Despite what the media preaches to you, your body has no intrinsic need for drugs. Over the course of a lifetime, the average person may be prescribed 14,000 pills (this doesn’t even include over-the-counter meds), and by the time you reach your 70s you could be taking five or more pills every day, according to Pill Poppers, a documentary.
The featured film asks a poignant question that anyone taking medications should also, which is, are these pills really beneficial, or are they doing more harm than good?
It is one of the oldest stories in the human pantheon, and one of the first any child learns at church. Noah and his great Ark, saving two of every animal from a world destroying flood.
Now, Robert Ballard, one of the world’s most famous underwater explorers, has set his sights on proving the existence of this flood. Ballard, the archaeologist who discovered the Titanic using a robotic submersible equipped with remote-controlled cameras in 1985, has been searching Turkey for evidence of a civilization swept away by a monstrous ancient flood.
“We went in there to look for the flood,” Ballard told ABC News. “Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed…The land that went under stayed under.”
The discovery of Noah’s ark — the huge ship filled with two of each creature meant to repopulate the Earth – has been announced many times. In 1960, a boat like formation was spotted in an aerial photograph on Mount Everest. The shape in the photograph was roughly 500 — 515 feet long, which would put it in the right ball park of the biblical dimensions of the floating zoo. According to the bible, the ark was 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high. In today’s terms, that’s 450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet high, as a cubit was “the length of a man’s arm from fingertips to elbow,” or approximately 18 inches.
More recently, in 2010, National Geographic reported that a team of “evangelical Christian explorers” claimed to have found the wooden remains of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat, 20 miles away from Everest.
Until the 1990s, though, not much evidence had been found for the flood itself. Columbia University marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman gathered compelling evidence to show that a flood may have occurred in the Middle East approximately 7,500 years ago. (Interesting side note: this time estimate does not agree with the age of the wooden structure found on Mount Ararat.)
The geologists put forth the theory that a rising Mediterranean Sea pushed a channel through what is now the Bosphorus. This submerged the original shoreline of the Black Sea in a flood moving at approximately 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls that extended out for about 100,000 miles.
Ballard says that some 12,000 years ago, much of the world as we know it today was covered in ice.
“Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that’s a big ice cube,” he told ABC News reporters. “But then it started to melt. We’re talking about the floods of our living history.”
“The questions is, was there a mother of all floods,” Ballard said.
Ballard and his team investigated the idea of the Mediterranean turning the small freshwater inland lake into the salty Black Sea.
“We went in there to look for the flood,” he said. “Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed… The land that went under stayed under.”
For more than a decade, Ballard has been exploring this theory. He first discovered evidence of a submerged ancient shoreline in 1999. In 2000, Ballard, Pitman and Ryan reported finding evidence of a structure “with carved wooden beams, wooden branches and stone tools collapsed among the mud matrix of the structure,” some 300 feet below sea level. Still not convinced at this point that it was the flood of biblical record, Ballard has continued his search. His team found a vessel and one of its crewmembers in the Black Sea this past year.
“That is a perfectly preserved ancient shipwreck in all its wood, looks like a lumber yard,” he said. “But if you look closely, you will see the femur bone and actually a molar.” The wreck was in surprisingly good condition because the Black Sea has almost no oxygen, a fact which slows down the decaying process. The wreck, however, does not date back to the story of Noah.
“The oldest shipwreck that we have discovered so far of that area is around 500 BC, classical period,” Ballard said. “But the question is you just keep searching. It’s a matter of statistics.”
Ballard says the “deep sea is the largest museum on Earth,” making him confident he will find older evidence.
They also found evidence of an ancient shoreline. Ballard, using carbon dating obtained from shells along that shoreline, estimates this catastrophic event happened around 5,000 B.C.
“It probably was a bad day,” Ballard said. “At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land, went under.”
