CORONAL HOLE: A coronal hole has formed in the sun’s northern hemisphere, and it is spewing solar wind into space. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the UV-dark gap during the early hours of August 14th:
In the image, above, the sun’s magnetic field is traced by white curving lines. The coronal hole is where those magnetic field lines have opened up, allowing solar wind to escape. A stream of solar wind flowing from this coronal hole is expected to reach Earth on August 16-18. NOAA forecasters estimate a 25% chance of polar geomagnetic storms when the windy stream arrives.
This is a good day for being alert to what is going on below the surface. There are shifts and changes that are happening right now, and they are affecting every area of your life. It is time to be aware of where you are going, why you are going, how you are going, and with whom you are going. It is time to let go of a lot of the old stories that you used to determine your actions and activities. The invisible hand that was at work in your life is no longer there. Curious that we can be so influenced by things that are invisible. Thankfully it has moved out of this realm. If you wish to call it back, then you must own that decision for yourself. This is a time of choices and a time of responsibility. This is a time for knowing. Work within your heart’s core to know what it is that truly defines you, to know how you wish to move forward in this new energy.
Today you can achieve some of the stuff you were wanting to achieve. Actually, it will not all be that high-falutin’, you can get stuff you were hoping to get. Hey, there is nothing wrong with that. So let today be what it wants to be. There are opportunities out there for you, and they are just beginning to get their definition. Today the pencils, crayons, brushes are in your hands and you can add some lines and angles to things you are working towards. There can be fun in all of this or there can be work. Just remember the outcomes. Fun results in more fun and work results in more work. Think about what each means to you. There is a bit of the Trickster in the air, so there is the secret door out there, and you are being invited to take a look. First you have to choose to take the chance. Then you have to do it. Today offers you so many things on so many levels and how it will all turn out will depend upon how many chances you are willing to take and how strong you are in WHO you are. Down the rabbit hole……
Archaeologists working in a buried Mayan pyramid in Guatemala have discovered an enormous inscribed frieze richly decorated with images of gods and rulers, the Guatemalan government announced.
Dating to the 6th century, the carving has been hailed by local authorities as “the most spectacular frieze seen to date” and one of the best-preserved pieces of Mayan art ever discovered.
It was found at the pre-Columbian archaeological site of Holmul, in the northern province of Peten, by Guatemalan archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli below a 65-foot-high pyramid which was built over it in the 8th century.
Measuring 26 feet by nearly 7 feet, the 1,400-year-old carvings decorated the outside of a mysterious multi-roomed rectangular building. Found when Estrada-Belli and his team excavated a tunnel left open by looters, the monumental artwork depicts human figures in a mythological setting, suggesting these may be deified rulers.
“This is a unique find. It is a beautiful work of art and it tells us so much about the function and meaning of the building, which was what we were looking for,” Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University’s anthropology department, said.
Painted in red, with details in blue, yellow and green, the stucco frieze is elaborately descriptive. It shows three human figures wearing bird headdresses and jade jewels. They are seated cross-legged on top of the head of a mountain spirit called witz.
A cartouche on the headdress contains glyphs identifying each individual by name, but only the central figure’s name is now readable. It says: Och Chan Yopaat, meaning “The Storm God enters the sky.”
Below the main character, two feathered serpents emerge from the mountain spirit and form an arch with their bodies. Under each of them is a seated figure of an aged god holding a sign that reads “First tamale.”
In front of the serpents’ mouths are the two additional human figures, also seated on mountain spirit heads.
An inscription of 30 glyphs in a band that runs at the base of the structure reveals the building was commissioned by Ajwosaj Chan K’inich, the ruler of Naranjo, a powerful kingdom to the south of Holmul in the northeast of Guatemala.
According to Alex Tokovinine, a Harvard University Maya epigrapher, the text places the building in the decade of the 590s. It also reveals a power struggle between two rival kingdoms — Tikal and the Snake Lords — fighting for control of the region.
