Rick Smith speaking about Mars, Masonic secrets and warfare, Moorish history, cosmic history, global history

Source: Anpu Heru on Blog Talk Radio

Listen to internet radio with anpu heru on Blog Talk Radio

Rrick Smith Website

Was there a real time traveler in 1928 in Hollywood on the Charlie Chaplin set of a movie called The Circus? [pictures + video]

Source: The News Of Today website





by Ed Krassenstein for The news Of Today

As we all know, there were no cell phones back in 1928. However, an Irish filmmaker, named George Clarke has discovered something rather unusual in extra footage from Charlie Chaplin’s film, “The Circus”.
“The Circus” was filmed back in 1928, when technology wasn’t even close to what it is today. However, as you can see in the video footage below, a woman appears to be talking on a cell phone during the filming of the movie. If this really is in fact a cell phone, there really is no explanation unless this women is a time traveler...Right?
Twitter and Facebook have been buzzing all day, with people trying to determine if the device that the woman appears to be talking into is really a cell phone.
Even if it were a cell phone, how on earth would she be getting a reception on it? If she was a time traveler from the future, her cell phone still would not operate without the infrastructure that exists today. That is of course, unless this women could have traveled to 1928 from a point in time beyond today, when cell phones could operate without cell towers.
These are all simply theories. Other theories explain that the device is not a cell phone, but simply an old-fashion hearing aid. Perhaps, the woman was having trouble with her hearing aid device, and is talking in order to see if she can hear herself properly. So far this theory seems to be the most believable we have heard so far.



Get the U.S. version of the Charlie Chaplin box collection set, the MK2 edition and see it for yourself:

Kanye West Runaway Video - Extended Version and Short Version [HD] - Purchase My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album

Source: Kanye West Vevo

Kanye West featuring Pusha T - Runaway Video (Short Version)



Kanye West - Runaway Movie (Extended Video)



Purchase Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album below

Louis Farrakhan challenges Jews world wide

Source: The Daily Caller By Caroline May



Last month, Louis Farrakhan, the “National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam,” sent a three-page letter to the leaders of 16 major Jewish organizations demanding reparations for alleged crimes Jews have perpetrated against African Americans.

Along with the letter, Farrakhan sent two books, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” and “Jews Selling Blacks: Slave Trade by American Jews,” written by unidentified members of the Nation of Islam’s Historical Research Team. Elijah Muhammad’s National Representative claims that the books contain evidence of Jewish crimes against the black community.

“We can now present to our people and the world a true, undeniable record of the relationship between Blacks and Jews from their own mouths and pens,” the letter reads. “These scholars, Rabbis and historians have given to us an undeniable record of Jewish anti-Black behavior, starting with the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, the labor movement of the North and South, the unions and the misuse of our people that continues to this very moment.”

The written diatribe continues with the Farrakhan proclaiming, “We could charge you [Jews] with being the most deceitful so-called friend, while your history with us shows you have been our worst enemy.”

Farrakhan graciously, however, provides Jewish leaders with a means for redemption: “This is an offer asking you and the gentiles whom you influence to help me in the repair of my people from the damage that has been done by your ancestors to mine. This is a wonderful way of the present generation of Jews to escape the Judgment of Allah (God) by aiding in the repair of His people.”

Of course, if they fail to bend to his wishes, Farrakhan “respectfully warns,” “in the Name of Allah (God) and His Messiah, The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, that the more you fight and oppose me rather than help me to lift my people from their degraded state, Allah (God) and His Messiah will bring you and your people to disgrace and ruin and destroy your power and influence here and throughout the world.”

Despite Farrakhan’s offered path to redemption, Jewish leaders didn’t take the letter well.

“This is an ugly and despicable document,” Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America and one of the recipients of Farrakhan’s letter, told The Daily Caller. “The most frightening aspect of the letter was the threat of ruin and destruction if we do not comply with his demands, which is why we, at the ZOA, have sent a letter to President Obama urging him to speak out against it…The President has spoken about healing divisions between Jews and the Black community, this is a great opportunity for him to do so.”

Klein continued, “I am very concerned about the possibility of violence from this,” he said. “Every week outside our office there are several of Farrakhan’s men in bow ties passing out ‘The Final Call.’ They listen to everything he says. You know, it only takes one to act on his threat and that is quite concerning.”

“Dialogue does not begin with bigoted accusations,” said Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and another letter recipient, in a public statement. “Farrakhan’s call for dialogue with Jews is so outrageous and disingenuous that you can’t believe anyone would take him seriously. And yet he continues to fill convention centers with those eager to bear witness to his bigotry, and to believe that he holds the truth. One wonders why there aren’t more voices in the African-American community willing to stand up and reject his hatred, his anti-Semitism. When will good people in the community be courageous enough to stand up and say, ‘enough already?’”

“This is nothing new for Farrakhan,” Ken Stern, director of American Jewish Council’s Department of Anti-Semitism and Extremism, told The Daily Caller. “Anti-Semitism is at the center of his movement and ideology. Back in the 90’s he was doing the same thing, calling for peaceful dialogue but engaging in some of the most violent anti-Semitic language you’ve heard.”

Stern continued by noting that the books Farrakhan included in his package are just modern versions of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the infamous anti-Semitic tsarist forgery that claimed Jews were plotting to control the world.

“Like the Protocols blames all the ill in the world on Jewish conspiracy, Farrakhan is just trying to recast the Jews as being responsible for the plight of blacks,” he said.

The leaders targeted in Farrakhan’s letter were:

Abraham Foxman, President, Anti-Defamation League

Alan Solow, Chairman, American Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations

William Hess, President, American Zionist Movement

Bob Elman, President, American Jewish Committee

Dennis W. Click, President, B’nai B’rith International

Richard S. Gordon, President, American Jewish Congress

Rabbi Moshe Kletenik, President, Rabbinical Council of America

Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, President, Central Conference of American Rabbis

Jerry Silverman, Executive Director, Jewish Federation of North America

Stephen J. Savitsky, President, Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

Martin Schwartz, Executive Director, Jewish Labor Committee

Lee Rosenberg, President, American Israel Public Affairs Committee

Wayne Firestone, President, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life

Herb Rosenbleeth, National Executive Director, Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America

Morton Klein, President, Zionist Organization of America

Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director, J Street

Secrets about Israel, Jerusalem, Moorish history, Egyptian/Kemetic history, the crusades and world history

Sources: The book When The Rocks Cry Out by Horace Butler



RE-EDUCATION. What if the maps were backwards? What if everything you learned was reversed in history? What if you were looking in the wrong places this entire time? What is the real history behind the Vatican inquisition and the crusades? Below you will find 2 interviews with Horace Butler, the first one was in April 2010, the other in December 2010. Click on the play button below to listen to the interview.

