UK sisters are world’s oldest siblings

Two sisters have been officially recognized by Guinness World Records as the oldest siblings in the world.

Dorothy Richards is 108 and her sister Marjorie Ruddle is 105.

They were born and brought up in Northampton before attending colleges in London and eventually returning to the East of England to look after the family home when their mother died.

The sisters celebrated their record with a tea party at the Peterborough nursing home where Mrs Ruddle lives.

A spokesperson from Guinness World Records confirmed the sisters had the “highest combined age of two living siblings”.

The aggregate age of the sisters is 213 years, three months, and 27 days.

Marjorie Phyllis Ruddle, a resident at the Park House Nursing Home in Peterborough, was born on 21 April 1907.

Dorothy Richards lives at Whitefriars Care Home in Stamford, Lincolnshire and was born on 15 December 1903 – two days before the Wright Brothers made the world’s first successful powered flight.

‘Quite frail’Mrs Ruddle’s daughter Pat Comber, who attended the party, said she had been amazed by the attention her mother and aunt were attracting.

“Really, all we wanted was to get the two of them together,” she said.

“They haven’t seen each other for three years because my mother has a slight disability and my aunt is quite frail.

“We’re getting my 108-year-old aunt across to the nursing home to spend an hour or so with my mother.

“It will be a treat for both of them,” she added.

The sisters grew up in Northampton where their father ran a men’s shoe factory, GT Hawkins.

After school, Mrs Richards left the city to study at a physical education college in London.

“My mother went to London as well, to the Buckingham Palace College of Domestic Science,” Mrs Comber said.

“But their mother sadly died and their father wanted them home to look after the household, so neither of them actually worked at what they had trained for.” …

BBC NEWS | JUNE 7, 2012

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Vatican publishes guide on how to deal with ‘supernatural phenomena’

They have been closely guarded for more than 30 years, but guidelines on how to deal with divine apparitions of the Virgin Mary and “supernatural phenomena” have now been released by the Vatican.

The “norms” on how the Roman Catholic Church should deal with mystical apparitions were initially drawn up in Latin in 1978 under Pope Paul VI and were intended for strictly internal use.

They shed light on the sorts of apparitions which have inspired the establishment of shrines such as those at Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal, which attract millions of pilgrims a year, many in search of cures for illnesses or other “miracles”.

The guidelines are intended to help bishops “in their difficult task of discerning presumed apparitions, revelations, messages or, more generally, extraordinary phenomena of presumed supernatural origin,” Cardinal William Levada, the American prefect of the CDF, wrote in a preface.

Deciding whether a spiritual revelation is genuine or not is based on its “orientation to Christ Himself,” Cardinal Levada wrote. “If it leads us away from Him, then it certainly does not come from the Holy Spirit.” Determining whether a spiritual revelation is authentic or not is the responsibility of the local bishop, the Vatican said.

He is required to set up a special panel of theologians, psychologists and doctors to judge the “psychological equilibrium and rectitude of moral life” of the person or people reporting the apparition and whether it corresponds with Church doctrine.

The bishop should try to “discern quickly” the authenticity of an apparition, although his judgment could be impeded by “critical scientific investigation”, the Vatican said.

A revelation would be dismissed if there was evidence that the person who had witnessed it was mentally unsound, whether the vision was the product of “collective hysteria” or if there was a suspicion that the whole thing was a fraud concocted for profit.

If the bishop cannot make a decision, the judgment can ultimately be referred to the Pope himself.

The Vatican decided to make the guidelines public, and to translate them into five languages, including English, because elements had leaked out into the public domain over the years. …

via Vatican publishes guide on how to deal with ‘supernatural phenomena’ – Telegraph.

A three metre long giant squid has been found floating off the south coast of Australia

A GIANT squid, one of the most mysterious and least understood of marine creatures, has been found floating off the south coast.

Daily Telegraph fishing columnist Al McGlashan discovered the remains of the ocean titan – so fresh it still carried its ruby red colouring – about 50km off Jervis Bay.

The carcass of the giant squid measured about 3m long, even though most of its tentacles had been bitten off, possibly in a fight to the death with its only known predator, a sperm whale, hundreds of metres below the surface.

“It must have died not that long before we found it because it didn’t smell at all and its colours were still strong – most giant squid remains are smelly and rotten and just off-white by the time someone finds them,” Mr McGlashan said.

Australian Museum squid specialist Mandy Reid said they can grow to 13m. Coincidentally the museum starts its Deep Oceans exhibition featuring a 5m model of a giant squid on June 16.

