AL GORE'S GAME

Members of the black leadership network Project 21 urge elected representatives to use Al Gore's appearances today before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to ask the former Vice President about his own lavish energy consumption -- and his advocacy of a society in which only the wealthy could enjoy amenities most Americans currently take for granted, like home heating.

Gore's proposals would result in a society in which the rich get warmer and the poor get colder.

While Gore is a long-time proponent of personal energy conservation and draconian regulations to mandate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research revealed that Gore's mansion in the exclusive Belle Meade neighborhood of Nashville uses more than 20 times the national household average of electricity.

In response, Gore's office said the Gores "do the carbon emissions offset" -- such as making environment-related investments -- that allegedly neutralize the environmental harm related to their extraordinarily-high energy use.

Gore receives his offsets as a benefit from a company that he co-founded -- Generation Investment Management -- and reportedly does not pay for them himself. Interestingly, Carbon Neutral Company, which provides Generation Investment Management with its offsets, says its offsets "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... in the short term."

If Gore's "buying offsets" strategy were to be adopted nationally, the average consumer would essentially be expected to pay twice for heat and power: first for the energy itself, then for offsets to atone for them.

Such double-billing would be particularly harmful to poor households, which, disproportionately, are minority.

"Al Gore may sleep well at night thinking he's not contributing to global warming, but if he expects everyone to be able to buy their way out of the sin of using electricity, natural gas and driving their cars to work and errands without having to cut back on necessities he is badly mistaken," said Project 21 fellow Deneen Borelli. "From the looks of their utility bills, the Gores kept their home warm and toasty this winter. Have they thought about the single mother who provides for her family on a paycheck-by-paycheck basis? I don't think she could afford an offset to heat her home without cutting back on something vital such as nutritional food and health care for herself and her children."

According to the federal Energy Information Agency, in an analysis released during the Clinton-Gore administration, imposing the restrictions mandated by the United Nation's Kyoto Global Warming Treaty would cost the U.S. economy $400 billion per year and would raise utility bills by 86 percent and gasoline by 66 cents a gallon.

An econometric study commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce and other groups found that Kyoto regulations could put 3.2 million American jobs at risk -- including 864,000 jobs held by blacks and 511,000 held by Hispanics.

Already this winter, eight states, including Gore's Tennessee, report they have run out of money to help poor households pay for heating bills. Households that cannot afford to heat their homes, let alone pay for offsets.

"People are already freezing because they can't pay their bills and aid to help them is already stretched too thin. Al Gore would only make things worse if he imposed increased regulations on public utilities," said Project 21 member Kevin Martin. "If he wants to create a society where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, Gore's got the right idea with his global warming offsets and regulations."

GLOBAL WARMING HOAX

Is global warming a hoax? We've received a huge number of reader questions (and even complaints) about this issue. Many are convinced that global warming is just a hoax contrived by the government to grab power and destroy the economy. In my view, that explanation is half right.

Yes, in my opinion global warming and climate change is absolutely being used by Big Government to grab more power, restrict more freedoms and in many ways consolidate power at both the national and global levels. That much is clearly true. At the same time, however, climate change is really happening.

I see convincing evidence that the activities of humankind are, indeed, altering our atmosphere in ways that accelerate normal processes, essentially dominating the cycles and throwing them far out of balance. The recent findings on rising sea levels, for example, truly are cause for concern for long-term "big picture" thinkers. Good studies show sea levels rising at a rate approaching one centimeter per year.

Last week, 2500 scientists gathered in Copenhagen to issue a stark warning about carbon emissions and "irreversible shifts in climate." (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/ne...) And much like an environmental freedom fighter, NASA scientist James Hansen is now spearheading protests aimed at the "do nothing" governments that sit around and ignore the climate change problem while things continue to get worse.

It's important to remember that just because Big Government is exploiting this crisis to grab power doesn't mean the crisis is not real. What's happened here, in my view, is that power-hungry bureaucrats around the world have latched onto this very real development of climate change and found ways to exploit it to their own advantage.

