Male hormone patch increases libido in women

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Postmenopausal women with low sexual desire levels reported improved sexual function after they were treated with a patch in which the male hormone testosterone was applied through the skin, a clinical study has found. However, more studies are needed to confirm the safety of this treatment.

"Many postmenopausal women continue to be sexually active despite a high level of sexual dissatisfaction, engaging in sexual activity to please their partner and maintain domestic harmony," lead author Dr. Susan R. Davis, at Monash University in Prahran, Australia, and fellow researchers note.

While testosterone has proved effective for increasing libido among postmenopausal women who are on hormone replacement therapy, the effectiveness of this approach in women who are not taking estrogen is unknown.

There has also been some concern that testosterone administered without being tempered by another hormone may adversely affect circulating lipid (fat) levels, glucose (sugar) metabolism or breast tissue.

The APHRODITE trial (A Phase III Research Study of Female Sexual Dysfunction in Women on Testosterone Patch without Estrogen), conducted at 65 centers in Australia, Europe, and North America, included postmenopausal women who reported significant loss of sexual desire that was causing personal distress.

In this study, 267 women were assigned to receive transdermal testosterone at 150 g/day, 267 were treated with the patch testosterone at 300 g/day, and a third group of 277 women received placebo. The patches (Intrinsa, Procter & Gamble) were applied to the abdomen twice a week. The group assignments were all random and neither the patients nor the clinicians knew what each group was given.

At 24 weeks, an increase in the frequency of satisfying sexual episodes was significantly greater in the group receiving the 300 g testosterone dose than the placebo group, but not significantly greater in the group that received the lower dose of testosterone.

Both testosterone groups also had significantly increased scores for sexual desire and decreases in personal distress.

"The increase in the frequency of satisfying sexual episodes was modest but appeared to be clinically meaningful," the authors comment.

The most common hormone side effect was an increase in unwanted hair growth in the higher-dose group. The frequency and severity of other side effects events -- acne, baldness, and voice deepening -- did not differ between the treatment groups. There were no clinically relevant changes in blood lipid levels, glucose metabolism or liver function in any of the groups.

Of concern was the diagnosis of breast cancer in four women in the testosterone groups. The authors note that one of the subjects was symptomatic, with a bloody nipple discharge prior to study entry, and another was diagnosed after 4 months of treatment. The other two were diagnosed after 52 weeks and 104 weeks of treatment.

"Additional data are needed to assess the long-term safety of testosterone use in women with estrogen depletion," the researchers conclude.

SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine, November 6, 2008.

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Fearsome T-Rex was one nosy dinosaur

PARIS (AFP) – Tyrannosaurus Rex could sniff out distant prey even at night, yet another reason the flesh-ripping predator reigned supreme as king of the dinosaurs, according to a study published on Wednesday.
Earlier research had shown that the towering T-rex could see better than an eagle and would have been able to run down the fastest of humans.
The new study now unveils a previously unheralded weapon in the fearsome theropod's arsenal: a dangerously keen sense of smell.
Any trace of the brains of dinosaurs, which roamed Earth for tens of millions of years up to the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago, has long since disappeared.
But a trio of scientists led by Darla Zelenitsky at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada found a novel way to gage the sniffing prowess of T-rex and a couple dozen other meat-eating dinosaurs and primitive birds.
By examining fossil skull bones, the researchers were able to measure the size of indentations made by olfactory bulbs, the part of the brain associated with the sense of smell.
"Living birds and mammals that rely heavily on smell to find meat have large olfactory bulbs," Zelenitisky said in a statement.
The same animals also tend to prowl for prey at night, and cover vast areas, he added.
Of all the dinosaurs examined, the T-rex had the largest olfactory bulb relative to its overall size.
The study, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, also found that primitive birds had high-performance odor detectors, challenging a long-held assumption about the evolution of winged vertebrates.
"It has been previously suggested that smell had become less important than eye sight in the ancestors of birds, but we have shown that this wasn't so," said Zelenitsky.
Archaeopteryx, for example, which took to the skies during the Jurassic Period some 150 million years ago, had a sense of smell comparable to meat-eating dinosaurs along with excellent eye sight, the study said.
Somewhere along the way birds began to lose their sense of smell, but the decline probably happened far later than previously thought, the study concludes.

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Japanese clone mouse from frozen cell, aim for mammoths

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese scientists said Tuesday they had created a mouse from a dead cell frozen for 16 years, taking a step in the long impossible dream of bringing back extinct animals such as mammoths.
Scientists at the government-backed research institute Riken used the dead cell of a mouse that had been preserved at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit) -- a temperature similar to frozen ground.
The scientists hope that the first-of-a-kind research will pave the way to restore extinct animals such as the mammoth.
The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
The scientists extracted a cell nucleus from an organ of the dead mouse and planted it into an egg of another mouse which was alive, leading to the birth of the cloned mouse, the researchers said.
"The newly developed technology of nucleus transfer greatly improved the possibility of reviving extinct animals," the research team led by Teruhiko Wakayama said in a statement.
"Even though reviving extinct animals is often described in films and novels -- such as in Michael Crichton's 'Jurassic Park' -- it had in reality been impossible," they said.
Cells from dead bodies have previously been useless as they are ruined in the freezing process. But Wakayama's team discovered a way to extract a nucleus intact from a frozen cell by grinding cell tissues into multiple pieces.
The cloned mouse was able to reproduce with a female mouse, it added.
But the researchers said tough challenges remain ahead in terms of how to restore extinct animals, which would require breeding with animals that are still alive.
To revive a mammoth, researchers would need to find a way to implant a cell nucleus of a mammoth into the egg of an elephant and then implant the embryo into an elephant's uterus, it said.
The elephant is the closest modern relative of the mammoth, a huge woolly mammal believed to have died out with the Ice Age.
But Akira Iritani, a mammoth expert at Kinki University in Osaka, said it was only a matter of time before researchers could find a mammoth for a resurrection project.
"I have high hopes that we will be able to find a fine sample," he told public broadcaster NHK.
"It's said that there are more than 10,000 mammoths lying underneath Siberia," he said.
Even if it is impossible to recreate a whole animal, the process could create cloned embryonic stem cells for extinct species, giving a boost to research on evolution and zoology, he said.
Cloning can be controversial in terms of both bioethics and, if the animals are eaten, food safety.
Earlier this year, a report by the European Union warned that cloning can threaten the health of livestock.
South Korea's parliament has passed a law to regulate research into cloning, following a scandal in which a now-disgraced expert falsely claimed to have made the first human clone stem cells.