Horace Butler interview on April 24, 2010 on Jedi Talk Radio on Blog Talk Radio. Show Length: 3 hours

Listen to internet radio with JEDI TALK RADIO on Blog Talk Radio

Horace Butler interview on Friday December 3, 2010 on Know The Ledge Radio on Blog Talk Radio. With other guests Taj Tark Bey and Hakim Bey. Show Length: 3 hours

Listen to internet radio with KNOW THE LEDGE RADIO on Blog Talk Radio

Why did The Library Of Congress pay 10 Million dollars for a map of the world?

Source: Library of Congress website



By JOHN R. HÉBERT the chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress.

In late May 2003 the Library of Congress completed the purchase of the only surviving copy of the first image of the outline of the continents of the world as we know them today— Martin Waldseemüller's monumental 1507 world map.

The map has been referred to in various circles as America's birth certificate and for good reason; it is the first document on which the name "America" appears. It is also the first map to depict a separate and full Western Hemisphere and the first map to represent the Pacific Ocean as a separate body of water. The purchase of the map concluded a nearly century-long effort to secure for the Library of Congress that very special cartographic document which revealed new European thinking about the world nearly 500 years ago.

Martin Waldseemüller, the primary author of the 1507 world map, was a 16th-century scholar, humanist, cleric and cartographer who was part of the small intellectual circle, the Gymnasium Vosagense, in Saint-Dié, France. He was born near Freiburg, Germany, sometime in the 1470s and died in the canon house at Saint-Dié in 1522. During his lifetime he devoted much of his time to cartographic ventures, including, in the spring 1507, the famous world map, a set of globe gores (for a globe with a three-inch diameter), and the "Cosmographiae Introductio" (a book to accompany the map). He also prepared the 1513 edition of the Ptolemy "Geographiae"; the "Carta Marina," a large world map, in 1516; and a smaller world map in the 1515 edition of "Margarita Philosophica Nova."

Thus, in a remote part of northeast France, was born the famous 1507 world map, whose full title is "Universalis cosmographia secunda Ptholemei traditionem et Americi Vespucci aliorum que lustrationes" ("A drawing of the whole earth following the tradition of Ptolemy and the travels of Amerigo Vespucci and others"). That map, printed on 12 separate sheets, each 18-by-24-inches, from wood block plates, measured more than 4 feet by 8 feet in dimension when assembled.

The large map is an early 16th-century masterpiece, containing a full map of the world, two inset maps showing separately the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, illustrations of Ptolemy and Vespucci, images of the various winds, and extensive explanatory notes about selected regions of the world. Waldseemüller's map represented a bold statement that rationalized the modern world in light of the exciting news arriving in Europe as a result of explorations across the Atlantic Ocean or down the African coast, which were sponsored by Spain, Portugal and others.

The map must have created quite a stir in Europe, since its findings departed considerably from the accepted knowledge of the world at that time, which was based on the second century A.D. work of the Greek geographer, Claudius Ptolemy. To today's eye, the 1507 map appears remarkably accurate; but to the world of the early 16th century it must have represented a considerable departure from accepted views of the composition of the world. Its appearance undoubtedly ignited considerable debate in Europe regarding its conclusions that an unknown continent (unknown, at least, to Europeans and others in the Eastern Hemisphere) existed between two huge bodies of water, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and was separated from the classical world of Ptolemy, which had been confined to the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia.

While it has been suggested that Waldseemüller incorrectly dismissed Christopher Columbus' great achievement in history by the selection of the name "America" for the Western Hemisphere, it is evident that the information that Waldseemüller and his colleagues had at their disposal recognized Columbus' previous voyages of exploration and discovery. However, the group also had acquired a recent French translation of the important work "Mundus Novus," Amerigo Vespucci's letter detailing his purported four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean to America between 1497 and 1504. In that work, Vespucci concluded that the lands reached by Columbus in 1492 and explored by Columbus and others over the ensuing two decades were indeed a segment of the world, a new continent, unknown to Europe. Because of Vespucci's recognition of that startling revelation, he was honored with the use of his name for the newly discovered continent.

It is remarkable that the entire Western Hemisphere was named for a living person; Vespucci did not die until 1512. With regard to Columbus' exploits after 1492, i.e., his various explorations between 1492 and 1504, the 1507 map clearly denotes Columbus' explorations in the West Indies as well as the Spanish monarchs' sponsorship of those and subsequent voyages of exploration.

By 1513, when Waldseemüller and the Saint-Dié scholars published the new edition of Ptolemy's "Geographiae," and by 1516, when Waldseemüller's famous "Carta Marina" was printed, he had removed the name "America" from his maps, perhaps suggesting that even he had second thoughts about honoring Vespucci exclusively for his understanding of the New World. Instead, in the 1513 atlas, the area named "America" on the 1507 map is now referred to as Terra Incognita (Unknown Land). In the1516 "Carta Marina," South America is called Terra Nova (New World) and North America is named Cuba and is shown to be part of Asia. No reference in either work is made to the name "America."

Cartographic contributions by Johannes Schöner in 1515 and by Peter Apian in 1520, however, adopted the name "America" for the Western Hemisphere, and that name then became part of accepted usage.

A reported 1,000 copies of the 1507 map were printed, which was a sizeable print run in those days. This single surviving copy of the map exists because it was kept in a portfolio by Schöner (1477-1547), a German globe maker, who probably had acquired a copy of the map for his own cartographic work . That portfolio contained not only the unique copy of the 1507 world map but also a unique copy of Waldseemüller's 1516 large wall map (the "Carta Marina") and copies of Schöner's terrestrial (1515) and celestial (1517) globe gores.

At some later time, the family of Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg acquired and retained Schöner's portfolio of maps in their castle in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, where it remained unknown to scholars until the beginning of the 20th century when its extraordinary contents were revealed. The uncovering of the 1507 map in the Wolfegg Castle early last century is thought by many to have been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of cartographic scholarship.

The map sheets have been maintained separated—not joined, with each of the large maps composed of 12 separate sheets—and that is probably why they survived. The portfolio with its great treasure was uncovered and revealed to the world in 1901 by the Jesuit priest Josef Fischer, who was conducting research in the Waldburg collection.

The Library of Congress' Geography and Map Division acquired the facsimiles of the 1507 and 1516 maps in 1903. Throughout the 20th century the Library continued to express interest in and a desire to acquire the 1507 map, if it were ever made available for sale. That time came in 1992 when Prince Johannes Waldberg-Wolfegg, the owner of the map, revealed to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, the Associate Librarian for Library Services Winston Tabb, and the chief of the Geography and Map Division Ralph Ehrenberg in a conversation in Washington that he was willing to negotiate the sale of the map. Ehrenberg and Margrit Krewson, the Library's German and Dutch area specialist, were encouraged to investigate the opportunity.

