Prehistoric building frenzy revealed as vast number of enclosures are precision dated with new technique

Until now, the history of early Britain – when a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence gave way to a settled agricultural way of life – has been sketchy.

But thanks to a new radio-carbon dating technique, scientists have begun to unravel the past.

It shows the nation experienced a frenetic period of monument building that lasted just 75 years after 3700BC.

The method has allowed researchers to date prehistoric features – built more than 1,000 years before Stonehenge was created – down to a margin of decades instead of centuries.

It was previously thought that huge monuments, including Windmill Hill in Wiltshire and Maiden Castle in Dorset, spread slowly across the country over five centuries during the Neolithic period from 4000 to 2000BC.

But researchers now believe that causewayed enclosures, a type of early Neolithic earthwork, were rapidly erected all over southern England in just 75 years.

Some of these were attacked and burnt down, and the people inside killed.

By 3630BC, the building of new enclosures had slowed down to a trickle, suggesting the turmoil of the preceding three-quarters of a century had drawn to a close.

The construction started in the Thames Estuary, then moved through Kent and Sussex, and then west on an intense scale that was not apparent before.

The study, carried out by scientists from English Heritage and University of Cardiff, promises to revolutionise the way prehistory is understood and studied – not only in Britain, but around the world.

Dr Alex Bayliss, of English Heritage, said: ‘By dating these enclosures more accurately, we now know that something happened quite specifically some 5,700 years ago.

‘The speed with which it took place has completely overturned our perception of prehistory. …

via Prehistoric building frenzy revealed as vast number of enclosures are precision dated with new technique | Mail Online.

Moving mirrors make light from nothing

A moving mirror can generate light from a vacuum.

A team of physicists is claiming to have coaxed sparks from the vacuum of empty space1. If verified, the finding would be one of the most unusual experimental proofs of quantum mechanics in recent years and “a significant milestone”, says John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study.

The researchers, based at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, will present their findings early next week at a workshop in Padua, Italy. They have already posted a paper on the popular pre-print server arXiv.org, but have declined to talk to reporters because the work has not yet been peer-reviewed. High-profile journals, including Nature, discourage researchers from talking to the press until their findings are ready for publication.

Nevertheless, scientists not directly connected with the group say that the result is impressive. “It is a major development,” says Federico Capasso, an experimental physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has worked on similar quantum effects.

At the heart of the experiment is one of the weirdest, and most important, tenets of quantum mechanics: the principle that empty space is anything but. Quantum theory predicts that a vacuum is actually a writhing foam of particles flitting in and out of existence.

The existence of these particles is so fleeting that they are often described as virtual, yet they can have tangible effects. For example, if two mirrors are placed extremely close together, the kinds of virtual light particles, or photons, that can exist between them can be limited. The limit means that more virtual photons exist outside the mirrors than between them, creating a force that pushes the plates together. This ‘Casimir force’ is strong enough at short distances for scientists to physically measure it.  …

For decades, theorists have predicted that a similar effect can be produced in a single mirror that is moving very quickly. According to theory, a mirror can absorb energy from virtual photons onto its surface and then re-emit that energy as real photons. The effect only works when the mirror is moving through a vacuum at nearly the speed of light — which is almost impossible for everyday mechanical devices.

Per Delsing, a physicist at the Chalmers University of Technology, and his colleagues circumvented this problem using a piece of quantum electronics known as a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID), which is extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic fields.

The team fashioned a superconducting circuit in which the SQUID effectively acted as a mirror. Passing a magnetic field through the SQUID moved the mirror slightly, and switching the direction of magnetic field several billion times per second caused it to ‘wiggle’ at around 5% the speed of light, a speed great enough to see the effect.

The result was a shower of microwave photons shaken loose from the vacuum, the team claims. The group’s analysis shows that the frequency of the photons was roughly half the frequency at which they wiggled the mirror — as was predicted by quantum theory. …

via Moving mirrors make light from nothing : Nature News.