As Hillary Clinton famously said recently, "Never waste a good crisis." And they sure aren't hesitating to leap on this climate change crisis as a way to restrict freedom and grab power.

Air Pollution on Global Temperature

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that although urban air pollution is expected to increase significantly in the coming century, it will not have a big effect on global temperature change.

While there may be temperature increases in certain regions, global mean surface temperature will not go up significantly because of urban air pollution, researchers at MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change wrote in a paper to be published in the September 27 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research--Atmospheres.

Using a method that allows global coupled-chemistry climate models to take urban air pollution into account in a new way, MIT researchers found that compared to a reference run excluding urban air pollution, the average tropospheric ozone concentration decreases while high concentrations of ozone are projected in the urban areas. As a consequence of the change in the chemical composition of the troposphere, the lifetime of methane increases. This leads to higher ambient methane concentrations, even if emissions are unaltered. As ozone decreases and methane increases, the net effect on the radiative budget of the Earth is small, because the contributions from these two greenhouse gases partially cancel each other out.

"People thought things would go in this direction, but they couldn't quantify it before," said Monika Mayer, research scientist at MIT's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and lead author on the paper, "Linking local air pollution to global chemistry and climate."

Global climate models are used by researchers to predict future conditions and to aid global policy matters such as the Kyoto Protocol. One example is the MIT Integrated Global System Model, which includes an economic development model; a two-dimensional land and ocean resolving interactive chemistry-climate model that divides the planet into 24 latitudinal bands; a terrestrial ecosystems model, and a natural emissions model.

While scientists agree that urban air pollution can alter concentrations of greenhouse gases such as ozone in the troposphere, they have left the complicated chemistry of urban air pollution out of global climate models. "Global-scale models that do not take into account urban areas' highly nonlinear atmospheric chemistry most likely overestimate tropospheric ozone production due to unreasonably high background nitric oxide concentrations," the authors write.

Yet, "high-resolution climate models don't have chemistry coupled to them," said Dr. Mayer. "It takes months just to run a global climate model without the chemistry."

Dr. Mayer and her colleagues, Chien Wang, Mort Webster, and Ronald G. Prinn, applied a method that allowed them to derive a computationally efficient urban air chemistry model from a state-of-the-art urban airshed model. They then coupled the "reduced form" urban air pollution model to the MIT integrated global climate model. This makes the global chemistry-climate model more powerful and comprehensive, because it is able to take urban air pollution into account in a way never before possible. "Our model takes about one day on a conventional workstation for a 100-year simulation. This is a powerful way to get interactions among air pollution, methane and other tropospheric gases," Dr. Mayer said.

Among the questions the more powerful model may help answer: How do air pollution and climate policies interact? What are the long-term effects of regional regulations regarding air pollution? What are the long-term effects or cost savings of targeting only greenhouse gases or more stringent Environmental Protection Agency air pollution regulations?

Population projections show that in the next 100 years, the concentration of people in urban areas will increase dramatically. While 30-40 percent of air pollution currently comes from urban areas, as much as 70 percent may originate from cities in the future. The researchers carried out three simulations of 100-year projections that factored in the effects of increased urban air pollution tied to population increases and economic development in these areas. They found that even with significant increases in air pollution, global mean temperature should not change much, although there may be more pronounced regional effects.

Vision - Light and Neuronal Activity of Eye

This videos shows, how exactly our eyes are working. How the light is captured by our eyes and send to brains through neural fibres. how we get a clear vision by the help of photo receptors, which is a key factor in vision of our eyes.

Color Vision

The color-responsive chemicals in the cones are called cone pigments and are very similar to the chemicals in the rods. The retinal portion of the chemical is the same, however the scotopsin is replaced with photopsins. Therefore, the color-responsive pigments are made of retinal and photopsins. There are three kinds of color-sensitive pigments:

• Red-sensitive pigment
• Green-sensitive pigment
• Blue-sensitive pigment

Each cone cell has one of these pigments so that it is sensitive to that color. The human eye can sense almost any gradation of color when red, green and blue are mixed.

