Man survives Atomic bomb ... twice!

It seems almost improper to suggest that fortune was smiling on Tsutomu Yamaguchi in the dying days of the second world war.

On 6 August 1945, he was in Hiroshima, preparing to return home from a business trip when the American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city. Yamaguchi lived, while 140,000 other people who were in the city that morning died, some in an agonising instant, others many months later.

Burned and barely able to comprehend what had happened - only that he had witnessed a bomb unlike any used before - Yamaguchi spent a fitful night in an air raid shelter before returning home the following day.


That home, 180 miles to the west, was Nagasaki. His arrival came the day before it was devastated by a second US atomic bomb on 9 August.

In a barely conceivable course of events, he had twice been perilously close to nuclear ground zero; and both times he had lived. More than 70,000 other residents of Nagasaki were not so lucky.

More than 60 years later, the 93-year-old became the first and only known survivor of both attacks yesterday to win official recognition from Japanese authorities.

While other survivors died prematurely from cancer and liver disease caused by their exposure to radiation, Yamaguchi remains in relatively good health apart from near-deafness in one ear and complaints that his legs are "growing weak".

Japanese records show dozens of people experienced the blast in Hiroshima only to be exposed to "residual radiation" in Nagasaki three days later. But Yamaguchi is the first to have been at ground zero when both explosions occurred.

According to a newspaper interview Yamaguchi gave on the 60th anniversary of the end of the Pacific war, he had spent the conflict designing oil tankers for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a wartime zaibatsu, or conglomerate, whose shipyards dominated the Nagasaki skyline.

After a three-month stint at the firm's yards in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi and two colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, prepared to return to Nagasaki on 7 August, 1945. The day before, they woke early, collected their belongings and prepared for the train journey west.

On the way to the station they became separated after Yamaguchi realised he had left his personal seal in the office.

He remembers hearing the Enola Gay circling above, but thought nothing of it: Hiroshima was an important wartime industrial base, and the sound of circling planes had become a fact of life.

Within seconds he had been knocked to his feet by the force of the blast as "Little Boy" detonated 580 metres above central Hiroshima just after 8.15 am, announcing its arrival with a blinding flash followed by a deafening boom. As he stumbled to the train station the next day, Yamaguchi witnessed the destruction and carnage left by the bomber's 13-kiloton payload.

The following day, his burns swathed in bandages, Yamaguchi reported for work in Nagasaki, like Hiroshima an important industrial and military base.

At 11.02 on 9 August, as his boss reportedly questioned his sanity for believing that a single bomb could destroy a city the size of Hiroshima, a 25-kiloton plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki, throwing Yamaguchi to the ground.

He, his wife and baby son survived and spent the following week in a shelter near what was left of their home. His son has since died of cancer aged 59.

After the war Yamaguchi worked for the US occupation authorities, became a teacher and eventually returned to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

Yamaguchi was quoted by the Mainichi newspaper. "My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," he said.

As a registered survivor of the Nagasaki bombing, Yamaguchi has owned a pale violet copy of the Atomic Bomb Victim Health Handbook since 1957, entitling him to monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs. More than 260,000 others are similarly covered.

Yamaguchi's handbook confirmed he was within a three-kilometre radius of ground zero in both cities, but the reference to Hiroshima was deleted when he renewed it at Nagasaki city hall in 1960.

Officials refused to recognise Yamaguchi's special status because, they said, it would not affect his medical and welfare entitlements, but relented after he filed another request earlier this year.

"As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognised as a survivor of atomic bombings," Toshiro Miyamoto, a Nagasaki city official, told the Associated Press. "It's such an unfortunate case, but it is possible there are more like him."

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The Youngest Smoker

This is Liang Liang, an ordinary 2.5 years old child who lives in China. Liang Liang smokes in a pack of cigarettes daily. As it turned out, his parents gave him the first cigarette at age 1.5 to relieve pain.

