Sea of the Devil: Dragon Triangle

The Bermuda triangle's infamous association with disappearing boats and aircraft is known across the globe. Less well known is an area off the west coast of Japan which has an equally deadly history. It is an area where Japanese sailors fear to voyage; they call it 'Ma-no Uni' – the "Sea of the Devil".

Legend has it that huge restless dragons surface from their deep shelters to seize any unfortunate passing mariners. Japanese sailors have often recorded freakish occurrences in the area and talk of hearing terrible noises and seeing awful red lights. They believe one particularly potent creature lives in an immense palace beneath the waves. They call this monster 'Li-Lung', the "Dragon King of the Western Sea", and say his lair is decorated with the ships he has captured.

This mysterious zone stretches from western Japan to Yap island in the south and Taiwan to the west. Like the Bermuda Triangle, it is seen as having an above average number of navigation and communication failures. In truth, this area of ocean bears a remarkable resemblance to its Western cousin. Both areas are known for extreme changes in weather conditions, unexpected fogs, tidal waves, seaquakes and hurricanes, and both have examples of agonic lines, lines upon which a compass needle will point true north and south. Their most unwelcome similarities are the truly horrifying levels of unexplained sinkings and disappearances.

By the late 1940s, the amount of ships being lost without trace in the region lead to the Japanese government declaring the area a danger zone. In the early 1950s they decided to dispatch a research vessel to study the area. Despite enjoying good visibility and calm seas, the Kiao Maru No.5 disappeared without trace on 24th September 1952. The lives of all twenty-two crew and nine scientists were lost. The vessel has never been found. They are regular occurrences which stretch back for centuries and continue to this day. Whether it is dragons or not, the real evidence behind this ocean’s terrible secret remains on the seabed.

Weirdest Animal Genetic Alterations

9.The Ear Mouse

One of the first genetic images to go viral was the “ear mouse.” The mouse appears to have a human ear attached to its back, but it is actually just human cartilage that was molded into an ear form. It is often confused with a real human ear, but that process is still a long way away.

 

 

 

 

8. Cow’s Breast Milk

Human DNA was mixed with a cow’s milk genetics to produce breast milk straight from the udder. Years from now, you could actually buy breast milk from a store instead of baby formula.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 7. Spider-Goat

Marvel may have the inspiration for its newest superhero with the Spider-Goat. Using genetics from spiders, goats have been born with the ability to produce a webbing protein in their milk. This webbing could be used to make all kinds of products in the future.

 

6. Blue Strawberries

Apparently mushy strawberries from the freezer have been a big enough concern that scientists felt the need to do something about it. Using DNA from an Arctic Flounder Fish, a new ge

netically altered strawberry turns blue while growing. The new strawberry could withstand harsher temperatures, but it will take years of research to see if it is ready for consumption.

 

5. The Sheep Humans

Several B-horror movies seem to be coming to life with the recent genetic alterations on sheep. Injecting human DNA into a sheep has resulted in 15% of the sheep to be made up of huma

n body parts. These parts include lungs, livers and other organs that could potentially be used for human transplants years in the future

4. Double-Sized Salmon Fish

DNA has been altered in salmon to make the fish grow double their size. The eggs are being sold to fish farms that can quickly grow the salmon, and then sell it. The sale of these fish in the United States could be approved within the next couple of years.

3. Tweeting Mice

No, mice have not yet learned how to use Twitter, but hundreds of them are tweeting in a Japanese laboratory. Over the years, genetic mutations from dozens of animals have been performed

on the mice, with one of the rare successes coming from a bird, with some mice using bird songs and tweets to make noise. 

 

 

Watch this video on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLu37VvCozw&feature

 

2. Scorpion Cabbage

What do scorpions and cabbage have in common? On a farm in California, they actually share the same venom. In an effort to prevent caterpillars from eating crops, this cabbage has bee

n genetically altered to contain scorpion venom that will kill the creatures instantly. The venom has been altered enough to cause no harm to humans.

 

 

1. Glowing Kittens

In an effort to prevent the spread of feline AIDS, a selected group of cat reproductive eggs were injected with genetic altering material that could prevent the disease, but also made

the animal glow. The glowing process is used to track the disease, but any new kittens born from these cats could possess the glowing power as well

Have Aliens Left The Universe?

Recently, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking stated that he too believes aliens exist: “To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.”

