Archives at Zinester: Conspiracy Journal. Conspiracy Journal. Science & Technology

- Former Head Of Star Wars Program Says Government Allowed 9/11 to Happen -
- Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century -
- ET Autopsy Film Finally Exposed As Fake? -
- The Art Transplant -
AND - Werewolves in Myth and Legend -

All these exciting stories and MORE in this week's issue of
CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!

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~ And Now, On With The Show! ~

- RULE BY FEAR DEPARTMENT -

Former Head Of Star Wars Program Says Government Allowed 9/11 to Happen

The former head of the Star Wars missile defense program under Presidents Ford and Carter has gone public to say that the official version of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory and his main suspect for the architect of the attack is Vice President Dick Cheney.

Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF, ret. flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is the recipient of the Eisenhower Medal, the George F. Kennan Peace Prize, the President’s Medal of Veterans for Peace, the Society of Military Engineers Gold Medal (twice), six Air Medals, and dozens of other awards and honors. His Ph.D. is in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from Caltech. He chaired 8 major international conferences, and is one of the country’s foremost experts on National Security.

Bowman worked secretly for the US government on the Star Wars project and was the first to coin the very term in a 1977 secret memo. After Bowman realized that the program was only ever intended to be used as an aggressive and not defensive tool, as part of a plan to initiate a nuclear war with the Soviets, he left the program and campaigned against it.

In an interview with The Alex Jones Show aired nationally on the GCN Radio Network, Bowman stated that at the bare minimum if Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were involved in 9/11 then the government stood down and allowed the attacks to happen. He said it is plausible that the entire chain of military command were unaware of what was taking place and were used as tools by the people pulling the strings behind the attack.

Bowman outlined how the drills on the morning of 9/11 that simulated planes crashing into buildings on the east coast were used as a cover to dupe unwitting air defense personnel into not responding quickly enough to stop the attack.

"The exercises that went on that morning simulating the exact kind of thing that was happening so confused the people in the FAA and NORAD....that they didn't they didn't know what was real and what was part of the exercise," said Bowman

"I think the people who planned and carried out those exercises, they're the ones that should be the object of investigation."

Asked if he could name a prime suspect who was the likely architect behind the attacks, Bowman stated, "If I had to narrow it down to one person....I think my prime suspect would be Dick Cheney."

Bowman said that privately his military fighter pilot peers and colleagues did not disagree with his sentiments about the real story behind 9/11.

Bowman agreed that the US was in danger of slipping into a dictatorship and stated, "I think there's been nothing closer to fascism than what we've seen lately from this government."

Bowman slammed the Patriot Act as having, "Done more to destroy the rights of Americans than all of our enemies combined."

Bowman trashed the 9/11 Commission as a politically motivated cover-up with abounding conflicts of interest, charging, "The 9/11 Commission omitted anything that might be the least bit suspicious or embarrassing or in any way detract from the official conspiracy so it was a total whitewash."

"There needs to be a true investigation, not the kind of sham investigations we have had with the 9/11 omission and all the rest of that junk," said Bowman.

Asked if the perpetrators of 9/11 were preparing to stage another false-flag attack to reinvigorate their agenda Bowman agreed that, "I can see that and I hope they can't pull it off, I hope they are prevented from pulling it off but I know darn good and well they'd like to have another one."

A mainstay of the attack pieces against Charlie Sheen have been that he is not credible enough to speak on the topic of 9/11. These charges are ridiculed by the fact that Sheen is an expert on 9/11 who spends hours a day meticulously researching the topic, something that the attack dogs have failed to do, aiming their comments solely at Sheen's personal life and ignoring his invitation to challenge him on the facts.

In addition, from the very start we have put forth eminently credible individuals only for them to be ignored by the establishment media. Physics Professors, former White House advisors and CIA analysts, the father of Reaganomics, German Defense Ministers and Bush's former Secretary of the Treasury, have all gone public on 9/11 but have been uniformly ignored by the majority of the establishment press.

