(Almoust) Everything Is Possible

Man survives Atomic bomb ... twice!

2009-07-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

It seems almost improper to suggest that fortune was smiling on Tsutomu Yamaguchi in the dying days of the second world war.

On 6 August 1945, he was in Hiroshima, preparing to return home from a business trip when the American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city. Yamaguchi lived, while 140,000 other people who were in the city that morning died, some in an agonising instant, others many months later.

Burned and barely able to comprehend what had happened - only that he had witnessed a bomb unlike any used before - Yamaguchi spent a fitful night in an air raid shelter before returning home the following day.

That home, 180 miles to the west, was Nagasaki. His arrival came the day before it was devastated by a second US atomic bomb on 9 August.

In a barely conceivable course of events, he had twice been perilously close to nuclear ground zero; and both times he had lived. More than 70,000 other residents of Nagasaki were not so lucky.

More than 60 years later, the 93-year-old became the first and only known survivor of both attacks yesterday to win official recognition from Japanese authorities.

While other survivors died prematurely from cancer and liver disease caused by their exposure to radiation, Yamaguchi remains in relatively good health apart from near-deafness in one ear and complaints that his legs are "growing weak".

Japanese records show dozens of people experienced the blast in Hiroshima only to be exposed to "residual radiation" in Nagasaki three days later. But Yamaguchi is the first to have been at ground zero when both explosions occurred.

According to a newspaper interview Yamaguchi gave on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Pacific war, he had spent the conflict designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a wartime zaibatsu, or conglomerate, whose shipyards dominated the Nagasaki skyline.

After a three-month stint at the firm's yards in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi and two colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, prepared to return to Nagasaki on 7 August, 1945. The day before, they woke early, collected their belongings and prepared for the train journey west.

On the way to the station they became separated after Yamaguchi realised he had left his personal seal in the office.

He remembers hearing the Enola Gay circling above, but thought nothing of it: Hiroshima was an important wartime industrial base, and the sound of circling planes had become a fact of life.

Within seconds he had been knocked to his feet by the force of the blast as "Little Boy" detonated 580 metres above central Hiroshima just after 8.15 am, announcing its arrival with a blinding flash followed by a deafening boom. As he stumbled to the train station the next day, Yamaguchi witnessed the destruction and carnage left by the bomber's 13-kiloton payload.

The following day, his burns swathed in bandages, Yamaguchi reported for work in Nagasaki, like Hiroshima an important industrial and military base.

At 11.02 on 9 August, as his boss reportedly questioned his sanity for believing that a single bomb could destroy a city the size of Hiroshima, a 25-kiloton plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, throwing Yamaguchi to the ground.

He, his wife and baby son survived and spent the following week in a shelter near what was left of their home. His son has since died of cancer aged 59.

After the war Yamaguchi worked for the US occupation authorities, became a teacher and eventually returned to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Yamaguchi was quoted by the Mainichi newspaper. "My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," he said.

As a registered survivor of the Nagasaki bombing, Yamaguchi has owned a pale violet copy of the Atomic Bomb Victim Health Handbook since 1957, entitling him to monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs. More than 260,000 others are similarly covered.

Yamaguchi's handbook confirmed he was within a three-kilometre radius of ground zero in both cities, but the reference to Hiroshima was deleted when he renewed it at Nagasaki city hall in 1960.

Officials refused to recognise Yamaguchi's special status because, they said, it would not affect his medical and welfare entitlements, but relented after he filed another request earlier this year.

"As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognised as a survivor of atomic bombings," Toshiro Miyamoto, a Nagasaki city official, told the Associated Press. "It's such an unfortunate case, but it is possible there are more like him."

The Youngest Smoker

2009-07-02T03:07:00.000-07:00

This is Liang Liang, an ordinary 2.5 years old child who lives in China. Liang Liang smokes in a pack of cigarettes daily. As it turned out, his parents gave him the first cigarette at age 1.5 to relieve pain.

Liang Liang was born with hernia and it was dangerous to operate it his its infancy. The boy suffered from severe pain and to distract him from the anguish, the father gave him a smoke. Over time, Liang Liang got addicted to smoking. Now the parents can't force him to stop smoking.

The world's youngest smoker now lives in Tianjin. This is a sad situation. I read online many stories covering the news about the youngest smoker. However, none of them went any further reporting if any doctor is caring for this child. This is indeed dangerous for this child and hopefully the Chinese doctors or the government may take measures to help this young child to stop smoking.

In this photo you can see LiangLiang holding a cigarette in his hand. The photo is used from Vokrug Sveta journal.

The Guinness Book of World Records is very unlikely and should not accept this odd case as a world youngest smoker record. In the past The Guinness Book of World Records has rightfully declined similar claims saying they promote bad habit. In this case, this indeed promotes the bad habit of smoking at an extraordinarily young age.

The Falkirk Wheel

2009-06-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Falkirk Wheel is a rotating boat lift connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. It is named after the nearby town of Falkirk in central Scotland. The difference in the levels of the two canals at the wheel is 24 metres (79 ft).

The original concept of a wheel to act as a boat lift actually dates back to 19th Century Europe, but it was first seriously considered by British Waterways as a solution for Falkirk in 1994. Dundee Architects, Nicoll Russell Studios presented a Ferris Wheel type design that was used to secure Millennium Commission Funding for the Project. This outline design was then reappraised to create a functional lift that could raise and lower boats swiftly whilst celebrating the reconnection of the two historic canals with a structure worthy of a new millennium.Ideas and concepts were numerous, and varied from rolling eggs to tilting tanks, giant see-saw to overhead monorails and included some complex counterbalanced structures. The final outcome was The Falkirk Wheel, which successfully combines both function and design, creating a stunning piece of working sculpture.

The unique shape of the structure is claimed to have been inspired by various sources, both manmade and natural, such as a Celtic double headed spear, a vast turning propeller of a Clydebank built ship, the ribcage of a whale or the spine of a fish. The canal network as a ‘backbone’ connecting Scotland, east to west seems appropriate and there a true beauty in the repetitive sweeping shapes of the aqueduct. The arches over the aqueduct also add to the drama of the structure, forming a complete circle with the reflection in the canal to extend the feeling of the tunnel. The fact the canal literally ends in mid air creates a thrilling sense of sailing off the edge in to the spectacular scenery of the horizon.

The various parts of The Falkirk Wheel were actually constructed and assembled, like one giant Meccano set, at Butterley Engineering’s Steelworks in Derbyshire. A team there carefully assembled the 1,200 tonnes of steel, painstakingly fitting the pieces together to an accuracy of just 10 mm to ensure a perfect final fit.In the summer of 2001, the structure was then dismantled and transported on 35 lorry loads to Falkirk, before all being bolted back together again on the ground, and finally lifted by crane in five large sections into position. The total 600 tonne weight of the water and boat filled gondolas imposes immense and constantly changing stresses on the structure as it turns around the central spine. Normal welded joints of steel would be susceptible to fatigue induced by these stresses, so to make the structure more robust, the steel sections were bolted together. Over 15,000 bolts were matched with 45,000 bolt holes, and each bolt was hand tightened.

The wheel, which has an overall diameter of 35 metres (110 ft), consists of two opposing arms which extend 15 metres beyond the central axle, and which take the shape of a Celtic-inspired, double-headed axe. Two sets of these axe-shaped arms are attached about 25 metres (82 ft) apart to a 3.5 metres (11 ft) diameter axle. Two diametrically opposed water-filled caissons, each with a capacity of 80,000 imperial gallons (360,000 l, 96,000 US gal), are fitted between the ends of the arms.

These caissons always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their combined capacity of 600 tonnes (590 LT, 660 ST) of floating canal barges as, according to Archimedes' principle, floating objects displace their own weight in water, so when the boat enters, the amount of water leaving the caisson weighs exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in five and a half minutes while using very little power. It takes just 22.5 kilowatts (30.2 hp) to power the electric motors, which consume just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (5.4 MJ) of energy in four minutes, roughly the same as boiling eight kettles of water.

The wheel is the only rotating boat lift of its kind in the world, and is regarded as an engineering landmark for Scotland. The United Kingdom has one other boat lift: the Anderton boat lift in Cheshire. The Falkirk Wheel is an improvement on the Anderton boat lift and makes use of the same original principle: two balanced tanks, one going up and the other going down, however, the rotational mechanism is entirely unique to the Falkirk Wheel.

Since 2007 the Falkirk Wheel has featured on the obverse of the new series of £50 notes issued by the Bank of Scotland. The series of notes commemorates Scottish engineering achivements with illustrations of bridges in Scotland such as the Glenfinnan Viaduct and the Forth Rail Bridge.

The Falkirk Wheel lies at the end of a reinforced concrete aqueduct that connects, via the Roughcastle tunnel and a double staircase lock, to the Union Canal. Boats entering the Wheel’s upper gondola are lowered, along with the water that they float in, to the basin below. At the same time, an equal weight rises up, lifted in the other gondola. This works on the Archimedes principle of displacement. That is, the mass of the boat sailing into the gondola will displace an exactly proportional volume of water so that the final combination of ‘boat plus water’ balances the original total mass.

Each gondola runs on small wheels that fit into a single curved rail fixed on the inner edge of the opening on each arm. In theory, this should be sufficient to ensure that they always remain horizontal, but any friction or sudden movement could cause the gondola to stick or tilt. To ensure that this could never happen and that the water and boats always remain perfectly level throughout the whole cycle, a series of linked cogs acts as a back up.

Hidden at each end, behind the arm nearest the aqueduct, are two 8m diameter cogs to which one end of each gondola is attached. A third, exactly equivalent sized cog is in the centre, attached to the main fixed upright. Two smaller cogs are fitted in the spaces between, with each cog having teeth that fit into the adjacent cog and push against each other, turning around the one fixed central one. The two gondolas, being attached to the outer cogs, will therefore turn at precisely the same speed, but in the opposite direction to the Wheel.

Given the precise balancing of the gondolas and this simple but clever system of cogs, a very small amount of energy is actually then required to turn the Wheel. In fact, it is a group of ten hydraulic motors located within the central spine that provide the small amount, just 1.5kw, of electricity to turn it.

The Falkirk Wheel cost £17.5 million, and the restoration project as a whole cost £84.5 million (of which £32 million came from National Lottery funds).

