Dead Sea Tread See

Ever heard of those Dead Sea sinkholes?

Well, here's the science:

The Dead Sea sinkhole hazard: Geophysical assessment of salt dissolution and collapse

Abstract:

A geophysical approach is presented for analyzing processes of subsurface salt dissolution and associated sinkhole hazard along the Dead Sea. The implemented methods include Seismic Refraction (SRFR), Transient Electromagnetic Method (TEM), Electric Resistivity Tomography (ERT), and Ground Penetration Radar (GPR). The combination of these methods allows the delineation of the salt layer boundaries, estimating its porosity distribution, finding cavities within the salt layer, and identifying deformations in the overlying sediments. This approach is shown to be useful for anticipating the occurrence of specific sinkholes, as demonstrated on both shores of the Dead Sea. These sinkholes are observed mainly along the edge of a salt layer deposited during the latest Pleistocene, when Lake Lisan receded to later become the Dead Sea. This salt layer is dissolved by aggressive water flowing from adjacent and underlying aquifers which drain to the Dead Sea. Sinkhole formation is accelerating today due to the rapid fall of the Dead Sea levels during the last 30 years, caused by anthropogenic use of its water.

Be careful

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Here It Comes: The YESHA Ray Gun

Ever wanted a microwave “pain beam”? A sort of ray-gun?



Got $250,000?

Here is what the Americans tried to develop but didn't succeed:-




The story comes from here and some excerpts:

The Active Denial System heats the target’s skin with short microwaves. These only penetrate to about 1/64 of an inch. That’s enough to be extremely painful but (generally) harmless. In thousands of tests of the system, nobody has been able to stay in the beam for more than a few seconds.

Existing Active Denial devices use a gyrotron, a type of free-electron maser...

...[an] Israeli team is taking a different approach. Researchers at the College of Judea & Samaria (CJS), led by Dr. Moshe Einat, say that they have developed “unique know-how” which will allow them to build portable versions of the Active Denial..they claim that: 'The development of the 95 GHz portable gyrotron to be used as the basis for a Stun-Gun prototype would cost approximately $250,000 (U.S.), with the program running 12 months in length.'

Flash Gordon



was Jewish?

Something To Lose Your Head Over

Athletes to Leave Their Brains to Concussion Study

N.F.L...retired players are planning to literally give their brains to a new center at Boston University’s School of Medicine devoted to studying the long-term effects of concussions.

A dozen athletes, including six N.F.L. players and a former United States women’s soccer player, have agreed to donate their brains after their deaths to the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

On Thursday, the center will announce that a fifth deceased N.F.L. player, the former Houston Oilers linebacker John Grimsley, was found to have brain damage commonly associated with boxers.

The former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, one of the players who has agreed to donate his brain, said he hoped the center would help clarify the issue of concussions’ long-term effects, which have been tied to cognitive impairment and depression in several published studies. The N.F.L. says that, in regard to its players, the long-term effects of concussions are uncertain.

This is an important study:-

[John] Grimsley died in February at 45 after he shot himself in the chest in what police ruled an accident. Subsequent analysis of his brain tissue confirmed the presence of neurofibrillary tangles that had already begun to affect Grimsley’s behavior and memory, said Dr. Ann C. McKee, an associate professor of neurology and pathology at the Boston University School of Medicine and a co-director of the new brain-study center.

Of the six former N.F.L. players’ brains that have been examined in this manner, Grimsley’s was the fifth to be found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy...

Muslims and Science: Excelling in Camel Production

One never knows where information, even of the most interesting but exoctic, will pop up. Like camel reproduction.

In a letter to the editor at the TLS, Steven Weinberg, of the Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, disputed the assertion of one F. Jamil Ragep, of the McGill Institute for Islamic Studies, who had disagreed with his earlier statement that after the death of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in 1111, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

He then goes on and declares:-

In support, Ragep mentioned the development of trigonometry, but this was primarily the work of al-Battani (858–918) and al-Biruni (973–1048), long before al-Ghazali. He also mentioned the conception of a moving earth, and referred to mathematical and conceptual tools that were essential to the Copernican revolution. But Copernicus credited the idea of a moving earth to Pythagoras and (in a passage he subsequently deleted) to Aristarchus of Samos. The Muslim astronomer on whom Copernicus chiefly relied was alBattani, who died 200 years before al-Ghazali.

There were talented Muslim scientists after al-Ghazali, but their work found no place in Islamic society. For instance, Ragep mentioned the discovery of the pulmonary circulation of the blood. I presume that he was referring to Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288). Al-Nafis did propose the pulmonary circulation of the blood, but his theory had no effect in the Islamic world, perhaps because for religious reasons he did not demonstrate its truth by the dissection of animals. Ragep also pointed to “the first large-scale astronomical observatories”. There were great observatories in the Islamic world, used largely for predicting prayer times and the Muslim lunar months. In 1577, Taqi al-Din built an observatory in Istanbul comparable to Tycho Brahe’s famous observatory in Denmark. But on the instigation of the Chief Mufti, al-Din’s observatory was destroyed by a squad of janissaries, and had no impact on astronomy, while Brahe’s observatory provided the data that made possible the work of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. It is too strong to say that there was no science at all in the Islamic world after al-Ghazali, but such science as there was led to nothing important.

Certainly the great period of Islamic science came to an end around the twelfth century. Nor has it been revived. A 2002 survey by Nature identified just three areas of science in which Islamic countries excel: desalination, falconry and camel reproduction.