Homul, the city-state where the frieze was found, once belonged to Tikal’s kingdom, but its rulers switched sides. In this view, the frieze would be a tribute to Homul’s defection.
Indeed, in the inscription, Ajwosaj, who was a vassal of the Snake Lords, claims to have restored the local ruling line and patron deities.
“Ajwosaj was one of the greatest rulers of Naranjo. The new inscription provides the first glimpse of the remarkable extent of Ajwosaj’s political and religious authority,” Tokovinine said.
It isn’t the first finding made by Estrada-Belli and his team at the mysterious building. Last year, the archaeologist unearthed a burial in cavity dug into the stairway leading up to the building. It contained the skeleton of an adult male accompanied by 28 ceramic vessels and a wooden funerary mask.
Preserved by large limestone slabs that kept the tomb free of debris, the individual had the incisor and canine teeth drilled and filled with jade beads, while two miniature flower-shaped ear spools were also found nearby.
By the skeleton, the archaeologists also unearthed nine red-painted plates and one spouted tripod plate decorated with the image of the god of the underworld emerging from a shell.
According to Estrada-Belli, the unusually high number of vessels and the jade dental decorations indicate the individual was a member of the ruling class at Holmul.
The archaeologist hopes to return to the area in 2014 to continue exploring the building.
Image: The stucco relief found in the ancient Maya city of Holmul. Credit: Francisco Estrada-Belli.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest is urging caution in the use of the artificial sweetener Splenda.
A food safety advocacy group has downgraded its rating for sucralose, the artificial sweetener better known as Splenda, from “safe” to “caution” in its chemical guide to food additives.
The Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest announced Wednesday that it had long rated sucralose as “safe” but is now categorizing it with a ”caution,” pending peer review of an unpublished study by an independent Italian lab that found the sweetener caused leukemia in mice.
Previously, the only long-term animal-feeding studies were done by sucralose’s manufacturers, the CSPI said.
Rebiana, a natural high-potency sweetener obtained from the plant stevia, is considered “safe” by the CSPI, though it says the sweetener needs better testing.
“Sucralose may prove to be safer than saccharin, aspartame, and acesulfame potassium, but the forthcoming Italian study warrants careful scrutiny before we can be confident that the sweetener is safe for use in food,” said CSPI Executive Director Michael F. Jacobson.
Despite concerns about artificial sweeteners, the CSPI says that drinking diet soda is better than sugar-carbonated soda, which it says “poses greater risks such as obesity, diabetes heart disease, gout and tooth decay.”
In order to avoid the risks of both sugars and non-caloric sweeteners, the CSPI is encouraging people to switch to water, seltzer water, flavored unsweetened waters, seltzer mixed with some fruit juice or unsweetened iced tea.
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
SpaceX founder and Tesla Motors co-founder Elon Musk’s plans for a pneumatic travel system that moves faster than the speed of sound will be published on Monday, with the billionaire revealing he has no plans to patent the design and will allow other researchers to study, modify or develop it on an “open source” basis.
The system is known as the “Hyperloop,” and according to Nick Allen of The Telegraph, it is not the same as the “vactrain” (vacuum-tube train) concept currently being developed by a firm in Colorado. While few details were revealed over the weekend, Musk confirmed the system would utilize tubes, but not vacuum tubes, and would be low-friction, but not completely frictionless.
In addition, in recent weeks the 42-year-old PayPal co-founder said a design created by Canadian technology enthusiast John Gardi – which featured a tunnel that was nine feet in diameter, raised off the ground on pylons, and formed a complete loop between two different locations – was “the closest I’ve seen anyone guess so far,” Allen said.
Gardi’s design also utilized giant turbines that would fill the tube with a stream of air, while two-meter wide pods filled with people would be transported by an electromagnetic projectile launcher known as a rail gun, the Telegraph reporter said. When the pod neared the end of its journey, it would be shifted out of the air stream, and it would then have its velocity slowed by a magnetic braking system.
