By Dan Cook

PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) – The United States’ first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration’s move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.

The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it — as long as they are out of public view — despite a federal ban.

“This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members,” said Madeline Martinez, Oregon’s executive director of NORML, a group pushing for marijuana legalization. Read the full story

Declaring “this is not your father’s moon,” NASA scientists said today that last month’s mission to punch a hole in the lunar surface found significant amounts of water in a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole.

“The moon is alive,” declared Anthony Colaprete, the chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission.

According to Colaprete and other researchers, the mission measured about 25 gallons of water in the form of vapor and ice after punching a hole about 100 feet across in the surface of the moon. While that’s not enough to fill a bathtub, it could be evidence there is enough water at the poles for future astronauts to use to live off the land. And it’s far more than anyone expected following the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s, which pronounced the moon a dead, forbidding world.

“This is painting a surprising new picture of the moon,” said Greg Delory, a space scientist at UC Berkeley. Read the full story

This story is part of a special series that explores the global water crisis. For more clean water news, photos, and information, visit National Geographics Freshwater Web site.

How’s this for a sweet surprise: A team of researchers in Washington State has found traces of cooking spices and flavorings in the waters of Puget Sound. (See map.)

University of Washington associate professor Richard Keil heads the Sound Citizen program, which investigates how what we do on land affects our waters. Read the full story

The American Medical Assn. changes its policy to promote clinical research and development of cannabis-based medicines and alternative delivery methods.

The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.

The nation’s largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.

In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.

“Despite more than 30 years of clinical research, only a small number of randomized, controlled trials have been conducted on smoked cannabis,” said Dr. Edward Langston, an AMA board member, noting that the limited number of studies was “insufficient to satisfy the current standards for a prescription drug product.” Read the full story

Read the leaked document here

More resources:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2009/11/secret_internet_copyri…

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/leaked-acta-internet-provisions-thr…

http://www.eff.org/issues/acta

From Boing Boing:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability. Read the full story

Though journalists, international affairs professionals, travel lovers, and international businessmen are already well aware that Brazil is the country to watch, there are still many gringos who aren’t tuned in to Brazil’s ascent or don’t quite understand the country’s importance. This list is for those gringos.

10. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s cultural capital (but not the national capital – that’s Brasília) is an excellent urban case study when learning about the developing world. It shares certain characteristics with other developing cities that provides many important lessons and a useful perspective on urban conflicts, like inequality, violent crime, and drug trafficking, as well as positive changes like a growing middle class, increased purchasing power of the average consumer and social movements. Read the full story

The United States Marine Corps will turn 234 on Tuesday and birthday celebrations will be taking place at bases stretching from the halls of Montezuma all the way to the shores of Tripoli.

Marine Air Corps Station Yuma, however, got the party started a few days earlier by holding a formal ceremony at the base’s parade field on Friday morning.

“Happy 234th birthday. And most of you don’t look a day over 18,” MCAS Yuma Commanding Officer Col. Mark Werth said during the celebration. Read the full story

The late comedian George Carlin once observed that Americans have “owners” who “control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.” Do you think of our mainstream media outlets as mouthpieces for balanced journalism? theN3TWORK’s creative team has put together its most comprehensive episode to date, dissecting the power structures behind American corporate media and exposing glaring conflicts of interest. We also encapsulate the most critical changes in media regulation policy over the last century and discuss the implications for the rise of alternative media with the current Director of Project Censored, Peter Phillips.

Source:

http://www.disinfo.com/2009/11/big-media/

The strongest limit on the number of possible universes is the human ability to distinguish between different universes. Credit: Linde and Vanchurin.

In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16. If that number sounds large, the scientists explain that it would have been even more humongous, except that we observers are limited in our ability to distinguish more universes; otherwise, there could be as many as 10^10^10^7 universes.

To work these numbers out, Linde and Vanchurin looked back to the time shortly after the Big Bang, which they view as a quantum process that generated lots of quantum fluctuations. Then during the period of inflation, the universe grew rapidly and these quantum fluctuations were “frozen” into classical perturbations in distinct regions. Today, each of these regions could be a different universe, having its own distinct laws of low energy physics.

