physical proof of evolution. Science wins. Can we move on now?

Close-up Look at Black Hole Reveals Feeding Frenzy

Astronomers are getting a close-up look at a cosmic eating machine: a spinning black hole that devours the mass equivalent of two Earths per hour, verging on the limit of its feeding ability.

Supermassive black holes can weigh as much as a billion suns or more and are thought to reside at the centers of most, if not all, large galaxies. Their gravity is so powerful it traps even light, making black holes invisible. Their presence is inferred by watching the motions of stars and gas around them, along with the radiation that’s generated in their frenzied vicinities.

The behemoth of interest in the new close-up study, which will be published in the May 28 issue of the journal Nature, lies at the center of a distant active galaxy known as 1H0707-495. Using data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory, astronomers analyzed X-rays emitted during the black hole’s feeding frenzy.

As matter swirls in toward a black hole, gravity makes it travel at significant fractions of light-speed. That generates X-rays and other radiation that can give astronomers information about the spin of the black hole and its size, among other details.

In this case, the astronomers say they are tracking matter that’s within twice the radius of the black hole itself.

Specifically, the XMM-Newton detections suggested the galaxy’s core is much richer in iron than the rest of the galaxy. In addition, there was a time lag of 30 seconds between changes in the X-ray light observed directly and those seen in its reflection from the disk. From this delay, the astronomers estimate the black hole weighs about 3 million to 5 million solar masses – modest by supermassive black hole standards.

The team will continue to track the galaxy and map out the accreting process of this supermassive black hole. Far from being a steady process, like muddy water slipping down a plughole, a feeding black hole is a messy eater.

“Accretion is a very messy process because of the magnetic fields that are involved,” said study scientist Andrew Fabian of the University of Cambridge.

via Close-up Look at Black Hole Reveals Feeding Frenzy – Yahoo! News.

Pentagon denies report Iraq prison photos show rape

The Pentagon on Thursday denied a British newspaper report that photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse, whose release U.S. President Barack Obama wants to block, include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Daily Telegraph newspaper had shown “an inability to get the facts right”.

“That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images,” Whitman told reporters. “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article.”

Thursday’s Telegraph quoted retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who conducted a 2004 investigation into abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, as saying the pictures showed “torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.”

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others were said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

In an interview with the New Yorker magazine published in 2007, Taguba was quoted as saying that he saw a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.

Photographs of abuse at the jail outside Baghdad that were published in 2004 damaged the image of the United States as it fought an escalating war against insurgents in Iraq that caused deep resentment throughout the Muslim world.

Whitman said he did not know if the Telegraph had quoted Taguba accurately. But he said he was not aware that any such photographs had been uncovered as part of the investigation into Abu Ghraib or abuses at other prisons.

via Pentagon denies report Iraq prison photos show rape – Yahoo! News.

Would Whitman know about all of the photos uncovered? If so, he is either lying or this is good news.

ROSWELL DEBRIS CONFIRMED AS EXTRATERRESTRIAL: Lab Located, Scientists Named by Anthony Bragalia

Newly discovered documents reveal that in the months immediately following the purported 1947 UFO crash at Roswell, secret government studies began on a material that was previously unknown to science. The “memory metal” that was studied precisely matches some of the debris material reported by several witnesses to the crash. Evidence shows that -under military direction- these unique metal studies were undertaken by a contracted laboratory that possessed advanced technical capabilities that the U.S. government itself did not have at the time. A former high-level scientist employed by the involved laboratory has offered a confession that he was tasked to study the crashed UFO material. Information provided by two U.S. Air Force Generals also offers direct support for this discovery. …

Battelle scientist Elroy John Center has stated that he analyzed metal from a crashed UFO when he was employed by the Institute. Center was a Senior Research Chemist who worked for Battelle for nearly two decades, from 1939 to 1957. This has been confirmed by both his University of Michigan alumni files and by the location of scientific papers that he authored during his employment while at Battelle.