Dr Reid said the squid had either encountered a sperm whale or had come to the end of its short life and floated to the surface.

“Most squid only live for a year, they grow extremely quickly, but there is also a chance that it has been attacked by a sperm whale,” Dr Reid said.

“Sperm whales are far bigger, heavier and faster in the water – the giant squid are quite slow – so the whale generally wins.”

And finding a giant squid, no matter how fresh, does not mean a calamari feast will follow.

“They taste really bad, the flesh has an intense ammonia smell,” Dr Reid said. “Ammonia makes the squid less dense than seawater, giving it neutral buoyancy so it doesn’t waste energy constantly swimming.” Giant squid may taste appalling to humans, but are a treat for sharks.

As Mr McGlashan filmed the monster from the deep on Friday, a 2.5m blue shark – a slender, open ocean shark known for its intense neon blue colour and long pectoral fins – appeared and could not resist the free feed.

“It hoed into the squid straight away and didn’t care a bit that it was right next to us; it was taking great chunks out of the squid in one bite,” Mr McGlashan said.

via A three metre long giant squid has been found floating off the south coast of Australia | Breaking National News & Australian News | The Courier-Mail.

Stone Age Art Gets Animated

Welcome to Animation Domination, Stone Age style. By about 30,000 years ago, Europeans were using cartoon-like techniques to give observers the impression that lions and other wild beasts were charging across cave walls, two French investigators find.

Ancient artists created graphic stories in caves and illusions of moving animals on rotating bone disks, say archaeologist Marc Azéma of the University of Toulouse–Le Mirail in France and Florent Rivère, an independent artist based in Foix, France.

“Stone Age artists intended to give life to their images,” Azéma says. “The majority of cave drawings show animals in action.”

Flickering torches passed over painted scenes would have heightened onlookers’ sense of seeing live-action stories, the researchers suggest in the June Antiquity.

Azéma and Rivère summarize their 20 years of research on Stone Age animation techniques, much of it previously published in French, in the new paper. They also describe for the first time examples of animation at two French caves, Chauvet and La Baume Latrone.

“Movement and action are indeed represented in cave art in different manners,” remarks archaeologist Jean Clottes, a rock-art specialist who now serves as honorary conservator general of heritage for the French Ministry of Culture. Clottes led a 1998 investigation of Chauvet’s 30,000-year-old cave paintings.

A 10-meter-long Chauvet painting represents a hunting story, Azéma proposes. The story begins by showing several lions, ears back and heads lowered, stalking prey. Mammoths and other animals appear nearby. In a second section of the painting, a pride of 16 lions, some drawn smaller than the rest to appear farther away, lunge toward fleeing bison.

Stone Age artists meant to depict animal movement in such scenes, Azéma says. An eight-legged bison at Chauvet, for example, resulted from superimposing two images of the creature in different stances to create the appearance of running.

In France, 53 figures in 12 caves superimpose two or more images to represent running, head tossing and tail shaking. At the famous Lascaux Cave, 20 painted animals display multiple heads, legs or tails.

A carving on an animal bone from another Stone Age cave in France depicts three freeze-frame images of a running lion, another way to represent motion. …

via Stone Age Art Gets Animated – Science News.

Depression: When the brain’s seat of guilt malfunctions, and why some people blame themselves for everything

Crushing guilt is a common symptom of depression, an observation that dates back to Sigmund Freud. Now, a new study finds a communication breakdown between two guilt-associated brain regions in people who have had depression. This so-called “decoupling” of the regions may be why depressed people take small faux pas as evidence that they are complete failures.

“If brain areas don’t communicate well, that would explain why you have the tendency to blame yourself for everything and not be able to tie that into specifics,” study researcher Roland Zahn, a neruoscientist at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience.

Zahn and his colleagues focused their research on the subgenual cingulated cortex and its adjacent septal region, a region deep in the brain that has been linked to feelings of guilt. Previous studies have found abnormalities in this region, dubbed the SCSR, in people with depression.

… The resulting scans showed that while the SCSR and the anterior temporal lobe activate together in both guilt and indignation in healthy brains, the brains of the once-depressed individuals functioned quite differently. During feelings of indignation, the SCSR-anterior temporal lobe linkage worked fine. But during feelings of guilt, the regions failed to sync up so neatly.

Participants who were most prone to blame themselves for everything showed the greatest communication gaps between these regions, Zahn and his colleagues reported on June 4 in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry. Importantly, once-depressed participants didn’t notice feeling any differently when they read the guilt and indignation sentences, suggesting that this breakdown in communication is not felt consciously.

