[Unmuseum_newsletter] Science Over the Edge - September 2012

[A Monthly Update on the World of Science]

Science Over the Edge - September 2012

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In the News: 

*Record Snake Found in Florida - University of Florida scientists examined a 17 ½ long, dead, Burmese python that was found in Everglades National Park. The snake breaks the former record as the longest ever found in Florida by almost a foot. "This thing is monstrous -- it's about a foot wide," said Kenneth Krysko, the manager of the Florida Museum of Natural History herpetology collection. "It means there's nothing stopping them and the native wildlife are in trouble." The snake was a pregnant female carrying 87 eggs, three more than the previous record. The pythons, originally from Asia, are not native to Florida, but have been imported as pets and then either escaped or were released. They are a deadly and competitive predator and threaten many of the native species in the southern part of the state. Researchers hope that by studying the record snake they can find clues to better help officials control the invasive species which now numbers in the thousands. 

*Dino Track found at Space Center - A 14 inche wide dinosaur track has been hiding in plain sight at the Goddard Space Flight Center near suburban Washington, D.C.. Despite being in the middle of a complex used by thousands of scientists everyday nobody noticed it for many years. Of course, the researchers at the center are trained up look at up, not down, so it took a visiting dinosaur tracker named Ray Stanford to make the discovery. Stanford, 74, noticed the track after having lunch with his wife, who works at Goddard. The track appears to be from a nodosaur, a plant-eater that was armored like a tank. They were about 15 feet in length and lived in the Early Cretaceous around 110 million years ago. Though Stanford is not a professional paleontologist he has co-authored a Journal of Paleontology paper on a new nodosaur species and found other confirmed dinosaur tracks. 

*Amateur Restoration in Spanish Church Ruins Art - An inexpert restoration of a 120 year-old fresco in a Spanish church has "destroyed the painting" according to the original artist's granddaughter. The painting 'Ecce Homo' by the artist Elias Garcia Martinez, one of two known surviving works by the artist, is displayed in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church at Borja near Zaragoza. Apparently churchgoer Cecilia Giménez decided to renovate it with disastrous results. According to Giménez "The priest was aware…he knew…Of course I did it because I was told to do it." One commentator has described the results as "something out of Planet of the Apes." According to the local Center for Borja Studies it is unclear at this point if the restoration can be removed and the fresco fixed. 

*"Curse" Scroll Found in English Town - Scientists have identified a strange scroll found in East Farleigh, U.K., three years ago, as a curse. The scroll, apparently buried in the third century AD, was meant to bring misfortune to those whose names were listed on it. Such items were popular in the Greek and Roman world and as a form of black magic were meant to ask the gods to torment certain victims. These items were rolled up to conceal their meanings and nailed to the walls of temples or entombed in places close to the underworld, such as graves, springs or wells. Roger Tomlin, an expert in Roman history from Wolfson College, Oxford, decoded the scroll. "The tablet is not necessarily complete, but what there is consists of two columns of personal names." Because the text is not all there it is impossible to know the details of the curse or why it was issued. However some of the names are written upside down which may have been done to invoke "sympathetic magic" and make life especially unpleasant for these individuals. 

*Three New Sharks Found - Arizona seems an unlikely place to discovery a new shark, but in recent months three new species have actually been identified here. The key is that the sharks lived 270 million years ago when the state was covered by a warm, shallow sea. The largest of these three was Kaibabvenator swiftae ("Swift's Kaibab hunter") which grew to about 20 feet in length. Neosaivodus flagstaffensis ("new Saivodus from Flagstaff") and Nanoskalme natans ("swimming dwarf blade") were 6 and ½ feet, and three feet long, respectively. The sharks were unearthed at what is known as the Kaibab Formation of northern Arizona. At the time these sharks were swimming in Arizona they filled many of the ecological niches that were occupied later by bony fish and mammals. This means, according to John-Paul Hodnett of Museum of Northern Arizona's Geology and Paleontology Department, that "The main predators on sharks would have been other sharks." 
 
 
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Science Quote of the Month - "I do not like it, and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it." - Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize, on quantum mechanics.
 
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What's New at the Museum: 

*Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa - Tradition has it that on Friday, September 28th, 1900, in Alexandria, Egypt, a donkey, hauling a cart full of stone, made a misstep and disappeared into a hole in the ground. If that story is accurate, this beast of burden made one of the most astounding discoveries in archeological history: A set of rock-cut tombs with features unlike that of any other catacomb in the ancient world (http://www.unmuseum.org/7wonders/catacomb.htm)

*Mysterious Picture of the Month - Who is this this?(http://www.unmuseum.org/fawcett.htm)
 
 
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Ask the Curator:

*Surviving a Jump - Can a person survive a dive into water from five stories up? - Anonymous 

Well, from personal experience on my summer vacation, I can tell you that you can dive into a river from 2 and ½ stories up (25 feet) and suffer no ill effects. In fact, Olympic style diving is typically done from a 33 foot platform (3 stories) with no problems. Finally, cliff divers in Acapulco, Mexico jump from 136 feet (13.5 stories), head first (using their hands to break the water), into the sea on a daily basis. So a five story (50 foot) dive into water is certainly survivable.

