Not Atlantis, but significant nonetheless – Swedish divers find 11,000-year-old relics.

Swedish divers have made a unique and rare discovery in the Baltic Sea – Stone Age artefacts left by Swedish nomads dating back 11,000 years.  Media sites are going a little berserk with talks of a ‘Swedish Atlantis’ and the ‘oldest settlement in Sweden’. However, a few facts need to be put straight. Firstly, this discovery is not even close to descriptions of Atlantis. Secondly, it does not reflect a city, town, or village. But we can still get excited about this discovery, because these are incredibly old artefacts which may shed light on how hunter-gatherers in the region once lived.    Björn Nilsson, archaeology professor at Södertörn University, and his team, have been given resources by the Swedish National Heritage Board to conduct a three-year excavation below the water’s surface in Hanö, a sandy bay off the coast of Skåne County. While excavations are still underway, so far, they have uncovered a number of remnants that are believed to have been discarded in the water by Swedes in the Stone Age, objects which have been preserved thanks to the lack of oxygen and the abundance of gyttja sediment, which is sediment rich in organic matter at the bottom of a eutrophic lake. It is extremely rare to find evidence from the Stone Age so unspoiled. Buried 16 metres below the surface, Nilsson uncovered wood, flint tools, animal horns and ropes. Among the most notable items found include a harpoon carving made from an animal bone, and the bones of an ancient animal called aurochs, the ancestor of domestic cattle, the last of which died off in the early 1600s. "There's wood and antlers and other implements that were thrown in there," said Nilsson. "Around 11,000 years ago there was a build up in the area, a lagoon or sorts ... and all the tree and bone pieces are preserved in it. If the settlement was on dry land we would only have the stone-based things, nothing organic." However, unlike the stories of Atlantis, the remains do not come from a great city or even a village because the people were nomadic at the time. Archaeologists are continuing the dig, and are now particularly interested to see whether there is also an ancient burial site in the region.

Source: Ancient Origins

World War One's financial crisis - parallels with 2008.

Queues in the City, banks raising cash in a hurry from the authorities and a rush to obtain gold - sounds like September and October 2008?

No, this was late July and early August 1914. Even before a shot had been fired by a British soldier, markets were gripped by fears of the consequences of war.

It is a story which in the 100 years since the outbreak of World War One has not been widely chronicled.

Former Bank of England Governor Mervyn, now Lord, King said at the height of the 2008 banking crisis that it was the worst since August 1914.

An expert on economic history, King liked to point out that there was nothing comparable in the 1930s which many saw as the obvious parallel to the financial implosion triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Markets wake up

King believed there were clear similarities between 2008 and 1914 - a flight to safe assets, a drying up of liquidity and market interest rates soaring.

In the final days of July 1914, financial markets woke up to the alarming reality that a European war was inevitable.

Queues built up at the Bank of England, as investors scrambled to change their paper money for gold (with sterling on the gold standard, the Bank was obliged to provide convertibility for the currency, though the government quickly opted to suspend the link to gold).

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It was the most serious systemic financial crisis that has ever overtaken Britain - or indeed the world”

Prof Richard RobertsKing's College London

Commercial banks rushed to convert their bonds and bills into cash or use them as collateral for loans from the Bank.

The Bank of England's official rate for lending operations soared from 3% to 10% in a matter of days. On Friday, 31 July, the stock exchange closed and commercial banks shut their doors for a week.

Bank closures were desperate measures which, however dire the situation might have seemed, never happened during the crisis of 2008. War was declared on Tuesday, 4 August, but by this stage the City had in effect already closed for business.

Exchange crashes and bank runs

Prof Richard Roberts, of King's College London, and author of Saving the City - the Great Financial Crisis of 1914, argues that the events of July and August were as bad as the City of London has ever seen, either before or since.

"In the week before Britain went to war all the London financial markets collapsed," he says.

"It was the most serious systemic financial crisis that has ever overtaken Britain - or indeed the world. There were something like 50 countries which had stock exchange crashes and runs on banks."

The response of the authorities was similar to the dramatic intervention 94 years later. There was an unprecedented lifeline for the markets and Prof Roberts estimates the overall support for the financial system in 1914 was larger as a share of national income than what was deployed in 2008.

The Bank of England opened up every tap to allow liquidity to spread around the City. It bought up financial assets held by banks which had plunged in value because of fears of default by institutions in France, Germany and Italy. The government agreed to provide taxpayer guarantees against any losses incurred by the Bank.

'A state of funk'

The debates in Parliament and in the City in 1914 bore an uncanny resemblance to those held in the aftermath of the bailouts of RBS and Lloyds/HBOS.

The concern about stigma being attached to those banks which went to the Bank of England to get access to emergency credit lines was voiced in 1914. Accusations that banks bailed out by the authorities were not lending to the wider economy were also heard.

