Strange Sounds Heard Round the World

MYSTERIOUS SOUNDS REPORTED AROUND THE WORLD

Analysis by Benjamin Radford
Wed Feb 8, 2012 04:20 PM ET 

Noise-mystery

People around the world have reported hearing strange sounds from the skies over the past month. Sometimes they describe it as a hum or low rumble; other times it’s a whine, thump, or even a melody. Often the sounds have been recorded and posted online, fueling rumors and conspiracy theories.

One blogger wrote, “either the world is ending, aliens are landing or everyone is getting hoaxed. Or, possibly, there’s an actual scientific explanation for the mass amount of YouTube videos capturing bizarre sounds that are being heard around the globe. Are we witnessing the beginning of a full-scale alien invasion?”

So, what are people hearing (and recording)?

Natural Explanations

The explanations are almost as varied as the sounds themselves. There’s not a single blanket explanation for all the mysterious sounds, though many have been identified. For example there’s the recent “midnight roar”reported in Malaysia:

 

According to a Borneo Post report, the “Sky Roar” had been heard over Kota Samarahan from around 2am or 3am till dawn on both days. Terrified residents, the report added, described the noises as a “loud hushing” or “snoring” sound. The sounds were also recorded that night, and were later uploaded on YouTube. The Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation has a very simple explanation – it was created by an oil palm factory testing their boiler pressure on Jan 11 and Jan 12.

 

In other cases the strange sound is still being researched; last week the Canadian government was asked to investigate a low-frequency hum that has intermittently plagued citizens in Windsor, Ontario for months. (If the conspiracy theorists are right, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper may soon get an unofficial visit from Men in Black-type agents warning him not to investigate.)

There are a few things to keep in mind about these strange, ambient sounds; for one thing, there is virtually no place on the planet where noise pollution is not a problem. We live in a constant sea of background noise, most of it unnoticed until we start paying attention to all the sounds and focusing on them.

Sources of indoor sounds are nearly endless, from faintly ticking clocks to air conditioning to bubbling aerators in fish tanks. Outside the problem is far worse, with noise generated by countless sources including traffic; airplanes (seen and unseen); radios; lawnmowers and snowblowers; trains; highways; and high-tension lines. Then there are the many industrial sources of noise and vibrations, including power plants and any factories with large machines such as auto assembly plants and printing presses.

Some complain that the promise of green energy offered by large wind turbines comes at a cost: a low, rumbling, rhythmic whoosh or groan that travels through the air and earth, sometimes for miles. Furthermore, the earth itself generates a natural, constant hum (though it’s typically far below the threshold of human hearing). Scientists believe the hum is created by ocean waves crashing over continental shelves, which creates vibrations that travel throughout the world.

Hoaxes

In some cases, the “mysterious sound” videos have been revealed as hoaxes. For example, a college student in Edmonton, Canada, posted a video of mysterious sounds which got nearly 140,000 views on YouTube before she admitted it was fake. She told a local newspaper, “I made the video by taking out my iPhone and merely video recorded my balcony view while holding my laptop right behind it, while my laptop played the Conklin YouTube video in the background. Took less than a minute to do this…. I made the video to show my friends and family how easy it was (literally less than five minutes of my life to make the video and upload it) to make something like that, and how they shouldn’t believe everything they see online, and should especially not get fearful.”

Mysterious sounds are nothing new, of course. The most famous mystery sound in the world is probably the Taos Hum, a low-frequency rumble heard by some residents in Taos, New Mexico since the early 1990s. Not everyone hears it, but the earwitnesses who do variously describe it as sounding like a running refrigerator or a buzzing bee. Researchers have been unable to pinpoint the source of the sound — or even confirm that the hearers are indeed perceiving a specific, identifiable sound.

While the public may assume that locating a sound is easy, it’s not. Identifying the source of a sound is very difficult in urban areas where concrete, glass, and buildings can reflect, change, and amplify sound waves from ordinary sources. Of course it’s more fun to think that the mysterious sounds are part of an alien invasion or secret military experiment than machinery at a local sewage plant.

http://news.discovery.com/human/mysterious-sounds-reported-around-the-world-120208.html

 

There are other explanations.  Check out the podcast on Lind Moulton Howe’s EARTHFILES:

http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1939&category=Environment

And from DUTCHSINSE youtube channel, there is this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ2ZcmMxehk

 

Dr. Jeff Masters on Climatic Warming

Posted by: JeffMasters, 2:53 PM GMT on February 10, 2012 +30
Last week, I blogged about how wintertime minimum temperatures in the U.S. have risen so much in recent decades, that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had to update their Plant Hardiness Zone Map for gardeners for the first time since 1990. The Plant Hardiness Zone Map is the standard by which gardeners and growers can determine which plants are most likely to thrive at a location. I got to looking at the new zone map for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I live, and saw how we’ve shifted one 5-degree Fahrenheit half-zone warmer. Ann Arbor used to be in Zone 5, but is now solidly in the warmer Zone 6. This got me to wondering, what sort of plants in Zone 6, until now rare or unknown in Ann Arbor, might migrate northwards in coming decades into the city? Then, with a sudden chill, I contemplated a truly awful possibility: The Ohio Buckeye Tree.


Figure 1. Comparison of the 1990 and 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Maps. Image credit: USDA and Arbor Day Foundation.

