Ancient site unearthed in Iraqi home of Abraham

 

This photo taken on March 31, 2013 photo provided by Manchester University professor Stuart Campbell shows excavation in progress at Tell Khaiber, Iraq. A British archaeologist says he and his colleagues have unearthed a huge, rare complex near the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, home of the biblical Abraham. Stuart Campbell of Manchester University's Archaeology Department says it goes back about 4,000 years, around the time Abraham would have lived there. It's believed to be an administrative center for Ur. (AP Photo/Stuart Campbell) 

Ancient site unearthed in Iraqi home of Abraham — British archaeologists said Thursday they have unearthed a sprawling complex near the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq, home of the biblical Abraham.

The structure, thought to be about 4,000 years old, probably served as an administrative center for Ur, around the time Abraham would have lived there before leaving for Canaan, according to the Bible.

The compound is near the site of the partially reconstructed Ziggurat, or Sumerian temple, said Stuart Campbell of Manchester University's Archaeology Department, who led the dig.

"This is a breathtaking find," Campbell said, because of its unusually large size — roughly the size of a football pitch, or about 80 meters (260 feet) on each side. The archaeologist said complexes of this size and age were rare.

"It appears that it is some sort of public building. It might be an administrative building, it might have religious connections or controlling goods to the city of Ur," he told The Associated Press in a phone interview from the U.K.

The complex of rooms around a large courtyard was found 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Ur, the last capital of the Sumerian royal dynasties whose civilization flourished 5,000 years ago.

Campbell said one of the artifacts they unearthed was a 9-centimeter (3.5-inch) clay plaque showing a worshipper wearing a long, fringed robe, approaching a sacred site.

Beyond artifacts, the site could reveal the environmental and economic conditions of the region through analysis of plant and animal remains, the archaeological team said in a statement.

The dig began last month when the six-member British team worked with four Iraqi archaeologists to dig in the Tell Khaiber in the southern province of Thi Qar, some 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of Baghdad.

Decades of war and violence have kept international archaeologists away from Iraq, where significant archaeological sites as yet unexplored are located. Still, the dig showed that such collaborative missions could be possible in parts of Iraq that are relatively stable, like its Shiite-dominated south.

Campbell's team was the first British-led archaeological dig in southern Iraq since the 80s. It was also directed by Manchester University's Dr. Jane Moon and independent archaeologist Robert Killick.

"This has been an opportunity to get back to an area very close to our heart for a long time," Campbell said.

Iraq faces a broader problem of protecting its archaeological heritage. Its 12,000 registered archaeological sites are poorly guarded. ( Associated Press )

Blog : Luxurious | Ancient site unearthed in Iraqi home of Abraham

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Pro-choice advocates should quit calling ultrasounds rape

Pro-choice advocates should quit calling ultrasounds rape - “Are we now going to have to convince our patients we are not raping them?” A longtime abortion provider posed that question to colleagues on a listserv this week, and it demonstrates what is wrongheaded about the rhetoric that abortion rights supporters have been using to oppose ultrasound laws. In the short run, the labeling has sent pro-life legislators running. But in the long run, it risks turning a benign and routine part of the abortion procedure into cause for alarm.

Pro-choicers should stop comparing the transvaginal ultrasound procedure to rape

Pro-choice commentators have called the transvaginal form of ultrasound that’s standard early in pregnancy “rape,” “forced vaginal penetration,” and an “unnecessary medical procedure” in response to bills in Virginia and elsewhere that would, practically speaking, require all abortion recipients to undergo an ultrasound by this method. In the short run, this framing galvanized a pro-choice backlash against the Virginia ultrasound bill. Faced with 1,000 protesters at the state capitol, widespread condemnation in the media, and ridicule on the late night comedy shows, Gov. Bob McDonnell partially backed off the ultrasound mandate he’d earlier indicated he would sign. McDonnell said that “mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state,” making it clear that the outcry over requiring a transvaginal ultrasound led to his reconsideration. In Alabama, the governor is backing away from a similar bill.

As a sociologist who has long studied and supported the pro-choice movement—and chronicled the rise of its opponents—I am heartened by the rare sight of a partial retreat by anti-abortion forces, and by evidence of new energy among abortion rights supporters. A group of Virginia women has just formed a “Women’s Strike Force” to defeat anti-abortion politicians. But I have considerable concerns about what calling these ultrasounds “rape” and “unnecessary” will mean for abortion patients and providers. The reality is that most abortion patients do receive an ultrasound to date their pregnancies. Since most abortions take place in the first trimester of pregnancy, many of these ultrasounds are performed with a transvaginal probe, the most effective method for viewing early-stage pregnancies. In the end, whether an ultrasound is performed, and which method is used, reflects either the practice of the abortion provider, the patient’s medical history, or—for a relatively small number of women—an aversion to the transvaginal method. Most of the time, however, the transvaginal ultrasound is a useful and common tool that helps providers perform abortions safely and well.

But now that women have heard abortion supporters describe this form of ultrasound as “rape,” will more of them be terrified when they arrive at a clinic and are informed they will have such a procedure? Or might they be scared off altogether? Will abortion clinic staff who perform the ultrasound be seen as “rapists,” as the provider I mentioned earlier worried? This is a possibility not lost on the anti-abortion website LifeNews, which recently ran the headline, “If Ultrasound is Rape, Arrest Planned Parenthood Staffers.”

Ultrasound mandates are terrible public policy, but not because of the particular method that they stipulate. These laws are terrible because it is not the job of legislators to intervene in the doctor-patient relationship, or to demand that all patients be treated alike. The essence of good abortion care—indeed of good health care generally—is the recognition that one size does not fit all, and each patient must be treated as an individual. That is the reason why providers who routinely perform transvaginal ultrasounds on most of their patients use other methods for women who have a particular fear of the probe. Or why the minority of providers who don’t do routine ultrasounds will order one for a woman whose pregnancy cannot be dated using other methods.

The record in states like Texas that already have ultrasound laws shows that the entire purpose is to make the abortion experience more difficult for the patient and provider alike. Until the Texas ultrasound law went into effect a few months ago, ultrasounds were performed by trained technicians, and a woman could choose whether or not she wished to see her ultrasound and hear a description of it.

Now the patient must hear a description of her fetus’ development (though she can decline an offer to see the ultrasound and hear the fetal heartbeat); she must wait at least 24 hours before she can have her abortion; a doctor must perform the ultrasound, and this doctor must be the same one who performs the abortion. For patients who work, this means a second day of lost wages and often a second day of paying for childcare, since many abortion patients are mothers (61 percent nationally). For clinic managers and physicians, the devil is also in the details: The Texas requirements mean scheduling headaches for clinic managers and physicians, since the doctors typically circulate among different clinics. In some instances, I have been told, some Texas clinics are no longer able to provide abortions because of the law.

What the ultrasound laws in Texas and elsewhere apparently have not done is make women change their minds about the procedure. As Tracy Weitz, a sociologist who has studied the impact of the laws, said in the New York Times, “Women are having abortions because of the conditions of their lives, their economic situation, their partner situation, their age, and the ultrasound doesn’t change that.”
It will be adding insult to injury if abortion patients—already beleaguered by so many obstacles to accessing this procedure quickly and with dignity—were to internalize the message that the transvaginal ultrasound they will likely be asked to undergo is tantamount to rape. Pro-choice advocates must oppose these pointless and manipulative ultrasound mandates. But let’s find better language to make our case.

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Are boys’ brains different from girls’ brains?

