Lost City of Mu discovered ?

A researcher investigating underwater rock formations off the coast of Japan believes they are the remnants of an Asian equivalent of Atlantis -- an ancient civilization swallowed up by the ocean. Marine geologist Masaaki Kimura says he has identified the ruins of a city off the coast of Yonaguni Island on the southwestern tip of Japan.He has worked for decades to prove the rocks found by scuba diving tourists in 1985 are from an ancient city, which he says may have sparked the fable of Mu -- a Pacific equivalent of the tale of the lost city of Atlantis."Judging by the design and the disposition of the ruins, the city must have looked just like an ancient Roman city," said Kimura, a professor at Ryukyu University and the chairman of the non-profit Marine Science and Culture Heritage Research Association."I can envisage a triumphal arch-like statue stood on the left side of the Colosseum and a shrine over the hill," he told Reuters Television.

Some of the initial divers notices the rocks were unnaturally smooth and formed a sort of staircase near the island's shores. Subsequent dives by Kimura revealed irregular rock outcrops over 1 square km (0.4 square mile) and mounds of rubble.Kimura says he believes the city had a castle, a shrine, an arch, statues and a colosseum."In my estimation, the castle was situated right in the middle of the city. And though not as big as the castle, a lot of ruins of shrine-like structures too have been discovered," he said at his research room.Kimura believes the city was sunk in an earthquake 3,000 years ago.

View: Full Article | Source: Reuters

Can Nessie survive the Internet ?

In the good old days, it would take weeks -- or even months -- to hear about a tsunami washing a dead mermaid ashore. Now we have the photos in our computer's inbox in mere hours. Yes, it's a whole new world for urban legends. Before there was an Internet, or even paper and pen, there were legends and myths. They served as campfire entertainment, passing between friends and generations without much thought as to whether they were true. Sometimes there was a lesson; sometimes it was just a good yarn. But there was always a big, unexplainable mystery, and the fun and wonder of telling an age-old story. Now, in an instantaneous society, everything has changed. Click and it's gone Modern technology can debunk stories that used to be able to travel around the world via word-of-mouth for years. Now, flying saucers become balloons. Bigfoot becomes a superimposed gorilla. Mermaids become papier-mache collections of animal parts. The flip side of that is the Internet is becoming a light-speed-traveling conduit for any crazy tale someone wants to make up.

Technology allows us to make the balloon back into a UFO. As one urban legend gets quashed, several new ones pop up. "The speed by which these legends are transported is ridiculously fast," says April Masini, the author of Web site AskApril.com, an advice and information site that deals with everything from urban legends to relationship advice. "This means more legends, more often. It also means that legends get quashed more easily and more quickly; in fact, there are even Web sites set up to let people know what myths are circulating and what truths are legend."

View: Full Article Source: Contra Costa Times

Sharks have genes for fingers and toes

The basic process for developing fingers and toes in land animals may have existed for more than 500 million years in shark genes, according to a new study. Researchers identified genetic activity in spotted catsharks embryos that signal the creation of digits. The discovery pushes back the date of the evolutionary "fin to limb" advance by some 135 million years. When a gene—essentially a set of instructions—is translated into a trait, such as red hair or an arm, it is said to be expressed. Scientists have long believed that the gene for digit development was first expressed some 365 million years ago in the earliest tetrapodsthe first vertebrates to walk on land. But the new study suggests the finger-and-toe gene was first expressed much earlier, in fish—though not to such an extent that it yielded actual digits. "We've uncovered a surprising degree of genetic complexity in place at an early point in the evolution of appendages," study leader Martin Cohn of the University of Florida said in a statement.

The findings appear this week in the journal PLos ONE. Limb development, which happens in the fetal stage of all limbed animals, is driven by the so-called Hox gene. The early stage of the Hox gene expression regulates the development of limbs down to the forearm and shin. The later phase is responsible for forming fingers and toes. "It has long been thought that fish fins exhibit only the early wave of Hox expression..." Cohn told National Geographic News.

View: Full Article Source: National Geographic

T. Rex quicker than professional athlete

T. rex may have struggled to chase down speeding vehicles as the movie Jurassic Park would have us believe but the world's most fearsome carnivore was certainly no slouch, new research out suggests. The University of Manchester study used a powerful supercomputer to calculate the running speeds of five meat-eating dinosaurs that varied in size from a 3kg Compsognathus to a six-tonne Tyrannosaurus.The study -- believed to be the most accurate ever produced -- puts the T. rex at speeds of up to 18mph, fractionally quicker than a sportsman such as a professional soccer player.The bipedal Compsognathus, by comparison, could reach speeds of almost 40mph -- that's 5mph faster than the computer's estimate for the fastest living animal on two legs, the ostrich.The team -- headed by biomechanics expert Bill Sellers and palaeontologist Phil Manning -- say the accuracy of their results is due to the computer's ability to use data relating directly to each dinosaur.

