Originally posted by maggot:

No mini black holes? How disappointing...

wait for the subsequent tests lor.. haha... the earth will be swallow up by the many mini black holes.. lolz

what is the situation over at singapore?

Thursday, October 02, 2008 Israel Today Staff

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday said that the recent peace offer made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is enough to get a final status agreement signed, but recognized that the outgoing Israeli leader does not have the ability to implement the proposal.

"We could have peace in two days" if Olmert's offer could be implemented, Abbas told a group of Muslim clerics at the tail end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

Olmert made his offer in a Rosh Hashanah interview with Israel's largest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot.

In the interview, Olmert said he was ready to withdraw from 93 percent of Judea and Samaria, including nearly all of eastern Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. Olmert offered to make up the difference by giving the Palestinians 5.5 percent of sovereign Israeli land.

The proposed deal also included a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

Abbas said he hopes that Olmert's proposal will form the foundation of peace talks with his successor. The Palestinian leader said he would like to view Olmert's offer as a peace "deposit."

The international community tried to make sure that will be the case when the Middle East Quartet last week insisted that all Israeli offers, no matter how tentative, be made binding.

Meanwhile, Israeli opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu reiterated in a holiday interview with Israel National News that the nation does not have a viable Palestinian peace partner with whom to make a deal.

In another holiday interview with Israeli Internet portal Walla!, Netanyahu said that if he regains the prime minister's chair he will actually increase Jewish settlement activity and shelf all talk of a peace deal leading to the creation of a Palestinian Arab state.

There is no hope of a viable final status peace deal at this point, said Netanyahu, so the best thing to do is forge an economic arrangement with the Arabs of Judea and Samaria.

Polls conducted over the past year consistently show that Netanyahu will win the next national election by a healthy margin.

To parn:

lol. God will know if it is true la.. haha

State bans 'Jesus' from troopers' prayers
'This edict is unacceptable and unconstitutional'

Posted: September 25, 2008
8:10 pm Eastern

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Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine is being called on the carpet by a national religious freedom advocacy organization after his administration implemented a new state policy forbidding state police chaplains from using "Jesus Christ" in public prayers, and half a dozen chaplains resigned in protest.

"This edict is unacceptable and unconstitutional and must be reversed immediately," said Bishop Council Nedd, chief of the group called In God We Trust USA. "Governor Kaine must immediately rescind this decision and beg the state police chaplains who have resigned in protest to return to duty."

Gordon Klingenschmitt, a former Navy chaplain who's been through a similar situation, also condemned the action.

"It's happening all over again! I cannot believe we live in a society where government officials literally dictate the content of a chaplain's prayers and dare to punish or exclude chaplains who pray 'in Jesus name,'" said  Klingenschmitt, who was fired from the military last year for praying "in Jesus name."

He later won a victory in Congress providing that right to other military chaplains and has a case pending to be reinstated.

(Story continues below)

"Kaine should be held responsible, since he campaigned as a Christian to get our votes. Now let's see him govern like a Christian," Klingenschmitt said.

According to Nedd, the ban was issued by state police Col. W. Steven Flaherty to chaplains just weeks ago. The dispute became public through the work of Charles W. Carrico Sr., a member of Virginia's House of Delegates who is a former trooper and will head up a Virginia effort to oppose the policy.

"In God We Trust will assist Delegate Carrico and oppose this policy with every means at our disposal," said Nedd. "Our supporters in Virginia are absolutely furious that the Commonwealth's government would rather its state troopers go without chaplains than risk someone being offended by a Christian chaplain invoking the name of Jesus Christ," Nedd said.

The group's report said there had been no complaints about any of the prayers by chaplains; it was simply a ban adopted "to prevent any possible future lawsuits."

The action, however, violates their First Amendment rights and prevents the chaplains "from serving effectively," said House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith. "These men had little choice but to resign."

