Pennsylvania science teachers will not be forced to advocate "intelligent design" after a judge ruled that that the theory is really religion in disguise. Judge John Jones of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled that intelligent design... is in fact reworked creationism. ...Jones said that the history of intelligent design shows that it is essentially creationism with explicit references to God and the Bible removed. As such, it is primarily a religious theory, not a scientific one, and cannot be taught in US public schools, which are prevented from promoting religion. ....He also found that intelligent design relies on the "false dualism" that if evolution can be disproven, then intelligent design is proven. In any case, he found that intelligent design's criticisms of evolution have been largely refuted.

Source: New Scientist

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A portion of the genetic code of the mammoth has been reconstructed and, to the surprise of scientists, the team that carried out the feat believes that it will be possible to decode the entire genetic make-up. ... So far, around 30 million "letters" of the genetic code have been read, albeit in small pieces, representing around 1 per cent of the entire code. The team says it could take as little as a year to finish the estimated 2.8 billion-letter code that provides the genetic wherewithal to create the animal. Dr Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University, one of the team that published the new work in the journal Science, said on Monday that it may also be possible to genetically alter an elephant to turn it into a mammoth.

Source: The Age

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The world's first walking humanoid robot is set to make its office debut in 2006 as a receptionist, Honda announced on Tuesday. The latest version of Honda’s Asimo robot will be starting its new job in April at a Honda office in Wako in Saitama prefecture north of Tokyo. The prototype, unveiled in Tokyo, can guide guests to a meeting room, serve coffee on a tray and push a cart with a load of up to 10 kilograms, says Honda.

Source: New Scientist

Plenty of people have received messages from other-worldly beings and non-human or spirituals entities, reagrding changes to occur in 2012. This page has gathered a bunch of them together: www.fromthestars.com

Earth's magnetic field - the force that protects us from deadly radiation bursts from outer space - is weakening dramatically. Scientists have discovered that its strength has dropped precipitously over the past two centuries and could disappear over the next 1,000 years.

The effects could be catastrophic. Powerful radiation bursts, which normally never touch the atmosphere, would heat up its upper layers, triggering climatic disruption. Navigation and communication satellites, Earth's eyes and ears, would be destroyed and migrating animals left unable to navigate.

'Earth's magnetic field has disappeared many times before - as a prelude to our magnetic poles flipping over, when north becomes south and vice versa,' said Dr Alan Thomson of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh.

Pole Reversalshappen every 250,000 years or so, and as there has not been one for almost a million years, we are due one soon.'

For more than 100 years, scientists have noted the strength of Earth's magnetic field has been declining, but have disagreed about interpretations. Some said its drop was a precursor to reversal, others argued it merely indicated some temporary variation in field strength has been occurring.

But now Gauthier Hulot of the Paris Geophysical Institute has discovered Earth's magnetic field seems to be disappearing most alarmingly near the poles, a clear sign that a flip may soon take place.

Using satellite measurements of field variations over the past 20 years, Hulot plotted the currents of molten iron that generate Earth's magnetism deep underground and spotted huge whorls near the poles.

Hulot believes these vortices rotate in a direction that reinforces a reverse magnetic field, and as they grow and proliferate these eddies will weaken the dominant field: the first steps toward a new polarity, he says.

And as Scientific American reports this week, this interpretation has now been backed up by computer simulation studies.

How long a reversal might last is a matter of scientific controversy, however. Records of past events, embedded in iron minerals in ancient lava beds, show some can last for thousands of years - during which time the planet will have been exposed to batterings from solar radiation. On the other hand, other researchers say some flips may have lasted only a few weeks.

Exactly what will happen when Earth's magnetic field disappears prior to its re-emergence in a reversed orientation is also difficult to assess. Compasses would point to the wrong pole - a minor inconvenience. More importantly, low-orbiting satellites would be exposed to electromagnetic batterings, wrecking them.

In addition, many species of migrating animals and birds - from swallows to wildebeests - rely on innate abilities to track Earth's magnetic field. Their fates are impossible to gauge.

www.PoleReversal.com

from 1998 to 2002...the team's computer algorithm identified 11 bursting radio sources coming from various directions near the galactic plane. The team spent the next three years observing the sky coordinates of these objects to confirm the discovery and to measure their properties. On average these bursting objects are invisible for all but 0.1 to 1 second per day, which explains why they were not discovered earlier. The bursts last between 2 and 30 milliseconds, with intervals between bursts ranging from 4 minutes to 3 hours. Previous astronomers might have interpreted such signals as radio interference. The group found periodicities for 10 of the 11 sources, falling between 0.4 and 7 seconds. This regularity strongly suggests (but does not prove) that the radio bursts come from rotating neutron stars. McLaughlin's team has affectionately named these objects RRATs, short for Rotating RAdio Transients.