In the diagram above, the wavelengths of the three types of cones (red, green and blue) are shown. Thepeak absorbancy of blue-sensitive pigment is 445 nanometers, for green-sensitive pigment it is 535 nanometers, and for red-sensitive pigment it is 570 nanometers.

SECRET OF EINSTEIN'S BRAIN

Dr. Diamond's work had received tremendous press coverage, only to be exposed as critically flawed in execution. In 1996, a University of Alabama researcher named Britt Anderson published another study on Einstein's brain with much less hullaballoo. Anderson had discovered that Einstein's frontal cortex was much thinner than normal, but that it was more densely packed with neurons. Anderson told Thomas Harvey that a researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, had been studying whether a more tightly packed cortex might explain differences in men's and women's brains. While men's brains were bigger, women's brains had the neurons packed tightly together, which may mean they can communicate more quickly.

Harvey took the name of that researcher and sent her a one-line fax: "Would you be willing to collaborate with me on studying the brain of Albert Einstein?". Dr. Sandra Witelson, the researcher at McMaster, answered back in the affirmative. What Witelson had going for her that other researchers did not was a large collection of brains with IQs, general health and psychiatric state accounted for. There would be no confusion about the control group, as there was with Diamond's work -- the 35 male brains used had an average IQ score of 116, slightly higher than normal (Witelson used 56 female brains for comparison as well). For decades, Witelson had been working with doctors and nurses to acquire brains for her research. She would be able to conduct the largest study of this kind.

Harvey went to Canada with the brain, and Witelson was allowed to select nearly a fifth of it for study -- more than any other researcher had been allowed. She selected pieces of the temporal and parietal lobes, and she also pored over the photographs Harvey had commissioned of the brain at the time of Einstein's death. She noticed that Einstein's Sylvian fissure was largely absent. The Sylvian fissure separates the parietal lobe into two distinct compartments, and without this dividing line, Einstein's parietal lobe was 15 percent wider than the average brain.

Significantly, the parietal lobe is responsible for skills such as mathematical ability, spatial reasoning and three-dimensional visualization. This seemed to fit in perfectly with how Einstein described his own thought process: "Words do not seem to play any roles," he once said. "[There are] more or less clear images" [source:Wilson]. The man who figured out the theory of relativity by imagining a ride on a light beam through space saw his ideas in pictures and then found the language to describe them [source: Lemonick].

Witelson hypothesizes that the lack of a Sylvian fissure may have allowed the brain cells to crowd in closer to one another, which in turn enabled them to communicate much faster than normal. This brain structure may also have had something to do with Einstein's delayed speech development, which raises questions about whether it's helpful to know this sort of information about yourself. If Einstein had known that his brain was different, maybe even flawed, would he have pursued academics?

At this point, scientists don't know enough about how the brain works to know if Witelson's work is accurate, though it's the going theory at the moment. For all visible purposes, Einstein's brain seems perfectly normal, if not a little damaged, with nothing that would immediately indicate any great genius. We may not know anything until there's another equivalent genius brain to study; perhaps Einstein can't be compared to average brains.

Harvey never gave up on his belief that the brain would reveal something special. Near the end of his life, after carting the brain around the country, he returned to the place from which he had taken it: Princeton Hospital. He gave the brain to the man who had his old pathology job; writer Michael Paterniti, who accompanied Harvey on one cross-country trip with the brain, hypothesized in the book "Driving With Mr. Albert" that Harvey picked someone who represented a sort of reincarnation of Harvey himself, something that the pathologist in question also acknowledges. "Well then, he's free now," the man told Paterniti of Harvey's choice, "and I'm shackled". If Einstein's brain ever truly reveals its secrets, Harvey won't be here to see it; he died in 2007 at the age of 94. Einstein and the mystery of his brain, however, live on.

THE SECRETS OF BRAIN

Scientists have developed biological cells that can give insight into the chemistry of the brain.

The cells, which change colour when exposed to specific chemicals, have been used to show how a class of schizophrenia drug works.

The researchers hope they will also help shed light on how many other drugs work on the brain.

The study, by the University of California - San Diego, is published in Nature Neuroscience.