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This year's Antarctic zone hole is 5th biggest

NEW YORK – This year's ozone hole over Antarctica was the fifth biggest on record, reaching a maximum area of 10.5 million square miles in September, NASA says. That's considered "moderately large," NASA atmospheric scientist Paul Newman said in a statement.
NASA has tracked the size of the hole for 30 years. Last year, it was 9.7 million square miles, about the size of North America.
The hole is an area of depletion in the stratospheric ozone layer, which blocks harmful ultraviolet rays from space. Created by human-produced gases, the ozone hole generally forms in August and grows to its maximum size in September or October before breaking up.
___
On the Net:
NASA's ozone hole watch: http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/


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Intel's Core i7 Passes Muster

The first desktop PCs using a chip family called Intel Core i7 -- code-named Nehalem -- were found to handle some computing chores 30% to 40% faster than other comparable Intel chips, according to test results published by Web sites that include ExtremeTech, LegitReviews and AnandTech. Performance gains were particularly impressive for tasks such as video encoding and rendering three-dimensional images, the reviewers said.
Machines based on Core i7 chips were not much faster for some games and other standard software, the Web sites reported. The machines also consume more power than some existing Intel chips, indicating that the first model won't be suitable for portable computers.
"We know it's going to be the de facto chip for high-end desktops," predicted Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest, a company that manufactures PCs for gamers and other performance enthusiasts. "Already we've had huge interest."
Systems based on the new chips are not expected to go on sale until Nov. 17. But Intel provided sample chips to reviewers, who published their findings Monday. The sites also published pricing for the chips, which ranges from $284 for a model that operates at 2.66 gigahertz to $999 for an "Extreme Edition" model for gamers that operates at 3.2 gigahertz.

The Core i7 gets its speed from a series of major design changes that exploit Intel's advanced production processes -- including a feature called an integrated memory controller that was pioneered by rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Each chip has the equivalent of four calculating engines -- each of which can simultaneously complete up to two instructions--and has a pipeline to fetch data from memory chips with more than twice the capacity of prior chips, said Steve Smith, an Intel vice president and director of operations for its digital enterprise group.
Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., is also adding a feature that automatically boosts the operating speed of the chip for some chores. In addition, through a technique called over-clocking, some reviewers have operated the 3.2 gigahertz Extreme Edition model at up to 5 gigahertz, Mr. Smith said.
Intel is expected to introduce a Core i7 model for servers in the first half of 2009 and a model for portables in the second half.
AMD, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is reserving its next performance boost for servers. It is expected to introduce a chip this month, code-named Shanghai, that is its first to adopt a sophisticated manufacturing process that Intel already uses for many of its products.
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

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International Space Station Litter Crashes Into Pacific

(RTTNews) - Monday, NASA officials reported that a refrigerator-sized ammonia tank that was thrown off the International Space Station over a year ago, finally crash-landed into the Tasman Sea late Sunday.The 1,400-pound tank was discarded in July 2007 to clear the way for future assembly work by space walker Clay Anderson. NASA officials said that the reentry would have a very low likelihood of impacting anybody.Originally, the tank was originally planned to be sent down on a space shuttle, but plans changed and it was simply tossed off the station. The speed of the tank gradually slowed down due to friction, thus descending, and becoming subject to more friction and so on. The tank hit the earth's atmosphere at an altitude of about 50 miles and was mostly disintegrated with any debris falling into the Pacific Ocean between Australia and New Zealand scientists said.Station Program Manager Mike Suffredini said that things are not thrown overboard from the space station haphazardly, but have a policy that has certain criteria to meet before any object can be discarded.

