kisma Johnson's blog: "Millions Share Paranormal Beliefs"

From the Boston Globe After she died in 1824 at the age of 30, Sarah Symonds rested in an out-of-the-way cemetery in the small town of Hillsborough, N.H., for nearly 200 years. But sometime around Halloween her sleep was disturbed. Someone dug up her coffin and her remains, leaving behind only a few shards of wood, a meticulously dug hole -- and a mystery for the local police. "It was dug in a very strange manner. It's perfect," said Hillsborough Police Chief Brian Brown. "You'd have to see it. The sides are all squared. The bottom's level." "We just don't have any answers right now," he said. Brown said the grave robbers had hit the Bible Hill Cemetery sometime between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. He said police were considering a number of possible theories in the case, including the possibility that the body was dug up by members of a satanic cult. Gilman Shattuck, 80, a resident who is active in the local historical society, said he had researched Symonds since the incident had hit the news and learned she was born on March 29, 1794. Her headstone listed June 18, 1824 as her date of death. She was never married. He said the small cemetery was in an isolated area of town with a stone wall around it and with probably 40 graves in it. The oldest grave goes back to the late 18th century. Most are from the first or second decade of the 19th century, and a few are from the late 19th century. Chief Brown said grave robbers simply looking for valuables or a body wouldn't have had any reason to dig so neatly and would likely try to fill up the grave to avoid detection. "You're not going to waste time to square the corners," he said. "Why leave it open? Why dig it so meticulously?

A physicist and his biologist son destroyed a common virus using a superfast pulsing laser, without harming healthy cells. The discovery could lead to new treatments for viruses like HIV that have no cure. "We have demonstrated a technique of using a laser to excite vibrations on the shield of a virus and damage it, so that it's no longer functional," said Kong-Thon Tsen, a professor of physics at Arizona State University. "We're testing it on HIV and hepatitis right now." Tsen and his son Shaw-Wei Tsen, a pathology student at Johns Hopkins University, came up with the idea while strolling in the park and discussing the need for antiviral treatments that go beyond vaccinations. Tsen senior has long experimented with ultrashort-pulse lasers (USPs), devices increasingly used outside of physics. Raydiance, a USP laser manufacturer, signed a deal with the FDA in July to explore laser therapies. As Wired News reported earlier this year, an FDA official estimated there could be a hundred medical uses for USP lasers, from common laser eye treatments to cell-by-cell tumor ablation. In the latest research, Tsen and his son demonstrated that their laser technique could shatter the protein shell, or capsid, of the tobacco mosaic virus, leaving behind only a harmless mucus-like mash of molecules. The laser shattered the capsid at low energy: 40 times lower, in fact, than the energy level that harmed human T-cells. Other types of radiation, like ultraviolet light, kill microbes on produce, but would damage human cells. The virus-deactivating laser works on a principle called forced resonance. The scientists tune the laser to the same frequency the virus vibrates on. Then they crank up the volume. Like a high-pitched sound shattering glass, the laser vibrates the virus until it breaks. The USP laser releases energy in femtosecond pulses -- one millionth of a nanosecond -- at a time. "The extreme brevity of these pulses is creating a physical effect that traditional lasers and other types of non-laser approaches can't do," said Scott Davison, president of the venture-backed USP laser company, Raydiance.