"Previous research has relied on data from extant bipedal models to provide clues as to how fast dinosaurs could run," said Dr Sellers, who is based in Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences. "Such calculations can accurately predict the top speed of a six-tonne chicken but dinosaurs are not built like chickens and nor do they run like them."Our research involved feeding information about the skeletal and muscular structure of the dinosaurs directly into the supercomputer so it could work out how the animals were best able to move."Despite its powerful memory and 256 processors the computer still took up to a week to learn the biomechanics of each animal -- starting with the first clumsy steps and developing into a top running speed based on the optimum gait and posture.The first data to be fed into the computer were those of a 70kg human with the muscle and bone structure of a professional sportsman. The computer accurately predicted a top running speed of just under the 8 metres per second of T. rex.

View: Full Article Source: Science Daily

Crop formation appears in Wiltshire

Sam Willey: Cropcircleconnector (crop website) featured a report on July 7 2007 by Mike Murray on a brand new Alton Barnes, Wiltshire, crop formation of at least 90 circles ranging from very small to very large in the East Field famous for crop formations going back to the early 1990s. Mike Murray made the following comments on the formation: "I went to this marvellous formation today, the sheer size is overwhelming. I couldn't even guess the area covered. It seems to ray out from a very large central circle then all the lines of circles decrease in size to nothing. There are lots of grape shot circles, some with tufts."The formation dowsed positive. I borrowed a pendulum from a young lady, when I used it my arm tingled. This happened at New Barn last year. As you can see from my pictures, the lay of the crop is good although after only a day it is jumping up again. I couldn't visualize the formation from above and wait eagerly for an aerial photograph.”

The first reported sighting of this new formation appearing in East Field was made at 4am just after bright flashes of light were seen. Gary King aged 41 who is currently studying at the Cardiff University in Wales UK and claims he has been able to sense when formations have been created on a number of occasions. Mr. King visited a café called the Silent Circle at mid-day were a local resident informed him that there may be a formation at East Field. Mr. King went to investigate and met other researchers and discovered a tiny portion at the edge of the field had been damaged by wind no formation was found. Mr. King decided he would spend the night at the top of Knapp Hill located directly in front of East Field. Mr. King went up to Knapp Hill on a vigil with another researcher by the name of Paula. Once there they met with a UFO Researcher by the name of Winston Keech. Keech had three cameras set up at the top of the hill as well as two others mounted to his jeep seeing both infrared and visible light one was aimed at East Field the other aimed at Milk Hill.

At approximately 1:35am Keech aimed his image enhancing camera and scanned East Field everything could be seen clearly including the road and no formations or anything else was detected within the field. Three images were providing proving no activity occurring within the field at 1:35am only 90 minutes before the formation appeared.

View: Full Article Source: Alien Nation Sam

The Mongolian Death Worm

The Mongolian Death Worm lives in Mongolia, obviously, and is so named because it spits lethal concoctions of poison and/or electricity on whatever it pleases. The creature's never been officially documented, but locals have seen it - lots of locals. It's even 'real' enough that the 1922 Prime Minister of Mongolia asked a man to bring one in.Did the man succeed?No, the man didn't succeed. But that doesn't keep others from trying to catch/document one of the worms. A Mongolian website has this to say about the super-slug: "The Alghoi Khorkhoi (literally intestinal worm) is a mythical animal known by Mongolians since long time but not indexed by science for the reason that no specimen could yet be captured or studied. It is described like a big worm of approximately 80 cm length living in very remote sand areas of Gobi desert and leaving to the free air only very seldom, in summer.

He is considered as a "terrible" animal able to kill in an unexplained way any man who touch it (poison, static electricity?)"The first report on this animal came from the famous paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews which was asked to capture it by the Prime Minister of Mongolia in 1922. The local belief of the existence of Alghoi Khorkhoi is very widespread and could accredit the assumption that an unknown animal, worm or reptile could still remain unknown by science from its great discretion and its desertic and hostile unhabitat." According to locals, the Death Worm chiefly burrows through the sand, but comes to the surface after it rains, or when a particular flower (the Goyo plant) is in bloom. One of the locals has had enough experience with the worm to make a wooden carving of it. It looks to be a much smaller version of the ones Kevin Bacon and the dad from Family Ties had to fight in the movie Tremors.

View: Full Article Source: Heckler Spray

Where is the rest of the universe ?

Scientists trying to create a detailed inventory of all the matter and energy in the cosmos run into a curious problem — the vast majority of it is missing. "I call it the dark side of the universe," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, referring to the great mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. In fact, only 4 percent of the matter and energy in the universe has been found. The other 96 percent remains elusive, but scientists are looking in the farthest reaches of space and deepest depths of Earth to solve the two dark riddles. Einstein's famous equation "E=mc^2" describes energy and matter (or mass) as one and the same — maps of the cosmos refer to the energy-matter combination as energy density, for short. The problem with detecting dark matter, thought to make up 22 percent of the universe's mass/energy pie, is that light doesn't interact with it.

But it does exhibit the tug of gravity. Initial evidence for the mysterious matter was discovered 75 years ago when astrophysicists noticed an anomaly in a jumble of galaxies: The galactic cluster had hundreds of times more gravitational pull than it should have, far outweighing its visible mass of stars. "We can predict the motions of the sun and planets very accurately, but when we measure distant things we see anomalies," said Scott Dodelson, an astrophysicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "Dark matter is currently the best possible solution, even though we've never seen any of it."

View: Full Article Source: MSNBC