by RTT Staff WriterFor comments and feedback: contact editorial@rttnews.com

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The War of the Words

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells, The Outline of History "We have tried to analyze the most baffling phenomena while disregarding structural peculiarities of languages..." -Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity Do UFOs exist? Most people who read about UFOs want that question answered. Knowing this, writers on the subject of UFOs often spend an entire book, or series of books, trying to prove whatever answer they provide. So that those demanding an assertive answer from this author won't feel cheated, I shall give one here as precisely and concisely as I can. Fortunately for the attention-deficient reader, this should require only a few paragraphs. First, to answer the question: Yes, UFOs exist. I say this with such certainty because I have seen them hundreds of times while driving to the store, taking a stroll, and just gazing up at the stars. In fact, I dare say that anyone who denies ever seeing a UFO has: a. lied, b. lost their vision, c. spent their life under a rock, d. misunderstood the definition of the term UFO. In the early 1950s, Captain Edward Ruppelt, head of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book investigation, coined the term UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) and its necessary counterpart IFO (Identified Flying Object). [see Clark, Jerome. The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial (New York: Visible Ink Press, 1998).] We can consider the primary aspiration of ufology - a neologism denoting UFO investigation - as an attempt to accurately reclassify UFOs to IFOs. When you drive down the road at 50 mph and peripherally see a black blur, you have had a UFO experience by definition. If you take the time to look back and examine the perceived object/event in question, you have graduated into a ufologists of sorts. In your investigation, you may recognize the black blur as a member of the bird species C. brachyrhynchos. Having thus identified a crow, you have turned a UFO into an IFO. People see UFOs (and UNFOs, unidentified non-flying objects) quite frequently, and accurately turn them into IFOs (or INFOs) perhaps most of the time. At this point, I would wager that the reader has picked up on a problem with the term UFO. Put simply, the problem stems from the synonymity between UFOs and other-worldly spacecraft. This semantically-erroneous generalization of the term has caused much unwarranted controversy and confusion over the years. (We'll get back to this in a moment.) Another, perhaps more critical, problem exists in ufology which derives from the widespread use of the term Unidentified Flying Object in the first place. I refer to the fact that flying object implies qualities which do not accurately describe the characteristics of many documented sightings. According to definitions provided by my Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries, "flying object" signifies a material entity which propels itself through the air via some mechanical means. It seems ludicrous to cram all the data on unidentified things in the air into such a limited, elementalistic definition. To avoid ascribing inaccurate qualities across the board, I introduce the term UAP (an acronym, pronounced "you-app"), which stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. Like UFO, it also generates a counterpart, IAP (pronounced "eye-app," denoting Identified Aerial Phenomenon). I think these terms generalize the bulk of reported sightings far better than the terms UFO and IFO. I say this, first, because the word aerial does not necessarily denote self-propulsion, mechanisms, or an operator. More importantly, the word phenomenon in both physics and philosophy signifies an occurrence perceptible by the senses. This usage does not make hasty ontological judgments of physicality from the get-go. For instance, Kantian philosophy defines the word phenomenon as the appearance of something to the mind as opposed to its objective existence, independent of the mind. (I also think the word phenomenon incorporates a more modern scientific approach by its implication of perspectivism, as opposed to the archaic notion of "true objectivity" in the pre-quantum sense of "solid objects existing independent of an observer.") To illustrate the usefulness of UAP over UFO, I would direct the curious to the case of the enigmatic lights reported in the sky over Greifswald, (then) East Germany in 1990. [see UFOs: The Best Evidence Ever Caught on Video (J. Frakes, host. Broadcast in U.S. on Fox television network, July 1997).] According to some sources, dozens, if not hundreds, of German and Russian employees at a nuclear power plant witnessed the formation of unexplained luminous orbs which hovered above the restricted site for over an hour. At least one person produced a video tape of the dancing lights, and in a segment of the tape we see one of the orbs merge with another in midair. When we see "illusory" behavior like this, we feel compelled to ask whether the phenomenon had any physical mass to it at all. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the phenomenon actually occurred and that the Greifswald footage does not represent a computer generated hoax. If so, we might seek an explanation such as a demonstration of high-tech holography. If this theory proved accurate, then the terms UFO/IFO no longer seem applicable. As most people know, holographic projections do not constitute solid objects or involve mechanics of flight such as the aerodynamic lift generated from the camber of a wing. However, the term UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) works quite well to incorporate such "ethereal" possibilities. Similarly, Identified Aerial Phenomenon (IAP) describes holography in general as accurately as it incorporates such documented phenomenological possibilities as ball lightning (kugelblitz), corona discharges, vaporized barium clouds, hallucination, etc. (Note that the term Identified Flying Object falls short of the mark in these cases.) Four hundred years before the Greifswald video, in Nuremberg, scores of inhabitants reported seeing formations of illuminated spheres, cylinders, and disks above the town. [see Nuremberg Broadsheet, 1561. Reproduced in Carl Jung's Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Princeton University Press, 2nd printing, 1991).] Using even the most extreme models available to ufologists - including various fringe psychological, theological, or extraterrestrial/extradimensional theories - to explain these events, UAP apples far better than UFO does. Aside from its more encompassing description, the term UAP avoids the heavy cultural baggage attached to UFO, who's initial association with "paranormal" origins, however true or untrue it may prove upon final analysis, sets