By analyzing the mechanism (called “slow roll inflation“) that initially generated the quantum fluctuations, the scientists could estimate the number of resulting universes at 10^10^10^7 (a number which is dependent on the model they used). However, this number is limited by other factors, specifically by the limits of the human brain. Since the total amount of information that one individual can absorb in a lifetime is about 10^16 bits, which is equivalent to 10^10^16 configurations, this means that a human brain couldn’t distinguish more than 10^10^16 universes.

Requiring that the human brain must be able to count the number of parallel universes may seem inappropriate, if not arrogant, but Linde and Vanchurin explain that dealing with the quantum world is different than our everyday lives in which quantum effects can be safely ignored. A crucial part of their calculation here is an investigation of quantum effects on supergalactic scales. In this kind of scenario, the state of the multiverse and observations made by an observer are correlated (similar to the Schrodinger cat experiment, where the outcome can be determined only after it is registered by a classical observer).

“When we analyze the probability of the existence of a universe of a given type, we should be talking about a consistent pair: the universe and an observer who makes the rest of the universe ‘alive’ and the wave function of the rest of the universe time-dependent,” the scientists write.

As the scientists explain, the calculation of the number of universes is an important step toward an even larger goal: to find the probability of living in a universe with a particular set of properties. What are the chances that we live in a world in which the laws of physics are these laws that we currently observe? Answering this question requires finding probabilities that depend on knowing about other universes, among many other challenges.

http://www.physorg.com/

thank you to:

brainchild9

You know things are shifting in America when Fortune magazine, the bible for business journalism, runs a cover story titled “Is pot already legal?”. You also know it when Barack Obama’s Department of Justice publishes a long-expected memo signalling that the federal government will no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries if they are legal under state law. That happened formally this month. Read the full story

By Dan Eden for viewzone.

They have always been there. People noticed them before. But no one could remember who made them — or why? Until just recently, no one even knew how many there were. Now they are everywhere — thousands — no, hundreds of thousands of them! And the story they tell is the most important story of humanity. But it’s one we might not be prepared to hear.

Something amazing has been discovered in an area of South Africa, about 150 miles inland, west of the port of Maputo. It is the remains of a huge metropolis that measures, in conservative estimates, about 1500 square miles. It’s part of an even larger community that is about 10,000 square miles and appears to have been constructed — are you ready — from 160,000 to 200,000 BCE!

The image [top of page] is a close-up view of just a few hundred meters of the landscape taken from google-earth. The region is somewhat remote and the “circles” have often been encountered by local farmers who assumed they were made by some indigenous people in the past. But, oddly, no one ever bothered to inquire about who could have made them or how old they were.

This changed when researcher and author, Michael Tellinger, teamed up with Johan Heine, a local fireman and pilot who had been looking at these ruins from his years flying over the region. Heine had the unique advantage to see the number and extent of these strange stone foundations and knew that their significance was not being appreciated.

“When Johan first introduced me to the ancient stone ruins of southern Africa, I had no idea of the incredible discoveries we would make in the year or two that followed. The photographs, artifacts and evidence we have accumulated points unquestionably to a lost and never-before-seen civilization that predates all others — not by just a few hundred years, or a few thousand years… but many thousands of years. These discoveries are so staggering that they will not be easily digested by the mainstream historical and archaeological fraternity, as we have already experienced. It will require a complete paradigm shift in how we view our human history. “ — Tellinger

Where it was found:

The area is significant for one striking thing — gold. “The thousands of ancient gold mines discovered over the past 500 years, points to a vanished civilization that lived and dug for gold in this part of the world for thousands of years,” says Tellinger. “And if this is in fact the cradle of humankind, we may be looking at the activities of the oldest civilization on Earth.”

Did gold play some role in the dense population that once lived here? The site is just about 150 miles from an excellent port where maritime trade could have helped to support such a large population. But remember — we’re talking almost 200,000 years ago!

The individual ruins [see below] mostly consist of stone circles. Most have been buried in the sand and are only observable by satellite or aircraft. Some have been exposed when the changing climate has blown the sand away, revealing the walls and foundations.

“I see myself as a fairly open-minded chap but I will admit that it took me well over a year for the penny to drop, and for me to realise that we are actually dealing with the oldest structures ever built by humans on Earth. The main reason for this is that we have been taught that nothing of significance has ever come from southern Africa. That the powerful civilizations all emerged in Sumeria and Egypt and other places. We are told that until the settlement of the BANTU people from the north, which was supposed to have started sometime in the 12th century AD, this part of the world was filled by hunter gatherers and so-called Bushmen, who did not make any major contributions in technology or civilization.” — Tellinger

A Rich and Diverse History

When explorers first encountered these ruins, they assumed that they were cattle corals made by nomadic tribes, like the Bantu people, as they moved south and settled the land from around the 13th century. There was no previous historical record of any older civilization capable of building such a densly populated community. Little effort was made to investigate the site because the scope of the ruins was not fully known.