A mystery creature washed up on Orkney almost 200 years ago was "strikingly similar" to descriptions of Nessie, the Highlands Science Festival will hear. Geneticist Dr Yvonne Simpson, who hails from Orkney, has researched the Stronsay Beast. Its carcass, which some said was that of a basking shark, was found off Stronsay in 1808. Dr Simpson said the descriptions of its long neck were along the lines of those of the Loch Ness Monster. She will give a joint talk with Loch Ness expert Adrian Shine during the science festival, which opened on Saturday. The Stronsay Beast was first sighted on 25 September 1808 on rocks at Rothiesholm Head, on the south-east of the island, by a local fisherman. Various others saw the carcass and fragments of it are preserved at the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. I felt this was an Orkney tale which had been forgotten, and which I wanted to uncover Dr Yvonne Simpson Some people suggested it was a basking shark or a large unidentified shark. Orcadian Dr Simpson, who has a degree in evolutionary, environmental and biomedical genetics from the University of St Andrews and a PhD in the field of DNA damage repair from Edinburgh's pathology department, is fascinated by the stories. Of her research comparing the two "monsters", she said: "Based on an analysis of eye-witness descriptions, Nessie and the Stronsay Beast are both massive aquatic creatures. MYSTERY MONSTERS The oldest sighting of the Loch Ness Monster dates back to AD565 when St Columba was said to have seen a large monster in the River Ness The term Nessie was created by a journalist after the first modern sighting in 1933 The Stronsay Beast measured (16 metres) 55ft "The drawings of the Stronsay Beast carcass are strikingly similar in shape and size to the popular image of Nessie." During her studies of the Orkney creature, Dr Simpson was impressed by the wealth of eye witness accounts and sworn testimonies given to justices of the peace. She said: "Most of the original remains have been lost, the skull and 'paw' had been sent down to London in the 19th Century and were destroyed in the Blitz, so the only surviving parts that I could locate were in a storage at Edinburgh's Royal Museum. "As a biologist I was intrigued by the rare opportunity to examine remains first-hand, but also as it is from Stronsay, and I grew up on another Orkney island, I felt this was an Orkney tale which had been forgotten, and which I wanted to uncover." The festival runs until 17 November at venues in Inverness-shire, Dingwall and Applecross.

In January 1979, The New York Times reported that despite repeated, feverish denials, the CIA had indeed investigated the UFO phenomenon: "CIA Papers Detail UFO Surveillance" screamed the headline. The report is said to have so upset the then CIA director, Stansfield Turner, that he reportedly asked his staff: "Are we in UFOs?" The answer was yes - since the late 1940s, apparently. But exactly how, what, when, why and who remained layered in mystery, leaving grist for the conspiracy mill. But this year a raft of newly unclassified CIA documents revealed that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack. More interesting still, the CIA documents show that despite decades of repeated public denials, behind the scenes there raged a series of inter-agency feuds that involved the highest levels of the US government. The subject of UFOs - and dabbling in psychological warfare techniques - not only focused the attention of the US government elite for 50 years, but of some of the greatest scientific and military minds of the era. Throughout the 1950s CIA files clearly document an explosion of activity by US intelligence and military bodies concerned with studying every possible implication for the US, and other Western democracies, of UFOs. The phenomenon, so adored by the cinematic world, was reflected in the CIA's fixations. Indeed, while highly educated CIA employees experimented by giving each other surprise LSD trips in 1953, there were others, in other parts of the agency, dealing with a flood of UFO reports. But significantly, after a burst of intense scrutiny in the early '50s, the available documents effectively go cold. Why? The Kafkaesque explanation provided is that few files were kept because these would only confirm that the CIA was investigating UFOs. A 1995 CIA review stated: "There was no formal or official UFO project within the agency in the '80s, and agency officials purposely kept files on UFOs to a minimum to avoid creating records that might mislead the public if released.