up a narrow and inflexible framework for honest scientific research. An investigator can benefit greatly from using the term UAP, I think, simply because it does not have the cultural connotations of UFO. We can see this acculturation (or occulturation ) of the term UFO clearly in Polish Archbishop Jozef Miroslaw Zycinskis' reply at a Vatican news conference to a reporter's question concerning interest in UFOs. The Archbishop dismissed ufology as indicative of the 'intellectual paucity of our era'. [see Simpson, Victor L. "Pope defends Church Central Truths." Associated Press, 15 October 1998.] Many in mainstream science and academia seem to agree with the Archbishop's assertion. Physicist Bruce Maccabee, for example, notes the reality of ridicule that exists for those in the scientific community who investigate airborne anomalies, likening the endeavor to 'professional suicide.' [see Dr. Maccabee's online reply to New York Post editors' criticism of the recent ufological study conducted by the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). Paul Flatin of the Kyodo News Service (29 June 1998) wrote: "Despite the abundance of UFO reports over the past 50 years, the scientific community had shown little interest in the subject due to a lack of funding to support research and a perception that the field is not respectable, the [SSE] report said."] For a long time scientists sneered at reports by numerous witnesses of luminous phenomenon seen during earthquakes in various countries. Experts ascribed all kinds of explanations to the sightings, from hoax to hallucination. It took a team of scientists at Idu, Japan to accidentally observe the strange lights firsthand before they became an accepted occurrence.Until then, in spite of the abundance of eyewitness accounts, there was some doubt as to the reality of those long flashes of lightning, balls of fire, spreading beams, pencils of light, and curtains of varying color and intensity... Ordinary explanations for phenomena[a] of this kind - storm lightning, aurora borealis, electric arcs between high-tension cables, and above all, the witness' own emotion... could be refuted one after the other at Idu, and the luminous manifestations attributed to the earthquake. [from Tazieff, Haroun. When the Earth Trembles. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966).] Science seems replete with mysterious aerial phenomena, including the earthlights at Idu, the more recent observations of lightning sprites, and numerous other unknowns of today. Bearing this in mind, I think the mental myopia of Scientific Orthodoxy concerning "UFOs" stands as a far better example of intellectual paucity than the investigation of as-yet unidentified phenomenon. If only we can internalize the concept of UAP over UFO... My research thus far indicates the use of the term "unidentified aerial phenomenon" as early as 22 March 1949, as described in a memo from the U.S. Strategic Air Command to the director of the FBI (released under the Freedom of Information Act, 1977). The reader should note that although I have advocated the initial use of the term UAP over UFO, I have not prescribed replacing it altogether. I say this for two reasons: 1. UFO has decades of cultural staying-power (as a MUFON State Director once quipped to me, "we're not going to change our name to MUAPN!"), and 2. despite its inherent neuro-semantic inadequacies, UFO has its place in the specialized study of ontological oddities. For instance, in his classic Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1965), Dr. Jacques Vallee wrote, "UFO phenomena are to be found among reports of objects, lights, beings, or physical effects that are regarded by the witnesses as anomalies because of their appearance or behavior." [see Vallee's Confrontations: A Scientists Search for Alien Contact (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990, p208-19) for more on definitions and classification systems in ufology.] As Vallee, Clark, Randles, and other veterans of ufology have extensively documented, many "UFO" cases don't even involve aerial phenomenon at all! To encompass these types of "Fortean" cases, I introduce a change from the conventional UFO (an acronym, all caps) to ufo (pronounced "you-foe"). [see "Mytho-Ufology" in the Winter-Spring 2000 issue of Rhesus Monkey Magazine for an example of ufo usage.] The reason for this change stems from linguistic and semantic factors concerning the term. As Professor Steven Pinker of MIT recently pointed out [in Words and Rules (New York: Basic Books, 1999, p28)], UFO has evolved, through decades of use, into a bona fide word. So why not treat it as such? Of course, we do not pronounce VCRs as "vikers" or POWs as a sound effect in a comic book, so why change the pronunciation of UFOs ("you-eff-ohs")? Put simply, the term UFO no longer remains synonymous with its root, no longer operates as a "true" acronym. (This goes to explain the confusing resulting from polls which ask people questions like, "do you believe in UFOs", or "do you think the government knows more about UFOs then they divulge to the public.") Thus changing the defunct acronym to a base word divorces it from its old meaning to accord with modern multiordinal interpretations. Since this essay's original printing [in the Spring 1999 issue of ETC: A Review of General Semantics (Concord, CA: International Society for General Semantics, Vol56 No1, p53-9)] my prescribing the general use of the word ufo has only seen opponents, curiously enough, from some ufologists (and a few writers of the "paranormal"). Since a few of the bios printed about me claim otherwise, I feel I should state for the record that - although I have done much work interviewing, researching, writing, etc. in their field of study - I do not consider myself a "ufologist" (or any other kind of "ologist" for that matter). It does, however, seem wryly amusing to note that the few "ufologists" who disdainfully replied to my verbal alteration of UFO to ufo actually referred to themselves as ufologists ("you-follow-gists") in their calls and letters to me, not one having called themself a UFO-logist ("you-eff-oh-low-gist"). You follow the gist? Dr. Jacques Vallee has commented, with great disappointment, that ufology seems to have 'slipped back into its infancy.' [see report in the online November-December 1995 issue of UFO Magazine, "Jacques Vallee Issues Warning to UFO Researchers."] Perhaps the re-introduction of the "technical" term Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon and my prescription of the word ufo will help to ensure this field of investigation avoids unnecessary atavism and academic enmity. As Tennessee Williams once said, "It's an unanswered question, but let us still believe in the dignity and importance of the question." We can use all the help we can get in a field of scientific investigation whose subjects remain - to borrow a phrase - up in the air.

