Ancient Egyptians and kissing death

Grave of men kissing was discovered in 1964 during an archaeological excavation of ancient tombs in the vicinity of Cairo. Once the archaeologists dug the tomb, they found neither the king nor treasures.

It shocked them somewhat, but the surprise came later. On the wall of the tomb were buried embossed images. These were two men. Surprisingly, however, was that they were frozen in a hug.

Their hands were intertwined, and their noses rub each other, which in ancient Egypt are believed to be an intimate kiss. A relief was written under their names and these were Nianhhnum and Hnumhotep. Egyptologists decipher them and give their occupation; they were personal manicurists to the Pharaoh during the fifth dynasty.

In the tombs of the Pharaoh were found his wife, children and even pets but never the latter husband who does not seem to be of a direct relative. Scientists still disagree on the question of relations between the two manicurists.

According to one hypothesis they were Siamese twins who just cannot but touch each other. According to others their relationship was pure love and therefore those who buried them have enabled them to be together in death.

Scientists have not yet discovered the mysterious reasons for this strange burial. They believe that the truth on this issue will shed light on homosexual relationships in the palace of the ancient Pharaohs.

Volcano struck the Neanderthals

Scientists from Russia announced in the newspaper, that it was 40, 000 years ago that the powerful volcano struck Neanderthals in Europe.

The eruption caused a "volcanic winter", which has proved fatal for the Neanderthals.
Volcanic Eruption

Modern humans have survived because at that time they lived in Africa and Southwest Asia, away from the reach of volcanic ash clouds.

Neanderthal is an extinct man that lived in Europe and western Asia in the era of the middle Paleolithic (130, 000 to 14, 000 BC). Until recently, Neanderthals have been regarded as subspecies of Homo sapiens and have been classified under the name, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

According to modern scientists, Neanderthals are materially different from modern man, with whom he has developed in parallel as a separate species. The two types of people likely shared a common ancestor, but Neanderthal does not fit into any evolutionary theory as a direct ancestor of modern man.

Researchers found deposits of volcanic dust in the cave in the Caucasus, which showed that Neanderthals were overtaken by an ecological disaster.

Among the deposits were very small plants. The disappearance of plants has been disastrous for the large mammals as they were the main food for the Neanderthals.

The scientist's team analyzed layers in the cave and discovered two types of volcanic ash which corresponded to two separate eruptions 45, 000 and 40, 000 years ago.

The first of the two eruptions was in the territory of the Caucasus and was weaker. The second, however, was very strong and was in what is now southern Italy.

Parts of the book of the dead were found in the sarcophagi

During excavations in El-Fayum oasis located 100 kilometers from Cairo 57 tombs have been discovered. Many of them have remained in very good condition and include a painted wooden sarcophagi.

They are of the eighteenth dynasty that ruled Egypt and the oldest of these tombs is 2750 BC. In this oasis, archaeologists have found items that may shed new light on the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

One of the oldest tombs proved to be virtually untouched by thieves. Mummies in all newly discovered tombs are covered with canvas.

The tomb was decorated with religious texts of the famous "Book of the Dead" and the scenes featuring ancient Egyptian deities, whose purpose was to help the deceased to undergo such tests of the afterlife.

One of the best preserved texts of the Book of the Dead refers precisely to the time of the eighteenth dynasty, when this work had intervened in a new stage of development.

Then the texts were moved on to the papyrus sarcophagi. Most of the papyrus texts from the mysterious book have been discovered in the tombs at Thebes. This caused the Book of the Dead to be called The Book of Thebes.

The papyrus was richly decorated with fine paintings that depicted scenes and burial containers in the afterlife. Researchers shared a special interest in the 125th page of the book, which describes the court of Osiris, who judged the deceased.

Osiris was the king and judge in the world of the dead, he was seated on a throne with the signs of kingship - crown, scepter and scourge. Above him is depicted, the god 42.

These are probably the gods of the different Egyptian regions. In the center of the room stood a statue of God Gore and God Anubis, it was a symbol of the soul of the ancient Egyptians.

In one part of the statue is the heart, mild or burdened with sins is the other - a reality in the form of the goddess Mahath. If a person has led a righteous life, his heart was with the severity of the statuette.

If he was wrong, the heart was more severe. Excuses from the deceased would go to paradise after death, but the sinner is eaten by the monster Amato, which constitutes a lion with a crocodile head.

Book of the Dead is a religious collection in which moral certainties are intertwined with ancient magic. In this collection there are prayers, songs and spells associated with the cult of the afterlife.