Will Robert Bowman also be blackballed as the mainstream continue to misrepresent the 9/11 truth movement as an occupation of the fringe minority?

Bowman is currently running for Congress in Florida's 15th District.

Source: PrisonPlanet.com
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2006/040406mainsuspect.htm

- TAKING IT TO THE EXTREME DEPARTMENT -

Meeting Doctor Doom

There is always something special about science meetings. The 109th meeting of the Texas Academy of Science at Lamar University in Beaumont on 3-5 March 2006 was especially exciting for me, because a student and his professor presented the results of a DNA study I suggested to them last year. How fulfilling to see the baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) leaves we collected last summer and my tree ring photographs transformed into a first class scientific presentation that's nearly ready to submit to a scientific journal (Brian Iken and Dr. Deanna McCullough, "Bald Cypress of the Texas Hill Country: Taxonomically Unique?" 109th Meeting of the Texas Academy of Science Program and Abstracts [ PDF ], Poster P59, p. 84, 2006).

But there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us. Because of many years of experience as a writer and editor, Pianka's strange introduction and the TV camera incident raised a red flag in my mind. Suddenly I forgot that I was a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section. Instead, I grabbed a notepad so I could take on the role of science reporter.

One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”

Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.

Saving the Earth with Ebola

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola (Ebola Reston), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Questions for Dr. Doom

Then came the question and answer session, in which Professor Pianka stated that other diseases are also efficient killers.

The audience laughed when he said, “You know, the bird flu's good, too.” They laughed again when he proposed, with a discernable note of glee in his voice that, “We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth.”

After noting that the audience did not represent the general population, a questioner asked, "What kind of reception have you received as you have presented these ideas to other audiences that are not representative of us?"

Pianka replied, "I speak to the converted!"

Pianka responded to more questions by condemning politicians in general and Al Gore by name, because they do not address the population problem and "...because they deceive the public in every way they can to stay in power."

He spoke glowingly of the police state in China that enforces their one-child policy. He said, "Smarter people have fewer kids." He said those who don't have a conscience about the Earth will inherit the Earth, "...because those who care make fewer babies and those that didn't care made more babies." He said we will evolve as uncaring people, and "I think IQs are falling for the same reason, too."

With this, the questioning was over. Immediately almost every scientist, professor and college student present stood to their feet and vigorously applauded the man who had enthusiastically endorsed the elimination of 90 percent of the human population. Some even cheered. Dozens then mobbed the professor at the lectern to extend greetings and ask questions. It was necessary to wait a while before I could get close enough to take some photographs.

I was assigned to judge a paper in a grad student competition after the speech. On the way, three professors dismissed Pianka as a crank. While waiting to enter the competition room, a group of a dozen Lamar University students expressed outrage over the Pianka speech.

Yet five hours later, the distinguished leaders of the Texas Academy of Science presented Pianka with a plaque in recognition of his being named 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. When the banquet hall filled with more than 400 people responded with enthusiastic applause, I walked out in protest.

Corresponding with Dr. Doom

Recently I exchanged a number of e-mails with Pianka. I pointed out to him that one might infer his death wish was really aimed at Africans, for Ebola is found only in Central Africa. He replied that Ebola does not discriminate, kills everyone and could spread to Europe and the the Americas by a single infected airplane passenger.

In his last e-mail, Pianka wrote that I completely fail to understand his arguments. So I did a check and found verification of my interpretation of his remarks on his own web site. In a student evaluation of a 2004 course he taught, one of Professor Pianka's students wrote, "Though I agree that convervation [sic] biology is of utmost importance to the world, I do not think that preaching that 90% of the human population should die of ebola [sic] is the most effective means of encouraging conservation awareness."

Yet the majority of his student reviews were favorable, with one even saying, “ I worship Dr. Pianka.”