Liang Liang was born with hernia and it was dangerous to operate it his its infancy. The boy suffered from severe pain and to distract him from the anguish, the father gave him a smoke. Over time, Liang Liang got addicted to smoking. Now the parents can't force him to stop smoking.

The world's youngest smoker now lives in Tianjin. This is a sad situation. I read online many stories covering the news about the youngest smoker. However, none of them went any further reporting if any doctor is caring for this child. This is indeed dangerous for this child and hopefully the Chinese doctors or the government may take measures to help this young child to stop smoking.

In this photo you can see LiangLiang holding a cigarette in his hand. The photo is used from Vokrug Sveta journal.

The Guinness Book of World Records is very unlikely and should not accept this odd case as a world youngest smoker record. In the past The Guinness Book of World Records has rightfully declined similar claims saying they promote bad habit. In this case, this indeed promotes the bad habit of smoking at an extraordinarily young age.

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The Falkirk Wheel

The Falkirk Wheel is a rotating boat lift connecting the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. It is named after the nearby town of Falkirk in central Scotland. The difference in the levels of the two canals at the wheel is 24 metres (79 ft).

The original concept of a wheel to act as a boat lift actually dates back to 19th Century Europe, but it was first seriously considered by British Waterways as a solution for Falkirk in 1994. Dundee Architects, Nicoll Russell Studios presented a Ferris Wheel type design that was used to secure Millennium Commission Funding for the Project. This outline design was then reappraised to create a functional lift that could raise and lower boats swiftly whilst celebrating the reconnection of the two historic canals with a structure worthy of a new millennium.Ideas and concepts were numerous, and varied from rolling eggs to tilting tanks, giant see-saw to overhead monorails and included some complex counterbalanced structures. The final outcome was The Falkirk Wheel, which successfully combines both function and design, creating a stunning piece of working sculpture.

The unique shape of the structure is claimed to have been inspired by various sources, both manmade and natural, such as a Celtic double headed spear, a vast turning propeller of a Clydebank built ship, the ribcage of a whale or the spine of a fish. The canal network as a ‘backbone’ connecting Scotland, east to west seems appropriate and there a true beauty in the repetitive sweeping shapes of the aqueduct. The arches over the aqueduct also add to the drama of the structure, forming a complete circle with the reflection in the canal to extend the feeling of the tunnel. The fact the canal literally ends in mid air creates a thrilling sense of sailing off the edge in to the spectacular scenery of the horizon.

The various parts of The Falkirk Wheel were actually constructed and assembled, like one giant Meccano set, at Butterley Engineering’s Steelworks in Derbyshire. A team there carefully assembled the 1,200 tonnes of steel, painstakingly fitting the pieces together to an accuracy of just 10 mm to ensure a perfect final fit.In the summer of 2001, the structure was then dismantled and transported on 35 lorry loads to Falkirk, before all being bolted back together again on the ground, and finally lifted by crane in five large sections into position. The total 600 tonne weight of the water and boat filled gondolas imposes immense and constantly changing stresses on the structure as it turns around the central spine. Normal welded joints of steel would be susceptible to fatigue induced by these stresses, so to make the structure more robust, the steel sections were bolted together. Over 15,000 bolts were matched with 45,000 bolt holes, and each bolt was hand tightened.

The wheel, which has an overall diameter of 35 metres (110 ft), consists of two opposing arms which extend 15 metres beyond the central axle, and which take the shape of a Celtic-inspired, double-headed axe. Two sets of these axe-shaped arms are attached about 25 metres (82 ft) apart to a 3.5 metres (11 ft) diameter axle. Two diametrically opposed water-filled caissons, each with a capacity of 80,000 imperial gallons (360,000 l, 96,000 US gal), are fitted between the ends of the arms.

