New reason to ask if planet alignment will bring doom.

Can there be any truth in the traditional linkage of a total conjunction of planets and universal disaster or is this just arrant nonsense?“All that the earth inherits will … be consigned to flame when the planets, which now move in different orbits, all assemble in Cancer, so arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their spheres. When the same gathering takes place in Capricorn, then we are in danger of the deluge.”

This statement is attributed to the Babylonian priest, Bēl-re’ušunu (3rd century BCE), better known as Berossus, and epitomises the once widespread astronomical concept of the ‘Great Year’. From the Roman Empire to China, ancient philosophers defined the ‘Great Year’ as a large cosmic cycle, completed when the five naked-eye planets, the sun and the moon appear in linear conjunction. It was thought that such complete conjunctions occasioned cosmic catastrophes – devastating floods and fires that destroyed the preceding cosmos and inaugurated a new world.

Standard astronomical models do not acknowledge any mechanisms accounting for global tides or fires in response to planetary conjunctions. While the tidal effects of the moon are satisfactorily explained with gravity, the same force cannot demonstrably be made to work for the planets, as has often been pointed out.

The crux is that this dismissal rests on the antiquated perception of interplanetary space as a vacuum, in which gravity is the only operational force. With the coming of the Space Age, this simplistic paradigm has been incontrovertibly refuted. It is now known that most of the interplanetary space, and of the entire cosmos, consists of plasma and almost every body in the solar system is enclosed in a plasma sheath, technically a double-layer structure that serves to shield the object inside from electric fields impinging on the shell.

Teardrop-shaped magnetotails, which are structurally comparable to the comas and ion tails of comets, extend out into space from the earth, Venus, and most other planets. These are often so long as to extend to the orbit of the next planet, sometimes ‘tickling’ the protective sheath around that object as they point away from the sun. The solar equivalent to these planetary magnetospheres is the solar wind, which is ultimately responsible for auroral displays on the earth and on other planets.

The physical composition and the interaction of these magnetospheres are extremely complex and scientists are only just beginning to get a handle on the subject. What is already clear, however, is that the possibility of the sun or any of the planets ‘influencing’ the electromagnetic weather on another body is no longer so remote.

As the plasma sheaths of different bodies brush against each other in the ecliptic plane, they effectively complete a giant electric circuit, allowing a transfer of electric charge between adjacent planets. Such discharging offers a straightforward explanation for the ‘forgotten’ Pythagorean conviction that ‘comets’ arise when planets form linear conjunctions. Can it also account for the destructions by fire and flood the ancients believed would happen when the planets line up?

To find out, it is necessary to make a careful distinction between apparent linear conjunctions as seen from a viewpoint on earth and actual linear conjunctions in space. …

The bottom line is that ancient speculations about a link between catastrophic events and planetary movements present a challenge that is well worth renewed attention. In this particular case, plasma physics offers an intellectually palatable way to vindicate the ‘astrological’ claim that the antics of the planets can affect the conditions of life on earth as a whole.

via Joining the Dots Part One: Fireworks on New Year’s Day.

Lightning-produced radiation a potential health concern for air travelers

New information about lightning-emitted X-rays, gamma rays and high-energy electrons during thunderstorms is prompting scientists to raise concerns about the potential for airline passengers and crews to be exposed to harmful levels of radiation.

Scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology, University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Florida have estimated that airplane passengers could be exposed to a radiation dose equal to that from 400 chest X-rays if their airplane happens to be near the start of a lightning discharge or related phenomena known as a terrestrial gamma ray flash.

The big unknown: how often — if ever — commercial airliners are exposed to these thunderstorm events, because the bursts of radiation occur only over extremely brief periods and extend just a few hundred feet in the clouds.

“We know that commercial airplanes are typically struck by lightning once or twice a year,” said Joe Dwyer, professor of physics and space sciences at Florida Tech. “What we don't know is how often planes happen to be in just the right place or right time to receive a high radiation dose. We believe it is very rare, but more research is needed to answer the question definitively.”