The researchers can’t yet say if pre-existing brain problems cause the communication breakdown, or if the depression itself causes this troubling pattern. Fortunately, Zahn said, the coupling of the SCSR and the anterior temporal lobe is known to be influenced by learning.

“It’s likely to be the sign of something that happened because of learned experiences, plus, of course, biology,” Zahn said.

That means there is hope that people prone to depression could learn to overcome their guilty tendencies. Zahn and his colleagues are now collaborating with Jorge Moll, a scientist at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education in Rio de Janeiro, to try to train people’s brains. The researchers are developing a program that will allow people to watch their brain activities in real time. If it works, patients will see their brain activation change as they try to alter their emotions. That feedback is important, given that once-depressed participants don’t consciously realize that they’re turning social molehills into mountains of self-blame.

“It’s something in the brain activation that you don’t have conscious access to,” Zahn said.

via Why do some people blame themselves for everything? | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

Huge Peru Tomb Found With 80 Bodies, Ring of Babies

Arranged in the fetal position, this skeleton is among some 80 bodies discovered this spring in a vast Peruvian tomb—the largest yet found at the ancient site of Pachacamac. Buried a thousand years ago with wooden “false heads,” the now decayed mummies were unearthed within a perimeter of infant human remains.

Once covered by a thatch roof, the tomb may have been a final resting place for diseased pilgrims drawn by promises of miracle cures, reports a team led by archaeologist Peter Eeckhout of Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

As for the babies, Eeckhout doesn’t rule out that they may have been sacrificed. It’s just one more riddle of the Ychsma (pronounced EESH-MA)—the little-understood pre-Inca people who built their largest known city at Pachacamac, he said.

via Pictures: Huge Peru Tomb Found With 80 Bodies, Ring of Babies.

A team of archaeologists from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) has discovered a spectacular tomb containing more than eighty individuals of different ages. This discovery – provisionally dated to around 1000 years ago – was made at the site of Pachacamac, which is currently under review for UNESCO

Pachacamac, situated on the Pacific coast about thirty kilometres from Lima, is one of the largest Prehispanic sites in South America. Professor Peter Eeckhout – under the auspices of the ULB – has been carrying out fieldwork at the site for the past 20 years. The 2012 season resulted in some particularly remarkable discoveries.

The Ychsma Project team undertook to record and excavate a series of Inca storage facilities (15th-16th c. AD), as well as a more ancient cemetery which had been detected during exploratory work in 2004.

It was here – directly in front of the Temple of Pachacamac – that the most important discovery was made. A scatter of later period burials was found to conceal an enormous burial chamber 20 metres long ; miraculously, it had survived the pillaging of the colonial period – which was particularly intensive on this site – and was completely intact.

The tomb is oval in outline, excavated into the earth and covered with a roof of reeds supported by carved and shaped tree trunks. A dozen newborn babies and infants were distributed around the perimeter, their heads oriented towards the tomb. The main chamber was seperated into two sections, separated by a wall of mud bricks which served as a base for yet more burials.

Inside the chambers, the archaeologists uncovered the remains of more than 70 skeletons and mummies (many of which still retained their wrappings), all in the characteristic fœtal position. The burials represented both sexes and all ages, and were often accompanied by offrenda including ceramic vessels, animals (dogs, guinea pigs), copper and gold alloy artefacts, masks (or ‘false heads’) in painted wood, calabashes, etc. These items are currently under restoration and analysis. Babies and very young infants were particularly common.

The team’s group of physical anthropologists, under the direction of Dr Lawrence Owens (University
of London), have posited the possibility of a genetic relationship between many of the individuals, on the basis of certain morphological traits recorded in the skeletons. Certain of the individuals suffered mortal injuries, physical trauma or serious illness.

Previous work by the Ychsma Project has revealed the extensive presence of disease in the Pachacamac skeletal population, leading to the suggestion that the affected individuals had, as testified by Inca sources, travelled to the site in search of a cure: a form of Prehispanic Lourdes.

Professor Eeckhout and his colleagues are currently carrying out laboratory analyses aimed at answering numerous questions that have arisen concerning this discovery, and how to contextualise it within the wider context of the site and the period(s) in question. Were the infants sacrificed ? Were the bodies all interred at the same time as a form of communal burial, or was the chamber reused over longer periods of time like some sort of crypt? Did the individuals come from Pachacamac or further afield? Did they belong to the same family or larger kinship group ? What was their cause of death…?