Buckeyes in Ann Arbor? The Horror!
For those of you unfamiliar the the buckeye tree, it is the emblem of Ohio State University. The Buckeyes of Ohio State have one of the most fierce rivalries in sports with that “school up north”, the University of Michigan. As someone who spent twelve years of my life as a student at the University of Michigan, the thought of Buckeye trees in Ann Arbor is not one I care to contemplate. But the USDA Forest Service has published a Climate Change Tree Atlas which predicts that the Ohio Buckeye Tree can be expected to march northwards and infest Ann Arbor with a warming climate. I can only sadly predict that to stem the invasion, non-ecologically-minded University of Michigan students will unleash genetically engineered wolverines that eat buckeye seeds.


Figure 2. Potential changes in the mean center of distribution of the Ohio Buckeye tree. The green oval shows the current center of the range of the Buckeye Tree, well to the south of Ann Arbor. In a scenario where humans emit relatively low amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide (light blue oval), the Buckeye Tree edges into Southern Michigan, and marches into Ann Arbor under the medium and high scenarios for emissions (other ovals.) Image credit: USDA Forest Service Climate Change Tree Atlas.

Libyan snowstorm triggered major Saharan dust storm
On February 6, a rare snow storm hit North Africa, bringing 2 – 3 inches of snow to Tripoli, Libya. It was the first snow in Tripoli since at least 2005, and may be the heaviest snow the Libyan capital has seen since February 6, 1956. The storm responsible for the North African snow also had strong winds that kicked up a tremendous amount of dust over Algeria during the week. This dust became suspended in a flow of air moving to the southwest, and is now over the Atlantic Ocean.


Figure 3. Dust storm on February 7, 2012, off the coast of West Africa, spawned by a storm that brought snow to North Africa on February 6. Note the beautiful vorticies shed by the Cape Verde Islands, showing that the air is flowing northeast to southwest. The red squares mark where fires are burning in West Africa. Image credit: NASA.

Have a great weekend, everyone, and I’ll be back Monday with a new post.

Jeff Masters

Earthquake Lists — USA by State

Armand Vervaeck and James Daniell have created a page for cataloging Earthquakes in the US.

Link:   http://earthquake-report.com/2012/02/10/united-states-real-time-earthquake-lists-for-each-of-the-50-us-states/

These guys do an amazing job of  reporting earthquakes and keeping things current relative to seismic events.  Take a look:

United States real-time earthquake lists for each of the 50 US States

Last update

February 10, 2012 at 5:43 pm by By 

This page has been created to find out in real-time if an earthquake has been noticed by seismographs in or near the state you are living.

We have started to fill our database in January 2012. On top of the USGS notifications, we are also showing the earthquake details as published by other seismological sources in the world (only for the stronger earthquakes).  We list all earthquakes greater than  M 2.5 (as this is in average the level that people might feel an earthquake).
We hope that you will describe what you have felt, if an earthquake strikes near you. Your experience is of great interest to the scientific community as a whole.

Alabama Florida  Kentucky Missouri  North Carolina Tennessee
Alaska Georgia Louisiana Montana  North Dakota Texas
Arizona  Hawaii Maine Nebraska  Ohio Utah
Arkansas  Idaho  Maryland Nevada  Oklahoma Vermont
California Illinois Massachusetts New Hampshire Oregon Virginia
Colorado Indiana Michigan New Jersey  Pennsylvania Washington 
Connecticut Iowa Minnesota New Mexico  Rhode Island West Virginia
Delaware Kansas  Mississipi  New York South Carolina Wisconsin 
South Dakota  Wyoming 

from:    http://earthquake-report.com/2012/02/10/united-states-real-time-earthquake-lists-for-each-of-the-50-us-states/

Okabashi Sandals — Recycled and Recyclable

Okabashi Closes the Loop on Sandal Recycling

by 02/10/12

recycled shoes, sandals, flip-flops, sandal recyclingOkabashi’s line of sandals and flip-flops not only contain up to 25 percent recycled plastic, but can be returned to the company for recycling at the end of their useful lives. Photo: Okabashi

Shoes made from recycled materials are not a new green fashion trend: New BalancePuma and even Manolo Blahnik have all turned waste into new kicks.

But Georgia-based Okabashi goes a step further: Not only are its sandals and flip-flops made from recycled plastic, but the company also takes back its old shoes for recycling at the end of their useful lives.

Okabashi’s line of sandals, which comes in an assortment of styles and colors, are molded from a blend of plastics called Microplast, making them vegan-friendly. While the amount of recycled content in each shoe depends on the material available, an average pair of Okabashi sandals contains 15-25 percent recycled plastic.

When customers are ready to retire a pair of well-worn Okabashis, they can mail their shoes back to the company’s Buford, Ga. factory and receive a coupon for their next purchase. Okabashi’s team cleans the old shoes, grinds them down and blends the recycled plastic pieces with new plastic. The workers then remold the plastic mixture to produce a new pair of sandals, achieving a closed-loop recycling process.

The company also incorporates the plastic scraps leftover from production into the plastic mixture to make new shoes, making their manufacturing process virtually waste-free. The 2 percent of re-ground material that Okabashi can’t recycle in its factory is sent to a partner company to be made into other plastic products.