Dwyer is the lead author of a paper about the research set to appear in the Journal for Geophysical Research — Atmospheres. Seven researchers from Florida Tech, UC Santa Cruz and UF contributed to the paper. “Estimation of the fluence of high-energy electron bursts produced by thunderclouds and the resulting radiation doses received in aircraft.” It is free and downloadable online from the journal's “papers in press” page. The link is here .

The authors did not measure high radiation doses directly with airplanes. Instead, they estimated radiation based on satellite and ground-based observations of X-rays and gamma rays.

via Lightning-produced radiation a potential health concern for air travelers.

Crematorium to use burning bodies to generate electricity

A crematorium is planning to use energy from burning bodies to run its own electricity and heating.

Hastings Borough Council in East Sussex says it would be the first in Europe to invest in technology which converts excess heat from cremations into reusable energy.

It hopes new generators, being installed next summer as part of an £800,000 refit, will save money in the long run by cutting energy bills.

Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead said the recycled power would not come directly from the bodies but from the machines used to cremate them and filter the fumes.

He said: “A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy. We buy about £25,000 worth of gas a year. Clearly we want to be as energy efficient as we can be.

“The first part would be to use that heat, but the second stage is to use it to generate electricity.

“They need to first see whether it will technically work, but if it does it would be the first in the UK or Europe.”

via Crematorium to use burning bodies to generate electricity – Telegraph.

Related:

Cremation is popular these days for those who have kicked the bucket. In Canada, only 3 per cent of the population got cremated 50 years ago, while today that number has ballooned to more than 55 per cent. But here’s a shocker for the conservation-minded: The amount of natural gas and electricity used to cremate one body is the equivalent of driving a car from coast to coast. When your body goes up in flames, it also emits a lot of nasty stuff: greenhouse gases, smog-causing gases, particulates, and mercury vapour if you’ve got a few of those old tooth fillings.

Given this post-humus environmental footprint — and given our concern about climate change — innovation in this area is on the rise. In Denmark and Sweden, some municipalities are taking the waste heat from their local crematoriums and using it as part of their district heating systems. In North America, there’s a new technology called Resomation — generically, biocremation — that avoids incineration by chemically breaking down the body. A Toronto-based company called Transition Science Inc. has licensed the technology and recently signed up its first customer, cemetery and crematorium operator Park Lawn Trust, which plans to have its first Resomation system up and running in Toronto next spring. I’ve got an article on this company and the technology in today’s Toronto Star. You can read the article for a detailed description of how it works. It’s kind of yucky — basically the body is loaded into a metal chamber that’s filled with an alkali-based solution that, under heat and pressure, turns the non-skeleton portion of the body into a soapy soup that’s simply flushed down the drain (apparently it’s benign and gets treated in our wastewater treatment system just like what we flush down the toilet). The process uses a fraction of the energy required for cremation.

Sure, sounds gross, but since we’re always talking about the need for cradle-to-grave energy analyses, it makes sense that we leave the world in the most energy-efficient way possible. … – ecofriendly

Researchers finds hidden sensory system in the skin

The human sensory experience is far more complex and nuanced than previously thought, according to a groundbreaking new study published in the December 15 issue of the journal Pain (painjournalonline.com/abstract). In the article, researchers at Albany Medical College, the University of Liverpool and Cambridge University report that the human body has an entirely unique and separate sensory system aside from the nerves that give most of us the ability to touch and feel. Surprisingly, this sensory network is located throughout our blood vessels and sweat glands, and is for most people, largely imperceptible.

“It’s almost like hearing the subtle sound of a single instrument in the midst of a symphony,” said senior author Frank Rice, PhD, a Neuroscience Professor at Albany Medical College (AMC), who is a leading authority on the nerve supply to the skin. “It is only when we shift focus away from the nerve endings associated with normal skin sensation that we can appreciate the sensation hidden in the background.”