Schizophrenia is most commonly associated with symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations.

But people with the illness also struggle to sustain attention or recall information.

A class of drugs called atypical neuroleptics has become commonly prescribed, in part because they seem to improve these problems.

However, the way they altered brain chemistry was uncertain.

It was known that the drugs trigger the release of a large amount of a chemical called acetylcholine, which enables brain cells to communicate with each other.

However, the drugs have also been shown to hobble a receptor on the surface of the receiving cell, which would effectively block the message.

The San Diego team designed biological cells - called CNiFERs - which changed colour when acetylcholine latched onto this particular class of receptors - an event scientists have not previously been able to detect in a living brain.

They implanted the cells into rat brains, then stimulated a deeper part of the brain in a way known to release acetylcholine nearby.

In response, CNiFERs changed colour - proving that they were working.

They then gave the rats one of two atypical neuroleptics. In both cases the drug severely depressed the response from the CNiFERs.

This suggested that the drugs' receptor-blocking action over-rides the increase they trigger in acetylcholine.

Researcher Professor David Kleinfeld said the new cells had great potential to reveal the mysteries of chemical action in the brain.

He said: "It's a world of signalling between cells that we were blind to before."

The researchers say they are already working to redesign CNiFERS so they can detect the activity of other types of receptors as well.

Paul Corry, of the mental health charity Rethink, said: "This study shows the value of mental health research.

"It is eliciting new information that could lead to the development of more effective drug treatments for schizophrenia, which have fewer of the debilitating side-effects associated with even the most modern atypical medicines.

"That in itself would benefit millions of people around the world.

"But the research also offers a new technique for understanding the workings of the brain that could also be developed for use across broad areas of medicine.

"We really do need to recognise that mental health research is starved of funds compared to other areas of medicine and recognise also that much of it takes place at the frontiers of our understanding which means that results from it could have far-reaching applications."

TR-3b EXPLAINED

Mr. Fouche describes the TR-3B's propulsion system as follows: "A circular, plasma filled accelerator ring called the Magnetic Field Disrupter, surrounds the rotatable crew compartment and is far ahead of any imaginable technology... The plasma, mercury based, is pressurized at 250,000 atmospheres at a temperature of 150 degrees Kelvin, and accelerated to 50,000 rpm to create a super-conductive plasma with the resulting gravity disruption.

The MFD generates a magnetic vortex field, which disrupts or neutralizes the effects of gravity on mass within proximity, by 89 percent...

The current MFD in the TR-3B causes the effect of making the vehicle extremely light, and able to outperform and outmaneuver any craft yet ...My sources say the performance is limited only the stresses that the human pilots can endure. Which is a lot, really, considering along with the 89% reduction in mass, the G forces are also reduced by 89%. The crew of the TR-3B should be able to comfortable take up to 40Gs... Reduced by 89%, the occupants would feel about 4.2 Gs.

The TR-3Bs propulsion is provided by 3 multimode thrusters mounted at each bottom corner of the triangular platform. The TR-3 is a sub-Mach 9 vehicle until it reaches altitudes above l20,000 feet - then who knows how fast it can go!..."

I was skeptical of Mr. Fouche's claims when I first read them, as I' m sure that many of you are, but I was interested enough to do further research on what happens when you spin a plasma at high speeds in a ring (toroidal) configuration. I came across a physics article (sorry, I can't seem to locate the source right now) that described this exact configuration. The article said that, surprisingly, the charged particles of the plasma don't just spin uniformly around the ring, but they tend to take up a synchronized, tightly pitched, helical (screw thread) motion as they move around the ring. This can be understood in a general way as follows: the charged particles moving around the ring act as a current that in turn sets up a magnetic field around the ring. It is a well-known fact that electrons (or ions) tend to move in a helical fashion around magnetic field lines. Although it is a highly complex interaction, it only requires a small leap of faith to believe that the end result of these interactions between the moving charged particles (current) and associated magnetic fields results in the helical motion described above. In other words, the charged particles end up moving in very much the same pattern as the current on a wire tightly wound around a toroidal core.