Source: Sky and Telescope

From an email list I subscribe to, News_of_the_Strange_and_Curious:

In July 2005, a small Primate skull was discovered in the desert of Tafilalet near Erfoud ( Marocco ). It was in the sand of a marble quarry where Devonian fossils were already found. Subsequently, the skull could be around 360 million years old. Characteristic features in the only 6.9 cm high and 3,9 cm broad fossil indicate the genus Homo : a globular forehead and hind skull, and an inferior position of the occipital hole under the cranium, which is typical for upright body posture. The fossil was called Homo alaouite, in homage to the Alaouite Dynasty. To be continued... (in french) at the CERBI official site : perso.wanadoo.fr or the CERBI miror site : cerbi.ldi5.com

I believe that a mass influx of cosmic ray radiation has created many, many more human species that those that have been found in fossil form. Fossils are a rare and unusual thing. And most of the new species did not last very long...

Rob.

Dr. Oliver Manuel claims that "massive neutron stars are the energy source at the center of galaxies. “The neutron stars break up and form smaller stars, which drift apart to form planetary systems,”

“This cycle involves neither the production of matter in an initial Big Bang, nor the disappearance of matter into black holes.”

Since the 1960s, scientists have more or less assumed that black holes populate the center of galaxies. Manuel says that assumption just doesn’t make sense to him.

“You should find a hole there, not a huge outpouring of energy and light,” Manuel insists. “If black holes exist at the center of galaxies, stars should be falling in -- instead of explosively moving away from the center.”

More: www.physorg.com

...a team is claiming the first direct evidence that Eta Carinae has a binary companion. Astronomers previously have been unable to detect this star for three reasons: the entire system is shrouded in vast quantities of dust, the secondary star's light is overwhelmed by the brilliance of the primary, and the two objects are separated by less than 10 milliarcseconds on the sky. Based on previous indirect evidence, many astronomers have long suspected that a companion lurks in Eta Carinae's midst. In 1997 Augusto Damineli (University of São Paulo, Brazil) first called attention to the fact that Eta Carinae's optical spectrum undergoes changes every 5.5 years, presumably due to an orbiting star swinging behind the primary star in an elliptical orbit. Subsequent X-ray observations have lent powerful support to this picture, indicating that the winds of the two stars violently collide when the two bodies approach each other every 5.5 years. But in a paper that has been posted on the Internet and that is scheduled to appear in the November 1st Astrophysical Journal, lead author Rosina C. Iping (Catholic University of America) and four colleagues report the direct detection of ultraviolet light from the companion.

Source: Sky and Telescope

When Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz introduces his paper on the "phantom time hypothesis," he kindly asks his readers to be patient, benevolent, and open to radically new ideas, because his claims are highly unconventional. This is because his paper is suggesting three difficult-to-believe propositions: 1) Hundreds of years ago, our calendar was polluted with 297 years which never occurred; 2) this is not the year 2005, but rather 1708; and 3) The purveyors of this hypothesis are not crackpots.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis suggests that the early Middle Ages (614-911 A.D.) never happened, but were added to the calendar long ago either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents, or by deliberate falsification by calendar conspirators. This would mean that all artifacts ascribed to those three centuries belong to other periods, and that all events thought to have occurred during that same period occurred at other times, or are outright fabrications. For instance, a man named Heribert Illig, one of the leading proponents of the theory, believes that Charlemagne was a fictional character. But what evidence is this outlandish theory based upon?

It seems that historians are plagued by a plethora of falsified documents from the Middle Ages, and such was the subject of an archaeological conference in München, Germany in 1986. In his lecture there, Horst Fuhrmann, president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, described how some documents forged by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages were created hundreds of years before their "great moments" arrived, after which they were embraced by medieval society. This implied that whomever produced the forgeries must have very skillfully anticipated the future… or there was some discrepancy in calculating dates.

This was reportedly the first bit of evidence that roused Illig's curiosity… he wondered why the church would have forged documents hundreds of years before they would become useful. So he and his group examined other fakes from preceding centuries, and they "divined chronological distortions." This led them to investigate the origin of the Gregorian calendar, which raised even more inconsistency.