Sex on the Brain - Are boys’ brains different from girls’ brains? Scientists debate the question - Are male brains different from female brains? If so, how? And does it matter?

This week, five researchers debated these questions at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Their panel session, “The Promise and Peril of Research on Sex Differences,” didn’t settle the controversy, because it isn’t binary, and evidence is complex. But the exchange did clarify common mistakes to watch out for. Here’s a guide.

How do boys' and girls' brains differ?

1. Ideology.

All the panelists recognized that sex-difference research could be abused to justify sexism. But Larry Cahill, a behavioral neurobiologist at the University of California-Irvine, raised the opposite concern: His colleagues are so afraid of being called “neurosexists” that they’ve refused to study or acknowledge differences. This anxiety about lending credence to sexism was manifest on the panel, as three of the presenters repeatedly emphasized similarities and downplayed differences. Afterward, they were challenged by two female scientists in the audience who called the aversion to studying innate differences anti-scientific and an impediment to understanding mental illness in women. The exchange, in which one panelist repeatedly portrayed sex-difference research as a waste of time, confirmed the problem: Fear of sexism has produced a bias against conceding sex differences, which gets in the way of frank discussion and investigation.


2. Monocausality.

Melissa Hines, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, proposed a good rule for screening studies and news reports: Beware any explanation that relies on a single factor. Hormones matter, but so does socialization. A study in animals might illuminate the role of genes, but it won’t capture the effects of culture on humans. Conversely, anyone who dismisses boy-girl differences as cultural artifacts (the panelists criticized Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender in particular) isn’t accounting for similar patterns in animals, such as research showing that male monkeys prefer to play more with cars and less with dolls than female monkeys do. Hines also mentioned a male-female gap in “maze performance” among rodents. You can’t blame that on society.


3. Casual extrapolation.

The problem with genetic or cultural theories of sex difference isn’t that they’re false. It’s that they’re limited. They work better in some contexts than in others. Hines recalled an incident in which, after she had described data on toy preference among girls, a male physicist said she had just explained why it was hard to recruit women to teach physics. The leap from dolls to doctorates was effortless, though groundless. Another psychologist on the panel, Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin, noted that sex differences in math performance had largely evaporated over the past 20 years. But not all differences: A stubborn gap remains in mental rotation, which requires the imaginary realignment of three-dimensional shapes. Cahill offered a sensible way to think about these uneven findings: The effects of sex difference on behavior and performance vary, and as a researcher of emotional stress, he acknowledged, “I may be working in a domain of neuroscience where these effects are maximal.” We need more of that humility, and less glib generalization.
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4. Self-fulfillment.

Maryjane Wraga, a psychologist at Smith College, presented research on stereotype threat, showing that women perform worse at mental rotation (compared with other women) when they’re told that men are better at it. So if scientists go around saying girls are bad with numbers, tests might appear to validate that prediction, but the prediction itself will be the culprit. The panelists were particularly alarmed by the single-sex education movement and the brain theorists behind it, authors Michael Gurian and Leonard Sax. These authors grossly exaggerate boy-girl differences, the panelists argued. But the greater danger is that single-sex education, by preaching and practicing segregated socialization, may exacerbate these differences.


5. Stereotypes.

Girls differ from boys, but girls also differ from other girls. This in-group variation gets obscured by composite models such as The Female Brain (a book by Louann Brizendine, panned by the presenters) and binary metaphors like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Sex differences don’t show up as separate clusters. They show up, in Cahill’s words, as “overlapping distributions.” Hyde explained that to compute the “effect size” of sex, you have to factor in the variability of scores among males and among females. Otherwise, you have no perspective on how meaningful the gap is between the male and female averages, relative to being Jane rather than Sally, or being Mike rather than Bill. You certainly can’t infer from a person’s sex how well he or she will do on a test.


6. Either/or.

Hyde took a blowtorch to former Harvard president Larry Summers, presenting data that showed no sex difference in K-12 math scores. Then, to be fair, she acknowledged Summers’ more complicated argument: not that boys are better than girls at math on average, but that boys are more spread out, with lots of boys scoring very high or very low compared with girls, who tend to cluster more in the middle. Hyde argued that the K-12 data didn’t support Summers because the ratio of male variation in scores to female variation in scores wasn’t high enough to explain a shortage of women in some Harvard faculty departments. But on her presentation slide, every grade level showed a ratio between 1.11 and 1.21. In other words, the data did show greater male variation. This might contribute to professional gender gaps, though it doesn’t fully explain them.


7. Overinterpretation.

With today’s technology, it’s easy to scan and measure brains and compute sex differences in size or activity. The hard part is figuring out what these differences mean. Yes, the brains of male fetuses and boys get bathed in testosterone. But does this really affect their math skills or their ability to communicate and process emotions, as some theorists assert? Yes, men have more gray matter, and women have more white matter. But does that justify CBS anchor Harry Smith’s conclusion—captured in a video clip by panelist Lise Eliot, a Slate contributor and neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University—that this is “why women are such good multitaskers”? The fishy part of neuroscience isn’t the data. It’s the spin we put on the data in the guise of explanation.


8. Inferred immutability.

Before you attribute sex differences in behavior or success to evolution, check the record. Today’s differences may not have existed yesterday and may not exist tomorrow. The percentage of math Ph.D.'s awarded to women in the 1950s, according to Hyde, was half what it was in the 1890s and one-sixth of what it is today. Several panelists targeted the word hardwired as a misleading metaphor for explaining the brain. Brains, unlike computers, are constantly altered by experience. So while scans may show differences between men’s and women’s brains, that doesn’t prove the differences are innate. Wraga’s scans, for instance, showed different patterns of activation, but the patterns corresponded to social inputs. Even in animals, Eliot noted that male rats are licked and groomed more than female rats are, which could affect sex differences in stress response. And Cahill described new research indicating that birth control pills alter patterns of emotional memory. So, yes, hormones influence how we think. But we, in turn, can influence our hormones.


9. Data pooling.

Beware broad generalizations based on the blending of data about various traits or activities. The panel made much ado about Hyde’s finding that 78 percent of effect sizes in studies of psychological sex difference were small or near zero. But that aggregate figure obscures the fine print: Half the effect sizes were between .11 and .35. In aggression, they averaged around .50, and in mental rotation, they were even higher. And if you read Hyde’s paper carefully, you’ll find that she breaks down these differences further. So while she’s right that males and females are largely similar, the details are intriguing. Likewise, Eliot’s observation that “most of our behavioral sex differences are quite a bit smaller than [sex differences in] height” obscures the curious fact, mentioned on one of Hines’ slides, that boys and girls differ more in toy preference than in height.


10. Comparison games.

In science, as in politics, you can make a difference look big or small by choosing the basis of comparison. So while Hines’ slide compared the height gap to the toy-preference gap, Eliot’s slide compared the height gap to the much smaller “empathy” gap. While Eliot and Hyde characterized the effect sizes in sex-difference studies as small or near zero, Cahill argued that these effect sizes were no smaller than those typically found in other neuroscience research. (Indeed, I heard no complaints from the panel about small effect size when Wraga cited a 6-percent effect on math scores as evidence of stereotype threat.) Hyde acknowledged that boys scored “an itty-bitty bit better” than girls in math in the United States, Taiwan, and Japan, but she pointed out that the bigger difference is between the three countries, with Taiwanese and Japanese girls outscoring American boys.