Over the past 20 years, people like Cyril Hromnik, Richard Wade, Johan Heine and a handful of others have discovered that these stone structures are not what the seem to be. In fact these are now believed to be the remains of ancient temples and astronomical observatories of lost ancient civilizations that stretch back for many thousands of years.

These circular ruins are spread over a huge area. They can only truly be appreciated from the air or through modern sattelite images. Many of them have almost completely eroded or have been covered by the movement of soil from farming and the weather. Some have survived well enough to reveal their great size [see above] with some original walls standing almost 5 feet high and over a meter wide in places.

Looking at the entire metropolis, it becomes obvious that this was a well planned community, developed by a highly evolved civilization. The number of ancient gold mines suggests the reason for the community being in this location. We find roads — some extending a hundred miles — that connected the community and terraced agriculture, closely resembling those found in the Inca settlements in Peru.

But one question begs for an answer — how could this be achieved by humans 200,000 years ago?

How the Site was dated

Once the ruins were examined, the researchers were anxious to place the lost civilization in a historical perspective. The rocks were covered with a patina that looked very old but there were no items sufficient for carbon-14 dating. It was then that a chance discovery revealed the age of the site, and sent a chill down the spine of archaeologists and historians!

Dating the site:

Finding the remains of a large community, with as many as 200,000 people living and working together, was a major discovery in itself. But dating the site was a problem. The heavy patina on the rock walls suggested the structures were extremely old, but the science of dating patina is just being developed and is still controversial. Carbon-14 dating of such things as burnt wood introduces the possibility that the specimens could be from recent grass fires which are common in the area. The breakthrough came quite unexpectedly. As Tellinger describes it:

“Johan Heine discovered Adam’s Calendar in 2003, quite by accident. He was on route to find one of his pilots who crashed his plane on the edge of the cliff. Next to the crash site Johan noticed a very strange arrangement of large stones sticking out of the ground. While rescuing the injured pilot from about 20 metres down the side of the cliff, Johan walked over to the monoliths and immediately realised that they were aligned to the cardinal points of Earth — north, south, east and west. There were at least 3 monoliths aligned towards the sunrise, but on the west side of the aligned monoliths there was a mysterious hole in the ground — something was missing.After weeks and months of measuring and observations, Johan concluded that it was perfectly aligned with the rise and fall of the Sun. He determined the solstices and the equinoxes. But the mysterious hole in the ground remained a big puzzle. One day, while contemplating the reason for the hole, the local horse trail expert, Christo, came riding by. He quickly explained to Johan that there was a strange shaped stone which had been removed from the spot some time ago. Apparently it stood somewhere near the entrance to the nature reserve.

After an extensive search, Johan found the anthropomorphic (humanoid shape) stone. It was intact and proudly placed with a plaque stuck to it. It had been used by the Blue Swallow foundation to commemorate the opening of the Blue Swallow reserve in 1994. The irony is that it was removed from the most important ancient site found to date and mysteriously returned to the reserve — for slightly different reasons.

The exact location of the calendar is listed on www.makomati.com. The first calculations of the age of the calendar were made based on the rise of Orion, a constellation known for its three bright stars forming the “belt” of the mythical hunter.

The Earth wobbles on its axis and so the stars and constellations change their angle of presentation in the night sky on a cyclical basis. This rotation, called the precession completes a cycle about every 26,000 years. By determining when the three stars of Orion’s belt were positioned flat (horizontal) against the horizon, we can estimate the time when the three stones in the calendar were in alignment with these conspicuous stars.

The first rough calculation was at least 25,000 years ago. But new and more precise measurements kept increasing the age. The next calculation was presented by a master archaeoastronomer who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of ridicule by the academic fraternity. His calculation was also based on the rise of Orion and suggested an age of at least 75,000 years. The most recent and most acurate calculation, done in June 2009, suggests an age of at least 160,000 years, based on the rise of Orion — flat on the horizon — but also on the erosion of dolerite stones found at the site.

