Earthlike Planets Much More Common Than Previously Thought?

Astronomers find batch of SuperEarths

European researchers said on Monday they discovered a batch of three "SuperEarths" orbiting a nearby star, and two other solar systems with small planets as well. They said their findings, presented at a conference in France, suggest that Earth-like planets may be very common.

"Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?" asked Michel Mayor of Switzerland's Geneva Observatory. "We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it," Mayor said in a statement.

The trio of planets orbit a star slightly less massive than our Sun, 42 light-years away towards the southern Doradus and Pictor constellations. A light-year is the distance light can travel in one year at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, or about 6 trillion miles. The planets are bigger than Earth, one is 4.2 times the mass, one is 6.7 times and the third is 9.4 times.

They orbit their star at extremely rapid speeds, one whizzing around in just four days, compared with Earth's 365 days, one taking 10 days and the slowest taking 20 days. Mayor and colleagues used the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS, a telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile , to find the planets. More than 270 so-called exoplanets have been found. Most are giants, resembling Jupiter or Saturn. Smaller planets closer to the size of Earth are far more difficult to spot. None can be imaged directly at such distances but can be spotted indirectly using radio waves or, in the case of HARPS, spectrographic measurements. As a planet orbits, it makes the star wobble very slightly , and this can be measured.

"With the advent of much more precise instruments such as the HARPS spectrograph ... we can now discover smaller planets, with masses between 2 and 10 times the Earth's mass," said Stephane Udry, who also worked on the study.

The team also said they found a planet 7.5 times the mass of Earth orbiting the star HD 181433 in 9.5 days. This star also has a Jupiter-like planet that orbits every three years. Another solar system has a planet 22 times the mass of Earth, orbiting every four days, and a Saturn-like planet with a 3 yr period.

"Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg," said Mayor. "The analysis of all the stars studied with HARPS shows that about one third of all solar-like stars have either SuperEarth or Neptune-like planets with orbital periods shorter than 50 days."

Mayan End of Days 2012

It is world known that the Mayan calendar says that the world is going to end on December 21st, 22nd, or 23rd (there is some debate about which day), but does it really say that? Or does it say something else entirely?

For the purposes of this article, I will refer to December 21, 22, and 23 as the "end of days". The Maya date civilization back to August 13, 3114 b.c. This is the beginning of the Mayan calendar. The date is also the beginning of the 5th Great Cycle. The Mayans believed that there are 5 Great Cycles of the Earth and that the beginning of civilization was the beginning of the 5th one. 2012 is the year thet the 5th Great Cycle is supposed to end. This is where the belief that the End of Days is 2012 comes from. All 5 Great Cycles are supposed to end in destruction.

There are several important events happening in 2012, particlularly on the end of days. The Earth, the Sun, and the black hole at the center of the Milky way Galaxy will align, this happens once every 26,000 years, also the Earth will complete one wobble around it's axis, another event that happens about once every 26,000 years ( more on happenings in 2012 later).

The Mayan calendar has made many prophesies that have come true. The third part of the calendar, the Katune is broken down into 13 parts each being 20 years and having it's own prophesy. For ex. Katune 10's prophesy is " Bleak times, Drought, famine, foreing occupation, change." Katne 10 last happened during WW2.

Katune 1's prophesy is "great changes, rebuild". This Katune next begins on the End of Days. Does this mean that there are going to be people left to rebuild? I believe that it does.

Nobody knows for sure, but in astrology, the Age of Aquaruis is supposed to begin sometime between the late 1900's to the early 2000's. Consensus is that it could begin close to the beginning of this century. Could it actually start on the End of Days? The Age of Aquarius is supposed to herald in a time of great changes and enlightenment, when we see what we have done wrong and really fix the problem.

Katune 2 (2032) is prophesised as" for half there will be good, the other half, misfortune, end of the world of God, uniting for a cause." I (and many others in the scholar community) believe that this means that these 2 halves must unite if we are going to survive.

Many believe that to figure out what is going to happen to us, we must look at what happened to the writers of the prophesies, the Mayans, and what happened to their civilization. The Mayan world was over populated, misused their natural resourses, and were in a constant state of warfare. When the Spaniards came, the Mayans were able to hold them back for years, then suddenly, the Spaniards overtook the Mayans. They seemed to have given into their fate.

Does any of the Mayan's story seem familiar to you? it should, the whole world is overpopulated, we are overusing our natural resourses, and the whole world is beginning to be in warfare. All we are missing is the invading force. I don't believe that the world is going to come to and end completly, but because of what we are doing to our environment and to each other, we ourselves are going to bring about the end of the world as we know it.