Flaherty reported he was acting on an appeals court ruling dealing with prayers at the Fredericksburg city council, and his rule allowed only "nondenominational" prayers at public events.

He said those who object could opt out.

"This is not a forced situation," a spokeswoman for the state law enforcement agency said. "We wouldn't put them in that position."

Klingenschmitt battled the military over the same dispute.

He called those who resigned heroes, "because they refused to deny Jesus when ordered to by the Kaine administration."

The appeals court opinion the state cited was decided in a written ruling from former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who said discriminating against anyone who prays "in Jesus name" among officials rotating responsibilities to open city meetings is fair and reasonable.

Her reasoning left Klingenschmitt wondering how that conclusion had been reached.

That dispute focused on Rev. Hashmel Turner, a resident of Fredericksburg, Va., and a member of the town council, who was a part of a rotation of council members who prayed at the council meetings. He ended his prayers "in Jesus name."

That phrase, however, offended a listener, who prompted the involvement of several activist groups that threatened a lawsuit if the elected Christian council member continued to be allowed to pray "in Jesus name."

The city then adopted a non-sectarian prayer requirement, imposing a ban on any reference to "Jesus."

O'Connor wrote: "The restriction that prayers be nonsectarian in nature is designed to make the prayers accessible to people who come from a variety of backgrounds, not to exclude or disparage a particular faith."

"Ironically, she admitted Turner was excluded from participating solely because of the Christian content of his prayer," Klingenschmitt noted.

"The Fredericksburg government violated everybody's rights by establishing a nonsectarian religion, and requiring all prayers conform, or face punishment of exclusion," he said.

New faith throws out the Ten Commandments

http://www.theage.com.au/national/new-faith-throws-out-the-ten-commandments-20080915-4h3d.html?page=-1

Barney Zwartz
September 16, 2008 - 3:46PM

- Jesus 'just a Jewish peasant'
- Cleric launches new faith
- Ten Commandments 'too negative'

Dr Macnab says Abraham is probably a concoction, Moses was a mass murderer and Jesus Christ just a Jewish peasant who certainly was not God. In fact, there is no God, in the usual sense of an interventionist deity - what we strive for is a presence both within and beyond us.

Dr Macnab, a noted psychotherapist and executive minister at St Michael's Uniting Church in the city, said the new faith was necessary because the old faith no longer worked.

"The old faith is in large sections unbelievable. We want to make the new faith more believable, realistic and helpful in terms of the way people live," he said.

St Michael's is promoting the new faith with a $120,000 campaign over several months, involving newspaper and radio advertising, the internet, banners and billboards. Dr Macnab is being advised by Barry Whalen, who was the media guru for Cardinal George Pell when he was Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne.

According to Dr Macnab, the new faith transcends denominations and religions. It is about searching, not dogma. It seeks the good, the tender and the beautiful, and finds it in Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism.

"At the Jesus Seminar (a scholarly but sceptical international enterprise examining the statements attributed to Jesus, of which Dr Macnab is a member), we are inclined to think there was a real Jesus but we don't know much about him. The record has been embellished a great deal along the way. He gives glimpses of something beyond him, and that's the most powerful aspect of what he was doing."

Dr Macnab said the Ten Commandments were full of what people could not do, and were given by a patriarchal figure, Moses, who was a mass murderer. The Bible records that Moses killed 3000 Israelites who worshipped the Golden Calf.

"Allegedly he went up the mountain and came down and said "you shall not kill', so how come he was such a genocidal man?" Dr Macnab said.

Until 1900, people believed in heaven above, earth, and hell below. "We have given up that idea. He's no longer the God up there, an interventionist God. We can all feel a presence beyond ourselves and are trying to get in touch with the presence better than ourselves. It's trying to bring a more humanitarian understanding."

