Source: Youtube channel - 263Kid
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Master Jedi Knight Adi Gallia from Star Wars
Source: Star Wars
In the movie Adi Gallia was portrayed by Gin Clarke.
*From the Movies
Her piercing blue eyes would command a powerful presence regardless of her strength in the Force. Jedi Master Adi Gallia was a member of the order's High Council during the waning days of the Republic. She and the other members of that ruling body would convene in a temple high above the Coruscant landscape, deciding important matters of the Jedi. Gallia served on the Council when Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn presented Anakin Skywalker to be trained.
Gallia was a tall human female with a trim build. She bore an exotic beauty and wore an odd headdress draped with organic tentacles. The Force runs strongly in Gallia's family. A close relative of hers, Stass Allie, is also a Jedi Master.
*From the Expanded Universe
Adi Gallia was renowned for her unerring intuition and research skills. The daughter of high-ranking Corellian diplomats, Gallia understood the intricacies of Republic politics at an early age. Her carefully cultivated network of contacts informed her of suspicious Trade Federation activity in the outlying systems. This prompted her to warn Supreme Chancellor Valorum, who later secretly dispatched Jedi representatives to deal with the Naboo blockade. Gallia had long respected the diminutive Jedi Master Even Piell. Years ago, Piell saved Gallia's parents from a terrorist strike on Lannik. Shortly after the Battle of Naboo, Gallia and Piell, along with several other Jedi Council members, were dispatched to Malastare to broker peace talks with the terrorists and Lannik representatives. Gallia was a superb pilot and skillful warrior. Unlike most Jedi, Gallia adopted an unorthodox reverse one-handed grip when wielding her lightsaber.
Although her own record of accomplishments and talents was impressive, Gallia took great pride in the actions of her apprentice, Siri Tachi.
[Adi Gallia and her female Padawan Siri Tachi]
[Siri Tachi]
During the Clone Wars, Adi Gallia often flew a Jedi starfighter on missions to protect Republic interests. Leading Red Squadron, she fought against pirate forces that prospered during the war years, scuttling pirate warships that harassed Senatorial cruisers. She saved Senator Bail Organa from such an attack.
Gallia was with Organa aboard the Republic Star Destroyer Intervention during a mission to find Separatist Commander Asajj Ventress. This took them to the graveyard world of Boz Pity, where the Intervention crashed. On the world's barren surface, General Grievous emerged from a Separatist stronghold and began attacking the assembled Jedi that had survived the crash of the Intervention.
With his arms fully separated into combat mode, Grievous overpowered Gallia. He strangled her with a pair of arms while gutting her with a lightsaber held by a third, killing the Jedi Master.
*Behind the Scenes
Although her appearance is exotic, Gallia was revealed to be a human. The fleshy tendrils on her head are actually a headdress, called a "Tholoth" headdress in one of the books.
Get the original Star Wars movies or the Prequel box sets for you and your family. Click on t eh picture or link below:
Star Wars DVD
In the movie Adi Gallia was portrayed by Gin Clarke.
*From the Movies
Her piercing blue eyes would command a powerful presence regardless of her strength in the Force. Jedi Master Adi Gallia was a member of the order's High Council during the waning days of the Republic. She and the other members of that ruling body would convene in a temple high above the Coruscant landscape, deciding important matters of the Jedi. Gallia served on the Council when Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn presented Anakin Skywalker to be trained.
Gallia was a tall human female with a trim build. She bore an exotic beauty and wore an odd headdress draped with organic tentacles. The Force runs strongly in Gallia's family. A close relative of hers, Stass Allie, is also a Jedi Master.
*From the Expanded Universe
Adi Gallia was renowned for her unerring intuition and research skills. The daughter of high-ranking Corellian diplomats, Gallia understood the intricacies of Republic politics at an early age. Her carefully cultivated network of contacts informed her of suspicious Trade Federation activity in the outlying systems. This prompted her to warn Supreme Chancellor Valorum, who later secretly dispatched Jedi representatives to deal with the Naboo blockade. Gallia had long respected the diminutive Jedi Master Even Piell. Years ago, Piell saved Gallia's parents from a terrorist strike on Lannik. Shortly after the Battle of Naboo, Gallia and Piell, along with several other Jedi Council members, were dispatched to Malastare to broker peace talks with the terrorists and Lannik representatives. Gallia was a superb pilot and skillful warrior. Unlike most Jedi, Gallia adopted an unorthodox reverse one-handed grip when wielding her lightsaber.
