LEMURIA

Lemuria, or Mu, is a continent said to have been swallowed by the sea, and to now lie under the Indian or Pacific Ocean. The famous Theosophist Madame Blavatsky claimed that the Lemurians were ape-like giants that had the gift of telepathy. In a book called “The Lost Continent of Mu”, one writer claimed that all of mankind has its origins in Mu, which once extended from Hawaii to Easter Island and Fiji. Supposedly, it was completely destroyed 12,000 years ago by an enormous earthquake, and sank into the sea.

Today, the Stelle group in the USA claims to be descended from the Lemurians. According to this group, the Lemurians escaped from earth following the catastrophe, and they have since been guiding the destinies of chosen groups such as themselves.

WATER FLOW PATTERNS ON MARS

 Water Flow Patterns on Mars

In 2011, Nasa released a statement, along with photos, saying they have evidence that there might be “flowing water” on Mars. The time-lapse shots appear to show liquid running down the planet’s rocky landscape to form long, dark flow patterns. Scientists’ best guess is that the flows are salty water, which warms up just enough during the planet’s summer months to melt and slosh around on the surface. Signs that Mars once had flowing water have been seen before, but this is the first time that such markings have been observed changing over a short period of time.

WATER FOUND ON MOON

On Oct 9, 2009 Nasa’s LCROSS, or Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite struck water in a cold, permanently dark crater at the south pole of the moon. The LCROSS was a nasa probe designed to impact the moon, while a small satellite followed behind it measuring the chemical makeup of the material that was ejected. After a year of data analysis, Nasa reported that it’s mission found water ice in the floor of the permanently-shadowed crater it’s probe impacted. Later data from three different spacecraft indicate a thin film of water coats the surface of the soil in at least some areas.

Mira A's tail

In 2007, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, or GALEX scanned Mira A, an older red giant star, as part of an ongoing surgery to scan the entire sky in ultraviolet light. Astronomers were shocked to find a 13 light year long, comet-like tail trailing behind Mira A. The star is plowing through the Universe unusually fast, at about 291,000 miles an hour. Until this discovery, it was thought that stars could not have tails.

 

 

 

Giant magnetic space bubbles

Nasa’s two Voyager probes have found magnetic bubbles in the region of the solar system known as the Heliosheath, 9 billion miles away from Earth. In the 1950s, scientist believed this region of space was relatively smooth. But when Voyager 1 entered the Heliosheath in 2007, and Voyager 2 got there in 2008 they detected a turbulence that is generated by the Sun’s magnetic field, that creates magnetic bubbles up to 100 million miles wide.

New moons orbiting pluto

 

Pluto now has four known moons. Charon was discovered in 1978, and is the largest of Pluto’s moons. It is 648 miles across, causing many people to consider it and Pluto a “double dwarf planet”. Nothing new was learned of icy bodies orbiting Pluto until 2005, when the Hubble Space Telescope discovered Nix and Hydra. They are both in the range of 20 – 70 miles in diameter. The most amazing discovery regarding Pluto’s moons came in 2011, when Hubble photographed what is temporarily being called P4. It is in the range of 8 – 21 miles in diameter. It is an amazing feat, for Hubble to photograph something that tiny, that is over 3 billion miles away from us.

Four White Found Eating Earthlike Planets

Planets shift their orbits and collide as they circle a dying star in an artist's conception.

Illustration courtesy Mark A. Garlick, space-art.co.uk/University of Warwick

Rachel Kaufman

for National Geographic News

Published May 7, 2012

It's no fairy tale: Four hungry white dwarfs have been found "snacking" on the shattered remains of Earthlike planets, according to a new study.

The findings foreshadow what might happen to our solar system when the sun dies in about five billion years, astronomers say.

As stars like our sun run out of nuclear fuel, they swell, becoming red giants. Astronomers think that when this happens to our star, its bulging atmosphere will engulf Mercury, Venus, and maybe even Earth.

(See "Red Giant Sun May Not Destroy Earth.")

Eventually, the outer layers of a sunlike star's atmosphere will balloon away to form a nebula, leaving the star's dense core—a white dwarf—shining in the center. (See a white dwarf picture.)

The study authors speculate that any planets not roasted by the star's initial expansion—which takes tens to a few hundred million years—would have their orbits destabilized as the dying star loses mass.

The changing orbits would sometimes lead to planets crashing into each other, churning up chunks of rocky debris.

Eventually some of these planetary pieces could be nudged so close to the white dwarf that they'd fall into the star and get ripped apart.

