A Never Ending Search for the Center
Today's headlines say that the Israeli troups are gathering at the Lebanon border to start a ground offensive. They are the best army in the world.
Oy.
History in the making.
Here are a couple of news stories I found quite interesting.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5192410.stm
Ancient humans 'followed rains'
By Helen Briggs Science reporter, BBC News
The Eastern Sahara covers an area the size of Western Europe
Prehistoric humans roamed the world's largest desert for some 5,000 years, archaeologists have revealed.
The Eastern Sahara of Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Chad was home to nomadic people who followed rains that turned the desert into grassland.
When the landscape dried up about 7,000 years ago, there was a mass exodus to the Nile and other parts of Africa.
The close link between human settlement and climate has lessons for today, researchers report in Science.
"Even modern day conflicts such as Dafur are caused by environmental degradation as it has been in the past," Dr Stefan Kropelin of the University of Cologne, Germany, told the BBC News website.
"The basic struggle for food, water and pasture is still a big problem in the Sahara zone. This process started thousands of years ago and has a long tradition."
Jigsaw puzzle
The Eastern Sahara, which covers more than 2 million sq km, an area the size of Western Europe, is now almost uninhabited by people or animals, providing a unique window into the past.
The settlers left their mark with art
Dr Kropelin and colleague Dr Rudolph Kuper pieced together the 10,000-year jigsaw of human migration and settlement; studying more than 100 archaeological sites over the course of 30 years.
In the largest study of its kind, they built up a detailed picture of human evolution in the world's largest desert. They found that far from the inhospitable climate of today, the area was once semi-humid.
Between about 14,000 and 13,000 years ago, the area was very dry. But a drastic switch in environmental conditions some 10,500 years ago brought rain and monsoon-like conditions.
Nomadic human settlers moved in from the south, taking up residence beside rivers and lakes.
They were hunter-gatherers at first, living off plants and wild game.
Eventually they became more settled, domesticating cattle for the first time, and making intricate pottery.
Neolithic farmers
Humid conditions prevailed until about 6,000 years ago, when the Sahara abruptly dried out. There was then a gradual exodus of people to the Nile Valley and other parts of the African continent.
"The Nile Valley was almost devoid of settlement until about exactly the time that the Egyptian Sahara was so dry people could not live there anymore," Dr Kropelin told the BBC News website.
"People preferred to live on savannah land. Only when this wasn't possible they migrated towards southern Sudan and the Nile.
"They brought all their know-how to the rest of the continent - the domestication of cattle was invented in the Sahara in the humid phase and was then slowly pushed over the rest of Africa.
"This Neolithic way of life, which still is a way of life in a sense; preservation of food for the dry season and many other such cultural elements, was introduced to central and southern Africa from the Sahara."
'Motor of evolution'
Dr Kuper said the distribution of people and languages, which is so politically important today, has its roots in the desiccation of the Sahara.
The switch in environmental conditions acted as a "motor of Africa's evolution," he said.
"It happened during these 5,000 years of the savannah that people changed from hunter-gathers to cattle keepers," he said.
"This important step in human history has been made for the first time in the African Sahara."
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/
Remember the National Geographic Genographic Projects which, using the Y marker, shows that all humans descended from a common male ancestor in Africa 60,000 years ago.
Even war is just a seeking to know who and why we are.
the big qustion mark.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5196362.stm
Tut's gem hints at space impact
Thing of beauty: Tutankhamun's Pectoral with desert glass scarab
Tutankhamun's gem
In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces.
The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.
Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert.
But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?
Thursday's BBC Horizon programme reports an extraordinary new theory linking Tutankhamun's gem with a meteor.
Sky of fire
An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images.
American geophysicist John Wasson is another scientist interested in the origins of the glass. He suggested a solution that came directly from the forests of Siberia.
"When the thought came to me that it required a hot sky, I thought immediately of the Tunguska event," he tells Horizon.
In 1908, a massive explosion flattened 80 million trees in Tunguska, Siberia.
Although there was no sign of a meteorite impact, scientists now think an extraterrestrial object of some kind must have exploded above Tunguska. Wasson wondered if a similar aerial burst could have produced enough heat to turn the ground to glass in the Egyptian desert.
Jupiter clue
The first atomic bomb detonation, at the Trinity site in New Mexico in 1945, created a thin layer of glass on the sand. But the area of glass in the Egyptian desert is vastly bigger.
Whatever happened in Egypt must have been much more powerful than an atomic bomb.
A natural airburst of that magnitude was unheard of until, in 1994, scientists watched as comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter. It exploded in the Jovian atmosphere, and the Hubble telescope recorded the largest incandescent fireball ever witnessed rising over Jupiter's horizon.