But how about heights of 15 stories and above? The higher you get the more critical the position you enter the water becomes. A study by Dr. Richard Snyder of people who jumped or fell off the Golden Gate Bridge found you had the best chance of living through it if you hit the water vertically, feet first. The roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge is around 250 feet above the water, about 25 stories. It has become a magnet for people who want to do themselves in by jumping off the bridge. Some die from the impact, others drown in the bay, but a few people do live to tell the tale. These people went in feet first in a vertical position. 

One who didn't make it was a stunt diver called Kid Courage. He went off the bridge in 1980, but landed on his back and suffered fatal internal injuries. He was dead when the pulled him from the water.

Some experts put the outside limit on survival of a fall into water at around 260 feet. By then a human body has usually reached a speed of greater than 80 miles per hour and hitting even a liquid at that speed is a huge shock. 

Even so there are rare reports of people who have fallen into water from great heights and survived. In June 1963 Marine pilot Cliff Judkins was forced to bail out of his F-8 Crusader at 15,000 feet and his parachute failed to open. It is likely he hit the ocean at nearly the human terminal velocity of 120mph, but survived despite huge odds against it. 

Have a question? Click here to send it to us. http://www.unmuseum.org/postmail.htm
  
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In History: 

*20th Century Mystery Airship - Most reports of mysterious blimp-like airships came from the 19th century (See the Mysterious Airship of 1896). However, in September of 1994 a man in Taos, New Mexico reported seeing a "huge" cigar-shaped object in the sky with a "bell like fish are when they are pregnant." According to the witness the object had more than a dozen lights underneath it. It flew slowly from east to west until it entered which lit up from the interior. "It was like nothing I've ever seen," he said later. "It was right on top of me, maybe 400 or 500 feet up. It made a noise, but it didn't make a noise like any other aircraft I've heard." No good explanation for the witness's report is known. 

  
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In the Sky: 

*Check out Jupiter and Venus - Early September gives you a chance to see the planets Venus and Jupiter, in the southeast morning sky. Look for the moon to be just two degrees from Jupiter on the 8th and near Venus on the 12th. By the 19th the moon will have found its way over to Mars in the evening sky. 
  
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Observed: 

*New Pyramid Found on Google Earth? - Angela Micol, a satellite archaeology researcher, claims she has found two sets of unusual groupings of mounds in Egypt that may be unknown sets of pyramids. One is in Upper Egypt, near the city of Abu Sidhum and features a group of four mounds within a larger, triangular-shaped plateau. The other is just 1.5 miles south east of the ancient town of Dimaia and contains a four-sided, truncated mound that is approximately 150 feet wide with three smaller mounds. Micol reported her findings on her website Google Earth Anomalies. According to Micol, the sites have been verified as undiscovered by Egyptologist and pyramid expert Nabil Selim. 

  
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On the Tube: 

Please check local listing for area outside of North America. 

*NOVA: Making Stuff: Smaller - How small can we go? Could we one day have robots taking "fantastic voyages" in our bodies to kill rogue cells? The triumphs of tiny are seen all around us in the Information Age: transistors, microchips, laptops, cell phones. Now, David Pogue takes NOVA viewers to an even smaller world in "Making Stuff: Smaller," examining the latest in high-powered nano-circuits and micro-robots that may one day hold the key to saving lives On PBS: September 19 at 10pm; ET/PT. 

*One Giant Leap: A Neil Armstrong Tribute - This one-hour original documentary showcases the tremendous impact Neil Armstrong made on the world and his legacy to space exploration. On The Discovery Channel: Sep 01, 8:00 pm & Sep 02, 1:00 am; ET/PT. 

*In The Shadow of the Moon - In The Shadow Of The Moon vividly depicts the extraordinary era between 1968 and 1972 when the world watched in awe as American spacecraft voyaged to the Moon. On The Science Channel: Sep 01, 8:00 pm; Sep 01, 11:00 pm; Sep 03, 3:00 am; ET/PT.

*NASA's Unexplained Files - Strange flying objects have been caught on NASA's cameras and astronauts have reported seeing UFOs. Some of the odd shapes and lights can be identified; others remain a mystery. We'll reveal NASA footage and interview the astronauts and scientists. On The Science Channel: Sep 10, 8:00 pm; Sep 10, 11:00 pm; Sep 12, 3:00 am; ET/PT.

*Dark Secrets of the Lusitania - On May 7, 1915, a well-placed German torpedo struck the RMS Lusitania passenger liner with 1,959 passengers on board. Ultimately, 1,198 of them succumbed to the water. But the ones who survived gave eyewitness accounts of a second, more powerful explosion that to this day cannot be fully explained. A team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California test four distinct theories to explain the cause of this explosion. On The National Geographic Channel: Sept 9 12AM & 11PM; Sept 8 10AM; ET/PT.

*Engineering Egypt - This two-hour special takes us into the hearts and minds of two of the greatest pharaohs of Ancient Egypt as they stop at nothing to build their way toward immortality and show us the story behind audacious projects in Egypt, such as one of Seven Wonders of the World: the Great Pyramid of Giza. On The National Geographic Channel: Sept 12, 10AM; ET/PT.

*Into the Great Pyramid - Join archaeologist Zahi Hawass as he unravels the mystery of how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built and who executed the awe-inspiring enterprise. Witness the opening of a 4,500-year-old sarcophagus, the oldest ever found in Egypt. On The National Geographic Channel: Sept 12, 1PM; ET/PT.
 

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LGM:


Copyright Lee Krystek, 2012.
 		 	   		  
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