Mummified Fetus Found in Tiny Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus

A suspected fake mummy currently on display at an Egypt center in Wales, in fact contains a fetus 12 to 16 weeks into development, CT scan has revealed.

Known as W1013, the 20-inch artifact is a case made of cartonnage — layers of linen stiffened with plaster or glue — and belongs to the Wellcome collection at Swansea University’s Egypt Center, which houses more than 5,000 objects. Most of them were collected by the Victorian pharmaceutical entrepreneur and archaeologist Sir Henry Wellcome on excavations in Egypt.

The tiny mummy came to Swansea in 1971, but nothing is known about where Wellcome obtained it.

The mummy has long puzzled experts. It is colorfully decorated in a style dating back to the 26th Dynasty, around 600 B.C. .

The inconclusive results of an X-ray carried out in 1998 combined with meaningless inscriptions painted on the cartonnage case, suggested the mummy could have been a 19th century forgery.

“But it’s not unusual for sham hieroglyphs to be placed on coffins. Undoubtedly this would indicate that the maker of the piece was not literate,” curator Carolyn Graves-Brown told Discovery News.

Further research solved the mystery.

Last month, Swansea University’s Paola Griffiths of the Clinical Imaging College of Medicine, CT scanned the artifact.

It was then revealed the majority of the interior of the case is taken up by what appears to be linen bandages.

Within those folded strips of material, the CT scan showed a darker area about 3 inches long which researchers identified as a fetus in fetal position and with a placental sac. What could be the fetus’s femur was also identified.

“The length of the femur together with the size of the dark patch is consistent with that of a 12 to 16-week-old fetus,” Graves-Brown said.

“Another dark patch suggests the presence of an amulet and there are several areas with dark circles resembling strings of beads or tassels,” she added.

Decorated with criss-cross pattern of rhombus shapes perhaps imitating the bead net placed over some other mummies, the cartonnage case might provide some clues on the unborn baby’s sex.

The face is painted in reddish-brown, a color usually associated with men. Moreover, the heavy, yellow and blue striped wig and wide collar are most common on male coffins.

But Graves-Brown cautions: “As the fetus is only 12-16 weeks and is not in a perfect state of preservation I would not guess the sex,” he said.

Read more at Discovery News

Fossils Reveal Post-Asteroid Cold Snap Doomed Dinos

The first-ever fossil proof of dramatic global cooling after the cosmic impact that ended the Age of Dinosaurs has been discovered.

The darkness and cold from the dust and ash thrown up by the giant collision was likely the main driver of the resulting mass die-off, known as the K-T extinction, scientists say. This extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period finished the reign of the dinosaurs. The only dinosaurian survivors were the birds; other reptiles such as turtles and crocodiles survived as well, although these are not descended from dinosaurs.

The prime suspect behind this disaster is a cosmic impact from an asteroid or comet. Scientists have found evidence of this collision near the town of Chicxulub (CHEEK-sheh-loob) in Mexico in the form of a giant crater more than 110 miles (180 kilometers) wide. The explosion that carved out this crater, likely caused by an object about 6 miles (10 km) across, would have released as much energy as 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times more than the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

"When such an asteroid hits the Earth, the results are devastating," said lead study author Johan Vellekoop, a PhD candidate in paleoclimatology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "The impact itself releases an enormous amount of energy, so much that in the first hours after the impact, the air is heated up, igniting global wildfires."

Speculative cooling

In principle, such impacts also loft dust and soot into the atmosphere, "blocking incoming sunlight," Vellekoop said. "The sun is both our source of light as well as our main source of heat — hence, when sunlight can no longer reach the surface of the Earth, this surface rapidly cools down, creating a so-called 'impact winter,' a period of darkness and cold lasting for decades."

Prior studies hint that the impact winter reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface by as much as 80 percent, cooling the land from tropical warmth to below freezing. This darkness and cold would have killed off plants and caused a global collapse of terrestrial and marine food webs.