The research team discovered this hidden sensory system by studying two unique patients who were diagnosed with a previously unknown abnormality by lead author David Bowsher, M.D., Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool’s Pain Research Institute. These patients had an extremely rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, meaning that they were born with very little ability to feel pain. Other rare individuals with this condition have excessively dry skin, often mutilate themselves accidentally and usually have severe mental handicaps. “Although they had a few accidents over their lifetimes, what made these two patients unique was that they led normal lives. Excessive sweating brought them to the clinic, where we discovered their severe lack of pain sensation,” said Dr. Bowsher. “Curiously, our conventional tests with sensitive instruments revealed that all their skin sensation was severely impaired, including their response to different temperatures and mechanical contact. But, for all intents and purposes, they had adequate sensation for daily living and could tell what is warm and cold, what is touching them, and what is rough and smooth.”

The mystery deepened when Dr. Bowsher sent skin biopsies across the ocean to Dr. Rice’s laboratory, which focuses on multi-molecular microscopic analyses of nerve endings in the skin, especially in relation to chronic pain conditions such as those caused by nerve injuries, diabetes, and shingles. These unique analyses were pioneered by Dr. Rice at Albany Medical College (AMC) along with collaborators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “Under normal conditions, the skin contains many different types of nerve endings that distinguish between different temperatures, different types of mechanical contact such as vibrations from a cell phone and movement of hairs, and, importantly, painful stimuli,” said Dr. Rice. “Much to our surprise, the skin we received from England lacked all the nerve endings that we normally associated with skin sensation. So how were these individuals feeling anything?”

The answer appeared to be in the presence of sensory nerve endings on the small blood vessels and sweat glands embedded in the skin. “For many years, my colleagues and I have detected different types of nerve endings on tiny blood vessels and sweat glands, which we assumed were simply regulating blood flow and sweating. We didn’t think they could contribute to conscious sensation. However, while all the other sensory endings were missing in this unusual skin, the blood vessels and sweat glands still had the normal types of nerve endings. Apparently, these unique individuals are able to ‘feel things’ through these remaining nerve endings,” said Dr. Rice. “What we learned from these unusual individuals is that there’s another level of sensory feedback that can give us conscious tactile information. Problems with these nerve endings may contribute to mysterious pain conditions such as migraine headaches and fibromyalgia, the sources of which are still unknown, making them very difficult to treat.”…

via Researchers finds hidden sensory system in the skin | Science Blog.

World Bank musters $5.5 billion for solar projects

The World Bank announced Wednesday 5.5 billion dollars would be invested in solar energy projects in five countries of the Middle East and North Africa in a bid to combat climate change.

The Washington-based bank’s Clean Technology Fund approved financing of 750 million dollars on December 2 to boost the use of concentrated solar power, an advanced technology that concentrates sunlight to harness energy.

The fund’s financing “will mobilize an additional 4.85 billion dollars from other sources, to accelerate global deployment of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP),” the development lender said in a statement.

The Clean Technology fund will invest in the CSP programs of five countries in the Middle East and North Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia.

“The proposed gigawatt-scale deployment through 11 commercial-scale power plants over a three- to five-year time-frame would provide the critical mass of investments necessary to attract significant private sector interest, benefit from economies of scale to reduce cost, result in learning in diverse operating conditions, and manage risk,” the 186-nation bank said.

The Clean Technology Fund, a multidonor trust fund to facilitate deployment of low-carbon technologies “at scale,” approved an investment plan that will produce “about one gigawatt” of CSP generation capacity, amounting to a tripling of worldwide CSP capacity, the World Bank said.

via World Bank musters $5.5 billion for solar projects – Yahoo! News.

Atom smasher catches 1st high-energy collisions

The world’s largest atom smasher has recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

The collisions occurred Tuesday evening as the Large Haldron Collider underwent test runs in preparation for operations next year, said Christine Sutton of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.

Two beams of circulating particles traveling in opposite directions at 1.18 trillion electron volts produced the collisions, she said. The Atlas “experiment,” one of four major detectors in cathedral-sized rooms in the collider’s underground tunnel at Geneva, had part of its equipment turned on and could register collisions.