Hawking thinks we should be cautious about interacting with aliens — that they might raid Earth’s resources, take our ores, and then move on like pirates. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

But where are they all anyhow?

For years, NASA and others have been searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. The universe is 13.7 billion years old and contains some 10 billion trillion stars. Surely, in this lapse of suns, advanced life would have evolved if it were possible. Yet despite half a century of scanning the sky, astronomers have failed to find any evidence of life or to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great antennas should be able to easily detect.

Some scientists point to the “Fermi Paradox,” noting that extraterrestrials should have had plenty of time to colonize the entire galaxy but that perhaps they’ve blown themselves up. It’s conceivable the problem is more fundamental and that the answer has to do with the evolutionary course of life itself.

Look at the plants in your backyard. What are they but a stem with roots and leaves bringing nutriments to the organism? After billions of years of evolution, it was inevitable life would acquire the ability to locomote, to hunt and see, to protect itself from competitors. Observe the ants in the woodpile — they can engage in combat just as resolutely as humans. Our guns and ICBM are merely the mandibles of a cleverer ant. The effort for self-preservation is vague and varied. But when we’ve overcome our struggles, what do we do next? Build taller and more splendid houses?

What happens after life completes its transition to perfection? Perhaps across space, more advanced intelligences have taken the next evolutionary step. Perhaps they’ve evolved beyond the three dimensions we vertebrates know. A new theory — Biocentrism — tells us that space and time aren’t physical matrices, but simply tools our mind uses to put everything together. These algorithms are the key to consciousness, and why space and time — indeed the properties of matter itself — are relative to the observer. More advanced civilizations would surely understand these algorithms well enough to create realities that we can’t even imagine, and to have expanded beyond our corporeal cage.

Like breathing, we take for granted how our mind puts everything together. I can recall a dream I had of a flying saucer landing in Times Square. It was so real it took awhile to convince myself that it was a dream (that I was actually at home in bed). I was standing in a crowd surrounded by skyscrapers when a massive spaceship appeared overhead. Everyone started running. My mind had somehow generated this spatio-temporal experience out of electrochemical information. I could feel the vibrations under my feet as the ship started to land, merging this 3D world with my inner thoughts and sensations.

Although I was in bed with my eyes closed, I was able to run and move my arms and fingers. My mind had created a fully functioning body and placed it in a virtual world (replete with clouds in the sky and the Sun) that was indistinguishable from the one I’m in right now. Life as we know it is defined by this spatial-temporal logic, which traps us in the universe of up and down. But like my dream, quantum theory confirms that the properties of particles in the “real” world are also observer-determined.

Other information systems surely exist that correspond to other physical realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time as we know it. In fact, the simplest invertebrates may only experience existence in one dimension of space. Evolutionary biology suggests life has progressed from a one dimensional reality, to two dimensions to three dimensions, and there’s no scientific reason to think that the evolution of life stops there.

Advanced civilizations would certainly have changed the algorithms so that instead of being trapped in the linear dimensions we find ourselves in, their consciousness moves through the multiverse and beyond. Why would Aliens build massive ships and spend thousands of years to colonize planetary systems (most of which are probably useless and barren), when they could simply tinker with the algorithms and get whatever they want?

Life on Earth is just beginning to send its shoots upward into the heavens. We’ve even flung a piece of metal outside the solar system. Affixed to the spacecraft is a record with greetings in 60 languages. One can’t but wonder whether some civilization more advanced than ours will come upon it. Or will it just drift across the gulf of space? To me the answer is clear. But in case I’m wrong, I have a pitch fork guarding the ore in my backyard.

What’s the Hottest the Earth Has Ever Gotten?

Hot enough to boil oceans and vaporize rock. The highest terrestrial temperatures occurred more than four billion years ago, when a Mars-size proto-planet smashed into the Earth. (The debris from this collision formed our moon.) Within a millennium, the surface air temperature had dropped from a high of about 3,700°F down to 3,000°. Then the planet went into a period of slower cooling that lasted a few tens of millions of years. As the atmosphere thickened with heat-trapping water clouds and carbon dioxide and a shell of solid rock formed around the Earth’s core, conditions stabilized at 440°.
The warmest weather we’ve had in recent times—since mammals diverged from the tree of life—came about 55 million years ago, during a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. In just a few thousand years, global surface temperatures increased by 5° to 10°, with parts of North America experiencing a tropical climate and spring-like average temperatures in the Arctic.
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Will Climate Change Make the Weather Too Extreme?