Ballard isn’t suggesting that Noah’s ark is real, however. His team suggests that the story of this traumatic event, seared into the collective memory of the survivors, was passed down from generation to generation and eventually inspired the biblical account of Noah.
“If you witness a terrible natural disaster, yes, you want a scientific explanation why this has happened,” said Karen Armstrong, author of “A History of God.” “But you also need to something that will help you to assuage your grief and anguish and rage. And it is here that myth helps us through that.”
According to Genesis, Noah was a deeply faithful father of three approaching his 600th birthday when God called him to build the ark.
“In the early chapters of Genesis, people live 800 years, 700 years, 900 years,” Rabbi Burt Visotzky, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York told ABC News. “Those are mythic numbers, those are way too big. We don’t quite know what to do with that. So sometimes those large numbers, I think, also serve to reinforce the mystery of the text.”
While the story of the flood is integral to the Old Testament book of Genesis, it is not the only tale of a world-altering flood. The Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the ancient Greeks and Romans, and even Native Americans all have their own variation of the flood story.
Many biblical scholars believe the story of Noah was mythical, inspired by the legendary floods of nearby Mesopotamia. The story of Gilgamesh and his flood were being passed around from one generation to the next for several centuries before Noah appeared in the early bible.
“The earlier Mesopotamian stories are very similar where the gods are sending a flood to wipe out humans,” said biblical archaeologist Eric Cline told ABC News. “There’s one man they choose to survive. He builds a boat and brings on animals and lands on a mountain and lives happily ever after? I would argue that it’s the same story.”
While the scientific community does not generally take the reports of Noah’s ark seriously, Ballard’s impressive track record is helping his theory and work to be noticed. Besides the discovery of the Titanic, Ballard is credited with finding the wreck of the battleship, Bismarck, and a U.S. fleet lost off Guadalcanal in the Pacific. Ballard plans to return to Turkey next year to continue his search.
“It’s foolish to think you will ever find a ship,” Ballard said, referring to the Ark. “But can you find people who were living? Can you find their villages that are underwater now? And the answer is yes.”
Bounty Of Golden Artifacts Unearthed From 2,400-year-old Bulgarian Tomb
November 9, 2012
Sveshtari Thracian tomb Bulgaria.
Bulgarian archeologists announced that they have unearthed a bounty of golden jewelry, sculptures, and other artifacts from a 2,400-year old tomb located in northern Bulgaria.
The artifacts were found in a wooden box that contained burnt bones and ritual items, which had been wrapped in a gold-weave cloth. The tomb belonged to the Getae, an ancient tribal people that were rivals with the ancient Greeks and part of a larger group of tribes called the Thracians. The Thracians inhabited an area west of the Black Sea for around 1,000 years, starting around the 5th century B.C.E.
Among the artifacts discovered were four bracelets with snake heads, a tiara with reliefs of lions and fantasy animals, a horse-head ornamental piece, a golden ring, 44 female figure depictions and 100 golden buttons.
“These are amazing findings from the apogee of the rule of the Getae,” lead researcher Diana Gergova, from the Sofia-based National Archaeology Institute, told The Guardian. “From what we see up to now, the tomb may be linked with the first known Getic ruler, Cothelas.”
The Thracians are well-known among archeologists for their goldsmithing skills and the volume of valuables in the tomb could indicate that the person buried there was among the society´s elite–possibly Cothelas himself. Cothelas was well-connected in this area of the ancient world and even forged a treaty with the Macedonian king Philip II, becoming his vassal.
The location where the artifacts were found is located in a larger Getic burial complex about 250 miles northeast of Sofia. One of the tombs in the larger site is the Tomb of Sveshtari, a UNESCO world heritage site. The tomb is famous for its murals and half-woman, half-plant sculpture that are unique throughout the Thracian territory, what is currently Bulgaria, northern Greece, Romania and Turkey.