I thought that this was an interesting fact, but didn't see how it could possibly relate to antigravity, until I ran across the following article: "Guidelines to Antigravity" by Dr. Robert Forward, written in 1962 (available at: http://www.whidbey.com/forward/pdf/tp007.pdf). Dr. Forward's article describes several little known aspects of Einstein's General Relativity Theory that indicate how moving matter can create unusual gravitational effects. When I saw Figure 5 in Dr. Forward's article, the pieces of the puzzle all fell together. I instantly saw how the moving matter pattern that Dr. Forward describes as necessary to generate a gravitational dipole was exactly the same as the plasma ring pattern described in the physics article discussed above!

If Fouche's description is even close to correct, then the TR-3B utilizes this little known loophole in General Relativity Theory to create it's antigravity effects! Even though the TR-3B can only supposedly cancel 89% of gravity (and inertia) today, there is no reason why the technology can't be improved to exceed 100% and achieve true antigravity capability!

In theory, this same moving matter pattern could be mechanically reproduced by mounting a bunch of small gyroscopes all around the larger ring, with their axis on the larger ring, and then spinning both the gyroscopes and the ring at high speeds. However, as Dr. Forward points out any such mechanical system would probably fly apart before any significant antigravity effects could be generated.

However, as Dr. Forward states, "By using electromagnetic forces to contain rotating systems, it would be possible for the masses to reach relativistic velocities; thus a comparatively small amount of matter, if dense enough and moving fast enough, could produce usable gravitational effects."

The requirement for a dense material moving at relativistic speeds would explain the use of Mercury plasma (heavy ions). If the plasma really spins at 50,000 RPM and the Mercury ions are also moving in a tight pitched spiral, then the individual ions would be moving probably hundreds, perhaps thousands of times faster than the bulk plasma spin, in order to execute their "screw thread" motions. It is quite conceivable that the ions could be accelerated to relativistic speeds in this manner. I am guessing that you would probably want to strip the free electrons from the plasma, making a positively charged plasma, since the free electrons would tend to counter rotate and reduce the efficiency of the antigravity device.

One of Einstein's postulates of GR says that gravitational mass and inertial mass are equivalent. This is consistent with Mr. Fouche's claim that inertial mass within the plasma ring is also reduced by 89%. This would also explain why the vehicle is triangular shaped. Since it still requires conventional thrusters for propulsion, the thrusters would need to be located outside of the "mass reduction zone" or else the mass of the thruster's reaction material would also be reduced, making them terribly inefficient. Since it requires a minimum of 3 legs to have a stable stool, it follows that they would need a minimum of 3 thrusters to have a stable aerospace platform. Three thrusters, located outside of the plasma ring, plus appropriate structural support, would naturally lead to a triangular shape for the vehicle.

I was extremely skeptical of Mr. Fouche's claimed size for the TR-3B, of 600 feet across. At first, I thought that this must be a typo. Why would anyone in their right mind build a "Tactical Reconnaissance" vehicle 2 football fields long? They must be nuts! However, the answer to this may also be found in Dr. Forward's paper. As Dr. Forward's puts it, "...even the most optimistic calculations indicate that very large devices will be required to create usable gravitational forces. Antigravity...like all modern sciences, will require special projects involving large sums of money, men, and energy."

TR-3b

The TR-3B is Code named Astra. The tactical reconnaissance TR-3B first operational flight was in the early 90s. The triangular shaped nuclear powered aerospace platform was developed under the Top Secret, Aurora Program with SDI and black budget monies. At least 3 of the billion dollar plus TR-3Bs were flying by 1994. The Aurora is the most classified aerospace development program in existence. The TR-3B is the most exotic vehicle created by the Aurora Program. It is funded and operationally tasked by the National Reconnaissance Office, the NSA, and the CIA. The TR-3B flying triangle is not fiction and was built with technology available in the mid 80s. Not every UFO spotted is one of theirs.

