Mysteries Unsealed Featured News

Archaeologists Unearth Remains of Largest Ancient Egyptian Fortified City in Northern Sinai

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:37:45 GMT

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Archaeologists have unearthed 3,000-year-old remains of the largest ancient Egyptian fortified city while exploring an old military road in Sinai that once connected Egypt to Palestine, the antiquities authority said Wednesday.
Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said that archaeologists unearthed a relief of King Thutmose II (1516-1504 B.C.), thought to be the first such royal monument found in Sinai. It indicates that Thutmose II may have built a fort in the area.

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Scientists say curious clouds could foretell earthquakes

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:09:15 GMT

"Scientists say strange cloud formations could alert nations to impending earthquakes, according to a report today.

The theory comes after two distinctive cloud formations were observed above an active fault in Iran, each before two large earthquakes occurred.

According to the New Scientist, geophysicists Guangmeng Guo and Bin Wang of Nanyang Normal University in Henan, China, noticed a gap in the clouds in satellite images from December 2004 that exactly matched the location of the main fault in southern Iran.

The gap in the clouds stretched for hundreds of kilometres and was visible for several hours.

It also remained in the same place despite the clouds around it moving.

Thermal images of the ground showed that the temperature was higher along the fault.

On February 22nd 2005 - 69 days later - a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the area, killing 600 people.

In December 2005 a similar cloud formation was spotted and 64 days later an earthquake with a magnitude of six hit the region.

Geophysicists argue that there could be a number of reasons for the link between clouds and earthquakes.

They say that an eruption of hot gases from inside the fault could have caused water in the clouds to evaporate.

Another theory is that when rocks are squeezed, positively-charged ions form in the air above.

The cloud formations have led some to propose that they could be used for earthquake prediction.

However Mike Blanpied of the US Geological Survey's earthquake hazards programme told the New Scientist: "There is no physical model that explains why something would suddenly occur two months before an earthquake, and then shut off and not occur again."

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Archaeologists unearth "mini-Stonehenge" in Greater Manchester

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:06:33 GMT

"London, April 10: Archaeologists have unearthed a "mini-Stonehenge" in Greater Manchester, England, which dates back to about 5,000 years.

Archaeologist Stuart Mendelsohn spotted two sites near the moors of Rochdale, believed to be ancient burial sites, during a walk on the hills in December.

He believes that the sites may soon become a major tourist attraction.

"I suppose you could describe it as Rochdale's version of Stonehenge. It would have been a sacred site and what we've found so far I feel will be the tip of the iceberg," Manchester Evening News quoted the 52-year-old archaeologist, who is based in Sweden but originally from Middleton, as saying.

He revealed that the sites boasted an oval made up of collapsed slabs, and a 30-metre circle of rounded stones.

"It was very unexpected and I didn't believe it at first. I just can't believe that it's been missed by everyone. The stones are not arranged randomly and it's quite clear to see," he siad.

"For our area and beyond, it's very significant. We've found two burial mounds. The stones may represent particular lunar events in the calendar. I think it would have been a focal point for the whole community," he added.

Peter Iles, a leading archaeological expert from Lancashire County Council, visited the two sites.

The sites have also been inspected by English Heritage, which described them as "fairly well preserved".

English Heritage claimed that both sites were "possible of Bronze age date", suggesting that they could date back to 3,000 BC.

However, unlike the famous monument at Stonehenge, local materials are believed to have been used at the newly discovered sites.

The first site, made up of fallen stones, is 10.2m in overall diameter. The second, which includes the circle, is on the western slope.

The entire site covers an acre, according to an English Heritage report.

"It's great news for Rochdale. Prehistoric flints have been found in Littleborough, but as far as I'm aware, this is the first significant discovery in the town," said Mendelsohn.

"I don't know why that site was chosen originally but it has fantastic views of Rochdale and was fairly close to where people lived. It's a great site and we really need to get it protected and preserved," he added.

Norman Redhead, the Greater Manchester county archaeologist, said that he was planning to visit the site in the next few weeks."

News Source

Study: Grand Canyon 11M years older than thought

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:12:46 GMT

"By Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Gazing into the majestic Grand Canyon, awe-struck visitors inevitably ask: "How old is it?"

Far older than generally thought, says new evidence that scientists culled from caves lining the canyon's red limestone cliffs.

The Grand Canyon often is referred to as about 6 million years old — but its western half actually began to open at least 17 million years ago, a University of New Mexico team reports Friday in the journal Science.