Could Humans Have Faced a Near Extinction 70,000 Years Ago?

An extensive genetic study is suggesting that human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago. The human population at that time was reduced to very small and isolated groups on the African Continent, most likely due to intense drought conditions, according to an analysis released Thursday. The report also notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated the number of early humans may have been reduced to as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand in the early Stone Age.

"This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history," Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence, said in a statement. "Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA."

Wells is director of the Genographic Project, launched in 2005 to study anthropology using genetics. The report was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. Previous studies using mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down through mothers, have traced modern humans to a single "mitochondrial Eve," who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The migrations of humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal. The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa which appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and Saharon Rosset of IBM TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations prior to the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.

Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago and the researchers said this climatological shift most likely contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups which developed independently. Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, commented: "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction."

Today more than 6.6 billion people inhabit the globe, according to the US Census Bureau. The research was funded by the National Geographic Society, IBM, the Waitt Family Foundation, the Seaver Family Foundation, Family Tree DNA and Arizona Research Labs.

Centralia, Pennsylvania a town on fire since 1962

Johnathan Faust opened Bull's Head Tavern in 1841 in what was then Roaring Creek Township. In 1854, Alexander W. Rea, a civil and mining engineer for the Locust Mountain Coal and Iron Company, moved to the site and laid out streets and lots for development. The town was known as Centreville until 1865, when the post office was established and the name was changed to Centralia. Centralia was incorporated as a borough in 1866. The anthracite coal industry was the principal employer in the community. Coal mining continued in Centralia until the 1960s, when most of the companies went out of business. Bootleg mining continued until 1982. Strip and open-pit mining is still active in the area, and there is an underground mine employing about 40 employees three miles to the west.

The borough was served by two railroads, the Philadelphia and Reading and the Lehigh Valley, with the Lehigh Valley being the principal carrier. Rail service ended in 1966. The borough operated its own school district with elementary schools and a high school within its precincts. There were also two Catholic parochial schools in the borough. The borough once had seven churches, five hotels, twenty-seven saloons, two theatres, a bank, post office, and fourteen general and grocery stores. During most of the borough's history, when coal mining activity was being conducted, the town had a population in excess of 2,000 residents. Another 500 to 600 residents lived in unincorporated areas immediately adjacent to Centralia.

Mine fire
In May 1962, Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, but in previous years the landfill was in a different location. The firemen, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire, let it burn for a time, and then extinguished the fire. However, the fire was not extinguished.

In her 2007 book about Centralia, Joan Quigley asserts that the fire began on May 27 when one of the two commercial haulers serving the borough "hurled hot ashes onto the dump." Quigley cites "interviews with volunteer firemen, the former fire chief, borough officials, and several eyewitnesses, as well as contemporaneous borough council minutes" as her sources for this explanation of the fire.

The fire remained burning in the lower depths of the garbage and eventually spread through a hole in the rock pit into the abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Attempts to extinguish the fire were unsuccessful, and it continued to burn throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Adverse health effects were reported by several people due to the carbon monoxide produced.


Where PA Route 61 Cuts off due to the Mine FireIn 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas station owner inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when 12 yr old Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole four feet wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet. He was saved after his older cousin pulled him from the mouth of the hole before he could plunge to his probable death. The incident brought national attention to Centralia as an investigatory group (including a state representative, a state senator, and a mine safety director) were coincidentally on a walking tour of Domboski's neighborhood at the time of his near-death incident.

Section of PA Route 61 closed due to mine fire.In 1984, Congress allocated more than $42 million for relocation efforts. Most of the residents accepted buyout offers and moved to the nearby communities of Mount Carmel and Ashland. A few families opted to stay despite warnings from state officials.

In 1992, Pennsylvania claimed eminent domain on all properties in the borough, condemning all the buildings within. A subsequent legal effort by residents to have the decision reversed failed. In 2002, the United States Postal Service revoked Centralia's ZIP code, 17927.

Today
A 1999 photo showing the abandoned highway, and its replacementA handful of occupied homes remain in Centralia. Most of the buildings have been razed, and at a casual glance the area now appears to be a meadow with several paved streets through it. Some areas are being filled with new-growth forest. Most of Centralia's roads and sidewalks are overgrown with brush, although some areas appear to be mowed. The remaining church in the borough holds weekly Saturday night services, and the borough's four cemeteries are still well-maintained. Centralia's cemeteries now have a far greater population than the town, including one on the hilltop that has smoke rising around and out of it.