According to Okabashi, the company recycled over 100,000 pounds of plastic last year, diverting 10 tractor trailers full of waste from landfills.

Priced at $20 or less, each Okabashi sandal is designed for optimal comfort, featuring a massaging insole, arch support and ergonomic foot beds.

from:   http://earth911.com/news/2012/02/10/okabashi-closes-the-loop-on-sandal-recycling/

Can Animals ‘Domesticate” Themselves?

Why some wild animals are becoming nicer

08 February 12

Nature is supposed to be red in tooth and claw, and domestication an artificial process for making animals gentle. But it appears that some corners of the animal kingdom are becoming kinder, gentler places. Certain creatures may be domesticating themselves.

This possibility is most apparent in bonobos, a close cousin of chimpanzees. Unlike their violent cousins, bonobos are generally peaceful. And while many animals have evolved to be socially agreeable, bonobos — and possibly other species –seem to be experiencing something more precise and profound: the physical and behavioural changes specifically described in studies of domestication, but as a natural evolutionary process.

“Normally you think of domestication as something that happens at the hands of humans,” said Brian Hare, a Duke University evolutionary anthropologist and co-author of a bonobo research review published Jan. 20 in Animal Behaviour. “The idea that a species domesticated itself is a bit crazy, but there are some species that outcompeted others by becoming nicer.”

The essence of domestication is a loss of aggression. Because this is such a basic trait, involving modifications to nervous and endocrine systems, and alterations of complex gene networks with multiple functions, it generates a variety of changes. Researchers call them a “domestication syndrome,” and while aspects are seen in all domesticated animals, the principles are distilled in a famous Russian experiment on foxes.

Starting in 1959 with 130 farm-bred but wild foxes and continuing until today, researchers allowed only those individuals most tolerant of human contact to breed. In less than 50 years, the fierce-tempered and untouchable foxes became playful, face-licking sweethearts who loved to be held. Those traits are typically seen in wild pups, but disappear as they grow up.

With juvenile behaviours came juvenile appearances: Even as adults, foxes in the experiment now have spotted coats, floppy ears, curly tails and short legs. They’re evolutionarily suspended in childhood — and that, said Hare, may explain bonobos. “I have a lot of bonobos who are ‘friends,’ and I look at them and say, ‘I don’t understand how you evolved. You are too goofy, too nice, too silly. How did you not get eaten?” he said. “But they are very successful.”

Bonobos are very different than chimpanzees, from whom they split taxonomically about one million years ago. Chimp males struggle constantly and violently for dominance; bonobo males almost never fight, and stage virility contests involving non-confrontational stick-dragging. Male chimps often coerce females into sex; bonobos ask for permission. At the group level, chimpanzees regularly engage in something like low-level warfare, with lethal consequences; bonobos don’t. Mostly they hang out, play, and exchange sexual favors with frequency so astounding they’ve become pop-culture tropes.

Lab tests back up in-the-wild observations. Relative to chimps, bonobos are stressed by competition, attentive to others’ needs, and eager to cooperate and share. Brain regions crucial to behaviour and development, like the amygdala and occipital frontal cortex, are arranged differently. And in keeping with theories of domestication, bonobos play like juvenile chimpanzees, but throughout their lives. Their skulls also have smaller jawbones and teeth, or what anatomists call “paedomorphic” — child-shaped — features. They also have a white tail tuft and extra-pink lips, a possible analogue to the white spots often seen in, for example, cats and dogs.

According to Hare and study co-author Richard Wrangham, one of the world’s foremost primatologists, these are likely signs of domestication. But why and how could natural selection tame the bonobo? One possible narrative begins about 2.5 million years ago, when the last common ancestor of bonobos and chimpanzees lived both north and south of the Zaire River, as did gorillas, their ecological rivals. A massive drought drove gorillas from the south, and they never returned. That last common ancestor suddenly had the southern jungles to themselves.

As a result, competition for resources wouldn’t be as fierce as before. Aggression, such a costly habit, wouldn’t have been so necessary. And whereas a resource-limited environment likely made female alliances rare, as they are in modern chimpanzees, reduced competition would have allowed females to become friends. No longer would males intimidate them and force them into sex. Once reproduction was no longer traumatic, they could afford to be fertile more often, which in turn reduced competition between males.

“If females don’t let you beat them up, why should a male bonobo try to be dominant over all the other males?” said Hare. “In male chimps, it’s very costly to be on top. Often in primate hierarchies, you don’t stay on top very long. Everyone is gunning for you. You’re getting in a lot of fights. If you don’t have to do that, it’s better for everybody.” Chimpanzees had been caught in what Hare called “this terrible cycle, and bonobos have been able to break this cycle.” In doing so, they rose to primate supremacy in a region roughly the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River, and reigned unchallenged until Homo sapiens came along.

All this, at least, is the hypothesis: It’s important to note that it’s a proposed rather than certain scenario. It’s at least conceivable, if highly unlikely, that bonobos started out peaceful and chimpanzees became more aggressive. Conclusive proof would require a time machine. Still, the evidence is suggestive and the scenario plausible.

“High aggression is likely costly,” said Frank Albert, an evolutionary anthropologist at Princeton University who studies the genetics of domestication. “So it seems not very surprising that some of the bonobo-chimp ancestors may have benefited from evolving reduced aggression — and eventually become today’s bonobos.”