The 45-minute lecture before the Texas Academy of Science converted a university biology senior into a Pianka disciple, who then published a blog that seriously supports Pianka's mass death wish.

Dangerous Times

Let me now remove my reporter's hat for a moment and tell you what I think. We live in dangerous times. The national security of many countries is at risk. Science has become tainted by highly publicized cases of misconduct and fraud.

Must now we worry that a Pianka-worshipping former student might someday become a professional biologist or physician with access to the most deadly strains of viruses and bacteria? I believe that airborne Ebola is unlikely to threaten the world outside of Central Africa. But scientists have regenerated the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people. There is concern that small pox might someday return. And what other terrible plagues are waiting out there in the natural world to cross the species barrier and to which scientists will one day have access?

Meanwhile, I still can't get out of my mind the pleasant spring day in Texas when a few hundred scientists of the Texas Academy of Science gave a standing ovation for a speaker who they heard advocate for the slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings.

Forrest M. Mims III is Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, and the editor of The Citizen Scientist. He and his science are featured online at www.forrestmims.org and www.sunandsky.org. The views expressed herein are his own and do not represent the official views of the Texas Academy of Science or the Society for Amateur Scientists.

Copyright 2006 by Forrest M. Mims III.

Source: The Citizen Scientist
http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/feature1p/index.html

- DAYS OF FUTURE PAST DEPARTMENT -

Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century

With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.

Black holes, wormholes, and cosmic strings – each of these phenomena has been proposed as a method for time travel, but none seem feasible, for (at least) one major reason. Although theoretically they could distort space-time, they all require an unthinkably gigantic amount of mass.

Mallett, a U Conn Physics Professor for 30 years, considered an alternative to these time travel methods based on Einstein’s famous relativity equation: E=mc2.

“Einstein showed that mass and energy are the same thing,” said Mallett, who published his first research on time travel in 2000 in Physics Letters. “The time machine we’ve designed uses light in the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time instead of using massive objects.”

To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space. Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam. A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.

“Say you have a cup of coffee and a spoon,” Mallett explained to PhysOrg.com. “The coffee is empty space, and the spoon is the circulating light beam. When you stir the coffee with the spoon, the coffee – or the empty space – gets twisted. Suppose you drop a sugar cube in the coffee. If empty space were twisting, you’d be able to detect it by observing a subatomic particle moving around in the space.”

And according to Einstein, whenever you do something to space, you also affect time. Twisting space causes time to be twisted, meaning you could theoretically walk through time as you walk through space.

“As physicists, our experiments deal with subatomic particles,” said Mallett. “How soon humans will be able to time travel depends largely on the success of these experiments, which will take the better part of a decade. And depending on breakthroughs, technology, and funding, I believe that human time travel could happen this century.”

Step back a minute (sorry, only figuratively). How do we know that time is not merely a human invention, and that manipulating it just doesn’t make sense?

“What is time? That is a very, very difficult question,” said Mallett. “Time is a way of separating events from each other. Even without thinking about time, we can see that things change, seasons change, people change. The fact that the world changes is an intrinsic feature of the physical world, and time is independent of whether or not we have a name for it.

“To physicists, time is what’s measured by clocks. Using this definition, we can manipulate time by changing the rate of clocks, which changes the rate at which events occur. Einstein showed that time is affected by motion, and his theories have been demonstrated experimentally by comparing time on an atomic clock that has traveled around the earth on a jet. It’s slower than a clock on earth.”

Although the jet-flying clock regained its normal pace when it landed, it never caught up with earth clocks – which means that we have a time traveler from the past among us already, even though it thinks it’s in the future.

Some people show concern over time traveling, although Mallett – an advocate of the Parallel Universes theory – assures us that time machines will not present any danger.

“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”

In light of this causal “safety,” it’s kind of ironic that what prompted Mallett as a child to investigate time travel was a desire to change the past in hopes of a different future. When he was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 33. After reading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Mallett was determined to find a way to go back and warn his father about the dangers of smoking.

