Bertrand Russell

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

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Masonic Apron

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The National Ignition Facility, located at Lawrence Liver

The National Ignition Facility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world’s largest laser system… 192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion… getting more energy out than was used to create it.

It’s never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. We expect to do it within the next 2-3 years. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing.

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Rig Veda 8.48

We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods

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Carl Sagan

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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Mystery seafaring ancestor found in the Philippines

The discovery of a single foot bone is forcing anthropologists to rethink how people first reached the islands off south-east Asia. It suggests that humans arrived on Luzon, the largest and northernmost major island in the Philippines, at least 67,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years earlier than had been thought.

“The arrival of people in Australia 50,000 to 60,000 years ago is a good comparison,” says expedition member Florent Detroit of the National Museum for Natural History in Paris, France. We have no idea how settlers got to Australia, he says, but we know from the archaeological evidence that they reached it settled it. “It seems coherent for us to think that in south-east Asia and Australia, humans had sea-faring capabilities by 60,000 to 70,000 years ago.”

from: New Scientist

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Medieval Mosque Shows Amazing Math Discovery

The mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th- to 17th-century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West.

Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as a quasi crystal—an infinite tiling pattern that doesn’t regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals.

Lu teamed up with physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University to test the similarity: If the patterns repeated when extended infinitely, they couldn’t be true quasi crystals. Most of the patterns examined failed the test, but one passed: a pattern found in the Darb-i Imam shrine, built in 1453 in Isfahan, Iran. Not only does it never repeat when infinitely extended, its pattern maps onto Penrose tiles—components for making quasi crystals discovered by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s—in a way that is consistent with the quasi crystal pattern.

from: Discover Magazine

Discover Magazine

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Geometric Solids

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Robert Kennedy

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.

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1000’s of New Mayan Structures Discovered

A flyover of Belize’s thick jungles has revolutionized archaeology worldwide and vividly illustrated the complex urban centers developed by one of the most-studied ancient civilizations — the Maya.

University of Central Florida researchers led a NASA-funded research project in April 2009 that collected the equivalent of 25 years worth of data in four days.

Aboard a Cessna 337, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) equipment bounced laser beams to sensors on the ground, penetrating the thick tree canopy and producing images of the ancient settlement and environmental modifications made by the inhabitants of the Maya city of Caracol within 200 square kilometers (77 square miles).

UCF anthropology professors Arlen and Diane Chase have directed archaeological excavations at Caracol for more than 25 years. The hard work of machete-wielding research scientists and students has resulted in the mapping of some 23 square kilometers (9 square miles) of ancient settlement.

The NASA technology aboard the Cessna saw beyond the rainforest and detected thousands of new structures, 11 new causeways, tens of thousands of agricultural terraces and many hidden caves — results beyond anyone’s imagination. The data also confirm the size of the city (spread over 177 square kilometers or 68 square miles) and corroborate the Chases’ previous estimates for the size of the population (at least 115,000 people in A.D. 650).

from: Science Daily

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The Sun Coral

‘The Sun Coral’ (by MORPHOLOGIC)

Tubastrea coccinea or ‘Sun Corals’, have an unusual background story, being the only invasive stony coral to become established in the Caribbean basin. Native to the tropical Indo-Pacific Oceans, they were first noted living on ships’ hulls in Puerto Rico and Curacao (Southern Caribbean) in the mid 1940’s. Over the ensuing decades, they eventually spread elsewhere throughout the entire Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico on the prevailing water currents. It is believed that these sun corals may have originally entered our region as larval stow-aways in the ballast water of intercontinental ships that passed through the Panama Canal.

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Rabindranath Tagore

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.

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