"Ultimately, more than 50 percent of all plants and animals on Earth died out because of this," Vellekoop said.

However, until now, scientists had lacked fossil evidence of this impact winter, because this severe cold spell might have only lasted months to decades, too short a time period to be captured in a fossil record stretching across millions of years. In addition, many of the algae that produce the chalky fossils scientists use to estimate ancient ocean surface temperatures went extinct during the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

"Our study is the first to show that this period of darkness and cold indeed took place," Vellekoop told Live Science.

Vellekoop and his colleagues focused their research on rocks exposed along the Brazos River between Waco and Hearne, Texas. These rocks originated from sediments deposited on the floor of a sea that existed in the area during and after the end of the Cretaceous.

Micro fossils

The scientists analyzed organic compounds from microbes known as Thaumarchaeota, which adjust the composition of fat molecules in their membranes as sea surface temperatures change.

The researchers investigated organic compounds from Thaumarchaeota in Bravos River sediments of the same age as the Chicxulub impact. These sediments held coarse layers of broken shells — possibly traces of a post-impact tsunami — and anomalously high concentrations of iridium, a metal rare on Earth's surface but more common in space rocks.The findings suggest ocean temperatures fell dramatically after the impact, cooling from about 86 degrees F (30 degrees C) to about 73 degrees F (23 degrees C).

"Working on an event 66 million years ago, it is incredible that we could resolve sea water temperature changes within decades," Vellekoop said.

Read more at Discovery News

After Neutron Star Death-Match, a Black Hole is Born

What happens when two neutron stars collide? Using a sophisticated computer simulation, NASA scientists have visualized this violent scenario in awesome degenerate-matter-crushing detail.

Neutron stars are the result of supernovae spawned by stars 8-30 times the mass of our sun. Occasionally, however, two neutron stars may meet, becoming entangled in a deep gravitational embrace. Should this scenario play out, one of the most powerful known explosions in the Universe may be sparked — a fast gamma-ray burst (GRB).

But before two neutron stars collide, what happens to their structures? What kind of insanely powerful tidal forces are at play?

In a simulation released today (May 13) by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientists, two neutron stars are placed a mere 11 miles apart. Keep in mind that although both neutron stars are 1.5 and 1.7 times the mass of our sun, all of that matter is packed into a tiny sphere only 12 miles wide. As a result, their densities and gravitational fields are immense — a teaspoonful of neutron star material would weigh as much as Mount Everest. The crushing gravitational forces ensure that atomic structures cannot be sustained, collapsing the material into a neutron degenerate state — only the structure of the neutrons themselves prevent the neutron star’s gravity from collapsing it into a point, forming a black hole.

Should more mass be added to the neutron star, a mass threshold may be reached when the gravitational forces overwhelm even the neutron degenerate pressure, causing it to collapse.

As the simulation unfolds, the neutron stars’ savage tidal forces rip each other to shreds, cracking open their thin crusts and shedding huge quantities of material into space. As they are so close to one another, the two neutron stars rapidly spin, merging in a fraction of a second. The progression of this simulated neutron star merger produces a ring doughnut-shaped material that forms about the genesis of the new-born black hole in its center.

Simulating these violent events are important for our understanding of not only how some black holes are created, but it can develop the science behind GRBs. As an extension, the mysterious source of the heaviest elements in the Universe may be found in these events where the rapid cohesion of neutron stars — and the resulting explosions — could forge rapid-neutron capture (or ‘r-process‘) elements.

Read more at Discovery News

Watch Saturn Snuggle Up With the Moon Tonight

On Tuesday evening (May 13), as the moon, just one night from full phase rises in the east-southeast sky it will be accompanied by a very bright yellowish-white "star" shining off to its lower left. That "star" will be the planet Saturn.

Saturn is currently shining bright in the night sky, just a few days after reaching opposition — its best display for stargazers — on Saturday (May 10). The planet shines at brilliant magnitude of zero on the brightness scale, making it virtually equal to the bright star Arcturus visible high above Saturn.

