Category Archives: Science
1,000 year old Viking burial site found in Scotland
Archaeologists working in the Scottish Highlands discovered A 1,000-year-old Viking burial site. Viking specialists from the University of Glasgow say the boat is likely to be from the 10th century AD.
The remains of a high-status Viking with an axe, sword and spear, who was buried in his boat, which was held together with 200 metal rivets, were found in a 5 metre long grave. The Grave, located on a remote Scottish peninsula, The amazing find is the first undisturbed Viking ship burial found on the British mainland.
Hannah Cobb, the dig project’s co-director, described the discovery on the Ardnamurchan peninsula as “an exciting find”.
“A Viking boat burial is an incredible discovery, but in addition to that, the artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain, The Vikings would have dug a boat shaped hole and then they would have dragged the boat up from the sea and put the boat into the hole and laid all his possessions around him. His shield would have been laid on his chest and his sword was at his side and then they filled up the boat with stones and that’s exactly what we found when we came to excavate it. Though we have excavated many important artefacts over the years, I think it’s fair to say that this year the archaeology has really exceeded our expectations,”
The archaeologists also unearthed part of a shield, a bronze ring-pin, a whetstone from Norway and Viking pottery at the site.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-19/12c000yo-viking-burial-site-found-in-britain/3580162
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=10550
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/10/19/Viking-ship-burial-found-in-Scotland/UPI-99021319055638/
Samsung seeks iPhone ban in Australia – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Samsung Electronics says it is trying to block the sale of Apple’s newest iPhone in Australia and Japan, escalating its legal battle with the US giant after several setbacks.
Samsung says it has filed for preliminary injunctions in courts in New South Wales and Tokyo, seeking a ban on sales of the iPhone 4S on the grounds it infringes Samsung’s technology patents.
The South Korean firm says it is also seeking a sales ban on the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 in Japan, after Apple won a temporary ban on sales of Samsung’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet in Australia.
“Apple has continued to violate our patent rights and free-ride on our technology. We will no longer stand idly by and will steadfastly protect our intellectual property,” Samsung said.
The filing in Japan cites infringement of technology patents, Samsung said, accusing Apple of also violating in Australia three of its wireless technologies essential for operating mobile phones.
via Samsung seeks iPhone ban in Australia – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Creepy things found on Wikipedia
Head transplant
A head transplant is a surgical operation involving the grafting of an organism’s head onto the body of another. It should not be confused with another, hypothetical, surgical operation, the brain transplant. Head transplantation inevitably involves decapitating the patient. Although it has been successfully performed using dogs, monkeys and rats, no human is known to have undergone the procedure.
Since the technology required to reattach a severed spinal cord has not yet been developed, the subject of a head transplant would become quadriplegic unless proper therapies were developed. This technique has been proposed as possibly useful for people who are already quadriplegics and who are also suffering from widespread organ failures which would otherwise require many different and difficult transplant surgeries. It may also be useful for people who would rather be quadriplegic than dead. There is no uniform consensus on the ethics of such a procedure
Read more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant
Whole-body transplant
A whole-body transplant or brain transplant is a hypothetical operation that would move the brain of one being into the body of another. It is a procedure distinct from head transplant, which involves transferring the entire head to a new body, as opposed to the brain only. Theoretically, a person with advanced organ failure could be given a new and functional body while keeping their own personality and memories.
Historically, whole-body transplants have not been feasibile and were widely regarded as impossible. Today, given progress in organ transplant and human cloning research, many scientists hold that whole-body transplants are theoretically possible and likely to be feasibile in the future. Somebioethicists argue that there are difficult moral problems involved in either harvesting a brain-dead body, especially one deliberately created using human cloning, or otherwise acquiring a body (say, of a criminal due to be executed for a crime,] or an individual who is not dead but is soon to die of a brain-based illness).
Though not feasible at current levels of technology and scientific understanding, this and similar concepts have been explored in various forms of fiction.
Read more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-body_transplant
Exploding head syndrome
Exploding head syndrome is a parasomnia condition that causes the sufferer occasionally to experience a tremendously loud noise as originating from within his or her own head, usually described as the sound of an explosion, roar, gunshot, loud voices or screams, a ringing noise, or the sound of electrical arcing (buzzing).
This noise usually occurs within an hour or two of falling asleep, but is not necessarily the result of a dream and can happen while awake as well. While the sound is perceived as extremely loud, it is usually not accompanied by pain. Attacks appear to change in number over time, with several attacks occurring in a space of days or weeks followed by months of remission. Sufferers often feel a sense of fear and anxiety after an attack, accompanied by elevated heart rate. Attacks are also often accompanied by perceived flashes of light (when perceived on their own, known as a “visual sleep start”) or difficulty in breathing. The condition is also known as “auditory sleep starts”. It is not thought to be dangerous,although it is sometimes distressing to experience. Sufferers may experience an inability to vocalize any sound, or mild forms of sleep paralysis during an attack.