The Secret Of Numbers

2009-05-31T10:21:00.000-07:00

Numbers are everywhere. In a sense, we are what we can count, and our computerised civilisation counts almost everything. Without numbers, it would simply cease to exist.Sometimes the numbers that surround us are simple records, obvious to all: figures that indicate taxes due, the stock market index or the balance in our bank accounts for example. But other numbers - usually hidden in the ceaseless flow of computer data - interact and control. The numbers that quietly manage fuel economy in a car engine save us money; the hundreds of thousands of numbers involved in the navigation of a jetliner, guide it through crowded skies to land safely at journey's end. Numbers can even create a world of their own: when you put on a virtual reality headset and gallop off on your virtual horse to rescue a virtual damsel from a virtual dragon, you are playing out a drama of numbers. Every item of virtual scenery exists as a list of numbers stored in a computer. As you move, the program performs thousands of calculations, from which it decides what images to send each eye to maintain the illusion. Numbers probably arose when ancient civilisations were becoming organised thousands of years ago. One theory is that people developed symbols before they learnt to count. A king would keep tabs on what he owned - his livestock and riches - by using clay tokens.

Special Numbers

All men and women are born equal, but the same does not apply to numbers. Some have magical qualities that are revered by mathematicians almost as guiding forces of nature. The rest are just, well, numbers.

Zero
For a long time people didn't think of zero as a number. Numbers are used to count things, and you can't count no things.
But the decimal system - which evolved between 3000 BC and AD 1000 - needed a symbol for "no tens", "no hundreds" and so on. It was natural to ask what that 0 on its own meant. Zero is the only number for which the operation of division makes no sense.

Pi (p)
The question "How long is the circumference of a circle of one unit diameter?" looks simple, but the answer led to a new kind of number - p, or 3.141592653689... It has been proved that the digits, which are known to billions of decimal places, never repeat the same pattern. Nor can p be represented by a fraction or expressed in simple algebraic form. That is why p is known as a transcendental number.

e ip + 1 = 0

This is one of the most awe inspiring equations there is. It elegantly demonstrates the connection between those five most important numbers 1,0,e,i and p.

The square root of minus one
In around 1500 mathematicians began to wonder what would happen if negative numbers were allowed a square root (the problem being that any number when multiplied by itself gives a positive number). They introduced a new kind of number, called an "imaginary" number, to show that it was something different from conventional, "real" numbers. By 1750 the symbol I had been introduced to denote the square root of minus one. Numbers like 2 + 5i were called complex numbers - meaning that they had two kinds of numbers, and not that they were incredibly complicated. Just as there had been with 0, there was a huge row about i. Only when it was clear I had importance in relation to fluids and electricity did everyone agree it was valid.

Prime numbers
Primes are intriguing because they show no obvious pattern. A non-prime number (like six) is said to be composite; it has more than one factor (two and three). A prime - 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 - can only be cleanly divided by one and itself. In 1640 Pierre de Fermat said he'd found a way of predicting prime numbers, with 2n+1, where n is a power of two. For the first five values of n, the outcomes - 3, 5, 17, 257, 65537 - are all primes. But the sixth (264+1) is not: it equals 641 x 6700417. No further prime Fermat numbers have been found.

e - the natural number
Suppose you start with £1 and invest it at an annual interest rate of 100 per cent for a year. At the end of the year you will have £2-your original £1 plus £1 interest. If the interest is 50 per cent every six months, compound, your total rate of interest is still 100 per cent, but you get £2.25 (£1 + 50p + 75p). If the same total rate of interest is compounded over ever-shorter periods, the amount you end up with after a year gets closer and closer to £2.7182818... This number - called e - is the base of natural logarithms. Like p it is not an exact fraction.

Great mathematical mysteries

There's no limit to theoretical puzzles that mathematicians would like to solve. Here are three of the most famous.

Fermat's Last Theorem
This 356-year-old problem concerns an extension of the idea of Pythagorean triples. These are numbers that can be represented on the sides of a right - angled triangle. Remember "the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides"? (The hypotenuse is the longest side, opposite the right angle.) Three, four and five form a right-angled triangle, since 32 + 42 = 52. Fermat wondered if there were similar numbers for cubes too. He got nowhere and decided there must be a reason for this. In the margin of his copy of an ancient Greek text, the Arithmetica by Diophantus, he made the most famous note in the history of mathematics: "To resolve a cube into the sum of two cubes, a fourth power into two fourth powers, or any power higher than the second into two of the same kind, is impossible; have found a remarkable proof of this. The margin is too small to contain it." His "remarkable proof" has never been found and experts generally believe that whatever he had in mind must have contained an error. A British mathematician, Andrew Wiles, tackled the problem in a series of lectures in Cambridge last year. He kept secret the fact that he had a proof until the last lecture.
When he announced the proof, there was a sudden ,silence; then the entire room burst into spontaneous applause. In fact, despite the excitement when Wiles made his announcement last year, an examination of his proof has since turned up a few errors Most of these have been repaired and only one still causing concern Wiles remains confident that his ideas will work.

Goldbach's conjecture
There are many problems concerning prime numbers. One of the most famous is -whether every even number bigger than two is a sum of two primes. Christian Goldbach was an amateur mathematician of the 18th century. He asked his friend the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler this question. Euler couldn't solve it and nor has anybody since.

Riemann's hypothesis
This is one of the most outstanding problems - if not the problem - in mathematics. In the 18th century Bernhard Riemann came up with the infinite sum 1/1s + 1/2s + 1/3s.... He hypothesised that it equals zero for certain values of S when S is a complex number (one with an imaginary component), only when the real part is 1/2. ("Trivial" zeros also arise when S is a negative even number.) This idea has deep connections with the distribution of prime numbers; it is thought that a solution would unlock a new world of mathematical secrets.

Magic Sequences

In 1202 Leonardo of Pisa (later dubbed Fibonacci) started the trend in number theory for spotting strange sequences. Fibonacci numbers: a pair of rabbits produce two young a year. The next year the same thing. The year after that the same pair and its first two young (now mature) produce a pair each (two pairs). The number of pairs of rabbits follows the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... where each number is the sum of the two before it. Fibonacci numbers have curious patterns, which have been found repeated in nature. Of three consecutive numbers - 5, 8, 13, - the product of the outer two differs from the square of the inner one by one (5 x 13 = 65; 82 = 64). "Lucky" numbers are obtained by a process of repeated "sieving". First you remove every second number to give the odd numbers. That sieving was based on two; the next is based on three. Every third number is removed to get 1, 3, 7, 9, 13, 15... In this evolving sequence, the next number is seven, so you remove every seventh number, and so on. The remaining numbers (1, 3, 7, 9, 13, 15, 21...) are called lucky. Their main mathematical significance is that they appear to share several properties with prime numbers: they come along about as often and as irregularly.

Mystery sequence: one of the most frustrating problems in number theory concerns a different kind of sequence. Think of a number: say seven. As it's odd multiply by three and add one; 22 is even, so divide by two (11). Repeat indefinitely.

The sequence starts 7, 22, 11, 34, 17, 52... then settles down: 8, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1... It looks like you always end up with a repeating cycle, but nobody knows for sure. If you think it's obvious that such a sequence will get down to one and then repeat, try a variation in which you treble odd numbers and then subtract one. Start with 17 and see what happens.

The evolution of numbers

The evolution of numbers Most early number symbols started as variations on I, II, III. Babylonian numbers (circa 200 BC) were made on pieces of wet clay with the end of a stick. For larger numbers they invented a shape for the number ten, and used multiples of that for 20, 30 and soon, till 60, which was represented by the symbol for 1, and 120 by 2, etc. Modern numerical notation is quite different. Instead of repeating the same stroke to denote larger numbers, we use a whole series of different symbols. And instead of having a distinct symbol for ten and multiples of ten, we use those same symbols (1 to 9) plus a new one (0). It is position that denotes whether a digit is a unit, ten, hundred or thousand, and so on. This is how the so-called "base ten" or decimal system works. The Mayans, who lived in South America around AD 1000, worked to base 20. In their system the symbols equivalent to our 525 would mean (5 x 20 x 20) + (2 x 20) + (5 x 1), which is 2,045 in our notation. The numerical base a society uses affects which numbers are regarded significant. Cricket fans always get upset when a batsman scores 49 and then is out, because he has just missed a half-century. But this is a decimalist way of viewing the situation. If the Mayans had played cricket, that number of runs would be represented by 29. For aliens on the planet Silimidon, where they use base seven, an innings of 49 is a century: (1 x 7 x 7) + (0 x 7) + (0 x 1) = 49.

The Toilet-Shaped House

2009-05-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Toilet-Shaped House has a very unique design, and was built by Sim Jae-duck, the chairman of the organizing committee of the Inaugural General Assembly of the World Toilet Association, and he hopes his toilet house will highlight the global need for better sanitation.. The Toilet-Shaped house is in fact named Haewoojae, which signifies in Korean “a place of sanctuary where one can solve one’s worries“. Sim Jae-duck will open what is billed as the world’s one and only toilet house on November 11 to mark the launch of his World Toilet Association.

The steel, white concrete and glass house, with a symbolic opening in the roof, will be ready to receive visitors next month, said the World Toilet Association in a statement. The house is a 419sq m structure with two bedrooms, two guestrooms and other rooms, the two-storey house of course features three deluxe toilets. Unlike the giant “toilet” in which they are located, they will not be see-through affairs. If you would like to visit this house you can go to Sim Jae-duck native city of Suweon, 40km south of Seoul.

The 4,508-sq-foot structure features four deluxe toilets—one of which includes a misting device that helps users "feel more secure" and electronic motion sensors that lift and lower the lid when needed. And if that wasn't hilarious enough, Sim Jae-duck is letting patrons rent the house for an absurd $50,000 a day.
The steel, white concrete and glass house, with a symbolic opening in the roof, will be ready to receive visitors next month, said the World Toilet Association in a statement.

"Among its many amenities, the house features four deluxe toilets," said the group, started in South Korea and dedicated to providing clean sanitation to the more than 2 billion people who live without toilets.The home has a showcase bathroom located in its centre. Other toilets have features that range from elegant fittings to the latest in water conservation devices.