The TR-3B vehicles outer coating is reactive to electrical Radar stimulation and can change reflectiveness, radar absorptiveness, and color. This polymer skin, when used in conjunction with the TR-3Bs Electronic Counter Measures and, ECCM, can make the vehicle look like a small aircraft, or a flying cylinder--or even trick radar receivers into falsely detecting a variety of aircraft, no aircraft, or several aircraft at various locations. A circular, plasma filled accelerator ring called the Magnetic Field Disrupter, surrounds the rotatable crew compartment and is far ahead of any imaginable technology.

Sandia and Livermore laboratories developed the reverse engineered MFD technology. The government will go to any lengths to protect this technology. The plasma, mercury based, is pressurized at 250,000 atmospheres at a temperature of 150 degrees Kelvin and accelerated to 50,000 rpm to create a super-conductive plasma with the resulting gravity disruption. The MFD generates a magnetic vortex field, which disrupts or neutralizes the effects of gravity on mass within proximity, by 89 percent. Do not misunderstand. This is not antigravity. Anti-gravity provides a repulsive force that can be used for propulsion. The MFD creates a disruption of the Earth's gravitational field upon the mass within the circular accelerator. The mass of the circular accelerator and all mass within the accelerator, such as the crew capsule, avionics, MFD systems, fuels, crew environmental systems, and the nuclear reactor, are reduced by 89%. This causes the effect of making the vehicle extremely light and able to outperform and outmaneuver any craft yet constructed--except, of course, those UFOs we did not build.

The TR-3B is a high altitude, stealth, reconnaissance platform with an indefinite loiter time. Once you get it up there at speed, it doesnt take much propulsion to maintain altitude. At Groom Lake their have been whispered rumours of a new element that acts as a catalyst to the plasma. With the vehicle mass reduced by 89%, the craft can travel at Mach 9, vertically or horizontally. My sources say the performance is limited only the stresses that the human pilots can endure. Which is a lot, really, considering along with the 89% reduction in mass, the G forces are also reduced by 89%.

The TR-3Bs propulsion is provided by 3 multimode thrusters mounted at each bottom corner of the triangular platform. The TR-3 is a sub-Mach 9 vehicle until it reaches altitudes above l20,000 feet--then God knows how fast it can go! The 3 multimode rocket engines mounted under each corner of the craft use hydrogen or methane and oxygen as a propellent. In a liquid oxygen/hydrogen rocket system, 85% of the propellent mass is oxygen. The nuclear thermal rocket engine uses a hydrogen propellent, augmented with oxygen for additional thrust. The reactor heats the liquid hydrogen and injects liquid oxygen in the supersonic nozzle, so that the hydrogen burns concurrently in the liquid oxygen afterburner. The multimode propulsion system can; operate in the atmosphere, with thrust provided by the nuclear reactor, in the upper atmosphere, with hydrogen propulsion, and in orbit, with the combined hydrogen\ oxygen propulsion.

What you have to remember is, that the 3 rocket engines only have to propel 11 percent of the mass of the Top Secret TR-3B. The engines are reportedly built by Rockwell. Many sightings of triangular UFOs are not alien vehicles but the top secret TR-3B. The NSA, NRO, CIA, and USAF have been playing a shell game with aircraft nomenclature - creating the TR-3, modified to the TR-3A, the TR-3B, and the Teir 2, 3, and 4, with suffixes like Plus or Minus added on to confuse further the fact that each of these designators is a different aircraft and not the same aerospace vehicle. A TR-3B is as different from a TR-3A as a banana is from a grape. Some of these vehicles are manned and others are unmanned.

ANTI GRAVITY

In physical cosmology, astronomy and celestial mechanics, anti-gravity is the idea of creating a place or object that is free from the force ofgravity. It does not refer to the lack of weight under gravity experienced in free fall or orbit, nor to balancing the force of gravity with some other force, such as electromagnetism or aerodynamic lift.

Instead, anti-gravity requires that the fundamental causes of the force of gravity be made either not present or not applicable to the place or object through some kind of technological intervention. Anti-gravity is a recurring concept in science fiction, particularly in the context ofspacecraft propulsion. The concept was first introduced formally as "Cavorite" in H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, and has been a favorite item of imaginary technology since that day.