In 1582, the Gregorian calendar we still use today was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII to replace the outdated Julian calendar which had been implemented in 45 BC. The Gregorian calendar was designed to correct for a ten-day discrepancy caused by the fact that the Julian year was 10.8 minutes too long. But by Heribert Illig's math, the 1,627 years which had passed since the Julian calendar started should have accrued a thirteen-day discrepancy… a ten-day error would have only taken 1,257 years.

So Illig and his group went hunting for other gaps in history, and found a few… for example, a gap of building in Constantinople (558 AD - 908 AD) and a gap in the doctrine of faith, especially the gap in the evolution of theory and meaning of purgatory (600 AD until ca. 1100). From all of this data, they have become convinced that at some time, the calendar year was increased by 297 years without the corresponding passage of time.

Sometimes a hypothesis which challenges convention can be alluring, particularly when it seems to fit most of the facts… but as Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It seems to me that all of the evidence provided by Illig and his group is circumstantial, and their conclusions misguided. The hypothesis does raise some interesting questions and point out some inconsistencies in history, but to jump to such an outlandish conclusion indicates an unscientific approach to the problem.

Not only that, but their suggestions for the possible motives behind the calendar-changing conspiracy border on ridiculous. For instance, the first hypothesis they put forward is that Otto III modified the calendar in order to reign in the year 1000 AD, because this suited his understanding of Christian milleniarism.

I consider myself a rather open-minded chap, and I researched this hypothesis with unbiased curiosity when I first learned of it. Granted, most of the materials regarding this theory are written in German and have not been translated into English, so there may be more specific arguments for the hypothesis than those available to me. But from what I can tell, this theory has no basis in fact.

Source: Damn Interesting www.damninteresting.com

Above is a 13 foot "ancient crocodile one whose massive jaws and jagged teeth would have made it the most fearsome predator in the sea"...

... and also recently discovered is a 3 metre tall camel from 100,000 years ago.

Source: AstroBio + Swiss Info

Aside from all the deductions claiming that the brewers were women, and that they had a big ritual before burning the brewery and leaving it... I think it's important to keep in mind that alcohol might have been very important thousands of years ago in the Americas. Perhaps Machu Picchu was a brewery too?

“Chicha, which is often made from maize, was at the heart of this culture, and this is one of the oldest and largest pre-Inca breweries ever discovered in the Americas,” said Patrick Ryan Williams of the Field Museum in Chicago. “Our analyses indicate that this specialty brew was a high-class affair. Corn and Peruvian pepper-tree berries were used to make the beer, which was drunk from elaborate beakers up to half a gallon in volume.” The outpost was partially burned down upon its evacuation, Ryan and colleagues say. Chicha was brewed by a team of select, high-status women because it was so important to the Wari, according to the researchers. They concluded this from the many elegant metal shawl pins found in the three-room brewery, which were absent elsewhere in the extensive ruins. The brewmistresses were probably chosen for their beauty or nobility, the archaeologists said.

(Or for their brewing skills??)

Source: World-Science.net

On November 3rd, at least six spacecraft picked up a powerful burst of gamma rays coming from an area in Ursa Major in the general direction of M81 and M82, two relatively large galaxies located about 12 million light-years away. Most of the flare's energy was packed into a pulse lasting just one-tenth of a second. If the burst originated in M81 or M82, the total energy and spectrum closely resemble the December 2004 giant flare from SGR 1806–20. ...taken together these two flares suggest that such blasts occur once every few decades in a large spiral galaxy such as the Milky Way.

Source: Sky & Telescope

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Scared-stiff astronomers have detected a mysterious mass they've dubbed a "chaos cloud" that dissolves everything in its path, including comets, asteroids, planets and entire stars -- and it's headed directly toward Earth!

Discovered April 6 by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the swirling, 10 million-mile- wide cosmic dust cloud has been likened to an "acid nebula" and is hurtling toward us at close to the speed of light -- making its estimated time of arrival 9:15 a.m. EDT on June 1, 2014.

"The good news is that this finding confirms several cutting- edge ideas in theoretical physics," announced Dr. Albert Sherwinski, a Cambridge based astrophysicist with close ties to NASA.

"The bad news is that the total annihilation of our solar system is imminent."

Experts believe the chaos cloud is composed of particles spawned near the event horizon of a black hole (a form of what's called Hawking Radiation) that have been distorted by mangled information spewed from the hole.

"A super-massive black hole lies about 28,000 light-years from Earth at the center of our galaxy," explained Dr. Sherwinski.

"Last year the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking revised his theory of black holes -- which previously held that nothing could escape the hole's powerful gravitational field. He demonstrated that information about objects that have been sucked in can be emitted in mangled form.