Remember, geologists caution, that the Grand Canyon was carved from drainage systems that didn't turn into the single river we now know as the Colorado until roughly 6 million years ago. The new research suggests two canyons formed that eventually joined. And it makes sense that the older side would even look different, less jagged, thanks to more years of gravity and wind erosion to soften its edges.

"This is really exciting for those of us who work in the stories and theories of how the Grand Canyon has evolved," Arizona geologist Wayne Ranney, author of Carving the Grand Canyon, said of the new work. "This paper helps us to more clearly understand that different parts of the canyon formed at different times. That's how big the Grand Canyon is."

How and when the Grand Canyon formed has been a question of both geologists and average visitors since John Wesley Powell's famous first expedition in 1869.

Dating the canyon's carving has been difficult because it has largely depended on evidence from exposed rock and mineral deposits that themselves erode over time.

The University of New Mexico team tried a new technique: Testing formations inside the numerous caves that line the Grand Canyon — protected formations less susceptible to erosion — that form at the water table. So cave specialist Carol Hill said they should provide a record of how the water table dropped over time as the canyon was cut deeper and deeper.

First Hill and colleagues made the grueling climbs to cull the formations from caves in 10 different spots along the length of the Grand Canyon. Then came work in specialized labs to pin down the age of each formation, using a method called uranium-lead isotope testing.

The findings: The western side of what is now the Grand Canyon started forming about 17 million years ago, and that initial erosion was fairly slow and steady — a couple of inches every thousand years.

The canyon formed not just downward and westward but it opened steadily to the east, too, through what geologists call "headward erosion," the team reports — until the western side cut through enough rock to meet water on the eastern side, around 5 to 6 million years ago.

Then the action really started, with the eastern side of the canyon being cut at a rate of about 8 inches to almost a foot every thousand years, they report.

Why the speedup? The new research can't say exactly, but Ranney notes that land mass was shifting around a lot during this period, too, heaving some sections of rock and lowering others. The Hurricane and Toroweap faults in the western Grand Canyon dropped enough to essentially form a waterfall, speeding water flow enough that the eastern side was being ripped as the river plunged to the west, he explained.

While geologists point to some questions in the new research, overall it does fit with various theories about how the Grand Canyon formed, said Rebecca Fowler of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who also studies the Grand Canyon.

"All of it is pointing toward a pretty complex history of Grand Canyon development, which is one of the reasons this area has been so controversial," she said. "It's a pretty complicated system and it's very likely that the entire Grand Canyon did not incise (cut) all at one time." "

News Source: USA Today

Melting Ice Sheets Can Cause Earthquakes, Study Finds

admin@mysteriesunsealed.com — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:57:44 GMT

"As ice sheets melt, they can release pent-up energy and trigger massive earthquakes, according to new study.

Global warming may already be triggering such earthquakes and may cause more in the future as ice continues to melt worldwide, the researchers say.

A series of large earthquakes shook Scandinavia around 10,000 years ago, along faults that are now quiet, the scientists point out.

The timing of each earthquake roughly coincided with the melting of thick ice sheets from the last ice age in those same places.

Researchers had suspected that the melting had triggered these earthquakes by releasing pressure that had built up in Earth's crust.

Now a new study, the first to use sophisticated computer models to simulate how ice sheets would affect the crust in the region, bolsters this scenario.

The study showed that earthquakes are "suppressed in presence of the ice and promoted during melting of the ice," said study leader Andrea Hampel of the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

Hampel and a colleague had earlier found evidence that the shrinkage of a huge lake at the end of the last ice age had triggered a series of large earthquakes in Utah.

The new study shows this can happen even along faults that are normally quiet and are not prone to slip.

The new research will be published soon in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Ancient Quakes Rocked Scandinavia

The ancient earthquakes marched northward through Scandinavia as ice sheets retreated.

They began in the south of what is now Sweden about 12,000 years ago, then hit south-central Sweden near modern-day Stockholm around 10,500 years ago (see Sweden map).

Finally the earthquakes hit Lapland, in northern Scandinavia, about 9,000 years ago.

Based on the amount that the faults slipped, it seems these ancient earthquakes were massive, registering about magnitude 8—bigger than the quake that devastated Kashmir in 2005.

(Related news photos: "Earthquake Devastation in Kashmir" [October 11, 2005].)