Not that bonobos will soon be peeking out of cardboard boxes on Cute Overload. On the trajectory from wild to domestic, they’re something likecertain wolves were tens of thousands of years ago, after reduced aggression allowed them to exploit a new ecological niche at the edges of growing human settlements, said Hare. At that time, people hadn’t yet started keeping and breeding dogs. Once they did, it accelerated a domestication already naturally underway.

to read more, go to:    http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-02/08/wild-animals-becoming-nicer

Can the Dead be Brought Back to Life?

Is It Possible to Reanimate the Dead?

Eli MacKinnon, Life’s Little Mysteries Contributor
Date: 08 February 2012 Time: 04:02 PM ET

 

reanimation, dead

In 1999, a Swedish medical student named Anna Bagenholm lost control while skiing and landed head first on a thin patch of ice covering a mountain stream. The surface gave way and she was pulled into the freezing current below; when her friends caught up with her minutes later, only her skis and ankles were visible above an 8-inch layer of ice.

Bagenholm found an air pocket and struggled beneath the ice for 40 minutes as her friends tried to dislodge her. Then her heart stopped beating and she was still. Forty minutes after that, a rescue team arrived, cut her out of the ice and administered CPR as they helicoptered her to a hospital. At 10:15 p.m., three hours and 55 minutes after her fall, her first heartbeat was recorded. Since then, she has made a nearly full recovery.

Bagenholm was the very definition of clinically dead: Her circulatory and respiratory systems had gone quiet for just over three hours before she was brought back to life. But what was happening in her body on a cellular level during the hours she wentwithout a heartbeat? Were her tissues dying along with her consciousness? And how much longer could she have gone with no blood circulation?

Can scientists learn anything from cases like this that could help them revive people who have been “dead” for an even longer period?

These are the types of questions that preoccupy the staff of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Resuscitation Science (CRS), a team of scientists, clinicians and engineers that’s revolutionizing the way we treat cardiac arrest and nudging forward the line between life and death. It all starts by learning what’s going on at the cellular level. According to Dr. Honglin Zhou, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and an associate director of the CRS, scientists generally agree that, unlike the larger organisms they compose, there are clear ways to tell whether an individual human cell is dead.

Every cell has a tight outer membrane that serves to separate its own contents from its surroundings and filter out the molecules that are nonessential to its function or survival. As a cell nears the end of its life, this protective barrier will begin to weaken and, depending on the circumstances of a cell’s death, one of three things will happen: It will send an “eat me” signal to a specialized maintenance cell that will then devour and recycle the ailing cell’s contents; it will quarantine and consume itself in a kind of programmed altruistic suicide; or it will rupture abruptly and spill its contents into the surrounding tissue, causing severe inflammation and further tissue damage.

In all cases, when the integrity of the outer membrane is compromised, a cell’s fate is sealed. “When the permeability of the membrane has increased to the point that the cellular contents are leaking out, you have reached a point of no return,” Zhou said.

Because even a mad scientist can’t put Humpty Dumpty’s cells back together again, a real-life Frankenstein’s monster is not a possibility in the foreseeable future. But, as it turns out, it can take some cells quite a long time to die.

When human cells are abruptly cut off from the steady supply of oxygen, nutrients and cleaning services that blood flow normally provides them, they can hold out in their membranes for a surprisingly long time. In fact, the true survivalists in your body may not die for many days after you’ve lost circulation, consciousness and most of the other things most people consider integral parts of living. If doctors can get to the patient before these cells have crashed, re-animation is still a possibility.

Unfortunately, the cells that are most sensitive to nutrient and oxygen deprivation are brain cells. Within five to 10 minutes of cardiac arrest, neuronal membranes will begin to rupture and irreparable brain damage will ensue. Making revival efforts more difficult, a surefire way to kill a cell that has been cut off from oxygen and nutrients for an extended period of time is to give it oxygen and nutrients. In a phenomenon called reperfusion injury, blood-starved cells that are abruptly reintroduced to a nutrient supply will quickly self-destruct.

The exact mechanisms of this process are still not well-understood, but Zhou speculates that when cells lose blood supply they may go into a kind of metabolic hibernation, with the goal of self-preservation. When the cells are roused from this state by an onslaught of oxygen and panicking white blood cells in an environment where toxins have accumulated, they are overwhelmed with inflammatory signals and they respond with self-immolation.

Though scientists don’t fully understand the causes of reperfusion injury, they know from experience that one thing that stifles its onset is to lower a patient’s body temperature. This is why Bagenholm, who arrived at the hospital with an internal body temperature of 56 degrees Fahrenheit (about 13 degrees Celsius), was able to recover and why one of the primary areas of research for the CRS is the application of so-called “therapeutic hypothermia.”

By rapidly lowering a patient’s body temperature to about 91 degrees F (33 degrees C) using an intravenous cooling solution or a kind of ice-pack bodysuit as soon as possible after a cardiac arrest, ER doctors have found they can greatly decrease the risk of reperfusion injury as they work to revive the patient. This process sometimes allows patients who have been clinically dead for tens of minutes to make full recoveries.