In 1999 Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg notified the Library that the German national government and the Baden-Württemberg state government had granted permission for a limited export license, which Krewson was instrumental in negotiating. Having obtained the license, which allowed this German national treasure to come to the Library of Congress, the Prince pursued an agreement to sell the 1507 map to the Library. In late June 2001 Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg and the Library of Congress reached a final agreement on the sale of the map for the price of $10 million. In late May 2003 the Library completed a successful campaign to raise the necessary funds to purchase Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, after receiving substantial congressional and private support to achieve the terms of the contract. The Congress of the United States appropriated $5 million for the purchase of the map; Discovery Communications, Jerry Lenfest and David Koch provided substantial contributions; and other individuals (George Tobolowsky and Virginia Gray) gave matching funds for the purchase and additional support for its preservation, exhibition and study.

Through the combined efforts of Billington, Tabb and members of the Library's staff over the past 11 years, the map was able to leave Germany and come to the Library of Congress.

The 1507 world map is now the centerpiece of the outstanding cartographic collections of the Geography and Map Division in the Library of Congress. The map serves as a departure point for the development of the division's American cartographic collection in addition to its revered position in early modern cartographic history. The map provides a meaningful link between the Library's treasured late medieval-early Renaissance cartographic collection (which includes one of the richest holdings of Ptolemy atlases in the world) and the modern cartographic age that unfolded as a result of the explorations of Columbus and other discoverers in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It represents the point of departure from the geographical understanding of the world based on Ptolemy's "Cosmographiae" and "Geographiae" (editions from 1475-) to that emerging in the minds of scholars and practical navigators as reports of the "new worlds" of America, southern Africa and other regions of Asia and Oceania reached Europe's shores. Waldseemüller recognized the transition taking place, as the title of his map notes and as his prominent placement of images of Ptolemy and Vespucci next to their worlds at the top portion of the 1507 world map denotes.

The Waldseemüller map joins the rich cartographic holdings of the Library's Geography and Map Division, which include some 4.8 million maps, 65,000 atlases, more than 500 globes and globe gores, and thousands of maps in digital form. And from that fragile first glimpse of the world, so adequately described by Waldseemüller in 1507, the Library of Congress' cartographic resources provide the historical breadth and cartographic depth to fill in the geographic blanks left by those early cosmographers.

The Library's acquisition of the Waldseemüller map represents an important moment to renew serious research into this exceptional map, to determine the sources which made possible its creation, and to investigate its contemporary impact and acceptance. The map's well-announced acquisition provides scholars with an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate the earliest of early depictions of our modern world. Major portions of this 1507 world map have not received the same concentrated scrutiny as the American segments. The very detailed depiction of sub-Saharan Africa, the south coast of Asia, and even the areas surrounding the Black and Caspian seas merit further study and discussion in response to obvious questions regarding the cartographic and geographic sources that were available and used by the Saint-Dié scholars to reach the conclusions that they embodied in the 1507 world map.

Through agreement with Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg and the government of Germany, the 1507 Waldseemüller world map is to be placed on permanent display in the Library of Congress' Thomas Jefferson Building. A second floor gallery, the Pavilion of the Discoverers, has been chosen as an appropriate location to house the map, where it will be exhibited with supporting materials from the Library's collections that will assist in describing the rich history surrounding the map and its relation to its creators and the sources used to prepare it in the 16th century.

The Library of Congress is extremely proud to have obtained this unique treasure and is hopeful that this great cartographic document will receive the public acclaim and the critical scholarly inspection that it so rightly merits.

* This book will help shed some light on why this world map is important

Are you a real B.L.O.O.D ? Are you a real C.R.I.P ? Street Tribes Re-Education

Source: youtube channel supanovaslom

A wake up for all 69 Mob, Almighty Vice Lord Nation, Black Disciples, Black P. Stones, Black Mafia Family, Bloods, Pirus, Crips, Rollin 60 Neighborhood Crips, Venice Shoreline Crips, Double II Set, The Council, Four Corner Hustlers, Gangster Disciples, Hidden Valley Kings, Jamaican Posse, Mickey Cobras, Philadelphia Black Mafia, Sex Money Murda, Supreme Team United Blood Nation, Zoa Pound Gang, Folk Nation, Friends Stand United, Maniac Latin Disciples, People Nation, Simon City Royals, Dixie Mafia, 18th Street Gang, Association Neta, Brown Pride, Cali Cartel, Dominicans Don’t Play, Fresno Bulldogs, gulf Cartel, Jheri Curls, Juarez cartel, La Raza Nation, Latin Eagles, Latin Kings, Los Zetas, Mara Salvatrucha, maniac latin Disciples, Medellin Cartel, Mexican mafia, Nortenos, Puro Tango Blast, Sinaloa Cartel, Surenos, Tijuana cartel, Trinitario, Indian Posse, Familia Azteca Flats, Los Zetas, Vagos Motorcycle club, Sonora Cartel, Solo Angeles, Los Negros, Mongols, Mexican Mafia, Gulf Cartel, colima Cartel, Beltran-Leyva Cartel and other street tribes nation, west or east coast, western hemisphere and world wide.

Dead Prez featuring RBG God Divine - MALCOLM GARVEY HUEY video [HD]+ behind the scenes footage

Source: youtube channels BLOWHIPHOPTV, PositiveBlackStories









Music By Dead Prez

Dead Prez official website

Justice Stephen Breyer on Islamic Sharia Law

Source; C-Span youtube channel



Sharia which means "way" or "path" is the sacred law of Islam. Muslims believe Sharia is derived from two primary sources of Islamic law; namely, the divine revelations set forth in the Qur'an, and the sayings and example set by the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in the Sunnah.







For books written by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

Superhero or Supervillain, make a choice

Source: Yahoo news, LiveScience

by Jeremy Hsu LiveScience Senior Writer



NEW YORK - There may be a hero in all of us, but there's also a possible supervillain waiting to run amuck if one of us were to acquire superhuman strength or the ability to fly. In a society that reveres superheroes, just how many people could follow the do-gooder's path if they were suddenly bitten by the radioactive spider?

That thought may not weigh heavily on the costumed attendees of New York City's Comic Con that kicked off today (Oct. 8). Yet the odds for ordinary people becoming superheroes rather than villains don't look great when news headlines frequently tell stories of corruption among those with power - politicians, law enforcement and business leaders. And everyone has witnessed the more petty abuses of power that take place in workplaces and on the playground.

Yes, power does corrupt, researchers say. But they add it can also enhance a person's preexisting goals and moral compass, for better or worse.

"That's where you can predict the supervillain or superhero," said Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University. "The average person is corrupted by power, but a select few see power as responsibility."

Power is relative depending on a person's place in the social hierarchy, Galinsky pointed out. Humans have great sensitivity to their place on the social ladder, as well as great awareness of where others stand (or soar above them in the case of Superman).