Musk first mentioned the Hyperloop back in May at D11, a conference put on by technology website All Things D. At the time, he described the concept as an alternative to California’s proposed high-speed rail project, which he said would be “the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile.” According to VentureBeat’s Dylan Tweney, Musk also went on to call the Hyperloop “a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table.”
On Wednesday, during a quarterly earnings call for his electric car company Tesla, Musk admitted he believed he might have “shot myself in the foot” by bringing up the Hyperloop concept, noting he was “too strung out” to undertake the project himself saying he was too busy with Tesla, Tweney’s colleague Meghan Kelly reports. Musk did not rule out getting involved in the project and offering a helping hand, but he said he hoped to find someone else to actually build the transport system.
Largely due to his issues with California’s high-speed rail project, Musk aspires to have the first Hyperloop built in that state, connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, Allen said. Musk believes his transport project could be built for just 10 percent the cost of the proposed bullet train, and could allow passengers to move between the two cities in just 30 minutes instead of the anticipated three-hour travel time associated with the rail project.
“The bullet train is currently estimated to be costing $68 billion and may not be completed until 2028,” Allen said. “It would reach top speeds of only around 130mph. In a survey seven in 10 people said, if the train ever does run, they would ‘never or hardly ever’ use it anyway.”
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man argued that the human species had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion. “Those communities,” he wrote, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Darwin was no economist, but wealth-sharing and cooperation have always looked more consistent with his observations about human survival than the elitism and hierarchy that dominates contemporary corporate life
Nearly 150 years later, modern science has verified Darwin’s early insights with direct implications for how we do business in our society. New peer-reviewed research by Michael Tomasello, an American psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has synthesized three decades of research to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory of human cooperation. What can we learn about sharing as a result?
Tomasello holds that there were two key steps that led to humans’ unique form of interdependence. The first was all about who was coming to dinner. Approximately two million years ago, a fledgling species known as Homo habilis emerged on the great plains of Africa. At the same time that these four-foot-tall, bipedal apes appeared, a period of global cooling produced vast, open environments. This climate change event ultimately forced our hominid ancestors to adapt to a new way of life or perish entirely. Since they lacked the ability to take down large game, like the ferocious carnivores of the early Pleistocene, the solution they hit upon was scavenging the carcasses of recently killed large mammals. The analysis of fossil bones from this period has revealed evidence of stone-tool cut marks overlaid on top of carnivore teeth marks. The precursors of modern humans had a habit of arriving late to the feast.
However, this survival strategy brought an entirely new set of challenges: Individuals now had to coordinate their behaviors, work together, and learn how to share. For apes living in the dense rainforest, the search for ripe fruit and nuts was largely an individual activity. But on the plains, our ancestors needed to travel in groups to survive, and the act of scavenging from a single animal carcass forced proto-humans to learn to tolerate each other and allow each other a fair share. This resulted in a form of social selection that favored cooperation: “Individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others,” writes Tomasello, “and perhaps shunned in other ways as well.”
This evolutionary legacy can be seen in our behavior today, particularly among children who are too young to have been taught such notions of fairness. For example, in a 2011 study published in the journal Nature, anthropologist Katharina Hamann and her colleagues found that 3-year-old children share food more equitably if they gain it through cooperative effort rather than via individual labor or no work at all. In contrast, chimpanzees showed no difference in how they shared food under these different scenarios; they wouldn’t necessarily hoard the food individually, but they placed no value on cooperative efforts either. The implication, according to Tomasello, is that human evolution has predisposed us to work collaboratively and given us an intuitive sense that cooperation deserves equal rewards.
The second step in Tomasello’s theory leads directly into what kinds of businesses and economies are more in line with human evolution. Humans have, of course, uniquely large population sizes—much larger than those of other primates. It was the human penchant for cooperation that allowed groups to grow in number and eventually become tribal societies.
Humans, more than any other primate, developed psychological adaptations that allowed them to quickly recognize members of their own group (through unique behaviors, traditions, or forms of language) and develop a shared cultural identity in the pursuit of a common goal.