FYI Weather Everett Collection

Unpredictable extremes of weather could be a huge problem. Simon N. Gosling, a geographer at the University of Nottingham in England, and Robert E. Davis of the University of Virginia agree that hotter weather on average isn’t as dangerous as unexpected weather. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April looked at how temperature fluctuations over a single summer affect mortality in vulnerable populations. Researchers found that a few months of rapidly changing conditions—with alternating spells of hotter and cooler weather—tend to produce more deaths, regardless of how hot it is overall. That’s especially true in parts of the country that aren’t accustomed to such rapid changes. “Variability is really important,” Gosling says, “and it has actually been overlooked quite a bit.”
Will climate change lead to more unexpected weather? It depends where you are. In Boston, for example, climate models suggest hotter weather over the next few decades while variation stays more or less the same. In Dallas, the average temperature may go up while the variability goes down (which might save lives). It’s hard to know for sure what will happen. “I don’t think as a community,” Davis says, “we understand why the variability changes from place to place.”
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Creating 150 MPH Hurricanes in a Giant Aquarium in Florida

SUSTAIN Cambridge Seven

About two years ago, Brian Haus, the chair of the Division of Applied Marine Physics at the University of Miami, was studying storms in the western Pacific ocean, off the coast of Taiwan. He and his team are chasing hurricanes. Sometimes the hurricanes completely miss the sensor-packed buoys placed in their path to track power and speed. Sometimes they don't.
This time, the researchers got lucky. Not one, but two super typhoons hit their equipment at the same time. Even luckier, most of their gear managed to not break apart. He and his team waited for the storms to subside before they left port to retrieve their recording devices. But before they could recover the buoys, one storm, named Chaba, defied the forecasts. Instead of losing strength, it headed right for them at full power. Haus and his fellow researchers found themselves enduring nine days of "most uncomfortable" 30-foot swells.
Last month, the University of Miami broke ground on the 45-million-dollar Marine Technology & Life Sciences Seawater Complex, which will house a tool that will give Haus and other scientists studying storms more steady, predictable, and controllable access to an important resource in their work--the hurricanes themselves.
The hurricane simulation tool, which is named SUSTAIN (short for SUrge-STructure-Atmosphere Interaction) is a tempest in a teapot the size of a small house. When it's completed, it'll be unique in its ability to create category-5 level hurricanes inside of a lab, across a 3-D field of waves made of real sea water pumped into the building at 1,000 gallons per minute.
With it, scientists will be able to better understand the process by which hurricanes are fueled by warm water.
* * * We know that hurricanes grow in power when they pass over deep warm water, and mellow out when they pass over colder areas. But we don't know much about the actual process of this energy transfer on the molecular level. By using salt water, the simulator more accurately creates sea spray and foam, which are believed to affect its evaporation into the atmosphere. And for the moment, how much heat is transferred directly and how much is transferred by evaporation is completely unknown. By simulating different kinds of waves and wind conditions, some with more and less spray, the scientists can measure the air and water temperature shifts using thermisters to model the delta in heat transfers when there's varying amounts of spray.
Knowing how this process fuels hurricanes will allow scientists and meteorologists to build smarter models of them, so we can forecast them with more accuracy. And its not possible, or easy, or safe to make these observations in the field. He says, "At sea, you have to deal with the real beast, but in the lab, we have the opportunity to create the hurricane when and how we want it."

The hurricane simulator and SUSTAIN is being designed by Cambridge Seven, the cross-functional architecture and engineering firm which got its start by winning the bid to create the New England Aquarium 50 years ago by being the only firm to mention fish in their pitch. Peter Sollogub, Associate Principal at Cambridge Seven, says the hurricane simulator is comprised of three major components:
The first is a 1400-horsepower fan originally suited for things like ventilating mine shafts. To create its 150mph winds, it will draw energy from the campus's emergency generator system, which is typically used during power outages caused by storms. The fan, sitting next to sensitive instrumentation, must have its vibrations isolated. "It's like your right hand is in a hurricane and your left hand is conducting retinal surgery," Sollogub says. The wind speeds are sensed through laser and sonic wind meters (otherwise known as anemometers).
The second part is a wave generator which pushes salt water using 12 different paddles. Those paddles, timed to move at different paces and rates, can create waves at various sizes, angles and frequency, creating anything from a calm, organized swell to sloppy chaotic seas. To reduce wave refraction, the end of the pool has a perforated, parabola-shaped beach to dissipate wave energy.
The third aspect of the tank is the tank itself, which is six meters in width by 20 meters in length by two meters high. It's made of three-inch thick clear acrylic so that the conditions inside can be observed from all sides. They've got to create ductwork for the air that creates "well behaved high velocity flow" so testing is accurate.
Bob Atlas, Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, has hopes for SUSTAIN, believing it will have an impact on our ability to predict the power of storms. Atlas says that when Katrina made landfall, NOAA--and the nation--realized that "we had made tremendous progress in track forecasting, but we hadn't yet really made a dent in being able to forecast intensity of hurricanes."