Sam Willey: I received quite an interesting email on October 28th 2007 by someone in the United Kingdom by the name of Gordon Dungavel who reported an interesting UFO event which he along with his wife witnessed back in May of 2006 whilst out on a walk. Along with a report Mr. Dungavel also sent along a large array of photographs of the strange umbrella like object speeding through the blustery skies of Bedford, England. Here is the initial email i received in October 2007: "I thought you may find the following of interest. Last May my wife and I took a walk to a country pub in Cardington, Bedford. I had my digital camera with me and was taking pictures of my her larking about in the bright yellow reap seed fields. On our return home at the top of Harringdon Road I noticed a small blue object hurtling through the sky towards us. I have had over thirty years experience of sky watching and a keen interest in the UFO phenomenon. I have seen and taken photo's before of strange objects. This umberella shaped object we could plainly see was not a balloon, kite, microlight, plane, helecopter, bin bag nor anything else I could think of. It was flying steadly into the wind not diverting in any way from it's course. It was small I would estimate between 5-10 feet in size, blue in colour with a projection hanging down from it's base with a silver ball on the end. I took over a dozen photos. I have attatched a few enlargments with this post. Maybe you could explain to me what this object could have been as I am perplexed. Also in a couple of the enlarged photo's a second unidentified object is present not seen at the time." After receiving the report and amazing photographs i was full of questions and wanted more information which Mr. Dungavel kindly and promtly provided with a response the very next day: "I would say this object was about 150 ft in altitude coming towards, over and away from us. Same level and speed not diverting in course despite it being rather blustery."

For almost 75 years, astronomers have believed that the Universe has a large amount of unseen or ‘dark’ matter, thought to make up about five-sixths of the matter in the cosmos. With the conventional theory of gravitation, based on Newton’s ideas and refined by Einstein 92 years ago, dark matter helps to explain the motion of galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, on the largest scales. Now two Canadian researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics suggest that the motion of galaxies in a distant cluster is more easily explained by a Modified Gravity (MOG) theory than by the presence of dark matter. Graduate student Joel Brownstein and his supervisor Professor John Moffat of the University of Waterloo present their results in a paper in the 21 November edition of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The two scientists analysed images of the ‘Bullet Cluster’ of galaxies made using the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray and Spitzer infrared observatories and the Magellan telescope in Chile. The Bullet Cluster consists of two merging clusters of galaxies and lies at a distance of over 3 billion light years in the direction of the southern constellation of Carina. This arsenal of instrumentation gave them maps of the 150 million degree hot gas between the galaxies and show the effect of gravitational lensing, where the gravity of an intervening object – here the Bullet Cluster - deflects the path of light emitted by a more distant galaxy. Previous studies suggested that the Bullet Cluster clearly demonstrates the presence of dark matter. But when Brownstein and Moffat compared the observed gravitational lensing and distribution of gas with that predicted using MOG theory, they found no evidence for this. In other words, it is more natural to explain the appearance of this cluster using a revised theory of gravitation than by including dark matter. MOG theory emerges from a generalization of relativity that eluded even Einstein, has been developed by Moffat for nearly thirty years and is now yielding astronomical and cosmological results.

British marine biologists have found what may be the oldest living animal — that is, until they killed it. The team from Bangor University in Wales was dredging the waters north of Iceland as part of routine research when the unfortunate specimen, belonging to the clam species Arctica islandica, commonly known as the ocean quahog, was hauled up from waters 250 feet deep. Only after researchers cut through its shell, which made it more of an ex-clam, and counted its growth rings did they realize how old it had been — between 405 and 410 years old. Another clam of the same species had been verified at 220 years old, and a third may have lived 374 years. But this most recent clam was the oldest yet. "Its death is an unfortunate aspect of this work, but we hope to derive lots of information from it," postdoctoral scientist Al Wanamaker told London's Guardian newspaper. "For our work, it's a bonus, but it wasn't good for this particular animal."