The Final Total Eclipse

2009-05-28T00:22:00.000-07:00

If there truly is some extraterrestrial Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it would undoubtedly list a total solar eclipse as one of the sights to see while taking a break from probing Earth's natives. Total solar eclipses, called totality for short, are pretty rare here on Earth; a casual observer might see only one or two during their lifetime.

Since the Earth is the only planet we have ever known, we can't really appreciate how truly lucky we are. The odds of the size of a planet's moon exactly matching the apparent size of its sun are pretty low. If the moon is too large, it blocks the majestic solar corona visible during totality. If it is too small, then all solar eclipses would be annular, allowing a ring of the sun's light to pass . The "Goldilocks" combination of Moon and Sun sizes on Earth makes totality possible, and unique in our solar system.

But alas, this beautiful phenomenon is ephemeral, at least in the geologic sense. The lunar disc shrinks slightly every year as the Moon recedes from the Earth; the chance of a total solar eclipse decreases correspondingly. Somewhere near 1 billion years from now, the last total solar eclipse will grace whatever residents of Earth there may be.

Unless you're planning on living forever, 1 billion years probably seems safely tucked away into the future. So much so, perhaps that it may be entirely irrelevant. But, as the Moon moves further away, the length of a day here on Earth increases by about half a second each year. So every few years, the official arbiters of time at the Greenwich Royal Observatory add a leap second to our day.

This effect, while small during a human lifespan, has dramatically increased the length of the day over geologic time. When the moon was first formed, an Earth day was approximately 6 hours. By the time dinosaurs roamed Pangea, a day had reached 21 hours. The ultimate fate of the length of a day is that it will match that of a month at about 47 days. At that point, the Moon will hang suspended over a single point on the Earth for all time. But again, don't panic! This is predicted to occur sometime long after the Earth and Moon have been utterly destroyed by the red-giant phase of our sun.

Strangely enough, the Moon is the cause of its own diminution in our sky. The pull of the Moon's gravity causes tides here on Earth; that much we all know. But, because the Earth rotates more rapidly than the Moon travels in its orbit, that tidal bulge pulls the Moon forward ever so slightly. This constant extra force accelerates the Moon, which forces it further away from the Earth.

So how fast is the Moon pulling way? About 3.8 cm/year right now. One of the great successes of Apollo lunar science was to place a series of corner-cubic laser reflectors on the surface of the Moon. Scientists back on Earth then fire laser beams at those reflectors through carefully aimed telescopes. The travel time between firing and receiving the return signal gives the distance of the Moon accurate to about 1 cm. Scientists are working on improving this accuracy to around 1 mm.

Historically, the Moon did not recede so quickly. We know this because certain species of coral have daily growth patterns and are buried by annual loads of sediment called rhythmites. So, by counting the growth rings of the coral buried in one year of sediment, geologists have calculated the length of the day as far back as 600 million years or so. Based on these findings, we know that the Moon has been receding at about 2 cm/year on average. It just so happens that the current orientation of the Earth's continents is almost optimal for accelerating the Moon.

If you missed the opportunity to catch that last total eclipse, don't worry, there will be plenty more for the next few hundred million years. And when you do witness an eclipse (hopefully not while staring directly at it) perhaps you can ponder the staggering odds which have brought us all this amazing, and temporary, event.

The Mysterious Sailing Stones

2009-05-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

One of the most famous landmarks in the southwestern United States is Death Valley. This vast desert is also home to one of the greatest mysteries of the ages.

In an area known as the "Racetrack playa" in Death Valley near the western border of Arizona, there are an amazingly large number of stones, ranging in size from mere pebbles to half ton boulders that regularly travel by themselves and no one has ever been able to explain why!

These huge stones move of their own volition, leaving miles of zig-zagged, curved and straight tracks that have continued to baffle the scientific community for decades. As you can see by the photos, the hardened surface of the landscape is marbled with the trails of water rivulets that would make concealing evidence of outside interference impossible. So the big question is, just how DO these mysterious stones move?
Early studies of the Sailing Stones began when geologists Allen Agnew and Jim McAllister mapped the area and noted the tracks left by the boulders in 1948. After that, these Sailing Stones were forgotten or ignored by scientists for two decades.
Then, in 1968, two scientists from the Institute of Technology in California conducted an ambitious seven year study tracking the stones that involved painstakingly mapping their movements by noting their positions at regular intervals. Although their data and their methods of observation were sound and well documented, their conclusions were found to be faulty.

In their report, the two geologists wrote that "the wind is able to pick up the rocks and start them moving. They push aside the very slippery mud and slide along on the firm surface." According to Sharp and Carey, surface water would freeze overnight, creating a slippery surface upon which the rocks were propelled. Admittedly, during the rainy season the water can flood the surface of the "playa" rather quickly, but the volume and the strength of the water current would simply not be enough to provide sufficient propulsion.As I mentioned earlier, Carey and Sharp maintained that the rocks would sometimes zig-zag across the desert floor in these erratic patterns because of shifting winds. Even at first glance, this theory is flimsy at best.Yet amazingly, it was widely accepted until 1991, when yet another geologist studied the enigmatic stones and brought his students along to test the validity of the earlier findings.This time, John Reid from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and a group of students converged on the stones en masse, during a time where the weather conditions matched those stated in the 1968 study. Reid and his students slid in the mud quite easily but they attempted as a group to push, shove and/or pull the rocks with ropes. Yet nothing could budge them and despite their valiant efforts, the rocks remained stubbornly immobile."The Tristan Effect" is yet another theory that has recently been suggested. The University of Zurich conducted research dealing with the actual physical properties of the rocks themselves. Their theory maintains that the air within the porous interior of the rocks compresses during the sub-zero nights.The next day, the intense desert heat and sun causes the air inside to once again expand and thus propel the rocks along their paths. However, this writer doubts the validity of the theory.I highly doubt that anything short of an explosion would cause enough sudden changes in air pressure surrounding the rocks to cause them to move. If that were the case, I would think the rocks would become unstable due to these repeated changes of internal pressure and eventually crumble.

Even now, the scientific community is still investigating and trying to discover just how these rocks move. Currently, they are being tracked with GPS devices and satellite tracking. It would also be interesting to discover if time lapse photography or video surveillance cameras could shed light on their movements.Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but I continue to find it intriguing that these Sailing Stones happen to be in a reasonably close proximity to the famed Roswell Area 51. Being interested in ancient ley lines and their alignments with heightened strengths of lines in the magnetic field of our planet, I can't help but think there may be a connection.For now, I suppose, our planet and these fascinating Sailing Stones will simply have to continue to mystify, enchant and baffle us.

Volkswagen Autostadt Car Tower in Germany

2009-05-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

Volkswagen's Autotürme, or car towers, are distinguishing features of the Autostadt. The transparent cylindrical buildings rise 48 meters or 150 feet above the grounds, and they're linked by a fully automated delivery system to both the Volkswagen factory and the KundenCenter (where VW customers pick up their new cars).

The car towers work like giant vending machines: As a new car arrives from the factory, it's transported by robot to an empty storage slot in one of the towers; when a customer shows up to collect the car, the same robotic picking system fetches the vehicle, brings it down to ground level, and transfers it to the KundenCenter in the next building. Each tower holds up to 400 cars on 20 levels and can process a car every 45 seconds during peak times.

In the past, tourists weren't allowed inside the towers for safety reasons, but a Car Tower Discovery attraction now makes the towers accessible to anyone who can spare 15 minutes and a handful of euros. Visitors enter a six-person glass box and are carried to the top story of a car tower by the same robotic lift that's used for automobiles.

Woman has 200 orgasms a day

2009-05-22T13:38:00.000-07:00

PRETTY Sarah Carmen is a 200-a-day orgasm girl who gets good, good, GOOD vibrations from almost anything.

The rumble of a train on the tracks, the purr of a hairdryer, the rhythmic drone of a photo-copier are all enough to make her go oh oh oh, ahhhhh.

She had FIVE orgasms during our 40-minute interview. But I can't take the credit-it was just talking about her sex life that set her off.

Sarah, 24, suffers from Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), which increases blood flow to the sex organs.

She said: "Sometimes I have so much sex to try to calm myself down I get bored of it. And men I sleep with don't seem to make as much effort because I climax so easily."

As she chatted, Sarah became increasingly flustered.

"Sorry, you'll have to excuse me for a minute. I'll be with you in a sec," she mumbled before letting out a long sigh.

Sarah, from London, developed PSAS after being prescribed anti-depressants at 19.

Stunned

She believes her condition was brought on by the pills.

She said: "Within a few weeks I just began to get more and more aroused more and more of the time and I just kept having endless orgasms.

"It started off in bed where sex sessions would last for hours and my boyfriend would be stunned at how many times I would orgasm.

"Then it would happen after sex. I'd be thinking about what we'd done in bed and I'd start feeling a bit flushed, then I'd become aroused and climax.

"In six months I was having 150 orgasms a day-and it has been as many as 200."

She and her boyfriend split- and new partners struggle to keep up with her sex demands. "Often, I'll want to wear myself out by having as many orgasms as I can so they stop and I can get some peace," she said.

Sarah is a beautician and working in salons filled with whirring hairdryers and skincare gadgets can cause problems.

"If I start coughing and run to the loo, the girls know to fetch the client a magazine or a cup of tea," she said, adding, "Sometimes I'd like to just have a normal life."

Sarah says the Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome that she suffers from can cause her to have orgasm at any time of day.

She explained: "Anything can set me off. Even the hairdryers cause funny pulsations through my body.

"As a skin care specialist I have to use tools which vibrate a lot of the time for micro-dermabrasion and they sometimes set me off.

"I find if I'm nervous I'm less likely to get over-excited. So sometimes I try to psyche myself up and worry to control my orgasms.

"Some of my regular customers know my problem. But with new clients it's hard to explain.

"I have been in the middle of a treatment and it's happened and I've had to carry on.

"I was doing a bikini wax and you have to really concentrate and keep your hands very still, and mine go a bit wobbly when I orgasm.

"I had to pretend I had cramp in my foot and just stood there wriggling around on the spot and stifling my moans until it was over."

Sarah's friends think she is the luckiest girl ever, although her family think her behaviour is sometimes slightly odd.

She said: "The best way to describe how I am when I am with my family and I have one of my 'moments' is that I behave like Sheila from Shameless.

"I just get a bid giddy and yelp out and try to control myself. I've never sat down and explained it to my mum and dad.

"They just think I get a bit hyperactive round them.