Some pieces of the marker stones had been broken off and sat on the ground, exposed to natural erosion. When the pieces were put back together about 3 cm of stone had already been worn away. These calculation helped assess the age of the site by calculating the erosion rate of the dolerite.

Who made the metropolis? Why?

It would seem that humans have always valued gold. It is even mentioned in the Bible, describing the Garden of Eden’s rivers:Genesis 2:11 — The name of the first [river] is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.

South Africa is known as the largest gold producing country of the world. The largest gold producing area of the world is Witwatersrand, the same region where the ancient metropolis is found. In fact nearby Johannesburg, one of the best known cities of South Africa, is also named “Egoli” which means the city of gold.

It seems highly probable that the ancient metropolis was established because of its proximity to the largest supply of gold on the planet. But why would ancient people work so hard to mine gold? You can’t eat it. It’s too soft to use for tool making. It isn’t really useful for anything except ornaments and its physical beauty is on a par with other metals like copper or silver. Exactly why was gold so important to early homo sapiens?

To explore the answer we need to look at the period of history in question — 160,000 to 200,000 years BCE — and learn what was happening on planet Earth.

What were humans like 160,000 years ago?Modern humans, homo sapiens, can trace our ancestry back through time to a point where our species evolved from other, more primitive, hominids. Scientists do not understand why this new type of human suddenly appeared, or how the change happened, but we can trace our genes back to a single female that is known as “Mitochondrial Eve”.

Mitochondrial Eve (mt-mrca) [Right: An artist's rendition] is the name given by researchers to the woman who is defined as the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for all currently living humans. Passed down from mother to offspring, all mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in every living person is derived from this one female individual. Mitochondrial Eve is the female counterpart of Y-chromosomal Adam, the patrilineal most recent common ancestor, although they lived at different times.

Mitochondrial Eve is believed to have lived between 150,000 to 250,000 years BP, probably in East Africa, in the region of Tanzania and areas to the immediate south and west. Scientists speculate that she lived in a population of between perhaps 4000 to 5000 females capable of producing offspring at any given time. If other females had offspring with the evolutionary changes to their DNA we have no record of their survival. It appears that we are all descendants of this one human female.

Mitochondrial Eve would have been roughly contemporary with humans whose fossils have been found in Ethiopia near the Omo River and at Hertho. Mitochondrial Eve lived significantly earlier than the out of Africa migration which might have occurred some 60,000 to 95,000 years ago.

[right] The region in Africa where one can find the greatest level of mitochondrial diversity (green) and the region anthropologists postulated the most ancient division in the human population began to occur (light brown). The ancient metropolis in located in this latter (brown) region which also corresponds to the estimated age when the genetic changes suddenly happened.

Could this be a coincidence?

Ancient Sumerian history describes the ancient metropolis and its inhabitants!I’ll be honest with you. This next part of the story is difficult to write. It’s so shocking that the average person will not want to believe it. If you are like me, you’ll want to do the research yourself, then allow some time for the facts to settle in your mind.

We are often made to believe that the Egyptians — the Pharoahs and pyramids — are where our known history begins. The oldest dynasties go back some 3200 years BP. That’s a long time ago. But the Sumerian civilization, in what is now Iraq, is much older. What’s more, we have translated many of their history tablets, written in cuneiform and earlier scripts so we know a lot about their history and legends.

The seal image [above] depicts the legend of the “Great Flood” which consumed mankind. Many Sumerian legends are strikingly similar to Genesis. Like Genesis, the Sumerian legend, Atrahasis, tells the story of the creation of modern humans — not by a loving God — but by beings from another planet who needed “slave workers” to help them mine gold on their extra-planetary expedition!

Read More:

http://www.viewzone.com/adamscalendar33.html

The tropical rainforest in the eastern lowlands of Ecuador assaults the senses: the sunlight dazzles the eyes, the heat is so fierce that within seconds one’s clothes are soaked in sweat. Then there are the sounds: a hypnotic symphony of frogs, crickets and other insects and birds which continues unabated day and night. There are sudden glimpses of the jungle’s abundant wildlife: a spectacular flash of a blue morpho butterfly at the river’s edge, a flock of green parakeets screeching.