"It now appears that mangled information can distort matter.

"Just imagine our galaxy the Milky Way as a beautiful, handwritten letter.

"Now imagine pouring a glass of water on the paper and watching the words dissolve as the stain spreads. That's what the chaos cloud does to every star or planet it encounters."

To avoid widespread panic, NASA has declined to make the alarming discovery public. But Dr. Sherwinski's contacts at the agency's Chandra X-ray Observatory leaked to him striking images of the newly discovered chaos cloud obliterating a large asteroid.

"It's like watching a helpless hog being dissolved in a vat of acid," one NASA scientist told Dr. Sherwinski.

Ordinarily, Hawkings Radiation is harmless.

"It's produced when an electron- positron pair are at the event horizon of a black hole," Dr. Sherwinski explained. "The intense curvature of space-time of the hole can cause the positron to fall in, while the electron escapes."

But when "infected" by mangled information from the black hole, the particles become a chaos cloud, which in turn mangles everything it touches.

"If it continues unchecked, the chaos cloud will eventually reduce our galaxy to the state of absolute chaos that existed before the birth of the universe," the astrophysicist warned.

Some scientists say mankind's best hope would be to build a "space ark" and hightail it to the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.1 million light-years away.

"We wouldn't be able to save the entire human population, but perhaps the best and the brightest," observed British rocket scientist Dr. David Hall, when asked about the feasibility of such a project.

But even if such a craft could be built in time, evacuating Earth might prove fruitless if theories about the origin of the chaos cloud are correct.

"A black hole at the center of Andromeda is about 15 times the size of the one in our own galaxy," Dr. Sherwinski noted. "It might be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire."

Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a senior White House official said the president's top science advisors are taking the findings in stride.

"This is a lot like global warming, where the jury is still out on whether it's real or not," said the official.

"The existence of this so called chaos cloud is only a theory. Americans shouldn't panic until all the facts are in."

Link to original Story tv.yahoo.com

ITS ALL A HOAX

An article from "oracle 20-20" magazine, a metaphysical journal

Earth Changes, Eschatology & 2012

by Jonathan Bethel

Considering all the earthquakes, volcanic activity, and extreme weather we have been experiencing, it's hard not to have apocalyptic thoughts and speculate that we may be approaching the end of time. It is very telling that many cultures have prophecies and calendars that focus on our current world age. These prophecies deem that our current time will be a period of great strife and transformation; they furthermore predict this chaos will precede the creation of a new form of mankind.

I endeavor to present a series of articles delineating earth changes, eschatology, and the year 2012. I will discuss the nuances of our rapidly transforming biosphere, and I will describe the advent of the noosphere, a layer of collective synchronous thought surrounding the planet. I seek to present the facts as they are, how they are related to our current outlook, and what could be on the horizon. However, I also desire to dispel the fear about our approach to this radical shift and describe what it "could" mean for us.

Why is 2012 related to the end of the world? To look at this as the "End" and not the beginning of a new cycle doesn't fit what is really happening. There are several lines of thought that point to the year 2012 as a period of radical transformation and the culmination of human history.

First of all, it is during this year that the Maya 13 baktun long- count calendar has its termination point – December 21, 2012 – the winter solstice. This 13 baktun calendar began on August 12, 3114 B.C., and its duration is 1/5 of a precession, a 26,000 year period. John Major Jenkins discovered that the 2012 end-date coincides with an alignment with the galactic center. Consequently, after 26,000 years we are completing a cycle, and we are realigning with the galactic center; this is the wake-up call for human history.

Secondly, Terence McKenna's TimeWave Zero, which is based on the Chinese system of the I-Ching and maps the fluctuation between habit and novelty, is the other belief system which points to this date. The TimeWave reaches infinite novelty at the same time as the end- date of the Calendar of the Maya during late 2012. In other words, what it says is the complexity of modern life reaches it zenith on this date, and mankind enters a new phase of being. There are various other intimations and prophecies of 2012, and we will discuss them later in this series.

There is evidence to suggest that 2012 will coincide with what is expected to be a very active year for sunspots. Some predictions even state the sun is going through a magnetic pole shift, and this pole reversal may be brought about by the extreme solar activity of 2012. If this were to occur on the sun, it could be a very devastating situation for all of us, including a pole shift on our planet. This may be actually occurring despite the sun shifting poles or not. One thing is for certain, the extreme weather we have been witnessing appears to be a direct influence from all the anomalous solar activity, not just the "Global Warming" as many are accusing.