This colorful mix is explained by the fact that probably the Book of the Dead was edited and enriched for several centuries. Ancient texts have traditionally remained until recent times, although their content is to remain uncertain for the new generations.

Mayan calendar does not predict the end of the world

Scientists from around the world continue to study the Mayan calendar, according to which during the time and year of 21/12/2012 the world will come to an end on planet earth.

In the calendar it is described that on December 21st the sun will rise to the center of the Milky Way, listed as a black hole. Over the past five years, astronomers have discovered that in fact there is a huge black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Modern astronomers supported the hypothesis that on the 21st December 2012 the situation on the ground will be aligned with the sun and the center of our Milky Way galaxy. This event happens once every 25, 800 years. Nobody knows what will be the effect, but the Mayans believed that something terrible would happen.

But does this have grounds for concern?

While studying the calendar of the extinct civilization, Michael Coe of Harvard University in 1966 concluded that after the calendar ends on December 21st 2012, then on that day so will come the end of the world.

However, many modern scholars have strongly opposed the theory that the planet will be deleted. Maya is one of the smartest and progressive civilizations born on Earth so far.

In their philosophy, time has never existed as a concept to the end of the world. Mayan Time is cyclical, it has no beginning and no end.

According to Mayan humanity we will be reborn again, but on another planet!

Volcanoes hide anciant Myan secrets

Volcanic ash is falling systematically on the land of Mayan mystery explains how ancient metropolises have prospered in relatively poor soil, through which they survived.

Metropolitan areas of the Maya were built relatively far from the volcanoes in their land, but a new study shed light on how these Cities have survived, says "National Geographic".
Mayan Ruins

Mayan empire stretched from today’s southern Mexico through Guatemala to northern Honduras and flourished between 250 and 900 year BC and then declined.

Recently scientists discovered beige clay minerals in the ducts of the archaeological site Tikal in Guatemala, where in the past was the largest city in the southern lands of the Maya.

This mineral, which is volcanic can be formed only after the fall of volcanic ash. Scientists made this chemical analysis to establish the source and found that the material of Tikal comes from volcanoes on the territory of modern states Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico.

"Minerals are talking about a series of volcanic events in the past, " says team leader Ken Tankarsli, an anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati.

Chalchuapa Mayan city in El Salvador was burned to the ground in a volcanic eruption in the sixth century. Scientists link the currents and dust to many distant cities of the Maya.
Mayan Pyramids

Samples of volcanic dust in Tikal are formed over a long period - from 340 BC to 990 BC by.

"There is no way to determine the number of eruptions, their frequency, or what kind of volcanic dust comes, " said Tankarsli.

The new discovery is considered very important because it explains the mystery of the Mayan lowland cities. Surrounding soil was very fertile. It was composed mainly of limestone and was not suitable for feeding many people. Yet in these places have lived between 160 and 230 people per square mile. The numbers puzzled scientists.

If the lowland of Maya cities, the fields were covered with volcanic ash for several years or even decades, soil there has been periodically enriched.

Then the powder was to improve soil fertility, and has increased its water permeability and porosity, and thus improves the ability to retain water. Volcanic ash is a source of useful items such as plants iron and magnesium.

Even a thin layer of volcanic ash, of several centimeters, may increase fertility for long. Moreover, some of it chokes harmful insects.

The Mayans believed that they could delay or prevent the eruption, having performed blood rituals and fed the spirits and gods to monitor volcanoes.

"They have built temples in the form of volcanoes and rituals were, like volcanic events. Volcanoes have been an integral part of Mayan life, " said Tankarsli.

Secrets of the Cheops pyramid

"Everything fears time, time fears the pyramids." This thought strikes each stood before the grandeur of the Egyptian pyramids. The most amazing buildings in human history were built approximately around 4600 years ago. Among them stands one of the last survivors to this day wonders of the world, the Great Pyramid.

According to Egyptian mythology, in this magnificent building should be preserved for eternity the mummy and treasures of the then ruler - Cheops. Some modern scholars believe that building there was for quite a different purpose than the common version. Others even believe that this was a giant machine for the production of excess energy.

One of today's consistently tantalizing questions: How can people who have had only stone hammers and copper chisels build such a huge building? According to ancient legends, Egyptian people inherited their incredible knowledge in ancient civilization. Unfortunately, very few reports have reached us, of how the pharaoh built the largest pyramid in the world. According to information disseminated, Egyptian priests told Herodotus that Cheops was a cruel tyrant. When he took the Egyptian throne, he brought misery to the country and forced everyone to work for him.