This stunning region, which covers more than a third of Ecuador’s area, almost the size of England, and which is one of the world’s richest biospheres, with a huge diversity of animals and plants, some found nowhere else on Earth, faces a double threat: from the logging industry, which would strip it bare, and from the oil industry, which for nearly 40 years has been exploiting the huge resources of crude beneath the soil. Now, however, Ecuador is betting it can keep what is left of the oil in the ground and hang onto its biosphere into the bargain.

The South American country has learned the hard way that oil brings human misery and environmental devastation along with billions in export earnings. Every new oil field is an invasion that brings tens of thousands of outsiders into the forest’s heart, polluting the air, soil and water, destroying wildlife, and assaulting the support systems of indigenous tribes, which can lead to their extermination. And the damage is not confined to the immediate vicinity of the wells.

The Via Auca is the main highway cutting through the Ecuadorean Amazonia region, and it has been a lifeline of the oil industry for nearly 40 years, slicing through the countryside like a badly healed wound, the roadside lined with hellish flares, murky waste pits and corroded pipelines. Accidents involving the pipelines are frequent, and their consequences harrowing. On the far side of the town of Dayuma, which sprang up as an oil workers’ shantytown and is still riddled with crime and prostitution, one of the ageing pipelines has ruptured, sending a jet of oil shooting 30 metres into the air, staining the vegetation black all around.

The sickly stench of crude oil is overwhelming in the midday tropical heat. A house and a field across the road have also been soaked by the filthy gusher. Sebastian Ortiz, whose elderly father owns the simple wooden house by the roadside on the edge of the jungle, points out where the oil has drenched the field and seeped into the ground. Petrobel, one of many oil companies now operating in the region, has said it will pay his father US$5,000 (£3,000) towards the clean-up costs. But Ortiz says: “I don’t know when he will be paid, or even if it is still safe for him to carry on living here.”

Pollution is only one of the many ills that the oil business brings with it. Fernando Moreno, an anthropologist with the Ministry of the Environment, has been monitoring the oil industry’s effect on the local community for years. “The people have become beggars” he says. “They have become accustomed to demanding whatever they need and more from the oil companies, just because they are in the same territory. Weighing up the benefits and drawbacks of the oil companies, I think it would be better not to have them. They lead to many bad habits, they make people avaricious, they increase the differences between people – and they are a source of contamination: for the land, the water and the people themselves.”

For the last 16 years Ecuador has been embroiled in a bitter battle over a huge $27.3 billion environmental damages claim brought against US oil giant Chevron by 30,000 Amazonian inhabitants. The plaintiffs accuse Texaco (which Chevron acquired in 1993) of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest between 1964 and 1990, and claim that 1,400 deaths occurred in the region as a result of the contaminated soil and water, which brought unaccountably high levels of cancer, skin and breathing conditions. The Amazon Defence Coalition, which represents the plaintiffs, says the scale of the pollution makes it the biggest environmental disaster in the world, dwarfing the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and leading some experts to dub it “South America’s Chernobyl”. It is certainly shaping up to become the world’s biggest environmental lawsuit.

Chevron robustly refutes the allegations. It says Texaco spent US$40 million on a clean-up before it handed over operations to the state oil company in 1992. Ecuador’s government then signed a release freeing Chevron from any liability for subsequent damages from potential oil contamination.

Whatever the outcome of the legal battle Ecuador is now banking on a new idea to help it shed its poisonous dependency on oil. The Yasuni-ITT Initiative aims to keep the region’s remaining oil reserves untapped and underground, in return for financial compensation from the international community and carbon offsets from the carbon markets.

The crux of the scheme is simple: to keep the oil beneath the Yasuni National Park where it is, in perpetuity. Covering nearly 2.5 million acres of primary tropical rainforest, Yasuni is the ancestral territory of the Waorani people and two other tribes, the Tagaeri and the Taromenane. It was named a Unesco biosphere reserve in 1989, and scientists regard it one of the most biodiverse places on earth.

It is also the home of Ecuador’s largest oil reserve. But by not extracting the estimated 846 million barrels of oil in the reserve, Ecuador will keep an estimated 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, makinga big contribution to the fight against global warming.

It will also pledge to respect the territories of the indigenous cultures living in the national park, as well as protecting its flora and fauna. In return, the Ecuadorean Government has asked for compensation of $350 million a year for 10 years, which would be invested in environmental and social development programmes, helping the country move towards a sustainable economy.