These caissons always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their combined capacity of 600 tonnes (590 LT, 660 ST) of floating canal barges as, according to Archimedes' principle, floating objects displace their own weight in water, so when the boat enters, the amount of water leaving the caisson weighs exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180° in five and a half minutes while using very little power. It takes just 22.5 kilowatts (30.2 hp) to power the electric motors, which consume just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (5.4 MJ) of energy in four minutes, roughly the same as boiling eight kettles of water.

The wheel is the only rotating boat lift of its kind in the world, and is regarded as an engineering landmark for Scotland. The United Kingdom has one other boat lift: the Anderton boat lift in Cheshire. The Falkirk Wheel is an improvement on the Anderton boat lift and makes use of the same original principle: two balanced tanks, one going up and the other going down, however, the rotational mechanism is entirely unique to the Falkirk Wheel.

Since 2007 the Falkirk Wheel has featured on the obverse of the new series of £50 notes issued by the Bank of Scotland. The series of notes commemorates Scottish engineering achivements with illustrations of bridges in Scotland such as the Glenfinnan Viaduct and the Forth Rail Bridge.

The Falkirk Wheel lies at the end of a reinforced concrete aqueduct that connects, via the Roughcastle tunnel and a double staircase lock, to the Union Canal. Boats entering the Wheel’s upper gondola are lowered, along with the water that they float in, to the basin below. At the same time, an equal weight rises up, lifted in the other gondola. This works on the Archimedes principle of displacement. That is, the mass of the boat sailing into the gondola will displace an exactly proportional volume of water so that the final combination of ‘boat plus water’ balances the original total mass.

Each gondola runs on small wheels that fit into a single curved rail fixed on the inner edge of the opening on each arm. In theory, this should be sufficient to ensure that they always remain horizontal, but any friction or sudden movement could cause the gondola to stick or tilt. To ensure that this could never happen and that the water and boats always remain perfectly level throughout the whole cycle, a series of linked cogs acts as a back up.

Hidden at each end, behind the arm nearest the aqueduct, are two 8m diameter cogs to which one end of each gondola is attached. A third, exactly equivalent sized cog is in the centre, attached to the main fixed upright. Two smaller cogs are fitted in the spaces between, with each cog having teeth that fit into the adjacent cog and push against each other, turning around the one fixed central one. The two gondolas, being attached to the outer cogs, will therefore turn at precisely the same speed, but in the opposite direction to the Wheel.

Given the precise balancing of the gondolas and this simple but clever system of cogs, a very small amount of energy is actually then required to turn the Wheel. In fact, it is a group of ten hydraulic motors located within the central spine that provide the small amount, just 1.5kw, of electricity to turn it.

The Falkirk Wheel cost £17.5 million, and the restoration project as a whole cost £84.5 million (of which £32 million came from National Lottery funds).

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The Secret Of Numbers

Numbers are everywhere. In a sense, we are what we can count, and our computerised civilisation counts almost everything. Without numbers, it would simply cease to exist.Sometimes the numbers that surround us are simple records, obvious to all: figures that indicate taxes due, the stock market index or the balance in our bank accounts for example. But other numbers - usually hidden in the ceaseless flow of computer data - interact and control. The numbers that quietly manage fuel economy in a car engine save us money; the hundreds of thousands of numbers involved in the navigation of a jetliner, guide it through crowded skies to land safely at journey's end. Numbers can even create a world of their own: when you put on a virtual reality headset and gallop off on your virtual horse to rescue a virtual damsel from a virtual dragon, you are playing out a drama of numbers. Every item of virtual scenery exists as a list of numbers stored in a computer. As you move, the program performs thousands of calculations, from which it decides what images to send each eye to maintain the illusion. Numbers probably arose when ancient civilisations were becoming organised thousands of years ago. One theory is that people developed symbols before they learnt to count. A king would keep tabs on what he owned - his livestock and riches - by using clay tokens.

Special Numbers

All men and women are born equal, but the same does not apply to numbers. Some have magical qualities that are revered by mathematicians almost as guiding forces of nature. The rest are just, well, numbers.