Wild. The truth is, we live in a universe where matter and energy (in very small amounts) are constantly popping in and out of reality.  In such a universe, why is it impossible that our minds might influence that creation? This idea may be pure superstition, but it is a fun one. The Wiccan’s would agree, I think.

The purpose of a spell is to manifest something you need or desire. That need or desire (or both) compose your intention. When you cast a spell, your intent is as vital to your success as your beliefs. Focusing attention on what you want puts energy behind your objective, enabling your mind to consciously create the circumstances you desire. As you design a spell, ask yourself a few basic questions. What is your reason for doing a spell? What outcome are you seeking? How passionately do you want what you’re trying to achieve or accomplish? Are you ready and willing to accept the outcome?

via NetPlaces

Do you visualize things and make them happen? Some friends of mine recently visualized a new kitchen. The result: They won a contest and it happened.  They had their entire kitchen ripped out and replaced with a $50,000 upgrade. At no cost.

Just in case there is anything to it, I recommend that you don’t squander your powers of creation by visualizing negative things.

Elements 114 and 116 Added to Periodic Table

Dmitri Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of Chemical Elements has just been augmented with two new entries – elements 114 and 116. An international commission of scientists, comprised mostly of physicists and chemists, agreed to include the ultra-heavy chemicals in the Table.

Copernicium and roentgenium, at 285 and 272 atomic mass units, respectively, were the previous record-holders for the world’s heaviest chemicals. But now, their place has been taken by elements 114 and 116, at 289 and 292 atomic mass units, respectively.

One of the reasons why the international scientific community took its time to introduce the new elements into the Table is the fact that they are extremely short-lived. They can last for about a second, before they are destroyed, due to their inherent stability.

The two elements are radioactive, experts say. When left alone, element 116 will decay into element 114, which will itself decay into copernicium (element 112). The decay process is accompanied by the release of alpha particles.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) says that only 75 copernicium atoms have ever been identified. The element is purely synthetic, and can only be produced in the laboratory.

The first, single atom of rapidly decaying element 114 was produced back in 1999, when a team of Russian physicists bombarded plutonium-244 targets with calcium-48 atoms. The resulting shower of particles contained one of the new atoms.

One year later, in 2000, element 116 was also found. Over the following years, researchers around the world gathered evidence to prove that the detection of these ultra-heavy atoms was not some sort of statistical fluke in the results.

Eventually, IUPAC and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) declared themselves satisfied, and awarded to two elements their official status on June 1, 2011.

Scientists have yet to decide on names for the two elements, which are temporarily called ununquadium (114) and ununhexium (116). Experts with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, who found the elements, want to name 114 flerovium, and 116 moscovium. The former could get its name from Soviet nuclear physicist Georgy Flyorov, who discovered seaborgium and bohrium.

via Elements 114 and 116 Added to Periodic Table – Softpedia.

How Big Pharma really influences your doctor

Every doctor boasts of being guided by articles published in the pages of The New England Journal of Medicine. After reading this and understanding how the system really works, you should have a healthy desire to question if those meds are making you better or worse. This might also make you want to be a doctor.

“All journals are bought—or at least cleverly used—by the pharmaceutical industry,” says Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, who now sits on the board of Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit open-access group publishing scientific journals that eschew corporate financing and are freely available online to the public.

Big Pharma, as the top tier of the industry is known, starts modestly, inserting the thin edge of its wedge by advertising copiously—and often inaccurately—in medical journals.  …

Medical journals are utterly dependent upon pharmaceutical advertising, which can provide between 97 and 99 percent of their advertising revenue. By 2005, some major journals, including Consultant, Geriatrics, and American Family Physician, carried more advertising than editorial pages and glossy, full-color inserts that were longer than the journal’s longest article. This explains why medical journals themselves advertise to drugmakers, flooding the pages of pharmaceutical-industry publications such as Medical Marketing and Media to vie for the attentions of Big Pharma. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) bills itself in advertising as “a priceless audience at a price you can afford,” while the Annals boasts: “With an audience of more than 90,000 internists (93 percent of whom are actively practicing physicians), Annals has always been a smart buy.”

