Italian woman with evidence she was impregnated by aliens

This is the most amazing abduction case I have ever heard with the most evidence you could have I think! Please send this to your friends that don’t believe as this one is very compelling.

English Subtitles: Another Jaime Maussan report. Italian lady who claims to have been abducted several times throughout her life and has a ton of physical evidence to prove it, including a real live alien fetus removed from her womb by doctors. Furthermore, she has taken both video and photographs of the ships and occupants in stunning clarity to further back up her story. This is an unbelievable case that warrants further investigation.

Warning, end of video shows a three fingered alien looking aborted fetus.

Woman goes on blow gun spree in Stevens Point

A 41-year-old woman is in jail after police say she went on a blow gun spree in downtown Stevens Point.

The Stevens Point Journal reports that police got a report at 9 p.m. Wednesday from a 25-year-old woman who said she was walking downtown when she felt something hit her chest. In the next half hour, three more people made similar reports. None were seriously injured.

One of the victims reported she saw the dart shot from a pipe sticking out the window of a black minivan. Police pulled the vehicle over at 9:30 p.m. and found a blow gun, a slingshot and a bucket of rocks inside.

Police arrested the van’s driver, Paula Wolf, and say she eventually admitted to shooting the pedestrians. She allegedly told an officer that she “liked to hear people say ouch.”

Wolf has been charged with recklessly endangering safety. She could not be reached for comment.

via Woman goes on blow gun spree in Stevens Point.

Mysterious Desert Lines Were Animal Traps

Mysterious lines on the deserts of the Near East are massive ancient hunting tools, made up of low stone walls.

British RAF pilots in the early 20th century were the first to spot the strange kite-like lines on the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt from the air and wonder about their origins. The lines are low, stone walls, usually found as angled pairs, that begin far apart and converge at circular pits. In some places in Jordan the lines formed chains up to 40 miles long.

Were they made by some weird kind of fault? Ancient astronauts?

A new study of 16 of what are called desert kites in the eastern Sinai Desert confirms what many researchers have long suspected: The walls form large funnels to direct gazelle and other large game animals into killing pits. What’s more, the kites are between 2,300 and 2,400-years-old, were abandoned about 2,200 years ago and are just the right size to have worked on local gazelles and other hooved game.

The research shows that the construction of the kite was actually more sophisticated than it seemed before, their use was more diverse than we thought, and the ancients’ knowledge of animal ethology was deeper and more intimate than one would think,” said Uzi Avner of Ben-Gurion University-Eilat, in Israel.

“We have no doubt at all that the kites were built for hunting, not for any other suggested function.”

Avner is a co-author of a paper on the new research which will appear in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Arid Environments.

For a time, many researchers suspected the kites might be corrals for protecting domesticated animals, but that idea has fallen out of favor as more research has been done.

“The hunting theory is the most accepted, and it appears that for most kites this was indeed the use,” said Dani Nadel, another kite researcher from the University of Haifa, Israel. “There are similar structures, either from wood or from stone, on most continents.”

Interestingly, the walls of the kites are not high enough to actually block the animals. Rather, they just seem to channel herds in the right direction. Modern wildlife managers in the same region have used a similar approach by laying pipes on the ground to direct gazelles into a corral, Avner reports.

A careful examination of not just the kites but their locations in relation to pastures and migration routes makes it very clear that desert kites were specialized for specific types of animals. Before the 20th century the region was home to several different species of gazelle, wild asses, hartebeests, oryxes, ibexes, dorcas and onagers.

Some kites cleverly exploited low spots in the landscape to lure animals into the unseen killing pit.

“Indeed, the pit would have appeared to the animals in the funnel as an opening in the boundary walls of the kite through which they could flee,” Avner reports.

Another sort of kite was found on steep slopes or ridges below a plateau or shoulder of a hill so that animals driven over the ridge would suddenly be confronted by the installation before and below them, Avner explained.

As for why the kites fell out of use, it’s still a bit of a mystery, says Nadel.

“They were abandoned, in several south-Negev cases, by the beginning of the middle Bronze age,” said Nadel. “This may suggest a climatic change and or a shift in subsistence strategies.”

via 201004223864 | Mysterious Desert Lines Were Animal Traps.

Do pressures to publish increase scientists’ bias?

Image: a photograph of Albert Einstein’s Princeton desk taken only a few hours after he died in 1955.

The quality of scientific research may be suffering because academics are being increasingly pressured to produce ‘publishable’ results, a new study suggests. A large analysis of papers in all disciplines shows that researchers report more “positive” results for their experiments in US states where academics publish more frequently.

The results are reported in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE on April 21st, by Daniele Fanelli, of the University of Edinburgh.

The condition of today’s scientists is commonly described by the expression “publish or perish.” Their careers are increasingly evaluated based on the sheer number of papers listed in their CVs, and by the number of citations received — a measure of scientific quality that is hotly debated. To secure jobs and funding, therefore, researchers must publish continuously. The problem is that papers are likely to be accepted by journals and to be cited depending on the results they report.

“Scientists face an increasing conflict of interest, torn between the need to be accurate and objective and the need to keep their careers alive” says Fanelli, “while many studies have shown the deleterious effects of financial conflicts of interests in biomedical research, no one has looked at this much broader conflict, which might affect all fields.” …

via Do pressures to publish increase scientists’ bias?.

Vanished: ‘Chupacabra’ walks away from Fiesta booth

If you think you have seen it all at Fiesta, then you must have stopped in at this unusual booth at Fiesta Fantasias held at Market Square.

On display was a mummified chupacabra. Stevens charges $1.00 for the public to get a closeup look at what he claims is the only known chupacabra in the U.S.

But no more.

Owner Brian Stevens says the special specimen has been stolen.