There is a distinct difference between Saturn and Arcturus though. While both are roughly of the same brightness (Saturn is just a trifle fainter) Arcturus twinkles and glimmers with an orange hue compared to Saturn which shines with a steady and sedate yellowish-white color.

So despite its relative close proximity to the moon, Saturn will still manage to stand-out quite well. And what will be especially interesting will be to watch how the moon seems to approach Saturn during the course of the overnight hours.

At dusk on Tuesday, Saturn will appear about 5.5 degrees to the lower left of the moon. (Your closed fist held out at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of the night sky). The moon will move toward Saturn at its own apparent width (one-half degree) per hour during the night.

So by dawn on Wednesday (May 14), the Saturn and the moon will be low in the west-southwest, the moon having moved to within 2.5 degrees to the lower right of the ringed planet. More interestingly, from the southern half of Australia, New Zealand and Victoria Land (Antarctica), the moon will occult (hide) Saturn on Wednesday evening.

Read more at Discovey News

HADES searches for dark matter: Astrophysicists cross 'Dark Photon' off the list in top position

Although Dark Energy and Dark Matter appear to constitute over 95 percent of the universe, nobody knows of which particles they are made up. Astrophysicists now crossed one potential Dark Matter candidate -- the Dark Photon or U boson -- off the list in top position. This is the result of recent HADES experiments, where researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and from 17 other European institutes try to pin down the nature of Dark Matter. These negative results -- recently published in Physics Letters B -- could even lead to challenges of the Standard Model of particle physics.

The interpretation of current astrophysical observations results in the striking mass-energy budget of matter in the universe: 75% Dark Energy and 20% Dark Matter. Only about 5% of the universe consists of "ordinary," baryonic matter.

Many attempts have been made to explain the nature of Dark Matter. Researchers believe that Dark Matter is comprised by hitherto unknown particles which do not fit into the Standard Model of particle physics. The Standard Model is a theoretically sound quantum field theory with fundamental matter particles, such as quarks (bound in hadrons, e.g., baryons) and leptons (e.g., electrons and neutrinos), which interact via exchange of force-carrier quanta, called gauge bosons (e.g., photons). Some of these species acquire their masses by the interaction with the Higgs boson. While evidences for the Higgs boson were found recently at CERN, the Standard Model looks now complete when supplemented by some neutrino masses, and nothing else seems to be needed to understand the wealth of atomic, sub-nuclear and particle physics phenomena. Nevertheless, Dark Matter appears not to be explained by any of the constituents of the Standard Model. This status of the affair has initiated worldwide efforts to search for Dark Matter candidates.

Beyond the Standard Model

Searching a needle in the haystack is simpler: one knows both the wanted object (the needle) and the place (the haystack). In the case of Dark Matter the object is unknown, and the localization, e.g. in galactic halos, is also not constraining the loci of interest. To specify the search goal one can envisage diverse hypothetical candidates, such as certain hypothetical particles beyond the Standard Model, which fulfill requirements qualifying them as constituents of Dark Matter.

Dark Energy drives the presently observed accelerated expansion of the universe. Dark Energy is homogeneously distributed and can be attributed to a cosmological constant or vacuum energy. In extreme cases it may cause, in the future, such a sudden expansion that anything in the universe is disrupted -- this would be the Big Rip. Dark Matter, in contrast, is bumpy and is needed to explain the formation of the observed density distribution of visible matter in the evolving universe, evidenced by the hierarchy of structures from (super)clusters of galaxies, galaxies, stars, planets and other compact objects such as meteorites, etc.