Moreover, drugmakers sometimes agree to buy journal advertising only if it is accompanied by favorable editorial mentions of their products. Or their in-house stables of writers or hired pens generate “advertorials,” a Frankensteinian mix of medical content and marketing messages that can be indistinguishable from editorial material. “Pharmaceutical firms also inform journals,” Smith observes, “that they are receptive to buying huge volumes of reprints that favor their wares: The profits for the journal can easily reach $100,000.”

Pharma’s journal ads tout not only products but also its hundreds of thousands of subsidized “educational opportunities.” Drug and medical-device makers spend $2 billion annually for more than 300,000 seminars and training opportunities, often held in the Bahamas or the Caribbean. The wolfed-on-the-run free pizza for harried medical residents that the industry has so sanctimoniously forsworn bears little resemblance to the sumptuous feasts, flowing wines, chartered flights, cruises, luxurious lodgings, golfing, snorkeling, and remarkably attractive sales reps that characterize these island educational junkets.

“There’s a lot of bribery involved—the kids get pizza, the grownups get trips to Hawaii,” observed Marcia Angell, MD, professor of social medicine at the Harvard Medical School, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and the author in 2004 of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. …

via Flacking for Big Pharma: an article by Harriet Washington | The American Scholar.

Deceptive math puzzle may be solved after 74 years

A long-standing and apparently simple puzzle that has left mathematicians stumped for nearly three-quarters of a century may finally be solved.

The Collatz conjecture was proposed by Lothar Collatz in 1937. It is also known as the “3n + 1 problem” because of its deceptively-simple definition.

Now mathematician Gerhard Opfer of the University of Hamburg, who was a student of Collatz, says he has proved the conjecture true.

The problem starts by choosing any whole number, n. If n is even, divide it by 2. If n is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1 to get 3n + 1. Collatz believed that if you keep repeating these operations on the resulting numbers, no matter what your starting number, the result will always reach the number 1 eventually.

This has been verified for numbers up to 5.76 x 1018 (nearly 6 billion billion), but without a proper mathematical proof there is always the possibility that an incredibly large number could violate Collatz’s rule.

Opfer claims to have achieved this proof, which is set out in a paper on the University of Hamburg’s preprint server – but the result has yet to be peer-reviewed and could prove incorrect. The paper has been submitted to the journal Mathematics of Computation for review. …

via Short Sharp Science: Deceptive puzzle may be solved after 74 years.

Armchair astronomer discovers ‘structure’ on Mars on Google earth

We have all heard of little green men from Mars.

But now an American ‘armchair astronaut’ claims to have discovered a mysterious structure on the surface of the red planet – by looking on Google earth.

David Martines, whose YouTube video of the ‘station’ has racked up over 200,000 hits so far, claims to have randomly uncovered the picture while scanning the surface of the planet one day.

Describing the ‘structure’ as a living quarters with red and blue stripes on it, to the untrained eye it looks nothing more than a white splodge on an otherwise unblemished red landscape.

He even lists the co-ordinates 49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W so others can go see the anomaly for themselves.

In a pre recorded ‘fly by’ video of the object, Mr Martines describes what he thinks the station might be.

He said: ‘This is a video of something I discovered on Google Mars quite by accident.

‘I call it Bio-station Alpha, because I’m just assuming that something lives in it or has lived in it.

‘It’s very unusual in that it’s quite large, it’s over 700 feet long and 150 feet wide, it looks like it’s a cylinder or made up of cylinders.

‘It could be a power station or it could be a biological containment or it could be a glorified garage – hope it’s not a weapon.