A graduate Chemical Engineer, Center authored papers that appeared in highly technical journals. His areas of research included the chemical testing of metals; the microdetermination of metals in alloys; and the spectroscopic analysis of unique materials. Center was likely involved in early analysis of the Roswell debris. A groundbreaking metals analysis technique that Center developed has been found cited in studies related to the “polygraphic determination of Titanium” in alloys. Specially-selected Titanium is required to create the Roswell-like “memory metal” Nitinol.

Center’s family members confirm that he had an intense interest in UFOs and the extraterrestrial. In May of 1992, noted historical researcher Dr. Irena Scott of Columbus, OH (herself a former Battelle scientist) interviewed a close professional associate of Elroy Center. Elroy had privately related to him in June of 1960 that while he was employed at Battelle he had been involved in a very strange laboratory project. Center said that earlier he had been tasked by his superiors to assist on a highly-classified Battelle study that was contracted by the government. He said that the project involved work on a very unusual material. Center understood that this debris material was retrieved by the US government from the earlier crash of a UFO. Center referred to the item he studied as a “piece.” He explained that this “piece” was not something with which anyone was familiar. He also said that the debris had been inscribed with strange symbols that he called “glyphics.” Similar markings have of course been reported by some of the witnesses to the Roswell crash debris. Center stopped short of providing any further details. The Battelle scientist passed away in 1991.

via The UFO Iconoclast(s): ROSWELL DEBRIS CONFIRMED AS EXTRATERRESTRIAL: Lab Located, Scientists Named by Anthony Bragalia.

I have some of this material… in wire form. I can’t seem to buy a sheet of it from anyone, however.

Scientist Claims UFO Collided with Tunguska Meteorite to Save Earth

Classify this under new of the weird. A Russian scientist claims that aliens downed the Tunguska meteorite 101 years ago to protect our planet from devastation. Yuri Lavbin says he found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the massive Siberian explosion. Ten crystals have holes in them, placed so the stones can be united in a chain, and other have drawings on them. “We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals,” said Lavbin. “We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”

… The Tunguska Event was a powerful explosion that occurred in an uninhabited and desolate area near the Tunguska River in Russia, on June 30, 1908. Although the cause of the explosion is the subject of debate, it is commonly believed to have been caused by the explosion of a large meteoroid or comet fragment, occurring the in Earth’s atmosphere about 5–10 kilometers (3–6 miles) high. The blast flattened an estimated 60 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers, but no crater or “smoking gun” meteorite has ever been found. Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object’s size, but there is general agreement that it was a few tens of meters across.

A couple of expeditions have gone to the remote site of the crash. Lavbin says that one expedition located the unusual crystals.

While I’m not a chemist, I couldn’t find any information on “ferrum silicate.” Seemingly, it doesn’t exist.

One small, nondescript photo accompanied Lavbin’s claims, published by the Macedonian International News Agency.

This isn’t the first time a UFO has been claimed to associated with the Tunguska event. Another report from 2004 said a scientific expedition to the site found blocks of an extraterrestrial technical device, and one 50-kilogram piece of the stone was brought to the city of Krasnoyarsk to be studied and analyzed. No subsequent reports or analysis could be located during an internet search.

Other claims of exploding alien spaceships or alien weapons detonating to “save the Earth from an imminent threat” appear to originate from a science fiction story “A Visitor From Outer Space” written by Soviet engineer Alexander Kazantsev in 1946, in which a nuclear-powered Martian spaceship, seeking fresh water from a lake blew up in mid-air. This story was was said to be inspired by Kazantsev’s visit to Hiroshima in late 1945.

via Scientist Claims UFO Collided with Tunguska Meteorite to Save Earth | Universe Today.

Meditation on Demand: Scientific American

In the fall of 2005, the Dalai Lama gave the inaugural Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. There were over 30,000 neuroscientists registered for the meeting, and it seemed as if most of them attended the talk. The Dalai Lama’s address was designed to highlight the areas of convergence between neuroscience and Buddhist thought about the mind, and to many in the audience he clearly achieved his objective. There was some controversy over his being invited to deliver this lecture insofar as he is both a head of state and a religious leader, and for that reason he largely stuck to his prepared text. But he strayed from the text at least once, reminding the audience that not only was he a Buddhist monk but also an enthusiastic proponent of modern technology.