Among the lists of candidates of Dark Matter is a hypothetical particle, often dubbed U boson or Dark Photon. These nicknames refer to the underlying theory construction: a second unitary ("U") symmetry allows for quanta which are, in one respect, similar to photons -- namely gauge bosons -- but in another respect different from photons -- namely attributing to these quanta a mass, making them to Dark Photons because of a very weak interaction with normal matter. Very similar to photons the Dark Photons can decay into electron-positron pairs, if they have the proper virtuality. Combining the chain of hypotheses one arrives at a scenario, where an "ordinary" virtual photon converts into a Dark Photon which decays afterwards into an electron-positron pair.

Needle and Haystack

If a Dark Photon or U boson would exist with the assumed properties mentioned above and would have a mass, a certain width and a certain coupling strength to the photon, then the "needle" is specified: a resonance-type signal showing up at an invariant electron-positron mass equal to the U boson mass. The "haystack" is specified too: invariant mass spectra, i.e. electron-positron distributions. A prerequisite is an understanding of the overall shape of these distributions.

Up to now the search for such a signal of a U boson as a candidate for Dark Matter has remained unsuccessful. Together with many other searches for the other candidates of Dark Matter the situations becomes more and more intricate. Cosmology on precision level requires the existence of Dark Matter; however, the various experiments have not found any positive hint. The negative results on the U boson by HADES and other experiments make the hunt for new physics beyond the Standard Model more challenging. For instance, high-precision experiments on the magnetic moment of the muon delivered hints for a discrepancy with predictions by the Standard Model. The discrepancy has been proposed to be resolved by the U boson. But the recently achieved negative search results seem to exclude such an option. This gives the impression that the tension of the Standard Model and cosmological request of extensions as well as small deviations of the Standard Model predictions and data, such as the muon magnetic moment and other observables, is increasing, thus making this frontier of physics very fascinating with high discovery potential.

Read more at Science Daily

The Art and Science of NASA’s Best Exoplanet Illustrations

Except in a few rare cases, we can’t directly see planets outside of our own solar system. Just about every time a new exoplanet is discovered, the announcement is accompanied by an artist’s rendering of the world.

The drawings are often impressive feats, managing the tricky task of being both beautiful and scientifically accurate, while depicting something that no one has ever seen before. But each time you see one, you might wonder how closely they represent reality and what part of them is pure fantasy?

“We’re in the job of telling a story with these pictures,” said visualization scientist Robert Hurt of Caltech, who works with NASA to make exoplanet renderings. “The science visualization process is always starting with one or two data points and trying to make an engaging illustration.”

Many new exoplanet discoveries have come from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, a space-based observatory that carefully watched the light of more than 150,000 stars to try and detect a tiny dimming of brightness (though sadly, it suffered a malfunction last year that has rendered it inoperable). This dip represents a planet passing in front of that star and eclipsing its light. Kepler can’t give astronomers much more than a few pieces of information about each exoplanet; its approximate size, the distance from its star, the length of its year, and an estimate of its surface temperature.

The Kepler science team takes this data to Hurt and his collaborator, animator Tim Pyle, and works with them to produce illustrations. Together, they decide what aspects of the exoplanet they want to highlight. Kepler-186f, a recently discovered Earth-sized planet that might have liquid water on its surface, has been designated “Earth’s cousin.” So the image from NASA’s visualization team needed to suggest the idea that this place was a like home, just not exactly.

Hurt and Pyle used a few tricks to do this. The illustration of Kepler-186f (seen in the first slide above) looks at first glance like Earth, with landmasses, an atmosphere, and clouds, but upon closer inspection starts to seem more and more alien. The ice caps, for instance, are larger than ours, and light from the star has a different quality than the white sunlight we receive.

Though Kepler’s data couldn’t say for certain if there’s water on the planet’s surface, it’s a reasonable idea given the distance at which Kepler-186f orbits around its parent star. Therefore, the planet in the drawing has oceans. But to make things less-Earth like, the team went with a 50/50 ratio of water to land, rather than our planet’s 70/30 split. They also discussed the possibility of plant life, talking with astrobiology experts about what color this vegetation might be. Because the star produces more light in the red range of the electromagnetic spectrum, plant life would likely not be the familiar green of Earth, but rather a shade of orange. But because it leaps quite far into speculation, the artists didn’t want to come out and say for certain that there would be plants on Kepler-186f, settling instead on a coppery tint for the landmasses.