This personal element fueled Mallett’s perseverance to study science, master Einstein’s equations, and build a professional career with many high notes. Since the ‘70s, his research has included quantum gravity, relativistic cosmology and gauge theories, and he plans to publish a popular science/memoir book this November 2006. With help from Bruce Henderson, the New York Times best-selling author, the book will be called Time Traveler: A Physicist’s Quest For The Ultimate Breakthrough.

Source: Physorg.com
http://www.physorg.com/news63371210.html

- OUT TO MAKE A BUCK DEPARTMENT -

ET Autopsy Film Finally Exposed As Fake?

Santilli Changes His Autopsy Film Story.

Tonight (April 4) showed the SKY ONE TV show 'Eamon Investigates - Alien Autopsy. The show starts of with Santilli still claiming that he saw real film of aliens and that he purchased it from a former US military cameraman. However, there is now a change in the story. Santilli & his colleague Gary Shoefield claim that it took 2 years to buy the film & that when it finally arrived in London 95% of it had 'oxidised' and the remaining 5% was in very poor condition. They therefore decided to 'reconstruct' it based on Santilli's recollection and a few frames that were left.

To do this they hired UK sculptor John Humphreys. Humphreys tells of how he used sheeps brain for the brain and a lambs leg for the leg joint.

The cameraman's interview film is also a fake. The man in the film is someone they literally brought in off the street and gave him a prepared script to read from.

Santilli and Shoefield continually try to insist that the AA film as we know it is a restoration, but in fact it was made by John Humphreys. To try and justify they claim that some of the surviving original frames are seen mixed in with the reconstruction/restoration. Interestingly neither Santilli, Shoefield or Humphreys could point out where and which are these frames when viewing the AA film.

Santilli admitted that the six-fingered panels in the debris film were the result of 'artistic license' an he even produced one of the I-beams from the boot of his car. The debris film was also mde by John Humphreys.

In fact, Humphreys is the surgeon in the film, and a former employee of Shoefield's in behind the window. He's Gareth Watson, a man I met several times in Ray's office.

Nick Pope and mysels appear briefly in this show and I dare say Nick will have hi own comments to make. For anyone interested in the AA film I do recommend watching this if you can. I've taken part in another show for Channel Five in the UK the content of which I am not permitted to disclose.

After watching this tonight I can honestly say that I do not believe one word of either Santilli or Shoefield and I have no doubt that the film is nothing more than a complete fake. There is and never was any original film and there is and never was any US military cameraman. Santilli & Shoefield had little credibility as it was but now they have none.

The alien autopsy film is dead and I hope to put it to rest, once and for all, soon. Watch this space.

Source: Philip Mantle/Rense.com
http://www.rense.com/general70/expos.htm

- DRIFTING DOWN FROM HEAVEN DEPARTMENT -

Some Scientists Think Humans Descended from Martian Microbes

Astrobiology sounds like the stuff of lava lamps and Jetsons reruns.

Yet seven years after NASA launched a formal astrobiology research program, scientists of every stripe — geologists, biologists, chemists, paleontologists, oceanographers and astronomers — have rallied to the quest.

They've spent as much as $65 million a year trying to solve a mystery that has underpinned religion and inspired thinkers from Seneca to Carl Sagan: How did life on the lonely Earth begin? And is Earth really the only source of life in the universe?

With the help of modern tools such as the genome, high-powered computer modeling and robotics, they're finding some out-of-this-world answers, ones that may lead to Mars and beyond.

During an astrobiology conference in Washington last week, scientists debated the newest evidence and worried that funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is vaporizing, just as their cross-disciplinary work is unearthing extraordinary discoveries, such as the organic matter in bits of Jovian comet dust recently collected by NASA's Stardust probe.

Many scientists favor the theory that life began as oxygen-loathing microbes in superheated deep-sea vents 3.8 billion years ago, when water probably covered the planet. Others suggest life's assembly could have occurred along the crystal face of damp volcanic rock.