Elaborating, he shared a confidence with the audience, telling the audience of scientists that meditating was hard work for him (even though he meditates for 4 hours every morning), and that if neuroscientists were able to find a way to put electrodes in his brain and provide him with the same outcome as he gets from meditating, he would be an enthusiastic volunteer. It turns out that a recent set of experiments, from researchers at MIT and Stanford, moves us a step closer to making his wish a reality.

…

The Dalai Lama’s interest in neuroscience has been reciprocated by at least some members of the neuroscience community. Reasoning that studying the brains of people who meditate might lead to novel insights about the human brain, investigations of long-term meditators has been fertile ground for scientific investigation, with some of the more rigorous work emerging from Richard Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. From the perspective of neuroscience, meditation can be characterized as a series of mental exercises by which one strengthens one’s control over the workings of their own brain. The simplest of these meditation practices is ‘focused attention’ where one concentrates on a single object, for example one’s breath. When expert meditators practiced focused attention meditation, demonstrable changes were seen using fMRI in the networks of the brain that are known to modulate attention.

A second set of experiments studied long-term meditators practicing ‘open monitoring meditation’, a more advanced meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor the universe of mental experience without directing attention to any one task. The unexpected result of this experiment was that the EEG of long-term meditators exhibited much more gamma-synchrony than that of naive meditators. Moreover, normally human brains produce only short bursts of gamma-synchrony. What was most remarkable about this study was that long-term meditators were able to produce sustained gamma-activity in a manner that had never previously been observed in any other human. As such, sustained gamma activity has emerged as a proxy for at least some aspects of the meditative state.
Gamma Waves
But what causes gamma rhythm? And are there any potential benefits of sustained gamma-activity? The strongest hypothesis for the cellular mechanisms underlying generation of the gamma rhythm is that it is due to the activation of fast-spiking interneurons in the cerebral cortex.  …

via Meditation on Demand: Scientific American.

Did President Kennedy meet extraterrestrials?

Image: President Kennedy arrives at Homestead AFB, Florida, 1962.

According to claims in a rare video, George Adamski met with President Kennedy at the White House in late 1961 and passed on a letter to him from human looking extraterrestrials. In addition to giving advice on the Cuban missile crisis, the alleged letter also contained an invitation for Kennedy to meet with the extraterrestrials. If Kennedy did attend such a meeting, it may explain why he was certain about human looking extraterrestrial life; made undisclosed trips to Air Force bases to deal with the UFO issue; and why he instructed NASA to cooperate with the USSR on joint space and lunar missions, and to release classified UFO files.

Lou Zinstag, Carl Jung’s niece describes what she was told by Adamski concerning Kennedy’s alleged meeting with extraterrestrials:

I still remember his [Adamski’s] White House story. He told me that he had been entrusted with a written invitation for President Kennedy to visit one of the space people’s huge mother ships at a secret airbase in Desert Hot Springs, California, for few days. In order to keep this visit absolutely secret, Adamski was to take the invitation directly to the White House through a side door. Still glowing with excitement and smiling happily, he explained how the row of cars in which his taxi was traveling had to stop because of a red light just in front of this particular door where a man he knew – a spaceman, he said – was standing ready to let him in. Adamski later learned that Kennedy had spent several hours at the airbase after having canceled an important trip to New York, and that he had a long talk with the ships crew, but that he had not been invited for a flight.”

The quality of witness testimonies, photos and film evidence presented in the rare video (see part one of this investigative series), all lead to the conclusion that George Adamski was largely telling the truth about his flying saucer sightings and contacts with human looking extraterrestrials. There is however no direct physical evidence that Kennedy met with the extraterrestrials Adamski was in contact with. There is, however, circumstantial evidence that such a meeting did happen, and it influenced Kennedy’s policies on space cooperation and UFOs.

via Honolulu Exopolitics Examiner: Did President Kennedy meet extraterrestrials?.

Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity

Close your eyes and visualize the sun setting over a beach.

How detailed was your image? Did you envision a bland orb sinking below calm waters, or did you call up an image filled with activity — palm trees swaying gently, waves lapping at your feet, perhaps a loved one holding your hand?

Now imagine you’re standing on the surface of Pluto. What would a sunset look like from there? Notice how hard you had to work to imagine this

scene. Did you picture a featureless ball of ice with the sun a speck of light barely brighter than a star along the horizon? Did you envision frozen lakes of exotic chemicals or icy fjords glimmering in the starlight?

What you conjured illuminates how our brains work, why it can be so hard to come up with new ideas — and how you can rewire your mind to open up the holy grail of creativity. Recent advances in neuroscience, driven by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that lets scientists watch brain activity as never before, have changed what we know about key attributes of creativity. These advances, for example, have swept away the idea that there is a pleasure center in the brain that somehow acts as an accelerator to the engine of human behavior. Rather, chemicals such as dopamine shuttle between neurons in ways that look remarkably like the calculations modern robots perform.

Creativity and imagination begin with perception. Neuroscientists have come to realize that how you perceive something isn’t simply a product of what your eyes and ears transmit to your brain. It’s a product of your brain itself. And iconoclasts, a class of people I define as those who do something that others say can’t be done — think Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, or Florence Nightingale — see things differently. Literally. Some iconoclasts are born that way, but we all can learn how to see things not for what they are, but for what they might be.

Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it’s so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain’s way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.

Entire books have been written about learning, but the important elements for creative thinkers can be boiled down to this: Experience modifies the connections between neurons so that they become more efficient at processing information. Neuroscientists have observed that while an entire network of neurons might process a stimulus initially, by about the sixth presentation, the heavy lifting is performed by only a subset of neurons. Because fewer neurons are being used, the network becomes more efficient in carrying out its function.

The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat. It doesn’t want to waste energy. That’s why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people’s visualization of a beach sunset.

via Neuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity – Rewiring the Creative Mind | Fast Company.

Space rock yields carbon bounty

Formic acid, a molecule implicated in the origins of life, has been found at record levels on a meteorite that fell into a Canadian lake in 2000. Cold temperatures on Tagish Lake prevented the volatile chemical from dissipating quickly.

An analysis showed four times more formic acid in the fragments than has been recorded on previous meteorites. The researchers told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that the formic acid was extraterrestrial.

Formic acid is one of a group of compounds dubbed “organics”, because they are rich in carbon.

“We are lucky that the meteorite was untouched by humans hands, avoiding contamination by organic compounds that we have on our fingers,” said Dr Christopher Herd, the curator of the University of Alberta’s meteorite collection.

Samples of the meteorite totalling 850 grams were collected from Tagish Lake in Canada, purchased in 2006 by a consortium including the Royal Ontario Museum and recently subjected to chemical analysis.

The scientists found levels of formic acid four times higher than had previously been recorded on a meteorite. Studies have until recently focused on the Murchison meteorite that landed in a town of that name in Australia in 1969.

“The interesting thing is that we do see this variability between meteorites, seeming to have increased enrichments of one particular compound over another,” said Mark Sephton, a meteorite and geochemistry professor at Imperial College London.

“This has for a while been overlooked as we concentrated predominantly on the Murchison meteorite, but now we’ve got another fresh sample and we can start to analyse a different portion of the asteroid belt and therefore a different portion of the Solar System.”

…

The Murchison meteorite contains many types of amino acids

The particular types, or isotopes, of hydrogen that are found in the formic acid show that it most likely formed in the cold regions of space before our Solar System existed.

On Earth, formic acid is commonly found in the stings of insects such as ants, but Professor Sephton it is likely to have been an important “ingredient in the kitchen” on Earth before life began.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Space rock yields carbon bounty.