Has Machu Picchu, The 'Lost City Of The Incas,' Become A Victim Of Its Own Success?

The president of Peru announced plans Wednesday to build an airport near the city of Cusco, base camp for the pre-Columbian ruins of Machu Picchu, in order to boost tourism to the surrounding region.

President Ollanta Humala said the $460 million facility would replace Velazco Astete Airport, which is only capable of handling limited daytime flights and has cost Peru key international airline links, including many with the United States.

NASA prepares to explore Van Allen Radiation Belts

Spacecraft engineers at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida are slated to configure RBSP for launch at approximately 10 p.m. The terminal countdown operation begins at 12:57 a.m., at which time the launch pad will be cleared of personnel in preparation for fueling the Atlas V rocket - with the loading of cryogenic propellants scheduled for 1:42 a.m and liftoff on track for 4:07 a.m.



Abraham Ibn Ezra on Elections, Interrogations, and Medical Astrology

Abraham Ibn Ezra (c.1089-c.1161), born in Tudela, spent the first fifty or so years of his life in Muslim Iberia, as far as we know writing Hebrew poetry, both secular and liturgical. Beginning in 1140 and for the next twenty years, Ibn Ezra travelled through Italy, southern France, the Angevin territories, and England, composing biblical commentaries, grammatical and theological works, and scientific treatises. Strikingly, as has long been known but is now becoming clearer, Ibn Ezra in his journeys found himself writing two or more versions of most of his works, in response to requests from students and according to the interests of various patrons.

Shlomo Sela is the world’s expert on Ibn Ezra’s astrology, having published an analysis of scientific and astrological concepts of space and time in Ibn Ezra’s biblical commentaries (1999), a survey of Ibn Ezra’s astrological works and particular views on astrology (2003), and numerous articles on his discoveries of previously unknown fragments and versions of Ibn Ezra’s astrological treatises.

Children of older men have more DNA mutations

The father’s age is decisive in determining how many mutations a child has in its genome – the older the father is, the higher the number of mutations is, and the greater the risk is that the child will develop e.g. autism and schizophrenia.

If your father was an older man when you were born, it can have had a negative influence on your DNA: you will have acquired more mutations in your genetic material than you would have if your father had been younger.

Red Giants and White Dwarfs Make Explosive Stellar Pairings

Mysterious stars that incite their stellar companions to explode in spectacular supernovas have just been revealed — these culprits can be bloated red giants, researchers say.

Supernovas are exploding stars that are bright enough to briefly outshine all the stars in their galaxies. They can occur when one star sheds gas onto a dying star known as a white dwarf, the dim fading core of a star that was once about the size of our sun.

Identification chips are vulnerable for attacks

Mohammad Reza Sohizadeh Abyaneh
 has found that RFID chips
aren’t totally safe. (Photo: Dag Hellestad)

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips can identify people, animals and objects from a distance of several metres but the technology is susceptible to misuse and hacking.

They are used in key or access cards, electronic travel cards and ID cards to make life easier. Unfortunately some of them can be used to make our lives a little riskier.

RFID is a technology for automatic and wireless identification of an object, animal or person – without any physical or even visual contact with the RFID reader.

This is because RFID chips are designed to be read by radio waves.

Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories

On Wednesday, May 16, I spent several hours on a hot bus in a neon desert called Las Vegas with a merry band of British conspiracists during their journey around the Southwest in search of UFOs, aliens, Area 51 and government cover-ups, all for a BBC documentary. 

One woman regaled me with a tale about orange balls of energy hovering around her car on Interstate 405 in California, which were subsequently chased away by black ops helicopters. A man challenged me to explain the source of a green laser beam that followed him around the English countryside one evening.

Milky Way Now Has a Twin (or Two): Astronomers Find First Group of Galaxies Just Like Ours

Research presented Aug. 23, 2012 at the International Astronomical Union General Assembly in Beijing has found the first group of galaxies that is just like ours, a rare sight in the local Universe.

The Milky Way is a fairly typical galaxy on its own, but when paired with its close neighbours -- the Magellanic Clouds -- it is very rare, and could have been one of a kind, until a survey of our local Universe found another two examples just like us.

Astronomer Dr Aaron Robotham, jointly from the University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and the University of St Andrews in Scotland, searched for groups of galaxies similar to ours in the most detailed map of the local Universe yet, the Galaxy and Mass Assembly survey (GAMA).

Milky Way's Black Hole Once Active

Evidence continues to mount that our galaxy's supermassive black hole was not always the quiet neighbor it is now.

There’s a dragon dozing in the Milky Way’s core. Hidden from sight by our galaxy’s dusty disk, a supermassive black hole sleeps fitfully. Sometimes a cloud of gas might whisk around its nostrils or a star fall on its head and make the dragon snort a bit of flame, then go back to sleep. But a few million years ago, something managed to rouse the beast so completely that it spewed plasma jets and a couple of big bubbles into space.

Somnambulant Savagery: When Sleep Turns Violent

More than 25 years later details of the attack are still shocking: Sometime after 2 A.M. one Sunday morning in May 1987, Kenneth James Parks, then 23, left his house in a Toronto suburb and drove 23 kilometers to the apartment of his wife's parents. He got out of the car, pulled a tire iron out of the trunk and let himself into the older couple's home with a key they had given him. 

Once inside, he struggled with and choked his father-in-law, Dennis Woods, until the older man fell unconscious and then struggled with and beat his mother-in-law, Barbara Ann Woods, stabbing her to death with a knife from her kitchen.