"My friends think it's great. I have more orgasms in one day than most of them will probably have in a year.

"They say to me that they feel lucky if their boyfriend makes them have one orgasm-some days I have one every ten minutes."

It has proved to be a problem for Sarah in some relationships.

She said: "I dated one guy who was very selfish and he was that way in the bedroom too. He'd just lie back and expect me to please him.

"He just figured that because I could climax without him even having to touch me, he didn't need to do anything to please me.

"I just thought that was rude and inconsiderate. It didn't last very long with him."

Noisy

She has also had embarrassing moments in public. Going to noisy bars and clubs is out of the question as the vibrations send her wild.

"We have to find nice quiet bars," she explained. "I have more orgasms if I have a drink as it relaxes me so I tend to drink very little now.

"It can be a bit embarrassing if I'm tipsy and guys who don't know me talk to me, because I find it harder to hide.

"The most embarrassing thing that has happened was when I answered a market research questionnaire and had an orgasm in front of the researcher.

"She knew what was happening and looked at me like I was a weirdo. I tried to explain that I couldn't help it, but I was blushing so much I had to walk away."

Sarah has even been to a Sex Addicts' Anonymous meeting in despair over her sex drive.

She said: "At first when the problem started I just wanted to have sex all the time, I thought I was a sex addict.

"But when I looked around the room and heard the stories other people told, about how desperate they were for sex, I realised I wasn't like them.

Problem

"With me, it was a means of releasing my orgasm, but now I know I don't have to have sex to do that."
Sarah has looked into the condition and believes it may have been triggered by her taking anti-depressants.

She said: "I've found studies that say that taking anti-depressants and then stopping has an effect on the sexual organs. That is the only thing that explains what happens to me.

"But I've heard of other girls who have the same problem and it just appears out of the blue. I've spoken to my doctor about it but she wasn't a great deal of help but that's mainly because there's very little known about it and no one yet knows how to cure it."

Thanks to her understanding friends and colleagues, Sarah feels like she can now live with PSAS.

She said: "I'm lucky because people around me are very kind and appreciate that sometimes this is a problem for me and it can be embarrassing.

"I need to concentrate on something sad or worrying when I talk to people and I don't want to get carried away."

During our 40-minute interview, Sarah told us she had five orgasms.

Years of dealing with the problem means that sometimes she can hide it quite well.

Her voice goes high pitched and she will lose her train of thought and have to stop talking completely for a few seconds. She says disguises this by coughing when she is in awkward situations.

"But it's also nice to have so much excitement every day! It's strange because it came from nowhere and I guess it could go away just as quickly, so I'm making the most of it while it lasts!"

Evolving Universes

2009-05-21T00:07:00.000-07:00

To many it seems unlikely that a universe could spring into being from chaos, and achieve a level of organization advanced enough to allow for life—let alone intelligence. After all, if an electron were only twice the size that it is, chemistry as we know it couldn’t exist. If the Strong and Weak nuclear forces were out of proportion, stars mayn’t work. Over the centuries a number of theories have cropped up to try to explain life, the universe, and everything, but almost none propose to explain how it all came together. As with many problems that are too grandiose to grapple, however, sometimes it’s best to start on a smaller scale.

Evolutionists and naturalists have long observed Earth’s “natural selection” where most creatures create offspring with slightly different characteristics than their own. Those with characteristics better suited to the environment will thrive, procreate, and pass on their heritage; whereas offspring less suited will wither, reproduce less, and their traits will fade and vanish.
Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin looked at the simple, functional elegance found in the the theory of natural selection, and thought that maybe such a concept could be applied on a universal scale. Thus the theory of Cosmological Natural Selection was born.

In order to tackle how complexity came into being, most scientific theories postulate that there are an infinite number of universes, and each of them are host to its own set of physical laws. Some would therefore have laws where chemistry cannot function, and thus are home to nothing more complex than a vast field of hydrogen. Some would have to be like ours: rife with complexity where a star larger than 1.44 times the size of ours can collapse into a black hole. And the black hole is the point where Cosmological Natural Selection begins.
Many people mistakenly attribute the concept of the Black Hole to Albert Einstein, however the earliest proposition of the Black Hole (called a “dark star” at the time) was presented by a fellow named John Michell in 1784—a hundred-forty years before General Relativity was published. Nevertheless, it was Einstein who refined the idea into its modern incarnation. According to General Relativity, when an object achieves enough mass, it crushes down to an inconceivably small point called the singularity. It is so weighty that the escape-velocity from it is greater than the speed of light, and since nothing exceeds the speed of light …

As good as it sounds, it’s been found that Einstein’s work doesn’t function so well when one starts exploring items smaller than the atom. Modern acolytes of Quantum Physics and String Theory have suggested that it’s highly unlikely that there’s a singularity in there at all. Instead they propose a 4-dimensional tube opens to a new region of space/time. The introduction of the black hole’s material in this virgin space/time is analogous to a Big Bang—the genesis of a new universe.

Here, at the dawn of a new universe is where Smolin’s theory fits. He postulates that the new universe’s laws are influenced by those of the parent. Thus, our universe which has complexity and is therefore very successful at creating black holes/new universes is spawning universes that also have complexity, and will pass that trait onto their progeny … much like evolution. However, unlike evolution, there are no known universe-predators culling the ill and unfit universes from the multiverse, therefore “Cosmological Natural Selection” might be a less apt name than “Fecund Universes”; it’s not a race for survival, just reproduction.
Some sectors of science dismiss the notion, calling it inherently untestable. There is no way to peek into other universes to see if they are related to their parent … yet. Smolin responds by asking that his peers to seek out any natural law that shows that our universe isn’t adapted to easily create black holes. After all, if there is a basic principle that inhibits the formation of black holes it would be a pretty big hole in the idea.

Pork flu

2009-05-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

How it happen

Foreign Bodies In The Rectum

2009-05-14T01:28:00.000-07:00

Foreign bodies in the rectum are a common occurrence and most of the cases are treated with anesthesia before removing objects. Patients have usually made multiple attempts to remove the object themselves before consulting the professional.

Common objects inserted are fruits, balls, bottles, vibrators, vegetables, and balls. However, interesting fact is that professors D. Busch and J. Starling; Madison, Wisconsin in 1986 did research and study report on strange rectal foreign bodies. Some of the unusual objects found in the anus and rectum include: magazine, beer glass, seven light bulbs, two flashlights, knife sharpener, frozen pigs tail, wire spring and tobacco pouch.

MegaQuake

2009-05-12T01:52:00.000-07:00

Professor Bill McGuire of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre explains that there are subduction zones all around the world, but mainly they occur around the rim of the Pacific. The so-called Ring of Fire. Most of the world's big, really destructive earthquakes occur here. A subduction zone is where a continental plate is sliding below an adjoining plate causing a build-up of friction. When this friction builds to a critical point, the plate breaks free of the friction and slips. This slippage causes a mega-thrust earthquake.

As most mega-thrust earthquakes occur near, or below, the sea the huge energy release causes a tsunami. A tsunami is different from a normal wave, in that with a normal wave only the surface water is moving, with a tidal wave the whole water column is moving. Millions of tons of water! The combination of massive earthquakes and tsunamis makes subduction zones a deadly geological hazard. So, it should have been a cause for some concern that the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a 600 mile long fault, lies right off the Pacific north-west coast. The strange thing was, that Cascadia didn't seem to be a danger at all.

For years, scientists have been studying seismic activity along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. They found that, unlike other subduction zones, it was virtually silent. If the adjoining plates were sliding smoothly then no friction would build and no earthquakes would occur. This appears to be backed up by 200 years of records, for as long as Europeans have lived here, there is no record of earthquakes from Cascadia.

However, there is another kind of history, the kind that isn't written down. For centuries before the Europeans, this land was home to native peoples. Viola Riebe is a member of the Ho Nation on the northern Washington coast. As a child, she remembers being told the legend of the thunderbird. The thunderbird lives at the head of the Ho river, and when he comes out, the ground shakes and the water is troubled. Could this story be describing a real event? Could this have been a mega-thrust earthquake of long ago?

Most geologists have no time for such speculation, but one decided to take a closer look.

Brian Atwater of the United States Geological Survey took his canoe and began exploring the marshes and rivers of the Washington coast. He was hoping that the layers of mud here, laid down over centuries, might provide a clue to events of the past.

Digging down through the layers of mud, Brian discovered evidence of the existence of a Spruce forest suggesting that at some time in the past, the land had been higher and had dropped to allow water to flood the forest. Above the spruce layer was sand, and since there is no sand in this locality, there must have been a sudden inrush of sea-water to transport the sand. This was no gradual change in land level, it must have been a violent collapse. The most likely explanation is a large earthquake causing the land to subside, and a warping of the sea floor to trigger a tsunami to flood the forest and bring in the sand.

Carbon dating of the buried trees showed that this event occurred roughly 300 years ago, before Europeans arrived. So the native legends may indeed be about a real event. This evidence alone, does not prove an earthquake. If a mega thrust earthquake had happened in Cascadia it would have produced a tsunami capable of travelling right across the Pacific, to countries like Japan.

When Dr. Kenji Satake, of the Geological Survey of Japan, heard about Atwater's theory he realised that Japan could hold the answer. He explained that while 300 years ago is pre-history for America, Japan has written records of seismic events dating back to this time. What Satake was looking for was a special kind of tsunami. Most tsunamis to hit Japan are caused by nearby earthquakes so they are accompanied by shaking of the ground, but a few tsunamis arrive without shaking because the parent earthquake is far away. When there is no known earthquake that could have caused the wave, it is called an orphan tsunami. In the coastal town of Neho, he finds a document describing just such a tsunami dated 28 Jan 1700. Crucially, the same tsunami was recorded in four other locations in Japan.

The final piece of evidence would be found in a mysterious corner of the Pacific north-west. 100 mile south of Seattle in a remote area of the Washington coast is the ghost forest. These are trees which died hundreds of years ago but remain standing to this day. What could kill a forest of Red Cedar trees along 60 miles of Washington coast?

Tree Specialist David Yamaguchi of the University of Washington has spent years looking at the trees and by analysing the tree rings he found that all of the trees died in the early months of 1700.

