Divine Mother, may Thy love shine forever on the sanctuary of my devotion, and may I be able to awaken Thy love in all hearts
- 2 minutes ago
- Europe
Friday, March 27, 2015
Thursday, March 26, 2015
BREAKING NEWS : Germanwings plane crash: Co-pilot 'wanted to destroy plane'
Germanwings plane crash: Co-pilot 'wanted to destroy plane'
The co-pilot of the Germanwings plane that crashed into the French Alps on Tuesday appeared to want to "destroy the plane", French officials said.
Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin, citing information from the "black box" voice recorder, said the co-pilot was alone in the cockpit.
He intentionally started a descent while the pilot was locked out.
Mr Robin said there was "absolute silence in the cockpit" as the pilot fought to re-enter it.
The co-pilot, now named as Andreas Lubitz, was alive until the final impact, the prosecutors added.
"We hear the pilot ask the co-pilot to take control of the plane and we hear at the same time the sound of a seat moving backwards and the sound of a door closing," Mr Robin told reporters.
"At that moment, the co-pilot is controlling the plane by himself. While he is alone, the co-pilot presses the buttons of the flight monitoring system to put into action the descent of the aeroplane.
"This action on the altitude controls can only be deliberate."
The Airbus 320 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf hit a mountain, killing 150 people, after an eight-minute descent.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Pray for the souls on board the Germanwings airliner that they were taken up before they knew what happened - Airliner crashes into French Alps
Germanwings airliner crashes in French Alps
- 11 minutes ago
- Europe
An Airbus A320 airliner has crashed in the French Alps between Barcelonnette and Digne, French aviation officials and police have said.
The jet belongs to the German airline Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa.
The plane had reportedly been en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf and was carrying 142 passengers and six crew.
French President Francois Hollande said: "The conditions of the accident, which have not yet been clarified, lead us to think there are no survivors."
Mr Hollande said the crash was a tragedy and called for solidarity with the victims, adding that the area of the crash was very difficult to access.
The plane had issued a distress call at 10:47 (09:47 GMT), according to sources quoted by AFP news agency.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said he had sent Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to the scene and a ministerial crisis cell to co-ordinate the incident had been set up.
Both Airbus and Germanwings have said they are aware of the reports but cannot yet confirm them.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Tree of Souls - Flowers that are out of this world: Enchanting wisteria vines in Japan are real-life version of blockbuster Avatar's Tree of Souls
Flowers that are out of this world: Enchanting wisteria vines in Japan are real-life version of blockbuster Avatar's Tree of Souls
- Japan's Ashikaga Flower park is home to hundreds of wisteria in its 10,000 square foot vine grove
- Wisteria can be 'trained' with careful pruning to stand upright in a tree-form, rather than just climb up surfaces
In the Hollywood 3D blockbuster Avatar, the Tree of Souls mesmerised audiences with its vibrant blue and purple colours.
But there's now an Earthly version giving the alien tree a run for its money - the breath-taking 10,000 square foot wisteria vine grove in Japan.
These amazing photographs were captured at Japan's Ashikaga Flower park, home to hundreds of enchanting wisteria vines.
Scroll down for video
Rare sight: A vibrant wisteria plant has been trained with careful pruning over numerous years to grow upright into a tree at the Ashikaga Flower park in Japan
Like something out of a fairy-tale: The view from beneath the wisteria trees in Ashikaga Flower park in Japan earlier this month
IT support worker Jeff Matsuya visited the park in May, and was blown away by the beauty and immense number of vines, held up by special poles that allow the plants to climb upwards.
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
'Most people react in surprise when they see the Wisteria, as at first sight you wouldn't guess it were a real plant,' said Jeff.
'This is always followed by pure amazement - it's hard to take your eyes off the wisteria when you're standing in the fairy-tale environment.'
Jeff came across the park while researching online and decided he had to see it first-hand.
Magical garden: The park contains a 10,000 square foot wisteria grove which visitors can walk through with the plant dangling overhead
Spot the difference: The wisteria plants at the Ashikaga Flower park bear a striking resemblance to the Tree of Souls in the Hollywood 3D blockbuster Avatar, pictured
He added: 'As soon as I saw images of the wisterias online, I immediately knew that I had to go and see it for myself.'
Wisterias are climbing plants related to the pea native to North America, China and Japan.
They were imported to Britain in the 18th Century and can be seen flowering this time of year across the country.
Through careful pruning wisteria can be 'trained' to stand upright in a tree-form, rather than just climb up surfaces as is natural for them.
These breath-taking photographs, also captured by photographer Koji Tajima, show how the vines range through a spectrum of colours from white, light pink, purple and red.
A wall of flowers: The hanging wisteria is so thick in some parts of the Japanese park it is impossible to see through it
Years in the making: Wisteria vines normally grow along walls but with pruning and the use of special poles to hold up the branches, they can be manipulated into tree shapes
The park is home to hundreds of these spell-binding trees, ranging from shrubs, draped wisteria, to 260-foot-long tunnels and are said to be the most beautiful wisterias in the world.