“The result,” says Tomasello, “was a new kind of interdependence and group-mindedness that went well beyond the joint intentionality of small-scale cooperation to a kind of collective intentionality at the level of the entire society.”
What does this mean for the different forms of business today? Corporate workplaces probably aren’t in sync with our evolutionary roots and may not be good for our long-term success as humans. Corporate culture imposes uniformity, mandated from the top down, throughout the organization. But the cooperative—the financial model in which a group of members owns a business and makes the rules about how to run it—is a modern institution that has much in common with the collective tribal heritage of our species. Worker-owned cooperatives are regionally distinct and organized around their constituent members. As a result, worker co-ops develop unique cultures that, following Tomasello’s theory, would be expected to better promote a shared identity among all members of the group. This shared identity would give rise to greater trust and collaboration without the need for centralized control.
Moreover, the structure of corporations is a recipe for worker alienation and dissatisfaction. Humans have evolved the ability to quickly form collective intentionality that motivates group members to pursue a shared goal. “Once they have formed a joint goal,” Tomasello says, “humans are committed to it.” Corporations, by law, are required to maximize profits for their investors. The shared goal among corporate employees is not to benefit their own community but rather a distant population of financiers who have no personal connection to their lives or labor.
However, because worker-owned cooperatives focus on maximizing value for their members, the cooperative is operated by and for the local community—a goal much more consistent with our evolutionary heritage. As Darwin concluded in The Descent of Man, “The more enduring social instincts conquer the less persistent instincts.” As worker-owned cooperatives continue to gain prominence around the world, we may ultimately witness the downfall of Carnegie’s “law of competition” and a return to the collaborative environments that the human species has long called home.
BREAK IN THE QUIET: Solar activity has been low for weeks. The emergence of sunspots AR1817 and AR1818 could break the quiet. Both pose a threat for M-class solar flares. AR1817 has already produced one almost-M class eruption:
The C8-category flare was recorded by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on August 11th at 2158 UT. Whether it is a herald of bigger things to come remains to be seen. AR1817 is almost directly facing Earth, so any eruptions this week will probably be geoeffective.
Very Strong earthquake out of the Piura coast in Northern Peru
Last update: August 12, 2013 at 10:36 am by By Ashish Khanal
Update 10:34 UTC : IGP Peru reports the following intensities, in line with other agencies :
MMI IV (light shaking) at Paita
MMI III-II (weak to very weak shaking) at Talara and Sullana
Update 10:25 UTC : based on the current (preliminary) data, earthquake-report.com expects this earthquake to be harmless but small damage like cracks in walls, fallen tiles etc are always possible.
The earthquake who occurred far enough out of the coast to be harmless for the coastal area has been reported with a (theoretical) max. light shaking on the coast. The very shallow hypocenter is normal as it is the beginning of the subduction plate (Nazca plate who subducts the South American plate)
94km (58mi) WSW of Paita, Peru
102km (63mi) WSW of Salinera Colan, Peru
115km (71mi) SW of Talara, Peru
121km (75mi) W of Sechura, Peru
685km (426mi) SSW of Quito, Ecuador
You might just be needing those energy drinks today as you find yourself falling into lethargy about this, that, and the other thing. It is not a good day for focusing as you find yourself being torn this way and that by all the shiny things that seem to be out there. Then it is time to step back, ground, and center. You are not seeing what is in front of your eyes. The energetic bubbles are popping out there, but the information they have, the messages for you are close by. You do not want to miss them by becoming bedazzled by things that ultimately have no real meaning for you. So, today, when the flows of the energy become too much, step back. Regroup. Ground. Go within. Center. Be within. Then take another look. When perspectives change, things that looked so glamorous are shown to be merely façade, stage sets, ephemeral. This is the day’s energy and the lesson. Things are on the surface what they seem to be, but in their deepest nature they have another meaning. Best to go below the surface to find out what it all purports for you.