Of all the Thracian tribes, the Getae had a more prominent reputation among the peoples of the ancient world; with the Greek historian Herodotus writing that they were “the noblest as well as the most just of all the Thracian tribes.”
The Getae saw their series of conflicts over the centuries with Philip II conquering the region in the 4th century B.C.E. The Macedonian Wars of the late 3rd and early 2nd century B.C.E. found the Thracians squarely between the Romans and Macedonians. The region would eventually fall under Roman control after 50 years of conflicts.
The volatility of the region would remain consistent even under Roman control. In the early first century B.C.E. the Romans marched against the Getae as they had aligned themselves with Mithridates VI, a Pontic king who ruled parts of Asia Minor. They were eventually subjugated by Augustus in the late first century B.C.E., with the exception of the Getic peoples living north of the Danube River who maintained their autonomy.
Several hundred years later, as the Roman Empire was in decline, several historians of the time began to refer to the Visigoths and other invading peoples as Getae.
From History of the Wars by the Procopius: “There were many Gothic nations in earlier times, just as also at the present, but the greatest and most important of all are the Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, and Gepaedes. In ancient times, however, they were named Sauromatae and Melanchlaeni; and there were some too who called these nations Getic.”
Sir Arthur Evans first discovered the 4,000-year-old Palace of Minos on the island of Crete in 1900. The civilization that built this palace was set apart from later Bronze Age Greeks by the artifacts the British archaeologist recovered, leading him to suggest that they were refugees from Northern Egypt. The Minoans — named after legendary King Minos — had been expelled by invaders from the South about 5,000 years ago, Evans claimed.
This theory has been a subject of debate ever since, according to Nature Magazine, and now a new study using ancient DNA recovered from Cretan caves suggests that the Minoans emerged from the early farmers who settled the island thousands of years before.
Flourishing on Crete for as many as 12 centuries until 1,500 BC, the Minoan civilization is thought to have been devastated by a catastrophic eruption of the Mediterranean island volcano Santorini, followed by a tsunami. The Minoans are widely recognized as one of Europe´s first “high cultures.” They are renowned for their pottery, metal-work and colorful frescoes — as well as fueling Greek mythology with creatures such as the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull who lived in a labyrinth constructed by King Minos.
After Crete gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1898, Evans and his team were among the first to explore the island. They discovered the Palace, and uncovered artifacts such as thick-walled circular tombs that bore a resemblance to those of ancient North Africans, and still-undeciphered scripts dubbed Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs. These artifacts marked the Minoans as a very different civilization than the Bronze Age Greeks.
BBC News reports that other theories have placed the origins of the Minoans in Palestine, Syria, or Anatolia, with genetic studies of modern Cretans doing little to form a consensus.
After working on this problem for over a decade, George Stamatoyannopoulos, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, hoped he could settle the debate once and for all by examining the DNA of the long-dead Minoans. “One of my motivations when I started the whole thing was to see whether Sir Arthur Evans was right or not,” he says.
Stamatoyannopoulos and his team gathered bone and tooth samples from more than 100 individuals who lived on Crete between 4,900 and 3,800 years ago. The remains were buried in a cave on the Lassithi plateau in the east part of the island. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), passed down through the female line basically unchanged, was obtained from 37 of their samples. They analyzed these in two different laboratories for quality control.
The team used data for 135 other populations, including ancient samples from Europe and Anatolia as well as modern peoples to compare the frequencies of distinct mtDNA lineages, known as “haplogroups,” in this ancient Minoan set.
The researchers discovered that the Minoan samples had 21 different mitochondrial DNA markers, 6 of which were unique to Minoans and 15 that were common in modern, Bronze Age and Neolithic European populations. They found no mitochondrial markers in common with present-day African populations, such as the Libyans, Egyptians, or Sudanese. The Minoans were also genetically distant from populations in the Arabian Peninsula, including Saudis, and Yemenis.
