Paranormal Magazine

A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

[For the rest of this story go to telegraph.co.uk]

An “astonishing” black penguin suffering from a rare condition has been photographed by wildlife enthusiasts.

The penguin, believed to be suffering from a condition known as melanism, was spotted on Fortuna Bay, a sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, about 860 miles off the Falklands.

A group of travellers had travelled to the island to watch local wildlife and one of the group, Andrew Evans, took this picture of the penguin, one of several thousand.

“Observing this black penguin waddle across South Georgia’s black sand beach revealed no different behaviour than that of his fellow penguins. In fact, he seemed to mix well,” he wrote on a National Geographic blog.

“Regarding feeding and mating behaviour there is no real way to tell, but I do know that we were all fascinated by his presence and wished him the best for the coming winter season.”

Biology experts say that because black penguins are particularly rare there is very little research discussing the subject.

Melanism is however, common on other animal species such as squirrels.

It is estimated that about one in every 250,000 penguins shows evidence of the condition.

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology expert Dr Allan Baker, from the University of Toronto, said the Antarctic penguin was black because it had lost control of its pigmentation patterns.

After being shown the pictures by National Geographic, Dr Baker, also the head of the Department of Natural History at the Royal Ontario Museum, described them as “astonishing”.

“I’ve never ever seen that before,” he told the magazine.

“It’s a one in a zillion kind of mutation somewhere. The animal has lost control of its pigmentation patterns. Presumably it’s some kind of mutation.”

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the condition is the darkness in an animal’s skin, feathers, or fur is acquired by populations living in an industrial region where the environment is soot-darkened. It can be gene related

It does, however, mean that the probability that its members will survive and reproduce is enhance.

The condition evolves over the course of several generations.

But due to being lighter in colour, they become more conspicuous to predators.

[via: telegraph.co.uk by Andrew Hough]

Do alien life forms exist in a Californian lake? Could there be a shadow biosphere? One scientist is trying to find out

Mono Lake has a bizarre, extraterrestrial beauty. Just east of Yosemite National Park in California, the ancient lake covers about 65 square miles. Above its surface rise the twisted shapes of tufa, formed when freshwater springs bubble up through the alkaline waters.

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a geobiologist, is interested in the lake not for its scenery but because it may be harbouring alien life forms, or “weird life”. Mono Lake, a basin with no outlet, has built up over many millennia one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic on Earth. Dr Wolfe-Simon is investigating whether, in the mud around the lake or in the water, there exist microbes whose biological make-up is so fundamentally different from that of any known life on Earth that it may provide proof of a shadow biosphere, a second genesis for life on this planet.

Arsenic is chemically close to phosphorus. While phosphorus is a primary building block of life on Earth — an essential component of DNA and ATP, the energy molecule — arsenic is a deadly poison. In Mono Lake there are micro-organisms that live with arsenic. But they don’t incorporate it into their biology.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has theorised that there may be life that chose an “evolutionary pathway” to utilise arsenic. If such microbes existed, it could suggest that life started on our planet not once but at least twice. In turn this would help to support the idea that life is much more likely to have started elsewhere in the galaxy.

“There is life ‘as we know it’ and there is life ‘as we don’t know it’. What would that look like? I am trying to give us a framework to work with to help us look for what ‘we don’t know’, the particular framework of arsenic,” she says.

Dr Wolfe-Simon has taken samples from the mud and the waters of the lake and is performing a series of multiple dilutions — hugely increasing the levels of arsenic and reducing residual phosphorous to zero. She adds sugar, vitamins and other nutrients to encourage organisms to grow and tests the results.

Her experiments are not yet over but she is quietly pleased with the progress she is making. “We have some very exciting data,” she says. The results should be published by the end of this year.

She points out that Mono Lake arsenic life, if found, may only go as far as proving the extreme adaptability of life on Earth billions of years ago. It is generally agreed that on early Earth the chemical soup was very different because of the material being thrown out of the planet’s depths by volcanoes and hydrothermal vents and the lack of biologically derived oxygen. If arsenic was around in far greater concentrations then, perhaps “arsenolife”, as she calls it, in Mono Lake is evidence of that ancestral life, a finding that would deepen our understanding of how life on Earth got started.

But she hopes that her research may help scientists to reconsider what alien or “weird” life might look like: “It may prove that there are other possibilities that are beyond our imagination. It opens the door for us to think about biology in ways we have never thought. We are going to look for life on other planets and we only know to look for that which we know. This may help us to develop tools to look for something we have never seen.”

Her work is funded by the Nasa Astrobiology Institute and she is based at the laboratories of Professor Ron Oremland, of the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. Does she believe that there are alien life forms out there? “I don’t know how there could not be extraterrestrial life,” she replies.

[via: timesonline.co.uk]

The ultimate in big boys’ toys – a hovercraft that flies – has been put up for sale on an internet auction website by its New Zealand inventor.

Rudy Heeman, who lives in the South Island city of Nelson, requisitioned a gas bottle from the family barbecue, parts from his wife’s car, and the control lever from his daughter’s motor scooter for his creation.

