Thursday, November 18, 2010

Paranormal Activities in White House

The White House is the home and work place of the United States President. Built between 1792 and 1800, the White House has been the executive home of every U.S. President since John Adams. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., it is owned by the National Park Service and is part of the President’s Park district. Today, the White House Complex includes the Executive Residence, as well as East and West Wings. The White House is made up of six stories (the Ground Floor, State Floor, Second Floor, Third Floor, and also a two-story basement).
The White House has had its share of ghost stories and paranormal reports. Many people have had encounters with the ghost who haunt this very historic place. One spirit that has been seen on a number of occasions here is that of Former President Abraham Lincoln . Although Lincoln was shot and killed in 1865, his spirit has been seen many times since. Former President Theodore Roosevelt and Former First Lady Grace Coolidge reported seeing a tall, gaunt figure in spirit form that looked a lot like President Lincoln. Lincoln’s ghost has been seen in all three parts of the White House. One room that he seems to favor is the bedroom that was his wives when they lived here together before his death. On one night, a guest was staying in that room and she was awoken in the middle of the night by a knock on the door. When she got out of bed and looked to see who it was that knocked on her door, standing there was the transparent figure of Lincoln. Seeing him startled her so bad that she fainted and was found the next morning lying on the floor.
A different kind of spirit that has been seen here inside of the White House is that of a
black cat. The ghost cat is almost always seen in the basement area, and there is a legend that goes with this cats appearance. The legend states that when the cat is seen, someone will die. So far this legend has proven true as the cat appeared before both Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s deaths.
Currently the White House is not open to the public. Since 2003, limited tours are given only to those individuals who make prior arrangements through their Congressional representatives and who submit to background checks.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

10 Amazing facts about Human Body

1: Tongue Print
­D­on't stick out your tongue if you want to hide your identity. Similar to fingerprints, everyone also has a unique tongue print!
2: Shedding
­ Your pet isn't the only one in the house with a shedding problem. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour. That works out to about 1.5 pounds each year, so the average person will lose around 105 pounds of skin by age 70.
3: Bone Count
­ An adult has fewer bones than a baby. We start off life with 350 bones, but because bones fuse together during growth, we end up with only 206 as adults.
4: New Stomach
­ Did you know that you get a new stomach lining every three to four days? If you didn't, the strong acids your stomach uses to digest food would also digest your stomach.
5: Scent Remembering
Your nose is not as sensitive as a dog's, but it can remember 50,000 different scents.
6: Bacteria
This will really make your skin crawl: Every square inc­h of skin on the human body has about 32 million bacteria on it, but fortunately, the vast majority of them are harmless.
7: Source of Body Odour
Th­e source of smelly feet, like smelly armpits, is ­sweat. And people sweat buckets from their feet. A pair of feet has 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.
8: Sneeze Speed
­The air from a human sneeze can travel at speeds of 100 miles per hour or more -- another good reason to cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze -- or duck when you hear one coming your way.
9: Blood Distance
­ Blood has a long road to travel: Laid end to end, there are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. And the hard-working heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through those vessels every day.
10: Saliva Quantity
­You may not want to swim in your spit, but if you saved it all up, you could. In a lifetime, the average person produces about 25,000 quarts of saliva -- enough to fill two swimming pools!

Friday, November 12, 2010

What happened to Spirit - One of the Nasa's Mars Rover


NASA mission controllers have not heard from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit since March 22, and the rover is facing its toughest challenge yet - trying to survive the harsh Martian winter.
The rover team anticipated Spirit would go into a low-power "hibernation" mode since the rover was not able to get to a favorable slope for its fourth Martian winter, which runs from May through November. The low angle of sunlight during these months limits the power generated from the rover's solar panels. During hibernation, the rover suspends communications and other activities so available energy can be used to recharge and heat batteries, and to keep the mission clock running.
On July 26, mission managers began using a paging technique called "sweep and beep" in an effort to communicate with Spirit.
"Instead of just listening, we send commands to the rover to respond back to us with a communications beep," said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "If the rover is awake and hears us, she will send us that beep."
Based on models of Mars' weather and its effect on available power, mission managers believe that if Spirit responds, it most likely will be in the next few months. However, there is a very distinct possibility Spirit may never respond.
"It will be the miracle from Mars if our beloved rover phones home," said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program in Washington. "It's never faced this type of severe condition before – this is unknown territory."
Because most of the rover's heaters were not being powered this winter, Spirit is likely experiencing its coldest internal temperatures yet -- minus 55 degrees Celsius (minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit). During three previous Martian winters, Spirit communicated about once or twice a week with Earth and used its heaters to stay warm while parked on a sun-facing slope for the winter. As a result, the heaters were able to keep internal temperatures above minus 40 degrees Celsius (which is also minus 40 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale).

Spirit is designed to wake up from its hibernation and communicate with Earth when its battery charge is adequate. But if the batteries have lost too much power, Spirit's clock may stop and lose track of time. The rover could still reawaken, but it would not know the time of day, a situation called a "mission-clock fault." Spirit would start a new timer to wake up every four hours and listen for a signal from Earth for 20 minutes of every hour while the sun is up.
The earliest date the rover could generate enough power to send a beep to Earth was calculated to be around July 23. However, mission managers don't anticipate the batteries will charge adequately until late September to mid-October. It may be even later if the rover is in a mission-clock fault mode. If Spirit does wake up, mission managers will do a complete health check on the rover's instruments and electronics.
Based on previous Martian winters, the rover team anticipates the increasing haziness in the sky over Spirit will offset longer daylight for the next two months. The amount of solar energy available to Spirit then will increase until the southern Mars summer solstice in March 2011. If we haven't heard from it by March, it is unlikely that we will ever hear from it.
"This has been a long winter for Spirit, and a long wait for us," said Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for NASA's two rovers who is based at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "Even if we never heard from Spirit again, I think her scientific legacy would be secure. But we're hopeful we will hear from her, and we're eager to get back to doing science with two rovers again."
Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, began exploring Mars in January 2004 on missions planned to last three months. Spirit has been nearly stationary since April 2009, while Opportunity is driving toward a large crater named Endeavour. Opportunity covered more distance in 2009 than in any prior year. Both rovers have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.
NASA's JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Israel's New Enemy: America?

