American Buddhist Net

A multi-disciplinary project launched three years ago has yielded archaeological evidence of Kerala's ancient glory. The official establishment plans to exploit the find to boost tourism but has little interest in identifying its creators.

Kerala has boasted of a long history on the basis of references in ancient Tamil texts and the accounts of foreign travellers. However, barring a stray find of Roman coins, no tangible proof of its antiquity was available until now.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Rainbow trout with six-pack abs and burly shoulders have emerged from a University of Rhode Island laboratory, and could someday find their way to humans' dinner tables. That's assuming diners don't panic at the sight of the muscular ichthyoid awaiting their knives and forks.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

WASHINGTON -- A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person's mind, researchers said Thursday.

British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Researchers say they've solved the mystery of why some chickens hatch out half-male and half-female.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

OBESITY kills, everyone knows that. But is it possible that we've been looking at the problem in the wrong way? It seems getting fatter may be part of your body's defence against the worst effects of unhealthy eating, rather than their direct cause.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Interesting idea. Something else that is interesting about this piece is most of us who read it will consider the information calmly and take something from these preliminary conclusions. Most of us will not feel frustrated that the question of why we get fat has not yet been answered. We expect debate and discussion, and many of us enjoy that part of the issue the most. Most of us are willing and able to reserve judgment, or change our minds as new evidence indicates. Few of us are threatened by competing theories. Same goes for many other prominent questions in the world of today--question about cosmology, the big bang, how to cure cancer, etc. Why not all of the questions and issues before us? ABN

Reports indicate that Australian archaeologists have uncovered a 40,000-year-old tribal meeting ground, which they believe is the world's southernmost site of early human life.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Why would a rational society not want to investigate and discuss 9/11? UPDATE: Here's an ABC report, which could be worse. The bottom line for me is there must be a thorough, honest, and believable public discussion of 9/11. The issue is far too important to just drop. There are many aspects to 9/11 that call for investigation. This ABC piece is better than most mainstream reporting, but it still slants heavily toward "truthers are crazy." Is the official story really so manifestly true that anyone who questions it must be suspected of being on the lunatic fringe? The answer is obviously no. 9/11 was a massive event with massive ramifications. We owe it to ourselves, to the people of the world, and to history to be sure we have all of the facts. Now is the time to gather them, and hence the urgency of the 9/11 movement. ABN

WASHINGTON — While astronomers scour the skies for signs of life in outer space, biologists are exploring an enormous living world buried below the surface of the Earth.

Scientists estimate that nearly half the living material on our planet is hidden in or beneath the ocean or in rocks, soil, tree roots, mines, oil wells, lakes and aquifers on the continents.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

The Italian archaeological mission in Pakistan has discovered a large number of Buddhist sites and rock shelters in Kandak and Kota valleys of Barikot in Swat in the North West Frontier Province which depicted the carvings and paintings from the bronze and iron ages.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Cutting the threads of the spacetime fabric and reinstating the aether could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.

If there’s one thing Einstein taught us, it’s that time is relative. But physicist Petr Ho?ava is challenging this notion and tearing through the fabric of spacetime in his quest for a theory of quantum gravity. His work may also resurrect another entity that Einstein had seemingly buried—the aether.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

WASHINGTON -- Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth's oceans, particularly off the United States' Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Do alien life forms exist in a Californian lake? Could there be a shadow biosphere? One scientist is trying to find out

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

The dreaded morning-after feeling could be a thing of the past after scientists in Korea came up with a technique that allows drinkers to avoid a hangover.

A team of researchers in South Korea added extra oxygen to drinks and found that the body was then able to metabolise the booze quicker and eliminate the alcohol quicker - cutting down the after effects.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

THE February 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile may have shortened the length of each day. Using a complex model, NASA scientist Richard Gross and his colleagues came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake could have shortened the length of a day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second). Moreover the quake, Gross said, would also have moved the earth's "figure axis" by three inches.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Gadget nerds: Prepare to lose the rest of your day to awesomeness. PopSci, the web-wing of Popular Science magazine, has scanned its entire 137-year archive and put it online for you to read, absolutely free. The archive, made available in partnership with Google Books, even has the original period advertisements.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

With an emphasis on 9/11.

There is a fee for reading the articles online, but they should be available in many libraries. The entire print volume (February 2010, Volume 53, No. 6) can be purchased by:

Contacting SAGE Journals customer service department via e-mail at journals@sagepub.com or phone 1-800-818-7243 then hit #2, then #0 for operator, then ask for "Journals", and they will mail a copy.

With luck, online versions of the articles will be made available soon.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Researchers in Japan have created the first superconducting material based on a molecule of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Although the superconducting transition occurs at a chilly 18K, the simplicity of the molecule, which consists of just five benzene rings, suggests that it will open the door to other molecules that have higher transition temperatures.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By David Chandler

Introduction

The destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was, by any assessment, a momentous turning point in world affairs. More than eight years after the event, the causes of the collapses of the three largest World Trade Center buildings (WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7) remain hotly contested despite official reports by government agencies, first by FEMA then by NIST, attempting to lay the matter to rest. A "9/11 Truth Movement" has arisen, including over 1000 architects and engineers who are calling for a new investigation. The NIST investigators constructed an elaborate computer model of the buildings which they used to model the airplane crashes, but strangely they did not model the actual collapses of the Twin Towers. They took their analysis only up to the point of initiation of collapse, relying, as we shall see, upon a much more simplistic model proposed by Zdenek Bazant[4, 5, 6, 7], which concluded that once the collapse was initiated, total collapse was inevitable.

What follows here is an analysis that follows the simplifying assumptions laid out by Bazant. Using measurements and a level of analysis accessible to an introductory physics class, undergraduate students have it within their power to evaluate the adequacy of the NIST-Bazant model. Their physics background, even at this stage, equips them for intelligent participation in a significant civic debate.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2010) — Two Spanish psychologists and a German neurologist have recently shown that the brain that activates when a person learns a new noun is different from the part used when a verb is learned. The scientists observed this using brain images taken using functional magnetic resonance, according to an article they have published this month in the journal NeuroImage.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

As the Uzbek-Japanese symposiums titled "Ancient Civilizations and Religions in Uzbekistan: In Search of Origins of Japanese Culture" in Japan have concluded, Uzbek and Japanese scientists have resolved to set up a scientific society.

The symposiums were organized at the initiative of the Fund Forum and took place on 15-18 February at Toyo University in Tokyo and Nara University in Japan's Kansai Region.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

When inter-Korean tension heightened due to the killing of a South Korean tourist by a North Korean soldier at Mount Kumgang in 2008, the restoration center for endangered species on Mount Jiri was at a loss.

The center is working to save the Asiatic black bear, an animal native to the Korean Peninsula. North Korea is the only place to import the rare species, so the center has keen interest in inter-Korean ties.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

...one scientist has had enough and is calling on filmmakers to temper their creativity by obeying the rules of science.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

I have had enough and am calling on scientists to let artists do what they want! ABN

By Jennifer Harper INSIDE THE BELTWAY

A lingering technical question about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks still haunts some, and it has political implications: How did 200,000 tons of steel disintegrate and drop in 11 seconds? A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

(PhysOrg.com) -- Hollywood movies have found a mathematical formula that lets them match the effects of their shots to the attention spans of their audiences.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

A rapid acceleration may have begun in levels of a gas far more harmful than CO2

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Aliens may be “staring us in the face” in a form humans are unable to recognise, the Queen’s astronomer has said.

LINK TO ORIGINAL