Paranormal Magazine

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien “sentient machines”.

Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.

But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio technology and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.

Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says that the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than “biological” life.

Read on at news.bbc.co.uk.

A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.

Ron Sveden had been battling emphysema for months when his condition deteriorated.

He was steeling himself for a cancer diagnosis when X-rays revealed the growth in his lung.

Doctors believe that Mr Sveden ate the pea at some point, but it “went down the wrong way” and sprouted.

“One of the first meals I had in the hospital after the surgery had peas for the vegetable. I laughed to myself and ate them,” Mr Sveden told a local Boston TV reporter.

Mr Sveden said the plant was about half an inch (1.25cm) in size.

“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the Jolly Green Giant, I don’t know. I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn’t the cancer,” Mr Sveden said.

He is currently recovering at home with his wife Nancy, who joked that God must have a sense of humour.

[via: news.bbc.co.uk]

Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is still poisoning Germany’s boars nearly 25 years on, with authorities fighting to keep toxic meat off the market as the wild boar population rockets.

The boars feed off mushrooms, truffles and wild berries which still contain high levels of caesium-137, carried in the radioactive cloud that spread across Europe following the 1986 accident at the Ukrainian nuclear plant.

“In some regions, especially in the south, the radioactivity found in boars is 10 times higher than normal,” Florian Emrich, spokesman for the Federal Agency for the Protection Against Radioactivity, said on Saturday.

A sharp increase in wild boar numbers has meant more boar meat — prized as a delicacy in Germany on a par with venison — is ending up on diners’ plates, raising concerns for human health.

“No one has fallen seriously ill after eating boar meat,” said Emrich, but all boar hunters in high-risk areas must have their game tested for radioactive contamination before it can go on sale on market stalls.

Berlin — which pays out compensation if boar meat has to be withdrawn from the market — shelled out 424,650 euros (565,000 dollars) last year to hunters and hunting associations, up from 240,000 euros in 2006.

According to the Bavarian health and food safety, nine of the 56 boars analysed last year showed contamination well above the allowed level of 600 becquerels per kilogram of meat, with some as much as twice the limit.

Wild mushrooms are especially prone to accumulating radioactivity because the toxic substances are recycled over and over in the forest humus, unlike on farmland where they are broken down by labouring and minerals in the soil.

In southern Bavaria, some porcini and girolles mushrooms contained caesium levels of several hundred becquerels per kilo last year, while blueberries and cranberries contained up to 100 becquerels, official figures show.

[via]

Ron Halliday has spent the last 30 years of his life trying to explain the unexplained. The author, whose books include UFO Scotland and Edinburgh After Dark, believes Scotland is now a haven of UFO activity.

In an exclusive interview with STV, Ron – a 60-year-old retired assistant registrar at Stirling University – said: “I think Scotland is like a world hot spot. All the UFO sightings. All the ghost sightings. All the monster sightings. Poltergeists.

“There is just so much that goes on in Scotland, it is absolutely incredible. It is very hard to explain why Scotland has all these reported incidents.”

Ron became interested in UFOs from a young age and started to research it seriously when he was 30. But what is it about the unexplained which interests him and millions of others around the world?

“The whole mystery of it. People claim all these strange experiences which are at odds with our everyday reality. You don’t walk down the street and expect to see an alien. The whole thing just seems completely bizarre.

“Things like Independence Day and The X-Files have stimulated people’s interest in the whole subject. It the media show interest in UFOs then it definitely generates more UFO reports because people come forward and say they have seen things.

“There are so many people taking photos these days, but there is also greater scepticism. It is very easy to fabricate a UFO picture. The thing that people interested in UFOs find hard to accept is why aliens don’t just land in George Square in Glasgow so TV crews can come and film them?

“I am sceptical too. But when you speak to people who have had these experiences, get their perspective on the thing – there is no particular reason why they would make this up.”

Read on at news.stv.tv for a run down of Halliday’s top ten paranormal happenings in Scotland.

A “grid of streets” on the seabed at one of the proposed locations of the lost city of Atlantis has been spotted on Google Ocean.

Painted walls believed to be 5,000 years old have been found at a Neolithic excavation in Orkney.

The coloured stonework has been uncovered at the Ness of Brodgar, in the heart of the area’s World Heritage Site.

Several coloured stones have been discovered, and it is thought the find is the first of its kind in the UK.

Archaeologists believe iron ore could have been mixed with animal fat, eggs or milk to create a primitive paint.

[via: bbc.co.uk]

This is the extraordinary place where we all live – the Universe.

The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe’s Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.

It took the 600m-euro observatory just over six months to assemble the map.

It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths – much longer than what we can sense with our eyes.

Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now.

“It’s a spectacular picture; it’s a thing of beauty,” Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency’s (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.

Dominating the foreground are large segments of our Milky Way Galaxy.

The bright horizontal line running the full length of the image is the galaxy’s main disc – the plane in which the Sun and the Earth also reside.

[Read on at news.bbc.co.uk]

New photos of the moon have revealed the most detailed views yet of a rare hole in the lunar surface — a pit large enough to swallow an entire football field whole.

High-resolution cameras aboard the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft first spotted the irregularly shaped chasm, located in Mare Ingenii on the moon’s southern hemisphere. Now, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken a new, up-close photo of the moon pit from lunar orbit.

“Only three have been discovered thus far, so I believe it is safe to state that skylights (pits) are rare at the 100-meter scale,” Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) at Arizona State University, told SPACE.com in an e-mail.

Mare Ingenii, also called the “sea of cleverness,” is best known for its prominent lunar swirls, which are highly reflective surface features that are associated with magnetic anomalies. The new images of the region from LROC show a giant pit measuring about 427 feet (130 meters) in diameter.

The boulders and debris resting on the floor of the cavity are partially illuminated and likely originated at the surface, falling through the pit opening during its collapse. The hole is thought to be the result of a partially collapsed lava tube.

A similar moon pit, which was believed to be a skylight into a lava tube, was previously discovered by the Kaguya mission in the Marius Hills region of the moon. The new pit in Mare Ingenii, however, lacks the numerous volcanic features that were found in the Marius Hills region.

“The existence of lava tubes and thus skylights had long been postulated,” Robinson said. “However it is a surprise to me how large and beautifully preserved are the three that we have seen thus far.”

Closer examination of Mare Ingenii could help scientists understand the differences between the two areas of the lunar surface, and such discoveries could also spur on further exploration of the moon, said Robinson.

“Imagine how fantastic it would be to land in one of these skylights and explore underground on the moon!” he said.

[via: space.com]

THOUSANDS of pilgrims have overwhelmed a small church in Argentina after blood was said to be oozing down the face of an image of Jesus Christ.

A red substance was photographed running from the forehead of Jesus and down his cheek in a church depiction of the Last Supper.

Local priest Father Jorge Gandur said the ‘ooze comes from one of the wounds on the left side of the forehead of Christ produced by the crown of thorns’.

The stains were first noticed on Friday by two men who had entered the Oratory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Yerba Buena, Tucuman province.

The pair reported the substance to Father Gandur, who took samples of the substance to be scientifically tested to see if it was human blood.

After local media were tipped off that the men had seen Christ weeping ‘tears of blood’ the streets surrounding the church became jammed pilgrims wanting to see the phenomenon for themselves.

Hundreds of people were reported to be crying and praying fervently in at least two streets leading up to the church.

[via: dailytelegraph.com.au]

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