Dr Macnab has been at St Michael's, where he is minister for life, since 1971. He did not seek wider approval for the campaign, and said some in the Uniting Church would resent it, but some would agree.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/national/new-faith-throws-out-the-ten-commandments-20080915-4h3d.html

Large Hadron Collider 'likely' to uncover sought-after 'God particle'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/10/scicern510.xml

Last Updated: 12:01pm BST 10/09/2008

The scientist whose work lies at the heart of the massive "Big Bang" experiment said today he believed it was "pretty likely" the undiscovered particle viewed as a holy grail of physics would be found.
# Full coverage of the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher
# Subatomic particles complete first circuit | How it works
# Legal bid to stop CERN atom smasher from 'destroying the world'

Scientists hope the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will uncover the most highly sought-after particle in physics, known as the Higgs Boson.
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It is thought the elusive particle may be responsible for giving mass to everything in the universe, and without it there would be no gravity.

But the particle - nicknamed the God Particle because it is thought to be so fundamental to the evolution of the universe - has not been discovered and to this day it remains a theory.

Today, the man who gave the particle its name expressed confidence that he would be proved right after all these years and said he would be "surprised and disappointed" if that were not the case.

Asked whether he believed the God Particle would be uncovered, Professor Peter Higgs said: "I think it's pretty likely.

"The way I put it is that if there isn't anything there, then it means I and a lot of other people no longer understand all the things we understand about these weak and electromagnetic interactions."

It was in 1964 that the scientist, now aged 79, carried out the work that eventually made his name.

His theory has dominated the world of particle physics ever since.
# Watch: How the great machine will work
# Watch: Telegraph TV visits CERN on the trail of the Higgs particle
# Watch: Large Hadron Collider workers' rap is YouTube hit

Prof Higgs returned to his working roots at the University of Edinburgh today to give a briefing in the same street where he formulated his scientific theory 44 years ago.

Speaking in an office on Roxburgh Street, he said the idea gradually dawned on him over the course of a weekend.

"It wasn't a 'eureka' moment," he said.

"It was a gradual realisation that stored in a different part of my memory was something which helped me to understand how to solve what I was worrying about at that time.

"When I came back on the Monday to work here the first thing I did was go and check various other papers to see if my recollection was correct and it would help me."

'Big Bang Machine' Successfully Completes First Test

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,420062,00.html

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The Large Hadron Collider, the world's new and largest particle collider, passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions around a 17-mile underground ring Wednesday.

Scientists hope it's the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a few trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen near Geneva, Switzerland, at 10:26 a.m. (4:26 a.m. EDT) indicating that the protons had traveled clockwise along the full length of the $3.8 billion collider — described as the biggest physics experiment in history.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Fermilab in Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.

Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise.

• Click here for more photos.

• Click here to find out how the Large Hadron Collider works.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.

Physicists around the world now have much greater power to smash the components of atoms together in attempts to learn about their structure.

"Well done, everybody," said Robert Aymar, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to cheers from the assembled scientists in the collider's control room at the Swiss-French border.

The organization, informally known by its former French acronym CERN, began firing the protons — a type of subatomic particle — around the tunnel in stages less than an hour earlier, with the first beam injection at 9:35 a.m. (3:35 a.m. EDT).

"The beam is the size of a human hair," said CERN spokeswoman Paola Catapano.

Eventually two beams will be fired at the same time in opposite directions with the aim of recreating conditions a split second after the big bang, which scientists theorize was the massive explosion that created the universe.

"My first thought was relief," said Evans, a Welshman who has been working on the project since its inception in 1984. "This is a machine of enormous complexity. Things can go wrong at any time. But this morning has been a great start."

He didn't want to set a date, but said that he expected scientists would be able to conduct collisions for their experiments "within a few months."

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, whizzing 11,000 times a second around the tunnel.

Scientists hope to eventually send two beams of protons through two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space.

The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will collide.

The supercooled magnets that guide the proton beam heated slightly in the morning's first test, leading to a pause to recool them before trying the opposite direction.

The collider's two largest detectors — essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons — are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time.