Zero
For a long time people didn't think of zero as a number. Numbers are used to count things, and you can't count no things.
But the decimal system - which evolved between 3000 BC and AD 1000 - needed a symbol for "no tens", "no hundreds" and so on. It was natural to ask what that 0 on its own meant. Zero is the only number for which the operation of division makes no sense.

Pi (p)
The question "How long is the circumference of a circle of one unit diameter?" looks simple, but the answer led to a new kind of number - p, or 3.141592653689... It has been proved that the digits, which are known to billions of decimal places, never repeat the same pattern. Nor can p be represented by a fraction or expressed in simple algebraic form. That is why p is known as a transcendental number.

e ip + 1 = 0

This is one of the most awe inspiring equations there is. It elegantly demonstrates the connection between those five most important numbers 1,0,e,i and p.

The square root of minus one
In around 1500 mathematicians began to wonder what would happen if negative numbers were allowed a square root (the problem being that any number when multiplied by itself gives a positive number). They introduced a new kind of number, called an "imaginary" number, to show that it was something different from conventional, "real" numbers. By 1750 the symbol I had been introduced to denote the square root of minus one. Numbers like 2 + 5i were called complex numbers - meaning that they had two kinds of numbers, and not that they were incredibly complicated. Just as there had been with 0, there was a huge row about i. Only when it was clear I had importance in relation to fluids and electricity did everyone agree it was valid.

Prime numbers
Primes are intriguing because they show no obvious pattern. A non-prime number (like six) is said to be composite; it has more than one factor (two and three). A prime - 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 - can only be cleanly divided by one and itself. In 1640 Pierre de Fermat said he'd found a way of predicting prime numbers, with 2n+1, where n is a power of two. For the first five values of n, the outcomes - 3, 5, 17, 257, 65537 - are all primes. But the sixth (264+1) is not: it equals 641 x 6700417. No further prime Fermat numbers have been found.

e - the natural number
Suppose you start with £1 and invest it at an annual interest rate of 100 per cent for a year. At the end of the year you will have £2-your original £1 plus £1 interest. If the interest is 50 per cent every six months, compound, your total rate of interest is still 100 per cent, but you get £2.25 (£1 + 50p + 75p). If the same total rate of interest is compounded over ever-shorter periods, the amount you end up with after a year gets closer and closer to £2.7182818... This number - called e - is the base of natural logarithms. Like p it is not an exact fraction.

Great mathematical mysteries

There's no limit to theoretical puzzles that mathematicians would like to solve. Here are three of the most famous.

Fermat's Last Theorem
This 356-year-old problem concerns an extension of the idea of Pythagorean triples. These are numbers that can be represented on the sides of a right - angled triangle. Remember "the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides"? (The hypotenuse is the longest side, opposite the right angle.) Three, four and five form a right-angled triangle, since 32 + 42 = 52. Fermat wondered if there were similar numbers for cubes too. He got nowhere and decided there must be a reason for this. In the margin of his copy of an ancient Greek text, the Arithmetica by Diophantus, he made the most famous note in the history of mathematics: "To resolve a cube into the sum of two cubes, a fourth power into two fourth powers, or any power higher than the second into two of the same kind, is impossible; have found a remarkable proof of this. The margin is too small to contain it." His "remarkable proof" has never been found and experts generally believe that whatever he had in mind must have contained an error. A British mathematician, Andrew Wiles, tackled the problem in a series of lectures in Cambridge last year. He kept secret the fact that he had a proof until the last lecture.
When he announced the proof, there was a sudden ,silence; then the entire room burst into spontaneous applause. In fact, despite the excitement when Wiles made his announcement last year, an examination of his proof has since turned up a few errors Most of these have been repaired and only one still causing concern Wiles remains confident that his ideas will work.

Goldbach's conjecture
There are many problems concerning prime numbers. One of the most famous is -whether every even number bigger than two is a sum of two primes. Christian Goldbach was an amateur mathematician of the 18th century. He asked his friend the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler this question. Euler couldn't solve it and nor has anybody since.