Looking like a conventional hovercraft but with the addition of detachable wings, the vehicle cruises at 56mph when flying, has a range of more than 140 miles, and reaches a height of about 10 feet.

It is powered by a 1.8-litre engine.

On the www.trademe.co.nz auction website the sale has already received more than 100,000 hits, has shot past the reserve price of NZ$20,000 (£9,300), and has attracted a long string of questions from viewers.

Mr Heeman, who has been building hovercrafts as a hobby in his back yard for more than 13 years, said this is his first flying model.

He says on the website: “It has been called all sorts of things, including aircraft, aeroplane, hovercraft and flying boat.

“It is in fact a WIG [a wing in ground effect] in the form of a hovercraft

“This machine is fast and furious, it roars like a lion and is not for the faint-hearted. It is adrenalin-pumping and exciting.

“Having a go on it is like a bungee jump, however, the thrill lasts as long as the ride.”

Mr Heeman said he thought farmers could make good use of his invention.

“You can land in a paddock and you wouldn’t have to worry about opening and closing the gates. You just go over them.”

The lightweight, canvas-covered wings are attached to the craft with what he calls a “Jesus pin”.

“If that comes out, you see Jesus,” he said.

Because the hovercraft is not classed as an aircraft under New Zealand aviation laws, the operator does not require a pilot’s licence.

It has taken Mr Heeman, a mechanic, 800 hours to build his invention and he has clocked up more than 75 hours’ flying time in it.

He said he was selling the craft because he needs the funds to get started on more “secret projects”.

[via: telegraph.co.uk]

The BBC reported a few weeks back that on a street in Windermere, motorists car remote controls stopped working for some unexplained reason.

What was dubbed the ‘Windermere Triangle’, car key fobs were mysteriously disabled and alarms would go off for no apparent reason.

Some locals looking to science blaming a new set of traffic lights, while others claimed a ghost called Albert said to haunt the nearby bakery was responsible for the electronic shenanigans.

But now, the mystery has been solved with all interference being caused by a hand-held ordering gadget at a local tea shop, Lazy Daisy’s Lakeland Kitchen.

Field engineer Dave Thornber who quickly traced the problem to Lazy Daisy’s said: ‘The source of the interference was a wireless order-taker used by waiting staff in the restaurant.

‘The device is designed to use airwaves that neighbour those used by wireless car keys.’

The culprit gadgets have now been switched frequency and the ghostly gadgetry interference is no more.

For the original BBC report CLICK HERE.

Scientists have detected more than 40 ice-filled craters in the Moon’s North Pole using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I.

NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 2 to 15 km in diameter.

The finding would give future missions a new target to further explore and exploit, a NASA statement said, adding it is estimated that there could be at least 600 million metric tons of water ice in the craters.

“The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the Moon,” Paul Spudis, principal investigator of the Mini-SAR experiment at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, said yesterday.

The new discoveries show that the Moon is an even more interesting and attractive scientific, exploration and operational destination than previously thought, he said.

Aboard Chandrayaan-I, the Mini-SAR mapped the Moon’s permanently-shadowed polar craters that are not visible from the earth. The radar uses the polarisation properties of reflected radio waves to characterise surface properties.

According to the findings which are being published in the latest issue of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, results from the mapping showed deposits having radar characteristics similar to ice.

“After analysing the data, our science team determined a strong indication of water ice, a finding which will give future missions a new target to further explore and exploit,” Jason Crusan, program executive for the Mini-RF Program for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said.

The space agency said these results are consistent with recent findings of other NASA instruments and adds to growing scientific understanding of the multiple forms of water found on the Moon.

The agency’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper discovered water molecules in the Moon’s polar regions, while water vapour was detected by NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.

Mini-SAR and Moon Mineralogy Mapper are two of 11 instruments on India’s first unmanned mission to the Moon — Chandrayaan-I.

[via: discoveryon.info]

A humble wasp learned how to use sophisticated antibiotics millions of years before the invention of penicillin, research has shown.

Digger wasps of the family Philanthus, also known as “beewolves”, harness beneficial bacteria to manufacture a cocktail of drugs that protect its larvae from infection.

Scientists who made the discovery believe it could assist the development of new agents to combat human “superbugs”.

The era of antibiotics began in 1928 when Alexander Fleming spotted how penicillin produced by green mould killed bacteria.

But long before, Philanthus wasps were coating their cocoons with antibiotics to fight off harmful microbes.

The insects not only evolved a method of manufacturing antibiotics, they used them in a highly effective way, said the scientists writing in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Just as human experts have learned to do, the wasps combine different drugs that work together to destroy many different organisms.

[via: dailymail.co.uk]

Funeral home workers in the Colombian city of Cali got the shock of a lifetime when an apparently dead 45-year-old woman suddenly started breathing and moving as they prepared her for burial, AFP reported Wednesday.

Local media said the woman had been declared clinically dead at a medical facility Tuesday after having been hospitalized in serious condition with a neurological condition a day earlier.