by Mark A. Raimer

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THE BROWN MOUNTAIN LIGHTS

For centuries, mysterious lights have baffled observers on Brown Mountain in Burke County, North Carolina. The strange lights are often described as white, red, or yellow balls of light. They reportedly move around or remain stationary. Sometimes they are said to look like misty spheres or produce a sizzling sound. Close encounters with the lights have been said to cause dizziness as was described in a 1962 report in the "Charlotte Observer". Twelve eyewitnesses watched the lights from a 60-foot tower. When one of the lights approached one of the men, he suddenly had "a static-like feeling of dizziness". According to the report, when the men climbed down from the tower, they were unable to stand. Explanations for the lights range from several ghostly legends to scientific theories including ball lightning and "earth-lights".
Dating back to 800 year-old Cherokee legends where the lights were said to be the spirits of slain warriors, the Brown Mountain Lights have been observed and investigated numerous times. In 1771, German engineer Geraud de Brahm wrote about the lights in his journals. In an attempt to provide a scientific explanation for the phenomenon, de Brahm wrote: "The mountains emit nitrous vapors which are borne by the wind and when laden winds meet each other the niter inflames, sulphurates and deteriorates." "The Charlotte Observer", a local newspaper, was the first to feature a story on the lights in 1913. W. J. Humphries, of the U.S. Weather Bureau investigated the lights and compared them to a similar phenomenon in the Andes Mountains of South America.
Another government organization, the U.S. Geological Survey, launched two expeditions on Brown Mountain in 1916 and 1922, digging deeper into the mystery. During the 1922 survey, scientist George Rogers Mansfield found a variety of possible causes for the lights including cars, trains, stationary lights and brush fires. Fireflies were even a culprit, but were later viewed as an unlikely explanation. While Mansfield found numerous possibilities for the cause of the lights, he found that a small percentage still had no known cause. Others who have investigated the phenomenon suggest they are "earth lights", a luminous phenomenon caused my seismic activity. Mirages, ball lightning, and swamp gas (despite the lack of swamps on Brown Mountain) have all failed to completely explain the nature of the lights.
The luminous orbs eventually made their way into a bluegrass hit, "The Legend of the Brown Mountain Light," performed by musician Tommy Faile in the 1960’s.
Over a two-week period in November 2000, L.E.M.U.R. Paranormal Research Team based in Asheville, North Carolina observed and filmed the Brown Mountain Lights using an Infrared Night Vision camera. Over an hour of activity was captured on the first known video evidence of the Brown Mountain Lights. L.E.M.U.R. hopes this footage will yield more clues about the mysterious lights that always have eluded a suitable explanation.
The L.E.M.U.R. team plans to show the footage during the First Annual Paranormal Weekend in Asheville, N.C. on January 11-13, 2002. Joshua P. Warren, founder and president of L.E.M.U.R., has written two books, "Haunted Asheville" and "How To Hunt Ghosts". "I believe footage of this quality is the most significant step forward in the history of researching the lights," says Warren. "By studying the video, we’re targeting places on the ridge to research further. Ultimately, we hope to solve the mystery."

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THE POPOBAWA - A ZANZIBARI INCUBUS

The infamous Popobawa has struck again causing panic in the Zanzibar islands off the coast of Tanzania in Africa. The "creature", described as a cyclops dwarf with bat-like wings and ears, and sharp talons, is feared for its nasty habit of sodomizing men while they sleep in their beds. The presence of the often invisible Popobawa can be detected by an acrid smell or a puff of smoke. Sometimes, the Popobawa is visible to everyone except the terrified victim. It is believed to take human form by day, but with pointed fingers. After doing its vile deed, the Popobawa instructs its victims to spread the word about their ordeal or it would be back.
The Popobawa, its name derived from the Swahili words for "bat" and "wing", first appeared in the neighboring island of Pemba in 1972. More attacks were reported in the 1980s, again in April of 1995, and recently in 2000 and July 2001. Attacks appear to coincide with political stress such as election. The 1972 attacks followed the assassination of the country’s president. Interestingly, the recent attacks have come without any political turmoil.
Hospitals in Zanzibar have treated numerous broken ribs, bruises, and other injuries attributed to the Popobawa. One mentally ill man was hacked to death after confessing that he was the troublesome demon. During times when the Popobawa terrorizes the islands, whole families will often sleep arm-in-arm in front of their houses, seeking safety in numbers.
Mjaka Hamad, a peasant farmer in his mid-50s and a victim of the Popobawa’s attacks in 1995, has related his ordeal to the media. "I could feel it," Hamad said. "...something pressing on me. I couldn’t imagine what sort of thing was happening to me. You feel as if you are screaming with no voice. It was just like a dream but then I was thinking it was this Popobawa and he had come to do something terrible to me, something sexual. It is worse than what he does to women." Hamad claimed that he did not believe in the Popobawa or other spirits before the attack and suggests that is the reason he was attacked. "I don’t believe in spirits so maybe that’s why it attacked me. Maybe it will attack anybody who doesn’t believe."
The Popobawa appears to be an African version of the wide-spread Mara phenomenon. Joe Nickell, an investigator with CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), has compared the Popobawa to Medieval legends of succubi (female spirits) and incubi (male spirits) who sexually molested their victims in bed at night. In Newfoundland, an ugly old woman sexually molested men in a phenomenon known as Hagging. Other similar reports from around the world describe vampires, formless black blobs, and extraterrestrials among other bizarre entities.
Skeptics claim that these experiences are a result of a hypnogogic hallucination during a "waking dream". Paralysis, a sense of being weighted down, floating sensations, and encounters with otherworldly beings are often all unifying characteristics of the phenomenon.