Riemann's hypothesis
This is one of the most outstanding problems - if not the problem - in mathematics. In the 18th century Bernhard Riemann came up with the infinite sum 1/1s + 1/2s + 1/3s.... He hypothesised that it equals zero for certain values of S when S is a complex number (one with an imaginary component), only when the real part is 1/2. ("Trivial" zeros also arise when S is a negative even number.) This idea has deep connections with the distribution of prime numbers; it is thought that a solution would unlock a new world of mathematical secrets.

Magic Sequences

In 1202 Leonardo of Pisa (later dubbed Fibonacci) started the trend in number theory for spotting strange sequences. Fibonacci numbers: a pair of rabbits produce two young a year. The next year the same thing. The year after that the same pair and its first two young (now mature) produce a pair each (two pairs). The number of pairs of rabbits follows the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34... where each number is the sum of the two before it. Fibonacci numbers have curious patterns, which have been found repeated in nature. Of three consecutive numbers - 5, 8, 13, - the product of the outer two differs from the square of the inner one by one (5 x 13 = 65; 82 = 64). "Lucky" numbers are obtained by a process of repeated "sieving". First you remove every second number to give the odd numbers. That sieving was based on two; the next is based on three. Every third number is removed to get 1, 3, 7, 9, 13, 15... In this evolving sequence, the next number is seven, so you remove every seventh number, and so on. The remaining numbers (1, 3, 7, 9, 13, 15, 21...) are called lucky. Their main mathematical significance is that they appear to share several properties with prime numbers: they come along about as often and as irregularly.

Mystery sequence: one of the most frustrating problems in number theory concerns a different kind of sequence. Think of a number: say seven. As it's odd multiply by three and add one; 22 is even, so divide by two (11). Repeat indefinitely.

The sequence starts 7, 22, 11, 34, 17, 52... then settles down: 8, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1... It looks like you always end up with a repeating cycle, but nobody knows for sure. If you think it's obvious that such a sequence will get down to one and then repeat, try a variation in which you treble odd numbers and then subtract one. Start with 17 and see what happens.

The evolution of numbers

The evolution of numbers Most early number symbols started as variations on I, II, III. Babylonian numbers (circa 200 BC) were made on pieces of wet clay with the end of a stick. For larger numbers they invented a shape for the number ten, and used multiples of that for 20, 30 and soon, till 60, which was represented by the symbol for 1, and 120 by 2, etc. Modern numerical notation is quite different. Instead of repeating the same stroke to denote larger numbers, we use a whole series of different symbols. And instead of having a distinct symbol for ten and multiples of ten, we use those same symbols (1 to 9) plus a new one (0). It is position that denotes whether a digit is a unit, ten, hundred or thousand, and so on. This is how the so-called "base ten" or decimal system works. The Mayans, who lived in South America around AD 1000, worked to base 20. In their system the symbols equivalent to our 525 would mean (5 x 20 x 20) + (2 x 20) + (5 x 1), which is 2,045 in our notation. The numerical base a society uses affects which numbers are regarded significant. Cricket fans always get upset when a batsman scores 49 and then is out, because he has just missed a half-century. But this is a decimalist way of viewing the situation. If the Mayans had played cricket, that number of runs would be represented by 29. For aliens on the planet Silimidon, where they use base seven, an innings of 49 is a century: (1 x 7 x 7) + (0 x 7) + (0 x 1) = 49.

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The Toilet-Shaped House

The Toilet-Shaped House has a very unique design, and was built by Sim Jae-duck, the chairman of the organizing committee of the Inaugural General Assembly of the World Toilet Association, and he hopes his toilet house will highlight the global need for better sanitation.. The Toilet-Shaped house is in fact named Haewoojae, which signifies in Korean “a place of sanctuary where one can solve one’s worries“. Sim Jae-duck will open what is billed as the world’s one and only toilet house on November 11 to mark the launch of his World Toilet Association.