Whether this kind of medical miracle qualifies as reanimating the dead is not the principal concern of doctors, but survivors of clinical death do seem to have reemerged from an interlude of profound mental absence. Said Zhou: “I’ve met with people who have recovered from cardiac arrest, and it was just totally blank in their brain what happened. The brain’s not dead, but they couldn’t retrieve anything during that cardiac arrest stage.”

This story was provided by Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/18379-reanimate-dead-frankentstein.html

Dogs Know Us Better than Chimps

Dogs Understand Us Better Than Chimps Do

Jennifer Viegas, DiscoveryNews
Date: 10 February 2012 Time: 08:53 AM ET
a small dog with a baby boy
Dogs may be born with this inherent gift, since 6-week-old puppies with no major training possess it.
CREDIT: Mark Philbrick/BYU.

Chimpanzees may be our closest living relatives, but they do not understand us as well as dogs do.

The study in the latest issue of PLoS ONE. found that chimpanzees could care less when people pointed to objects, but dogs paid attention and knew precisely what the person wanted.

“We think that we are looking at a special adaptation in dogs to be sensitive to human forms of communication,” co-author Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, told Discovery News. “There is multiple evidence suggesting that selection pressures during domestication have changed dogs such that they are perfectly adapted to their new niche, the human environment.”

Dogs may even be born with this inherent gift, since 6-week-old puppies with no major training possess it.

For the study, Kaminski and her colleagues compared how well chimpanzees and dogs understood human pointing. The person pointed at a visible object out of reach of the human but within reach of the animal subject. If the chimp or dog retrieved the object, he or she would be rewarded with a tasty food treat. (Chimps received fruit juice or peanuts, while dogs got dry dog food.)

The chimps bombed, ignoring the human gestures, even though they were interested and motivated to get the food rewards. The dogs aced the test.

The chimpanzees failed to comprehend the referential intention of the human in the task. They did not see the pointing as important to their goal of getting the food, so they simply ignored the people during the study.

“We know that chimpanzees have a very flexible understanding of others,” Kaminski said. “They know what others can or cannot see, when others can or cannot see them, etc.”

Chimps are therefore not clueless, but they have likely not evolved the tendency to pay attention to humans when trying to achieve goals.

Kaminski explained that even wolves do not have this skill.

“Wolves, even when raised in a human environment, are not as flexible with human communication as dogs,” she said. “Dogs can read human gestures from very early ages on.”

As for cats, prior research found that domesticated felines also pay attention to us and can understand human pointing gestures. Kaminski, however, mentioned that “the researchers had to select them out of many hundreds of cats, “ suggesting that only certain house kitties are on par with dogs when it comes to understanding people.

The breed of the animal may also factor in, according to Márta Gácsi, from Eötvös University, Hungary. Gácsi worked with a team of researchers to examine the performance of different breeds of dogs in making sense of the human pointing gesture.

The scientists found that gun dogs and sheep dogs were better than hunting hounds, earth dogs (dogs used for underground hunting), livestock guard dogs and sled dogs at following a pointing finger.

“Although these results may appear to be unsurprising, there is a common tendency to make assumptions about genetic explanations for differences in comprehension between ‘dogs’ and wolves,” Gácsi said. “Our results show that researchers must be careful to control for animal breed when carrying out behavioral experiments.”

With chimps added to the study mix, researchers are now puzzled, as popular theories about communication hold that certain core abilities can be inherited. Chimpanzees are so close to us on the primate family tree, and yet they cannot seem to understand our pointing gestures. This suggests that pointing may be a unique form of human communication, but dogs challenge the hypothesis.

Kaminski said, “We therefore need to study in more detail the mechanisms behind dogs’ understanding of human forms of communication.”

This article was provided by Discovery News.

from:   http://www.livescience.com/18411-dogs-understand-humans-chimps.html

Dr. Jeff Masters on January Weather & Records

Posted by: JeffMasters, 2:25 PM GMT on February 08, 2012 +21
It wasn’t the warmest January in U.S. history, but it sure didn’t seem like winter last month–the contiguous U.S. experienced its fourth warmest January on record, and the winter period December 2011 – January 2012 was also the fourth warmest in the 117-year record, reported NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center yesterday. The percent area of the U.S. experiencing extremes in warm maximum temperatures was 56 percent–the second highest value on record. Thirteen of the 550 major U.S. cities with automated airport weather stations broke or tied all-time records for their hottest January temperature:

Craig, CO 82°F
Bakersfield, CA 82°F
Alexandria, LA 83°F
Duluth, MN 48°F
Minot, ND 61°F
Mitchell, SD 68°F
Fargo, ND 55°F
Jamestown, ND 56°F
Huron, SD 65°F
Aberdeen, SD 63°F
Iron Mountain, MI 52°F
Alma, GA 83°F
Omaha, NE 69°F

However, extremely cold air settled in over Alaska in January, and several cities in Alaska had their coldest average January temperatures on record: Nome (-16.6 degrees F), Bethel (-17.3 degrees F), McGrath (-28.5 degrees F), and Bettles (-35.6 degrees F).