“We wanted to be consistent with the idea that there was life or plants, without saying there’s plants there,” said Pyle.

Hurt said color is a powerful part of the artists’ storytelling toolkit, and the closer the overall palette matches Earth’s, the more Earth-like the world is implied to be. Painting an exoplanet’s oceans the same cobalt blue of our own world will make a viewer naturally feel that it’s more like home, while lighter or darker blue shades could imply exoticness. The artists went through several iterations for the Kepler-186f drawing, giving it tweaks to “de-Earth” it, until it represented exactly what they wanted.

“We know we’re going to have people running by a newspaper stand, and seeing a headline that reads ‘NASA finds another Earth’ with this graphic next to it,” said NASA’s public affairs officer Michele Johnson, who coordinates Kepler’s press releases. “So we wanted to be very smart about the little we do know, saying this is our best interpretation, with a healthy amount of imagination as well.”

There are of course deviations from what’s physically possible. Most of these artistic shots are positioned behind a planet, with the star’s light on the opposite side. In real life, this would make the planet’s surface pitch black, with only a small sliver of daylight, but the picture needs to give a good view for the reader, instead showing a brightly lit surface. In the case of the Kepler-186f image, four other exoplanets can be seen shining up close to the star (with one even transiting in front of it to remind viewers of Kepler’s method of detection). These planets are far brighter and larger than they would be to an observer at the exoplanet, but serve as embellishments for the sake of a good story.

Read more at Wired Science

Origin of Mysterious Jellyfish Lightning 'Sprites' Revealed

Red electrical flashes that mysteriously hover above some thunderstorms have long puzzled scientists, but now, new research reveals how these alienlike atmospheric sprites form.

Sprites form at irregularities in the plasma, or charged particles of gas, in the ionosphere, the layer just above the dense lower atmosphere, about 37 to 56 miles (60 to 90 kilometers) above the Earth's surface, a study found. Since disturbances in the ionosphere can affect radio communication, sprites could be useful for sensing such disturbances remotely, researchers say.

"We would like to know how sprites are initiated and how they develop," Victor Pasko, an electrical engineer at Penn State and author of the study published May 7 in the journal Nature Communications, said in a statement.

Sprites are large electrical discharges that occur above thunderstorms. They resemble reddish-orange jellyfish with bluish tentacles streaming down.

But while sprites require thunderstorms, not all thunderstorms produce sprites. Recent studies suggested that ionosphere irregularities were required for these ghostly flashes to occur, but evidence for them was lacking.

In the study, Pasko and his colleagues studied high-speed video of sprites, and developed a model for how the strange lightning evolves and disappears. They used the model to try to recreate sprite-forming conditions.

Analysis of the videos showed that streamers snake downward from the sprites much more quickly than they spread horizontally, suggesting plasma irregularities were driving the streamer spread.

To study sprite dynamics, the team used a two-dimensional mathematical model of the movement of charged particles in the sprite. They used the model to recreate how sprites are formed, using it to see how the streamers originated and how large the plasma irregularities were.

Several sources could be causing these irregularities in the plasma. The existence of a previous sprite is the most obvious, but there were none that occurred in the region studied that occurred close enough in time — unless the irregularities last much longer than scientists suspect.

Read more at Discovery News

Star Birthing in Violent Galaxy Mergers

When two galaxies collide, astronomers witness a frenzy of star formation creating what are known as “starburst galaxies.” Although this is known, it’s a little counter-intuitive; during galactic mergers, the swirling interstellar gases are so turbulent that star formation should be switched off. So what’s going on?