The steel, white concrete and glass house, with a symbolic opening in the roof, will be ready to receive visitors next month, said the World Toilet Association in a statement. The house is a 419sq m structure with two bedrooms, two guestrooms and other rooms, the two-storey house of course features three deluxe toilets. Unlike the giant “toilet” in which they are located, they will not be see-through affairs. If you would like to visit this house you can go to Sim Jae-duck native city of Suweon, 40km south of Seoul.

The 4,508-sq-foot structure features four deluxe toilets—one of which includes a misting device that helps users "feel more secure" and electronic motion sensors that lift and lower the lid when needed. And if that wasn't hilarious enough, Sim Jae-duck is letting patrons rent the house for an absurd $50,000 a day.
The steel, white concrete and glass house, with a symbolic opening in the roof, will be ready to receive visitors next month, said the World Toilet Association in a statement.

"Among its many amenities, the house features four deluxe toilets," said the group, started in South Korea and dedicated to providing clean sanitation to the more than 2 billion people who live without toilets.The home has a showcase bathroom located in its centre. Other toilets have features that range from elegant fittings to the latest in water conservation devices.

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The Final Total Eclipse

If there truly is some extraterrestrial Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it would undoubtedly list a total solar eclipse as one of the sights to see while taking a break from probing Earth's natives. Total solar eclipses, called totality for short, are pretty rare here on Earth; a casual observer might see only one or two during their lifetime.

Since the Earth is the only planet we have ever known, we can't really appreciate how truly lucky we are. The odds of the size of a planet's moon exactly matching the apparent size of its sun are pretty low. If the moon is too large, it blocks the majestic solar corona visible during totality. If it is too small, then all solar eclipses would be annular, allowing a ring of the sun's light to pass . The "Goldilocks" combination of Moon and Sun sizes on Earth makes totality possible, and unique in our solar system.

But alas, this beautiful phenomenon is ephemeral, at least in the geologic sense. The lunar disc shrinks slightly every year as the Moon recedes from the Earth; the chance of a total solar eclipse decreases correspondingly. Somewhere near 1 billion years from now, the last total solar eclipse will grace whatever residents of Earth there may be.

Unless you're planning on living forever, 1 billion years probably seems safely tucked away into the future. So much so, perhaps that it may be entirely irrelevant. But, as the Moon moves further away, the length of a day here on Earth increases by about half a second each year. So every few years, the official arbiters of time at the Greenwich Royal Observatory add a leap second to our day.

This effect, while small during a human lifespan, has dramatically increased the length of the day over geologic time. When the moon was first formed, an Earth day was approximately 6 hours. By the time dinosaurs roamed Pangea, a day had reached 21 hours. The ultimate fate of the length of a day is that it will match that of a month at about 47 days. At that point, the Moon will hang suspended over a single point on the Earth for all time. But again, don't panic! This is predicted to occur sometime long after the Earth and Moon have been utterly destroyed by the red-giant phase of our sun.

Strangely enough, the Moon is the cause of its own diminution in our sky. The pull of the Moon's gravity causes tides here on Earth; that much we all know. But, because the Earth rotates more rapidly than the Moon travels in its orbit, that tidal bulge pulls the Moon forward ever so slightly. This constant extra force accelerates the Moon, which forces it further away from the Earth.

So how fast is the Moon pulling way? About 3.8 cm/year right now. One of the great successes of Apollo lunar science was to place a series of corner-cubic laser reflectors on the surface of the Moon. Scientists back on Earth then fire laser beams at those reflectors through carefully aimed telescopes. The travel time between firing and receiving the return signal gives the distance of the Moon accurate to about 1 cm. Scientists are working on improving this accuracy to around 1 mm.