“They recorded a handful of collisions, and one of them looks quite nice, so it’s on their Web site,” she said.

Sutton said the collisions occurred when the machine was ramped up briefly to 1.18 TeV. That same level set a world record for proton acceleration in November, when Geneva’s particle beams traveled with 20 percent more power than Fermilab near Chicago, which previously held the record.

The operators plan many more collisions at lower energies so the experiments can calibrate their equipment and prepare for more advances ahead.

CERN then plans more collisions at 1.18 TeV to give all experiments the opportunity to record data at that level, but new scientific discoveries are not expected before next year when the beams are ramped up still higher, to 3.5 TeV.

That will be 3.5 times more energy that has been reached at Fermilab, previously the most powerful collider.

via Atom smasher catches 1st high-energy collisions – Yahoo! News.

Day two of the iphone, free speech to text and barcode scanning

Day TWO of the iPhone.  This is my first post from my iPhone.

Learned how to move the cursor the right place in text (somewhat challenging), learn how to copy text and paste text from one application to another. (The iPhone has an invisible “clipboard” just like your computer.)

I’m now using DragonDictate a free app which types what I say. It’s awesome that I can talk and see a transcription, however, there are many frustrating things about it. I spend about the same time correcting as if i’d just typed on the slow little keyboard .

One of the coolest things I figured out tonight, is how to use an application called QuickMark to scan barcodes. Under settings you have to set barcode type to EAN 8/13. For the search URL enter this:

http://www.checkupc.com/search.php?keyword=

This wordpress app keeps deleting what I save! I’ ve had to re enter this three times.

Oh, then I found an app called ShopSavvy which is much easier and gives local and web prices as well as reviews. Now I understand what someone meant when they said they were going around scanning every barcode they could find in their home.  This app looks like it could definitely save me some money.

ShopSavvy™ informs the shopper. It bridges the gap between shopping online and shopping at the store. With ShopSavvy™ userso can scan the barcode of any product using their phone’s built-in camera. Once scanned, it will search for all the best prices on the internet and at nearby, local stores. http://www.biggu.com/apps/shopsavvy-iphone/

So, if you have an iPhone and you get this free ShopSavvy app by searhing for that name in the iTunes Store, you would be able to run the app, point your iPhone camera at the picture of the bar code above, and tell what product this is! Slick. You’d also find out a secret about me. Give it a try. Post a comment if you figure it out.

Scientists discover tsunami on the Sun + Free Xeno Song: Tsunami on the Sun

In what is a surprising discovery, scientists have found tsunami-style towering waves that race across the face of the Sun.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory provided a tantalizing glimpse of a solar wave about 12 years ago, but it took the three-dimensional view from NASA’s STEREO solar probes to nail it.

“It came as a surprise to us when we started seeing these waves expanding,” said Joseph Gurman, a solar physicist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center .

The waves, which are comprised of plasma, appear at the base of the corona, a couple of thousand kilometres above the surface of the sun.

They rise quickly from a central point and spread out in a circular pattern millions of kilometres in circumference.

Scientists, using the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), confirmed the existence of solar waves in February 2009 when a sunspot erupted, sending a cloud of gas into space and a 100,000-kilometre-high tsunami sprinting across the surface of the sun at about 900,000 kilometres per hour.

The twin STEREO satellites recorded the wave from two positions, giving researchers a three-dimensional view of what had happened.

“The satellites allowed us to determine without doubt the true nature of the wave,” said lead researcher Assistant Professor Spiros Patsourakos, with George Mason University.

The waves are associated with flares and solar storms known as coronal mass ejections, which spew billions of tons of plasma and embedded magnetic fields from the sun’s corona into interplanetary space.

Plasma that encounters earth’s magnetosphere can trigger powerful geomagnetic storms that can interfere with Global Positioning System radio signals, satellites and other technologies.

Studying how the waves grow and travel should give scientists fresh insights into the sun’s magnetic environment, according to Gurman.