Mark Boslough, who specialises in modelling large impacts on supercomputers, created a simulation of a similar impact on Earth.
The simulation revealed that an impactor could indeed generate a blistering atmospheric fireball, creating surface temperatures of 1,800C, and leaving behind a field of glass.
"What I want to emphasise is that it is hugely bigger in energy than the atomic tests," says Boslough. "Ten thousand times more powerful."
Defence lessons
The more fragile the incoming object, the more likely these airborne explosions are to happen.
In Southeast Asia, John Wasson has unearthed the remains of an event 800,000 years ago that was even more powerful and damaging than the one in the Egyptian desert; one which produced multiple fireballs and left glass over three hundred thousand square miles, with no sign of a crater.
"Within this region, certainly all of the humans would have been killed. There would be no hope for anything to survive," he says.
According to Boslough and Wasson, events similar to Tunguska could happen as frequently as every 100 years, and the effect of even a small airburst would be comparable to many Hiroshima bombs.
Attempting to blow up an incoming asteroid, Hollywood style, could well make things worse by increasing the number of devastating airbursts.
"There are hundreds of times more of these smaller asteroids than there are the big ones the astronomers track," says Mark Boslough. "There will be another impact on the earth. It's just a matter of when."
Horizon: Tutunkhamen's Fireball, made by production company TV6 is on BBC Two at 2100 BST on Thursday, 20 July.
Space Weather News for July 21, 2006
http://spaceweather.com
Yesterday on the sun, a magnetic filament snapped. The resulting explosion hurled a CME into space and sent beautiful waves of energy surging through the sun's atmosphere. Although the CME is not heading directly for Earth, the outskirts of the cloud might brush against Earth's magnetic field on July 23rd, causing a mild geomagnetic storm.
Visit http://spaceweather.com/ to view movies of the eruption and for updates about the approaching CME.
.....
Everything is interconnected. The cause effects the cause effect the effect affects the cause.
.....
This week's Torah Portion is
Parashat Matot-Maseiפרשת מטות־מסעי . Lots of vows and wars in these portions.
Candlelighting 8:05, minus 3.
Shabbat Shalom
Oy.
History in the making.
Here are a couple of news stories I found quite interesting.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5192410.stm
Ancient humans 'followed rains'
By Helen Briggs Science reporter, BBC News
The Eastern Sahara covers an area the size of Western Europe
Prehistoric humans roamed the world's largest desert for some 5,000 years, archaeologists have revealed.
The Eastern Sahara of Egypt, Sudan, Libya and Chad was home to nomadic people who followed rains that turned the desert into grassland.
When the landscape dried up about 7,000 years ago, there was a mass exodus to the Nile and other parts of Africa.
The close link between human settlement and climate has lessons for today, researchers report in Science.
"Even modern day conflicts such as Dafur are caused by environmental degradation as it has been in the past," Dr Stefan Kropelin of the University of Cologne, Germany, told the BBC News website.
"The basic struggle for food, water and pasture is still a big problem in the Sahara zone. This process started thousands of years ago and has a long tradition."
Jigsaw puzzle
The Eastern Sahara, which covers more than 2 million sq km, an area the size of Western Europe, is now almost uninhabited by people or animals, providing a unique window into the past.
The settlers left their mark with art
Dr Kropelin and colleague Dr Rudolph Kuper pieced together the 10,000-year jigsaw of human migration and settlement; studying more than 100 archaeological sites over the course of 30 years.
In the largest study of its kind, they built up a detailed picture of human evolution in the world's largest desert. They found that far from the inhospitable climate of today, the area was once semi-humid.
Between about 14,000 and 13,000 years ago, the area was very dry. But a drastic switch in environmental conditions some 10,500 years ago brought rain and monsoon-like conditions.
Nomadic human settlers moved in from the south, taking up residence beside rivers and lakes.
They were hunter-gatherers at first, living off plants and wild game.
Eventually they became more settled, domesticating cattle for the first time, and making intricate pottery.
Neolithic farmers
Humid conditions prevailed until about 6,000 years ago, when the Sahara abruptly dried out. There was then a gradual exodus of people to the Nile Valley and other parts of the African continent.
"The Nile Valley was almost devoid of settlement until about exactly the time that the Egyptian Sahara was so dry people could not live there anymore," Dr Kropelin told the BBC News website.
"People preferred to live on savannah land. Only when this wasn't possible they migrated towards southern Sudan and the Nile.