Although her own record of accomplishments and talents was impressive, Gallia took great pride in the actions of her apprentice, Siri Tachi.
[Adi Gallia and her female Padawan Siri Tachi]
[Siri Tachi]
During the Clone Wars, Adi Gallia often flew a Jedi starfighter on missions to protect Republic interests. Leading Red Squadron, she fought against pirate forces that prospered during the war years, scuttling pirate warships that harassed Senatorial cruisers. She saved Senator Bail Organa from such an attack.
Gallia was with Organa aboard the Republic Star Destroyer Intervention during a mission to find Separatist Commander Asajj Ventress. This took them to the graveyard world of Boz Pity, where the Intervention crashed. On the world's barren surface, General Grievous emerged from a Separatist stronghold and began attacking the assembled Jedi that had survived the crash of the Intervention.
With his arms fully separated into combat mode, Grievous overpowered Gallia. He strangled her with a pair of arms while gutting her with a lightsaber held by a third, killing the Jedi Master.
*Behind the Scenes
Although her appearance is exotic, Gallia was revealed to be a human. The fleshy tendrils on her head are actually a headdress, called a "Tholoth" headdress in one of the books.
Get the original Star Wars movies or the Prequel box sets for you and your family. Click on t eh picture or link below:
The Large Hadron Collider And The Alleged Time Traveling Bird
Source: Yahoo News, TIME
By EBEN HARRELL
Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.
While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.
The LHC, a 17-mile underground ring designed to smash atoms together at high energies, was created in part to find proof of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. According to current theory, the Higgs is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons.
In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird. (A CERN spokesman said power cuts such as the one caused by the errant baguette are common for a device that requires as much electricity as the nearby city of Geneva, and that physicists are confident they will begin circulating atoms by the end of the year).
In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, "you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."
Many physicists say that Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory, while intellectually interesting, cannot be accurate because the event that the LHC is trying to recreate already happens in nature. Particle collisions of an energy equivalent to those planned in the LHC occur when high-energy cosmic rays collide with the earth's atmosphere. What's more, some scientists believe that the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (or Fermilab) near Chicago has already created Higgs bosons without incident; the Fermilab scientists are now refining data from their collisions to prove the Higgs' existence.
Nielsen counters that nature might allow a small number of Higgs to be produced by the Tevatron, but would prevent the production of the large number of particles the LHC is anticipated to produce. He also acknowledges that Higgs particles are probably produced in cosmic collisions, but says it's impossible to know whether nature has stopped a great deal of these collisions from happening. "It's possible that God avoids Higgs [particles] only when there are very many of them, but if there are a few, maybe He let's them go," he says.
Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory represents one side of an intellectual divide between particle physicists today. Contemporary physicists tend to fall into one of two camps: the theorists, who posit ideas about the origins and workings of the universe; and experimentalists, who design telescopes and particle accelerators to test these theories, or provide new data from which novel theories can emerge. Most experimentalists believe that the theorists, due to a lack of new data in recent years, have reached a roadblock - the Standard Model, which is the closest thing the theorists have to an evidence-backed "theory of everything," provides only an incomplete explanation of the universe. Until theorists get further data and evidence to move forward, the experimentalists believe, they end up simply making wild guesses - like those concerning time-traveling saboteurs - about how the universe works. "Nielsen and Ninomiya's theories are clearly crazy theories," says Dmitri Denisov, a physicist and Higgs-hunter at the DZero experiment at Fermilab. "In recent years theorists have been starving for experimental input and as a result, theories of second type are propagating widely. The majority of them have nothing to do with world we live in."
Nielsen concedes, "We have very little data, so theorists are going their own ways and making a lot of theories that may not be very plausible. We need guidance from experimentalists to make the theories more healthy."
"But," he adds, "in terms of our theory, we are submitting to a form of experiment. We are saying the LHC won't be allowed to produce a large number of Higgs. If it does, it would be very damaging to our theory."
Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, "Of course not, but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it." In other words: if preposterous theories are mathematically sound and can be confirmed by observation, they are true, even if seemingly impossible to believe. To scientists in the early 20th century, for example, quantum mechanics may have seemed outrageous. "The concept that you could have a wave-particle duality - that an object could take on either wave-like properties or point-like properties, depending on how you observe it - takes a huge leap of imagination," says Roberto Roser, a scientist at Fermilab. "Sometimes outlandish papers turn out to be the laws of physics."