Figure 1. State-by-state rankings of temperatures for January 2012. Nine states had top-ten warmest Januarys on record, while no states had below-average temperatures in January. Records go back to 1895. Image credit: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

28th driest January for the contiguous U.S.
The first week of January was almost precipitation-free across the entire contiguous U.S., but a series of storms over Texas, the Ohio Valley, and the Pacific Northwest later in the month boosted precipitation totals enough to make January 2012 the 28th driest in the 118-year period of record. Remarkably, Texas had its 30th wettest January on record, and was the 2nd wettest state during the month. Texas also had a very wet December, their 19th wettest December. It is very rare for Texas to receive so much precipitation during a La Niña winter. Texas had not experienced two consecutive months with above-average precipitation since January – February 2010, during the last El Niño event.


Figure 2. State-by-state rankings of precipitation for January 2012. Three states had top-ten driest Januarys on record, while no states had a top-ten wettest January. Records go back to 1895. Image credit: NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

3rd least-snowy January
According to the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, the average U.S. snow extent during January was the 3rd smallest January snow cover extent in the 46-year period of record. The National Weather Service sends out a daily “Weather and Almanac” product for several hundred major U.S. cities that we make available on underground. The February 6 statistics for those cities that reported measurable snow this winter show that only fifteen cities in the lower 48 states reported above-average snowfall as of February 6, and 155 had received below-average snowfall.


Figure 3. The new “Blue Marble” image of Earth on January 4, 2012, as seen by the VIIRS instrument on the new Suomi NPP satellite. The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s. NOAA’sAdvanced Hydrologic Prediction Service shows that only one state–Washington–had areas where precipitation accumulated more than 0.25″ on January 4, 2012, which is an extraordinary occurrence for a January day. Image credit:NASA.

Drought expands in January
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, as of January 31st, 2012, about 3.3 percent of the contiguous U.S. was experiencing the worst category of drought–called D4 or exceptional drought–about the same as the beginning of the month. However, the percent area of the U.S. experiencing drought of any severity increased from 32 percent at the beginning of January to 38 percent at the end of the month. Most of the drought expansion occurred across the Upper Midwest and the western states.

2nd most January tornadoes on record
With 95 preliminary tornado reports, January 2012 is likely to end up with the 2nd most January tornadoes since 1950 (the record is 218, set in January 1999.)

from:    http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2031

CC Treadway on Spherical Time

SPHERICAL TIME

By CC Treadway

In the beginning of time there was you. And in the end of time there will also be you.

This is what my Higher Self says at the beginning of every channeling.

Here we are, in 2012, at the beginning and end of time as we know it.

And what is a human life with no time?

I have often pondered this question to myself over the years. The Mayan Calendar has made it very popular to think of life without time, and yet it is not so easy to wrap our heads around this abstract concept! But, little by little, spherical time starts to take over, and the experience is felt in the body and heart, and trickles up to the mind.

 

I can’t explain it to you in any sort of technical way, and perhaps physics masters could really break it down. But let me tell you what I have been told, and what I have experienced of spherical time/space. Perhaps I can distill 5 years of channeling into one simple article.

We sit in the center of the universe.

 

We are the center of the universe.

We are the center of life in a holographic experience.

The universe around us, in space, exists spherically, spirally within a sphere that is Breathing.

The breath of God breathes Love, we are breathing in the Breath of God.

Within this sphere are time conglomerates of desires, experiences and memories. Some ours, some other’s, some in the land of myth, some our own consciousness having another life experience, some aspects of our monadic energy having a life experience. If we keep breathing in and out within the sphere, we become One, again and again. And then, on the exhale, we bring our focal point back to the individuated consciousness of I. Each time we expand our consciousness to be in the One, and then back into the individuated focal point of I, we bring more life into our Now. I would call this navigating spherical space, rather than learning over linear time.

There is then a gap to be bridged in the psyche of the human being, who exists linearly, in order to reconcile this paradigm shift. The bridge exists in the experience of expanding and contracting the consciousness through spherical space. The bridging of this gap can take some….time. Our larger God consciousness must fuse with the smaller human consciousness until it is seamless.

Within spherical space are these desires as I mentioned; we gravitate towards, and attract into our field, the desires that are the strongest. Some of these desires are what we want consciously, some turn out to be what we want unconsciously (which sometimes feels like the opposite of desire!) This is why it is so important to align with the Divine in ourselves, so that the Love of God can fill the unconscious places with light, helping us to attract what we really want, who we really are.

In this practice of breathing with God, a magical thing occurs. Our divine spark, through the law of attraction, magnetizes our soul family, our monadic family first in the energetic realms, then in the physical. Like magnets, the members of the soul family rush towards each other.

In this consistent alignment and surrender with our God self, we are inevitably united with our larger self. The physical unification process begins. And these remarkable aspects of our self can be hugged and kissed, just as we have always dreamed. Sigh.

The Love Affair with Creator continues.

I know this to be true in my life. There is nothing so healing, so uplifting, than to be surrounded by soul family. The individual consciousness then becomes part of the collective consciousness of the soul family and we begin to grow together as One. At first this is disorienting because the limited path of realizing our own dreams is challenged by the larger force of the group energy field. But, over time, this is also reconciled, as we find our place that fits in the community.

Spherical time, I am told, has linear time within it. This is good news. We can still use good old fashioned linear time to create and live when needed, but then there is this whole other force that is working for us while we sleep: The combined energy of the soul family with the Breath of God. There is a common intention, and I am finding it overrules my individual intention much of the time. The group intention is aligned with God, and this is a good thing. The individual self will welcome the larger force of the Divine and surrender to it willingly, especially because so many positive things happen as a result. If a soul family is committed to their higher growth, to the higher growth of humanity, it is safe to sink into it and trust.