“The instruments the patient was connected to gave no blood pressure or heart rate readings,” said Miguel Angel Saavedra, a doctor at the clinic where the woman was treated.

Medical staff at the facility signed the women’s death certificate and her body was transferred to a funeral home to be prepared for burial.

But, in a case of what physicians call “Lazarus Syndrome,” the woman was not actually dead.

“When they were going to apply formaldehyde, the patient began to breathe again and make movements,” Saavedra told a local news station.

The woman, whose name has not been released, was readmitted to hospital and was in a coma, doctors said.

[via: foxnews.com]

More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, the name “Unit 731″ still has the power to generate shock, revulsion and denial in Japan.

The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews.

The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.

Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit.

A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.

The bones are thought to be from up to 100 people and were discovered in a mass grave in 1989 during construction work.

They bore the marks of saws and some of the skulls had drill holes and portions of the bone cut out. But the issue is so controversial in Japan that they have since been stored in a repository.

Acting on information from a former nurse, the authorities have announced they will re-examine the remains to determine whether they were used in some of the barbaric experiments carried out by Unit 731 in the dying days of the Second World War.

Toyo Ishii came forward to say that during the weeks after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, she and her colleagues at the army hospital were ordered to bury corpses, bones and body parts – she said it was impossible to determine how many people they came from – before the Allies arrived.

In an interview, she claimed that the hospital had three mortuaries where bodies with numbered tags around their necks were stored in a pool of formalin to preserve them before they were dissected. Organs and other body parts were preserved in glass jars. The sites that Ishii pinpointed as the mass graves will now be excavated.

The remains were found on the site of an apartment complex in the Shinjuku district of the city which is scheduled for redevelopment. It means the search is likely to be the last effort to identify the victims and determine their fate.

An investigation after the remains were found in 1989 concluded they were mostly non-Japanese Asians and had probably been used in “medial education” or taken to the medical school from battlefields overseas for analysis. The health ministry has repeatedly denied requests from relatives of several Chinese whose relatives are believed to have died in Unit 731 experiments to have DNA tests carried out on the bones.

Unit 731 was mostly active in China, where it carried out biological, bacteriological and chemical weapons tests on civilians and prisoners of war, including Russian soldiers and Americans.

Others were subject to live vivisections, exposed to extreme cold or killed in tests in pressure chambers.

The extreme right wing in Japan refuses to accept that the unit was anything more than a sanitation team that operated behind the front-line troops while virtually nothing on its activities is mentioned in school history books. Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 went on to have careers in politics, academia, business, and medicine.

“Most people do not believe it even happened; the rest just want to cover it up and forget about what Japan did during the war,” said Tsuyoshi Amemiya, a retired military historian. “Young people don’t know and they don’t want to know.”

[via: telegraph.co.uk by Julian Ryall]

After nine years of searching, detectors buried 2,000ft underground in an old US iron mine registered two “hits” by what could turn out to be dark matter particles.

Both bear the hallmarks of “weakly interacting massive particles” or “Wimps”, one of the most likely dark matter candidates.

But frustratingly, two detections are not quite enough to clinch the discovery.

There is still a one in four chance that the results, published by the journal Science, are due to accidental background “noise”.

The scientists say five detections would be sufficient to confirm the presence of Wimps.

Physicists came up with the theory of dark matter to explain strange anomalies in the rotational speed and clustering of galaxies.

The total mass of all the stars, dust and gas in the galaxy clusters was five times too little to account for the gravitational effects observed.

Scientists were forced to conclude that some other missing material was present, described as “dark” because it was invisible and neither reflected nor absorbed light.

Dark matter is now estimated to make up as much as 23 per cent of the cosmos.

It is believed to play a central role in the evolution of galaxies and large scale structure of the universe.

Without dark matter, galaxies would not group together to form clusters and superclusters. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, belongs to a cluster known as the “Local Group”.

No-one knows what dark matter is, but particle physics points to the likelihood of them being Wimps.

Wimp particles are dubbed “weakly interacting” because despite having mass they have little or no effect on ordinary matter.

This makes them extremely difficult to detect. But scientists believe it should be possible to “catch” Wimps by looking for small amounts of energy released when they randomly bounce off ordinary atoms.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) observatory, located nearly half a mile underground in the disused Soudan iron mine in Minnesota, is designed to do just that.

At its heart are 30 germanium and silicon detectors frozen to minus 273.1C – less than a degree above “absolute zero”, theoretically the coldest temperature in the universe.

Unlike other particles, weakly interacting Wimps would be able to pass straight through the thick layers of earth and rock to reach the detectors.

Dr Tarek Saab, from the University of Florida at Gainesville, US, one of dozens of physicists working on CDMS II, said: “Many people believe we are extremely close – not just us, but other experiments.

It is expected or certainly hoped that in the next five years or so, someone will see a clear signal.”

But he acknowledged the current evidence was not quite strong enough.

“With one or two events, it’s tough,” he said. “The numbers are too small.”

[via: telegraph.co.uk]

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