In the first mathematically accurate description of gravity, Newton's law of universal gravitation, gravity was an external force transmitted by unknown means. However in the early part of the 20th century Newton's model was replaced by the more general and complete description known as general relativity. In general relativity, gravity is not a force in the traditional sense of the word, but the result of the geometry of space itself. These geometrical solutions always cause attractive "forces". Under general relativity, anti-gravity is highly unlikely, except under contrived circumstances that are regarded as unlikely or impossible. The term "anti-gravity" is also sometimes used to refer to hypotheticalreactionless propulsion drives based on certain solutions to general relativity, although these do not oppose gravity as such.

There are numerous newer theories that add onto general relativity or replace it outright, and some of these appear to allow anti-gravity-like solutions. However, according to the current widely accepted physical theories, verified in experiments, and according to the major directions of physical research, it is considered highly unlikely that anti-gravity is possible.

Symbols of MU

According to Churchward, Mu was a lost continent in the Pacific Ocean, which was destroyed in a global cataclysm tens of thousands of years ago; Mu was the original home of mankind, and all subsequent civilizations descended from it. The Pacific islands and their inhabitants are supposed to be the last survivors of this primordial motherland. Churchward's Mu was a huge continent, which stretched from Micronesia in the West to Easter Island and Hawaii in the East. Churchward also believed in a literal mid-Atlantic Atlantis. He proposed a global network of huge gas-filled caverns which, if vented, could cause large areas of land to be submerged.

Churchward served with the British Army for thirty years. He claimed that, while posted in India, he befriended a priest ('Rishi'), who revealed to him ancient tablets written in an otherwise unknown language. The Rishi taught Churchward how to read this language, Naacal. The tablets described the land of Mu, the Lemuria of the Theosophists. He also claimed that he was able to discern writing from Mu on a mysterious set of tablets discovered in Mexico by an explorer named William Niven.

Churchward's Mu theory hasn't achieved even the marginal credibility of Atlantis. For one thing, his science is absurd. The Pacific appears to have been free of large land masses for billions of years. In fact, the Pacific basin may mark the place where the Moon was expelled from the proto-earth. Coral atolls that dot the Pacific have taken millions of undisturbed years of activity to form. And the Pacific was one of the last regions on the planet to be settled by humans; this is proven by linguistic evidence, and the well-documented oral traditions which describe the history of the Polynesian migrations.

It doesn't help matters that Churchward's books are largely absent of apparatus such as footnotes or bibliography, and his basic source material cannot be independently confirmed. In his Mu-monomania, he employs circular and tautological reasoning. Often, he will make a startling assertion, and before supporting it, will move on to some other train of thought. At other times, he writes factually about, say, Egyptian mythology, without any clue for the reader as to why this proves anything about Mu. The reader is simultaneously entertained and irritated by this intellectual shell game.

However, Churchward may have the last laugh yet. There was a large land mass in the Pacific that was submerged during prehistoric times: Sundaland, the continental shelf around Indonesia, which was exposed during the ice ages. It was most certainly the route that humans used to get to Australia, as only a few kilometers of water separated Sundaland from Australia at that time. Although it was submerged slowly as the result of rising sea levels at the end of the ice age, the region has some of the most violent volcanoes on Earth (such as the famous Krakatoa). A documented eruption in that region about 60,000 years ago may have decimated the human race, producing a 'population bottleneck' during which our species was reduced to a few hundred individuals; this has emerged from mitochondrial DNA studies. Some have hypothesized that Sundaland may have been home to an early lost civilization, perhaps the home of the mysterious voyagers who charted the anomalous ice-age maps which the early modern map-makers incorporated in their atlases. While not Mu or Lemuria, of all of the nooks and crannies where a lost civilization might have existed, Sundaland is one of the most plausible; only time will tell.

ORBS

The Old Orb Theories

For the past 10 years or so, and since digital cameras have become more popular, the Internet has seen a explosion of photographs of these little balls of light that many misinformed ghost hunters have wrongly claimed as being the first stage of a ghost manifestation.