Another prominent historian named Diodorus does tell us that people hated the ruler so that they threw him in the mummy's tomb. Indeed, when the first treasure hunters penetrated into his tomb the sarcophagus was found there empty. There is another unsolved riddle on the construction of the ancient giant. If it was just the tomb, why was necessary the incredible mathematical perfection of both project?

According to modern theories, the pyramid is a scale model of the globe. Parallel and meridian, which intersect with it go through most of Earth. Therefore, it appears that it is located in the center of the Earth. While there is still much work needed, data archeology, mathematics and other sciences lead to the conclusion that the Great Pyramid is an impressive facility for capturing a mysterious energy field.

According to another theory, the pyramids at Giza are arranged like the stars in the constellation Orion. Researchers have many theories on the construction of the world of the ancient giants of the desert, but no exact answer to this day. These magnificent facilities survived millennia, and remain vigilant to keep their secrets. And we still only hope that soon a great mind will be able to unveil the mystery of the greatest surviving wonder of the world - the Great Pyramid.

NASA's Inspiring, Enlightening, and Successful Search for New Earths

Journey that began four decades before Columbus sailed for the New World finally ended when the Kepler space telescope snared a few errant photons as they shot past Earth’s orbit en route to infinity. The light had sped through space for 560 years, traveling more than three quadrillion miles from a star much like our sun. Captured by Kepler’s digital sensors, transformed into bytes of data, and downloaded to computers at NASA’s Ames Research Center near San Francisco, the processed starlight slowly revealed a remarkable story: A planet not much bigger than Earth was whipping around its native star at a blistering pace, completing an orbit—its version of a “year”—in just over 20 hours.

Aside from its size, the planet bears little resemblance to Earth. It circles so close to its star that its surface temperature probably exceeds 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt iron. Nevertheless, the planet’s detection was a technical and intellectual coup, a rite of passage for Kepler. The planet, dubbed Kepler-10 b when NASA announced its existence this past January, was the smallest world yet found beyond our solar system. Its discovery proved that the Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in March 2009, could indeed do what its designers had boldly promised: find small, Earth-size planets around distant stars, a task that once seemed so difficult as to border on the absurd.

Kepler-10 b was merely a preview. A month after the January announcement, NASA released its first full data set from the Kepler mission, and the results left astronomers straining for superlatives. “Frankly, we’re overwhelmed,” says Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Kepler team. “What NASA is doing is akin to the transoceanic voyages of the 15th century—the voyages that opened up the whole world. With the Kepler telescope, we’re learning about the properties of planets across the cosmic ocean. This is history. It’s Armstrong stepping off the bottom rung.”

Kepler monitors 156,000 stars, less than 0.0001 percent of the galaxy’s population. Like some cosmic wildcat drilling operation, Kepler has struck a gusher, discovering 1,235 possible new worlds in its first four months of operation. That number doubles the previous total of just over 500, painstakingly gathered over the last 16 years. Prior to 1995, keeping track of all the known planets around other stars like the sun was easy—the tally stood at an even zero.

The bulk of Kepler’s data have not yet been studied, and the mission will keep going for at least two and a half more years. But it is already shredding the textbooks, showing that our galaxy (at least the fraction of it seen by the spacecraft) contains a far more exotic assortment of planets than astronomers expected to find. “We’re learning about a diversity of worlds in our universe that we had no clue about beforehand,” Marcy says. “Rocky planets, yeah, we thought there might be some of those. By the way, we’re finding some rocky planets that are even denser than Earth. But we’re also finding these mini-Neptunes, a class of planet for which we have no examples in our solar system. They’re like small Neptunes but with huge amounts of liquid water around a rocky core.”

Also on the list are 67 planets roughly the size of Earth, give or take a thousand miles or so in radius; 288 “super-Earths” up to twice Earth’s diameter; 662 Neptune-size planets; and 184 giants rivaling or exceeding Jupiter in size. The simple statistics from Kepler say that Earth-size planets are widespread.

Just two years into its mission, Kepler is well on its way toward determining whether planets like Earth are rare or common. But that is just the first domino as scientists try to topple the much bigger questions, the kinds that make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Does life exist on other planets? Are planets with life common? Are any other intelligent beings out there?

For the first time, we have a handle on the odds, and the numbers beaming in from Kepler are not only encouraging but staggering. “Our galaxy contains 200 billion stars,” Marcy says. “I would guess that at least 30 percent of them have an Earth-size planet. So 30 percent of 200 billion, that’s at least 60 billion Earth-size planets just in our galaxy alone”...



Science Video

Rare White Tiger

Biggest Tree In The World (General Sherman Tree)