Today those Scandinavian faults rarely cause quakes, and when they do, the temblors are small, usually less than magnitude 5.

"With our new modeling technique we can model faults themselves and directly compare the slip on the model fault to the slip on natural faults," Hampel said.

The models showed that thick ice could weigh down the land, preventing a fault from slipping and thereby causing it to store up that energy.

The thicker the simulated ice sheets—from 325 to 6,500 feet (100 to 2,000 meters) thick—the more they suppressed earthquakes, and the bigger the earthquakes were after the ice sheets melted.

Since the amount of movement on the fault in the model matched the actual amount of slippage measured in the field, this supports the idea that the melting of ice sheets had triggered the earthquakes, Hampel said.

Global Warming Causing Quakes?

Such melt-induced earthquakes are not just a thing of the past and could be happening today, since global warming is melting ice worldwide, the team says.

"The frequency of earthquakes should increase in the future if the ice continues to melt," Hampel and colleagues write in their study.

"The current low level of seismicity in Greenland and Antarctica may be caused by the presence of the large ice sheets."

Jeanne Sauber of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has led research showing a recent increase in earthquakes in Alaska when the ice was melting the most.

"All of sudden, between 2002 and 2006, we had warmer temperatures and much more rapid ice wastage," Sauber said.

Even though ice thickness shrank 10 percent or less, this was apparently enough to trigger small earthquakes in the summers when the ice was melting, the study showed.

"It's harder to see if there's an influence on large earthquakes, because they don't happen as often," Sauber added.

"We expect that in Greenland and Antarctica, if they start rapidly losing lots of ice, you would expect at least some little earthquakes." "

News Source

Planet X Projected at Solar System's Edge

admin@mysteriesunsealed.com — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:35:30 GMT

"Scientists at a Japanese university said Thursday they believed another planet up to two-thirds the size of the Earth was orbiting in the far reaches of the solar system.

The researchers at Kobe University in western Japan said calculations using computer simulations led them to conclude it was only a matter of time before the mysterious "Planet X" was found.

"Because of the very cold temperature, its surface would be covered with ice, icy ammonia and methane," Kobe University professor Tadashi Mukai, the lead researcher, told AFP.

The study by Mukai and researcher Patryk Lykawka will be published in the April issue of the Astronomical Journal.

"The possibility is high that a yet unknown, planet-class celestial body, measuring 30 percent to 70 percent of the Earth's mass, exists in the outer edges of the solar system," said a summary of the research released by Kobe University.

"If research is conducted on a wide scale, the planet is likely to be discovered in less than 10 years," it said.

Planet X--so called by scientists as it is yet unfound--would have an oblong elliptical solar orbit and circle the sun every thousand years, the team said, estimating its radius was 15 to 26 billion kilometers.

The study comes two years after school textbooks had to be rewritten when Pluto was booted out of the list of planets.

Pluto was discovered by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 in the so-called Kuiper belt, a chain of icy debris in the outer reaches of the solar system.

In 2006, nearly a decade after Tombaugh's death, the International Astronomical Union ruled the celestial body was merely a dwarf planet in the cluttered Kuiper belt.

The astronomers said Pluto's oblong orbit overlapped with that of Neptune, excluding it from being a planet. It defined the solar system as consisting solely of the classical set of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The team noted that more than 1,100 celestial bodies have been found in the outer reaches of the solar system since the mid-1990s.

"But it would be the first time to discover a celestial body of this size, which is much larger than Pluto," Mukai said.

The researchers set up a theoretical model looking at how the remote area of the solar system would have evolved over the past four billion years.

"In coming up with an explanation for the celestial bodies, we thought it would be most natural to assume the existence of a yet unknown planet," Mukai said.

"Based on our hypothesis, we calculated how debris moved over the past four billion years. The result matched the actual movement of the celestial bodies we can observe now," he said.

He was hopeful about research by Kobe University, the University of Hawaii and Taiwan's National Central University.

"We are expecting that the ongoing joint celestial observation project will eventually discover Planet X," Mukai said."

News Source: Discovery News

Have Scientists Discovered a Way of Peering Into the Future?

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 23:22:19 GMT

"Deep in the basement of a dusty old library in Edinburgh lies a small black box that churns out random numbers. At first glance the box looks profoundly dull, but it is, in fact, the ‘eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened, and appeared to forewarn of the Asian Tsunami.