“Monitoring for waves also should allow solar physicists to pinpoint the source of coronal mass ejections that may be heading toward earth,” said Simon Plunkett, with the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC.

via Scientists discover tsunami on the Sun.

I think I’ll call my next song “Tsunami on the Sun”. I will record it in stereo for extra irony. Only I will get it.

12/9/2009 Update: Okay, here it is.   Recorded in about an hour: Tsunami on the Sun by Xeno. The idea behind this is that stars are alive and the Tsunamis are how they communicate. If you could listen, it would sound a bit like a whale. That’s what this song is, the sound of the Sun Tsunami talking… what is it saying? That’s up to you.

Jesus may have visited Scotland according to Scottish minister

If he existed as a real historical person (see the Flavian hypothesis), then it is fair to wonder if he hung out with the Druids.

Jesus may have walked on Scottish soil in the prime of his life says Church of Scotland minister Dr Gordon Strachan.

Dr Gordon Strachan claims that Jesus may have visited Scotland before turning 30. Speaking on The Hour, Strachan said Jesus “wouldn’t have missed the chance” to visit Scotland if he had travelled all the way to England with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, as he believes he did.

In 1804, British poet William Blake first suggested the theory when writing that Jesus came to Britain and “walk[ed] upon mountains green.”

While researching for his book, Jesus the Master Builder, the retired Edinburgh University lecturer of History and Architecture used these legends as a starting point to try and prove a network of connections between the Celtic world and Mediterranean culture and philosophy.

“My first question is ‘why shouldn’t he have come?’. Nobody knows what happened to him till he was aged 30. That’s a long time

“There were legends he went to Egypt and to India but then there are also legends that he came to Glastonbury, to Cornwall.”

Strachan was first converted to the idea that Jesus came to England after speaking to friends and he quickly became involved in his own research.

“I went down to Glastonbury and looked around and then went out to Israel on a job for two years so I got both ends of the story.”

The former professor believes that if Jesus did make the long journey to the UK then he would have done so for a deep reason, most likely to further his education.

“His uncle was Joseph of Arimathea and he came with his uncle for the tin mines. He added: “Eventually he came to Glastonbury and he built a church.

“He probably was going to say hello to the druids.” …

via Jesus may have visited Scotland according to Scottish minister | History | Scotland on TV from STV.

Study: Parents’ Sex Talks with Kids Happening Too Late

… ironically, despite their apparent dread, kids really want to learn about sex from their parents, according to study after study on the topic. (See pictures of teenagers in America.)

“The results didn’t surprise me,” says Dr. Mark Schuster, one of the authors of the new study, published in Pediatrics, and chief of general pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston. “But there’s something about having actual data that serves as a wake-up call to parents who are not talking to their kids about very important issues until later than we think would be best.”

The study involved 141 families enrolled in the Talking Parents, Healthy Teens program, organized by the University of California Los Angeles/Rand Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and overseen by Schuster. Parents and their children, aged 13 to 17, responded to questions about 24 issues regarding sex and sexuality, including how women become pregnant, body changes that occur during puberty, how to use condoms and birth control, as well as issues around homosexuality. (See the top 10 teen idols.)

Researchers asked both parents and their children, separately, when they had first discussed each topic, and compared that information to teens’ self-reports about their engagement in three specific categories of sexual behavior – hand-holding or kissing; genital touching or oral sex; and intercourse. Families were surveyed four times, once at the beginning of the study, then again at three, six and 12 months.

By the end of the study, more than half of the parents reported that they had not discussed 14 of the 24 sex-related topics by the time their adolescents had begun genital touching or oral sex with partners. Forty-two percent of girls reported that they had not discussed the effectiveness of birth control and 40% admitted they had not talked with their parents about how to refuse sex before engaging in genital touching. Nearly 70% of boys said they had not discussed how to use a condom or other birth-control methods with their parents before having intercourse. Yet only half of the boys’ parents, by contrast, said they had not discussed condom use or birth control with their sons. …

via Study: Parents’ Sex Talks with Kids Happening Too Late – Yahoo! News.