The only indications of the fire, which underlies some 400 acres, spreading along four fronts, are low round metal steam vents in the south of the borough, and several signs warning of underground fire, unstable ground, and carbon monoxide. Additional smoke and steam can be seen coming from an abandoned portion of Pennsylvania Route 61, the area just behind the hilltop cemetery, and various other cracks in the ground scattered about the area. Route 61 was repaired several times until its final closing. The current route was a detour around the damaged portion during the repairs and became a permanent route in the mid 90's, thus abandonment occurred to the old route with permanent barriers being placed at both ends of the former route. However, the underground fire is still burning and will continue to do so for the indefinite future. There are no current plans to extinguish the fire, which is consuming an eight mile seam containing enough coal to fuel it for 250 years.

The Battle of Hastings 1066

When Edward the Confessor died he left no direct heir, and the throne of England passed to Harold. However, William of Normandy claimed that Edward had promised the crown to him, and indeed that Harold himself had sworn a sacred oath to relinquish his claim in William's favour. William prepared an invasion fleet and, armed with a papal bull declaring his right to the throne, he crossed the English Channel to land near Pevensey.

Harold , in the meantime, had another threat to concern him; his brother Tostig allied with Harald Hardrada of Norway and landed in the north of England. They took York, but Harold defeated them soundly at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. No sooner had the battle dust settled than Harold received news of William's invasion in the south. He marched his tired men from York to Sussex, arriving there on October 13 to face the Normans.

The battle took place on October 14, 1066. Harold and the English army took up a defensive position on a high ridge known as Senlac. The battle began with devastating volleys of stone missiles hurled into the Norman infantry by the Saxon "fyrd", or irregular troops levied from the shires. William himself led the centre of the Norman army, and it is said that he carried into battle some of the holy relics upon which Harold had sworn to cede the crown to him.

The Norman infantry made no dent in the Saxon lines, and the cavalry fared no better. But when some of the Norman horsemen turned and fled, a large group of Saxons left their position to chase them. It was a fatal mistake, as William rallied his men and routed the unprotected attackers. The Saxon lines quickly closed, but they had not learned their lesson, and they repeated the same folly of chasing an apparently fleeing enemy twice more as the day wore on. By late afternoon the Saxon lines were wavering under continued Norman attacks. It is then that the most famous arrow in English history was released by an anonymous Norman archer. The arrow took King Harold in the eye, and a final Norman onslaught killed him where he stood. The rest of the leaderless Saxons ceded Senlac ridge yard by grudging yard, but eventually they had no choice but to turn and flee the field. The day belonged to Duke William, soon to be dubbed, "the Conqueror". The body of King Harold was eventually buried in Waltham Abbey.

The Battle of Hastings was the decisive Norman victory in the Norman Conquest of England. Although there were sporadic outbreaks of Saxon resistance to Norman rule after the Battle of Hastings, notably in East Anglia under Hereward the Wake, and in the north of England, from this point on England was effectively ruled by the Normans.

Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn

In 1875, Sioux and Cheyenne Indians defiantly abandoned their reservations, outraged over the continued intrusions of whites into their sacred lands in the Black Hills. They gathered in Montana with the great warrior Sitting Bull to fight for their lands. The following spring, two victories over the US Cavalry emboldened them to fight on in the summer of 1876. To force the large Indian army back to the reservations, the Army dispatched three columns to attack in coordinated fashion, one of which contained Lt. Colonel George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. Spotting the Sioux village about fifteen miles away along the Rosebud River on June 25, Custer also found a nearby group of about forty warriors. Ignoring orders to wait, he decided to attack before they could alert the main party. He did not realize that the number of warriors in the village numbered three times his strength. Dividing his forces in three, Custer sent troops under Captain Frederick Benteen to prevent their escape through the upper valley of the Little Bighorn River. Major Marcus Reno was to pursue the group, cross the river, and charge the Indian village in a coordinated effort with the remaining troops under his command. He hoped to strike the Indian encampment at the northern and southern ends simultaneously, but made this decision without knowing what kind of terrain he would have to cross before making his assault. He belatedly discovered that he would have to negotiate a maze of bluffs and ravines to attack.

Reno's squadron of 175 soldiers attacked the southern end. Quickly finding themselves in a desperate battle with little hope of any relief, Reno halted his charging men before they could be trapped, fought for ten minutes in dismounted formation, and then withdrew into the timber and brush along the river. When that position proved indefensible, they retreated uphill to the bluffs east of the river, pursued hotly by a mix of Cheyenne and Sioux. Just as they finished driving the soldiers out, the Indians found roughly 210 of Custer's men coming towards the other end of the village, taking the pressure off of Reno's men. Cheyenne and Hunkpapa Sioux together crossed the river and slammed into the advancing soldiers, forcing them back to a long high ridge to the north. Meanwhile, another force, largely Oglala Sioux under Crazy Horse's command, swiftly moved downstream and then doubled back in a sweeping arc, enveloping Custer and his men in a pincer move. They began pouring in gunfire and arrows.