So what would Peter Higgs himself make of the intellectual controversy surrounding his eponymous particle? Speaking on behalf of his friend, Professor Richard Kenway, who holds Higgs' former position at the University of Edinburgh, says that the 78-year-old emeritus professor remains quietly confident that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson when it is eventually running at full strength. For his part, Kenway says the LHC's delays are to be expected given the size and intricacy of the $9 billion experiment. And he says if he ever needs further proof that the Higgs boson is not abhorrent to nature, he need only spend time with his friend and mentor. "If nature truly did not want us to discover the Higgs, a cosmic ray would have zapped the embryo that became Peter, preventing its development into a physicist," he says.
By EBEN HARRELL
Sometime on Nov. 3, the supercooled magnets in sector 81 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), outside Geneva, began to dangerously overheat. Scientists rushed to diagnose the problem, since the particle accelerator has to maintain a temperature colder than deep space in order to work. The culprit? "A bit of baguette," says Mike Lamont of the control center of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which built and maintains the LHC. Apparently, a passing bird may have dropped the chunk of bread on an electrical substation above the accelerator, causing a power cut. The baguette was removed, power to the cryogenic system was restored and within a few days the magnets returned to their supercool temperatures.
While most scientists would write off the event as a freak accident, two esteemed physicists have formulated a theory that suggests an alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future.
The LHC, a 17-mile underground ring designed to smash atoms together at high energies, was created in part to find proof of a hypothetical subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. According to current theory, the Higgs is responsible for imparting mass to all things in the universe. But ever since the British physicist Peter Higgs first postulated the existence of the particle in 1964, attempts to capture the particle have failed, and often for unexpected, seemingly inexplicable reasons.
In 1993, the multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently, the aerial bread bombardment from a bird. (A CERN spokesman said power cuts such as the one caused by the errant baguette are common for a device that requires as much electricity as the nearby city of Geneva, and that physicists are confident they will begin circulating atoms by the end of the year).
In a series of audacious papers, Nielsen and Ninomiya have suggested that setbacks to the LHC occur because of "reverse chronological causation," which is to say, sabotage from the future. The papers suggest that the Higgs boson may be "abhorrent to nature" and the LHC's creation of the Higgs sometime in the future sends ripples backward through time to scupper its own creation. Each time scientists are on the verge of capturing the Higgs, the theory holds, the future intercedes. The theory as to why the universe rejects the creation of Higgs bosons is based on complex mathematics, but, Nielsen tells TIME, "you could explain it [simply] by saying that God, in inverted commas, or nature, hates the Higgs and tries to avoid them."
Many physicists say that Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory, while intellectually interesting, cannot be accurate because the event that the LHC is trying to recreate already happens in nature. Particle collisions of an energy equivalent to those planned in the LHC occur when high-energy cosmic rays collide with the earth's atmosphere. What's more, some scientists believe that the Tevatron accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (or Fermilab) near Chicago has already created Higgs bosons without incident; the Fermilab scientists are now refining data from their collisions to prove the Higgs' existence.
Nielsen counters that nature might allow a small number of Higgs to be produced by the Tevatron, but would prevent the production of the large number of particles the LHC is anticipated to produce. He also acknowledges that Higgs particles are probably produced in cosmic collisions, but says it's impossible to know whether nature has stopped a great deal of these collisions from happening. "It's possible that God avoids Higgs [particles] only when there are very many of them, but if there are a few, maybe He let's them go," he says.
Nielsen and Ninomiya's theory represents one side of an intellectual divide between particle physicists today. Contemporary physicists tend to fall into one of two camps: the theorists, who posit ideas about the origins and workings of the universe; and experimentalists, who design telescopes and particle accelerators to test these theories, or provide new data from which novel theories can emerge. Most experimentalists believe that the theorists, due to a lack of new data in recent years, have reached a roadblock - the Standard Model, which is the closest thing the theorists have to an evidence-backed "theory of everything," provides only an incomplete explanation of the universe. Until theorists get further data and evidence to move forward, the experimentalists believe, they end up simply making wild guesses - like those concerning time-traveling saboteurs - about how the universe works. "Nielsen and Ninomiya's theories are clearly crazy theories," says Dmitri Denisov, a physicist and Higgs-hunter at the DZero experiment at Fermilab. "In recent years theorists have been starving for experimental input and as a result, theories of second type are propagating widely. The majority of them have nothing to do with world we live in."
Nielsen concedes, "We have very little data, so theorists are going their own ways and making a lot of theories that may not be very plausible. We need guidance from experimentalists to make the theories more healthy."
"But," he adds, "in terms of our theory, we are submitting to a form of experiment. We are saying the LHC won't be allowed to produce a large number of Higgs. If it does, it would be very damaging to our theory."
Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, "Of course not, but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it." In other words: if preposterous theories are mathematically sound and can be confirmed by observation, they are true, even if seemingly impossible to believe. To scientists in the early 20th century, for example, quantum mechanics may have seemed outrageous. "The concept that you could have a wave-particle duality - that an object could take on either wave-like properties or point-like properties, depending on how you observe it - takes a huge leap of imagination," says Roberto Roser, a scientist at Fermilab. "Sometimes outlandish papers turn out to be the laws of physics."
So what would Peter Higgs himself make of the intellectual controversy surrounding his eponymous particle? Speaking on behalf of his friend, Professor Richard Kenway, who holds Higgs' former position at the University of Edinburgh, says that the 78-year-old emeritus professor remains quietly confident that the LHC will discover the Higgs boson when it is eventually running at full strength. For his part, Kenway says the LHC's delays are to be expected given the size and intricacy of the $9 billion experiment. And he says if he ever needs further proof that the Higgs boson is not abhorrent to nature, he need only spend time with his friend and mentor. "If nature truly did not want us to discover the Higgs, a cosmic ray would have zapped the embryo that became Peter, preventing its development into a physicist," he says.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Ethiopia found tons - tonnes of gold
Source: Yahoo News, AFP
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) – Ethiopia on Tuesday announced the discovery of a mine containing more than 40 tonnes of gold deposit worth 1.7 billion dollars (1.1 billion euros).
The state-run Ethiopian News Agency reported that the new find, announced by the ministry of mines and energy, will require some 200 million dollars to extract and process.
"Geological survey indicates that... an estimated 500 tonnes of gold deposit is found in the country," the agency said, providing a figure for the whole of Ethiopia.
Some 44 companies are engaged in gold exploration, earning Ethiopia about 105 million dollars in export every year.
The Horn of Africa country has mineral resources that have so far remained unexploited.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) – Ethiopia on Tuesday announced the discovery of a mine containing more than 40 tonnes of gold deposit worth 1.7 billion dollars (1.1 billion euros).
The state-run Ethiopian News Agency reported that the new find, announced by the ministry of mines and energy, will require some 200 million dollars to extract and process.
"Geological survey indicates that... an estimated 500 tonnes of gold deposit is found in the country," the agency said, providing a figure for the whole of Ethiopia.
Some 44 companies are engaged in gold exploration, earning Ethiopia about 105 million dollars in export every year.
The Horn of Africa country has mineral resources that have so far remained unexploited.
Google Street View grid gets more access
Source: Yahoo News, The New York Observer
By Gillian Reagan
Last month, Google announced that they had invented a "Street View trike." Their Street View car could roll down traditional roads and take pictures for their popular maps feature. But it couldn't document hard-to-access trails, parks, landmarks and sports venues. A Google mechanical engineer who did some mountain biking in his spare time decided to build an alternative. With the trike, they could bike where they like. They asked users to send suggestions on where they should ride their new trike.
This week, Google has chosen the finalists and Central Park and the Bronx Zoo made the list! Central Park is in the "Landmarks" category and is up against four other contenders including Alcatraz and the Kennedy Space Center. The Bronzx Zoo made the "Theme Parks & Zoos" list. Princeton is also running in the "University Campuses" category.
The finalist that receives the most votes in each category will get a visit from the Google Street View trike.
You can vote as many times as you want at www.google.com/trike. The deadline is Nov. 30.
"We'll then work on getting all the winners into Google Maps, and of course we'll work closely with the relevant organizations to collect images of any privately-owned locations," wrote Laura Melahn, a Google product marketing manager. "It takes a bit of time to ride a 250-pound bike around the country, but we're excited to see which locations get your votes."
Although a few bike paths made the final list, we'll be excited if Google takes the Street View trike on the city's 420 miles (!) of bike lanes so they can build a "bike there" feature for their Google Transit site. Google hinted on their Lat Long Blog that they're be working on it. Sites like Ride the City are picking up the slack, but it's not always easy to look up at the street signs while you're riding down 1st Avenue and trying to swerve around pedestrians, delivery trucks and taxis. With Street View maps, bike riders would know they'd have to take a left at the Dunkin Donuts on to get on the 21st Street, West-bound bike lane.
By Gillian Reagan
Last month, Google announced that they had invented a "Street View trike." Their Street View car could roll down traditional roads and take pictures for their popular maps feature. But it couldn't document hard-to-access trails, parks, landmarks and sports venues. A Google mechanical engineer who did some mountain biking in his spare time decided to build an alternative. With the trike, they could bike where they like. They asked users to send suggestions on where they should ride their new trike.
