A Child's Letter

Scientology vs. Anonymous

Been keeping up with the efforts of Anonymous (Project Chanology) against Scientology ? These are the same folks that are spreading around the Tom Cruise videos. So, now, how does that phrase go, about getting a kiss before getting f'd?

Bonus link: Scientology in 100 seconds

Moon vs. Earth

Moon wins.

Bricks better than stakes?

This was never in Buffy!

Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

"This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire," Borrini told Reuters by telephone. "This helps ... authenticate how the myth of vampires was born."

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 -- in which the artist Titian died -- on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse's teeth, and vampires became known as "shroud-eaters."

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the "undead" were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

"To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there," said Borrini. "It's possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized."

credit:Reuters

Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Brazil model who lost hands, feet dies

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Health officials say a Brazilian model whose feet and hands were amputated because of an infection has died.

Officials said in a statement early Saturday that 20-year-old Mariana Bridi's condition deteriorated overnight. She died at 2:30 a.m.

The Espirito Santo State Health Secretariat said in the statement she died from complications related to a generalized infection. It was caused by the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is known to be resistant to multiple kinds of antibiotics.

Bridi had been in the hospital in the city of Serra in southeastern Brazil since Jan. 3. She fell ill in December and doctors originally diagnosed her with kidney stones, local media said.

Bridi was twice a finalist in the Brazilian stage of the Miss World pageant.

credits: AP Jan 24

Cloaking upon us

Funded, of course, by War Inc.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel. The world’s two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.

It follows earlier work at Imperial College London that achieved similar results with microwaves. Like light, these are a form of electromagnetic radiation but their longer wave-length makes them far easier to manipulate. Achieving the same effect with visible light is a big advance.

Underlying the work is the idea that bending visible light around an object will hide it.

Xiang Zhang, the leader of the researchers, said: “In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock.” An observer looking at the cloaked object would then see light from behind it – making it seem to disappear.

credit: Times Online UK

08-08-08

And apart from the fact that the date itself looks cool (it could have been perfect for the apocalypse) in the technology world, 8/8/8 is also special for other reasons:

1876 - Thomas Edison receives a patent for his mimeograph, a precursor of the photocopier.
1908 - Wilbur Wright makes his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France. It's the Wright Brothers' first public flight and the French public goes wild.
1910 - The US Army installs the first tricycle landing gear on the Army's Wright Flyer.
1929 - The German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a round-the-world flight.
1946 - First flight of the Convair B-36. The B-36 was the largest mass-produced piston engined aircraft ever made and the biggest wingspan combat aircraft ever built.
1974 - Watergate scandal: U.S. President Richard Nixon announces his resignation, effective the next day.
1989 - Space Shuttle program: STS-28 Mission - Space Shuttle Columbia takes off on a secret five-day military mission.

credits: Gawker/Gizmodo

It's the last one that makes me go "wha?"

Like cream drops in black coffee

How hot is this shit?!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space and say it is strung along web-like filaments that form the backbone of the universe.

The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday.

Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter -- the protons and neutrons that make up atoms -- but there also is an even larger amount of invisible "dark" matter.

Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.

"We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe," said Mike Shull of the University of Colorado, who helped lead the study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The matter is spread as superheated oxygen and hydrogen in what looked like vast empty spaces between galaxies.

However, observations of a quasar -- a bright object far off in space -- show its light is diffused much as a lighthouse can reflect on a thin fog that was invisible in the dark.

"It is kind of like a spider web. The gravity of the spider web is what produced what we see," Shull said in a telephone interview. "It's very thin. Some of it is very hot gas, almost a million degrees."

This is where the dark matter comes in. The dark matter is heating up the gas, Shull said.

"Dark matter has gravity. It pulls the gas in," Shull said. "This causes what I call sonic booms -- shock waves. This shock heats it to a million degrees. That makes it even harder to see."

The atoms of oxygen are in a stripped-down, ionized form. Five of the eight electrons are gone. It emits an ultraviolet spectrum of light that instruments aboard FUSE and Hubble can spot, Shull said.

These web-like filaments of matter are the structure upon which the galaxies form, he said.

"So when we look at the distribution of galaxies on a very large scale, we see they are not uniform," Shull said. "They spread out in sheets and filaments."

Some faint dwarf galaxies or wisps of matter in these structures could be forming galaxies right now, the researchers said.

Shull and colleagues said these webs of hydrogen and oxygen are too hot to be seen in visible light and too cool to be seen in X-rays.

credit:By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
(Editing by Will Dunham and Xavier Briand)

(too many cooks, but still....--ss)

Cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions....

Nothing to see here ... move it along...

The Nazi Paranormal Bureau