How power corrupts

A person's move up in a hierarchy has a transformative effect so that "power makes the person," Galinsky said. That transformation stems in part from a person's enhanced self-perception - and studies have shown that people consistently overestimate their smarts or looks anyway.

But power also acts like strong cologne that affects both the wearer and those within smelling distance, Galinsky noted. The person gains an enhanced sense of their importance, and other people may regard them with greater respect as well as extend leniency toward their actions. That combination makes for an easy slide into corruption.

The idea that power corrupts was summed up by the Greek philosopher Plato, who talked about an imaginary "Ring of Gyges" that could turn the wearer invisible. Plato suggested that no one could escape the corrupting influence of having the power to do anything without being caught - a sort of earlier version of "Lord of the Rings," Galinsky said.

"Power makes people feel psychologically invisible," Galinsky told LiveScience. "It's ironic, because in many ways they become more visible to other people."

Galinsky and other researchers have shown how people who feel entitled to their power became moral hypocrites by holding other people to higher moral standards for speeding or breaking tax laws - even as they judged themselves less harshly for the same actions.

Revealing the true self

Yet not everyone who suddenly gets a flying Iron Man suit will embark on a selfish reign of terror. One of Galinsky's studies found that people who felt powerful but undeserving of such power would actually judge themselves more harshly than other people for the same wicked actions - a reversal of hypocrisy that was dubbed "hypercrisy."

That study relied on a priming effect to make people feel temporarily more powerful, and so it's uncertain whether such hypercrisy might hold over the long term. But other research has suggested that a person's prior moral convictions can come out even more strongly when they suddenly gain power.

"Plato talked about how true power makes the person in terms of transforming and changing him or her, but power also reveals the person," Galinsky said. "My research and other people's research have shown that, in many cases, power makes you more how you truly are."

One such study took place at the University of California in Berkeley under psychologist Serena Chen. Her group first used personality tests to sort out people who had a strong sense of communal responsibility versus those who took the business-like approach of "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."

When given the power and authority to dole out tasks to a group, the communally oriented people willingly shouldered the responsibility of tackling more tasks themselves. By contrast, the more self-centered people took on less.

Circumstances matter

Personality matters, but upbringing, culture and other circumstances also play a role in deciding whether a person will abide by the moral Uncle Ben set down for Peter Parker: "With great power comes great responsibility."

Galinsky's past work has shown that Americans and Canadians in a powerful state of mind responded more quickly to terms related to entitlement, whereas many Chinese and Japanese immigrants responded more quickly to words geared toward responsibility. The only immigrants who responded more to entitlement had already shown that they had adopted the Western-style approach to power.

Whether or not a person has the high social standing and wealth of Iron Man's Tony Stark or Batman's Bruce Wayne could also make a difference, according to Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist and author of several existing and forthcoming books on superheroes. She sat on two panels for Comic Con where she discussed the personalities of Iron Man, Batman and Spider Man.

"If your life is generally good and you get a power, it's much easier to want to do good [for others] with it than if your life is very constrained," Rosenberg said in a prior phone interview.

A poor person might have legitimate reason to focus first on their needs, Rosenberg explained. By that logic, the recent economic recession might make a huge difference regarding who would chose to become a superhero or supervillain if they gained superpowers today.

Even age could influence how a person uses the newfound power of, say, X-Ray vision.

"A 20-year-old may go to the locker rooms and look through the walls," Rosenberg said. "I don't know that a 50-year-old would."

How to stay a hero

Whatever their background, few people have faced the enormous temptations that confront superheroes endowed, by science or other forces, with amazing superpowers. Many comic books and films have illustrated that battle with temptation among well-known superheroes such as Batman and Spiderman.

But superheroes do have some help in staying focused on the righteous path, according to Rosenberg.

"You could make a case that having a secret alter ego that's a regular person is part of what keeps them grounded," Rosenberg explained. "It's like the rock star having to take out the trash."

For instance, Spiderman may spend much of his time web-slinging around New York City and fighting crime with exceptional strength, but most of the time he's just plain old Peter Parker struggling to eke out an everyman existence.

"To me, Peter Parker is the audience," said Fred Van Lente, a writer of The Amazing Spiderman comic books for Marvel, during a Comic Con panel today.

Finally, the most powerful superheroes may have to make superhuman effort to act morally - not just for themselves but also for the public that trusts them as defenders of justice, Rosenberg said. The same might apply for trusted authorities or law enforcement such as the FBI.

She gave the example of Superman, whose long list of powers such as superhuman speed, X-Ray vision, flight and invulnerability to just about everything, make him powerful enough to take over the world. Because of that power, he sets an unmistakable moral standard - a bright line that he won't cross.

"Because they have more power, their moral line should be clearer, brighter and farther away," Rosenberg said. "So there's a sense in which in order not to be more corrupted, they need to use power more gently."

Marching - Architect of Destruction - Vol 1

Source: Youtuber youngerminds

Would you want all of your life info on the Matrix grid?

Source: By Discovery News Analysis Clark Boyd

Let's face it. Thinking about death isn't that much fun. Personally, I have successfully put off making out a will for about 40 years now. I guess I never thought it so important to ensure that my precious collection of 1980s hair-metal cassettes (cassettes!) get passed along to my wife (not a metal fan) or my daughter (who will never know what a cassette actually is). Come to think of it, I'm not sure I want anyone that close to me to know that Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me" was ever in heavy rotation on my Walkman.

I did, however, come across an idea recently that got me thinking about how much of what I want to leave behind is, well, virtual. The idea is called Legacy Locker. The website describes it as "a digital safety deposit box" where you can store all of the passwords to your online accounts (be they email, bank accounts or your Twitter feed). Then, for each account, "you assign a beneficiary, someone to whom you want to entrust your digital content for the future."

Legacy Locker is the brainchild of Jeremy Toeman, who in a recent interview with AFP said he got the idea after he started worrying about what his children would miss out on if he suddenly passed. "One day my blog will have meaning to them," he told AFP. "In the same way that you find an old photo of your grandfather and wonder what the story was."

The cost for securing your digital legacy? Thirty dollars a year, or a one-time fee of $300. Not bad, considering that also gives you unlimited space to make digital back-ups of important paper documents (your will? ha!), pictures, etc. You can also trial a scaled-back free version too.

Toeman's point, and it's well taken, is that our legal system is in no way keeping pace with the rate of technological change. There aren't that many provisions out there to ensure that your online assets get passed along to your heirs in the same way as your physical ones.

And the grandfathers of the future, Toeman told AFP, are going to be leaving a different set of remembrances behind. "Today, you get a shoe box full of pictures; tomorrow you will get a Flickr account. Today, you get a diary; tomorrow you will get a blog."