Although these are the facts, this is nothing but doom and gloom and doesn't promote anything but hopelessness. In spite of that it may very well be, as some insinuate, that the sun is emitting evolution altering energy, torsion-wave energy, and mutating us all into entities capable of operating in a new and higher existence. This is the perspective of several researchers; although, I don't think you will get any reductionist scientists agreeing with that. I don't know if it's true or not, but we should remain open-minded until we find out otherwise. Science would consider this all preposterous. We shall see; I really doubt my own eyes are lying to me and all this evidence and extreme weather is bogus. It appears that we humans, the domesticated primates on this planet, veil the unknown and uncertain in ominous imagery out of fear. Therefore, because we're in a time of rapid change, a disintegrating biosphere, extreme weather, and of uncertain future, the 2012 end-date takes on threatening and apocalyptic imagery. On the other hand, we have others who think they have it all figured out, thinking things will remain the same as always, and we have nothing to face or fear. These two perspectives are typical of domesticated primates and get us nowhere. We need to face all of this with open yet discriminating minds, without casting doom on everything we hear and without being so self-assured that we think we have it all figured out. We need to take in the facts as they become apparent and make decisions accordingly.

Whatever the facts of the matter are, we need to be creating spiritual ideals and treating the others around us with the kindness we would like to receive, creating a positive morphic thought field and influencing the course of events in a beneficial way. In this way, we will be in the best frame of mind to meet any challenges that may arise. If nothing happens, wonderful, we're all the better with our benevolent behavior!

Jonathan Bethel is a writer and researcher in the areas of futurism, eschatology, and esoteric wisdom. He is the director of Omega Point Institute - www.omegapoint.org It is a futurist think tank, singularity watch group and esotericism group. He also runs a website devoted to the 2012 meme( www.2012eschaton.com )

Source: timewavezero2012

Semir Osmanagic said Visocica Hill, about 18 miles from Sarajevo, is actually a pyramid built by people who were the first inhabitants of the Balkans. The researcher said the hill, which is about 2,300 feet high, is man-made. The hill includes sandstone slabs 17 feet below the surface. Sandstone, he said, is not a naturally occurring rock in the area.

Source: turnto10.com

Scientists have long said that it is an unusually quiet galactic center, but the lack of energy seems to be temporary...

In other galaxies it is common to find black holes that are 100 million times brighter... Only 350 years ago it would have looked a million times brighter to us on Earth than it does now... Luckily, even if the black hole erupted again it would not pose a threat to life on Earthm, as our atmosphere provides ample protection from gamma rays.

But, the New Scientist article fails to mention if our atmosphere is enough to protect us from a million times current brightness (as in 350 years ago) or 100 million times, like other balck holes normally have, or even more than that...

Source: New Scientist Feb 5 2005, page 8

It's a pretty basic calendar from Roman times:

A parapegma was a stone tablet with movable pegs and an inscription to indicate the approximate correspondence between, for example, the rising of a particular star and the civil date. Because the calendar had to be changed regularly to keep the civil calendar in phase with the astronomical one, the parapegma had movable pegs which could be adjusted as necessary.

But what is interesting is the possibility of the same thing occuring in Ecuador before contact with the west!

Source: pakhomov.com

Given the almost hysterical ( and often deeply amusing) fuss over the meaning of the "End of the Mayan Long Count calendar , the following information should, I think be promulgated more fully. (it's now only noted at a fairly obscure Wikipedia site):

December 18, 2012: Transit of Mercury as (hypothetically) seen from Venus

December 20, 2012 Transit of Mercury as " seen from Saturn (graze)

December 21, 2012 Transit of Venus as " seen from Saturn

Since the Mayans were reputed to be experts in the motion of Venus, I find it rather interesting that these events are occuring at the 2012 solstice.....

Regards,

Ron Stewart

Astronomers are puzzled by two vast objects in our galaxy that spew powerful radiation, yet appear pitch black. The objects are not black holes, which generally are smaller and which, despite their name, do seem to emit visible light, though that light actually comes from around them and not inside them. The two bizarre objects were detected in a survey of sources within our galaxy of very high-energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are a type of light that is the most powerful known, yet is invisible to our eyes. The objects appear to be light-years wide, the astronomers said. This would make them bigger than our Solar System ...The newfound objects are also distinct from another, well known type of gamma-ray source called gamma-ray bursts—momentary flashes of gamma rays, detected about once a day, which astronomers think may signal the birth of black holes as dead stars abruptly shrink out of existence. Astronomers have dubbed the mystery objects dark accelerators.

Source: World Science