These 10 warnings don’t add up to an answer on the overall question of sex differences. There is no answer. There’s only a complex, preliminary array of evidence on various questions, and an evolving menu of research to explore those questions further. Let’s not be afraid to pursue the research. And let’s not jump to conclusions. ( slate.com )

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Purging Cells in Mice Is Found to Combat Aging Ills

Purging Cells in Mice Is Found to Combat Aging Ills - In a potentially fundamental advance, researchers have opened up a novel approach to combating the effects of aging with the discovery that a special category of cells, known as senescent cells, are bad actors that promote the aging of the tissues. Cleansing the body of the cells, they hope, could postpone many of the diseases of aging.

The findings raise the prospect that any therapy that rids the body of senescent cells would protect it from the ravages of aging. But many more tests will be needed before scientists know if drugs can be developed to help people live longer.

Senescent cells accumulate in aging tissues, like arthritic knees, cataracts and the plaque that may line elderly arteries. The cells secrete agents that stimulate the immune system and cause low-level inflammation. Until now, there has been no way to tell if the presence of the cells is good, bad or indifferent.

The answer turns out to be that the cells hasten aging in the tissues in which they accumulate. In a delicate feat of genetic engineering, a research team led by Darren J. Baker and Jan M. van Deursen at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has generated a strain of mouse in which all the senescent cells can be purged by giving the mice a drug that forces the cells to self-destruct.

Rid of the senescent cells, the Mayo Clinic researchers reported online Wednesday in the journal Nature, the mice’s tissues showed a major improvement in the usual burden of age-related disorders. They did not develop cataracts, avoided the usual wasting of muscle with age, and could exercise much longer on a mouse treadmill. They retained the fat layers in the skin that usually thin out with age and, in people, cause wrinkling.

Two 9-month-old mice from the study. The one on the right received the drug to eliminate senescent cells

“I am very excited by the results,” said Dr. Norman E. Sharpless, an expert on aging at the University of North Carolina. “It suggests therapies that might work in real patients,” he said.

Dr. van Deursen’s work is the first to show that removing senescent cells is beneficial. If confirmed, it “will be considered a fundamental advance by our field,” Dr. Sharpless said.

Aging research is a relatively young field because until 20 or so years ago the prospect of defeating age seemed hopeless. Then researchers found that the lifespan of laboratory animals could be extended by manipulating certain genes, setting off a hunt for drugs that might influence the corresponding genes in people. This line of research remains promising but has produced few tangible results so far. The discovery that senescent cells seem to be the cause of tissue degeneration opens out a new direction for researchers on aging to explore.

Judith Campisi, at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, said the new finding was the first proof that senescent cells can drive the aging process. “So it’s really quite a breakthrough,” she said.

In both mice and people, senescent cells are few in number but have major effects on the body’s tissues. Killing the cells should therefore have large benefits with little downside. The gene-altering approach used on the mice cannot be tried in people, but now that senescent cells appear to be harmful, researchers can devise ways of targeting them.

Drugs already exist to combat some of the inflammatory hormones secreted by senescent cells. The body’s immune system, which probably clears away senescent cells all the time but does so less efficiently with age, could perhaps be trained to attack senescent cells more aggressively. Or researchers could one day develop specific drugs to kill the cells, when the differences between ordinary and senescent cells are better understood.

Dr. van Deursen said he thought it worth trying to eliminate senescent cells after the finding that they reliably switch on a characteristic marker gene known as p16-Ink4a. In his mice, he arranged that the genetic element that switches on the marker gene would also prime a mechanism to make the cell self-destruct. The mechanism fired only when the mice were dosed with a specific drug. The result was that only senescent cells were at risk from the drug, and that they could be purged at any desired time in the mouse’s lifetime.

In a second experiment, the mice were not given the cell-cleaning drug until they were middle-aged. Their cataracts had already developed by then and were irreversible, but aging was delayed in their fat and muscle tissues.

It may be that senescent cells are beneficial in youth but harmful in old age, when the immune system seems to clear them less rapidly from the body. The second mouse experiment suggests that middle age would be an effective time for clinical intervention, assuming humans behave in the same way.

If aging of the tissues is delayed by eliminating senescent cells, the mice should, in principle, have lived longer. Dr. van Deursen said this was not the case in this experiment only because he had chosen a fast-aging strain of mice in order to save himself time. These particular mice succumb to heart attacks at an early age, regardless of the state of their tissues. The Mayo Clinic team plans to repeat its experiment with an ordinary strain of mouse that normally lives three years or more, to see if its life span is extended as expected.

The Mayo Clinic finding “is a really important step forward for the field,” said Dr. Campisi of the Buck Institute.

The purpose of research on aging, she said, is not to let people live a thousand years, as portrayed in science fiction, but to increase health span, the proportion of people’s natural lives that they live in good health.

“People used to see aging as a rusting nail — there’s nothing you can do about it,” Dr. Campisi said. “But we now know that there are processes that are driving aging, and that those processes can be meddled with.” ( nytimes.com )

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Scientists Examine Why Singing Helps Correct Speech Problems

Song Or Rhythm? Scientists Examine Why Singing Helps Correct Speech Problems - Singing has long been thought to help people with severe speech problems, including people who have suffered a stroke. But a new study suggests that it may not be the actual singing that helps -- rather, it's the rhythm from singing that does the trick.

German researchers had 17 people with non-fluent aphasia (an inability to engage in or understand language, which can be caused by a stroke) articulate a few thousand syllables by either singing them, or saying them with a rhythmic or arrhythmic accompaniment. They found that people who sang didn't do any better at articulating the syllables as people who rhythmically said them, suggesting that it's the rhythm that helps with their speech, according to the Brain study.

"The key element in our patients was, in fact, not the melody but the rhythm," study researcher Benjamin Stahl, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, said in a statement.

The study comes on the heels of recent research, that shows that stroke patients with speech problems who sing "How are you?" over the course of months is associated with changes in the right hemisphere of the brain. The idea is that those changes in the right hemisphere can compensate for damage suffered in the left brain's speech areas, researchers said.

Even though this study suggests it's just the rhythm that does the trick, other research shows other benefits singing has on health. Singing can help to lower blood pressure and boost levels of oxytocin (the "cuddle" hormone) , the San Francisco Examiner reported. And people who sing in groups -- choral singers -- report having a higher life satisfaction than the rest of the general public, Discovery Fit & Health reported. ( huffingtonpost.com )

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Plant, animal extinctions often exaggerated

Plant, animal extinctions often exaggerated – A projected spate of extinctions of animals and plants this century may be less drastic than feared because the most widely used scientific method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent, a study said on Wednesday.

"Extinctions caused by habitat loss require greater loss of habitat than previously thought," two experts, based in China and the United States, wrote in the journal Nature.

Despite that good news, the report also endorsed past findings that human activities are wrecking habitats from the tropics to the Arctic, threatening the worst losses of species since the dinosaurs.

"Our results must not lead to complacency about extinction due to habitat loss, which is a real and growing threat," Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell wrote.

The study, based on a survey of birds in the United States and forests, suggested the most commonly used method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent.

Waldrapps, critically endangered species - Waldrapps, a critically endangered species, perch inside the breeding aviary cage at the Preservation and Research Center in Yokohama, south of Tokyo October 25, 2010

"The method has to be revised," Hubbell, of the University of California, told a news conference.

Scientists have long struggled to project extinctions as a rising human population shrinks habitats, for instance by felling forests to clear land for farms or cities. Pollution and global warming are also adding to threats.