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BERMUDA TRIANGLE

On 5 December 1945, disaster was about to strike the personnel of Fort Lauderdale in Florida. That afternoon five torpedo-bombers took off on a routine training flight. Soon, things began to go wrong. The flight leader reported equipment malfunctions, gyro-compasses went crazy, and he lost his horizon. Finally, he reported that he was lost. This happened just off the Florida coast and, as the day progressed, the weather worsened rapidly. Two hours later, the aircraft disappeared and were never seen again. No bodies were found and no wreckage spotted.In isolation, the tragedy was not unprecedented. Disorientation is easy to achieve over water and, if lost, it is easy to fly until your fuel runs out, simply falling from the sky. The lack of evidence of a crash was unusual but, again, it has happened before. But what do we make of a sixth plane - part of the search and rescue operation - blowing up less than half an hour after take-off, with total loss of life?
A CATALOGUE OF DISASTER
The above is one of the major episodes of what has become known as the Bermuda Triangle. Others include the loss of two aircraft in 1948, taking sixty lives. In 1950 a freighter disappeared with all hands. 1963 saw a triple tragedy with the loss of another freighter and three large aircraft.Indeed, if you add up the minor incidents as well you come up with a continuous list of mysterious disappearances of over 140 ships and planes and a thousand lives. The greatest tragedy happened in March 1918. Sailing from Barbados to Norfolk, Virginia, the US Navy Supply Vessel Cyclops disappeared without trace, taking three hundred lives.The Bermuda Triangle stretches from Bermuda to Cuba, and along the US coast from Miami to New York. Sceptics would argue there is no mystery as traffic is so dense that disasters are inevitable. But a whole industry of the fantastic has been built up to explain such disappearances.
PSEUDOSCHOLASTIC SHENNANIGANS
Vincent Gaddis blamed a space-time continuum touching our dimension at this point.Charles Berlitz put it down to UFO activity and time warps. A Dr Kenneth McCall postulated the tormented souls of black slaves thrown overboard to be cursing the area.Ivan Sanderson suggested a slightly less bizarre theory with his magnetic vortices. Identifying similar areas around the Earth, such vortices are formed where warm and cold currents collide.A further idea is offered by geo-chemist, Dr Richard McIver, who blames gas hydrates trapped in the seabed. Geo-disturbances can cause the release of large amounts of methane. When this happens, the sea can go frothy, like the head of beer, causing ships to lose buoyancy and sink.When the methane reaches the air, a plane engine can cause it to ignite, the wreckage falling into the frothy sea and disappearing. However, whilst this last theory holds real possibilities, perhaps we are looking at the mystery from the wrong angle.
CLEARING THE FOG
From the myriad disasters and close escapes in the area a list of factors leading to disaster can be highlighted. For instance, escapees speak, almost unanimously, of faulty gyro-compasses, equipment malfunction, loss of horizon, lack of wreckage, planes blowing up, water seeming to rise up as if a water-spout, dense banks of sudden fog, and sudden turbulent waters.Yet each of the above events are experienced all the time by sailors and airmen the world over. There is nothing really unusual about any of them in isolation. What IS unusual is that, in the Bermuda Triangle, they all seem to strike at once. We have a word for such a congregation of events. Coincidence.Even skeptics are wary of using this word to explain the Bermuda Triangle. Better, they think, to not think about it at all. After all, the mystery is just so ridiculous. But this is a mistake. For instance, you do not need to study other disasters for long before you realize that coincidence is often the major factor in disaster. It is the coming together of small mistakes and failures that build up to the coincidental congregation of events that cause disaster.
AN INEVITABLE THEORY
This is, actually, inevitable. The universe is obviously designed in such a way as to allow coincidental happenings to occur. If it wasn’t, they simply wouldn’t happen. The law of chance itself demands that coincidences DO occur. Indeed, in such a ‘coincidental’ universe, the Bermuda Triangle is, itself, an inevitability, for coincidence would dictate that sometime, somewhere, a congregation of events must come to a particular location.Folklore would speak of such an inevitability with terms such as curse or jinx. This, in itself, is interesting. For inevitability can have a marked effect on the human mind, causing people to make silly mistakes they otherwise would not make. For instance, if you think you’re going to have an accident, you will be wary and perform different to the norm, increasing the possibilities of an accident happening. Hence, could it be that, as a culture of disaster arose in the area, human psychology dictated that the prevalence of mistakes would increase?Science is quite rightly based on Reductionism, where the simplest explanation is preferred, and the ‘incidences’ of single events take priority over the wider ‘pattern’ of related events. But I am sure that science requires a bedfellow in terms of a more holistic way of looking at things – a discipline I have called Patternology, or P-ology.The Bermuda Triangle could be a classic example for P-ological study, for nowhere else has such a congregation of events occurred, ripe for analysis and study. The suggested statistical bias towards disaster, combined with a possible collective human psychology of inevitability, could be studied in the raw, with the possible outcome of a ‘science of disaster’ that could offer guidance for avoiding disaster in the future.To ignore such a possibility is to condemn us to a continuing bias towards disaster.

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The Tesla Connection

Oliver Nichelson has a very interesting web site entitled, "Tesla Wireless and the Tunguska Explosion" that advocates this theory, with some very compelling information about the background and secret experiments of the Serbian-born American inventor. "Tesla's writings have many references to the use of his wireless power transmission technology as a directed energy weapon," says Nichelson. "The Tunguska explosion of 1908 may have been a test firing of Tesla's energy weapon."
Nichelson details many of the experiments with electricity conducted by Tesla in many areas of the United States. He relates one such experiment at his Colorado Springs laboratory where he erected a 200-foot pole topped by a large copper sphere that discharged lighting bolts up to 135 feet long.
"People along the streets were amazed to see sparks jumping between their feet and the ground," Nichelson writes. "Flames of electricity would spring from a tap when anyone turned them on for a drink of water. Light bulbs within 100 feet of the experimental tower glowed when they were turned off." Nichelson then chronicles the evolution of Tesla's method of the wireless transmission of electrical energy, and how it led up to the secret test in 1908. Apparently, Tesla had proved that directed electrical energy could be used as a beneficial or destructive force. "Beset by financial problems and spurned by the scientific establishment, Tesla was in a desperate situation by mid-decade... and, according to Tesla's biographers, he suffered an emotional collapse. In order to make a final effort to have his grand scheme recognized, he may have tried one high-power test of his transmitter to show off its destructive potential. This would have been in 1908."