"It's Earth shattering stuff," says Dr Roger Nelson, Emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the USA. "But unfortunately we don't have a box for predicting the future that we can sell to the CIA. We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark."

Dr Nelson's Global Consciousness Project - originally hosted by Princeton University - is one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. It aims to ‘sense' whether all of humanity shares a single unconscious mind that we all tap into without realising it. Some might refer to it as the mind of God. But the machine has also thrown up another tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.

Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, Holland, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest running investigation ever into the paranormal.

"Very often paranormal phenomena evaporate if you study them for long enough," says physicist Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. "But this is not happening with the Global Consciousness Project. The effect is real. The only dispute is about what it means."

The project has its roots in the extraordinary work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University during the late 1970s. Professor Jahn was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously. Intrigued by such things as telepathy, telekinesis and ESP, he was determined to study the phenomena using the most up to date technology available.

One of these new technologies was a humble looking black box known was a Random Event Generator. This used sophisticated technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper. The pattern of ones and noughts - ‘heads' and ‘tails' as it were - can then be printed out as a graph. Pure chance dictates that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros which produces a more or less flat line on a graph. Any deviation from this shows up as a gently rising curve.

During the late 1970s, Professor Jahn hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on a number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails. It was a preposterous idea at the time, and to many it still is.

The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained. Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machines and produce significant fluctuations on the graph. According to all of the known laws of science, this should not have happened - but it did. And it kept on happening.

Dr Roger Nelson, also working at Princeton University, then extended Professor Jahn's work by taking the machines to group meditations, which were very popular in America at the time. Again, the results were shocking. The meditators somehow caused dramatic shifts in the numbers.

From then on, Dr Nelson was hooked. Using the Internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line. But during the funeral of Princess Diana something extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards and reached for the sky. It was clear that they'd detected a totally new phenomena. The concentrated mental effort of millions of people appeared to be influencing the output of random event generators around the world. But how? Dr Nelson was still at a loss to explain it.

In 1998 he gathered together scientists from all over the world to try and understand the phenomena. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen Jahn and Nelson's work. The Global Consciousness Project was born.

Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the ‘eyes' of the project. And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure. The Eggs not only ‘sensed' the moment that Princess Diana was buried, but also the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Kursk tragedy and America's hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations such as New Year's Eve. Even more bizarrely, they sense the celebrations as they sweep through the Earth's different time zones.

The project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11th 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only did they register the event as it happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began four hours before the two planes hit the Twin Towers.

"I knew then that we had a great deal of work ahead of us," says Dr Nelson.

The same happened with the Asian Tsunami. Twenty four hours before the tragedy unfolded, the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began. Curiously, it was at around this time that animals in the path of the tsunami began fleeing for their lives. Very few animals were killed in the tragedy, as you may remember, leading some to ask whether they had somehow foreseen the disaster.

So does the Global Consciousness Project really forecast the future? After all, cynics will quite rightly say that if you look at enough data then you will find correlations with something. After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and terrorist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration.

The team behind the project say that they've thought of this. Using rigorous scientific techniques and powerful mathematics it is possible to exclude these chance connections. And they believe they have done so.

"Good scientists will ask what mistakes we've made," says Dr Nelson. "We're perfectly willing to discover that we've made mistakes. But we haven't been able to find any, and neither has anyone else.

"Our data shows clearly that the chances of getting these results by chance are one million to one against. That's hugely significant."

The Global Consciousness Project may have generated an incredible amount of compelling evidence, and garnered the support of eminent scientists, but many remain sceptical.

Professor Chris French, a psychologist and noted sceptic at Goldsmiths College in London, says: "The project has generated some very intriguing results that cannot be readily dismissed. I'm involved in similar work to see if we get the same results. We haven't managed to do so yet but it's only an early experiment. The jury's still out."

Strange as it may seem, there's nothing in the laws of physics that precludes the possibility of foreseeing the future. Time may not just move forwards - but backwards too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell the future.

"There's plenty of evidence that time may run backwards," says Professor Dick Bierman, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam. "And if it's possible for it to happen in physics then it can happen inside our heads too."

As a consequence says Professor Bierman, forecasting the future may not just be possible - it's something we do routinely without even realising it.

Dr John Hartwell, working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, was the first to uncover evidence that people could sense the future. In the mid 1970s he hooked people up to hospital EEG machines so that he could study their brainwave patterns. When these people were shown emotionally charged cartoons, characteristic patterns flickered through their brainwaves. Strangely, these patterns began to emerge a few seconds before they actually saw the pictures.