(Related: "Planets Being Pulverized Near Giant Black Holes?")

Down to the Core

Evidence for this theory seems to lie in the newly observed white dwarfs' atmospheres, said study leader Boris Gänsicke, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in the U.K.

Normally, a white dwarf's atmosphere is a mix of only hydrogen and helium, relatively light elements. That's because a white dwarf's intense gravity pulls heavier elements toward the star's core.

Any other chemicals in a white dwarf's atmosphere must therefore come from debris falling onto the star's surface.

To hunt for signs of planetary consumption, Gänsicke and colleagues looked at 80 white dwarf stars in ultraviolet using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The team found four stars whose atmospheres contain oxygen, magnesium, iron, silicon, and a small bit of carbon—just the elements expected if the stars are absorbing dust from former planets.

"The abundances we find are almost exactly the same as those of the entire Earth," Gänsicke said. "If you could shred the Earth into dust and put it into the white dwarf, it would match the chemical composition."

In addition, one star, called PG0843+516, is even more heavily iron-enriched than the other dwarfs and contains high abundances of nickel and sulfur.

This makes sense if the star is devouring a chunk of planetary core, the study authors say. (Related: "New Magma Layer Found Deep in Earth's Mantle?")

"If you think about what the Earth looks like inside, it is almost pure iron and nickel. What we imagine is we see bits of a body that was at some point large enough to have an iron core."

Trail of Crumbs

The dust seen surrounding the four white dwarfs will be eaten up within "maybe a few thousand or tens of thousands of years," Gänsicke added.

But at some point, another planetary fragment could fall toward the star, creating more of these tell-tale rocky "crumbs," he said.

However, the scientists can't tell how many fragments—or even whole planets—might remain around the currently feeding white dwarfs.

(See "New 'Deep Fried' Planets Found—Survivors of Star Death.")

"We know from studies of other planetary systems that systems come in all kinds of shapes," Gänsicke said.

If there are more lingering worlds orbiting the four white dwarfs, "we don't know [what] the other rocky planets look like and how many there could be, or how stable or unstable their orbits are."

The feeding white dwarf research has been accepted for publication in theMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Cyclops Shark Found

One-Eyed Anomaly

Photograph courtesy Marcela Bejarano-Álvarez

Talk about a one-of-a-kind discovery—an extremely rare cyclops shark(pictured) has been confirmed in Mexico, new research shows.

The 22-inch-long (56-centimeter-long) fetus has a single, functioning eye at the front of its head—the hallmark of a congenital condition called cyclopia, which occurs in several animal species, including humans.

Earlier this year fisher Enrique Lucero León legally caught a pregnant dusky shark near Cerralvo Island (see map) in the Gulf of California. When León cut open his catch, he found the odd-looking male embryo along with its nine normal siblings. "He said, That's incredible—wow," said biologist Felipe Galván-Magaña, of the Interdisciplinary Center of Marine Sciences in La Paz, Mexico.

Once Galván-Magaña and colleague Marcela Bejarano-Álvarez heard about the discovery—which was put on Facebook—the team got León's permission to borrow the shark for research. The scientists then x-rayed the fetus and reviewed previous research on cyclopia in other species to confirm that the find is indeed a cyclops shark.

Cyclops sharks have been documented by scientists a few times before, also as embryos, said Jim Gelsleichter, a shark biologist at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. The fact that none have been caught outside the womb suggests cyclops sharks don't survive long in the wild.

Overall, finding such an unusual animal reinforces that scientists still have a lot to learn, Gelsleichter added.

"It's a humbling experience to realize you ain't seen it all yet."

Biggest Great White Shark Found

Biggest Great White Shark Caught, Released

18-foot fish may help crack migration mysteries, team says.

The Shark Men crew work to keep the great white shark nicknamed Apache alive on board their boat.

Photograph courtesy National Geographic Channel

Christine Dell'Amore

National Geographic News

Published May 6, 2011

ON TV: Shark Men—Biggest and Baddest premieres at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, May 8, on the National Geographic Channel.

Talk about a big fish—an expedition crew has hauled up—and released—what the team says is the biggest great white shark yet caught.

The 17.9-foot-long (5.5-meter-long) male behemoth was found off Mexico'sGuadalupe Island (map) in fall 2009.

The animal breaks the team's previous record of 16.8 feet (5.1 meters), set when they caught a female great white named Kimel. (Both records are unofficial and not maintained by a formal organization.)