There was now no doubt that the same catastrophe that had killed the ghost forest had also sent the tsunami across to Japan. And from the Japanese records Kenji Satake could work out exactly when it had happened. On the 26th January, 1700, at nine pm. On that winter's night a megathrust earthquake, just like the Boxing Day earthquake of 2004, struck the Pacific Northwest. It drowned forests and turned land in to sea. It sent a tsunami hurtling across the Pacific. And it spawned a legend that would be passed down to a dozen generations. The scientists knew that if it happened here once it would happen again. One day the people of the Pacific Northwest will face a megathrust earthquake. So how big will it be? What damage will it cause? And when will it happen? The first question is how large will the earthquake be. The power of an earthquake depends on the size of the fault that breaks. In the case of the Boxing Day earthquake it was huge. Over six hundred miles of fault ruptured. The Cascadia subduction zone is almost exactly the same length. So it's likely that it will create an equally powerful earthquake.

Scientists believe the next Cascadia earthquake will be one of the largest on the planet, up to magnitude 9.0. The Kobe earthquake, which killed six thousand people and devastated the Japanese economy, was a magnitude 6.8. The terrible Mexico City earthquake which killed over 10,000 people was 8.1. But, a magnitude 9.0 releases many times more energy than those.

Tim Walsh of the Washington State Geological Survey explains "The magnitude scale is logarithmic, that is each one is ten times bigger than the previous number, but that's the amount of displacement. When you do that in terms of energy release each one is thirty to forty times bigger than the previous one. So a magnitude nine, has a thousand times more energy release than does a magnitude seven."

Fortunately the big cities of the Pacific north-west are some way inland, but many people live in the coastal regions and the beaches are a big tourist draw in the summer. So there will still be many thousands of people at risk from a Cascadia tsunami but, far more people will be affected by the earthquake itself. So Washington, Oregon and British Columbia will experience strong ground shaking which may last as long as five minutes.

So what damage will several minutes of shaking do to cities like Seattle? Even though the Boxing Day earthquake and the next Cascadia earthquake may be very similar they could have very different effects. In Indonesia most of the damage was caused by the tsunami not the earthquake itself.

Professor Tom Heaton of the California Institute of Technology voices his concerns: "My theory is that in a Cascadia event these buildings may sway some large distance and as we get a very long duration of shaking that the swaying may grow in intensity and the buildings may begin to be damaged." But not everyone agrees. John Hooper is a buildings engineer who has worked on many of Seattle's tallest buildings. He believes that the modern skyscrapers at least should be strong enough to avoid serious damage.

The reality is no one knows for sure. Because there has never been a megathrust earthquake near a modern high rise city. But there is a type of building that everyone agrees will be at risk. The older un-reinforced brick buildings.

The next megathrust earthquake may not happen for centuries, or it could be imminent. No one knows. We don't know whether the entire Cascadia fault will rupture like it did in 1700. We don't know how badly affected the modern cities will be. But Yumei Wang, director of Geo Hazards for Oregon, believes we must still take action. He says "We know that a Cascadia earthquake is inevitable, we can't prevent earthquakes, but one thing that we can do is prevent a lot of the damage. We can save lives if we prepare now."

Strange but true facts about the Earth

2009-05-10T01:44:00.000-07:00

In 1783 an Icelandic eruption threw up enough dust to temporarily block out the sun over Europe.

About 20 to 30 volcanoes erupt each year, mostly under the sea.

A huge underground river runs underneath the Nile, with six times more water than the river above.

Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana formed in a hollow made by a meteorite.

Beaver Lake, in Yellowstone Park, USA, was artificially created by beaver damming.

Off the coast of Florida there is an underwater hotel. Guests have to dive to the entrance.

Venice in Italy is built on 118 sea islets joined by 400 bridges. It is gradually sinking into the water.

The Ancient Egyptians worshipped a sky goddess called Nut.

The world's windiest place is Commonwealth Bay, Antartica.

In 1934, a gust of wind reached 371 km/h on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, USA.

American Roy Sullivan has been struck by lighting a record seven times.

The desert baobab tree can store up to 1000 litres of water in its trunk.

The oldest living tree is a California bristlecone pine name 'Methuselah'. It is about 4600 years old. The largest tree in the world is a giant sequoia growing in California. It is 84 meters tall and measures 29 meters round the trunk. The fastest growing tree is the eucalyptus. It can grow 10 meters a year.

The Antartic notothenia fish has a protein in its blood that acts like antifreeze and stops the fish freezing in icy sea.

The USA uses 29% of the world's petrol and 33% of the world's electricity.

The industrial complex of Cubatao in Brazil is known as the Valley of Death because its pollution has destroyed the trees and rivers nearby.

Tibet is the highest country in the world. Its average height above sea level is 4500 meters.

Some of the oldest mountains in the world are the Highlands in Scotland. They are estimated to be about 400 million years old.

Fresh water from the River Amazon can be found up to 180 km out to sea.

The White Sea, in Russia, has the lowest temperature, only -2 degrees centigrade. The Persian Gulf is the warmest sea. In the summer its temperature reaches 35.6 degrees centigrade.

There is no land at all at the North Pole, only ice on top of sea. The Arctic Ocean has about 12 million sq km of floating ice and has the coldest winter temperature of -34 degrees centigrade.

The Antarctic ice sheet is 3-4 km thick, covers 13 million sq km and has temperatures as low as -70 degrees centigrade.

Over 4 million cars in Brazil are now running on gasohol instead of petrol. Gasohol is a fuel made from sugar cane.

Garbage in space

2009-04-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

November 1957, Russian scientists managed to lob a 180-pound metal sphere called Sputnik 1 into orbit around the earth. Its purpose was simple and remarkably low-tech: scare the hell out of Americans by broadcasting a signal that could be heard via radio every 90 minutes. There was no military or commercial application for Sputnik, it was a blatant act of Cold War propaganda and it was a smashing success. A year later, NASA managed to put a satellite called Vanguard 1 into orbit and the race for space was on.

Oddly, none of the contestants stopped to consider that, while the subjugation of the last frontier was financed through traditional methods of raping and pillaging, the "final frontier" has no Martians to enslave and no natural resources to consume. Thus, the race became a macho game to see who could "get it up" the highest and keep it up the longest.

Fast forward 42 years. It's a new century and the space race, like the cold war, is officially being won by capitalism – not the noble ideas of Communism or Democracy – just good old fashioned wireless-communication networks and satellite TV. But it seems that even the capitalists are having their problems taming the final frontier.

Case in point: Iridium World Communications Ltd. recently set a new world record for the costliest corporate fiasco of all time (approximately $7 billion) when its ambitious plan to create a worldwide satellite telephone network fell into bankruptcy. The Motorola-owned company will now systematically steer into the atmosphere each of the 66 low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites it spent billions to develop and deploy. Iridium's failure is due, in part, to the success of land-based wireless networks, and the fact that the accompanying phone was only slightly lighter than a bowling ball and cost $3,000.

Ironically, on the other side of the astral playing field, it appears that the Russians have also hopped aboard the Starship Capitalism. After Russia's space agency stranded a cosmonaut on Mir for six months because it couldn't afford to bring him back, Moscow decided that the $250 million it spends annually to maintain Mir is wasted money. Since then, Kremlin officials have been concocting alternative ways to finance and maintenance the world's largest piece of space trash, lest they be forced to follow Motorola's lead and crash it into the planet.

Recent plans for the former pride of the Soviet Union include turning it into a vacation spot for high-paying tourists, and renting it out to film companies who want to shoot their space movies on location. But, in light of its astronomical price tag, no one's buying.

Sputnik 1 fell back to the earth six months after it was launched, but Vanguard 1 still makes its daily pass around the planet. Though, it's now about as useful as a VW Bug made in the same year and even more noteworthy, it's not alone.

Of approximately 2,400 man-made satellites that have been launched since 1957, more than 2,000 of them are now obsolete or abandoned and, according to the US National Space Command, there are 20 pieces of useless debris in orbit for every operational satellite.

It's true. Four decades of intense space colonization have created a massive armada of junk that now spins around our planet like high-tech ice cubes trapped in a cosmic frozen daiquiri.

NSC currently tracks more than 10,000 "identifiable objects" including spent rockets, fuel canisters, and large trashcans intentionally jettisoned by shuttle crews. Estimates for orbital debris are actually around 35-million if you count "unidentifiable objects" such as paint chips, bolts, and foil shards that all move twelve-times faster than a bullet, and are each capable of killing an astronaut who is out for an afternoon space walk. To prevent costly and even lethal collisions, NSC officials must navigate the shuttle through this flying minefield, maintaining a five-mile safety envelope around it at all times.

If the thought that Motorola and Russia plan to systematically rain satellites and space stations on our planet gives you cause for alarm, don't worry. According to NASA, everything’s under control. The units will likely burn up on re-entry and whatever is left will splash down in a colorful billion-dollar fireworks show over the ocean.

NASA was not so full of assurances in 1998, however, when they called the Chilean government in a semi-panic to inform them that one of their orbiters, with a nuclear fuel core no less, was going to fall "somewhere" over their country "sometime" in the next 48 hours. Luckily for the Chileans, NASA's calculations were off and the unit disappeared into the aquatic bowels of the Pacific. NASA's response was something on the order of "sorry, that stuff happens."

Of course, NASA would like nothing better than for Russia to dump its 13-year-old planetary RV into the sea so that it can concentrate on helping develop the "new improved" International Space Station.

Now, a sensible person might look at this situation and be inclined to ask: why pour billions of dollars into developing a space station when: A) the other space station already in orbit is about to be discarded because it has little viable use beyond that of a movie set; and B) the billions of dollars could be better spent developing things like alternative fuel sources that would be commercially viable and improve life for all of the planet's inhabitants?

Somehow, I bet George Lucas is behind this. After all, in another couple of decades he'll probably need a defunct space station to use for Star Wars 9, and he'll likely be one of the few institutions with a sufficient budget to capitalize on it.

So far, it appears that the only useful thing to come from space is just that, space. Or rather, to use the Department of Defense term, strategic space. Which roughly translated means: a good place to put floating surveillance cameras and media transmission devices.

Really, there is little else "out there." Unless you're an X-Files fan, in which case "the truth" is out there, but everyone knows that truth is hard to sell.