At the beginning of time there was you. And at the end of time there will also be you.

Each day I meditate upon this, each day my understanding grows.

 


About CC Treadway

CC Treadway

 

CC Treadway, founder of Treadway Esoteric, is a healer, channel, sound healer and multidisciplinary artist.

To sign up for a free monthly newsletter, access educational tools and learn more about CC’s work and events, visit www.treadwayesoteric.com.

from:    http://www.spiritofmaat.com/feb12/spherical_time.html

Bashar & Pyramid Energy

Bashar on Pyramid Energy

bashar  Question:  Could you speak on the subject of pyramid power? I heard recently of an invention called — well, there are two. One is called a sensor, which is a medallion that’s based on the focusing of pyramid energy…BASHAR:  Yes.

Q:  … and the other is a neurophone, which is supposed to do something with the electromagnetic field to benefit the body. Could you speak on this?

B:  In a sense. Allow me to address the second idea, that which you call the neurophone at this time.

It is not complete yet in its overall idea, but is serving a purpose in part at this time. This will be understood later in a fuller context. The first idea does serve basically the function as you describe it in that way.

Allow me to say that basically at this time, within the beaming that is taking place, there is much in the way of this type of information. You will find that the creation of pyramidal structures out of various metallic elements and crystalline elements will serve as the basis, the beginning, of a new understanding of energy and a new methodology of technology.

You may begin with various experimentations of various types of pyramidal structures of various types of metallic elements with crystalline capstones — of various types of crystals. Experiment and see what type of effects you get, Stack them, line them up; do many different things with them. Use your imagination. But you are on the right track in the sense of recognizing yourself to becoming more crystalline in your own aspect.

Thus, the pyramid shape is representational of the idea of attraction of energies in that way, and that is why you find that, within your natural environment, the natural crystalline shape of what you term to be the magnetic stone you call lodestone will be two pyramids base to base. That will be the shape of the crystal, and will exemplify the idea of the pyramidal shape to act as a focuser or amplifier or magnifier for certain specific electromagnetic field energies in the same way that lenses of glass focus light. The pyramids focus a different type of light.

Q:  I see.

B:  The light-force light. You follow me?

Q:  Yes, I do. How effective is the sensor that has been developed in the metal of say, bronze?

B:  It will be effective for certain ideas containing, I’ll say physiological balances within the chemical, endocrine and mineral ideas of the body.

Q:  I’m sorry; I didn’t quite follow that.

B:  It will be effective with regard to physical/chemical changes within the body; balancing in that way.

Q:  Ah! Thank you.

B:  Gold will also encompass the auric field and balance that.

Q:  Hmm. How’s silver?

B:  It will balance certain other, I’ll say, chemical glandular systems within the body, and also it will have an opening effect in a sense. Can be positive and/or negative — can open in effect in a sense within the mental field.

Q:  You are very perceptive. In Egypt, in what’s called the Great Pyramid, there’s a place that is called the King’s Chamber.

B:  Yes.

Q:  And in the King’s Chamber is what was found to be an empty stone box without a lid.

B:  Yes. The resonating chamber, yes.

Q:  When I saw it, there was a chunk taken out of the stone box. I have a couple of questions regarding that and one other. What was that box used for?

B:  For the initiate to lie within it so they could project themselves out of their body.

Q:  Fantastic. Do you have any more comments you’d care to share about that?

B:  That is what the original pyramid was for anyway: as initiation for the expansion of the understanding of the soul being.

Q:  How recently was that used? And why was the pyramid closed off with the large stone block so that none had access to that chamber?

B:  You will understand that there was a recognition of the ending of a timing of knowledge that was brought from Atlantis, and when there was the recognition that the initiates were no longer in existence within the society, then the chamber was sealed.

Q:  I was just wondering what it is about pyramids that allows, for instance, a flower or a piece of fruit to stay fresh?

B:  The idea of that particular shape in that particular ratio acts as a lens for the Earth’s, or any planet’s, magnetic field. In much the same way that a lens of glass will focus a beam of light, pyramids will focus a beam of magnetism.

Q:  What should we make it in, with what kind of material…?

B:  Any kind at all. It will work. It is simply the idea of the ratio as it interrupts the electromagnetic field of your planet.

Q:  Base always down? Base on the ground?

B:  It will have a different effect the other way.

Q:  I see.

B:  And understand there is always under any pyramid an inverted pyramid. Understand the ideas of your natural crystals of magnetic substance are two four-sided pyramids base to base… Will that have answered your question?

Q: When you gave us the analogy of the pictures on the wall…

B:  Yes.

Q:  …is that, in fact, what the Egyptians were telling us with their two dimensional paintings; and if so, how does that relate to the pyramids?

B:  Very good.   To some degree, yes, they were.  The stylized art form was an understanding that the physical form is very much like a shadow, in that way.  To the higher self it is very two-dimensional.

The pyramid was their tool for accessing that higher self, for aligning the vibrations that they were, so that they could, in fact, realize that the physical dimension you think of as very solid was, in fact, an illusion, simply a shadow.  By being in many of the chambers within those pyramids, they allowed themselves to exit the body and get the perspective that gave them the understanding of the physical reality’s shadowiness.  You follow me?