Historically, the Moon did not recede so quickly. We know this because certain species of coral have daily growth patterns and are buried by annual loads of sediment called rhythmites. So, by counting the growth rings of the coral buried in one year of sediment, geologists have calculated the length of the day as far back as 600 million years or so. Based on these findings, we know that the Moon has been receding at about 2 cm/year on average. It just so happens that the current orientation of the Earth's continents is almost optimal for accelerating the Moon.

If you missed the opportunity to catch that last total eclipse, don't worry, there will be plenty more for the next few hundred million years. And when you do witness an eclipse (hopefully not while staring directly at it) perhaps you can ponder the staggering odds which have brought us all this amazing, and temporary, event.

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The Mysterious Sailing Stones

One of the most famous landmarks in the southwestern United States is Death Valley. This vast desert is also home to one of the greatest mysteries of the ages.

In an area known as the "Racetrack playa" in Death Valley near the western border of Arizona, there are an amazingly large number of stones, ranging in size from mere pebbles to half ton boulders that regularly travel by themselves and no one has ever been able to explain why!

These huge stones move of their own volition, leaving miles of zig-zagged, curved and straight tracks that have continued to baffle the scientific community for decades. As you can see by the photos, the hardened surface of the landscape is marbled with the trails of water rivulets that would make concealing evidence of outside interference impossible. So the big question is, just how DO these mysterious stones move?
Early studies of the Sailing Stones began when geologists Allen Agnew and Jim McAllister mapped the area and noted the tracks left by the boulders in 1948. After that, these Sailing Stones were forgotten or ignored by scientists for two decades.
Then, in 1968, two scientists from the Institute of Technology in California conducted an ambitious seven year study tracking the stones that involved painstakingly mapping their movements by noting their positions at regular intervals. Although their data and their methods of observation were sound and well documented, their conclusions were found to be faulty.


In their report, the two geologists wrote that "the wind is able to pick up the rocks and start them moving. They push aside the very slippery mud and slide along on the firm surface." According to Sharp and Carey, surface water would freeze overnight, creating a slippery surface upon which the rocks were propelled. Admittedly, during the rainy season the water can flood the surface of the "playa" rather quickly, but the volume and the strength of the water current would simply not be enough to provide sufficient propulsion.As I mentioned earlier, Carey and Sharp maintained that the rocks would sometimes zig-zag across the desert floor in these erratic patterns because of shifting winds. Even at first glance, this theory is flimsy at best.Yet amazingly, it was widely accepted until 1991, when yet another geologist studied the enigmatic stones and brought his students along to test the validity of the earlier findings.This time, John Reid from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and a group of students converged on the stones en masse, during a time where the weather conditions matched those stated in the 1968 study. Reid and his students slid in the mud quite easily but they attempted as a group to push, shove and/or pull the rocks with ropes. Yet nothing could budge them and despite their valiant efforts, the rocks remained stubbornly immobile."The Tristan Effect" is yet another theory that has recently been suggested. The University of Zurich conducted research dealing with the actual physical properties of the rocks themselves. Their theory maintains that the air within the porous interior of the rocks compresses during the sub-zero nights.The next day, the intense desert heat and sun causes the air inside to once again expand and thus propel the rocks along their paths. However, this writer doubts the validity of the theory.I highly doubt that anything short of an explosion would cause enough sudden changes in air pressure surrounding the rocks to cause them to move. If that were the case, I would think the rocks would become unstable due to these repeated changes of internal pressure and eventually crumble.


Even now, the scientific community is still investigating and trying to discover just how these rocks move. Currently, they are being tracked with GPS devices and satellite tracking. It would also be interesting to discover if time lapse photography or video surveillance cameras could shed light on their movements.Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but I continue to find it intriguing that these Sailing Stones happen to be in a reasonably close proximity to the famed Roswell Area 51. Being interested in ancient ley lines and their alignments with heightened strengths of lines in the magnetic field of our planet, I can't help but think there may be a connection.For now, I suppose, our planet and these fascinating Sailing Stones will simply have to continue to mystify, enchant and baffle us.

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