The scientists stoked controversy by saying there was "reason to question" a U.N.-led Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that projected future extinctions at 1,000 to 10,000 times current rates, and a 2004 study saying that 18 to 35 percent of all species could be set on a path toward extinction by 2050.

Chris Thomas, the lead author of the latter study at the University of York in England, said he had published an update later in 2004 with a less severe extinction projection, broadly using techniques advocated in Wednesday's report.

CLIMATE CHANGE

"It is a pity that the authors did not realize this," he said. "And currently there is no reason for complacency that the extinction risk from climate change will necessarily be lower" than originally projected, he told Reuters.

Wednesday's report did not question findings by the U.N. panel of climate scientists in 2007 -- used by governments to guide climate policies -- that said 20 to 30 percent of species may be "at increased risk of extinction" as temperatures rise.

For scientists, the problem is they can fairly easily count species in an area -- adding one for each new bird, flower or mammal they find. It is far harder to count extinctions since that requires a judgment that the last individual has died.

Some studies in the 1970s, for instance, wrongly projected that half of all species could be lost by 2000.

More recent studies have added the idea of an "extinction debt," that species are doomed to die out once their habitat shrinks beyond a critical point. The study said estimations used by that technique were mathematically flawed.

Still, it said there was "no doubt whatsoever that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has correctly identified habitat loss as the primary threat to conserving the Earth's biodiversity, and the sixth mass extinction might already be upon us or imminent."

Scientists count five mass extinctions in the fossil record, the most recent 65 million years ago when dinosaurs vanished. ( Reuters )

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Sun Eruption Creates Spectacular Plasma Tentacle

Sun Eruption Creates Spectacular Plasma Tentacle - A NASA spacecraft watching the sun has caught a dazzling view of a solar eruption that launched a vast tendril of magnetic plasma into space.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the sun tentacle, which scientists call a solar prominence, on March 19 as it erupted into space with a rounded, twisting motion.

The eruption occurred over five hours as SDO watched the sun in the ultraviolet range of the light spectrum, SDO mission scientists said in a statement. The solar observatory watched as the prominence twisted up from the sun and expanded, then became unstable.


Ultimately, the sun filament lost cohesion and its particles streamed away from the sun.

Image of sunspot take by Hinode Satellite - An image of a sunspot take by the Hinode Satellite is shown in ths undated NASA photo released to Reuters March 2, 2011

"Prominences are elongated clouds of plasma that hover above the sun's surface, tethered by magnetic forces," SDO mission scientists explained.

The sun is currently in the midst of an active phase of its 11-year solar weather cycle and has kicked up a series of powerful eruptions and flares in recent months. The SDO spacecraft and other space observatories are keeping a close watch on the sun to monitor is solar weather activity.
Earlier this month, the sun unleashed its second X-class solar flare of the year that was aimed at Earth. X-class solar flares are the strongest types of solar flares. The weakest types of solar flares are Class C sun storms, with Class M flares registering as medium strength, but still powerful, NASA scientists have said.

Strong solar flares, when aimed at Earth, can potentially disrupt satellites and power grids, as well as pose a hazard to astronauts on spacecraft. They can also spark dazzling shows of the northern lights, or aurora borealis. ( Space.com )

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Waste of space?

Waste of space? - Fifty years after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth, Gerard DeGroot questions whether his endeavour served any useful purpose.

The Vostok capsule that carried Yuri Gagarin – the world's first spaceman – into orbit on April 12 1961 looked nothing like the sleek craft Buck Rogers used to travel the cosmos in science-fiction fantasies. It had two tiny windows; Gagarin did not need to see where he was going since he had little control over his craft. The spherical shape brings to mind circus performers shot from cannons.

In truth, that analogy is accurate; Gagarin's feat was an exponential embellishment on that fairground stunt. Far more meaningful space spectaculars had already occurred, but their importance went unrecognised because they lacked human passengers. On that day nearly 50 years ago, Gagarin demonstrated a principle that remains rock solid: in order to garner attention, space needs a face.

Gagarin returned to a world changed profoundly by his achievement. His mission was the latest in a long line of space stunts that had embarrassed the United States. The Americans had prided themselves on being the technologically superior nation; capitalism and modernity were supposed to go hand-in-hand. Yet the Russians upset that paradigm, in the process sending a powerful message to non-aligned nations. They were first to launch a satellite, first to launch a dog and, now, first to launch a man. The reason they were so good at these stunts was because they were so bad at building nuclear weapons.

Their bombs were inordinately heavier than American ones of similar payload. A heavier bomb necessitated a bigger rocket to carry it on a transcontinental trajectory. The Russians, masters of propaganda, soon realised that those rockets, pointed skyward, could be used to throw symbols of dominance into space. The sound and fury, it seemed, signified everything.

Prior to Gagarin, the US did not have a clearly defined space strategy. President Dwight Eisenhower had resisted being drawn into what seemed to him a shallow weightlifting competition. He saw manned space travel as "a complex and costly adventure" without useful purpose. When Nasa sent proposals for the Apollo Moon mission to the White House for approval, he vetoed the idea. Presidential advisers erupted in laughter when someone suggested that, after reaching the Moon, Nasa would probably want to go to Mars.

Eisenhower's successor, John Kennedy, shared those doubts. His advisers warned that "a crash programme aimed at placing a man into an orbit may hinder the development of our scientific and technical programme". They were right. Since Kennedy knew that the US led the Soviet Union in satellite technology, he saw no need to indulge in machismo. That, however, annoyed the American people, who craved heroes like Gagarin, not clumsy contraptions circling the Earth. In newspapers across the nation, Gagarin's mission was presented as an American failure, rather than a Soviet success.

It seemed that Gagarin had singlehandedly won a huge battle in the Cold War. Kennedy's friends warned him that non-aligned nations would conclude that the Soviet Union was the real superpower. Then, five days later, came the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The US, it seemed, could do nothing right.

In public, Kennedy feigned confidence, but in private he panicked. "Is there any place we can catch them?" Kennedy asked a group of space experts. "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let's find somebody, anybody. I don't care if it's the janitor over there, if he knows how. There's nothing more important." Up stepped Nasa's Robert Gilruth. He told Kennedy: "Well, you've got to pick a job that's so difficult that it's new, that [the Soviets] will have to start from scratch. They just can't take their old rocket and put another gimmick on it and do something we can't do. It's got to be something that requires a great big rocket, like going to the Moon."

Convinced by the logic of bigness, Kennedy announced on May 25 1961: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The Moon was important "because it is there" – a finishing line in a race for prestige.

Kennedy always struggled when asked to explain why it was necessary to go to the Moon. In a brief moment of candour, he once asked a reporter: "Don't you think I would rather spend these billions on programmes here at home, such as health and education and welfare? But in this matter we have no choice. The nation's prestige is too heavily involved." When his science adviser Jerome Wiesner argued that there were more sensible ways to spend money, Kennedy replied: "Well, it's your fault. If you had a scientific spectacular on this Earth that would be more useful – say desalting the ocean – or something that is just as dramatic and convincing as space, then we would do it."

Nasa hated the way the Moon mission was conceived. The agency wanted an open-ended commitment to space exploration, not a single race with a distinct finishing line. When the Nasa administrator James Webb complained to Kennedy about America's distorted priorities, the president gave him an earful: "Everything that we do should be tied into getting on to the Moon ahead of the Russians. Otherwise, we shouldn't be spending this kind of money because I am not that interested in space. We're talking about fantastic expenditures. We've wrecked our budget, and the only justification for it is to do it in the time element I am asking."