Q:  Yes.

B:  It was the fourth-dimensional tool that allowed them to understand the third dimension, in a sense, in a two-dimensional way.  You follow me?

Q:   No, I fell off.

B:  The pyramid is a fourth-density tool.  They projected themselves into the fourth-dimension, and therefore, their perspective of the third dimension lost its solidity.

Q:  Okay.

B:  Many times individuals, when you are walking down your street, and you all of a sudden — for your own reasons and your own timing — snap into that awareness and that alignment, have not many of you felt that the physical dimension around you all of a sudden was very flat?  Almost, as you say, made out of cardboard.  Like a set, not quite real, not quite solid; that you could look behind it?  This is the analogy, to some degree, of their art, and the reason for the period.

It is a magnet.  It is a lens for the electro and ethero-magnetic field of your world.  When you allow that lens to focus that energy into your vibrational auric field, it will then instill, imprint upon, your auric field the idea of that pattern that will allow you to expand and blossom into the more expanded higher self.  You follow me?

Q:  Yes.

B:  Does that assist you?

Q:  Yes. Your friends in Sacramento asked me to ask you a question regarding the great pyramid in Giza, Egypt.

B:  All right. Yes.

Q:  Who built it? When, and for what purpose?

B:  Thank you. Recognize, in your terminology, it was what you call your Egyptian civilization with offshoot remnants of Atlantean skill.

Very early, early on in your history, there had been some extraterrestrial co-mingling, but only because all of you are in that sense extra-terrestrially connected as well. Your civilization of Atlantis, though native to your world, stems from the first incursions upon your planet of whom and what you are.

None of you are native to Earth intrinsically. And therefore, the civilization and the technology in what you call Atlantis spread out over various sectors of your planet, infiltrating into what you call the Egyptian culture, and were responsible for the very earliest of pyramids, of which what you call the Giza pyramid is one. But even that is after the fact of many of the earlier pyramids, many of which are now lying on your ocean floor in your Atlantic ocean. You follow me?

Q:  Yes.

B:  Mostly it was that the later pyramids were built by the Egyptian civilization after they had forgotten much of the technique and technology that was employed in Atlantean times of the sonic vibration, or sonic levitation of stone into place. The great pyramid you refer to was built in such a manner. But some of the later pyramids were built, as many of you have speculated, through what you would call brute force and leverage, after the original techniques were lost and forgotten.

Approximately — though this will vary in our perception — to some degree you may understand that your great pyramid began to exist in, approximately, what you would call ten thousand years ago, approximately. Does that answer your question?

Q:  And for what purpose was the pyramid built?

B:  It is an initiation, in the sense that it is a crystal; it is a magnet; it is an amplifier of the Earth’s magnetic field, a focuser of that field, and an alignment tool. For within the center of that pyramidal structure, in what you call the chamber of the king, there will be an alignment force and a focus that will allow individuals to accelerate their vibration to experience astral projection. And in this way learn to connect with your higher self. That is the initial purpose for acceleration of energies. You understand?

Q:  Yes. Thank you.

B:  The idea of why those pyramid forms became associated with the after-life, and were associated with entombments, was because of the early recognition that allowed an individual to perceive the eternalness of the soul. Understand?

Q:  Yes.

B:  Does that answer your question and serve you?

Q:  Yes, it does. You’ve talked about pyramids from your point of view, the three-sided tetrahedral pyramids. And the Pleiadians, like the Egyptian pyramids, are four-sided; and I imagine there is a five-sided, six-sided, seven…

B:  In a sense, there can be. Although these other ideas will, more often than not, represent themselves in planes of existence that are not as directly connected to your own at this time.

Q:  It’s fun to experiment with though.

B:  Oh, you can experiment with it if you wish.

Q:  Okay, the question I was asking is: the progression of that leads to a shape called the pyramidal cone, and does that have any significance to us at all? I haven’t seen that shape manifest itself on the Earth before.

B:  You haven’t?

Q:  No.

B:  Are you sure?

Q:  Hhmm… let’s see…

B:  A cone.

Q:  Oh, a dunce cap.

B:  What other type of hat?

Q:  A wizard’s hat.

B:  Thank you.

Q:  Like a vortex.

B:  Yes!

Q:  (Laughing) And I called it a dunce cap! (AUD: laughter)

B:  Well, the idea of putting the cap on what you imagine or judge to be a dunce is that the cap is supposed to make them smarter.

Q:  Sure.

B:  That is the connection that you have created in your subconscious memory, the cap of a wizard.

Q:  I’ll keep that in mind.

B:  All right. Wear it well! (More laughter)

Q:  So were our pyramids on Earth, at one time, crystal capped?

B:  Some, also gold, with crystal… some, what you would call the earlier ones. Not all of them – by any means, not all of them.

Q:  Were they more powerful?

B:  In a sense, let us say that when they were in that form they were able to focus the energy of the electromagnetic field of your planet a little more precisely, yes. For now, in your terms, they have been partly disassembled. Therefore, while they still can channel the energy, it will fluctuate in uneven, un-symmetrical ways. Does that answer your question?

Q:  Yes, thank you.

B:  Thank you.

from:    http://www.newrealities.com/index.php/articles-on-metaphysics/item/1960-bashar-on-pyramid-energy