Born with Two Heads

2009-04-26T10:08:00.000-07:00

On March 31st 2004 in Aghur, Egypt a young woman, Naglaa Mohammed Yehiya, is rushed to hospital in labour six weeks early. She is expecting to give birth to twins, confirmed in earlier scans. The first twin is born normally and is quite healthy. The second twin is causing problems. After several hours the hospital need to conduct an emergency caesarean section to deliver the second twin.

Hospital staff are amazed at what they see. The baby has two heads!

In a condition known as Craniopagus Parasiticus a second parasitic head has developed attached to the host head. This is an extremely rare condition and only about 10 cases have ever been recorded. Of these, only three have been born alive.

The condition comes about when the egg splits to form identical twins. This would normally occur at 10 weeks. However with Naglaa it didn't occur until 13 weeks resulting in conjoined twins. Damage with the blood supply in the second twin made it draw blood from the join at the skull forming a parasitic connection. Manar's little heart could not pump enough blood to support two bodies, so the second body could not develop. The second skull and brain were able to develop more or less normally.

The parasitic head is very much alive and displays reflexive behaviour.

A Scan shows how the skulls are joined, the brains are fused together and share a single blood supply. Manar is not expected to live.

However, after 10 months Manar has defied her doctor's prognosis. She is alive although she has suffered 5 heart failures, developed convulsions, and had 2 chest infections.

The parasitic head has started to show signs of gangrene, and this is being circulated to Manar's body. It has become clear that the only hope of saving Manar is to separate her from the twin.

Egypt is a Muslim country, so any operation is not only a medical question, but a moral and ethical one too. Professor Dr Mohammed Lotfy has agreed to carry out the operation, but he consults Sheikh Dr Ali Gomaa, The Grand Mufti of the Egyptian Republic for religious and ethical guidance.

This operation has never been carried out successfully before and carries a very high risk. The Grand Mufti gives his blessing to the operation, so surgery is scheduled for February 18 2005.

The World's media descend on Benha Children's Hospital as soon as word gets out. The hospital agree to having a video link installed in the operating theatre.

After 13 hours of painstaking surgery and 8 full blood transfusions, the parasitic head is successfully removed. Manar is alive but extremely critical. She has ten intravenous lines in and is kept sedated in a coma for five days to stop her convulsing.

By the 28th May 2005 Manar is well enough to go home for the first time in her young life. She needs constant care and careful medication to control her temperature and convulsions. Six weeks later Manar takes a turn for the worse and begins having fits. Naglaa takes her back to Cairo to see Professor Lotfy who is concerned with what he sees.

A scan reveals that the valve intended to drain the brain cavity has become blocked reulting in a build up of fluid. A condition known as hydrocephalus. This is quite common after brain surgery, but it can lead to brain damage.

Professor Lotfy has the drain valve replaced immediately but fears that irrevocable damage may already have taken place. It is possible that Manar will never fully recover.

Sadly, on Mar 25th 2006, just before her second birthday, Manar died after suffering a brain infection.

Man Holds the Record for the Most Guinness World Records

2009-04-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

The 54-year-old Ashrita Furman from Jamaica, Queens, was officially registered as the first person in the world to hold 100 Guinness Book of Records simultaneously. The record was registered after he joint a group of people at City Hall Park, who recited one poem in 111 languages. The group read the poem "Precious", written by the late Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy.

Furman was the one to read the eighth line of the poem in Zulu. "It was fun learning about many of these languages - quite a few I never even heard of," he said.

Over one hundred participants gathered in the park from different countries to recite the poem in languages that ranged from Dzongkha to Picard. The attempt was successful, breaking the previous record, when people read the "Values on Community Harmony" in 79 languages.

Currently Furman holds the position of a health-food store manager. He registered his first Guinness Book record back in 1979 and since then the man managed to earn about 230 Guinness records. In his first record Furman did 27,000 jumping jacks in 5 hours. One of his latest records involved eating the most M&Ms in 1 minute using chopsticks. The record was 38, reports New York Daily News.

Furman broke records on every continent over the last three decades. But he wasn't always like that. "As a kid I was always fascinated by the Guinness Book of World Records. But I was very unathletic and I never thought I could," he said.

A strong belief in his abilities came to him after Furman discovered meditation when he was a teenager. He believes that everyone has an inner strength but people rarely use it. "I just love the challenge of trying to be the best in the world in something," says Furman.

Some of his most amazing records include:
- Most deep knee bends in one minute, 55,
- Most cloves of garlic eaten in one minute, 22;
- Most baseballs held in baseball glove for 10 seconds, 22;
- Most T-shirts torn in half in one minute, 14;
- Most eggs crushed with head in one minute, 80;
- Fastest time for eating and peeling 3 kiwifruits, 24.05 seconds.

The Baby in the Concrete Block

2009-04-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

England, 2002

While clearing out an old garage, a grizzly find was to spark a major police investigation. The remains of a baby were found encased in a concrete block.

A pathologist who examined the baby's remains determined that she had been about 5 months old when she died. Lara, the name the police gave to her, had been ill-treated and showed signs of beating and head injuries. She had also been neglected, a gum abscess had grown so large that it had eaten into her jaw. This would have caused the child intense pain.

DNA Samples were taken from local residents in the surrounding villages, but obtaining a DNA profile from Lara was to prove more difficult.

Dr. Stuart Black from the University of Reading carried out isotope analysis on the remains, to try and establish a time of death and a locality were Lara had been born. This concluded that Lara was almost certainly from Cumbria and had probably died between 1990 and 1992.

Police set about tracing every baby born in the area between 1989 and 1993. This accounted for 3,200 children but no Lara.

Mitochondrial DNA, inherited only from the mother, is present in greater quantities in the cells and so is better able to resist degradation. When they tested for this, they were able to raise Lara's full DNA profile.

This identified Anne Chadwick as a very close genetic match to Lara. So close, she could be her mother or her sister. Anne and Philip Chadwick now lived in Worcestershire with their three children.

While the DNA identified Anne as the possible mother, it also ruled out Philip as the father.

The police arrested Anne and Philip, and a search of their house uncovered a collection of press cuttings about the Barepot baby.

After lengthy questioning and studying videos that Anne and Philip had from the years around 1990, the couple were released without charge.

The forensic scientists were forced to re-assess the dates they had from the isotope analysis and now acknowledged that baby Lara could have died anywhere between the mid 1960s and the 1980s.

Now the police attention moved to Anne's mother. Sheila Parker was known to have had a 15 year affair with local builder Joseph Thwaites who had fathered Anne and her sister Yvonne. Sheila and Joseph had passed away some years earlier and, unfortunately for the investigation, Sheila had been cremated.

However, a stroke of luck revealed that a local hospital had retained some histology slides from Sheila who had died of cancer. Although the slides were 20 years old they reveal sufficient DNA to show that Sheila could, indeed, have been Lara's mother. Sheila was known to have concealed earlier pregnancies, so why not Lara?

It is probable that Sheila gave Lara up for adoption and the adoptive parents were in some way responsible for her death and concrete entombment. But with so little evidence all the police can say with certainty, is that they have found the family that little Lara was born into.

Real Cobra Snake whiskey

2009-04-21T00:25:00.000-07:00

This special whiskey is infused with a farm real farm raised baby Cobra snake, ginseng roots and herbal seed pods. The whiskey is steeped for several months, which then imparts a unique flavour into the whiskey, it is quite an acquired taste. The story is that this is used in SE Asia as a very strong Aphrodisiac; and it also has many medical uses, such as the treatment of back and muscle pain. Every bottle is unique in its own way so therefore the item purchased may differ slightly in looks but not size.

46 Year Pregnancy

2009-04-19T00:17:00.000-07:00

In 1955 in a small village just outside Casablanca, 26 year old Zahra Aboutalib is pregnant with her first child. She was looking forward to giving birth, but after 48 hours of painful labour, she was rushed to the local hospital. Doctors informed her that she would need a caesarean section. On the ward Zahra saw a woman in terrible pain die in child-birth. She fled the hospital fearing she would meet the same fate if she remained.

In the days that followed, Zahra continued to suffer excruciating labour pains but the baby remained resolutely in her womb. After a few more days the pains ceased and the baby stopped moving.

In Moroccan culture, it is believed that a baby can sleep inside the mother to protect her honour. Zahra believed this myth and put the pregnancy out of her mind. She adopted three children and in due course they made her a grandmother.

Many years later when Zahra was 75 years old, the pains suddenly returned. Her son being concerned for his mother's well-being wanted her to see a specialist. For this they had to travel to Rabat where they saw Professor Taibi Ouazzani. He suspected the protruding belly was being caused by an ovarian tumour and arranged for her to have an ultra-sound scan. This revealed a large mass that he could not identify.

He referred Zahra to a specialist radiographer for a second opinion. He could see it was a calcified structure of some sort, but it took a detailed MRI scan to reveal that it was the baby Zahra had conceived 46 years earlier.

Zahra had an ectopic pregnancy where the egg had implanted in the fallopian tube. The foetus that developed, burst out of the fallopian tube and continued to develop in the abdominal cavity. It survived by attaching it's placenta to vital organs around her stomach.

Professor Ouazzania was faced with a difficult decision when deciding if it would be safe to try and remove the foetus. The foetus weighed 7lb and measured 42cm in length.

When they operated they discovered that the foetus had calcified and was a hard, solid lump. It was, essentially, a stone-baby. More concerning was the fact that it had fused with her abdominal wall and vital organs.

After nearly 4 hours the surgeons manage to remove the calcified foetus from Zahra and the operation is hailed a success.

In an ectopic pregnancy, if the dead foetus is too large to be re-absorbed by the mother's body it becomes a foreign body to the mother's immune system. To protect itself from possible infection the mother's body will encase the foetus in a calciferous substance as the tissues die and dehydrate.

As the calciferous wall builds up, the foetus is gradually mummified becoming a lithopedion or stone baby.

Man with tree in lung

2009-04-17T00:11:00.000-07:00

A five-centimeter fir tree has been found in the lung of a man who complained he had a strong pain in his chest and was coughing blood.

The 28-year-old patient, Artyom Sidorkin, came to a hospital in the city of Izhevsk in Central Russia last week, Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reports.

Doctors x-rayed his chest and found a tumor in one of the lungs. Suspecting cancer, they made a decision to perform biopsy, but when they cut the tissue, they were amazed to see green needles in the cut.

“I blinked three times, and thought I was seeing things. Then I called the assistant to have a look,” says Vladimir Kamashev, doctor at the Udmurtian Cancer Center.