Two Canadian astronomers think there is a good reason dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to make up the bulk of matter in the universe, has never been directly detected: It doesn't exist. Dark matter was invoked to explain how galaxies stick together. The visible matter alone in galaxies—stars, gas and dust—is nowhere near enough to hold them together, so scientists reasoned there must be something invisible that exerts gravity and is central to all galaxies. Last August, an astronomer at the University of Arizona at Tucson and his colleagues reported that a collision between two huge clusters of galaxies 3 billion light-years away, known as the Bullet Cluster, had caused clouds of dark matter to separate from normal matter. Many scientists said the observations were proof of dark matter's existence and a serious blow for alternative explanations aiming to do away with dark matter with modified theories of gravity. Now John Moffat, an astronomer at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and Joel Brownstein, his graduate student, say those announcements were premature. In a study detailed in the Nov. 21 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the pair says their Modified Gravity (MOG) theory can explain the Bullet Cluster observation. MOG differs from other modified gravity theories in its details, but is similar in that it predict that the force of gravity changes with distance. "MOG gravity is stronger if you go out from the center of the galaxy than it is in Newtonian gravity," Moffat explained. "The stronger gravity mimics what dark matter does. With dark matter, you take Einstein and Newtonian gravity and you shovel in more dark matter. If there's more matter, you get more gravity. Whereas for me, I say dark matter doesn't exist. It's the gravity that's changed." Using images of the Bullet Cluster made by the Hubble, Chandra X-ray and Spitzer space telescopes and the Magellan telescope in Chile, the scientists analyzed the way the cluster's gravity bent light from a background galaxy—an effect known as gravity lensing. The pair concluded that dark matter was not necessary to explain the results. "Using Modified Gravity theory, the 'normal' matter in the Bullet Cluster is enough to account for the observed gravitational lensing effect," Brownstein said. "Continuing the search for and then analyzing other merging clusters of galaxies will help us decide whether dark matter or MOG theory offers the best explanation for the large scale structure of the universe." Moffat compares the modern interest with dark matter to the insistence by scientists in the early 20th century on the existence of a "luminiferous ether," a hypothetical substance thought to fill the universe and through which light waves were thought to propagate. "They saw a glimpse of special relativity, but they weren't willing to give up the ether," Moffat told SPACE.com. "Then Einstein came along and said we don't need the ether. The rest was history." Douglas Clowe, the lead astronomer of the team that linked the Bullet Cluster observations with dark matter (and now at Ohio University), says he still stands by his original claim. For him and many other astronomers, conjuring up new particles that might account for dark matter is more palatable than turning a fundamental theory of how the univese works on its head. "As far as we're concerned, [Moffat] hasn't done anything that makes us retract our earlier statement that the Bullet Cluster shows us that we have to have dark matter," Clowe said. "We're still open to modifying gravity to reduce the amount of dark matter, but we're pretty sure that you have to have most of the mass of the universe still in some form of dark matter."

Intellectual Question Here's a riddle for the true intellectuals amongst you. Try to come up with the answer on your own. The answer is in my online status for those who are unable to think this one through. At the exact same time, there are two 35-year-old men on opposite sides of the earth: One is walking a tight rope between two skyscrapers. The other is getting "oral pleasure" from an 85-year-old toothless woman. They are both thinking the exact same thing. What are they both thinking?

You've probably never used a blimp cam, but when you're a ghost hunter like Vince Wilson, you need to improvise with technology tools. Wilson, a well-known paranormal investigator, built the blimp cam in 2005 using a digital video camera, four large Mylar balloons and a number of propellers for an investigation at a well-known ghost hunting site: the Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott City, Md. This former school is long rumored to be haunted by a young girl who reportedly died from pneumonia during her first year there, after having been forced to attend. Many of the alleged ghost sightings involved a small girl sitting in a second-floor window, Wilson says. One problem: The building had been gutted and there was little or no structure inside, let alone a second floor. So he built the blimp cam and floated it up to the window. Wilson's blimp cam : "We never got anything really cool [at Patapsco] as far as ghosts and haunting is concerned," Wilson says. "But I still think the blimp cam is a very valuable device for us to have for future investigations." That's just another day at work for Wilson, who has authored two books, Ghost Science: The Essential Guide to the Scientific Study of Ghosts and Hauntings and Ghost Tech: The Essential Guide to Paranormal Investigation Equipment. Along with Loyd Auerbach, Wilson is considered one of the world's best-known paranormal investigators. In layman's terms, they're ghost hunters. Spook spotters. They evaluate people who claim to have extra sensory perception (ESP), who think they can propel objects, or heal illnesses via "mind/matter interactions," among other tasks. Vince Wilson This time of year, it's hard to resist peeking into their technology toolboxes.