SUSTAIN 2:  Cambridge 7 Associates

Bob Atlas has spent his career forecasting harsh weather, beginning in the U.S. Air Force where he maintained a rate of accuracy greater than 95%. His career then turned to research and modeling, first at NASA and now with NOAA, where the agency’s Hurricane Forecasting Improvement Project has improved 26% in track prediction and 14% in intensity forecasting from 2005-2011. Atlas credits better models that also incorporate Doppler radar from hurricane spotting planes--both things that the hurricane simulator at U Miami will also help improve. SUSTAIN has been designed with a large overhead space where remote sensing experts plan to aim cameras positioned downward, mimicking the perspective of weather satellites. The remote measurements of the cameras will be compared against the actual measurements taken by lasers in the tank to fine-tune our ability to measure storms and waves from afar. But, Atlas added, there's a more practical aspect of the SUSTAIN facility that will tell us about more than just storms--it'll also tell us about how the world we live in will react to violent weather. All of SUSTAIN's fury can be aimed at models of manmade and natural structures--buildings, beachheads, sea walls--so that architects and engineers can test how storm surge and spray will affect cities and coasts. (Yes, they plan on clobbering mini models of skyscrapers.)
Atlas says, "NOAA has to be able to predict the storm. But ultimately, what the public needs to know is if their streets and homes will be flooded, and if their homes will survive when the hurricane is making land fall. And for that, I believe this facility can help."
Courtesy:www.popsci.com

India to Predict Monsoon Rains With Supercomputer Accuracy

Monsoon Rains Roll Over Mumbai Enygmatic-Halycon via Wikimedia

In an effort to stay one step ahead of the summer monsoon season, Indian scientists are embarking on an ambitious and unprecedented project to build computer models that will allow them to predict the movements of erratic monsoons weeks in advance. If successful, the Indian government thinks it can drastically alter economic outcomes for hundreds of millions of people whose lives depend directly on India’s agriculture sector.
The ability to predict the movements and impacts of monsoons ahead of time would go a long way toward augmenting India’s disaster management services, but in the long term it’s very much more important to the economic health of the nation, which derives 15 percent of its economic prosperity to agriculture. The June-September monsoon season provides three-quarters of India’s annual rain during a “normal” season--though this summer’s below-average rains have led to fears of drought and famine even though some parts of the country have seen flooding that has displaced two million people.

With these problems in mind, Indian computer scientists are working with American and British scientists to hack the monsoon season, tapping supercomputers to create both long- and short-term computer models that provide far more detailed and actionable information. This not only helps farmers tilling the land know how to better manage resources at field level, but also would help Indian authorities better conserve water resources and craft more-informed economic policies. Right now, farmers get long-term projections twice a year--once in April with an update in June--detailing what the Indian Meteorological Office (IMD) sees on the horizon. These forecasts are based on wind speeds, sea temperatures, and air pressure compared with similar data over the past five decades. It’s imprecise and, as weather patterns the world over are shifting, increasingly inaccurate.
The new monsoon mission wants to offer short-term forecasts accurate out to 15 days, and long-term seasonal forecasts that are better than the ones it issues now, based on more granular data and better computer modeling. That’s a difficult computing challenge, but one that’s not outside the realm of possibility. IBM’s Deep Thunder project already does something like this for regions in New York, Brazil, and elsewhere. Where there is data and computing power, there is potential. India hopes to leverage that into increased economic stability for one of the world’s most populous nations.
Courtesy:www.popsci.com

A shift in the Earth's magnetic field

The increased electricity used by modern appliance parts is causing a shift in the Earth's magnetic field. By the year 2327, the North Pole will be located in mid-Kansas, while the South Pole will be just off the coast of East Africa.