This week, Google has chosen the finalists and Central Park and the Bronx Zoo made the list! Central Park is in the "Landmarks" category and is up against four other contenders including Alcatraz and the Kennedy Space Center. The Bronzx Zoo made the "Theme Parks & Zoos" list. Princeton is also running in the "University Campuses" category.
The finalist that receives the most votes in each category will get a visit from the Google Street View trike.
You can vote as many times as you want at www.google.com/trike. The deadline is Nov. 30.
"We'll then work on getting all the winners into Google Maps, and of course we'll work closely with the relevant organizations to collect images of any privately-owned locations," wrote Laura Melahn, a Google product marketing manager. "It takes a bit of time to ride a 250-pound bike around the country, but we're excited to see which locations get your votes."
Although a few bike paths made the final list, we'll be excited if Google takes the Street View trike on the city's 420 miles (!) of bike lanes so they can build a "bike there" feature for their Google Transit site. Google hinted on their Lat Long Blog that they're be working on it. Sites like Ride the City are picking up the slack, but it's not always easy to look up at the street signs while you're riding down 1st Avenue and trying to swerve around pedestrians, delivery trucks and taxis. With Street View maps, bike riders would know they'd have to take a left at the Dunkin Donuts on to get on the 21st Street, West-bound bike lane.
The Vatican Church is on a mission to find aliens
Source: Yahoo News, Associated Press
By ARIEL DAVID, Associated Press Writer
[Pope Benedict XVI admires the sky above Sydney, Australia. The Vatican has hosted a dayslong conference to study the possibility of alien life in the universe and its implication for the Catholic Church.]
VATICAN CITY – E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.
"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.
Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology — the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.
Funes said the possibility of alien life raises "many philosophical and theological implications" but added that the gathering was mainly focused on the scientific perspective and how different disciplines can be used to explore the issue.
Chris Impey, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said it was appropriate that the Vatican would host such a meeting.
"Both science and religion posit life as a special outcome of a vast and mostly inhospitable universe," he told a news conference Tuesday. "There is a rich middle ground for dialogue between the practitioners of astrobiology and those who seek to understand the meaning of our existence in a biological universe."
Thirty scientists, including non-Catholics, from the U.S., France, Britain, Switzerland, Italy and Chile attended the conference, called to explore among other issues "whether sentient life forms exist on other worlds."
Funes set the stage for the conference a year ago when he discussed the possibility of alien life in an interview given prominence in the Vatican's daily newspaper.
The Church of Rome's views have shifted radically through the centuries since Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 for speculating, among other ideas, that other worlds could be inhabited.
Scientists have discovered hundreds of planets outside our solar system — including 32 new ones announced recently by the European Space Agency. Impey said the discovery of alien life may be only a few years away.
"If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs bio-chemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound," he said.
This is not the first time the Vatican has explored the issue of extraterrestrials: In 2005, its observatory brought together top researchers in the field for similar discussions.
In the interview last year, Funes told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God.
"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said in that interview.
"Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God's creative freedom."
Funes maintained that if intelligent beings were discovered, they would also be considered "part of creation."
The Roman Catholic Church's relationship with science has come a long way since Galileo was tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant his finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.
Today top clergy, including Funes, openly endorse scientific ideas like the Big Bang theory as a reasonable explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.
Earlier this year, the Vatican also sponsored a conference on evolution to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species."
The event snubbed proponents of alternative theories, like creationism and intelligent design, which see a higher being rather than the undirected process of natural selection behind the evolution of species.
Still, there are divisions on the issues within the Catholic Church and within other religions, with some favoring creationism or intelligent design that could make it difficult to accept the concept of alien life.
Working with scientists to explore fundamental questions that are of interest to religion is in line with the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made strengthening the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.
Recent popes have been working to overcome the accusation that the church was hostile to science — a reputation grounded in the Galileo affair.
In 1992, Pope John Paul II declared the ruling against the astronomer was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."
The Vatican Museums opened an exhibit last month marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first celestial observations.
Tommaso Maccacaro, president of Italy's national institute of astrophysics, said at the exhibit's Oct. 13 opening that astronomy has had a major impact on the way we perceive ourselves.
"It was astronomical observations that let us understand that Earth (and man) don't have a privileged position or role in the universe," he said. "I ask myself what tools will we use in the next 400 years, and I ask what revolutions of understanding they'll bring about, like resolving the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude."