Thus Gagarin pulled Kennedy by the nose into space. At the time of that historic mission, the US was five years ahead of the Russians in space science and satellite technology, yet American priorities were suddenly shifted to a macho race to the Moon. Kennedy's reaction to the Gagarin embarrassment set a pattern that remains predominant to this day. The main reason the Americans have not returned to the Moon is because they originally went for the wrong reason. Once the race was won, a point was proved, and further missions seemed senseless.

As the ambitions of China and India now indicate, the fixation with man in space became a paradigm, a test of a nation's virility, important not for what could be discovered out there but for some flimsy prestige earned back on Earth.

The space industry today suffers from acute schizophrenia. The great achievements that have transformed our lives have occurred in near space, thanks to boring satellites. Advances in communications, weather forecasting, intelligence gathering and so on have brought enormous benefit. But there's still this obsession with astronauts, reflected in that old Nasa adage: "There's no bucks without Buck Rogers." Space agencies realise that their ability to attract funding is directly proportional to their capacity to produce heroes. Nations, still tempted by that siren prestige, channel scarce funds toward absurd expressions of vanity.

That schizophrenia was evident earlier this month when the Royal Aeronautical Society celebrated the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight. The MP Phillip Lee, vice-chairman of the Parliamentary Space Committee, gave a rousing speech that borrowed heavily from Star Trek, complete with split infinitives. Space, he suggested, provides a spiffing adventure. "My great dream," Lee said, "is that some day a British person will walk on the Moon or Mars."

That brought bemused smiles from European Space Agency (ESA) representatives, who were there to sell satellites. "It's interesting," one ESA engineer remarked, "that we now use satellites to explore the Earth, yet, when we talk about exploring Mars, there's this insistence that a man should go."

A statue of Gagarin will soon be placed on the Mall. That seems a fitting tribute to a spectacular achievement. His heroic feat was, however, similar to that of conquering Everest – something that brought great vicarious excitement but little real benefit.

While China and India still feel the need to emulate Gagarin with shallow quests for kudos, one hopes that the future belongs to the more humble ESA. Practical projects in space are so enormously expensive, yet still so essential, that it makes sense to share the cost and spread the value. Co-operation will also ensure that prestige no longer corrupts the space equation.

Britain has an important role to play, but it should not be the stuff of Lee's fantasies. The British should do what they can do best, namely help build satellites to improve our lives. If Buck Rogers feels neglected, there's a home for him in China ( telegraph.co.uk )

READ MORE - Waste of space?

Pastor loses job after questioning hell's existence

Pastor loses job after questioning hell's existence - New book is spurring debate over the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for damned souls — When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.

The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.

Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow's Chapel in Henderson.

"I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don't think that means an eternity of torment," Holtz said. "But I can understand why people in my church aren't ready to leave that behind. It's something I'm still grappling with myself."

Chad Holtz was fired from his position as pastor of a church in Henderson, N.C., after posting on his Facebook page a defense of a forthcoming book by megachurch pastor Rob Bell, in which Bell challenges millions of Christians’ understanding of the afterlife.

The debate over Bell's new book "Love Wins" has quickly spread across the evangelical precincts of the Internet, in part because of an eye-catching promotional video posted on YouTube.

Bell, the pastor of the 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., lays out the premise of his book while the video cuts away to an artist's hand mixing oil paints and pastels and applying them to a blank canvas.

He describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: "Reality check: He's in hell."

"Gandhi's in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?" Bell asks in the video.

In the book, Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell.

"This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear," he writes in the book.

For many traditional Christians, though, Bell's new book sounds a lot like the old theological position of universalism — a heresy for many churches, teaching that everyone, regardless of religious belief, will ultimately be saved by God. And that, they argue, dangerously misleads people about the reality of the Christian faith.

"I just felt like on every page he's trying to say 'It's OK,'" said Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler at a forum last week on Bell's book held at the Louisville institution. "And there's a sense in which we desperately want to say that. But the question becomes, on what basis can we say that?"

Bell argues that hell has assumed an outsize importance in Christian teaching, considering the word itself only appears in the New Testament about 12 times, by his count.

"For a 1st-century Jewish rabbi, where you go when you die wasn't the most pressing question," Bell told The Associated Press. "The question was how can you enter into the shalom and peace of God right now, this day."

Bell denies he's a universalist, and his exact beliefs on what happens to people after death are hard to pin down, but he argues that such speculation distracts people from an urgent point. In his telling, hell is something freely chosen that already exists on earth, in everything from war to abusive relationships.

The near-relish with which some Christians stress the torments of hell, Bell argues, keep many believers needlessly afraid of a loving God, and repel potential Christians who might otherwise be curious about the faith's teachings.

"The heart of the Christian story is that God is love," he said. "But when you hear the word 'Christian,' you don't necessarily think 'Oh, sure, those are the people who don't stop talking about God's love.' Some other things would come to mind."

Ancient debate

About the only thing everyone agrees on is that this is not a new debate in Christianity. It stretches to antiquity, when Christianity was a persecuted sect in the Roman Empire, and the third century theologian Origen developed a theory that contemporary critics charged would mean that everyone, even the devil himself, would ultimately be saved. Church leaders eventually condemned ideas they attributed to Origen, but he has had a lasting influence across the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.

Those traditions often disagree, even internally, on what awaits souls after death. The Catholic Church, which has a formal process for identifying souls in heaven through canonization, pointedly refrains from saying that anyone is without a doubt in hell. Protestants reject the concept of purgatory, in which sins can be atoned for after death, but disagree on other questions. The lack of consensus is enabled partly by ambiguities in the Bible.

Evangelical opposition to Bell is exemplified in a succinct tweet from prominent evangelical pastor John Piper: "Farewell, Rob Bell."

Page Brooks, a professor at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, thinks Bell errs in a conception of a loving God that leaves out the divine attributes of justice and holiness.

"It's love, but it's a just love," Brooks said. "God is love, but you have to understand you're a sinner and the only way to get around that is through Christ's sacrifice on the cross."

Making his new belief public is both liberating and a little frightening for Holtz, even though his doubts about traditional doctrines on damnation began long before he heard about Rob Bell's book.

A married Navy veteran with five children, Holtz spent years trying to reconcile his belief that Jesus Christ's death on the cross redeemed the entire world with the idea that millions of people — including millions who had never even heard of Jesus — were suffering forever in hell.

"We do these somersaults to justify the monster god we believe in," he said. "But confronting my own sinfulness, that's when things started to topple for me. Am I really going to be saved just because I believe something, when all these good people in the world aren't?"

Gray Southern, United Methodist district superintendent for the part of North Carolina that includes Henderson, declined to discuss Holtz's departure in detail, but said there was more to it than the online post about Rob Bell's book.

"That's between the church and him," Southern said.

Church members had also been unhappy with Internet posts about subjects like gay marriage and the mix of religion and patriotism, Holtz said, and the hell post was probably the last straw. Holtz and his family plan to move back to Tennessee, where he'll start a job and maybe plant a church.

"So long as we believe there's a dividing point in eternity, we're going to think in terms of us and them," he said. "But when you believe God has saved everyone, the point is, you're saved. Live like it." ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Pastor loses job after questioning hell's existence

The lure of Bali

The lure of Bali - The lure of Bali to foreign artists during the 20th century is well documented; names like Arie Smit, Rudolf Bonet, the questionable Donald Friend and more are household names in Indonesia.

Less well known are self-taught artists from Java who left the security of their villages and jumped busses to Bali with little but charcoal and paper in their packs.