And then there is the theory known as panspermia. Once the province of science-fiction novels and cartoons, the notion that the vital ingredients of life came from outer space has garnered respect from some lofty places of late.

A few scientists think there's evidence that humans actually descended from Martian microbes, not exactly what the author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus had in mind.

But it merits further study, said chemist Steven Benner, who has founded a new institute in Gainesville, the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology, which aims to bridge chemistry and biology, with evolution as its guide.

"If you really want to find a place to get life started, it's Mars, and if you want to get a place to get life to flourish, it's Earth," Benner said.

While at the University of Florida a few years ago, Benner's team collaborated with scientists at The Scripps Research Institute to explore what kind of chemistry is necessary to support life.

In the process of trying to synthesize a living, evolving molecule in his lab, Benner seized upon minerals containing the element boron, the substance that makes some fireworks glow green.

Was boron the ingredient that enabled the Earth to go green as well?

Benner found that boron, with calcium at hand, had the talent of helping hold together the chain of carbon needed to stabilize a ribose sugar, the backbone of ribonucleic acid, the scaffolding for our genes. Without boron and calcium, heat, water and lightning would cause ribose to disintegrate into a tarlike mess, unable to support genes.

For geologic reasons, Benner's boron finding points directly to Mars as a likely source for Earth life, said Cal Tech geobiologist Joseph L. Kirschvink.

"When Steve told me of his work on ribosynthesis with boron, I said, 'Steve you've just proven to me that we're Martians.' "

That's because the boron needed to make ribose must come as calcium borate, a mineral that's soluble in water, Kirschvink believes.

A few places on Earth, including Death Valley, have a good supply of calcium borate, but they were under water at the time the first evidence of microbes appears on Earth, Kirschvink said. That was not the case on Earth's nearest neighbor, Mars, which was sending off bits of rock and dust in the Earth's general direction every time it took a hit from a meteorite.

"We know we have about a ton of Martian rock coming in a year," Kirschvink said. "And it wouldn't take more than a few spores to seed the Earth with life."

Could Mars possibly have had spores?

Space exploration and powerful telescopes have revealed that the red planet has polar ice, just like our own planet. In 2004, NASA's Opportunity rover found evidence that it once had liquid water running across its surface.

And 3 billion or 4 billion years ago, at the time when the Earth apparently was covered with water, Mars may have had a warmer atmosphere and abundant microbial life.

"It's entirely reasonable that there was life on Mars, but maybe long extinct," said Gerald Joyce, a professor at Scripps in La Jolla, Calif., who has collaborated with Benner. "The way to find it is to go there, drill down a bit, bring back samples to Earth and look at them."

Unfortunately, a plan to do just that has fallen victim to NASA budget cuts.

"It's very sad," Joyce said.

Plus, President Bush's budget request to Congress for next year proposes slashing funding for astrobiology research in half.

Kirschvink fears religious sentiment may be playing a role in the money cuts.

"There are fundamentalists who don't like the idea that their creator put life anywhere other than Earth," he said.

In the meantime, Joyce and other scientists are going as far as they possibly can with their science here on Earth.

In the journal Chemistry & Biology, Joyce's lab describes using evolutionary principles to convert RNA into DNA and keep its chemical activity intact.

Such conversion may have been necessary for more advanced life to evolve. It's one more clue as to how life might have assembled, Joyce said.

Meanwhile, the Marsophiles are excited about a new paper from Martin Fisk, a University of Oregon marine geologist. Fisk has studied several pieces of Martian meteorite, including one called Nakhla, donated from the Smithsonian Institution. In the journal Astrobiology, Fisk describes finding tunnels etched into the Martian rock — tunnels just like ones he has seen in Earth rock. On Earth, only microbes cause those types of tunnels.

"They are not known to be made by any other process that we know of," Fisk said.