In his book City of London: The History, David Kynaston quotes disapproval of the bankers in Downing Street. The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, described the City's leaders as being in "a state of funk like old women chattering over tea cups in a cathedral town".

The words were a little different, but the sentiments the same, when Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling gave their verdicts on the bank chiefs in 2008.

One hundred years on, the Bank of England has opened up its archives for 1914 for public viewing. A fascinating episode in economic history is set out in the ledgers kept in the vaults.

The authorities' massive intervention propped up the financial system and kept it afloat as Britain went to war. Financial history would repeat itself more than nine decades on but without the bloodshed.

Perhaps Mervyn King and his colleagues consulted the archives to see how their predecessors dealt with the banking crisis of 1914.

Source: BBC

Alchemy May Not Have Been the Pseudoscience We All Thought It Was.

Although scientists never could quite turn lead into gold, they did attempt some noteworthy experiments

Throughout much of the 20th century, the academic community had little patience with alchemists and their vain efforts to transmute base metals into gold. Any contemporary scholar who even dared to write about alchemy, historian Herbert Butterfield warned, would “become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.”

But, in the 1980s, some revisionist scholars began arguing that alchemists actually made significant contributions to the development of science. Historians of science began deciphering alchemical texts—which wasn’t easy. The alchemists, obsessed with secrecy, deliberately described their experiments in metaphorical terms laden with obscure references to mythology and history. For instance, text that describes a “cold dragon” who “creeps in and out of the caves” was code for saltpeter (potassium nitrate)—a crystalline substance found on cave walls that tastes cool on the tongue.

This painstaking process of decoding allowed researchers, for the first time, to attempt ambitious alchemical experiments. Lawrence Principe, a chemist and science historian at Johns Hopkins University, cobbled together obscure texts and scraps of 17th-century laboratory notebooks to reconstruct a recipe to grow a “Philosophers’ Tree” from a seed of gold. Supposedly this tree was a precursor to the more celebrated and elusive Philosopher’s Stone, which would be able to transmute metals into gold. The use of gold to make more gold would have seemed entirely logical to alchemists, Principe explains, like using germs of wheat to grow an entire field of wheat.

Principe mixed specially prepared mercury and gold into a buttery lump at the bottom of a flask. Then he buried the sealed flask in a heated sand bath in his laboratory.

One morning, Principe came into the lab to discover to his “utter disbelief” that the flask was filled with “a glittering and fully formed tree” of gold. The mixture of metals had grown upward into a structure resembling coral or the branching canopy of a tree minus the leaves.

What intrigues Principe and his fellow historians, though, is the growing evidence that the alchemists seem to have performed legitimate experiments, manipulated and analyzed the material world in interesting ways and reported genuine results. And many of the great names in the canon of modern science took note, says William Newman, a historian at Indiana University Bloomington.

Robert Boyle, one of the 17th-century founders of modern chemistry, “basically pillaged” the work of the German physician and alchemist Daniel Sennert, says Newman. When Boyle’s French counterpart, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, substituted a modern list
of elements (oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and others) for the ancient four elements (earth, air, fire and water), he built on an idea that was “actually widespread in earlier alchemical sources,” Newman writes. The concept that matter was composed of several distinctive elements, in turn, inspired Sir Isaac Newton’s work on optics—notably, his demonstration that the multiple colors produced by a prism could be reconstituted into white light.

Other scholars have at times responded to this idea with outrage. Principe was once confronted at an academic conference by a member of the audience who was “literally shaking with rage that I could defame Boyle in this way.” But younger academics have taken up alchemy as a hot topic. The early revisionist research, says Principe, “cracked open the seal and said ‘Hey, look everybody, this is not what you thought it was.’”

In a mark of that new acceptance, the Museum Kunst­palast in Düsseldorf, Germany, will present a show, beginning in April, that—along with alchemy-influenced artworks, from Jan Brueghel the Elder to Anselm Kiefer—will include an exhibit on Principe’s “Philosophers’ Tree” experiment.

Does this new view of alchemy make the great names in the early history of science seem more derivative and thus less great? “We were just talking in my class about the rhetoric of novelty,” says Principe, “and how it benefits people to say that their discoveries are completely new.” But that’s not how scientific ideas develop. “They don’t just sort of come to someone in a dream, out of nowhere. New scientific ideas tend to develop out of older ones by a slow process of evolution and refinement.”

From that perspective, the scientific revolution may have been a little less revolutionary than we imagine. Better to think of it as a transmutation, like the alchemists’ quest to change lead into gold.

Read more: Smithsonian magazine 

Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition – Video

This video sheds light into the nature of love, relationships, the "New Age" movement, reality-creation, quantum physics, objectivity vs. subjectivity and how it all relates to the topics of "conspiracy theories", psychopathy, and the importance of esoteric self-work.

UFO Caught Near Space Station, Demonstrates Incredible Speeds.