‘Whoever put it up there had a purpose I’m sure. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose was. I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to live on Mars.

‘It could be a way station for weary space travellers. It could also belong to NASA, I don’t know that they would admit that.

‘I don’t know if they could pull off such a project without all the people seeing all the material going up there. I sort of doubt NASA has anything to do with this. …

via Armchair astronomer discovers ‘structure’ on Mars on Google earth | Mail Online.

Apple causes ‘religious’ reaction in brains of fans, say neuroscientists

In a recently screened BBC documentary, UK neuroscientists suggested that the brains of Apple devotees are stimulated by Apple imagery in the same way that the brains of religious people are stimulated by religious imagery.

People have often talked about “the cult of Apple”, and if a recent BBC TV documentary is to be believed, there could be something in it.

The program, Secrets of the Superbrands, looks at why technology megabrands such as Apple, Facebook and Twitter have become so popular and such a big part of many people’s lives.

In the first episode, presenter Alex Riley decided to take a look at Apple. He wanted to discover what it is about the company that makes people so emotional. Footage of the opening of the Cupertino company’s Covent Garden store in central London last year showed hordes of Apple devotees lining up outside overnight, while the staff whipped up customers (and themselves) into something of an evangelical frenzy. This religious-like fervor got Riley thinking – he decided to take a closer look at the inside of the head of an Apple fanatic to see what on earth was going on in there.

Riley contacted the editor of World of Apple, Alex Brooks, an Apple worshipper who claims to think about Apple 24 hours a day, which is possibly 23 hours too many for most regular people. A team of neuroscientists studied Brooks’ brain while undergoing an MRI scan, to see how it reacted to images of Apple products and (heaven forbid) non-Apple products. …

“This suggests that the big tech brands have harnessed, or exploit, the brain areas that have evolved to process religion,” one of the scientists says. A meeting with the Bishop of Buckingham, who reads the Bible using his Apple iPad, appeared to back up this assertion. …

via Apple causes ‘religious’ reaction in brains of fans, say neuroscientists.

Android propaganda?

Scientists Find ‘Werewolf’ Gene, Future cure for baldness?

Scientists have discovered a genetic mutation responsible for a disorder that causes people to sprout thick hair on their faces and bodies.

Hypertrichosis, sometimes called “werewolf syndrome” is a very rare condition, with fewer than 100 cases documented worldwide. But researchers knew the disorder runs in families, and in 1995 they traced the approximate location of the mutation to a section of the X chromosome (one of the two sex chromosomes) in a Mexican family affected by hypertrichosis.

Men with the syndrome have hair covering their faces and eyelids, while women grow thick patches on their bodies. In March, a Thai girl with the condition got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s hairiest child.

A man in China with congenital hypertrichosis helped researchers break the case. Xue Zhang, a professor of medical genetics at the Peking Union Medical College, tested the man and his family and found an extra chunk of genes on the X chromosome. The researchers then returned to the Mexican family and also found an extra gene chunk (which was different from that of the Chinese man) in the same location of their X chromosomes. [Top 10 Worst Hereditary Conditions]

The extra DNA may switch on a hair-growth gene nearby, resulting in runaway furriness. The best bet for a culprit, wrote study researcher Pragna Patel of the University of Southern California, is a gene called SOX3, which is known to play a role in hair growth.

“If in fact the inserted sequences turn on a gene that can trigger hair growth, it may hold promise for treating baldness or hirsutism [excessive hair growth] in the future, especially if we could engineer ways to achieve this with drugs or other means,” Patel said in a statement.

The study is detailed in the June 2 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

via Scientists Find ‘Werewolf’ Gene – FoxNews.com.

CERN group traps antihydrogen atoms for more than 16 minutes

Trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has become so routine that physicists are confident that they can soon begin experiments on this rare antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

“We’ve trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever” in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics, faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

The ALPHA team is hard at work building a new antihydrogen trap with “the hope that by 2012 we will have a new trap with laser access to allow spectroscopic experiments on the antiatoms,” he said.