It's a controversial notion, one that has been debated since 1996, when another bit of Martian meteorite stored at NASA labs near Houston was found to contain organic material and what appeared to be fossilized microbes.

At the time, critics shot down the idea, insisting that inorganic activity might have made the marks in the rock.

Fisk notes that his samples contained no DNA, the code for life.

Benner thinks it's not a deal-breaker.

"The failure to find DNA in the Martian rock is assumed to argue against Martian life. But this logic is coherent only if Martian life must use the same type of DNA as Earth life uses," Benner said.

Kirschvink agreed. "DNA would not survive 4 billion years, even on Mars," he said. "It barely survives in frozen mammoths that are only 12,000 years old."

For now, there are more skeptics of Mars' seeding life on Earth than there are advocates.

Conel Alexander, a geochemist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, suspects life arose organically on Earth.

"The worry is nobody really understands how well microbes would survive the shock that is required to put something into orbit. To knock it off Mars, how would it survive the radiation? That's one of the many questions," Alexander said.

"Nonsense," retorts Kirschvink. "The European Space Agency demonstrated more than five-year survival to space conditions, and some of the Martian meteorites get here within one year of a major impact on Mars."

Matt Schrenk, a geobiologist at the Carnegie Institution, favors the deep-sea vent theory, although he's not ruling anything out yet.

"The simplest explanation is that life started here," Schrenk said. "This is the one place where we know life does exist on Earth. But I think as evidenced by this Stardust mission, there's plenty of organic material coming in constantly from space. That must have played some role in the origin of life on Earth."

Source: The Palm Beach Post
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/content/local%5Fnews/epaper/2006/04/03/
c1a%5FMARS%5F0403.html

- YOU WILL ALWAYS BE A PART OF ME DEPARTMENT -

The Art Transplant

William Sheridan's drawing skills were stuck at nursery level. His stick figures were the sort you would expect of a child. But as he convalesced after a heart transplant operation, he experienced an astonishing revelation.

Suddenly he was blessed with an artistic talent he simply did not recognise, producing beautiful drawings of wildlife and landscapes.

He was even more amazed when he discovered what he now believes to be the explanation. The man who donated his new heart was a keen artist.

Last night Mr Sheridan, 63, was being hailed as the latest example of a phenomenon which sounds like science fiction but which is intriguing a growing number of medical experts - that it is possible during an organ transplant to inherit character traits from the donor.

Mr Sheridan, a retired catering manager, started drawing as therapy to relieve the boredom while waiting for a donor in New York's Mount Sinai Hospital.

There was no way his efforts could be considered artistic, according to the hospital's consultant art therapist, Beth DeFuria.

"But days after his transplant, he began creating this amazing, elaborate artwork," she said. "It was really quite amazing how his talent blossomed."

Yesterday, Mr Sheridan met the mother of the heart donor and handed her a sketch of a large hand holding a heart with the inscription: "You gave me more than a heart. Thank you."

He had agreed to give up the traditional anonymity between donor and recipient as part of a campaign to publicise the need for more organs.

'Cellular memory'

In the process he discovered the heart had come from 24-year-old Wall Street stockbroker Keith Neville, who died in a car crash And one of the first things Mr Sheridan asked the dead man's mother, Donna Reed, was whether her son had been artistic. Mrs Reed told him her son loved to paint. She said: "He was very artistic. He showed an interest in art when he was just 18 months old.

"He always preferred to be given art supplies rather than toys."

Mr Sheridan said: "I am alive because someone was kind enough to give me their heart. He had to be a good person because I feel myself being more caring and loving."

Medical opinion is sceptical over whether organ recipients can gain more than just a lifeline from their transplants. But Gary Schwartz, a professor of medicine, neurology, psychiatry and surgery at the University of Arizona, says research by a team he leads has found definite links. He calls it 'cellular memory'.

He has documented 70 cases where he believes transplant recipients have inherited the traits of their donors.