After a slow start the plan has begun to attract serious promises of commitment. Amazon Watch, an organisation dedicated to protecting the rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants, calls it “a landmark proposal … a precedent-setting effort by an oil-exporting nation to preserve a global biodiversity hotspot, protect indigenous rights and set the stage for its own economic and energetic shift away from fossil fuels”.

Some big international players agree: Germany has offered $50 million on condition that other nations stump up similar sums. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, and Yolanda Kakabadse, a senior member of the Yasuni commission, have been in London and continental European capitals this week spreading the word. And in December Ecuador’s former chancellor Francisco Carrión, the Government’s envoy on the initiative, will present it at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Among Ecuadoreans themselves, the initiative is welcomed particularly by the flourishing tourist industry. With a spectacular range of natural attractions, from the Galapagos Islands to the snow-peaked Andes, Ecuador has long been a pioneer in ecotourism.

Fander Falconi the foreign minister and one of the founders of the initiative, says the scheme will work on the basis of shared responsibility, locally and globally. “What we are aiming for is global sustainability, but with a distinction drawn between those who harm the environment and those who suffer the consequences of this harm.”

Luz Coloma, Yasuni-ITT’s press officer, added, “Ecuador has had sad experiences with the exploitation of oil and no one wants any more environmental disasters like the Chevron-Texaco case.”

On the banks of the Shiripuno river, to the west of the Yasuni National Park, is the Huaorani Ecolodge run and owned by formerly nomadic hunters who only came into contact with the outside world 50 years ago. Omene Paa, a tour guide at the lodge, tells how oil has been a curse for his people from the time “the path-cutters” first arrived. The “petrolera” companies brought disease and contaminated the water, he claims. One of his cousins died of a lung infection. Now Omene says his people, who first fought off the US oilmen with axes, just want to be allowed to live in peace. “Our battle should continue; we the Huaorani must look after our territory.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/

The chemical – curcumin – has long been thought to have healing powers and is already being tested as a treatment for arthritis and even dementia.

Now tests by a team at the Cork Cancer Research Centre show it can destroy gullet cancer cells in the lab. Read the full story

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 29 (UPI) — U.S. scientists say they have confirmed the production of the superheavy element 114, 10 years aftera Russian group first claimed to have made it.

The researchers

at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, led by University of California-Berkeley Professor Heino Nitsche and and Berekely Lab senior staff scientist Ken Gregorich, independently confirmed the production of the new element, which was first published by the Dubna Gas Filled Recoil Separator group.

Using an instrument called the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator at Berkeley Lab’s 88-Inch Cyclotron, the researchers said they were able to confirm the creation of two individual nuclei of element 114, each a separate isotope having 114 protons, but a different numbers of neutrons, and each decaying by a separate pathway.

“By verifying the production of element 114, we have removed any doubts about the validity of the Dubna group’s claims,” Nitsche said. “This proves that the most interesting superheavy elements can in fact be made in the laboratory.”

The verification of element 114 is reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“People have been dreaming of superheavy elements since the 1960s,” Gregorich added. “But it’s unusual for important results like the Dubna group’s claim to have produced 114 to go unconfirmed for so long. Scientists were beginning to wonder if superheavy elements were real.”

© 2009 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/

2009-10-24

A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.

The moon seems to possess long, winding tunnels called lava tubes that are similar to structures seen on Earth. They are created when the top of a stream of molten rock solidifies and the lava inside drains away, leaving a hollow tube of rock. Read the full story

Although CNN has chosen to report this ‘discovery’ as something that has happened recently, the discovery of this pyramid is not recent news. According to this Wikipedia entry for El Mirador:

Discovery

El Mirador was first discovered in 1926, and was photographed from the air in 1930, but the remote site deep in the jungle had little more attention paid to it until Ian Graham spent some time there making the first map of the area in 1962.^{[citation needed]} A detailed investigation was begun in 1978 with an archaeological project under the direction of Dr. Bruce Dahlin (Catholic University of America) and Dr. Ray Matheny (Brigham Young University). Dahlin’s work focused primarily on the bajo swamps and mapping, while Matheny’s team focused primarily on excavations in the site center and architecture. This project ended in 1983. To the surprise of the archaeologists, it was found that a large amount of construction was not contemporary with the large Maya classic cities in the area, like Tikal and Uaxactun, but rather from centuries earlier in the Pre-Classic era^{[citation needed]} (see: Mesoamerican chronology). Read the full story