A proton-proton collision at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN laboratory in Geneva that produced more than 100 charged particles. CREDIT: CERN

In a development physicists are calling “huge,” “tantalizing” and “unexpected,” researchers have measured a signal that could herald a new kind of particle or force of nature.

Yet the finding is not yet conclusive, and leaves many researchers skeptical.

The discovery comes from an atom smasher called the Tevatron at the Fermilab physics laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Inside the accelerator there, particles are ramped up to near the speed of light as they race around a 4 mile (6.3 km) ring. When two particles collide, they disintegrate into other exotic particles in a powerful outpouring of energy.

Scientists analyzed thousands of these collisions, and found a suspicious pattern in about 250 more cases than predicted. In these instances, the products of the collision between a proton and its antimatter partner, the antiproton, were different than expected.

Read complete article here. {via livescience.com}

New secrets revealed?

Modern technology may be the key to unlock hidden secrets about an ancient monument: Stonehenge.

Researchers are using lasers to scan the nearly three dozen stones, or megaliths, that make up the famous circular complex on the Salisbury Plain of southern England.

The vertical stones — over 10 feet tall and weighing many tons — form the site that’s believed to be nearly 5,000 years old. And nobody is sure why or how Stonehenge was originally built.

“This new survey will capture a lot more information on the subtleties of the monument and its surrounding landscape,” said Paul Bryan of English Heritage, an adviser to the British government on historic buildings and monuments.

Read complete article here. {via aolnews.com}

Mystery Spiral

None of the world’s experts no what the strange spiral structure on the left is. Why the spiral glows is itself a mystery, with a leading hypothesis being illumination by light reflected from nearby stars. NASA astronomers think it is related to a star in a binary star system entering the planetary nebula phase, when its outer atmosphere is ejected. The huge spiral spans about a third of a light year across and, winding four or five complete turns, has a regularity that has never been observed before.

Read complete article here. {via beforeitsnews.com}

This is a map of the city states of ancient Mesopotamia during the Sumerian civilization.(wikipedia)

Read complete article here. {via Paranormal News}

Super-powered Eye

WASHINGTON: Making a startling discovery, a scientist has claimed in his new book that the evolution of vision has provided humans with four real superpowers: telepathy, X-ray vision, seeing the future, and speaking with the dead.

And, as it turns out, these superpowers have been instrumental in shaping the way people interact with one another and see the world.

Mark Changizi, a neurobiology expert and assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has detailed the most basic scientific assumptions about human vision in his book, titled ‘The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision’.

Read complete article here.{via Times of India}

One Big Cemetery

So after all the theories and studies it’s really no secret, just a big cemetery.

Huge, intriguing stones mark burial site, archaeologists conclude, for family that ruled region many generations.

Washington —- The secret of Stonehenge has been solved: The mysterious circle of large stones in southern England was a burial ground for almost five centuries, and it probably holds the remains of a family that long ruled the area, new research concludes.

Based on radiocarbon-dating of cremated bones up to 5,000 years old, researchers with the Stonehenge Riverside Archaeological Project said they are convinced that the area was built and grew as a “domain of the ancestors.”

“It’s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages,” said Mike Parker Pearson, archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield in England and head of the project. “Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium B.C.”

Read complete article here. {via ajc.com}

Man-made Black Hole (credit: Fresh News)

Man-made black holes, sounds a bit dicey to me.

A team of physicists have created an artificial black hole in their lab that traps sound instead of light, in an attempt to detect the theoretical Hawking radiation.

The radiation, proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking more than 30 years ago, causes black holes to evaporate over time.

Astrophysical black holes are created when matter becomes so dense that it collapses to a point called a singularity.

The black hole’s gravity is so great that nothing – not even light – can escape from a boundary around it called an event horizon.

Read complete article here. {via Fresh News}

Bronze Age burial mounds (Credit: Damian Grady/ English Heritage)

It will be interesting if anything is discovered in these new tombs which are reportedly 1000 years older than Stonehenge. The tombs have yet to be excavated but experts are claiming that they likely contain chambers with human remains from the Bronze Age (roughly 2000 to 700 B.C. in Britain).

Given away by strange, crop circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise.

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among “Britain’s first architecture,” according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

For such a site to have lain hidden for so long is “completely amazing,” said Wickstead, of Kingston University in London.

Read complete article here. {via National Geographic News}

Strange Creature? (credit: Joe Fex)

I messed around with the alleged original photo and there does seem to be something there when you mess with the levels and exposure of the shot. Weird.

I recently received these photos from Joe Fex one of the top Bigfoot researchers in the world [http://apexresearch.ufothinktank.com/]. I sent them to Brad Steiger to have a look at. Since he is currently working on his new book on monsters, I thought he would especially be interested in seeing these arresting pictures. After reading Joe’s comments on them, you can read below how they were assessed by Brad Steiger’s photo-analysis expert.

 Joe Fex : Here are some more curiosities for you, three images from 2007 of a phantasm (Undetected by the witnesses present) that appeared in a photo at Lake Travis, Texas (The strangest lake I’ve ever seen! Check it out on google maps).
 
Not the first time I’ve seen this type of humanoid but it is somewhat rare. A college biology professor shot the photo w/digital camera to test the flash & later noticed two points of light. Thinking it was an animal, had the shot light-blasted revealing the 11-14ft giant standing approx. 26ft away and definitely observing the student.

Read complete article here. {via The Examiner}

Dark matter ring. (Credit: Image courtesy of Andalucía Innova)

Here’s an article on the ever elusive dark matter. Science seems to be making some sort of headway on this stuff.

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2009) — Dark matter is an enigmatic energy that makes up most of the mass in the Universe, whose nature has not yet been identified. Researchers have succeeded in estimating the percentage of dark matter in the Universe and describing the processes related to the very existence of this matter. But, until now, no one has established the distribution and behavior of the dark matter in a galaxy.

Now, astronomers in the Theoretical Physics and Cosmos Department of the University of Granada, led by Eduardo Battaner, in collaboration with researchers in the Applied Mathematics Department, have made great progress: establishing the distribution and behaviour of the dark matter in a galaxy.

New mathematical calculations on the dark matter describe the density profiles which define how the dark matter changes in a galaxy. This had not been specified in the astronomy field yet. Until now, the behaviour of the dark matter had been estimated through simulations, but the new mathematical description approach based on equations and functions which describe each characteristic of the dark matter make this result much more reliable.

Read complete article here. {via ScienceDaily}