It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — which is sometimes called the "God particle" because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Previously unknown particles are also expected to pop up, if only for a millionth of a second, from the high-energy collisions of protons and antiprotons.

A pair of Russian scientists even think the LHC would be the world's first time machine, and that we should expect visitors from the future to arrive soon after it goes into operation.

The start of the collider came over the objections of some who feared the collision of protons could eventually imperil the Earth by creating micro-black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN.

CERN was backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking , who declared the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Brian Cox, a glamorous particle physicist at the University of Manchester in England who literally was once a rock star, told London's Daily Telegraph that he and his colleagues had been receiving death threats.

He bluntly characterized anyone who feared the LHC would destroy the world with an unprintable term for a female body part.

That hasn't stopped several people, including a former nuclear engineer from Hawaii and a German biochemist, from speaking out against the project.

"Someone will spot a light ray coming out of the Indian Ocean during the night and no one will be able to explain it, retired Professor Otto Roessler told London's Mail on Sunday. "Very soon the whole planet will be eaten in a magnificent scenario — if you could watch it from the moon. A Biblical Armageddon. Even cloud and fire will form, as it says in the Bible."

"[T]he compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole," reads a lawsuit filed in March in U.S. District Court in Honolulu by Walter L. Wagner and a Spanish colleague, Luis Sancho.

The case, in which Wagner and Sancho demand that the LHC stop operations until an independent safety review is conducted, is still pending.

Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel.

Nothing of the sort occurred Wednesday, though the accelerator is still probably a year away from full power.

The project organized by the 20 European member nations of CERN has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million. Japan, another observer, also is a major contributor.

Some scientists have been waiting for 20 years to use the LHC.

The complexity of manufacturing it required groundbreaking advances in the use of supercooled, superconducting equipment.

The 2001 start and 2005 completion dates were pushed back by two years each, and the cost of the construction was 25 percent higher than originally budgeted in 1996, Luciano Maiani, who was CERN director-general at the time, told The Associated Press.

Maiani and the other three living former directors-general attended the launch Wednesday.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom.

Less than 100 years ago scientists thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but in stages since then experiments have shown they were made of still smaller quarks and gluons and that there were other forces and particles.

FOXNews' Paul Wagenseil and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Why Disasters Are Getting Worse

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080904/us_time/whydisastersaregettingworse;_ylt=AuYIQjsFlNMWTuzAGQjR52es0NUE

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By AMANDA RIPLEY Thu Sep 4, 12:40 PM ET

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In the space of two weeks, Hurricane Gustav has caused an estimated $3 billion in losses in the U.S. and killed about 110 people in the U.S. and the Caribbean, catastrophic floods in northern India have left a million people homeless, and a 6.2-magnitude earthquake has rocked China's southwest, smashing over 400,000 homes.

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If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it's because they are. But some disasters do seem to be affecting us worse - and not for the reasons you may think. Floods and storms have led to most of the excess damage. The number of flood and storm disasters has gone up by 7.4% every year in recent decades, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. (Between 2000 and 2007, the growth was even faster - with an average annual rate of increase of 8.4%.) Of the total 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected by floods.

It is tempting to look at the line-up of storms in the Atlantic (Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live.

In recent decades, people around the world have moved en masse to big cities near water. The population of Miami-Dade County in Florida was about 150,000 in the 1930s, a decade fraught with severe hurricanes. Since then, the population of Miami-Dade County has rocketed 1,600% to 2,400,000.

So the same intensity hurricane today wreaks all sorts of havoc that wouldn't have occurred had human beings not migrated. (To see how your own coastal county has changed in population, check out this cool graphing tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)

If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of storms, it's not obvious in the historical weather data. And whatever effect it is having is much, much smaller than the effect of development along the coastlines. In fact, if you look at all storms from 1900 to 2005 and imagine we had today's populations on the coasts, as Roger Pielke, Jr., and his colleagues did in a 2008 Natural Hazards Review paper, you would see that the worst hurricane would have actually happened in 1926.

