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Beyond Darwin The Galapagos are dots of land on a vast Pacific From the 1600s on they were a lonely stopping place for pirate vessels and ships drifting off course Now, instead of a place you get to by accident or bad luck the Galapagos are a magnet for travelers and especially scientists attracted by the chance for dramatic discoveries It’s silly to think age of discovery is over Never by over going going going with all kind of new thing I can’t wait to be old and gray and come back here and have some new person tell me how wrong I was Be no problem, be fun In 1835 these humble unknown islands were visited by a humble unknown scientist, (more…)

ln the holiest shrine of the ancient Egyptian capital, Solon was shown records of unsurpassed antiquity the secrets of a long-lost age when a civilization of incomparable power and prestige had dominated the world nine thousand years before. The empire of Atlantis. The description the Egyptian priest gave to Solon of this mighty vanished civilization is the starting point for every search ever undertaken to find Atlantis.
A description which Plato says: ” has the great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction.” Atlantis was said to lie beyond the Pillars of Hercules outside the Mediterranean Sea in an ocean we now call the Atlantic. Plato was very, very specific about where Atlantis was and what size it was and he described it as being larger than the continents of Africa and Asia put together and he located it very carefully outside the Pillars of Hercules. (more…)

Pyramid becomes Noah’s Ark the Temple of Artemis becomes the Temple of Solomon. Look, there is something else very interesting in this tapestry here. These poor workers that made these things in Brussels really had to follow these grand designs. But in the borders, they were allowed to do their own thing. And these guys in their little dark workshops were thinking about the Seven Wonders of the World. Not the grand vision, the little common ordinary visions. And say you get up there, another of the gothic Seven Wonders, the magic bird the phoenix that builds its funeral pyre and is lit by the sun. And as it burns to death it rises in resurrection as an image of Jesus Christ. And there is another very local wonder here too. And that is a little hot spring by the french town of Grenoble. Very wonderful to have warm water without having to heat it. Now, Heemskerkjust did not do Seven Wonders, he did eight. And the eighth was his beloved Coliseum in Rome. The only one of the wonders he actually would have seen There it is. And look what is standing in the middle. In the Middle Ages it was thought that the Colossus of Rhodes had actually been taken to Rome and stored in the middle of the c oliseum which was a great temple of the sun. So there is the statue, standing now in the middle of a wonderful Gothic landscape with millions of people enjoying the games. You see, what Heemskerk did, he brought the Seven Wonders alive and he put them back onto the stage of history. Piro Ligorio actually got to build a model of his Rome and all its wonders too here in the magical gardens of Carlo d’ Este at Tivoli outside Rome. Sad to say, there is not much left of Piro’s Rome today. Enough though to see something of a dream. For four hundred years Tivoli has been one of the West’s most influential gardens. From here, the ghosts of wonder have seeped into the West. When it was new, before the great trees grew up, Piro’s design was overwhelming. It began with the Biblical Deluge a single massive waterfall running down the hill. The hill greater even than Babylon’s great hanging gardens. Piro’s garden, in fact is nothing more or less than a huge model of the universe. A cosmos with echoes of the ancient wonders. Piro’s model Rome stood for civilization. (more…)

The natural world is full of hunters. It is a world of the quick and the dead. Savage and remorseless, nature seeks a bloody balance.
Predator and prey are the eternal players in a game with the highest stakes of all.

And a billion and a half years later, the first predators came onto the scene.
Strange new creatures, alien and deadly, began cruising the once peaceful waters for prey.

Carnivorous animals that masqueraded as plants.Among the flowery hunters were the anemones.

The Air Force felt that as the airplane flies at night it should be black and that in fact is not the best color for flying at night it turns out, but real men don’t fly funny pastel airplanes.

Everything on the airplane had to be in concert with its mission which is stealth and precision. A very very difficult design challenge of it s day was the design and development of the Pitot probes.

Extremely quick when compared to your average street car, but not against the other dragsters. Then there are funny cars. Take away the fiberglass covering and there is nothing humorous about these nitro-burning speed demons.
But for the ultimate in power and speed, nothing beats top-fuel dragsters. These cars couldn’t take you to the corner grocery store, or even negotiate the neighborhood cul-de-sac. But no other car can touch them when it comes to straight, gut- wrenching acceleration.
Along with funny cars, top-fuel dragsters are the fastest racecars on Earth. Both repeatedly cover a quarter-mile at speeds in excess of miles per hour.
These cars go zero to in one second and they pull five and a half Gs, which is more than the space shuttle at takeoff, and it’s a great ride.

The idea of panspermia was it a spore
falling in from some previously
existing life
or in my opinion more likely,
was it a set of carbon containing
molecules fall into the Earth’s
surface?

Origins researchers are turning to space, because demonstrating how life originated on Earth is proving more difficult than anyone imagined.

To imagine the cataclysmic events of early Earth, scientists like Chris Chyba, look to echoes in present day space, to the thunder of comets and asteroids, the solar system’s wanderers.

So, that’s gotten a lot of people thinking that, well, maybe life did not start on
Earth from a prebiotic soup but somehow was carried to Earth and arrived on Earth full blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus, ready to go.

Science believed that planet Earth was a rare crucible, for the stuff from which life is made.
But no longer.
What we see in space, the basic chemistry of life, carbon chemistry and organic chemistry, is the chemistry of the universe.

We look in the outer solar system and the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and the moons of Saturnand we see organic material.

Flowing through the endless miles of Egypt’s desert sands its precious waters gave birth and breath to one of the greatest civilizations that has ever taken hold on our planet.

Went an ancient hymn sprung from earth

come to nourish Egypt.