Despite Vice President Joe Biden's recent pledge of unswerving fidelity to Israel during his recent visit there, the rhetoric and pressure directed by the Obama administration against the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East more accurately resembles the behavior of an enemy. Increasingly under this administration -- but also present in Republican administrations -- America's policy toward Israel is full of "harmful designs" and "antagonistic activities." The intentions may not be deliberate, but the outcome would lead to the same injurious end.
The latest pretext for putting more pressure on Israel to do more in the "pursuit of peace" comes from a decision by Israel's Interior Ministry to construct 1,600 new housing units in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo, which is located in "disputed territory." To the Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim neighbors, most especially Iran and Syria, all of Israel is "disputed territory." It is difficult to understand why the U.S. State Department thinks not building a few houses is going to dissuade Israel's enemies from wanting less than they want now.
The failure of this formula has been evident for decades, but U.S. policy continues to employ it, always with the same results. Whether Israel's concessions have been unilateral -- most recently with its abandonment of the Gaza Strip, which predictably led to terrorist attacks from that territory -- or negotiated deals which the Palestinians have never lived up to, Israel always ends up getting its pocket picked. Then, the United States, the U.N., Europe and Russia demand that it put more valuables in its pocket so the thieves can continue their thievery.

Latest Threat to Earth

Although scientists have basically cleared us from any danger from asteroid 2002 NT7 which originally had been reported as an impact hazard for the year 2019, a newer space rock has been spotted, which may pose a threat even sooner.
At around 1.2 km in width, 2003 QQ47 is substantially smaller than 2002 NT7 (2km), but has been called "an event meriting careful monitoring" by astronomers. If an impact does occur, it could be on March 21, 2014
.Discovered on August 24, 2003, by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Project (an MIT Lincoln Laboratory program funded by the United States Air Force and NASA) in New Mexico, 2003 QQ47 has been classified as a 1 on the Torino scale of impact hazards. Scientists are urging calm, however, saying the odds of a catastrophic collision are only around 1 in 909,000.
The orbit of this asteroid has been calculated on only 51 observations during a seven-day period and require further observations to determine if any danger does exist. It will be monitored closely over the next two months. Astronomers expect the risk of impact to decrease significantly as more data is gathered.
If it does strike Earth, the impact could have the effect of over 20 million Hiroshima style atomic bombs. As Billy Bob Thornton says in Armageddon, “It's what we call a Global Killer....the end of mankind. Half the world will be incinerated by the heat blast.....the rest will freeze to death in a nuclear winter. Basically, the worst part of the Bible!”

IRAQ WAR REALITY - LEAKED!!!


The 391,831 reports, drawn up in many cases by US soldiers of relatively junior rank, perhaps after a long, hot day on patrol in Baghdad, provide a terrifying insight into the anarchy which enveloped Iraq after Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed.
The reports reveal in terrifying detail how any hope of replacing the former dictatorship with a functioning democracy quickly became a faded dream as Iraq descended into an orgy of killing which reached every corner of the country.
In often nauseating detail, the files disclose the coalition commanders turned a blind eye to acts of torture and murder conducted on an industrial scale.
In one log it is reported that an Iraqi man was arrested by the police and shot in the leg by an officer.
The report continues: "this detainee suffered abuse which amounted to cracked ribs, multiple lacerations and welts and bruises from being whipped with a large rod and hose across his back".
The report, with stunning understatement, adds that these acts amount to "reasonable suspicion of abuse" but the outcome was: "No further Investigation Required".
The decision not to investigate was a direct order from the Pentagon as US officials sought to pass the management of security from the coalition to the Iraqis.
It was a cataclysmic error which probably lengthened the insurgency as the victims of abuse sought vengeance and directed their anger at US and British troops. How many dead coalition troops would be alive today had the Iraqi death squads been stopped?
Worryingly the war logs also reveal the true extent of Iran's involvement in the insurgency – a fact which, for political reasons, the British government constantly denied.
The logs also expose the ease with which US troops appeared to open fire on unarmed civilians who made the mistake of approaching, military checkpoints too quickly. One document entitled "Friendly action, escalation of force" reveals how two US soldiers fired two hundred rounds into a car which "would not yield to their patrol". Two adults were killed and two children, aged nine and six, suffered gun shot wounds. The report reveals that the adults were the children's parents.
There are no clues as to whether a subsequent investigation was undertaken but it could be assumed that the reaction form the family of those killed and injured would be hostile.
Fundamental to any counter-insurgency campaign is the need for strong command at the junior level. One mistake by a single soldier can easily have strategic consequences.
The abuse of Iraqi detainees by US guards at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 became a turning point in the insurgency.
Wars amongst the people are always bloody and for the US soldiers in Baghdad, fighting an enemy indistinguishable from the civilians they were trying to protect, daily life must have been truly terrifying.
But fear can neither be used as either a defence or an excuse. Mistakes will be made in war, they are part of the fabric of conflict, but they must be investigated not ignored for the sake of political expediency.