Fajans and the ALPHA team, which includes Jonathan Wurtele, UC Berkeley professor of physics, will publish their latest successes online on June 5 in advance of print publication in the journal Nature Physics. Fajans, Wurtele and their graduate students played major roles in designing the antimatter trap and other aspects of the experiment.

Their paper reports that in a series of measurements last year, the team trapped 112 antiatoms for times ranging from one-fifth of a second to 1,000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds. … Trapped antiatoms are detected by turning off the magnetic field and allowing the particles to annihiliate with normal matter, which creates a flash of light.

Because the confinement depends on the antihydrogen’s magnetic moment, if the spin of the antiatom flips, it is ejected from the magnetic bottle and annihilates with an atom of normal matter. This gives the experimenters an easy way to detect the interaction of light or microwaves with antihydrogen, because photons at the right frequency make the antiatom’s spin flip up or down. …

via CERN group traps antihydrogen atoms for more than 16 minutes.

 

… scientists have no idea whether or not antimatter obeys the same laws of physics as regular matter. It’s supposed to, but nobody has been able to get enough of the stuff to sit still in one place to test it out. … Besides being a major plot point in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, antihydrogen is one of the crucial components of Star Trek’s warp drives, since combining antihydrogen with regular hydrogen is the most efficient way to produce energy that there is, period. Never mind that it currently takes 10 million antiprotons and 700 million positrons plus particle accelerator the size of San Francisco to make just 38 atoms of the stuff. Now that we’ve got some, warp drive is inevitable.

via dvice.com

 

Antihydrogen is the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen. Whereas the common hydrogen atom is composed of an electron and proton, the antihydrogen atom is made up of a positron and antiproton. Antihydrogen began to be produced artificially in accelerator experiments in 1995, but the atoms produced had such “hot” velocities as to collide with matter and annihilate before they could be examined in detail.

via wikipedia

Giant rats eat two babies in South Africa townships in separate attacks

Giant rats as big as cats have killed and eaten two babies in separate attacks in South Africa’s squalid townships this week.

Lunathi Dwadwa, three, was killed as she slept in her parent’s shack in the Khayelitsha slum outside Cape Town and another girl was killed in Soweto township near Johannesburg the same day.

Little Lunathi was sleeping on a makeshift bed on the floor of her family’s breeze block and corrugated iron home on Sunday night when she died. Her puzzled parents didn’t even hear her scream.

When her mother discovered her lifeless body, she saw that her daughter’s eyes had been gouged out.

Bukiswa Dwadwa, 27, said: ‘I can’t forget how ugly my child looked after her eyes were ripped out.

‘She was eaten from her eyebrows to her cheeks, her other eye was hanging by a piece of flesh.’

Her father Mncedisi Mokoena said police told him: ‘Nothing could have done that but rats’

And today police revealed that a baby girl died in the Soweto township when she was attacked by rats while her teenage mother was out with friends.

‘We were called to the scene of the death of an infant due to a rat attack on Monday morning at around 9am,’ said police officer Bongani Mhlongo.

‘The mother of the child was arrested on charges of culpable homicide and negligence.’

…

Residents of South Africa’s impoverished townships say the giant rats grow up to three-foot long, including their tails, and have front teeth over an inch long.

The suspects in the baby attacks are believed to be African Giant Pouched Rats, a species only distantly related to UK rats, but native to sub-Saharan Africa – and the biggest in the world.

They are nocturnal, omnivorous and can produce up to 50 young a year. Some tribal people breed them for food.

They thrive in the townships’ filthy conditions and feast on residents’ uncollected rubbish.

via Giant rats eat two babies in South Africa townships in separate attacks | Mail Online.

My god.  In the big picture I blame human overpopulation.  Stop breeding. There are too many of us. No one should have to live in these conditions.