As the Indians closed in, Custer ordered his men to shoot their horses and stack the carcasses to form a wall, but they provided little protection against bullets. In less than an hour, Custer and his men were killed in the worst American military disaster ever. After another day's fighting, Reno and Benteen's now united forces escaped when the Indians broke off the fight. They had learned that the other two columns of soldiers were coming towards them, so they fled.

After the battle, the Indians came through and stripped the bodies and mutilated all the uniformed soldiers, believing that the soul of a mutilated body would be forced to walk the earth for all eternity and could not ascend to heaven. Inexplicably, they stripped Custer's body and cleaned it, but did not scalp or mutilate it. He had been wearing buckskins instead of a blue uniform, and some believe that the Indians thought he was not a soldier and so, thinking he was an innocent, left him alone. Because his hair was cut short for battle, others think that he did not have enough hair to allow for a very good scalping. Immediately after the battle, the myth emerged that they left him alone out of respect for his fighting ability, but few participating Indians knew who he was to have been so respectful. To this day, no one knows the real reason.

Little Bighorn was the pinnacle of the Indians' power. They had achieved their greatest victory yet, but soon their tenuous union fell apart in the face of the white onslaught. Outraged over the death of a popular Civil War hero on the eve of the Centennial, the nation demanded and received harsh retribution. The Black Hills dispute was quickly settled by redrawing the boundary lines, placing the Black Hills outside the reservation and open to white settlement. Within a year, the Sioux nation was defeated and broken. "Custer's Last Stand" was their last stand as well.

New Insights on the age of the Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon is far older than generally thought, says new evidence that scientists gained from studying from caves lining the canyon's red limestone cliffs. The Grand Canyon often is referred to as about 6 million years old — but its western half actually began to open at least 17 million years ago, a University of New Mexico team reports Friday in the journal Science.

Wait.... The western side of the canyon is the downstream end of the Colorado River, so how could it be older than the arguably more spectacular eastern side? Remember, geologists caution, that the Grand Canyon was carved from drainage systems that didn't turn into the single river we now know as the Colorado until roughly 6 million years ago. The new research suggests two canyons formed that eventually joined. And it makes sense that the older side would even look different, less jagged, thanks to more years of gravity and wind erosion to soften its edges.

"This is really exciting for those of us who work in the stories and theories of how the Grand Canyon has evolved," Arizona geologist Wayne Ranney, author of Carving the Grand Canyon, said of the new work. "This paper helps us to more clearly understand that different parts of the canyon formed at different times. That's how big the Grand Canyon is."

How and when the Grand Canyon formed has been a question of both geologists and average visitors since John Wesley Powell's famous first expedition in 1869. Dating the canyon's carving has been difficult because it has largely depended on evidence from exposed rock and mineral deposits that themselves erode over time. The University of New Mexico team tried a new technique: Testing formations inside the numerous caves that line the Grand Canyon — protected formations less susceptible to erosion — that form at the water table. So cave specialist Carol Hill said they should provide a record of how the water table dropped over time as the canyon was cut deeper and deeper.

First Hill and colleagues made the grueling climbs to cull the formations from caves in 10 different spots along the length of the Grand Canyon. Then came work in specialized labs to pin down the age of each formation, using a method called uranium-lead isotope testing.

The findings: The western side of what is now the Grand Canyon started forming about 17 million years ago, and that initial erosion was fairly slow and steady — a couple of inches every thousand years. The canyon formed not just downward and westward but it opened steadily to the east, too, through what geologists call "headward erosion," the team reports — until the western side cut through enough rock to meet water on the eastern side, around 5 to 6 million years ago. Then the action really started, with the eastern side of the canyon being cut at a rate of about 8 inches to almost a foot every thousand years, they report.

Why the speedup? The new research can't say exactly, but Ranney notes that land mass was shifting around a lot during this period, too, heaving some sections of rock and lowering others. The Hurricane and Toroweap faults in the western Grand Canyon dropped enough to essentially form a waterfall, speeding water flow enough that the eastern side was being ripped as the river plunged to the west, he explained.

While geologists point to some questions in the new research, overall it does fit with various theories about how the Grand Canyon formed, said Rebecca Fowler of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who also studies the Grand Canyon.

"All of it is pointing toward a pretty complex history of Grand Canyon development, which is one of the reasons this area has been so controversial," she said. "It's a pretty complicated system and it's very likely that the entire Grand Canyon did not incise (cut) all at one time."