There are no plausible hypotheses that I could find on the internet that could explain what an orb is consisted of or how does a dead body create one of these floating balls of light that appear on digital camera but not to the naked eye. The only evidence that I have been able to find is anecdotal reports by ghost hunters wanting to support a claim that has no grounding in solid science and who also lack the knowledge to be able to come up with a logical answer but instead prefer to jump to the fantastical conclusion because that is what they have read on the Internet. Of course, we then have the abundance of poorly taken photographs that are claimed to be the 'proof'.

Orbs often appear in photographs when some airborne dust particles, moisture or insects are outside the depth of field of the camera and the flash is a few degrees away from the axis of the camera lens. This in turn causes the object to be displayed as a semi-transparent brightly light but very out of focus ball of light. If you want a great step-by-step guide on how to take orb photographs, try taking a look at assap.org and click on 'Paranormal Photos' (http://www.assap.org/newsite/htmlfiles/Photos.html). There you will find all the information that you could ever need to reproduce these orb pictures.

Now many ghost hunting websites out there have stopped publishing orb photos on their websites. One can only speculate that they have at last seen reason or it may be just that they are sick of getting the flack for their misguided beliefs. However, there are still the hardened believers out there that will not accept any other explanation and still feel that there are legitimate orb photos. Over the years I have heard many Orb believers that accept that dust and moisture could cause false orbs, but they state in their defence that the false orbs have a blue halo or edge whereas a real orb picture wont.

Sadly for the orb believer, this blue halo or edging is well known to photographers and is caused by nothing less than cheap, low quality optics and certain sensors within the camera. Another theory that I have come across is that orbs are not ghosts at all, rather that they are photographs of energy being transferred to the spirit or ghost. In the past I have read on one pro-orb website saying something like “the laws of physics say that energy would naturally take on the the shape of a sphere”, which anyone with a high school level of physics knowledge would know that energy is not a physical substance that appears as a glowing ball in photographs at all. In fact energy is nothing more than a measurement. So it confuses me as to what laws of physics they are talking about.

New Orb Theories - The New Way Of Thinking

With all these theories being shot down in flames, there may just be one last bastion of hope for the much debated orb. Allan, the co-founder of Ghost Science has come up with a very interesting orb theory that is actually plausible. Allan's theory is based upon the fourth state of matter (solid, liquid, gases, plasma) called plasma. Plasma is a conductive collection of charged particles, namely Ions, which act as a collective, a bit like the Borg from Star Trek (in other words, they work as one organism). Plasma makes up 99% of the visible universe, however, there are billions of different types of plasma and these have been placed into simple categories. The one we are are interested in has a large multi-scale structure, exerts a large electromagnetic field and operates at a near zero core operating temperature.

This type of plasma is commonly based in crystal state, however, there are also other forms of plasma that are carbon based which occur naturally as air ions are bombarded by dust particles found all around us in the air. What makes this interesting is that the electromagnetic field (EMF) of this type of plasma borders the Infrared side of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Allan's work in this field has led him to believe that there is another type of plasma that is similar to the type described above but the ionic bombardment of carbon based dust results in a new plasma class which maintains itself endothermically by using any electrical source which maintains a stable electromagnetic field. This method would mathematically give it a larger than normal EMF, however, despite the well known rumor that ghosts give off electromagnetic fields, this type of plasma would actually be using other sources of locally produced EMF fields and then distorting them like a cheap kettle on a houses wiring circuits to help create the manifestation.

The plasma would be attracted to sources of High EMF but repelled by high temperatures. Allan estimates theory fits an orbs description perfectly as it would be most commonly found at night when air temperatures are lower but ground temperatures are higher. The resulting orb would dash about wildly as a result of such thermal differences and electromagnetic attraction.
The orbs internal electromagnetic field would be close to the Infrared end of the spectrum which would result in Infrared anomalies when using imaging equipment such as video cameras, and as the orb has a cold core, it would cause a cold feeling when someone is in close proximity to it.

Further spikes on a ghost hunters EMF meter would only be the result of additional 'drain' from other sources of electromagnetic fields in close proximity and would cause anomalies to such fields because of the unstable nature of plasma.