The Vatican Observatory has also been at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between religion and science. Its scientist-clerics have generated top-notch research and its meteorite collection is considered one of the world's best.
The observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, is based in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside town in the hills outside Rome where the pope has his summer residence. It also conducts research at an observatory at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.
By ARIEL DAVID, Associated Press Writer
[Pope Benedict XVI admires the sky above Sydney, Australia. The Vatican has hosted a dayslong conference to study the possibility of alien life in the universe and its implication for the Catholic Church.]
VATICAN CITY – E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church.
"The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.
Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results Tuesday of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology — the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos.
Funes said the possibility of alien life raises "many philosophical and theological implications" but added that the gathering was mainly focused on the scientific perspective and how different disciplines can be used to explore the issue.
Chris Impey, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said it was appropriate that the Vatican would host such a meeting.
"Both science and religion posit life as a special outcome of a vast and mostly inhospitable universe," he told a news conference Tuesday. "There is a rich middle ground for dialogue between the practitioners of astrobiology and those who seek to understand the meaning of our existence in a biological universe."
Thirty scientists, including non-Catholics, from the U.S., France, Britain, Switzerland, Italy and Chile attended the conference, called to explore among other issues "whether sentient life forms exist on other worlds."
Funes set the stage for the conference a year ago when he discussed the possibility of alien life in an interview given prominence in the Vatican's daily newspaper.
The Church of Rome's views have shifted radically through the centuries since Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 for speculating, among other ideas, that other worlds could be inhabited.
Scientists have discovered hundreds of planets outside our solar system — including 32 new ones announced recently by the European Space Agency. Impey said the discovery of alien life may be only a few years away.
"If biology is not unique to the Earth, or life elsewhere differs bio-chemically from our version, or we ever make contact with an intelligent species in the vastness of space, the implications for our self-image will be profound," he said.
This is not the first time the Vatican has explored the issue of extraterrestrials: In 2005, its observatory brought together top researchers in the field for similar discussions.
In the interview last year, Funes told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God.
"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said in that interview.
"Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God's creative freedom."
Funes maintained that if intelligent beings were discovered, they would also be considered "part of creation."
The Roman Catholic Church's relationship with science has come a long way since Galileo was tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant his finding that the Earth revolves around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.
Today top clergy, including Funes, openly endorse scientific ideas like the Big Bang theory as a reasonable explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter.
Earlier this year, the Vatican also sponsored a conference on evolution to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species."
The event snubbed proponents of alternative theories, like creationism and intelligent design, which see a higher being rather than the undirected process of natural selection behind the evolution of species.
Still, there are divisions on the issues within the Catholic Church and within other religions, with some favoring creationism or intelligent design that could make it difficult to accept the concept of alien life.
Working with scientists to explore fundamental questions that are of interest to religion is in line with the teachings of Pope Benedict XVI, who has made strengthening the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.
Recent popes have been working to overcome the accusation that the church was hostile to science — a reputation grounded in the Galileo affair.
In 1992, Pope John Paul II declared the ruling against the astronomer was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."
The Vatican Museums opened an exhibit last month marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first celestial observations.
Tommaso Maccacaro, president of Italy's national institute of astrophysics, said at the exhibit's Oct. 13 opening that astronomy has had a major impact on the way we perceive ourselves.
"It was astronomical observations that let us understand that Earth (and man) don't have a privileged position or role in the universe," he said. "I ask myself what tools will we use in the next 400 years, and I ask what revolutions of understanding they'll bring about, like resolving the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude."
The Vatican Observatory has also been at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between religion and science. Its scientist-clerics have generated top-notch research and its meteorite collection is considered one of the world's best.
The observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, is based in Castel Gandolfo, a lakeside town in the hills outside Rome where the pope has his summer residence. It also conducts research at an observatory at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Clash Of The Titans 2010 movie trailer [HD]
In the film, the ultimate struggle for power pits men against kings and kings against gods. But the war between the gods themselves could destroy the world. Born of a god but raised as a man, Perseus (Worthington) is helpless to save his family from Hades (Fiennes), vengeful god of the underworld. With nothing left to lose, Perseus volunteers to lead a dangerous mission to defeat Hades before he can seize power from Zeus (Neeson) and unleash hell on Earth. Leading a daring band of warriors, Perseus sets off on a perilous journey deep into forbidden worlds. Battling unholy demons and fearsome beasts, he will only survive if he can accept his power as a god, defy his fate and create his own destiny.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
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