Using two of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, French astrophysicists simulated 300,000 light-years of interstellar gas inside a Milky Way-like galaxy (on the TGCC Curie supercomputer in France) and a volume of gas, 600,000 million light-years wide, inside two merging galaxies (on the SuperMUC supercomputer in Germany). Committing millions of hours of computational time, the simulation replicated the random motions of gas inside the galactic disks, resolving chaotic features fractions of a light-year across.

It is known that dense clouds of interstellar gas can collapse under mutual gravity, eventually sparking fusion and new stars. But in the turbulent wake of a galactic merger, star formation should be hindered, not accelerated. Turbulence should disrupt star forming regions, fragmenting the cloud. As these simulations prove, however, it is this turbulence that actually accelerates star birth, driving starburst galaxies.

The researchers were able to compare the two simulations, showing that in the collision model, violent turbulence makes interstellar gases ripe for compression (and not dispersion), accelerating star birth.

“This is a big step forward in our understanding of star formation, something only made possible by the similarly major and parallel advances in computing power,” said lead researcher Florent Renaud of the AIM institute near Paris. “These systems are helping us unlock the nature of galaxies and their contents in ever more detail, helping astronomers to slowly assemble their complete history.”

Read more at Discovery News

Paleontologists discover new fossil organism

Scientists at the University of California, Riverside have discovered a fossil of a newly discovered organism from the "Ediacara Biota" -- a group of organisms that occurred in the Ediacaran period of geologic time.

Named Plexus ricei and resembling a curving tube, the organism resided on the Ediacaran seafloor. Plexus ricei individuals ranged in size from 5 to 80 centimeters long and 5 to 20 millimeters wide. Along with the rest of the Ediacara Biota, it evolved around 575 million years ago and disappeared from the fossil record around 540 million years ago, just around the time the Cambrian Explosion of evolutionary history was getting under way.

"Plexus was unlike any other fossil that we know from the Precambrian," said Mary L. Droser, a professor of paleontology, whose lab led the research. "It was bilaterally symmetrical at a time when bilaterians -- all animals other than corals and sponges -- were just appearing on this planet. It appears to have been very long and flat, much like a tapeworm or modern flatworm."

Study results appeared online last month in the Journal of Paleontology.

"Ediacaran fossils are extremely perplexing: they don't look like any animal that is alive today, and their interrelationships are very poorly understood," said Lucas V. Joel, a former graduate student at UC Riverside and the first author of the research paper. Joel worked in Droser's lab until June 2013.

He explained that during the Ediacaran there was no life on land. All life that we know about for the period was still in the oceans.

"Further, there was a complete lack of any bioturbation in the oceans at that time, meaning there were few marine organisms churning up marine sediments while looking for food," he said. "Then, starting in the Cambrian period, organisms began churning up and mixing the sediment."

According to the researchers, the lack of bioturbators during the Ediacaran allowed thick films of (probably) photosynthetic algal mats to accumulate on ocean floors -- a very rare environment in the oceans today. Such an environment paved the way for many mat-related lifestyles to evolve, which become virtually absent in the post-Ediacaran world.

"The lack of bioturbation also created a very unique fossil preservational regime," Joel said. "When an organism died and was buried, it formed a mold of its body in the overlying sediment. As the organism decayed, sediment from beneath moved in to form a cast of the mold the organism had made in the sediment above. What this means is that the fossils we see in the field are not the exact fossils of the original organism, but instead molds and casts of its body."

Paleontologists have reported that much of the Ediacara Biota was composed of tubular organisms. The question that Droser and Joel addressed was: Is Plexus ricei a tubular organism or is it an organism that wormed its way through the sand, leaving a trail behind it?

"In the Ediacaran we really need to know the difference between the fossils of actual tubular organisms and trace fossils because if the fossil we are looking at is a trace fossil, then that has huge implications for the earliest origins of bilaterian animals -- organisms with bilateral symmetry up and down their midlines and that can move independently of environment forces," Joel said. "Being able to tell the difference between a tubular organism and a trace fossil has implications for the earliest origins of bilaterian organism, which are the only kinds of creatures that could have constructed a tubular trace fossil. Plexus is not a trace fossil. What our research shows is that the structure we see looks very much like a trace fossil, but is in fact a new Ediacaran tubular organism, Plexus ricei."