"They brought all their know-how to the rest of the continent - the domestication of cattle was invented in the Sahara in the humid phase and was then slowly pushed over the rest of Africa.
"This Neolithic way of life, which still is a way of life in a sense; preservation of food for the dry season and many other such cultural elements, was introduced to central and southern Africa from the Sahara."
'Motor of evolution'
Dr Kuper said the distribution of people and languages, which is so politically important today, has its roots in the desiccation of the Sahara.
The switch in environmental conditions acted as a "motor of Africa's evolution," he said.
"It happened during these 5,000 years of the savannah that people changed from hunter-gathers to cattle keepers," he said.
"This important step in human history has been made for the first time in the African Sahara."
https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/
Remember the National Geographic Genographic Projects which, using the Y marker, shows that all humans descended from a common male ancestor in Africa 60,000 years ago.
Even war is just a seeking to know who and why we are.
the big qustion mark.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5196362.stm
Tut's gem hints at space impact
Thing of beauty: Tutankhamun's Pectoral with desert glass scarab
Tutankhamun's gem
In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces.
The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.
Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert.
But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?
Thursday's BBC Horizon programme reports an extraordinary new theory linking Tutankhamun's gem with a meteor.
Sky of fire
An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images.
American geophysicist John Wasson is another scientist interested in the origins of the glass. He suggested a solution that came directly from the forests of Siberia.
"When the thought came to me that it required a hot sky, I thought immediately of the Tunguska event," he tells Horizon.
In 1908, a massive explosion flattened 80 million trees in Tunguska, Siberia.
Although there was no sign of a meteorite impact, scientists now think an extraterrestrial object of some kind must have exploded above Tunguska. Wasson wondered if a similar aerial burst could have produced enough heat to turn the ground to glass in the Egyptian desert.
Jupiter clue
The first atomic bomb detonation, at the Trinity site in New Mexico in 1945, created a thin layer of glass on the sand. But the area of glass in the Egyptian desert is vastly bigger.
Whatever happened in Egypt must have been much more powerful than an atomic bomb.
A natural airburst of that magnitude was unheard of until, in 1994, scientists watched as comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter. It exploded in the Jovian atmosphere, and the Hubble telescope recorded the largest incandescent fireball ever witnessed rising over Jupiter's horizon.
Mark Boslough, who specialises in modelling large impacts on supercomputers, created a simulation of a similar impact on Earth.
The simulation revealed that an impactor could indeed generate a blistering atmospheric fireball, creating surface temperatures of 1,800C, and leaving behind a field of glass.
"What I want to emphasise is that it is hugely bigger in energy than the atomic tests," says Boslough. "Ten thousand times more powerful."
Defence lessons
The more fragile the incoming object, the more likely these airborne explosions are to happen.
In Southeast Asia, John Wasson has unearthed the remains of an event 800,000 years ago that was even more powerful and damaging than the one in the Egyptian desert; one which produced multiple fireballs and left glass over three hundred thousand square miles, with no sign of a crater.
"Within this region, certainly all of the humans would have been killed. There would be no hope for anything to survive," he says.
According to Boslough and Wasson, events similar to Tunguska could happen as frequently as every 100 years, and the effect of even a small airburst would be comparable to many Hiroshima bombs.
Attempting to blow up an incoming asteroid, Hollywood style, could well make things worse by increasing the number of devastating airbursts.
"There are hundreds of times more of these smaller asteroids than there are the big ones the astronomers track," says Mark Boslough. "There will be another impact on the earth. It's just a matter of when."
Horizon: Tutunkhamen's Fireball, made by production company TV6 is on BBC Two at 2100 BST on Thursday, 20 July.
Space Weather News for July 21, 2006
http://spaceweather.com
Yesterday on the sun, a magnetic filament snapped. The resulting explosion hurled a CME into space and sent beautiful waves of energy surging through the sun's atmosphere. Although the CME is not heading directly for Earth, the outskirts of the cloud might brush against Earth's magnetic field on July 23rd, causing a mild geomagnetic storm.
Visit http://spaceweather.com/ to view movies of the eruption and for updates about the approaching CME.
.....
Everything is interconnected. The cause effects the cause effect the effect affects the cause.
.....
This week's Torah Portion is
Parashat Matot-Maseiפרשת מטות־מסעי . Lots of vows and wars in these portions.
Candlelighting 8:05, minus 3.
Shabbat Shalom
posted by VickeB | 1:03 PM
1 Comments:
"Everyting is interconected" Let's go farther...Everything what happens and exists in the world reveals and teaches a part to us of Hashem.
Shabat Shalom!!
Post a Comment
<< Home