The artefacts found in the tomb date it stylistically to around 1000 AD, although this is yet to be confirmed radiometrically. The importance of the site cannot be overstated: Pachacamac is a candidate for inclusion on the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. The Ychsma Project benefits from the support of the ULB’s Centre for Archaeological and Heritage Research, the ULB Foundation, and from the National Fund for Scientific Research.

via alphagalileo.org

Piccard sets world record: Giant solar plane completes Spain-Morocco flight

A solar-powered plane has landed in Morocco after flying from Spain, completing the second leg of its pioneering journey.

Pilot Bertrand Piccard landed the Solar Impulse in Rabat – 19 hours after taking off from Madrid.

The plane – the size of a jumbo jet – was powered by 12,000 solar cells turning four electrical motors.

The 2,500km-trip (1,550 miles), begun in Switzerland in May, is described as a rehearsal for a world tour in 2014 .

Made of carbon fibre, the plane is the size of an Airbus A340 but only weighs as much as an average family car, according to its creators.

‘Silent giant’

People were able to follow the aircraft’s flight progress via a virtual dashboard on Solar Impulse’s website, which showed the plane’s battery status, altitude and speed.

Mr Piccard was also posting live updates of his journey on Twitter (@bertrandpiccard). In one of his tweets, the former balloonist described the “great feeling” of gliding across southern European skies with solar-powered engines.

The Solar Impulse project was launched in 2003 by Mr Piccard and Swiss pilot Andre Boschberg who flew the first leg of the journey from Switzerland to Madrid in late May.

The aircraft made history in July 2010 when it became the first manned solar plane to complete a 26-hour nonstop flight.

The landmark flight proved that the sun’s energy was enough to keep the plane in the air, even at night.

The organisers now hope to go on a round-the-world tour with an improved Solar Impulse model in 2014.

via BBC News – Giant solar plane completes Spain-Morocco flight.

The Big Machine That Could Lead to Fusion-Powered Spaceships

The thrusters we’ve used to visit the moon are no good for traveling to Mars—they simply can’t carry enough fuel. But one of the new ways NASA is exploring for sending astronauts into deep space just got a boost.

Jason Cassibry, an engineer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, thinks nuclear power may be the answer. “If you took 1 kilogram of fusion fuel and burned it, it would exceed the energy of 1 kilogram of petroleum by at least a million times,” he says. Cassibry estimates that 30 to 40 years from now pulsed-fusion-propulsion systems—which would use small nuclear explosions to generate thrust—could carry humans on a round-trip journey to Mars in just six months, as opposed to two or three years in a rocket-based craft.

Yes, viable fusion technology has always seemed 5 or 10 or 50 years away. And the concept of pulsed-fusion propulsion is several decades old but still speculative—it’s low on NASA’s “Technology Readiness” scale. But that may change soon: The University of Alabama recently acquired a powerful new machine that will enable researchers to put pulsed-fusion ideas to the test.

“There’ve been a lot of papers, a lot of theory, but these will be the first laboratory experiments,” says Robert Adams, an advanced propulsion technologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who is working with Cassibry to begin developing pulsed-fusion technologies. “Everything we’ve done so far shows that there are no real show-stoppers when it comes to pulsed-fusion propulsion. It is orders of magnitude better than anything that’s out there now. It’s really important at this point that we stop talking about it and start testing.” …

Cassibry imagines attaching a large reactor on the back of a human transport vessel. Similar to how the piston of a car compresses fuel and air in the engine, the reactor would use electrical and magnetic currents to compress hydrogen gas. That compression raises temperatures within the reactor up to 100 million degrees C—hot enough to strip the electrons off of hydrogen atoms, create a plasma, and fuse two hydrogen nuclei together. In the process of fusing, the atoms release more energy, which keeps the reactor hot and causes more hydrogen to fuse and release more energy. (These reactions occur about 10 times per second, which is why it’s “pulsed.”) A nozzle in the reactor would allow some of the plasma to rush outward and propel the spacecraft forward.

Cassibry says the acceleration of such a thruster wouldn’t pin an astronaut to the back of his seat. During shuttle liftoff, rocket boosters generate a thrust of about 32 million newtons. In contrast, the pulsed-fusion system would generate an estimated 10,000 newtons of thrust. But rocket fuel burns out quickly while pulsed-fusion systems could keep going at a “slow” but steady 24 miles per second. That’s about five times faster than a shuttle drifting around in Earth orbit….

via The Big Machine That Could Lead to Fusion-Powered Spaceships – Popular Mechanics.