This is a very unusual catch at the ISS. Streetcap1 of Youtube not only caught a long white light near the ISS, but also as it shot off, stopped the shot off again. This guy has eyes of an eagle to catch this UFO. Most of us would have easily missed it. A great video of alien tech in action. To view it, pause the video at 33 sec into it. SCW

Source Cam: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html#.UuSJK3lm6X0

Mars drill project awarded £3.95m

A Scottish space programme has been awarded almost £4 million to develop a drill to explore the surface of Mars.

The Space Glasgow research group at the University of Glasgow received the funding to go towards building a drill to extract and contain samples from the surface of the red planet.

It is expected to be built by the summer of 2016 and will be tested on the uninhabited Devon Island in Baffin Bay, Canada, which is described as "one of the most Mars-like places on Earth" by scientists.

Dr Patrick Harkness and Professor Margaret Lucas from the university's engineering school are leading the drilling programme.

Dr Harkness said: "The Martian surface has features that look like dried up riverbeds, suggesting that the planet may have been much wetter in the past. Even today, there may be brine near the surface.

"Samples of the surface rocks would be extremely useful to develop our understanding of how similar Mars might have been to the Earth and how the planets have diverged."

The drill will use high-frequency vibrations to shatter the rock on the surface of the plant rather than drill through it and potentially damage the samples.

Dr Harkness added: "Planetary drilling is difficult because the low gravity makes it difficult to apply the large forces that are normally used to shatter rock on Earth while the need to preserve the samples means that the rock temperature must be kept close to ambient.

"Once we have the samples, they cannot be returned directly to Earth because of the risk - however remote - that they could contain pathogens dangerous to our planet. They must be sealed inside a container that will only be opened in a secure laboratory."

The automated Curiosity rover operated by Nasa is currently exploring the surface of Mars and the space agency reported late last year that it had found evidence of a freshwater lake that may once have supported life on the planet.

The £3.95 million of funding is from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme, which aims to boost research and education across Europe.

It will also support Space Glasgow's research into the physics of solar flares - large, bright streaks released by the sun in a build-up of energy.

The research will bring together experts from seven universities to collect and analyse data from satellite and earthbound observations of solar flares.

Dr Lyndsay Fletcher and Dr Nicolas Labrosse from the University of Glasgow's school of physics and astronomy will work on the project.

Dr Fletcher said: "This project will allow us to combine ultra-high detail observation of solar flare events with advanced theoretical and computational modelling to shed light on the way a flare's energy is stored, released and converted into other forms.

"The material of the solar atmosphere, in common with 99% of the visible universe, is an electrified gas, or plasma, carrying a magnetic field.

"By studying energy release and radiation in solar flares we'll be learning more about how astrophysical plasmas work, as well as probing a solar system event that has a direct impact on our planet's environment."

Source: Yahoo news

Global Consciousness? There May Be An App For That…

Six years ago this February, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) shut its doors for the last time1. Spearheading maverick research on consciousness and human/machine interactions, PEAR’s alumni have presented provocative and contentious findings serving to enflame groups like Guerilla Skeptics. For example, Roger Nelson’s random event generator registering fluctuations in global consciousness during New Year’s Eve, 9/11 (nevar fergit), and the death of Nelson Mandela2.

PEAR’s dream is still alive through Psyleron. They’re selling a Random Event Generator for $349 USD3 so everyone has the opportunity to collect data on the phenomena of global consciousness. Still the bar for entry is quite high.

Maybe not for long.

There’s an Indiegogo campaign poised to revolutionize how we use our smartphones. When released, it will supposedly transform your phone into a true random number generator (RNG). This is a surprising development since most RNGs are pseudorandom, susceptible to being gamed if someone breaks the key. A very simple RNG is taking a string of 8 numbers (k) 86753099, saving the middle four integers (s) 7530, then perform s^2 56700900, and save the middle four integers of that number. Rinse, lather, repeat as necessary. Knowing k is 86753099 can cock up everything since the numbers aren’t truly random.

The app, so far, is a mix of Twitter and Foursquare. Not only are you tracked in the name of science, your microblog entries are compared against the background consciousness (courtesy of their Random Event Generator (REG)) in your vicinity, and fellow users. Bonus, the app’s going to be free. Psyleron currently offers a random event generator service, SyncTXT, that’s $6.49 a month. No word if that’ll be phased out when the app goes gold.

Over the past ten days, the campaign’s earned $8,546 USD which is a strong start for their $100,000 goal. Appreciate the campaign is “flexible funding”, meaning the campaign will receive all funds raised even if they miss the goal. You’re not dealing with (alleged) thieves like Rick Dyer and his ilk. Roger Nelson and Adam Curry (no, not the guy from MTV) are consulting on development, along with Dean Radin4 and many others involved in PEAR, psi research, and similar fields.

So reach deep, real deep, into your pockets! We don’t want to hear no jingling, just the crinkling of paper, and give what you can afford to make this vision a reality.