One of the earliest of these risk takers is Pak Slamet of Ludtunduh. At 79 years of age, he springs out of bed daily, excited to continue working on his canvasses. Living these days in his single room studio, Slamet, who learned to paint from his brother “and lots of friends” put his kids through university from his art practice.

Passion for life: At 79 years of age, painter Slamet bounds out of bed each day to pain

“I was born in Pemalang on August 17, 1932,” says Slamet who in his life has been ruled by the Dutch, the Japanese, Sukarno, Soeharto and today Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Throughout all those years, he has never cared for politics, nor painted his feelings on the regimes’ qualities.

The artist moved to Bali in 1963 after a stint in Sumatra. Even then Bali was a magnet for artists explains Slamet.

“First I stayed with a friend in Denpasar. I later moved to Ubud because it was a center for the arts and paintings fetched better prices — art was more valued,” says Slamet who volunteered during the Mount Agung eruption and kept an eye out for danger during the 1965 Sukarno/Soeharto coup.

Hidden meaning: Narko, an artist who came to Bali in 1980 draws the outline of a birdcage.“Back in 1965, during the coup I opened a little all night coffee house in Denpasar. At that time people were disappearing; there would be a knock at the door in the early hours before the dawn and people were never seen again. With that coffee shop, I was awake and could see what was going on, but I was never brave enough to draw or paint what I saw. Because I draw from life I would have been seen sketching what was happening.”

He chose instead to honor the nation’s workers in his paintings.

“I feel I owe them [the workers]. They are suffering and I want to remind the government these people are our nation’s backbone. Everyone needs the chance to read the newspaper in the evenings, they need a day off a week to spend time with their families, but now people are working all the time — just to make enough for food,” says Slamet whose paintings of farmers in the fields, women hawking in the markets or road builders pay homage to Indonesia’s unsung heroes.

Focusing on the poorest sector of society has not made Slamet a rich man. He could have been comfortably retired on a government pension; his first job was a clerk in the newly formed Sukarno government.

He chose instead to document life around him, to sacrifice comfort and join his subjects’ daily struggle.

A success story: Pranoto, who is now one of Ubud’s better-known artists, stands in front of oil paintings hung on the walls of his Ubud gallery.“Who wants to buy my paintings of farmers. It would be impossible for farmers — they have no money. By painting their stories and lives, I feel I am paying my debt to them, paying my respects for what they do for this nation,” says Slamet.

The aging artist has produced “maybe 1,000 paintings in my life. I am still learning with every stroke of my brush. Life is better as an artist that as a government clerk — there is no pension, but I am free.”

A decade after Slamet made his way to Ubud, the holy grail for Java’s artists, Pranoto from the Central Javan city of Solo, also known as Surakarta, followed in his footsteps.

“I came because I wanted to be an artist. I had applied to the Yogyakarta ISI [Institut Seni Indonesia] in 1971. When I failed the entrance I was traumatized, I thought I could never be a success in art,” says Pranoto, who is now one of Ubud’s better-known artists, running a gallery, teaching art and hosting weekly life drawing classes.

A self-taught artist, Pranoto came to Bali learn at the feet of those who had gone before him.

“To live in Solo art that time as an artist was difficult. The Solo art market is really small and the choice was to go to Jakarta or Bali. The Sukarno Collection had a lot of artists from Ubud, such as Lempad and Ida Bagus Made and the works were coming from the Ubud area. I came here because as an artist’s village you could learn — you were not alone — there were people to share ideas with,” says Pranoto of his early days in Ubud.

Down below: Using pencil and paper, Narko produces haunting still lives.During the 1970s and 1980s Ubud attracted Indonesia’s most celebrated artists.

“When I moved here I met Affandi, Hendra, Soejoyono, they would all come for a few weeks each year and then go; Hendra lived here in 1982. When you are young and you want to be an artist, it seems an impossible dream, then you meet people like this and see the dream can come true. Meeting these heroes of mine — wow it’s like meeting Julia Roberts. I mean to do that, as a young artist in Solo would be impossible,” says Pranoto who through risking all for his art is, at 59 years of age, living the dream.

With the simple medium of pencil and paper 55-year-old Narko Hanjaya has captured Bali and Java’s shadows and tones, caught it’s becak and buildings in still lives that haunt the viewer. Solo born, like Pranoto, Narko headed to Bali in 1980. Learning the techniques of drawing and painting from his older brother, Narko says his talents could not have been nurtured or recognized in his hometown.

“Here in Bali I can make a living from my work. I have a manager in Jakarta who sells overseas for me. It’s difficult to do that in Solo, because few people are interested – there are very few collectors, even in Yogyakarta.”

His works “tell of the things people see every day and don’t think about. But when they are represented in art, people see these objects more clearly.

“It’s like my bird cages; when you see a cage you don’t think about it; my drawings speak of wanting what you don’t have; the bird in the cage wants to give up food and shelter for freedom, thinks its life would be better elsewhere, but that’s not always true.”

Like pilgrims there is a new crop of Javanese painters taking up residence in Bali, including 35-year-old Dwi Ari Martono from Purworejo in Central Java and Suliyat Buamar.

Impressionist figurative painter Dwi came to open a Padang warung with his brother. His warung became a center for local artists, Dwi became intrigued with painting. He picked up a paintbrush, quit his job in the Padang warung and applied himself to art successfully.

Expressionist Suliyat from Malang came to Ubud because it was “an open community, particularly for painters — I also wanted to explore myself and the local culture,” says Suliyat of Bali — a Mecca for Java’s artists. ( thejakartapost.com )

READ MORE - The lure of Bali

How Penguins Got Their Cold-Weather Coats

How Penguins Got Their Cold-Weather Coats - Those tuxedo-wearing birds that inhabit Earth's coldest continent may have evolved a means of retaining heat when they were still living in warm climates, scientists now suggest.

A key adaptation that helped modern penguins to invade the cold waters of Antarctica within the last 16 million years is the so-called humeral arterial plexus, a network of blood vessels that limits heat loss through the wings.

The plexus routes blood coming into the body from the wings past the blood traveling from the body to the wings. As such, the cooler blood from the wings, which get cold in the water, is heated up by warmer blood from the body, thus conserving heat.

Palaeeudyptes, one of the "giant" penguins lived during the Oligocene, about 28 million years ago. Bones in this bird and its relatives show clear evidence of a heat-conserving structure known as a humeral arterial plexus. Credit: the Geology Museum, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.

To find out more about how this anatomical structure evolved, scientists investigated seven live penguin species and 19 fossil ones. In live specimens, they found the plexus leaves behind grooves in the upper arm bone called the humerus. As such, they could see when this structure began appearing in extinct penguin species from the fossil record. [Image of extinct penguin]

Surprisingly, they found the plexus arose at least 49 million years ago, when the planet was going through a warm "greenhouse Earth" phase due to vast amounts of global warming gases that got pumped into the atmosphere, perhaps by volcanism.

"I began this work thinking we would relate heat retention in penguins to the global cooling that took place at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary [about 34 million years ago], whereas in fact, penguins were cold-water-tolerant millions of years earlier," researcher Daniel Thomas, a paleontologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told LiveScience.

The earliest known penguins to feature the plexus lived on the lost continent of Gondwana, on what is now Seymour Island in Antarctica. Back then, the waters there were 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius), compared with the water's current average temperature of 34 degrees F (1 degree C). (Scientists can deduce ancient temperatures by looking at the chemistry of fossils - for instance, magnesium levels in the shells of certain organisms rise as temperatures go up.)