Stamatoyannopoulos believes it´s most likely that the Minoans were descended from Neolithic populations that migrated to Europe from the Middle East or Turkey. Early farmers were living on Crete by around 9,000 years ago, according to archaeological excavations, so they could be the ancestors of the Minoans. The similarities that Evans and others saw between the Minoan artifacts and those of Egypt were probably the result of cultural exchanges across the Mediterranean Sea, rather than wholesale migrations.
“There has been all this controversy over the years. We have shown how the analysis of DNA can help archaeologists and historians put things straight,” Prof Stamatoyannopoulos told BBC News in an interview. “The Minoans are Europeans and are also related to present-day Cretans – on the maternal side.”
He added, “It’s obvious that there was very important local development. But it is clear that, for example, in the art, there were influences from other peoples. So we need to see the Mediterranean as a pool, not as a group of isolated nations.”
The team´s findings are limited because mitochondrial DNA represents only a single maternal lineage for each individual. The team plans to collaborate with Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, to sequence the nuclear genomes of Minoans and other ancients to learn more about their history.
“For the last 30, 40 years there´s been a growing sense that Minoan Crete was created by people indigenous to the island,” Cyprian Broodbank, a Mediterranean archaeologist at University College London, told Nature Magazine’s Ewen Callaway. He welcomes the latest line of support for this hypothesis. “It´s good to have some of the old assumptions that Minoans migrated from some other high culture scotched,” he says.
Crete´s early history is probably more complicated than this study suggests, Wolfgang Haak, a molecular archaeologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told Callaway. Haak thinks that multiple Neolithic populations arrived on the island around the same time. “It’s nevertheless good to see some data – if authentic – from this region of Europe contributing to the big and complex puzzle,” he says.
Alex Wilson: “The overflow of Ladybower Reservoir in the Peak District looks just like somebody has removed a giant bathplug”
Rory Browne
Rhea Andrada: “A school of fish in one of the lakes in Jiuzhaigou Valley, [China,] a Unesco World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve.”
Ieuan Yusuf-George: “Isola dei Pescatori on Lago Maggiore seen through the summer haze on our late afternoon ferry trip back to Baveno[, Italy].”
Guy Butler: “One of Glencoe’s small lakes looking east across the Scottish Highlands.”
Lake Naivasha in Kenya, taken by Simon Hewett.
John Edwards: “Taken from the summit of Snowdon, [Gwynedd,] the lake in the foreground is Llyn Llydaw and the lakes in the background are Llynnau Mymbyr near to Capel Curig.”
Adil Iqbal: “Taken at Plitvice Lakes National Park, whilst on holiday in Croatia this past spring. The World Heritage Site encloses 16 crystal clear lakes, all a shade of azure blue and connected by waterfalls and cascades. Breathtaking.”
Emerald Lakes in Tongariro National Park, New Zealand by Sean Harrison.
Jim McVeigh: “This is a World War II Curtiss SB2C Helldiver being retrieved from Otay Lake, near San Diego, California, 65 years after it crashed during training. The plane was discovered by a sport fisherman using a sonar fish-finder.”
It’s a common grumble that politicians’ lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president – who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay.
Laundry is strung outside the house. The water comes from a well in a yard, overgrown with weeds. Only two police officers and Manuela, a three-legged dog, keep watch outside.
This is the residence of the president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, whose lifestyle clearly differs sharply from that of most other world leaders.
President Mujica has shunned the luxurious house that the Uruguayan state provides for its leaders and opted to stay at his wife’s farmhouse, off a dirt road outside the capital, Montevideo.
The president and his wife work the land themselves, growing flowers.
This austere lifestyle – and the fact that Mujica donates about 90% of his monthly salary, equivalent to $12,000 (£7,500), to charity – has led him to be labelled the poorest president in the world.
“I may appear to be an eccentric old man… But this is a free choice.”
“I’ve lived like this most of my life,” he says, sitting on an old chair in his garden, using a cushion favoured by Manuela the dog.