Not to mention all of that gold you've hoarded playing World of Warcraft for years...and years...and years.

I can hear you scoffing at this. But just think for a minute of all the different accounts you have, and all the information you have tucked away in various corners of the web. If nothing else, this would serve as a great place to collect all of that information in one place. You, while living, can of course access this information 24/7 as part of your Legacy Locker account.

And imagine the joy you can give your eager Twitter followers. A caring loved one will, in your virtual stead, perhaps continue to spam their Twitter feeds with your stupid FarmVille updates.

Remember, it's not nice to speak ill of the dead.

Diamonds will be medication soon

Source; Discovery News



Scientists from Taiwan have developed nanodiamonds that, when swallowed, harmlessly coat the digestive track. When coated with special sugars or proteins, the nanodiamonds are absorbed into the body and attach themselves to specific cells.

The research, which is currently limited to animals, could eventually diagnose and eventually treat diseases in humans.

"This research work demonstrates that nanodiamonds are non-toxic in both cellular and organismic levels," said Yi-Chun Wu, a scientist who, along with Huan-Cheng Chang and their colleagues in Taiwan, co-authored a new study in the journal ACS Nano Letters.

Nanodiamonds are tiny pieces of pure carbon only a few of nanometers across. (One nanometer is about 100,000 times smaller than a human hair.) Most nanodiamonds are formed by blowing up TNT or other explosives to create high temperate and high pressures that bond carbon atoms together in a classic 3D diamond nanostructure.

These nanodiamonds are not solid, however. Inside those tiny structures are tiny holes, called vacancies, where a nitrogen atom from the air has replaced two carbon atoms. Nitrogen vacancies in diamonds are common. Natural diamonds with lots of nitrogen have a yellow tint to them. The nanodiamonds the scientists from Taiwan used absorb yellow light and emit violet light.

Next, the scientists fed two types of nanodiamonds to the round worm C. elegans. The first batch of nanodiamonds were uncoated, just pure carbon with a few nitrogen atoms. Those nanodiamonds coated the digestive tract of the transparent roundworm.

The second batch of nanodiaonds the roundworms ate were coated with a special sugar. Once inside the roundworm, the nanodiamonds passed through the digestive tract and into the body of the worm, congregating at various points inside the body.

Both the coated and uncoated nanodiamonds glowed purple when yellow light was shined onto the roundworms, revealing their location inside the worm. All the bejeweled worms had normal lifespans, and none of them showed any sign of distress, said the scientists.

The scientists fed the nanodiamonds to the worms just to measure their toxicity and to see where the diamonds ended up. More specific functions will come soon though, said Vadym Mochalin, a scientist at Drexel University who uses nanodiamonds in his own research.

Virtually any kind of protein or chemical can coat nanodiamonds. When placed into the body, those coated nanodiamonds could seek out and attach themselves to cancer cells, immune cells, pathogens and other cells.

At first, coated and glowing nanodiamonds will likely help doctors and scientists find and map cancers and other things that harm humans. After that nanodiamonds will likely be used to deliver low doses of powerful drugs to help treat those diseases.

Some researchers are most excited about using nanodiamonds to track stem cells.

"One of the most exciting applications of [fluorescent nanodiamonds] in humans is the long-term imaging, tracking, and sorting of human stem cells," said Chang.

Those stem cells could jump-start immune responses, help repair nerve damage, and potentially even regenerate entire organs if the research pans out. Those kinds of advanced therapies are still years, if not decades away however, caution scientists. But this research, along with dozens of other papers and groups working with nanodiamonds, opens the door for powerful therapies in the future.

"The nanodiamond looks very promising compared with other carbon-based nanoparticles," said Mochalin. "It's the least toxic carbon-based nanomaterial to date."

Learn about the healing powers of stone, gems, crystals and metals

Use Weed, Marijuana better known as Hemp to build your house

Source: Discovery News



Hemp is looking pretty snazzy these days. Put aside old visions of burlap-like shirts that belong with hacky sacks. New hemp tech is greening electric vehicles and even house construction.

The "Hemp House" in Asheville, North Carolina, looks so far from a hippie haven it could have been ripped from the pages of Dwell. Anthony Brenner of Push Design led the house construction for Russ Martin and Karon Korp. CNN recently featured it in a segment, showing walls made from "hempcrete," a material made out of hemp, lime, and water.

Hemp is a hardy plant that grows quickly, and hempcrete is an excellent insulator. According to CNN, the 3,400 square foot house's recent month cooling bill was $100. The house wasn't cheap to construct -- at $133 per square foot the total is just under half a million bucks. But it looks like a million.

Can the science of spider webs help airplanes and cars?

Source: Discovery News



Aircraft could soon be covered in new technological cobwebs. Inspired by the gossamer strands of spider webs, scientists from Stanford University have created an ultra-fine mesh of strain and temperature sensors.

Wrapped around an aircraft, the sensors could help craft monitor their internal well-being. This added awareness could prevent microscopic cracks from developing into catastrophic failures. Beyond aircraft, the new technology could create a new breed of intelligent automobiles, packaging and medical devices.

"We want to make airplanes that fly like birds," said Fu-Kuo Chang, a scientist at Stanford University who developed the sensors and co-authored a recent article about the technology in the journal, Advanced Materials. "Aircraft that have all the sensing information about what is happening around them, just like birds do."

Aircraft and birds both have various ways to sense their environment. Birds have eyes to see, ears to hear and mouths to speak (or sing). Aircraft have their own versions of these organs, such as radar, which gathers information about the physical environment, and radio, which allows them to communicate.

But aircraft lack nerves. Unlike birds, they don't have a way to sense tiny changes inside their bodies. For instance, a bird in a dive can sense, through its nerves and other tissues, whether the strain is too great and if they need to pull up before their bones break.

The new spider web-inspired mesh would give aircraft two new senses birds have had for millions of years: strain and temperature. The new mesh contains tiny structures that can, say, measure the temperature along the entire body of the aircraft, or map the air pressure flowing around a wing.

The new sensor is a plastic polymer that has the gold sensors laid down on top of it, which monitor the skin of the aircraft. The Stanford scientists are already developing technology that will allow pilots to image the interior of their aircraft similar to the way pregnant women can see their unborn children.

By adding ultrasonic wave-inducing piezoelectric devices, pilots could constantly scan the aircraft to discover, say, microscopic cracks in the supports long before they developed into life-threatening failures.

"This will help ensure the safety of air transportation," said Frank Chang, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who is familiar with the research but is not involved in it.

To paper an entire aircraft with sensors would ordinarily add significant weight, and therefore require more fuel, something airlines are anxious to avoid. To get around this problem the California scientists stripped the sensors down to the bare minimum of material, eliminating 99.7 percent of it.