If it happened today, the Great Miami storm would have caused $140 to $157 billion in damages. (Hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in U.S. history, caused $100 billion in losses.) "There has been no trend in the number or intensity of storms at landfall since 1900,"says Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. "The storms themselves haven't changed."

What's changed is what we've put in the storm's way. Crowding together in coastal cities puts us at risk on a few levels. First, it is harder for us to evacuate before a storm because of gridlock. And in much of the developing world, people don't get the kinds of early warnings that Americans get. So large migrant populations - usually living in flimsy housing - get flooded out year after year. That helps explain why Asia has repeatedly been the hardest hit by disasters in recent years.

Secondly, even if we get all the humans to safety, we still have more stuff in harm's way. So each big hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even controlling for inflation.

But the most insidious effect of building condos and industry along the water is that we are systematically stripping the coasts of the protection that used to cushion the blow of extreme weather. Three years after Katrina, southern Louisiana is still losing a football field worth of wetlands every 38 minutes.

Human beings have been clearing away our best protections all over the world, says Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "The natural protections are diminishing - whether you're talking about mangrove forests in areas affected by the Indian ocean tsunami, wetlands in the Gulf Coast or forests, which offer protection against landslides and mudslides."

Before we become hopelessly lost in despair, however, there is good news: we can do something about this problem. We can enact meaningful building codes and stop keeping insurance premiums artificially low in flood zones.

But first we need to understand that disasters aren't just caused by FEMA and greenhouse gases. Says Tierney: "I don't think that people have an understanding of questions they should be asking - about where they live, about design and construction, about building inspection, fire protection. These just aren't things that are on people's minds."

Increasingly, climate change is on people's minds, and that is all for the better. Even if climate change has not been the primary driver of disaster losses, it is likely to cause far deadlier disasters in the future if left unchecked.

But even if greenhouse gas emissions plummeted miraculously next year, we would not expect to see a big change in disaster losses. So it's important to stay focused on the real cause of the problem, says Pielke. "Talking about land-use policies in coastal Mississippi may not be the sexiest topic, but that's what's going to make the most difference on this issue." View this article on Time.com

Could RFID and satellites help fight kidnappers?

The use of microchips to track people (such as those embedded in hospital wristbands) and products (those uncomfortable tags on clothing that have to be cut off prior to wearing) has come under fire from civil rights groups who claim that big corporations are using this technology as a tool for spying. But what about when these tags are embedded in people themselves, rather than the things they wear?

That's what Mexican security firm Xega SA, which sells technology for tracking people, wants to do, particularly in cases when people are held for ransom. For about $3,700, the company will implant a chip the size of a grain of rice (it costs another $1,800 per year for monitoring), reports the Telegraph. Although it is unclear where the chip is likely to be implanted in a person's body its customers carry with them a panic button that can be pressed if a person feels he or she is in danger. A transmitter then sends signals via satellite to pinpoint the location of the person in distress, reports Reuters. (Xega did not respond to requests from ScientificAmerican.com for an interview).

It's perhaps the next obvious step in radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, which companies already use to gather information about consumer behavior that can be used as a marketing tool, to track merchandise in order to protect themselves from shoplifting, and to locate patients who've wandered away from hospital beds. Xega's technology is troubling in a number of ways, in particular that there's a market for it in countries including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela.

But there are also several questions about whether the technology will actually work in an emergency. Implanted chips have been used in self-experimentation (such as England's self-styled cyborg Kevin Warwick) and by security contractors to automatically communicate their security credentials over short distances to gain access to a secure facility . While Warwick was actually plugged into a computer, the alternative has been to send and receive information via RFID, even though this technology has a limited range (in most cases about 25 feet) and the signal can be weakened by any metal that comes between the RFID reader and the tag, says Roy Want, a principal engineer at Intel Research/CTG in Santa Clara, Calif.