Read more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome
Your “Carbon Legacy”
I came across this article that I think all should read it may wake many up to the truth about carbon emissions. Is this what we want??
Honestly This is the biggest Hoax going. Didnt we all learn at school CO2 was good for vegetation? We also learnt that plants need it to grow and construct their tissues. So would the extra CO2 projected to be in the air by the end of the century actually be beneficial for the planet’s vegetation?
If people keep supporting this rubbish the following article will show you where we will end up if wee keep believing in this hoax, yes Hoax its like War of the Worlds all over again starting panic over nothing But false information.
Your “Carbon Legacy”
Volume 12, Number 11: 18 March 2009
Politicians who bow to the demands of the world’s climate alarmists have long sought various means of reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions. To date, the measures they have proposed have been rather mundane, focusing primarily on reducing emissions associated with one’s household activities and transportation habits. For example, we have been encouraged to replace our incandescent light bulbs with more energy efficient ones. We’ve also been asked to participate in municipal recycling programs, to drive less, to car pool or to utilize public transportation. But the “rules of the road” will soon be become much more stringent, and you and I may be asked – if not mandated by law – to make an unprecedented lifestyle change that could dramatically curtail one of our most cherished personal freedoms, all in the name of “saving the planet.”
Writing for the scientific journal Global Environmental Change, two academics at Oregon State University – Paul Murtaugh and Michael Schlax – identify this lifestyle change in a paper entitled “Reproduction and the Carbon Legacies of Individuals.” In this treatise they attempt to quantify, in their words, “the carbon legacy of an individual,” and to examine “how it is affected by the individual’s reproductive choices,” based on the premise that “a person is responsible for the carbon emissions of his descendants, weighted by their relatedness to him.” So what did they find?
The two researchers calculated that a woman in the United States would reduce her lifetime CO2emissions by about 486 tons if she implemented the green-approved household and transportation activities mentioned previously. But they estimate that if she were to have just one child, that child, over its lifetime, would eventually release nearly 20 times more CO2 to the atmosphere than the reductions achieved by its mother via her more mundane green activities.
In light of these calculations, Murtaugh and Schlax conclude that “the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle,” adding that “enormous [our italics] future benefits can be gained by immediate changes [our italics] in reproductive behavior,” and, therefore, that “an individual’s reproductive choices can have a dramatic effect on the total carbon emissions ultimately attributable to his or her genetic lineage.”
We can only hope, in this regard, that everyone’s future reproductive behavior will continue to be a matter of choice. But in light of the supposedly “enormous” CO2-related “benefits” of curtailing child-bearing – especially in the United States – no one can assume that such will continue to be the case, especially in light of the claims of climate alarmists such as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama, who consider CO2-induced global warming to be the greatest threat to the survival of civilization ever to be encountered. Faced with such a unique and unparalleled threat, we could well awake one morning and find ourselves with no choice in the matter, mandated by law to only procreate to the extent deemed ecologically appropriate by those enlightened few who somehow simply “know” what is best for the biosphere.
It may seem unthinkable today that our government – of the people, by the people and for the people – would ever assume the power to tell us how many children we can and cannot have. But much has happened in the past few months that truly was unthinkable, and only a single year ago. And if it’s happened before, it can happen again; for in times of crisis – either real, as in the current economic crisis, or imagined, as in Al Gore’s climate crisis – normally-rational people can do some wildly-irrational things. We must, therefore, maintain the eternal vigilance that is needed to preserve our God-given rights that no one has the authority to rescind. Stand up with us and demand that your elected officials carefully scrutinize both sides of the CO2-climate debate and think for themselves. We need thoughtful men and women of integrity to guide our nation, not mindless lemmings.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
Reference
Murtaugh, P.A. and Schlax, M.G. 2009. Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals.Global Environmental Change: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.10.007.
Woolly Rhino Fossil Discovery in Tibet Provides Important Clues to Evolution of Ice Age Giants
ScienceDaily (Sep. 2, 2011) — A new paper published in the journal Science reveals the discovery of a primitive woolly rhino fossil in the Himalayas, which suggests some giant mammals first evolved in present-day Tibet before the beginning of the Ice Age. The extinction of Ice Age giants such as woolly mammoths and rhinos, giant sloths, and saber-tooth cats has been widely studied, but much less is known about where these giants came from, and how they acquired their adaptations for living in a cold environment.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110901142100.htm
Spot of fun with a Dash of Serious 