When the mesh is initially created it doesn't look like a spider web. But pull on the sides and the material can expand more than 265 times its original size, creating an almost invisible mesh of wires that are nonetheless strong and and durable. One square foot of the material could easily stretch far enough cover an entire car, said Stanford University's Chang.

Spider web-like sensors that can detect touch and temperature in aircraft are just the beginning, say the scientists. The new sensors could eventually lead to smarter cars, wound dressings that tell doctors how quickly a patient is healing, shirts that allow pregnant women to see their unborn child whenever they want, or even synthetic skin for robots.

"This will have very extensive usage and importance," besides just aircraft, said UCLA's Chang.

Were the Tibetans related to the Avatar Air Tribe?

Source: Discovery News



Ever wonder how Tibetans can thrive on the roof of the world while the rest of us suffer from altitude sickness just looking at Pike's Peak?

Scientists think they have the answer.

A team of researchers from China, England, Ireland and the United States identified a particular spot within the human genome that is linked to low hemoglobin levels, a variant specific to Tibetans.

The variant is called EPAS1, and it explains why Tibetans can live two miles above sea level without getting sick.

"Altitude affects your thinking, your breathing and your ability to sleep," co-author Cynthia Beall of Case Western Reserve University said in a press release.

"But high-altitude natives don't have these problems. They're able to live a healthy life, and they do it completely comfortably," she said.

Hemoglobin is the oxygen-carrying component of the blood. Humans not used to high altitude automatically make more hemoglobin when they climb so their bodies can carry more oxygen in a low-O2 world. That's one reason why athletes train at altitude: Higher blood oxygen levels boost performance when they return to lower elevations.

But people who get chronic altitude sickness suffer from too much hemoglobin. Tibetans, on the other hand, have lower-than-normal hemoglobin levels, ensuring that they're less susceptible to the disease than other populations.

The team studied 200 blood samples from Tibetans and compared them with lowland samples from China. The difference that emerged was one gene on chromosome 2, the same gene responsible for red blood cell production and hemoglobin concentration in the blood.

Although all humans have the EPAS1 gene, Tibetans are the only group of people known to have the special variation.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could explain why some people cope better with less oxygen than others, leading to more targeted treatments for people with lung cancer or chronic altitude sickness.

"Many patients, young and old, are affected by low oxygen levels in their blood -- perhaps from lung disease, or heart problems," said co-author Hugh Montgomery of University College London.

"Some cope much better than others. Studies like this are the start in helping us to understand why, and to develop new treatments," he said.

Books on Tibetan history

Women's body can be picky with the sperm they choose

Source: Discovery News



A woman's body may be unconsciously selective about sperm, allowing some men's to progress to pregnancy but killing off the chances of less suitable matches, an Australian researcher said Wednesday.

University of Adelaide professor Sarah Robertson said her research suggested that sperm contains "signaling molecules" that activate immunity changes in a woman so her body accepts it.

But some apparently healthy sperm failed to activate these changes, leading to the suggestion that the female system can be "choosy" about its biological mate, she said.

"It's rather like a two-way dance," Robertson said.

"The male provides information that increases the chances of conception and progression to pregnancy, but the female body has a quality control system which needs convincing that his sperm is compatible," she added. "That's where the dance can go wrong with some couples -- if the male signals are not strong enough, or if the female system is too 'choosy'."

Robertson said sperm was more likely to fail if the woman had not previously been exposed to that man's semen for at least three months.

"We used to think that if a couple couldn't get pregnant, and the man's semen test was normal, the problem lay with the woman. But it appears this is not always the case," Robertson said.

The researchers plan to continue their work, which they hope will lead to improved treatments for infertility and miscarriages.

Bending time and different realities

Source: Discovery News



Anyone looking to defer the effects of aging, at least for a split-second, may want to think about driving fast cars at low elevations, according to scientists from the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST).

New experiments have proven that time dilation, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theories of relativity where time flows faster or slower depending on speed and gravity, occurs during ordinary events like riding a bike or climbing the stairs.

"We demonstrated that with our incredibly accurate clocks, just going up a step or two, we can see the effects of time dilation," said James Chou, a co-author of the new Science article.

While the effects are there at even small differences in elevation or speed, "people won't notice a difference" in their day-to-day lives.

Movies and television often interpret this phenomenon as one person being shot into space at nearly the speed of light and returning with only minimal aging, while the Earth-bound counterpart grows old.

A consequence of Einstein's 1905 theories of relativity, time dilation wasn't definitely proven for many years.

In one particularly famous demonstration in 1971, scientists equipped commercial jets with atomic clocks and flew them around the world. When the aircraft landed, the clocks on the aircraft and the clocks on the ground did not match up. This demonstrated that the time dilation predicted by Einstein indeed happened.

"People have measured time dilation before," said Vladan Vuletic, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. "But it's impressive that it can be measured over such small distances."

The new experiments used more mundane methods -- and much more precise clocks -- to test the theory.

The NIST scientists used aluminum ions that act like the second hand, ticktocking between two energy levels over a million-billion times per second. The two clocks are some of the most accurate in existence.

In the first experiment, the scientists offset the two clocks by roughly one foot in elevation to test gravity's effect of the flow of time. In the second experiment, since they couldn't send the clocks around the world at a high speed, the scientists made one clock's ion oscillate faster than the other, several meters per second faster, to test the effect of speed on time dilation.

In both experiments, time flowed differently. Time flowed faster in the clock at a higher elevation, as predicted. Similarly, time flowed slower in the clock where the ions moved faster.

The difference in the clocks was very small, but given the distances involved were significant. If two people somehow managed to live 79 years exactly one foot apart in elevation, the difference in time would only amount to 83 billionths of a second.

One foot is not very far apart, however. What if the distance between two people was much larger, say a person standing on top of the Empire State Building and another one on Fifth Avenue?

"Even over a lifetime it wouldn't come to a second's worth of difference," said Chou.

Our sun is emitting a mysteries atom changing particle

Source: Discovery News, Stanford University



When probing the deepest reaches of the Cosmos or magnifying our understanding of the quantum world, a whole host of mysteries present themselves. This is to be expected when pushing our knowledge of the Universe to the limit.

But what if a well-known -- and apparently constant -- characteristic of matter starts behaving mysteriously?

This is exactly what has been noticed in recent years; the decay rates of radioactive elements are changing. This is especially mysterious as we are talking about elements with "constant" decay rates -- these values aren't supposed to change. School textbooks teach us this from an early age.

This is the conclusion that researchers from Stanford and Purdue University have arrived at, but the only explanation they have is even weirder than the phenomenon itself: The sun might be emitting a previously unknown particle that is meddling with the decay rates of matter. Or, at the very least, we are seeing some new physics.

Many fields of science depend on measuring constant decay rates. For example, to accurately date ancient artifacts, archaeologists measure the quantity of carbon-14 found inside organic samples at dig sites. This is a technique known as carbon dating.