Prof Schwartz said: "When the organ is placed in the recipient, the information and energy stored in the organ is passed on to the recipient. The theory applies to any organ that has cells that are interconnected. They could be kidneys, liver and even muscles.

"The stories we have uncovered are very compelling and are completely consistent."

He says his studies have found that heart transplant patients are the most likely to experience personality changes.

Professor Gary Schwartz's findings are backed up by Dr Paul Pearsall, author of The Heart's Code, a book dealing with the same phenomenon.

Their casebook also includes:

A woman who was terrified of heights until she was given the lungs of a mountain climber. Dottie O'Connor, from Massachusetts, is now a climber.

A seven-year-old girl had nightmares about being killed after being given the heart of a child who had been murdered.

Paul Oldam, a lawyer from Milwaukee, received the heart of a 14-year-old boy and inherited his craving for Snickers.

And a man of 25 received a woman's heart and, to his girlfriend's delight, now wants to go shopping all the time.

Source: The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?
in_article_id=381589&in_page_id=1774

- EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE AT HEART DEPARTMENT -

Werewolves in Myth and Legend

A werewolf is one of the central figures of the oldest superstitions. This monster featured in numerous Hollywood blockbusters has been terrifying children and adults worldwide for thousands of years as well as vampires, witches, mermaids, ghosts and sorcerers. Werewolf is also known by the name ‘lycanthrope’ meaning “a wolf human” and originating from the Greek word Likantropia. Some dictionaries define the word as ‘turning a witch into a wolf”.

The werewolf theme was always popular in the folklore worldwide, and each country has its name for the creature. Beginning from the epoch of Romulus and Remus, stories about wolves and werewolves excited the imagination of such prominent figures as Jean-Jack Rousseau, Carolus Linnaeus and Jonathan Swift. The talented writers composed an entire series of wonderful stories about werewolves.

However, the werewolf is little known as compared with his fellow, the vampire. The werewolf is more multiform and more mysterious than the vampire. The modern science may easily discredit all the mythical characteristics given to the vampire. But it is known that in old times some strange disease really affected entire settlements and turned people living there into furious beasts. Those diseased revealed all the classical symptoms of lycanthropy.

The interest to the werewolf issue seems to be inexhaustible. In the 20th century, filmmakers were inspired with the issue for making a great number of films about werewolves. Today, fiction and journalism reveal even a deeper approach to the werewolf issue and consider it in a wider aspect.

December 17, 1976 London’s The Daily Mail published a story entitled ‘Werewolf Killer Caught, The Police Say’ that told about the seizure of a criminal known as the Paris werewolf for committing numerous killings. At the end of WWII, Nazis founded a terrorist organization code named Werwolf (Werewolf). Criminals are often described with the strong moral metaphor ‘werewolves’ when they commit really wild series killings, violations that are beyond logic; when they practice cannibalism, tortures, sadomasochism and Satanism. The irony of the metaphor means that the wolf never attacks and kills itself unless it is hungry or wounded. According to recent researches, wolves in a pack maintain close trusting relations where the entire pack is based upon mutual responsibility. And in case some of the wolves in a pack reveals the killer instinct they liquidate it for the welfare of the rest of the pack.

Genuine werewolves in the contemporary society are those who come to mental hospitals as patients and participate in ritual ceremonies of American Indians. Doctors call people of both sexes who imagine or feel they are werewolves ‘lycanthropes’. So, today the word ‘lycanthrope’ is a professional medical term indicating a pathological condition; and the word ‘werewolf’ is a word used in fiction, films and as a characteristic of criminals.

Werewolves and their terrible doings were known already in the time when Rome was being founded. People in Ancient Greece also feared the scary creature. But werewolves as well as vampires were particularly scary for people in Eastern Europe where the only mentioning of a werewolf made peasants turn white and look around numb with fear.