The new titleholder was named Apache after the dog of Brett McBride, boat captain on the National Geographic Channel show Shark Men. (The National Geographic Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

Shark Men chronicles the work of scientists and fishers who catch and release great whites in an effort to figure out where the mysterious giants breed and give birth. The scientific team is led by Michael Domeier, president and executive director of the Marine Conservation Science Institute.

The two-ton Apache put up a fight—at one point breaking free from his barbless hook, said expedition leader Chris Fischer.

"The battle with Apache was like nothing we've ever dealt with," Fischer said.

Once on board, the researchers fitted the fish with a satellite-tracking tag, took a blood sample, and released him, watching him vigorously swim away.

(See related pictures: "'Shark Elevator' Lifts Great Whites From Sea.")

"He was all scarred up and had big marks all over him—you could tell he was just a bad-ass shark," Fischer said.

"It was so impressive and so humbling to be near him."

Size Doesn't Matter for Shark Research

In large ocean fish species, females are almost always bigger than males, because they need more girth to carry their young, Fischer noted. (See great white shark pictures.)

However, even a male of Apache's size is not unheard of among great whites, other experts say.

"That is one big shark, [but] I have no doubt that this isn't the largest white shark in the wild," John O'Sullivan, head of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's White Shark Program, said by email.

Shark expert Kenneth J. Goldman added, "I don't see anything overtly magnificent about it being so large. It's just another adult male they've tagged."

That's because size alone doesn't tell scientists much, said Goldman, a fishery research biologist at the Alaska Department of Fish & Game in Homer.

Instead, Apache's real value would be in helping to resolve the lingering mysteries of great white behavior.

Biggest Shark May Help Crack Mysteries

Expedition leader Fischer agrees—and he and his team are now watching to see where Apache goes.

For instance, recent research suggests that Pacific great whites gather in specific spots near the coasts—including the Guadalupe Island site—and then travel to a "cafe" in the middle of the ocean to feed. The animals often return to the same aggregation sites after feeding.

But this is still a tentative theory, so it "would be groundbreaking if, [say], Apache left Guadalupe and went to the middle of the ocean and [returned] to a different aggregation site," Fischer said.

(See "Great White Shark Filmed Breaching at Night—A First.")

Overall, tagging sharks to figure out where they migrate and congregate may help conservationists protect the species, Fischer added. Great whites are considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Meanwhile, Apache lives on, he said, as a "giant male shark out there doing his great white thing."

Lost Maya City Found

Archaeologist Brigitte Kovacevich in a looters' tunnel inside the pyramid at the Head of Stone site.

Photograph courtesy Michael G. Callaghan

Three-dimensional map of the buried observatory at the Guatemalan Maya site of Holtun. Illustration courtesy Melvin Rodrigo Guzman Piedrasanta.

Ker Than

for National Geographic News

Published April 26, 2011

Hidden for centuries, the ancient Maya city of Holtun, or Head of Stone, is finally coming into focus.

Three-dimensional mapping has "erased" centuries of jungle growth, revealing the rough contours of nearly a hundred buildings, according to research presented earlier this month.

Though it's long been known to locals that something—something big—is buried in this patch of Guatemalan rain forest, it's only now that archaeologists are able to begin teasing out what exactly Head of Stone was.

Using GPS and electronic distance-measurement technology last year, the researchers plotted the locations and elevations of a seven-story-tall pyramid, an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, several stone residences, and other structures.

(See National Geographic pictures of excavated Maya cities.)

The Maya Denver?

Some of the stone houses, said study leader Brigitte Kovacevich, may have doubled as burial chambers for the city's early kings.

"Oftentimes archaeologists are looking at the biggest pyramids or temples to find the tombs of early kings, but during this Late-Middle Preclassic period"—roughly 600 B.C. to 300 B.C.—"the king is not the center of the universe yet, so he's probably still being buried in the household," said Kovacevich, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

"That may be why so many Preclassic kings have been missed" by archaeologists, who expected to find the rulers' burials at grand temples, she added.

The findings at Head of Stone—named for giant masks found at the site—could shed light on how "secondary" Maya centers were organized and what daily life was like for Maya living outside of the larger metropolitan areas such as Tikal, about 22 miles (35 kilometers) to the north, according to Kathryn Reese-Taylor, a Preclassic Maya specialist at Canada's University of Calgary.

Head of Stone, which has never been excavated, "was not a New York or Los Angeles, but it was definitely a Denver or Atlanta," said Reese-Taylor, who called the new mapping study "incredibly significant."