“I can live well with what I have.”
His charitable donations – which benefit poor people and small entrepreneurs – mean his salary is roughly in line with the average Uruguayan income of $775 (£485) a month.
All the president’s wealth – a 1987 VW Beetle
In 2010, his annual personal wealth declaration – mandatory for officials in Uruguay – was $1,800 (£1,100), the value of his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.
This year, he added half of his wife’s assets – land, tractors and a house – reaching $215,000 (£135,000).
That’s still only about two-thirds of Vice-President Danilo Astori’s declared wealth, and a third of the figure declared by Mujica’s predecessor as president, Tabare Vasquez.
Elected in 2009, Mujica spent the 1960s and 1970s as part of the Uruguayan guerrilla Tupamaros, a leftist armed group inspired by the Cuban revolution.
He was shot six times and spent 14 years in jail. Most of his detention was spent in harsh conditions and isolation, until he was freed in 1985 when Uruguay returned to democracy.
Those years in jail, Mujica says, helped shape his outlook on life.
“I’m called ‘the poorest president’, but I don’t feel poor. Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more,” he says.
“This is a matter of freedom. If you don’t have many possessions then you don’t need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself,” he says.
“I may appear to be an eccentric old man… But this is a free choice.”
The Uruguayan leader made a similar point when he addressed the Rio+20 summit in June this year: “We’ve been talking all afternoon about sustainable development. To get the masses out of poverty.
“But what are we thinking? Do we want the model of development and consumption of the rich countries? I ask you now: what would happen to this planet if Indians would have the same proportion of cars per household than Germans? How much oxygen would we have left?
“Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.”
Mujica accuses most world leaders of having a “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption, as if the contrary would mean the end of the world”.
Mujica could have followed his predecessors into a grand official residence
But however large the gulf between the vegetarian Mujica and these other leaders, he is no more immune than they are to the ups and downs of political life.
“Many sympathise with President Mujica because of how he lives. But this does not stop him for being criticised for how the government is doing,” says Ignacio Zuasnabar, a Uruguayan pollster.
The Uruguayan opposition says the country’s recent economic prosperity has not resulted in better public services in health and education, and for the first time since Mujica’s election in 2009 his popularity has fallen below 50%.
This year he has also been under fire because of two controversial moves. Uruguay’s Congress recently passed a bill which legalised abortions for pregnancies up to 12 weeks. Unlike his predecessor, Mujica did not veto it.
Instead, he chose to stay on his wife’s farm
He is also supporting a debate on the legalisation of the consumption of cannabis, in a bill that would also give the state the monopoly over its trade.
“Consumption of cannabis is not the most worrying thing, drug-dealing is the real problem,” he says.
However, he doesn’t have to worry too much about his popularity rating – Uruguayan law means he is not allowed to seek re-election in 2014. Also, at 77, he is likely to retire from politics altogether before long.
When he does, he will be eligible for a state pension – and unlike some other former presidents, he may not find the drop in income too hard to get used to.
An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme has found the number of suicides among soldiers and army veterans last year was much higher than previously reported.
It has found more than 50 cases of soldiers taking their own lives – more than were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2012. Toby Harnden reports.
While North Korea’s ‘Supreme Commander’ Kim Jong-Un has been threatening thermo-nuclear war against the United States, Panorama reporter John Sweeney spent eight days undercover inside the most rigidly controlled nation on Earth.
Travelling from the capital Pyongyang to the countryside beyond and to the de-Militarised Zone on the border with South Korea, Sweeney witnesses a landscape bleak beyond words, a people brainwashed for three generations and a regime happy to give the impression of marching towards Armageddon.
Mark Twain said about India: The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday’s bear date with the modering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined. Here are a few fun pictures of daily life across India. Take a look at some amusing people, things and situations from this amazing country named India. Enjoy…
Instead, he chose to stay on his wife’s farm
The Highlanders 