'Having lived in Japan for ten-years, I couldn't believe I hadn't visited before,' said Jeff.
'There are so many places I'm discovering for the first time and this was just one of the ones that took my breath away.
'I spent the entire day walking around and taking photos as various scenes caught my eye, there was so much to see.
'Photographers will always continue to visit this magical place year-after-year, just to capture the growing beauty.'
One of the largest wisterias, known as a 'Fugi Tree' in Japan, has been growing for 100-years, and forms a living umbrella of leaves over visitors.
Blooming marvellous: Wisteria plants come in a variety of colours including white, pictured, light pink, purple and red
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324253/Flowers-world-Enchanting-wisteria-vines-Japan-real-life-version-blockbuster-Avatars-Tree-Souls.html#ixzz3Uze7XKuj
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Japanese scientists make breakthrough in wireless energy transmission - remember TESLA? - JAXA Science Article
NATIONAL / SCIENCE & HEALTH
Japanese scientists make breakthrough in wireless energy transmission
AFP-JIJI, JIJI
Japanese scientists have succeeded in transmitting energy wirelessly, a key step that could one day make solar power generation in space a possibility, an official said.
Researchers used microwaves to deliver 1.8 kilowatts — enough to run an electric kettle — through the air with pinpoint accuracy to a receiver 55 meters (170 feet) away.
While it wasn’t a great distance, the technology could pave the way for mankind to eventually tap the vast amount of solar energy available in space and use it here on Earth, a spokesman for The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said Thursday.
“This was the first time anyone has managed to send a high output of nearly 2 kilowatts of electric power via microwaves to a small target, using a delicate directivity control device,” he said.
JAXA has been working to devise space solar power systems, or SSPSs, for years, he said. Solar power generation in space offers many advantages, notably the permanent availability of energy regardless of weather or time of day.
While man-made satellites, such as the International Space Station, have long been able to use the solar energy that washes over them from the sun, getting that power down to Earth where people can use it has been a thing of science fiction.
But the Japanese breakthrough offers the possibility that humans will one day be able to tap an inexhaustible source of energy in space.
The idea, said the JAXA official, would be for microwave-transmitting satellites with sunlight-gathering panels and antennae to be set up about 36,000 km (22,300 miles) from Earth.
“But it could take decades before we see practical application of the technology — maybe in the 2040s or later,” he said.
“There are a number of challenges to overcome, such as how to send huge structures into space, how to construct them and how to maintain them,” he said.
The SSPS concept emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s. Japan’s version, mostly financed by the industry ministry, started in 2009, he said.
Resource-poor Japan has to import huge amounts of fossil fuel. It has become substantially more dependent on these imports as its nuclear power industry shut down in the aftermath of the disaster at Fukushima in 2011
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. meanwhile said Thursday it succeeded in transmitting 10 kilowatts wirelessly to a receiver 500 meters away, in a test in Kobe. It hopes to find practical applications for the technology in five years, such as for charging electric vehicles or powering warning lights on power transmission towers. The company also said it aims to use the technology to send power to isolated areas in the wake of disasters.
Mitsubishi Heavy has cut costs by using a mechanism employed in microwave ovens because the cost of wireless power transmission technology used in space is high, according to the company. The company plans to eventually halve the cost.
At present, a more efficient system is needed to transmit power from offshore wind turbines and send electricity to isolated rural areas, Mitsubishi Heavy said
Life on Jupiter! Next the scientists will find Life on Venus! Now wouldn't that be surprising... - BBC Science article
Life on Jupiter - Hubble finds 'best evidence' for Ganymede subsurface ocean
13 March 2015 Last updated at 06:20 GMT
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
7 ways to have a near-death experience - Parnia Report School of Medicine USA - 2000 experiences
The seven ways to have a near-death experience
(Getty Images)
Seeing a light and a tunnel may be the popular perception of death, but as Rachel Nuwer discovers, reports are emerging of many other strange experiences.
In 2011, Mr A, a 57-year-old social worker from England, was admitted to Southampton General Hospital after collapsing at work. Medical personnel were in the middle of inserting a catheter into his groin when he went into cardiac arrest. With oxygen cut off, his brain immediately flat-lined. Mr A died.
"The mental experience of death is much broader than what’s been assumed"
Despite this, he remembers what happened next. The staff grabbed an automated external defibrillator (AED), a shock-delivery machine used to try to reactivate the heart. Mr A heard a mechanical voice twice say, “Shock the patient.” In between those orders, he looked up to see a strange woman beckoning to him from the back corner of the room, near the ceiling. He joined her, leaving his inert body behind. “I felt that she knew me, I felt that I could trust her, and I felt she was there for a reason [but] I didn’t know what that was,” Mr A later recalled. “The next second, I was up there, looking down at me, the nurse and another man who had a bald head.”
Hospital records later verified the AED’s two verbal commands. Mr A’s descriptions of the people in the room – people he had not seen before he lost consciousness – and their actions were also accurate. He was describing things that happened during a three-minute window of time that, according to what we know about biology, he should not have had any awareness of.