The five-centimeter branch was removed from the patient’s body.

“They told me my coughing blood was not caused by any disease,” Sidorkin says.

“It was the needles poking the capillaries. It really hurt a lot. But I never felt like I had an alien object inside of me.”

It is obvious that a five-centimeter branch is too large to be inhaled or swallowed, doctors say. They suggest that the patient might have inhaled a small bud, which then started to grow inside his body.

Meanwhile, the piece of lung with the little fir tree has been preserved for further study.

Fugu — Dining with Death

2009-03-18T02:45:00.000-07:00

Every year hundreds of thousands of Japanese put their lives on a plate, literally, in a gastronomic form of Russian roulette. They pay a fortune to sit down to a full course fugu meal. Most of them live to talk about the experience the next day, but each year about fifty of them do not. They die still thinking clearly but unable to speak or move and, finally, breathe. Nevertheless, fugu is now more popular than ever, with annual consumption way up to the tens of thousands of tons.

There is an old expression such that "I want to eat fugu, but I don't want to die" in Japan. Since fugu's poison can lead to instantaneous deaths of diners, only licensed cooks are allowed to prepare fugu. You must have special skills and knowledge about fugu to be licensed. Poisonous parts of fugu differ, depending on the kind of fugu. Because of the strict regulations, the number of deaths is decreasing.

But what exactly is fugu? Well, fugu is the general name for the fish of the Tetraondontidae family, which in English are known as blowfish, puffer, globefish or swellfish. Although fugu can be deadly, they have been eaten for hundreds of years in Japan, except for during the feudal period (1603–1868), when the regime of the Tokugawa shogunate strictly prohibited the consumption of fugu. But as soon as the shogunate was overturned, eating fugu became popular again.

What is it that makes fugu so deadly? The simple answer is that the fugu poison, known as tetrodoxin, is so powerful that a mere one or two milligrams is the estimated lethal dose for an adult. It is, in fact, 1250 times deadlier than cyanide. The poison blocks sodium channels in nerve tissues, ultimately paralysing the muscles, leading to respiratory arrest as the cause of death. And there is no proven antidote. About 60% of puffer poisonings prove fatal. The poison is found in the ovaries, intestines and livers, and if even a touch of these internal organs is left in the fish, the diner can die within minutes; so preparation of the fish must be carefully supervised.

To ensure safety in the consumption of fugu, government regulations state that fugu must be prepared by a licensed fugu chef who has taken intensive courses, served an extensive apprenticeship and passed written exams. But in Japan it is common to break the rules to cement a personal relationship, and no chef would think twice about bending the rules to please a treasured customer, even if it means risking tragedy.

Tragedy struck Mitsugoro Bando VIII, Japan’s leading Kabuki actor, on January 16, 1975 after a meal of fugu in one of the country’s top fugu restaurants. Bando, who had been designated a “living national treasure” by the government, was also a gourmet with a passion for fugu. Dining with three friends who, afraid of being poisoned, declined the livers, Bando rashly ate all four servings of the poison-filled organs, three of which are considered strong enough to kill a man.

Before going to bed on the night of his death, Bando told his wife that he was feeling great, as if he were floating on air because he had eaten fugu for dinner. He died of paralysis and convulsions in the middle of the night.

It was, and still is, prohibited to serve the fugu liver in restaurants, so the restaurant was suspended for ten days. But Bando’s demise did not stop the customers arriving in droves. If anything, it increased the popularity of the restaurant.

Why the Japanese should make a ritual eating deadly poisonous fish is difficult for foreigners to comprehend. For many, the elegant, death-defying event is a status symbol, and some say that consumption of the meat produces a pleasant, warm tingling. Connoisseurs, take the idea a little bit further and try to ingest a little bit of the poison, just enough to cause a warm buzz. And, like Bando, they sometimes overstep the danger mark.

Fugu dishes are usually expensive. One meal can cost $100 to $200 per person at a famous restaurant. But there are inexpensive fugu dishes (from $15 to $20) available at some restaurants. It's said that the most poisonous fugu, "Tora-fugu," is the most delicious. Tora-fugu is expensive and can cost over one hundred dollars at a fish market. Nowadays, prepared-fugu are sold at grocery stores and online stores, and fugu are eaten at Japanese homes. Fugu dishes are becoming more common than they used to be. Winter is the best season to eat fugu.

Raiders of the Lost Lake

2009-02-21T01:28:00.000-08:00

In the early 1990s, a Russian drilling rig encountered something peculiar two miles beneath the coldest and most desolate place on Earth. For decades, the workers at Vostok Research Station in Antarctica had been extracting core samples from deep scientific boreholes, and analyzing the lasagna-like layers of ice to study Earth's bygone climate. But after tunneling through 414,000 layers or so– about two miles into the icecap– the layers abruptly ended. The ice below that depth was relatively clear and featureless, a deviation the scientists were at a loss to explain. In search of answers, the men drilled on.

Unbeknownst to the Russians, their drill had mingled with the uppermost reaches of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world; a pristine pocket of liquid whose ecosystem was separated from the rest of the Earth millions of years ago. As for what sort of organisms might lurk in that exotic environment today, no one can really be certain.

In prehistoric times the Antarctic continent was much more temperate, with lush tropical foliage and thriving wildlife. But millions of years ago the Earth's extra-flaky crust caused the landmasses of Australia and South America to gradually peel away from Antarctica, creating a ring of open sea around the southernmost continent. This allowed a massive oceanic current to begin encircling the pole, deflecting warmer northerly currents away from Antarctica's shores. Without warm water to moderate the temperature, a scab of polar ice developed over the formerly forested lands.

Roughly forty million years later, in 1996, the men and women of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) urged their Russian colleagues to halt their indiscriminate drilling.

Airborne radar and satellite altimetry had finally managed to penetrate the thick mound of ice over the south pole, and after electromagnetically groping every rock and crevice in Antarctica, a flat region 155 miles long and 31 miles wide was detected below Vostok Station. As improbable as it seemed, SCAR researchers surmised that a liquid lake must lie just below the Russians' steadily advancing bore shaft. In order to avoid contaminating the huge lake with surface bacteria and drilling chemicals, the tunneling had to be stopped.

Lake Vostok was found to have approximately the same surface area as the great Lake Ontario in North America, with more than thrice the depth. Separated from sunlight by two miles of solid ice, the subglacial lake is a place of profound darkness and bitter cold. The water temperature is estimated at 3 degrees below zero Celsius, but it maintains a liquid state due to the crushing weight of the polar ice slab; the temperature at which water freezes is significantly lower under such phenomenal pressure. It is also suspected that geothermal heat from the ground below adds some ambient warmth. According to the ice cores extracted by the Vostok Base scientists, the lonely lake has been sealed beneath the ice for at least 500,000 years, but possibly as much as 25 million.

As requested, the Russians temporarily suspended their drilling efforts pending further study. Their borehole– which was filled with sixty tons of kerosene and freon to prevent re-freezing– stopped within a mere 300 feet of the lake surface. The anomalous ice they had encountered turned out to be lake water which had long ago frozen to the bottom of the slowly migrating glacier. These ice samples provided a few insights into the lake's anatomy, such as its lack of salt, and its absurd overabundance of oxygen; under extreme pressures oxygen will more readily dissolve in water. If the drilling over Vostok had continued uninterrupted, thereby encroaching upon the liquid portion of the lake, the hapless Russians might have been assaulted by a towering geyser of ancient water and liberated oxygen due to the astonishing pressure of the hidden body of water.

In the wake of the lake's discovery, there arose considerable debate regarding the likelihood of finding life there. The environment is remarkably similar to the dark and cold ocean below the surface of Jupiter's ice moon Europa, so the discovery of life in Vostok could have interesting extraterrestrial implications. Due to the cold, the complete absence of sunlight, and the toxic levels of oxygen, many scientists are certain that Lake Vostok is sterile. That, however, would be a scientific first, since never before has a completely lifeless body of water been found on Earth. Extremophile organisms have turned up in the unlikeliest of places, including within volcanic vents on the ocean floor, in the rocks deep in the Earth's crust, and in frozen arctic soil.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that cold-tolerant creatures could thrive in the waters of Lake Vostok, overcoming the oxygen saturation with extraordinary natural antioxidants. But millions of years of evolutionary isolation in an extreme environment may have created some truly bizarre organisms. This notion is supported by the ice samples drawn from the ice just above Lake Vostok, where some unusual and unidentifiable microbial fossils have been found. But the possibility that they are merely contaminates has not yet been completely ruled out.

At present, a number of researchers are mulling over methods to investigate the lake's unique ecosystem without defiling its pristine nature. The introduction of any organisms or chemicals from the surface could irreversibly pollute its waters, and there is a small but real possibility that the lake's alien organisms could be dangerous to humans. To date, the best candidate seems to be the cryobot, a fittingly phallic penetrating probe designed to gingerly work its way into the virgin lake. Its heated tip would melt a channel straight into the ice as it unspools a power and communications line behind it. The melted water would quickly re-freeze behind the cryobot in temperatures which linger around minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and once it finally reached the water it would eject a small submersible hydrobot to capture images and take measurements.

Though most scientists are proceeding with considerable caution, and some advocate avoiding the lake altogether, there are reports that the Russian researchers intend to restart drilling in order to reach the lake before their rivals. The Antarctic Treaty of 1961 guarantees all nations the right to conduct non-military scientific study on the continent, therefore little can be done to intervene if the men at Vostok station insist upon proceeding. Several smaller lakes have since been identified beneath the Antarctic icecap, but geologists speculate many of these are linked by a network of under-ice rivers, so contaminating just one lake might taint them all beyond repair.

If science seizes the opportunity to properly explore this perplexing pocket of liquid, it would be equally enlightening whether there is a plethora of life or a complete absence thereof. If the lake is found to be sterile, its desolate waters will provide some measure of insight into life's practical limitations. But if living things do indeed lurk beneath the thick Antarctic icecap– even if only in microbial form– their presence will demonstrate that life is made up of truly resilient stuff, with scientific implications well beyond the scope of our planet.