The researchers suspect the plexus first evolved to help penguins save energy during long foraging trips in the cold water, as the structure evolved in concert with dramatic skeletal changes that promoted buoyancy and reduced drag, thus improving deep-diving and long-distance swimming. As global climate cooled, the plexus then found a new use, proving key to the penguins' invasion of Antarctic ice sheets.

"Penguins have occupied much of the Southern Hemisphere in the last 40 million years because of their tolerance for cold water," Thomas said. ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - How Penguins Got Their Cold-Weather Coats

What goes on in a woman's brain when she has an orgasm

What goes on in a woman's brain when she has an orgasm - The first scan revealing exactly what happens inside a woman’s brain when she has an orgasm has been developed by scientists.

They have discovered that sexual arousal numbs the female nervous system to such an extent that she doesn’t feel as much pain – only pleasure.

American researchers found that the orgasm affects up to 30 different parts of the brain including those responsible for emotion, touch, joy, satisfaction and memory.

The team from Rutgers University, New Jersey, now hope to be able to map what typically happens inside a woman’s brain when she has an orgasm.

Watch this: Meg Ryan in the fake organism scene in When Harry Met Sally, the 1989 hit movie

This could enable them to pinpoint what is going wrong among those with problems of sexual dysfunction or low libido.

They also want to build up a similar picture for men so they can compare how the sensation affects the male and female brains.

Evidence suggests women experience longer orgasms than men, and can have several in quick succession.

The researchers asked eight women to stimulate themselves while lying under a blanket inside an Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, a tunnel-like machine often used to detect brain tumours.

Most women took less than five minutes to reach an orgasm although some took as long as 20.

During that time, the MRI scanner took images of their brain every two seconds to show which parts became active during the orgasm.

The scientists found that two minutes before the orgasm, the brain’s reward centres become active, the areas usually activated when eating food and drink.

Immediately before they reached the peak, other areas of the brain became affected such as the sensory cortex, which receives ‘touch’ messages from parts of the body and the thalamus, which relays signals to other parts of the body.

Once the orgasm has started other parts of the brain are activated such as those responsible for emotion - the cingulate cortex and the insula.

The final part of the brain to be activated is the hypothalamus, the ‘control’ part of the brain which regulates temperature, hunger, thirst and tiredness.

At the same time another area responsible for pleasure is activated - the nucleus accumbens - as well as the caudate nucleus, which is responsible for memory.

The scientists found that the pattern of activity was the same for all women in their experiment.

Barry Komisaruk, professor of psychology at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, said: 'In women, orgasm produces a very extensive response across the brain and body.

'In one experiment we asked women to self-stimulate and then raise their hands when they orgasmed.

'Some women raised their hands several times each session, often just a few seconds apart.

'So the evidence is that women tend to have longer orgasms and can experience several in rapid succession.'

A woman’s orgasm last an average of 10-15 seconds, whilst a man’s is thought to last for just six seconds.

But only within the past few decades has society accepted that women actually enjoy sex - rather than it just being a function for them to give birth.

Until the late 1960s, many scientists and doctors refused to believe that they could actually have an orgasm.

Last week TV presenter Stephen Fry provoked outrage amongst feminists by claiming that women are unenthusiastic about sex, and see it only as ‘the price they are willing to pay for a relationship’.

Many still insist that women with a low sex drive are not suffering from a medical condition - they are either tired or not in the mood.( dailymail.co.uk )

READ MORE - What goes on in a woman's brain when she has an orgasm

'Time Traveler' May Just Be Hard of Hearing

'Time Traveler' May Just Be Hard of Hearing - Speculation about a supposed time traveller talking on her cell phone at a 1928 Hollywood film premiere has sped across the Internet faster than a DeLorean time machine. But a less mind-bending possibility is that she was just hard of hearing, experts say.

The story first surfaced in a YouTube video that includes film footage showing the 1928 premiere of the Charlie Chaplin film "The Circus" at Manns Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Cali. Irish filmmaker George Clarke points out a woman in the old footage holding what he describes as a cell phone against her ear. The shape implies the woman is a time traveler using a modern mobile device rather than an ear trumpet, Clarke said.

What Clarke didn't consider was that a simple ear trumpet could still explain it all, said hearing device historians, who provided LiveScience with images of sample ear trumpets for comparison.

"As you can tell from these, old-fashioned mechanical or resonating hearing aids were not necessarily long and rounded," said Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University in St. Louis. "Short, compact rectangular forms were not unusual."

In other words, they could look something like a cell phone to imaginative YouTube viewers in the 21st century.

19th-century resonator hearing aids such as ear trumpets were still made in large numbers well into the first decades of the 20th century, Skroska explained, and the basic designs didn't change much aside from incorporating newer, plastic-like materials.

"Besides, I would expect this woman to be over 50 years old, so using a late 19th century design in 1928 would not be a stretch I think," Skroska said.

Electronic hearing aids also existed before World War II, but in fewer numbers.

"Now, I can't really explain why the woman appears to be talking (other than yelling at the man who quickened his pace ahead of her)," Skroska said in an e-mail. "But I think it's fair to say it would be a hasty judgment to dismiss the possibility that it was a hearing aid she was holding up to her ear."

This explanation might be less exciting than the time travel theory, but it avoids a huge number of theoretical and practical problems associated with sending someone into the past.

Time travel issues

Theorists have kicked around a few scenarios for how people might travel to the past, said Brian Greene, author of the bestseller, "The Elegant Universe" (Vintage Books, 2000) and a physicist at Columbia University, during a past LiveScience interview. "And almost all of them, if you look at them closely, brush up right at the edge of physics as we understand it. Most of us think that almost all of them can be ruled out."

One theory focuses on wormholes - hypothetical tunnels that connect two regions of space-time that could represent two parts of the same universe, or even completely different universes.

But creating a wormhole that punches through space-time looks far beyond anything humans can accomplish with today's technology, said Michio Kaku, author of "Hyperspace" (Anchor, 1995) and "Parallel Worlds" (Anchor, 2006), and a physicist at the City University of New York, in a past interview.

Humans would need to somehow harness the energy of a star or possibly matter with negative energy density - an exotic and hypothetical form of matter with the energy of less than nothing. Even if such matter exists, there would likely not be enough of it for a time machine to harness.

Another time travel theory relies upon cosmic strings - narrow tubes of energy that span the entire length of the expanding universe. Predictions suggest that such regions could contain huge amounts of mass and warp space-time in a way that allows for time travel.

The cosmic strings either run on infinitely or form loops "like spaghetti or SpaghettiO's," said Richard Gott, author of "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe" (Mariner Books, 2002) and an astrophysicist at Princeton University. Two such strings parallel to one another could perhaps bend space-time enough to make time travel possible - but it's a challenge that only a "super civilization" might try, Gott explained in a past interview. ( LiveScience )

READ MORE - 'Time Traveler' May Just Be Hard of Hearing

Prehistoric humans 'had feelings of compassion and cared for others'

Prehistoric humans 'had feelings of compassion and cared for others' - Early humans like Neanderthals had a deep-seated sense of compassion, new research suggests.

A team from the University of York examined archaeological evidence for the way emotions began to emerge in our ancestors as they became modern humans.

The research shows that in Europe between around 500,000 and 40,000 years ago, early humans such as Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals developed commitments to the welfare of others.

Neanderthal Man may have cared for others in the group

The injured or infirm were routinely cared for in this period, according to the findings.

