Laniakea: Our home supercluster

Defining regions in an infinite universe is tricky business: Clusters of dozens of galaxies, called local groups, are further bound into clusters containing hundreds of galaxies. The Laniakea supercluster, described in a paper published in this week’s Nature, is 500 million light-years in diameter and contains 100,000 galaxies – and we sit at the very edge of it. Together, those galaxies carry 100 million billion times the mass of our sun.

How can such a massive number of galaxies be connected? While some areas of space are basically empty, others contain highly concentrated star power. In these areas, the supercluster galaxies are drawn toward each other in intricate ways. According to R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and lead author of the study, galaxies in the cosmos can be compared to water on Earth.

“Within a land form, water flows in certain directions,” Tully said. “The water knows, even if the land is very flat, which way is downhill.” Instead of downhill valleys that attract water flow, our universe has something called the “Great Attractor.” This region serves as a gravitational focal point , influencing the motion of galaxies in the supercluster.

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Sophisticated drug paraphernalia, complete with a hippy-looking headband, provide evidence that an elite, hallucinogen-using culture flourished at around 500 A.D. in the south-central Andes and lasted there for at least another 600 years.

The items, described in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, shed light on the lifestyle and belief systems once held by the people of Tiwanaku, an ancient city-state located near Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.

The objects, which include “snuffing tablets,” a wooden snuffing tube, spatulas, a multi-colored textile headband and more, also provide clues to early usage of psychoactive substances.

“Snuffing tablets in the Andes were primarily used by ritual specialists, such as shamans,” lead author Juan Albarracin-Jordan of the Fundación Bartolomé de Las Casas in La Paz, Bolivia, explained to Discovery News.

“Psychotropic substances, once extracted from plants, were spread and mixed on the tablets. Inhalation tubes were then used to introduce the substances through the nose into the system.”

Albarracin-Jordan and colleagues Jose ́Capriles and Melanie Miller analyzed the items and related objects unearthed during excavations at the site, called Cueva del Chileno. They also found drinking cups known as “kerus,” used for drinking chicha, an alcoholic brew made from fermented corn.

It is now believed that famous surviving monoliths from the region, such as the Bennett monolith, show individuals holding a keru with the left hand and a snuffing tablet with the right.

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Spotted: Asteroids ‘Smashing Themselves To Smithereens’ 1,200 Light-Years Away

When a crop of dust spread forth from the star NGC 2547-1D8 during 2012 observations, scientists quickly sprang into action. What they believe happened was two huge asteroids 1,200 light-years away crashed into each other. What’s more, researchers say that what they witnessed could herald planetary formation similar to what created our own solar system.

“We think two big asteroids crashed into each other, creating a huge cloud of grains the size of very fine sand, which are now smashing themselves into smithereens and slowly leaking away from the star,” stated lead author and graduate student Huan Meng of the University of Arizona.

The debris was tracked with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and represents the first time scientists have picked up information before and after an event such as this.

Spotted: Asteroids ‘Smashing Themselves To Smithereens’ 1,200 Light-Years Away

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Android security mystery – ‘fake’ cellphone towers found in U.S.

warrenellis:

“Seventeen mysterious cellphone towers have been found in America which look like ordinary towers, and can only be identified by a heavily customized handset built for Android security – but have a much more malicious purpose, according to Popular Science.”

I was already thinking about running some crazy mods on my phone, now I want to see what’s out there when I’m on a long walk through the city.

Android security mystery – ‘fake’ cellphone towers found in U.S.

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“Severe” Ice Age event could have killed off Neanderthals 39,000 years ago, say experts

Significant interbreeding between Neanderthals and early modern humans had probably already occurred in Asia more than 50,000 years ago, so the dating evidence now indicates that the two populations could have been in some kind of contact with each other for up to 20,000 years, first in Asia then later in Europe.

This may support the idea that some of the changes in Neanderthal and early modern human technology after 60,000 years ago can be attributed to a process of acculturation between these two human groups.

Of course, samples from some sites did not produce dates at all, and the coverage did not extend to eastern regions such as Uzbekistan and Siberia, where Neanderthals are also known to have lived, so it is still possible Neanderthals lingered later in some areas.

But the overall pattern seems clear – the Neanderthals had largely, and perhaps entirely, vanished from their known range by 39,000 years ago.

A severe Heinrich event, characterised by cold and dry conditions, hit Europe between 39-40,000 years ago, and it remains to be seen whether that event delivered the coup de grâce to a Neanderthal population that was already low in numbers and genetic diversity, and trying to cope with economic competition from incoming groups of Homo sapiens.”

“Severe” Ice Age event could have killed off Neanderthals 39,000 years ago, say experts

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Neanderthals made some of Europe’s oldest art

Rock art is notoriously tricky to date because it is not immediately linked to human or animal bones that can be carbon-dated. Finlayson, however, is confident that the etching was made by Neanderthals more than 39,000 years ago. A layer of sediment that once covered the engraving contained stone tools typical of those made by Neanderthals dating to between 30,000 and 39,000 years ago. This means that the engraving must be even older, Finlayson says, perhaps 40,000 to 45,000 years old. Humans did not arrive at Gorham’s Cave until more than 10,000 years later, and long after Neanderthals were gone.