Tesla's Tower of Power

2009-02-21T00:51:00.000-08:00

In 1905, a team of construction workers in the small village of Shoreham, New York labored to erect a truly extraordinary structure. Over a period of several years the men had managed to assemble the framework and wiring for the 187-foot-tall Wardenclyffe Tower, in spite of severe budget shortfalls and a few engineering snags. The project was overseen by its designer, the eccentric-yet-ingenious inventor Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 - 7 January 1943). Atop his tower was perched a fifty-five ton dome of conductive metals, and beneath it stretched an iron root system that penetrated more than 300 feet into the Earth's crust. "In this system that I have invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth," he explained, "otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip… so that the whole of this globe can quiver."

Though it was far from completion, it was rumored to have been tested on several occasions, with spectacular, crowd-pleasing results. The ultimate purpose of this unique structure was to change the world forever.

Tesla's inventions had already changed the world on several occasions, most notably when he developed modern alternating current technology. He had also won fame for his victory over Thomas Edison in the well-publicized "battle of currents," where he proved that his alternating current was far more practical and safe than Edison-brand direct current. Soon his technology dominated the world's developing electrical infrastructure, and by 1900 he was widely regarded as America's greatest electrical engineer. This reputation was reinforced by his other major innovations, including the Tesla coil, the radio transmitter, and fluorescent lamps.

In 1891, Nikola Tesla gave a lecture for the members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York City, where he made a striking demonstration. In each hand he held a gas discharge tube, an early version of the modern fluorescent bulb. The tubes were not connected to any wires, but nonetheless they glowed brightly during his demonstration. Tesla explained to the awestruck attendees that the electricity was being transmitted through the air by the pair of metal sheets which sandwiched the stage. He went on to speculate how one might increase the scale of this effect to transmit wireless power and information over a broad area, perhaps even the entire Earth. As was often the case, Tesla's audience was engrossed but bewildered.

Back at his makeshift laboratory at Pike's Peak in Colorado Springs, the eccentric scientist continued to wring the secrets out of electromagnetism to further explore this possibility. He rigged his equipment with the intent to produce the first lightning-scale electrical discharges ever accomplished by mankind, a feat which would allow him to test many of his theories about the conductivity of the Earth and the sky. For this purpose he erected a 142-foot mast on his laboratory roof, with a copper sphere on the tip. The tower's substantial wiring was then routed through an exceptionally large high-voltage Tesla coil in the laboratory below. On the night of his experiment, following a one-second test charge which momentarily set the night alight with an eerie blue hum, Tesla ordered his assistant to fully electrify the tower.

Though his notes do not specifically say so, one can only surmise that Tesla stood at Pike's Peak and cackled diabolically as the night sky over Colorado was cracked by the man-made lightning machine. Colossal bolts of electricity arced hundreds of feet from the tower's top to lick the landscape. A curious blue corona soon enveloped the crackling equipment. Millions of volts charged the atmosphere for several moments, but the awesome display ended abruptly when the power suddenly failed. All of the windows throughout Colorado Springs went dark as the local power station's industrial-sized generator collapsed under the strain. But amidst such dramatic discharges, Tesla confirmed that the Earth itself could be used as an electrical conductor, and verified some of his suspicions regarding the conductivity of the ionosphere. In later tests, he recorded success in an attempt to illuminate light bulbs from afar, though the exact conditions of these experiments have been lost to obscurity. In any case, Tesla became convinced that his dream of world-wide wireless electricity was feasible.

In 1900, famed financier J.P. Morgan learned of Tesla's convictions after reading an article in Century Magazine, wherein the scientist described a global network of high-voltage towers which could one day control the weather, relay text and images wirelessly, and provide ubiquitous electricity via the atmosphere. Morgan, hoping to capitalize on the future of wireless telegraphy, immediately invested $150,000 to relocate Tesla's lab to Long Island to construct a pilot plant for this "World Wireless System." Construction of Wardenclyffe Tower and its dedicated power generating facility began the following year.

In December 1901, a scant few months after construction began, a competing scientist named Guglielmo Marconi executed the world's first trans-Atlantic wireless telegraph signal. Tesla's investors were deeply troubled by the development despite the fact that Marconi borrowed from seventeen Tesla patents to accomplish his feat. Though Marconi's plans were considerably less ambitious in scale, his apparatus was also considerably less expensive. Work at Wardenclyffe continued, but Tesla realized that this his competitor's success with simple wireless telegraphy had greatly diminished the likelihood of further investments in his own, much grander project.

In essence, Tesla's global power grid was designed to "pump" the planet with electricity which would intermingle with the natural telluric currents that move throughout the Earth's crust and oceans. At the same time, towers like the one at Wardenclyffe would fling columns of raw energy skyward into the electricity-friendly ionosphere fifty miles up. To tap into this energy conduit, customers' homes would be equipped with a buried ground connection and a relatively small spherical antenna on the roof, thereby creating a low-resistance path to close the giant Earth-ionosphere circuit. Oceangoing ships could use a similar antenna to draw power from the network while at sea. In addition to electricity, these currents could carry information over great distances by bundling radio-frequency energy along with the power, much like the modern technology to send high-speed Internet data over power lines.

Given his supporting experimental data and previous engineering accomplishments, there was little reason to doubt the veracity of Tesla's claims. But building the power station, the huge wooden tower, and the fifty-five ton conductive dome depleted the original investment money relatively quickly, leading to chronic funding shortages. The complications were further compounded by a stock market crash in 1901 which doubled the cost of building materials and sent investors scurrying for financial cover.

The Wardenclyffe team tested their tower a handful of times during construction, and the results were very encouraging; but the project soon devoured Tesla's personal savings, and it became increasingly clear that no new investments were forthcoming. In 1905, having exhausted all practical financial options, the construction efforts were abandoned.

If Tesla's plans had come to fruition, the pilot plant would have been merely the first of many. Such "magnifying transmitter" towers would have peppered the globe, saturating the planet with free electricity and wireless communication as early as the 1920s. Instead, the futuristic facility's potential went untapped for over a decade, until the tower was finally demolished for salvage in 1917.

Tesla's ingenious design for the wireless transmission of electricity

The fall of Wardenclyffe thrust the brilliant inventor into a deep depression and financial distress, and in the years that followed his colleagues began to seriously doubt his mental well-being. His eccentricities became increasingly exaggerated, underscored by his tendency to bring home and care for the injured pigeons he encountered during his daily visits to the park. He also developed an unnatural fear of germs, washing his hands compulsively and refusing to eat any food which had not been disinfected through boiling. But his mind remained pregnant with groundbreaking ideas, as he demonstrated when he described radar technology in 1917, almost twenty years before it became a reality.In 1928, aged seventy-two years, he filed one of his last patents; it described an ingenious lightweight flying machine that was an early precursor to today's tilt-rotor Vertical Short Takeoff and Landing (VSTOL) planes such as the V-22 Osprey.

Nikola Tesla shuffled off this mortal coil in 1943, suffering a heart attack alone in his hotel room. Though he kept copious diaries of his experiments and ideas throughout his life, they were notoriously vague and lacking in technical details. He preferred to rely on his photographic memory for such nuances, therefore much of his knowledge went with him to the grave. Some modern investigations and calculations, however, do support Tesla's contention that wireless electricity is not only feasible, but it may have even been a superior alternative to the extensive and costly grid of power lines which crisscross our globe today.

Had Wardenclyffe been completed without interruption, Tesla may have once again managed to alter the course of history. Instant access to power, information, pirated phonograph cylinders, and lewd photos of bare-ankled floozies on the TeslaNet may have ushered in the Information Age almost a century ahead of schedule, making today's world a very different place indeed. Perhaps one day we will enjoy the future that Tesla envisioned, albeit a bit behind schedule.

The Twin Within The Twin

2009-02-21T00:40:00.000-08:00

Fetus in Fetu

In India, doctors are operating to remove what they thinks is a massive tumour on a man who looks nine months pregnant. When they cut him open, they are horrified by what they find inside.

Deep inside Sanjay Kumar, possibly also known as Sanju Bhagat, is the body of his twin brother. A half-formed baby that has lain inside him, as a parasite, for thirty six years. Sanjay's story is shocking but every twin pregnancy is fraught with danger. His case is the extreme end of a range of conditions that affect twins in the womb. All too often the journey from conception to birth may be a battle; a battle that can end in death.

May 1999, in the city of Nagpur in India on a hot summer night, thirty six year old Sanjay Kumar is rushed to hospital. His stomach is so swollen he looks nine months pregnant and he can barely breathe. Doctors think he has a giant tumour and decide to operate immediately. Dr Ajay Mehta of the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai recalls "Basically, the tumour was so big that it was pressing on his diaphragm and that's why he was very breathless".

Surgeons prepare to operate, they know they're facing a dangerous task but are unaware of the full scale of the horror they're dealing with. Dr Mehta and his team begin to operate and soon it becomes clear they're not dealing with any tumour. They cut into the mysterious lump and out gushed gallons of pus to reveal a strange, almost human, shape within. Dr Mehta relates "To my surprise and horror I could shake hands with someone inside".

Inside Sanjay's belly is the half-formed body of an infant boy. Dr Suchitra Mehta tells us "The feet and hands were well developed. It had fingers and nails; the nails were quite long".

It is a baby boy, and it has been growing inside Sanjay for thirty six years. Even more shocking, this baby is the mutated body of Sanjay's twin brother. The half-formed twin has been growing inside him parasitically feeding off him, sooner or later it would have killed him.

Sanjay had suffered one of the world's strangest medical conditions, where one foetus envelops and absorbs it's twin inside the womb, called fetus in fetu. It occurs in less than one in five hundred thousand deliveries.

Fetus-in-fetu comes about when, early in pregnancy, one twin foetus wraps round and envelops the other. As the foetus then grows, what would have been it's twin remains inside it attaching it's blood vessels to it's host and feeding off it as a parasite.

Normally, fetus in fetu is diagnosed in the womb or soon after birth. These days, with ultrasound technology, cases of fetus in fetu are usually detected very early on. Sanjay's case was unprecedented, doctors were baffled as to how his parasitic twin had gone undetected for 36 years.

To doctors, Sanjay's case may have been a medical miracle but, it brought only shame and misery to him. As he grew older his belly got bigger and bigger. People in the village, where he grew up, made fun of him. They said he looked pregnant. After the operation Sanjay explained "Before the operation, life was very tough, but now I'm much better".

Although it was a baby, Sanjay's twin, like all fetus in fetu, was too under-developed to be viable. It could not survive outside it's host.