Carbon-14 has a very defined half-life of 5730 years; i.e. it takes 5,730 years for half of a sample of carbon-14 to radioactively decay into stable nitrogen-14. Through spectroscopic analysis of the ancient organic sample, by finding out what proportion of carbon-14 remains, we can accurately calculate how old it is.

But as you can see, carbon dating makes one huge assumption: radioactive decay rates remain constant and always have been constant. If this new finding is proven to be correct, even if the impact is small, it will throw the science community into a spin.

Interestingly, researchers at Purdue first noticed something awry when they were using radioactive samples for random number generation. Each decay event occurs randomly (hence the white noise you'd hear from a Geiger counter), so radioactive samples provide a non-biased random number generator.

However, when they compared their measurements with other scientists' work, the values of the published decay rates were not the same. In fact, after further research they found that not only were they not constant, but they'd vary with the seasons. Decay rates would slightly decrease during the summer and increase during the winter.

Experimental error and environmental conditions have all been ruled out -- the decay rates are changing throughout the year in a predictable pattern. And there seems to be only one answer.

As the Earth is closer to the sun during the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere (our planet's orbit is slightly eccentric, or elongated), could the sun be influencing decay rates?

In another moment of weirdness, Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins noticed an inexplicable drop in the decay rate of manganese-54 when he was testing it one night in 2006. It so happened that this drop occurred just over a day before a large flare erupted on the sun.

Did the sun somehow communicate with the manganese-54 sample? If it did, something from the sun would have had to travel through the Earth (as the sample was on the far side of our planet from the sun at the time) unhindered.

The sun link was made even stronger when Peter Sturrock, Stanford professor emeritus of applied physics, suggested that the Purdue scientists look for other recurring patterns in decay rates. As an expert of the inner workings of the sun, Sturrock had a hunch that solar neutrinos might hold the key to this mystery.

Sure enough, the researchers noticed the decay rates vary repeatedly every 33 days -- a period of time that matches the rotational period of the core of the sun. The solar core is the source of solar neutrinos.

It may all sound rather circumstantial, but these threads of evidence appear to lead to a common source of the radioactive decay rate variation. But there's a huge problem with speculation that solar neutrinos could impact decay rates on Earth: neutrinos aren't supposed to work like that.

Neutrinos, born from the nuclear processes in the core of the sun, are ghostly particles. They can literally pass through the Earth unhindered as they so weakly interact. How could such a quantum welterweight have any measurable impact on radioactive samples in the lab?

In short, nobody knows.

If neutrinos are the culprits, it means we are falling terribly short of understanding the true nature of these subatomic particles. But if (and this is a big if) neutrinos aren't to blame, is the sun generating an as-yet-to-be- discovered particle?

If either case is true, we'll have to go back and re-write those textbooks.

Sign and warning that civilizations collapse after cutting down trees

Source: Discovery News



The ancient Nazca people, who once flourished in the valleys of south coastal Peru, literally fell with the trees they chopped down, new research has concluded.

The Nazca caused their own collapse when they cleared their forests in order to make way for agriculture, thus exposing the landscape to wind and flood erosion, according to a study published in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

Best known for carving hundreds of geometric lines and images of animals and birds in the Peruvian desert that are fully visible from the air, the Nazca flourished between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D.

During these centuries they made sophisticated ceramics and textiles and amassed one of South America's largest collection of human trophy heads.

Then, between 500 and 600 A.D., this enigmatic civilization slid into oblivion.

"It was not just that they were hit by a huge mega El Nino in about 500 A.D., but that they had already cleared their forests of huarango, a tree that lives in highly arid zones and stabilizes the soil with some of the deepest roots of any tree known-and can live up to 1000 years," Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty a palaeoecologist from the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru, told Discovery News.

Stretching down as deep as 180 feet to subterranean water channels, the huarango roots not only suck up water for the tree, but bring it into the higher subsoil, creating a water resource for other vegetation.

"This is one of the most fragile ecosystems on Earth. It hardly ever rains here and the huarango tree is indeed a keystone ecological species," David Beresford-Jones, from the McDonald institute for archaeological research at Cambridge University, told Discovery News.

A leguminous hardwood tree, the huarango (Prosopis pallida) enhances soil fertility and moisture, while being a source of food for humans and animals.

"If you remove it, you destroy the ecosystem," Beresford-Jones said.

That was exactly what the Nazca did. Analysis of pollen from an excavation area of the lower Ica Valley of the Nazca domain, which is in complete desert today, has revealed a sequence of human-induced events that led to the Nazca’s catastrophic collapse.

"At the bottom of the profile, I found lots of huarango pollen. This indicates that large forests were originally growing in that area.

Subsequently, I saw cotton pollen and other weeds, but still a lot of huarango pollen. It seems at this stage farming was in balance with the environment," Chepstow-Lusty said.

Then, about 400 A.D., the Nazca apparently stopped growing cotton, switching to large crops of maize.

The researchers found a major reduction of huarango pollen, indicating that people started clearing the forests to plant more crops.

But the agricultural gain from clearing forests was short-lived. When a mega El Nino event hit the south coast of Peru in about 500 A.D., there were no huarango roots to anchor the landscape.

The fields and canal systems were washed away, leaving a desert environment. Today, only pollen from plants adapted to salty and arid conditions can be found, Chepstow-Lusty said.

"The bottom line is that the Nazca could have survived the devastating El Nino floods had they kept their forests alive. Basically, the huarango trees would have cushioned that major event," Beresford-Jones said.

According to the researchers, some important lessons can be learned today from the Nazca's disastrous environmental strategies.

Indeed a similar scenario threatens Peru as the few remaining pockets of old-growth huarango trees on the south coast are being cleared by illegal charcoal burning.

"With most of Peru's glaciers predicted to disappear by 2050, the Andes need trees to capture the moisture coming from Amazonia. A major program of reforestation is desperately required both in the Andes and on the coast " Chepstow-Lusty said.

Ancient temple of cat goddess Bastet/Baset found

Source: Discovery News, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities



The remains of a 2,200-year-old temple dedicated to an ancient Egyptian cat goddess have been discovered by archaeologists near Alexandria's train station, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said on Tuesday January 19, 2010.

Possibly pointing to the long-sought location of Alexandria's royal quarters, the ruins of the Ptolemaic-era building have been unearthed at the Kom el Dikka area in the Mediterranean city founded by Alexander the Great around 331 B.C.

The temple remains, 60 metres (200 feet) in height and 15 meters (49 feet) wide, are thought to belong to Queen Berenike II, wife of king Ptolemy III (246-222 B.C.).

At the site, the archaeologists, led by Dr. Mohamed Abdel Maqsoud, Head of Antiquities of Lower Egypt, also unearthed a cachette of 600 Ptolemaic statues.