In fact, perhaps Tesla was confessing in 1915 when he wrote: "It is perfectly practical to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance. I have already constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible. But when unavoidable [it] may be used to destroy property and life. The art is already so far developed that the great destructive effects can be produced at any point on the globe, defined beforehand with great accuracy."

The Tesla experiment might also account for the enigmatic aspects of the Tunguska event, according to Nichelson: the lack of a crater; the disturbances in the planet's magnetic field; the odd glow in the sky seen before and after the event; the radiation-like burns; and the electromagnetic pulse.

The test, however, may not have been a complete success, says Nichelson. Tesla may have been aiming for the completely uninhabited region of the north pole. He may have overshot his target.

Research Continues

Scientists continue to research the Tunguska event and debate its causes. As recently as 1996, they gathered in Bologna, Italy for the Tunguska International Workshop. More than 65 participants attended the conference, mostly Russians and Americans, but no consensus was reached. The scientists remained divided between those who favor the meteorite hypothesis and those who favor the comet hypothesis.

Why is it important to study Tunguska? Because it may have been the most recent occurrence of a major meteor or comet impact on our planet. If it had struck over a major city instead of an isolated forest, hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed.

But no one at the conference, it seemed, was seriously interested in the Tesla theory, nor in the suggestion raised that the explosion was actually caused by an errant, 2,000-year-old Japanese nuclear spacecraft returning home... but missing the runway.

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So What Happened?

The theories put forth to account for the Tunguska event range from the scientifically plausible to the ridiculous to the intriguing. They included:

A fragmentary asteroid or meteorite that exploded in the atmosphere.

The nucleus of a comet that likewise exploded in the atmosphere.

An unusual tectonic event.

A tiny black hole that entered the Earth's atmosphere from outer space and imploded. A chunk of antimatter that reacted with the matter of our planet.

A crashed UFO, the propulsion drive of which exploded.

A deliberate attack by extraterrestrials.

The result of a test of Nikola Tesla's wireless power transmitter.

Again, there's no definitive proof for any of these ideas, but let's consider each.

Asteroid - This and the comet theory are favored by scientists, of course - mainly because they can't conceive of any other explanation.

I'd have to agree that it's the most likely. But because there is no crater and little debris, there's only circumstantial evidence. Before Tunguska, scientists rarely considered that an asteroid would explode in the atmosphere before striking the ground. Yet, because there is no crater, they reason, that must be what happened. So where are all the fragments of the asteroid that they estimate must have weighed some 100,000 tons? Vaporized, they say - pulverized into dust and tiny gravel. The only fragments found thus far have been tiny glass nodules embedded in the fallen trees, which are consistent in makeup with stony asteroid fragments that have been super-heated.

Comet - This is the prevailing theory today - that it was a 100,000-ton fragment of Encke's Comet. Since there is little debris, the explosion might be consistent with a comet, which generally is a loose mixture of stone and ice. Upon explosion, very little debris would remain as evidence. Ironically, it is the very lack of evidence that boosts the credibility of the comet theory.

An unusual tectonic event - Andrei Yu. Ol'khovatov, a Russian scientist, has recently come up with the interesting, plausible theory that Tunguska was "a geophysical event, associated with tectonic processes" - a powerful earthquake, the enormous pressures of which also resulted in the recorded atmospheric effects.

Black hole - This idea isn't taken very seriously by mainstream scientists, simply because it's not known whether such small black holes even exist. And if they did, what the result would be upon one entering our atmosphere is completely unknown.
Antimatter - This idea is also readily dismissed, since it is unlikely that antimatter would be able to transverse space and reach our planet without already encountering some matter and annihilating.

Crashed UFO - There's no evidence whatever of this idea, of course. No fragments of the spacecraft or piece of an alien's intergalactic map. If it were the explosion of the UFO's propulsion system - nuclear or whatever - it might have vaporized all traces of the ship, but come on....

Extraterrestrial attack - If they were going to attack, why would they choose an unpopulated region, unless their intelligence was bad? Or unless it was meant as just a warning. And it it was just a warning, where was the follow-up or contact?

Nikola Tesla's experiment - Granted, this idea is far more unlikely than an asteroid or comet strike, but I find it quite a bit more interesting. A lot of myth has grown around the mysterious, dark and temperamental figure of Tesla. Although known as the discoverer of the principals of alternating current and other inventions, he is also credited in some quarters with far more notorious inventions, including a death ray. Some say the controversial HAARP array in Alaska is a continuation of Tesla's experiments that used electricity to create super weapons. The Tunguska event, they say, was the result of a test of such a weapon - a test that didn't go exactly as planned.

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The Tunguska Mystery

In 1908, something exploded in an isolated area of Siberia. What was it?"

I was sitting on the porch of the house at the trading station, looking north. Suddenly, in the north... the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire. I felt a great heat, as if my shirt had caught fire. At that moment, there was a bang in the sky, and a mighty crash. I was thrown twenty feet from the porch. The earth trembled."
Dialogue from some asteroid impact movie? An excerpt from a science fiction novel? A witness to the test of a nuclear explosion? The witness is real, but the event was not the test of an atomic or nuclear device. And it certainly wasn't fiction.
This incredible event, related by this Russian witness, took place on the morning of June 30, 1908 in a remote area of Siberia called Tunguska. And exactly what happened there is still unknown. There are several theories as to what caused the great explosion in the sparsely populated forest at 62 degrees north latitude, but there is no definitive proof for any of them. Nearly 100 years later, the debate about the Tunguska event continues.
Whatever happened, the resulting devastation was enormous. A fireball as bright as the sun was seen streaking across the sky. Observers 300 miles away heard deafening bangs. Trees were flattened in a radial pattern over an area of 850 square miles. Seismic vibrations were recorded by instruments as far away as 600 miles. Fires burned for weeks. Forty miles from ground zero, people were thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious. One man was hurled into a tree and killed. Scientists examining the area calculated that the explosion was equivalent to 40 megatons of TNT - 2,000 times the force of the atomic bomb released on Hiroshima in 1945. Yet there was no crater.
Other, more enigmatic effects were recorded:
-disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field

-a local geomagnetic storm
-a reversal of soil magnetization

-an electromagnetic pulse, similar to what would becreated by a nuclear explosion

-aurora displays before and after the event

-unusually bright nights seen before and after the event

-genetic mutations in plants and animals

-accelerated growth of plants afterward

-radiation-like burns and deaths of exposed people.