(Thinkstock)
Mr A’s story – described in a paper in the journal Resuscitation – is one of a number of reports that challenge accepted wisdom on near-death experiences. Until now, researchers assumed that when the heart ceases to beat and stops sending vital blood to a person’s brain, all awareness immediately ends. At this point, the person is technically dead – although as we learn more about the science of death, we are beginning to understand that, in some cases, the condition can be reversible. For years, those who have come back from that inscrutable place have often reported memories of the event. Doctors mostly dismissed such anecdotal evidence as hallucinations, and researchers have been reluctant to delve into the study of near-death experiences, predominantly because it was viewed as something outside of the reach of scientific exploration.
But Sam Parnia, a critical care physician and director of resuscitation research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, along with colleagues from 17 institutions in the US and UK, wanted to do away with assumptions about what people did or did not experience on their deathbeds. It is possible, they believe, to collect scientific data about those would-be final moments. So for four years, they analysed more than 2,000 cardiac arrest events – moments when a patient’s heart stops and they are officially dead.
Of those patients, doctors were able to bring 16% back from the dead, and Parnia and his colleagues were able to interview 101 of them, or about a third. “The goal was to try to understand, first of all, what is the mental and cognitive experience of death?” Parnia says. “And then, if we got people who claimed auditory and visual awareness at the time of death, to see if we are able to determine if they really were aware.”
Seven flavours of death
Mr A, it turned out, was not the only patient who had some memory of his death. Nearly 50% of the study participants could recall something, but unlike Mr A and just one other woman whose out-of-body account could not be verified externally, the other patients’ experiences did not seem to be tied to actual events that took place during their death.
(Thinkstock)
Instead, they reported dream-like or hallucinatory scenarios that Parnia and his co-authors categorised into seven major themes. “Most of these were not consistent to what’s called ‘near-death’ experiences,” Parnia says. “It seems like the mental experience of death is much broader than what’s been assumed in the past.”
Those seven themes were:
Fear
Seeing animals or plants
Bright light
Violence and persecution
Deja-vu
Seeing family
Recalling events post-cardiac arrest
Seeing animals or plants
Bright light
Violence and persecution
Deja-vu
Seeing family
Recalling events post-cardiac arrest
These mental experiences ranged from terrifying to blissful. There were those who reported feeling afraid or suffering persecution, for example. “I had to get through a ceremony … and the ceremony was to get burned,” one patient recalled. “There were four men with me, and whichever lied would die … I saw men in coffins being buried upright.” Another remembered being “dragged through deep water”, and still another was “told I was going to die and the quickest way was to say the last short word I could remember”.
Others, however, experienced the opposite sensation, with 22% reporting “a feeling of peace or pleasantness”. Some saw living things: “All plants, no flowers” or “lions and tigers”; while others basked in the glow of “a brilliant light” or were reunited with family. Some, meanwhile, reported a strong sense of deja-vu: “I felt like I knew what people were going to do before they did it”. Heightened senses, a distorted perception of the passage of time and a feeling of disconnection from the body were also common sensations that survivors reported.
(Thinkstock)
While it is “definitely clear that people do have experience at the time that they’re dead”, Parnia says, how individuals actually choose to interpret those experiences depends entirely on their background and pre-existing beliefs. Someone from India might return from the dead and say they saw Krishna, whereas someone from the Midwest of the US could experience the same thing but claim to have seen God. “If the father of a child from the Midwest says, ‘When you die, you’ll see Jesus and he’ll be full of love and compassion,’ then of course he’ll see that,” Parnia says. “He’ll come back and say, ‘Oh dad, you’re right, I definitely saw Jesus!’ But would any of us actually recognise Jesus or God? You don’t know what God is. I don’t know what God is. Besides a man with a white beard, which is just a picture.
“All of these things – what’s the soul, what is heaven and hell – I have no idea what they mean, and there’s probably thousands and thousands of interpretations based on where you’re born and what your background is,” he continues. “It’s important to move this out of the realm of religious teaching and into objectivity.”
Common cases
So far, the team has uncovered no predictor for who is most likely to remember something from their death, and explanations are lacking for why some people experience terrifying scenarios while others report euphoric ones. Parnia also points out that it’s very likely that more people have near-death experiences than the study numbers reflect. For many people, memories are almost certainly wiped away by the massive brain swelling that occurs following cardiac arrest, or by strong sedatives administered at the hospital. Even if people do not explicitly recall their experience of death, however, it could affect them on a subconscious level. Parnia hypothesises that this might help explain the wildly different reactions cardiac arrest patients often have following their recovery: some become unafraid of death and adopt a more altruistic approach to life, whereas others develop PTSD.
Parnia and his colleagues are already planning follow-up studies to try to address some of these questions. They also hope their work will help broaden the traditionally diametric conversation about death, breaking it free from the confines of either a religious or sceptical stance. Instead, they think, death should be treated as a scientific subject just like any other. “Anyone with a relatively objective mind will agree that this is something that should be investigated further,” Parnia says. “We have the means and the technology. Now it’s time to do it.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)