A chip that relies on GPS poses a whole new set of challenges. For one, the chip would need an antenna and radio as well as a battery powerful enough for its signal to reach a satellite network. "I'm skeptical," Want says, "that you could build something that could reach a satellite and yet be small enough to put under your skin."

Other problems are more logistical than technical. When the person's captor finds out about the embedded GPS beacon, it would likely be removed in a very painful way and be rendered useless if the captive is moved to a new location. Additionally, sometimes knowing where a captive is being held is only part of the problem, particularly if the captive is being held by guerilla forces situated deep in the Amazon, which is the case in several South American countries (the rescue of Colombia's Ingrid Betancourt and three American security contractors provided some insight into the plight of these captives).

Still, with kidnapping becoming a lucrative industry in several countries (often as a means of funding anti-government rebels), technology such as what Xega is proposing would be welcome as another tool for law enforcement to work with.

Originally posted by Keii:

 

In this case, probably AFA.

I'm interested to know how they are twisting the facts and truths laid, and using it with legal means for personal gain. And what are the facts and truths? Quite vague in your remarks..

You are refering to AFA or organization like Ford and Mcdonald's?

What are the facts and truths laid? Don't quite get you.

Anyway, God knows.

Originally posted by Keii:

And this is supposed to help... how?

I understand what you mean. Anyway, I read somewhere that the AFA took on Ford Motor Company and won.

Mcdonalds is supporting the gay community. The AFA is asking for boycotting. Will you boycott MC or will you stay neutral?

http://www.boycottmcdonalds.com/

The Last Hope

FTC to Host Town Hall Meeting to Explore Contactless Payment

Got you, under the skin

Air Force Use of RFID to Take Off

Will the world government put a law that we all must be tagged ?

.

Originally posted by Isis:

Ahh i think most of the Singaporean girl will fail to meet ur criteria.

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The conference featured a challenge to the identification of "Mariemene" with Mary Magdalene, a crucial part of the statistical analysis behind Cameron's and Jacobovici's confidence.

Professor Stephen Pfann, of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said the inscription does not read "Mariemene e Mara" at all but instead "Mariame" and "kai Mara," suggesting the ossuary contained bones of two women, Mary and Martha. Further, other scholars of early church history dismissed the link between "Mariamene" and Mary Magdelene.

"A statistical analysis of the names engraved on the ossuaries leaves no doubt that the probability of the Talpiot tomb belonging to Jesus' family is virtually nil if the Mariamene named on one of the ossuaries is not Mary Magdalene," wrote Duke University Professor Eric M. Meyers.

"Even the reading of the inscribed name as 'Mariamene' was contested by epigraphers at the conference," he wrote. "Furthermore, Mary Magdalene is not referred to by the Greek name Mariamene in any literary sources before the late second-third century AD. An expert panel of scholars on the subject of Mary in the early church dismissed out of hand the suggestion that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, and no traditions refer to a son of Jesus named Judah."

Myer also disputed the DNA claims of the filmmakers, citing a report by the head of the DNA laboratory at Hebrew University that concluded the sampling of the bone material was invalid and contaminated and could not be used to infer that "Jesus" and "Mariemene" were unrelated adults and, therefore, likely husband and wife.

"It was not even worth discussion. That should have closed the case," Myers told Christian Post.

The "smoking gun" at the conference, said Myers, was a surprise appearance by Ruth Gat, the widow of the archaeologist who excavated the tomb in 1980 and has since passed away.

Gat told the scholars her husband Yosef knew he had found "the burial tomb of Jesus Christ," but had "serious concerns and fears" over publicizing his discovery. Having been a child in Nazi-occupied Poland, he feared "a wave of anti-Semitism" because of his find.

Gat told the Jerusalem Post after her address her husband had been "staggered" by the discovery, and that he had discussed it with her "at the kitchen table."

Film director Jacobovici, who attended the symposium, said he "fell off the chair" when he heard her and claimed he had been vindicated by Gat's statement.