The team’s dating of the Gorham etching makes it one of the oldest examples of cave art in Europe. A smudge of pigment in the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain dates to more than 40,000 years ago, but it is not clear whether Homo sapiens or Neanderthals created it.

To better understand the engraving, Finlayson’s team tried replicating them using original Neanderthal stone tools. They found that only dozens of purposeful, repeated motions could create similar etchings. “We wanted to show that this was not a doodle, a casual thing,” he says, unlike the helter-skelter scratchings that the authors left when they sliced fresh pork skin on rock, for instance. The team’s results appear in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Neanderthals made some of Europe’s oldest art

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About | Disaster Playground

coldalbion:

m1k3y:

fuckyeahdarkextropian:

Disaster Playground is a ‘theatre of cruelty’ as defined by Antonin Artaud, a platform where scientific catastrophe and/or surprise can be more acclaimed than success. This cross and pluri-cultural project will go beyond American and European frontiers and will question the notion of disasters, widely represented in the literature of J.G Ballard and will investigate rescue reactions across culture.

Disaster Playground, PART I: The Film,  is about the scientists planning the monitoring and deflection of hazardous Near Earth Objects_NEO (asteroids).  It attempt to address the complex decision-making involved in developing a coordinated international response to the challenge of protecting the Earth from NEO impacts. The thrust of the film follows a real-life procedure in place in the event of an asteroid collision with the earth. It depicts the chain of command necessary where only a few experts exist who understand the technology. Hollywood relied on Bruce Willis and a big drill to save the world in Armageddon, but how real is that and what needs to be done to save our civilization from the next major asteroid impact? The film explores aspects of planetary defense, such as Asteroid Deflection and Asteroid Capture, and showcases the work of the scientists’ pioneering missions to interact with asteroids and to accelerate efforts to detect, track, characterize, and mitigate the threat of potentially hazardous asteroids.

This sounds amazing.

New life goal: play a life-giving, panspermic asteroid in local production of a Dark Extropian, “theatre of cruelty” dramatization of existential risk.

“WE GIVE LIFE. WE TAKE IT AWAY.”
chorus chants: “PRAISE BE THE ASTEROID”

Wth this as your themesong,

m1k3y

? Killing Joke-Asteroid:

http://youtu.be/g5ujsROMsAU

YES.

Find anthem for asteroid death cult? CHECK

About | Disaster Playground

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an anonymous tipster wrote to me and turned me onto this cheeky bit of naughtiness in Dawkins’ bestseller, The God Delusion. In Chapter 5 the professor muses upon the ‘cargo cult’ phenomenon, which was so crucial in the life and work of Erich Von Daniken:

“In The Life of Brian, one of the many things the Monty Python team got right was the extreme rapidity with which a new religious cult can get started. It can spring up almost overnight and then become incorporated into a culture, where it plays a disquietingly dominant role. The ‘cargo cults’ of Pacific Melanesia and New Guinea provide the most famous real life example.”

After recounting how these cults arose out of tribal peoples’ contact with advanced technology they had no exposure to, Dawkins starts to get quite cheeky indeed:

“The entire history of some of these cults, from initiation to expiry, is wrapped up within living memory. Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high speed.”

Now, it all undoubtedly slid past his readers, but Dawkins is saying here that Christianity “began the same way” as the cargo cults. Which, as he exhaustively explains in this chapter, arose from native peoples’ exposure to superior alien technology (the aliens being Europeans in this context). As he says here:

“It seems that in every case the islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white immigrants to their islands, including administrators, soldiers and missionaries. They were perhaps the victims of (Arthur C.) Clarke’s Third Law, which I quoted in Chapter 2: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”

Now isn’t that a fascinating little juxtaposition? Quoting the author of the the world’s most acclaimed Ancient-Astronaut narrative (2001: A Space Odyssey, for those new to all of this) shortly after claiming that the cult of the god-man Jesus “began the same way” as the cargo cults! As Eric Idle once said, “Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more, say no more.” And just in case you missed Richard’s inference the first time, he repeats it:

“Fourth, the cargo cults are similar, not just to each other but to older religions. Christianity and other ancient religions that have spread worldwide presumably began as local cults like that of John Frum.”

The cargo cults which- and I’ll state this until the cows come home- began when a primitive people encountered a technologically superior civilization. After making quite a bit of the cargo cults, Dawkins then writes:

“I don’t want to make too much of the cargo cults of the South Pacific. But they do provide a fascinating contemporary model for the way religions spring up from almost nothing.”

Which, as Richard goes to great pains to explain, were the result of contact with a technologically-superior alien civilization.

The Secret Sun: Richard Dawkins, Ancient Astronaut Theorist?: Part 2
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It could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe a civillization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now that is a possibility and an intriguing possibility and I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry or molecular biology you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

The Secret Sun: Richard Dawkins – Ancient Astronaut Theorist?
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