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The Legent of Sea Monster "Siren"

In Greek mythology the Sirens were sea deities who lived on an island called Sirenum scopuli. In some different traditions they are placed on Cape Pelorum, others in the island of Anthemusa, and still others in the Sirenusian islands near Paestum, or in Capreae (Strab. i. p. 22 ; Eustath. ad Horn. p. 1709 ; Serv. I.e.). All locations were described to be surrounded by cliffs and rocks. Seamen who sailed near were decoyed with the Sirens' enchanting music to shipwreck on the rocky coast.
The Sirens were considered the daughters of Achelous (by Terpsichore, Melpomene, Sterope, Chthon (in Euripides' Helen)) or Phorcys (Virgil. V. 846; Ovid XIV, 88). Homer says nothing of their number, but later writers mention both their names and number ; some state that they were two, Aglaopheme and Thelxiepeia (Eustath. ad Horn. p. 1709) ; and others, that there were three, Peisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia (Tzetz. ad LycopL7l2) or Parthenope, Ligeia, and Leucosia (Eustath. /. c.; Strab. v. pp. 246, 252 ; Serv. ad Virg. Georg. iv. 562). Their number is variously reported as between two and five, and their individual names as Thelxiepeia/Thelxiope/Thelxinoe, Molpe, Aglaophonos/Aglaope, Pisinoe/Peisinoë, Parthenope, Ligeia, Leucosia, Raidne, and Teles. According to some versions, they were playmates of young Persephone and were given wings by Demeter to search for Persephone when she was abducted (Ovid V, 551). Their song is continually calling on Persephone. The term "siren song" refers to an appeal that is hard to resist but that, if heeded, will lead to a bad result. Later writers have stated that the Sirens were anthropophagous, but this is not supported by classical writings, nor is there any evidence that the Sirens drowned themselves failing to seduce one of the many heroes that passed their way, though that has also become a fixture in retellings of the story.

news source of http://www.wikipedia.org/

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The Legent of Sea Monster "Scylla"

Scylla was one of the many monsters in Greek mythology (one other being Charybdis) that live on either side of a narrow channel of water. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other, so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis will pass too close to Scylla and vice versa. The phrase between Scylla and Charybdis has come to mean being in a state where one is between two dangers and moving away from one will cause you to be in danger from the other. Traditionally the aforementioned strait has been associated with the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily, but more recently this theory has been challenged, and the alternative location of Cape Skilla in northwest Greece has been suggested.
Scylla is a horribly grotesque sea monster, with six long necks equipped with grisly heads, each of which contained three rows of sharp teeth. Her body consisted of twelve canine legs and a fish's tail. She was one of the children of Phorcys and either Hecate, Crataeis, Lamia or Ceto (where Scylla would also be known as one of the Phorcydes). Some sources cite her parents as Triton and Lamia.
In classical art she was depicted as a fish-tailed mermaid with four to six dog-heads ringing her waist.
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is given advice by a ghost from the land of the dead to sail closer to Scylla, for Charybdis could drown his whole ship. Odysseus then successfully sails his ship past Scylla and Charybdis, but Scylla manages to catch six of his men, devouring them alive. When this happens, Odysseus takes the empty spot on the boat and helps the men row the ship out of harms way.
According to Ovid, Scylla was once a beautiful nymph. The fisherman-turned-sea-god Glaucus fell madly in love with her, but she fled from him onto the land where he could not follow. Despair filled his heart. He went to the sorceress Circe to ask for a love potion to melt Scylla's heart. As he told his tale of love about Scylla to Circe, she herself fell in love with him. She wooed him with her sweetest words and looks, but the sea-god would have none of her. Circe was furiously angry, but with Scylla and not with Glaucus. She prepared a vial of very powerful poison and poured it in the pool where Scylla bathed. As soon as the nymph entered the water she was transformed into a frightful monster with twelve feet and six heads, each with three rows of teeth. Angry, growling wolf heads grew from her waist, and she tried to brush them off. She stood there in utter misery, unable to move, loathing and destroying everything that came into her reach, a peril to all sailors who passed near her. Whenever a ship passed, each of her heads would seize one of the crew.
In a late Greek myth it was said that Heracles encountered Scylla during a journey to Sicily and slew her. Her father, the sea-god Phorcys, then applied flaming torches to her body and restored her to life.
It is said that by the time Aeneas' fleet came through the strait after the fall of Troy, Scylla had been changed into a dangerous rock outcropping which still stands there to this day.
Scylla and Charybdis are believed to have been the entities from which the phrase, "Between a rock and a hard place" originated.
It has been suggested that the myth of Scylla may have been inspired by real life encounters with giant squid (which are normally dying when near the surface), and she has some similar features to the kraken in Norse mythology and lusca in Caribbean mythology.

news source of www.wikipedia.org

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