But Gat's claim was disputed by panelist Shimon Gibson, who was a young archeologist on the 1980 dig. He said Yosef never told him he believed the tomb was Jesus'.

Amos Kloner, former Jerusalem District archeologist, who wrote the excavation report from Gat's minimal notes 16 years after the find, said the notion Gat believed he had found Jesus' tomb was "absolutely not the case."

Further, noted Myers, Gat was a field archaelogist and did not have the epigraphic expertise to read the inscriptions.

According to Kloner, who called Jacobovici "a liar" at one session of the symposium and earlier branded the documentary "brain confusion," most of the bones found in the ossuaries 28 years ago were badly decomposed. Because of pressures from religious Jews, they were never subjected to anthropological tests and were transferred to the Religious Affairs Ministry for immediate reburial along with other remains found in construction projects and archaeological excavations. Their location is not known.

TOMB RAIDERS
Conference scholars reject 'Jesus coffin'
Say filmmaker's identification of burial site falls on statistical, DNA, epigraphic evidence
Posted: January 26, 2008
8:00 p.m. Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com

"Tomb of Jesus" outside Jerusalem
A group of scholars is disputing the positive media coverage given a Jerusalem conference earlier this month on the so-called tomb of Jesus popularized last year by "Titanic" director James Cameron and Jewish investigative journalist and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, saying the majority of experts and academics in attendence either rejected the identification of the site excavated in 1980 as belonging to Jesus' family or find the claim highly speculative.

As WND reported in February 2007, the Oscar-winning director's film project, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," claimed the discovery of 10 stone coffins in a Jerusalem suburb is actually the family crypt of Jesus of Nazareth.

The 90-minute film, made for the Discovery Channel, makes the case that Jesus had a son named Judah with Mary Magdalene.

Cameron and his director, Jacobovici, claimed also to have DNA evidence to back their story.

"People who believe in a physical ascension – that he took his body to heaven – those people will say, 'Wait a minute,'" warned Jacobovici.

According to the filmmakers, 10 ossuaries, or stone boxes containing bones, found in the first century tomb are almost certain to hold the remains of Jesus, Mary Magdalene his wife, Judah their son and other family members.

One of the ossuaries is reportedly inscribed, "Jesus son of Joseph," another "Mariemene e Mara," which in some early Christian texts was believed to refer to Mary Magdalene, and another "Judah son of Jesus." DNA analysis of the bones reportedly showed Jesus and Mariemene were unrelated adults, leading to the conclusion they were husband and wife. Other ossuaries were inscribed with the names Mary, Mathew, and Jofa.

The news came a year after release of "The Da Vinci Code" movie, based on the best-selling novel of 2004 by Dan Brown, both of which also claimed Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus.

"This is archaeology," claims James Tabor, chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina, who is interviewed throughout the documentary. "We've got the casket. We've got the bones. I think we can say, in all probability, Jesus had this son, Judah, presumably through Mary Magdalene."

Cameron and Jacobovici cited statistical analysis that suggested finding the combination of related historical names in a first century crypt at 600 to 1.

Those claims were the subject of the "Third Princeton Theological Seminary Symposium on Jewish Views of the Afterlife and Burial Practices in Second Temple Judaism: Evaluating the Talpiot Tomb in Context," held Jan. 13-16, 2008, in Jerusalem. The conference was attended by some fifty international and Israeli scholars.

According to a posting on the Princeton Theological Seminary website, the consensus of the participants was against the tomb being related to Christianity's founder.

"Unfortunately, many of the initial reports in the press following the symposium gave almost the exact opposite impression, stating, instead, that the conference proceedings gave credence to the identification of the Talpiot tomb with a putative family tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. As is abundantly clear from the statements to the contrary that have been issued since the symposium by many of the participants, such representations are patently false and blatantly misrepresent the spirit and scholarly content of the deliberations."