The large collection contained many statue representations of the cat goddess Bastet, suggesting that the temple was dedicated to the deity and that its worship continued even after the decline of the Pharaohs, when the Hellenistic Egyptians associated her with their own Greek deity Artemis.

"This is the first Ptolemaic temple discovered in Alexandria to be dedicated to the goddess Bastet," the statement said.

Originally associated with a lioness rather than the domesticated cat, Bastet was mainly worshipped in the city of Bubastis, about 50 miles from Cairo in the eastern Nile Delta. The ancient city even housed a great cemetery of mummified cats.

Queen Berenike's temple was destroyed in later eras when it was used as a quarry. This led to the disappearance of many of its stone blocks, Dr. Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said.

Clay pots as well as bronze and ceramic statues of different ancient Egyptian deities were also uncovered, along with terracotta statues of the gods Harpocrates and Ptah.

The mission also found the inscribed base of a granite statue from the reign of King Ptolemy IV (205-222 B.C.). It bears ancient Greek text written in nine lines stating that the statue belonged to a top official in the Ptolemaic court.

According to Dr. Maqsoud, the base was made to celebrate Egypt's victory over the Greeks during the Battle of Raphia in 217 B.C.

Ancient letter to pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt found

Source: Discovery News and Hebrew University of Jerusalem



Archaeologists in Jerusalem have unearthed the most ancient written document ever found in the Holy City – a tiny fragment of a letter thought to be addressed to Akhenaten, the “heretic” pharaoh who ruled Egypt during the 14th century B.C.

Discovered outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls, the document consists of a minuscule clay fragment -- about one square inch -- covered with cuneiform script in ancient Akkadian.

Thought to date back some 3,400 years, the fragment appears to have been part of a tablet from the royal archives.

Indeed, the script on the chip, which includes the words “you,” “you were,” “later,” “to do” and “them,” is of a very high level, according to Wayne Horowitz, a scholar of Assyriology at the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology.

“It was written by a highly skilled scribe that in all likelihood prepared tablets for the royal household of the time,” said Horowitz, who deciphered the script with colleague Takayoshi Oshima of the University of Leipzig, Germany.

The fragment is believed to be a contemporary of the 380 tablets discovered in the 19th century at Amarna in Egypt in Akhenaten’s archives.

The son of Amenhotep III and also the father of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten (1353-1336 B.C.) is known as the "heretic" pharaoh who introduced a monotheistic religion by overthrowing the pantheon of the gods to worship the sun god Aton.

The Amarna archives include tablets sent to Akhenaten by the kings who were subservient to him in Canaan and Syria, and provide details about the complex relationships between them.

Among these tablets are six that are addressed from Abdi-Heba, the Canaanite ruler of Jerusalem.

“The tablet fragment in Jerusalem is most likely part of a message that would have been sent from the king of Jerusalem, possibly Abdi-Heba, back to Egypt," said Eilat Mazar, the Hebrew University archaeologist who carried the excavation.

“The find testifies the importance of Jerusalem as a major city in the Late Bronze Age, long before its conquest by King David,” Mazar said.

The oldest known text previously found in Jerusalem was a tablet unearthed in the Shiloah water tunnel in the same area. Celebrating the completion of the tunnel, it dated back to the eight century B.C.

This tiny clay fragment predates that tablet by about 600 years.

Books on Akhenaten

Ancient Nubians drank antibiotic beer 2,000 years ago

Source: Discovery News



People have been using antibiotics for nearly 2,000 years, suggests a new study, which found large doses of tetracycline embedded in the bones of ancient African mummies.

What's more, they probably got it through beer, and just about everyone appears to have drank it consistently throughout their lifetimes, beginning early in childhood.

While the modern age of antibiotics began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin, the new findings suggest that people knew how to fight infections much earlier than that -- even if they didn't actually know what bacteria were.

Some of the first people to use antibiotics, according to the research, may have lived along the shores of the Nile in Sudanese Nubia, which spans the border of modern Egypt and Sudan.

"Given the amount of tetracycline there, they had to know what they were doing," said co-author George Armelagos, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta. "They may not have known what tetracycline was, but they certainly knew something was making them feel better."

Armelagos was part of a group of anthropologists that excavated the mummies in 1963. His original goal was to study osteoporosis in the Nubians, who lived between about 350 and 550 A.D. But while looking through a microscope at samples of the ancient bone under ultraviolet light, he saw what looked like tetracycline -- an antibiotic that was not officially patented in modern times until 1950.

At first, he assumed that some kind of contamination had occurred.

"Imagine if you're unwrapping a mummy, and all of a sudden, you see a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses on it," Armelagos said. "Initially, we thought it was a product of modern technology."

His team's first report about the finding, bolstered by even more evidence and published in Science in 1980, was met with lots of skepticism. For the new study, he got help dissolving bone samples and extracting tetracycline from them, clearly showing that the antibiotic was deposited into and embedded within the bone, not a result of contamination from the environment.

The analyses also showed that ancient Nubians were consuming large doses of tetracycline -- more than is commonly prescribed today as a daily dose for controlling infections from bad acne. The team, including chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, reported their results in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

They were also able to trace the antibiotic to its source: Grain that was contaminated with a type of mold-like bacteria called Streptomyces. Common in soil, Strep bacteria produce tetracycline antibiotics to kill off other, competing bacteria.

Grains that are stored underground can easily become moldy with Streptomyces contamination, though these bacteria would only produce small amounts of tetracycline on their own when left to sit or baked into bread. Only when people fermented the grain would tetracycline production explode. Nubians both ate the fermented grains as gruel and used it to make beer.

The scientists are working now to figure out exactly how much tetracycline Nubians were getting, but it appears that doses were high that consumption was consistent, and that drinking started early. Analyses of the bones showed that babies got some tetracycline through their mother's milk.

Then, between ages two and six, there was a big spike in antibiotics deposited in the bone, Armelagos said, suggesting that fermented grains were used as a weaning food.

Today, most beer is pasteurized to kill Strep and other bacteria, so there should be no antibiotics in the ale you order at a bar, said Dennis Vangerven, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

But Armelagos has challenged his students to home-brew beer like the Nubians did, including the addition of Strep bacteria. The resulting brew contains tetracycline, tastes sour but drinkable, and gives off a greenish hue.

There's still a possibility that ancient antibiotic use was an accident that the Nubians never knew about, though Armelagos has also found tetracycline in the bones of another population that lived in Jordan. And VanGerven has found the antibiotic in a group that lived further south in Egypt during the same period.

Finding tetracycline in these mummies, said VanGerven, was "surprising and unexpected. And at the very least, it gives us a very different time frame in which to understand the dynamic interaction between the bacterial world and the world of antibiotics."

Books On Nubian history