“I’ve owned the chupacabra for more than a year and my partner, David Walker had owned it for two years prior” said Stevens. “It’s one of three, and the other two are in Ensenada, Mexico where this one was purchased,” said Stevens.

Wednesday Stevens reported the theft to the San Antonio Police Department.

“We’ve contacted the owner of the other two chupacabras in Mexico and they are making arrangements to bring one on loan for the remainder of Fiesta,” said Stevens.

Stevens is offering a reward for the return of the remains.

Call SAPD if you have any information on the mysterious disappearance of this chupacabra.

via Vanished: ‘Chupacabra’ walks away from Fiesta booth | kens5.com | San Antonio News, Weather, Sports, Traffic, Entertainment, Video and Photos.

NASA may send Orion capsule to International Space Station in 3 years

Boeing has delivered a prototype heatshield for NASA’s Orion crew exploration vehicle (CEV). The 5m-diameter ablative heatshield would protect the Orion capsule during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

The so-called thermal protection system (TPS) manufacturing development unit (MDU) was produced by Boeing Advanced Systems under contract to NASA Ames Research Center in California.

The Orion heatshield will dissipate some of the extreme heat generated during atmospheric reentry by gradually burning away. The TPS must withstand a lunar-direct return, during which the capsule will re-enter at much higher speed and generate about five times more heat than missions returning from the International Space Station. … – flightglobal

… NASA may be able to send a new vessel to the International Space Station within three years to provide astronauts aboard the orbiting outpost an emergency escape, Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. said Thursday.

The Orion capsule would not have to be rated to carry humans and would only have to comply with safety requirements for vehicles visiting the station and those that return astronauts to Earth, Bolden told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in Washington.

“That gives us a domestically produced return vehicle on the International Space Station in three years,” Bolden said during a hearing on NASA‘s budget request for fiscal 2011, which starts Oct. 1. “It also relieves some of the pressure from some of the commercial vendors to try to deliver a vehicle that has the human-rated capability in a shorter period of time.”

President Obama announced in February that he would end NASA‘s Constellation program, developed under the George W. Bush administration, which would have built rockets and spacecraft for a return to the moon by 2020.

Instead, Obama directed NASA to focus on developing rocket systems that might eventually take humans into deep space and help private companies build vessels to carry astronauts to the space station.

The president‘s plan has drawn criticism from Democratic and Republican lawmakers in states with NASA operations. Last week, Obama announced that part of the Constellation program, the Orion capsule, was being revived to provide astronauts an emergency escape from the station and reduce U.S. reliance on Russian Soyuz vehicles when the space shuttle program ends this year.

Orion is part of a goal to use spacecraft built by entrepreneurial companies to carry crews and cargo to and from the station. Lockheed Martin Corp., of Bethesda, Md., is Orion‘s prime contractor.

Letting such companies develop a space ferry would allow NASA to focus on developing a vessel that can carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to destinations such as Mars, Bolden said.

via NASA may send Orion capsule to International Space Station in 3 years – latimes.com.

Sounds Make Memories Stick During Sleep

A good night’s sleep, or even just a nap, can be an aid to memory. Psychologists have known for years that sleep solidifies what we’ve learned during the day, transforming tenuous associations into stable ones. Learning while you snooze seems supremely efficient, and so people have long dreamed of co-opting this process so that their dozing brain shores up what matters to them—say, material they’ve studied for a test or a talk, or verbiage in a foreign language they want to master. But until now there has been little support for the notion that studying in your sleep is useful. Psychology graduate student John Rudoy at Northwestern University in Illinois reported findings here on Monday at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 annual meeting that hint at a way to do that.

Rudoy, who works in neuroscientist Ken Paller’s group, and his colleagues showed study participants 50 photographs and asked them to memorize where each one appeared on a computer screen. To help the participants remember the locations, the researchers asked them to practice moving each picture to where they thought it had appeared, and after they’d made their move, showed them the picture’s correct location. In addition, the participants were taught to associate each photograph with a distinct sound—say, a chirp, ring, buzz or tone—that was related to the image. For example, the sound of an object hitting the water accompanied a picture of a splash.

The participants then took a nap lasting for up to 90 minutes in an easy chair in the laboratory. As they dozed, the investigators exposed the subjects to 25 distinct sounds—the ones they had associated with half of the photographs. When the nappers woke up, they again tried to move each of the 50 photographs to its previously assigned spot on a screen.

The sounds did seem to have an effect on memory for location: subjects were far more accurate at placing the pictures they had previously associated with the sounds played during their nap than they were at locating pictures for which they had not heard cues during slumber. The researchers surmise that the noises reinvigorate a complex web of neural connections that comprise our memories and thus strengthen them. Rudoy and his colleagues do not know, however, if this trick would work for memories that differ from the location or “spatial” type; they are also unsure if the sound cues have to be noises or if they could be, say, French words.

Nevertheless, psychologist Michael C. Anderson of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences unit in Cambridge, England, was impressed that you can use auditory cues to reinforce specific memories during sleep. “If I were given this as a proposal, I would say it was an interesting idea but it wouldn’t work,” Anderson says. “The fact that it did is very cool.” The work also suggests, he adds, that what you remember during sleep may be sensitive to your physical environment—and thus may depend, in part, on chance. So if your cat meows or your baby cries during the night, the sound might reactivate and strengthen thoughts about your pet or your child. And if you doze off in a noisy environment, the cacophony might conceivably fortify recollections you might prefer to forget.

via Sounds Make Memories Stick During Sleep: Scientific American.

Inspires me to to create an mp3 I can play while I sleep that plays tones and names them all night. Might help me acquire absolute pitch as long as I do some similar sounding exercise during the day.