Several scholars issued a statement on the Duke University Religion Department's website indicating their rejection of the filmmakers' claims and disputing the press coverage.

* Professor Mordechai Aviam, University of Rochester
* Professor Ann Graham Brock, Iliff School of Theology, University of Denver
* Professor F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Princeton Theological Seminary
* Professor C.D. Elledge, Gustavus Adolphus College
* Professor Shimon Gibson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
* Professor Rachel Hachlili, University of Haifa
* Professor Amos Kloner, Bar-Ilan University
* Professor Jodi Magness, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
* Professor Lee McDonald, Arcadia Seminary
* Professor Eric M. Meyers, Duke University
* Professor Stephen Pfann, University of the Holy Land
* Professor Jonathan Price, Tel Aviv University
* Professor Christopher Rollston, Emmanuel School of Religion
* Professor Alan F. Segal, Barnard College, Columbia University
* Professor Choon-Leong Seow, Princeton Theological Seminary
* Mr. Joe Zias, Science and Antiquity Group, Jerusalem
* Dr. Boaz Zissu, Bar-Ilan University

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,322751,00.html

Black hole 'bully' blasts galaxy
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

Infographic, BBC
A powerful jet of particles from a "supermassive" black hole has been seen blasting a nearby galaxy, according to the US space agency (Nasa).

Galaxies have been seen colliding before, but this form of galactic violence is rarely witnessed by astronomers.

The jet could have a profound effect on any planets in the jet's path and could also trigger a burst of star formation.

The findings are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

They were obtained using Nasa's space-based Chandra X-ray Observatory, its Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as the Very Large Array (VLA) and Merlin radio telescopes on the ground.

The event took place in a system called 3C321, which lies 1.4 billion light-years from Earth. It contains two galaxies in orbit around one another which are in the process of merging.

Most, if not all, galaxies - including our own Milky Way - are thought to host supermassive black holes at their galactic centres. A handful of these galaxies eject powerful jets from the vicinities of their black holes, and are known as radio galaxies - because jets are very "visible" at radio wavelengths.

The larger of the two galaxies in 3C321 - dubbed the "death star galaxy" by the astronomers - has a jet emanating from the vicinity of the black hole at its centre. The unfortunate smaller galaxy has apparently swung into the jet's line of fire.

Destructive force

A bright spot in some images shows where the jet has slammed into the side of the companion galaxy, dissipating some of its energy. After striking it, the jet has become disrupted and deflected.

Jets can race out at close to the speed of light and can travel vast distances. The jet in 3C321 was about 1,000 light-years across and might have travelled one or two million light-years from its origin.

These jets consist of high energy particles and magnetic fields. They produce enormous amounts of radiation, especially in the form of high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays.

"This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling," said Dan Evans, lead author from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US.

This type of event is rarely seen. But astronomers Steve Croft and Wil van Breugel have observed a gas-rich jet in setting off star birth in an arc of stars known as Minkowski's Object.

The combined effects of radiation and particles travelling at almost the speed of light could have disastrous consequences for the atmospheres of any Earth-like planets lying in the path of the jet.

For example, protective layers of ozone in the planet's upper atmosphere could be destroyed, which could result in the mass extinction of any life that had evolved on the planet.

Neil Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York commented: "Black holes are famous for wreaking havoc on their environment. This particular black hole is disrupting its local region by dining on matter that wanders too close - which is the source of the energy for this jet.

"It also fires a jet out of the galaxy. So it is like a black hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy."

Basic properties

"There are still basic unanswered questions about how these jets work," said co-author Martin Hardcastle of the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

"We don't know how exactly they're generated close to the black hole, what they're made of, how fast they're going, or how they evolve with time. So an object like 3C321 can act as an experiment which can give us an insight into the inner working of the jet."

The effect of the jet on the companion galaxy is likely to be substantial, because the galaxies in 3C321 are extremely close to one another. At only about 20,000 light years apa