Remains examined by the university's Department of Archaeology researchers revealed how a child with a congenital brain abnormality was not abandoned but lived until five or six years old.

And it shows how a Neanderthal with a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye was cared for, perhaps for as long as 20 years.

The four-stage model developed by Penny Spikins, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford charts the beginnings of human empathy from six million years ago when the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees began to 'help' others, perhaps with a gesture of comfort or moving a branch to allow them to pass.

Compassion in Homo erectus 1.8 million years ago began to be regulated as an emotion integrated with rational thought, the researchers said.

Care of sick individuals showed compassion towards others while special treatment of the dead suggested grief at the loss of a loved one and a desire to soothe individuals.

In modern humans starting 120,000 years ago, compassion was extended to strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts.

Dr Spikins, who led the study, said new research developments such as neuro-imaging have enabled archaeologists to attempt a scientific explanation of what were once intangible feelings of ancient humans.

She said: 'Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion.

'It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive. This apparent fragility makes addressing the evidence for the development of compassion in our most ancient ancestors a unique challenge, yet the archaeological record has an important story to tell about the prehistory of compassion.

'We have traditionally paid a lot of attention to how early humans thought about each other, but it may well be time to pay rather more attention to whether or not they 'cared'.'

The research is published in the journal Time and Mind and Dr Spikins will give a free public lecture at the University of York on Tuesday October 19. ( dailymail.co.uk )

READ MORE - Prehistoric humans 'had feelings of compassion and cared for others'

Do you have long-life genes?

do you have long-life genes?. There have been many recent advances to our longevity, Victoria Lambert gives old age a closer look.

'How incessant and great are the ills,” wrote CS Lewis, quoting Juvenal, “with which a prolonged old age is replete.” Yet given that he passed away at the age of 64, the writer would these days be counted as having died relatively young.

Since Lewis died in 1963, the definition of old age has changed – indeed, most of us today are not so much hoping for a long life, as expecting it. Researchers from the Aging Research Centre at the University of Southern Denmark claim that life expectancy will continue to rise indefinitely: half the children born in Britain in 2000 will live past 100, and half the babies born in Japan in 2007 will live to be 107.

This raises a host of questions. How will we cope with an older society? Is reaching old age in good enough condition to enjoy it a question of genes, diet or lifestyle? And will life expectancy continue to soar, or does the human body come with a built-in limit?

The answer to the second question, disappointingly for health freaks, seems to be genetics. Earlier this month, a team of scientists at Boston University claimed to be able to predict – with 77 per cent accuracy – which of us will live to 100. By studying the DNA of more than 1,000 people who have reached that age and comparing it with that of the general population, they found genetic signatures that appeared to confer “exceptional longevity”.

The researchers’ findings, published online in Science, seemed good news for anyone with those “signatures” – although their methods and conclusions have been criticised by other scientists, and they offered no insight into how common this set of genetic variants are, nor how an individual can be tested for them.

However, even if the study turns out to be accurate, those without the relevant genes need not despair. New findings from Japan suggest a startling way to extend your lifespan – if you’re a woman. Dr Noriko Kagawa, assistant director of the Kato Ladies Clinic in Tokyo, revealed at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Rome two weeks ago that transplanting ovarian tissue into mice not only restored their fertility, but also extended the rodents’ lives by more than 40 per cent (to the equivalent of 120 in human years).

When Dr Kagawa transplanted minute slivers of tissue harvested from younger mice into older subjects, she was astonished to see that not only did the mice live longer, but they also became younger. “All the mice

that had received transplants resumed the normal reproductive behaviour of young mice,” she says.

But it wasn’t just that their menopause was reversed: “They showed interest in male mice, mated and had some pups. Normally, old mice stay in the corner of the cage and don’t move much, but these mice resumed quick movements. Their arthritis was cured.”

She noted, too, that the mice’s naturally thinning coats grew back thicker. In fact, the results were so surprising that she and her fellow researchers thought they had mixed up the tags on the animal cages, so youthful, healthy and frisky did the older mice become: “They were all over the male mice,” she says.

Applying this to humans might be a jump, but it’s eminently possible. “Women who have ovarian tissue frozen at a young age, perhaps because they are about to embark on cancer treatment, can have their young tissue transplanted back when they are older,” says Dr Kagawa. “Normally, we would be doing this to preserve their fertility or to expand their reproductive lifespan – but our mice experiment suggests that this might improve overall longevity.”

Dr Sherman Silber of St Luke’s Hospital in St Louis, Missouri, who pioneered the first ovarian transplant and has collaborated with Dr Kagawa and her team, is even more confident. “This is a genuine way for women to live longer,” he says. “There is a real human application to this discovery. Any woman – not just cancer patients – could benefit from having a piece of her ovary frozen at 20, not just to delay childbearing, but to extend her lifespan.”

The reason why the ovarian tissue has this effect seems to lie in the way that it stimulates the production of oestrogen. When women go through the menopause, their oestrogen levels fall dramatically, causing the symptoms – hot flushes, hair and libido loss, thinning bones, mood swings and poor skin – that are so well documented. In the animal world – and among primitive humans – females were programmed to die not long after menopause, as they were no longer needed genetically.

Thanks to modern medicine and better public health, women now live nearly as long after the menopause as before, yet their ovaries haven’t caught up with the jump in longevity. This means that the second half of their lives can be painful and often riven by infirmity. As Professor Bart Fauser, of the Utrecht Medical Centre in the Netherlands, explains, “Women were not meant to live without oestrogen for 40 to 50 years.”

As a result of the new research, Dr Silber believes that, in the short term, women should reconsider hormone replacement therapy: “Don’t wait until you’re 55 and in the middle of it; the damage to your body is done by then. You should be getting oestrogen at 45 before you start feeling symptoms.” He can also see young women in the future freezing a slice of ovarian tissue the size of a fingernail, removed in a quick keyhole procedure, to have it transplanted back in when they hit the menopause, and perhaps again at 60.

Even for those who have passed this point, he does not rule out transplants from daughters or nieces. “You’d need to be closely matched by tissue-typing, but then it would only take a little immune-suppression medication to prevent rejection; we’re getting better at that.”

This raises the startling prospect of our creating a generation of “super-cougars” – women who never age, while their peer group of men drop like flies. Yet Dr Silber has hope for his sex, too. “Urologists are increasingly thinking that all men need testosterone replacement,” he says – production of the hormone also slows down with ageing.

For those reluctant to explore surgical techniques, research from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis shows calorie restriction can also extend lifespan. In April, scientists reported that cutting calorie intake by between 10 and 50 per cent considerably increases longevity in animals, and leads to fewer problems with conditions related to ageing, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. For men who wanted to keep up with their oestrogen-boosted wives, refusing dessert would be a good place to start.

“People will say it is not natural to live to 100,” says Dr Silber, “but then it’s not natural to survive cancer either. You don’t hear anyone complaining about that.”

Then again, as Juvenal pointed out centuries ago, old age is only desirable if it is healthy. Do we want to receive ovarian tissue transplants and live to 120, only to spend the final years in dramatically crumbling health?

Fortunately, the experience of the Japanese mice suggests that this won’t happen.

Dr Kagawa noted that the effects of the transplant wore off slowly, and the mice experienced a normal second menopause before they died. She does, however, think that 120 is about the maximum number of years that the rest of the human body can bear before wearing out. Just to be sure, though, she is now considering consecutive transplants in mice, in order to test the miraculous rejuvenating powers of the ovary to their limits. ( telegraph.co.uk )

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