Unlike vampires that got out from their coffins to suck blood out of living people, werewolves do not belong to the other world. The werewolf is an absolutely earthly phenomenon. It is highly likely that the turning of humans into wolves was connected with some disease, and anyone could be affected with the disease. It was for sure that a werewolf bite would make a victim diseased. But nobody knew when and under what conditions the terrible werewolf symptoms could reveal themselves. And this fact explained the wild fear and mass executions in the Middle Ages when people suspected of being werewolves were burnt or executed with swords. When the mass fear sweepingly spread, people known as batty or those having something wolfish in their features could be immediately prosecuted as werewolves.

People suspected of lycanthropy found themselves in a really terrible situation. Such attacks as a rule entailed a huge range of moral and religious problems in the epoch when the church played a really important role in the everyday life of all people.

The tradition of that time was to start open legal proceedings with tortures against those declared werewolves, and then the latter were executed which was usually burning. It is not known exactly how many people were executed by hanging or burning on the charges of lycanthropy. However, ancient written evidence proves that the number was quite considerable indeed.

People particularly feared the full moon as it was believed that the disease affected people particularly at this time. Those affected with the disease found their bodies awfully changed, they looked and behaved very much like wolves. After the terrible transformations, werewolves set off for their night wandering to kill anyone they met. That was a real disaster indeed. A human can turn into a vampire only after an attack and bite of another vampire. But lycanthropy was the disease that could suddenly affect anyone, and there was no salvation from it.

There was little chance that patients suffering from lycanthropy could be cured. As a rule, werewolves were doomed to their every night wandering until some other stronger creature killed them or they were not shot with a silver bullet. Unlike vampires, werewolves could be killed in very traditional ways, but it was believed that especially cast silver bullets were particularly effective against werewolves. It was until the 18th century that people in some parts of Europe believed that werewolves had their haired wolf tails hidden under clothes even when they turned into humans again. People thought that the physical peculiarity was always typical of lycanthropy patients, and doctors stated they actually saw patients having tails. That was true that doctors could offer no medicine to cure the disease.

Ancient treatises say that true lycanthropes not only physically turned into wolves, their mind and behavior also changed at that. Such people sensed they were absolute beasts. Those documents stated that meeting a lycanthrope was also risky on a sunny day, but moonlit nights of the full moon were particularly dangerous. It took just a very short period of time for lycanthropy patients to begin to transform into wolves. They felt fever and thirst, then their hands and legs turned into legs resembling those of a wolf. People threw off their shoes as their feet turned into wolf’s paws. The mind of a lycanthropy patient also absolutely changed, and it could no longer stay indoors. Then nausea and spasms entailed madness when the transformation became perfectly evident: a patient threw his clothes off, his body began to cover with hair and the feet grew coarse. Soon, all of the head was covered with thick hair and it seemed a human was wearing an animal mask. Then a lycanthrope was gripped with the blood lust and it ran away in search of a victim. Like many beasts of prey, lycanthropes killed their victims by biting their cervical arteries. When the blood lust was satisfied, a lycanthrope fell asleep right in the forest where he killed his victim. At daybreak, a lycanthrope turned into a human again.

Lycanthrope always felt when the terrible transformations began, but they usually occurred within a very short period of time. So, people suffering from the awful disease had to take special measures not to be exposed. Lycanthropes having big houses had special secret rooms where they hid until they turned into humans again. Others preferred to escape to forests where they were growling and rolling about the surface.

Philosophers and scholars in all epochs disputed whether werewolves actually existed or were just a fiction. Many of outstanding scholars supposed that in case of some mental diseases patients could feel they are beasts, but they emphasized that real lycanthropes could not exist at all.

In 125 B.C., Roman poet Marcell Sidet wrote that people affected with lycanthropy revealed mania, frightful appetites and wolf ferocity. According to the poet, people were particularly subject to the disease at the beginning of a year, in February, when the disease was widespread and revealed in acute forms.

Source: Pravda
http://english.pravda.ru/society/anomal/04-04-2006/78313-werewolf-0