But it was to be another 15 years before anyone else took this work further. Dean Radin, working in America, connected people up to a machine that measured their skin's resistance to electricity. This is known to fluctuate in tandem with our moods, indeed, it's this principle that underlies many lie detectors. Radin repeated Dr Hall's work whilst measuring skin resistance. Again, people began reacting a few seconds before they were shown the pictures. This was clearly impossible, or so he thought, so he kept on repeating the experiments and getting the same results.

"I didn't believe it," says Professor Bierman. "So I repeated the experiment myself and got the same results. I was shocked. After this I started to think more deeply about the nature of time."

Bierman then devised an experiment to settle his mind once and for all. He decided to use a hospital brain scanner to peer inside people's minds as they were shown a series of photographs. Each person was randomly shown erotic or violent pictures, or neutral images of white fluffy clouds. Each of these pictures produced unique patterns in the patient's brainwaves. In effect, you could see inside the mind as it reacted to each picture.

What is remarkable is that the patients began reacting 1-2 seconds before they saw the images. This is clearly impossible, or so we're taught to believe. And yet it happened time and time again.

Obviously sceptics would love to demolish Bierman's work but have so far failed to do so. Nor is his research a one off that can be casually dismissed. To make matters even more intriguing, Bierman says that other mainstream labs have produced similar results but they are too frightened to go public.

"They don't want to be ridiculed so they won't release their findings, says Professor Bierman. "So I'm trying to persuade all of them to release their results together. That would at least spread the ridicule a little more thinly!" jokes the Professor.

If Bierman is right, then sensing the future may help explain such things as deja vu, intuition and a host of other paranormal phenomena. It may also open up a far more interesting possibility - enhancing psychic powers using machines. Just as we have built machines to replace muscle power, may we one day build a device to enhance psychic abilities?

Dr Nelson is optimistic - but not for the short term: "We may be able to predict that something is going to happen. But we won't know exactly what will happen or where it's going to happen," he says.

But for Dr Nelson, talk of psychic machines is of far less importance than the implications of his work for ordinary people. We may all be individuals, he says, but we are also part of something far, far greater.

"We're taught to be individualistic monsters," he says. "We're driven by society to separate ourselves from each other. That's not right. We may be connected together far more intimately than we realise."

News Source: News Monster

Saturn Moon May Have Water

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:45:39 GMT

"Feb. 6, 2008 -- Astrophysicists in Germany say they can add evidence to bolster theories that water, one of the precious ingredients for life, exists on the Saturnian moon Enceladus.

A tiny satellite measuring just 504 kilometers (315 miles) across, Enceladus has become one of the most fiercely debated objects in the solar system, thanks to close-up pictures taken by the NASA Cassini probe.

Enceladus has a brilliant white shell of ice that is untouched except for some strange-looking grooves and impacts from space rocks.

Cassini revealed plumes of water vapor that gush from surface stripes near its south pole, shooting crystal jets upwards for hundreds of miles into space.

Fuelling discussion about the origin of these strange "cryo-volcanoes" is the fact that icy particles of dust are also mixed in with the eruptions, but beguilingly travel far slower than the vapor.

A team led by Juergen Schmidt of the University of Potsdam, near Berlin, say they can now answer at least this part of the mystery.

Their theory is that water vapor and ice grains are blasted through funnels in the so-called tiger stripes -- and the grains, being heavier, rub against the rough sides of these holes.

The friction slows the particles down, which explains why they travel at a far lower velocity in the void.

For this to happen, though, liquid water would have to exist in equilibrium with ice and vapor beneath the moon's frigid crust, according to the model.

One hypothesis for the cause for Enceladus's cryo-volcanoes is a phenomenon called tidal heating.

The little moon suffers agonising gravitational pull from the giant Saturn and from the nearby satellites of Dione and Janus.

As a result, its interior is squeezed and stretched, causing friction that causes water to warm, this theory goes.

Enceladus has a surface temperature of -193 degrees Celsius (-315 degrees Fahrenheit) and the tiger stripes are -133 C (-207 F), which implies that its interior must be warmer still.

Heat and water are two of the essentials for life as we know it, although anything that exists in Enceladus's presumed sub-surface ocean is likely to be microbial at best, scientists add.

The new study appears on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal."

News Source: Discovery News