Read more at Science Daily

Newtown School Board Shuts Down Conspiracy Theorists

Ever since the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, wild conspiracies have circulated claiming that the massacre was a hoax and a fraud. Twenty children and six adults were shot, and grieving families of the dead children have been accused of being paid actors in a scripted drama.

In the weeks and months following the Newtown shooting a loosely formed group of conspiracy theorists called the Sandy Hook Truther movement formed to promote evidence of what it claimed was a cover-up. The specific claims vary from person to person but typically suggest that the school shooting never happened — or if it did happen, it didn’t happen as described in the government’s “official story.”

In a “quest for truth” at a public board of education meeting earlier this week, conspiracy theorists took the opportunity to air their questions and complaints. According to an article in the Connecticut Post, “A dozen or so self-described skeptics of official accounts of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting appeared Tuesday night at the Board of Education meeting, each taking the allotted three minutes to address pointed questions to board members. Wolfgang Halbig, the most prominent member of the group, raised questions about everything from the scale of police response that day to their refusal to accept his expert help in analyzing the event. He suggested that his legitimate efforts to get answers have been thwarted, and accused board members of toeing an official line.”

The Board of Education, to their credit, refused to take the bait and completely ignored the conspiracy theorists. This is often an effective way to deal with conspiracy theories, since any response will be assumed to part of the “cover up” and thus a waste of time. Any contradictory evidence — no matter how conclusive or compelling — can be dismissed by claiming that it’s part of the cover-up. There is ultimately no evidence that would satisfy most conspiracy theorists, and responding to their claims merely gives them publicity and legitimacy.

Despite Halbig’s doubts about the “official story,” there is in fact no such thing as a single, homogenous “official story” about what happened at Sandy Hook; the narrative descriptions of what happened were composed of hundreds of local, state, and national officials, eyewitnesses, victims, members of various law enforcement agencies, hospital workers, dozens of independent journalists from various news outlets and so on. They all had different experiences, and it’s not as if they all came together to agree on one “official” undisputed version of events.

Conspiracy theorists spend weeks combing through news reports and accounts to find real or perceived inconsistencies and cite those as “evidence” of a conspiracy. Though the board wisely chose not to dignify Halbig’s questions with a response, others have assembled detailed, referenced responses answering his questions and debunking his claims.

The simple, undeniable fact is that the children killed in Newtown are gone, and they are not coming back. The Sandy Hook conspiracists would have us believe that the parents and families of the murdered children are part of some sinister scheme or “false flag” event to take away America’s gun rights, and that the “dead” children are really alive, presumably to be kept hidden away somewhere for the rest of their lives, or given false identities, or even killed by the government or abducted by aliens who crashed in Roswell and then escaped from Area 51. In the absence of evidence, one wild theory is as good as the next.

Harassment By Conspiracy Theorists

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, and conspiracy promoters take full advantage of it. They are permitted to spread their claims in blogs, books, magazines, television shows and anywhere else they like, including public meetings. However conspiracy theorists typically do not want merely to have their ideas heard; they want them widely accepted as truth. They feel that they have an inside look at what really happened, and become angry and frustrated when they are unable to provide convincing evidence of their claims.

Similar harassment occurred in the wake of the theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012 by alleged shooter James Holmes. According to an article on MSNBC, “Prosecutors say victims and witnesses in the Colorado theater shootings have been pestered by conspiracy theorists, impersonated in court filings and had their addresses and phone numbers posted online… prosecutors say some victims are concerned for their safety.” One conspiracy theorist was even arrested for stalking and harassment after repeatedly contacting relatives of the victims and telling them that their deaths were hoaxed, and that the coffins of their dead loved ones were buried empty.

Read more at Discovery News