Society for Interdisciplinary Studies

New Scientist 2775 August 31st ... the discovery of what looks like a scalpel at an Early Bronze Age settlement at Ikiztepe in Anatolia (dating between 3200-2100BC). The site consisted of single storey houses made of logs of wood with a courtyard and oven in front. The scalpels are thought to have been used for surgery rather than ritual as some skeletons found in a graveyard exhibit evidence of skulls being cut open as if with a surgical instrument.

Associated Press September Ist ... archaeologists have found an Iron Age temple in Jordan believed to date back to the Kingdom of Moab. Figurines and clay vessels have been found but the nature of the rituals has yet to be defined. The interest in the site will arise when evidence of contact with the outside world is found - Assyria, Egypt, the Babylonians etc. It seems Moab was primarily located laong the spine of mountains and hills on the eastern side of the Dead Sea - not far from modern Amman (which presumably has a link with ancient Ammon).

There is an image of a red comet at www.dailygalaxy.com September 1st, being Comet Sidling Spring, which is named after the Australian observatory where it was first seen in 2007. It was visible in binoculars until January of this year (2010) and the post goes on to describe the idea of panspermia - the seeding of life by comets. Life on earth seems to have appeared soon after the termination of a massive bombardment event at around 3.8 billion years ago (so it is said).

At http://arxiv4.library.cornell.edu/abs/1008.4960v1 - an interesting post sent in by Gary Gilligan that moves seamlessly into juxtaposition  to the extraterrestrial impact debate - and red rain clearly has analogies with the Biblical Exodus event which was decyphered by Velikovsky as derived from a comet passing relatively close to the earth. The authors of the paper, Rajkumar Gangappa (University of Glamorgan), Chandra Wickramasinghe (Cardiff University), Milton Wainwright (Sheffield University), S.

At http://io9.com/5626068/new-evidence-that-it-was-once-possible-to-sail-across-antarctica/ is a strange title as it gives the impression a paper with a lead author from the British Antarctic Survey was referring to the continent of Antarctica dissected by a waterway - when in fact they were saying no such thing.

An interesting post by Casey Kazan who continues to rattle the cage at www.dailygalaxy.com and posted on August 31st 'Do Jupiter's radio emissions hint that dark energy may not exist?' ... the cosmic microwave background as tracked by the WMAP satellite shows a pattern of ripples that underpin the idea the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy. Researchers at Durham Univesity think they have found a flaw in the data - starting with WMAP observations of the planet Jupiter.

At www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100827082326.htm .... Orcus Patera is a mysterious elliptical depression near the equator of Mars, some 380km by 140km in a NNE - SSW direction. It has a rim that rises up 1800m above the surrounding plain while the floor of the depression is some 400 to 600m below the surrounding landscape. It doesn't fit into any currently accepted pattern - impact or volcanic

This is a paper by Kurbatov, Mayewski, Steffensen, West, the Kennetts, Bunch, and others which can be downloaded free in full text from http://cosmictusk.com August 31st. Recommended reading. Basically, a small layer of free nanodiamonds in very high abundances implies an unprecedented influx of extraterrestrial material  that occurred over the last glacial episode. From that layer nanodiamonds and hexagonal diamonds (lonsdaleite) of the order of many times grreater than background levels in adjacent younger and older ice.

Embedded resistance to the YD boundary event is evident in the post at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100830152530.htm (see also www.physorg.com ), a report on a paper published in the August 30th issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by Tyrone Daulton, Pinter and Scott et al. They say they could find no evidence of nanodiamonds in YD boundary material - and this means the impact hypothesis has lost it's sparkle.

August 2010

August 2nd ... Science and the Brotherhood of Silence

August 2nd ... Cooking the Data to warm it up

August 2nd ... What the Large Hadron Collider is doing - in a nutshell

August 2nd ... Stratigraphy and a Revision (the Alan Montgomery solution)

August 3rd ... a negrito migration?

August 3rd ... Current World Archaeology

August 3rd ... A New Mann non-tree ring hockey stick model

August 3rd .... geoglyphs from the Atacama Desert in Chile

August 3rd ... the Jared Diamond myth in tatters