(Get the full story of the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographicmagazine.)

Buried Pyramid

From about 600 B.C. to A.D. 900, Head of Stone—which is about three-quarters of a mile (1 kilometer) long and a third of a mile (0.5 kilometer) wide—was a bustling midsize Maya center, home to about 2,000 permanent residents.

But today its structures are buried under several feet of earth and plant material and are nearly invisible to the untrained eyed.

Even Head of Stone's three-pointed pyramid—once one of the city's most impressive buildings—"just looks like a mountain enveloped in forest," said study leader Kovacevich, who presented the findings at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Sacramento, California.

Jungle Thick as Thieves

Head of Stone is so well hidden, in fact, that archaeologists didn't learn of it until the early 1990s, and only because they were following the trails of looters who had discovered the site first—perhaps after farmers had attempted to clear the area, according to Kovacevich.

For thieves, the main attractions were massive stucco masks measuring up to ten feet (three meters) tall. Uncovered as looters dug tunnels into the buried city, the heads once adorned some of Head of Stone's most important buildings.

The temple, Kovacevich said, "would have had these really fabulously, elaborately painted stucco masks flanking the two sides of the stairway that represented human figures, snarling jaguars," and other forms.

During the Preclassic period, Head of Stone's important public buildings would have been painted primarily in blood reds, bright whites, and mustard yellows, the University of Calgary's Reese-Taylor said. Murals of geometric patterns or scenes from myth or daily life would have covered some of the buildings, she added.

(Pictures: See what the Maya Empire looked like.)

King of Stars

During special events at Head of Stone, such as the crowning of a king or the naming of a royal heir, "there would have been a lot of people—not only the 2,000 people living at the site itself but all the people from surrounding areas as well. So, several thousand people," Reese-Taylor said.

Thick gray smoke and the smell of burning incense would have filled the air. Gazing up at the temple top through this haze, a visitor might have seen "ritual practitioners" performing dances and sacred rituals while adorned with elaborate feathered costumes and jade jewelry.

During the solstices or equinoxes, the crowds would have moved farther south and higher up in the city, surrounding the buildings that made up the astronomical observatory.

"During the solstices, you would've been able to see the sun rising in line with the eastern structure, and the common people would have thought that the king was commanding the heavens," study leader Kovacevich said.

The researchers, though, are directing their gaze downward. This summer they hope to begin excavating residential structures and the observatory, as well as to possibly remove the undergrowth from the main temple.

And, by using ground-penetrating radar, they hope to bring Head of Stone into even sharper relief.

By seeing through soil the way the previous mapping project saw through trees and brush, radar should reveal not just the rounded shapes of the city but the hard outlines of the buildings themselves.

BlackBeard Sword

Blackbeard's Sword?

Photograph courtesy Wendy M. Welsh, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

Could this partly gilded hilt have held Blackbeard's sword? There's no way to know for sure, though it was found amid the North Carolina wreck of theQueen Anne's Revenge, the flagship of the infamous 18th-century pirate.

Since 1997, archaeologists have been excavating the Queen Anne's Revenge. The sword hilt—found in pieces but reassembled for this picture—is among their latest finds and was revealed to the public this month.

(Related: exclusive pictures of Blackbeard pirate relics and gold.)

After running aground on a sandbar in 1718 near the town of Beaufort (map), the ship was abandoned but likely remained intact and partly above water for as long as a year before collapsing and disintegrating, according to archaeologist David Moore of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

"In any event," he said, "the pirates would have had ample opportunity to take anything that they thought valuable." The newfound hilt may have been left behind because it was unwanted, or it may have been inaccessible, according to Moore's colleague Wendy Welsh, a conservator on the project.

Blackbeard’s brief career as a pirate lasted only about two years, but during that time he became one of  history's most feared outlaws. Operating in the West Indies (map) and off the coast of colonial America, he struck terror into the hearts of commercial ships' captains and once held the entire city of Charleston, South Carolina (map), hostage.

New Discovery of 2012

A New Discovery of 2012:
                              A new planet found about 36 light-years away could be one of the most Earthlike worlds yet—if it has enough clouds. The rocky planet's discovery became the tenth most visited National Geographic News story of 2011.

The unpoetically named HD85512b was discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of an orange dwarf star in the constellation Vela, according to an August study.

Astronomers found the planet using the European Southern Observatory's High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS, instrument in Chile.