Can Thieves Rob People Using Hypnosis?

A woman in Germany claims she was hypnotized outside of a supermarket, put into a trance, and later woke up at home having been robbed.

A news story explains, “A pair of hypnotists are being hunted by police after a victim claimed she was put in a trance before being robbed. Police in Germany are investigating a spate of crimes involving two Russian women who tell their victims they will read their fortune. In one incident 66 year-old Sarah Alexeyeva told detectives she was spoken to outside an Aldi supermarket in Elmshorn, Schleswig-Holstein. But the next thing she knew she snapped out of a trance and was sat in her armchair at home. All her jewellery and valuables had disappeared, police said.”

Though such claims are unusual, they are not unheard of. According to a 2008 BBC News story, “Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotizing supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers. In every case, the last thing staff reportedly remember is the thief leaning over and saying: ‘Look into my eyes’, before finding the till empty.”

There’s a certain creepy Gothic allure to the idea that a mesmerizing stranger can ask you to stare deeply into his eyes, or ask you to follow a pocketwatch swaying seductively to and fro and listen to him count backwards into a hypnotic trance. But it’s pure fiction.

Misunderstood Hypnosis

Hypnosis is a widely misunderstood psychological phenomenon, due largely to its depictions in popular culture and film. Many people believe that hypnosis is a way to access memories of traumatic events that have somehow been hidden or forgotten. In the book “Human Memory: An Introduction to Research, Data, and Theory,” Dr. Ian Neath of Purdue University notes, “The majority of studies do not find that hypnosis allows recollection of information that could not otherwise be recalled.”

In fact there is a significant danger that any information or memories that may be recalled under hypnosis may be false, created accidentally by the power of suggestion. False memories elicited using hypnosis played a role in the “Satanic Panic” scare of the 1980s and 1990s in which dozens of people were falsely accused of physically and sexually abusing children. Some people even spent years and decades in prison for crimes they did not commit based on little or no evidence other than hypnosis-derived memories.

Another common myth about hypnosis is that it can put someone into a helpless or suggestible trance-like state. To psychologists, however, this idea has no basis. If it were possible to simply stare deeply into a stranger’s eyes to induce a trance-like, compliant state, then it would happen all the time. Anyone with practice or skill in hypnosis could easily turn to a life of crime by walking into a bank, casting a hypnotic stare at a teller, and take whatever they like.

In their book “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology,” psychologists Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and Barry Beyerstein debunk this popular myth: “Recent survey data show that public opinion resonates with media portrayals of hypnosis. Specifically, 77 percent of college students endorsed the statement that ‘hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, quite different from normal waking consciousness.’… But research refutes these widely accepted beliefs. Hypnotized people are by no means mindless automatons.”

Many psychologists believe that hypnosis is not some special altered state of consciousness, but simply a form of deep relaxation. Stage hypnosis — such as the kind seen in Las Vegas comedy acts where “suggestible” audience members get on stage and pretend to be chickens or caught in embarrassing situations — is not true clinical hypnosis but instead a combination of showmanship and participatory comedy.

Read more at Discovery News

Comet Swarm Smash-Up Spied Around Nearby Star

A giant clump of carbon monoxide found around a nearby star hints at collisions between comets and the presence of a massive hidden planet, according to recent observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile.

Located a little over 63 light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor, Beta Pictoris is a young star slightly more massive and about 9 times brighter than the sun. It’s surrounded by a dusty protoplanetary disk that we see edge-on and orbited by at least one known planet — Beta Pictoris b.

Based on the behavior of an enormous ring of dust and carbon monoxide (CO) gas surrounding Beta Pictoris three times as far out as Neptune is from our sun, either multiple small, rocky planets were once present and have recently smashed into each other or, considered more likely, millions of icy comets have been gravitationally gathered into a condensed cluster by a single, massive planet and there they are currently on chaotic collision courses.

The collisions are thought to replenish the carbon monoxide in the ring, which would otherwise be quickly broken down by UV light from the star — within about a century.

“To produce the amount of gas we detect, we’re looking at the equivalent of the total destruction of a large comet every five minutes,” said Aki Roberge, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and coauthor on the paper. ”To get this number of collisions, this would have to be a very tight, massive swarm.”

The swarm could be focused by the gravity of an as-yet undiscovered planet orbiting closer in to Beta Pictoris.

“A planet with roughly Saturn’s mass could do the job,” said Roberge.

If the comet collisions were occurring randomly throughout the entire disk, the gas observed would be evenly distributed and not in specific dense regions.

Whether there are multiple clumps of gas around Beta Pictoris or just one is still unknown — because we see the entire system edge-on it’s difficult to determine. The motion of the densest, brightest clump appears to indicate two, though.

Read more at Discovery News

Earth's mantle plasticity explained: Missing mechanism for deforming olivine-rich rocks

Earth's mantle is a solid layer that undergoes slow, continuous convective motion. But how do these rocks deform, thus making such motion possible, given that minerals such as olivine (the main constituent of the upper mantle) do not exhibit enough defects in their crystal lattice to explain the deformations observed in nature? A team led by the Unité Matériaux et Transformations (CNRS/Université Lille 1/Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Lille) has provided an unexpected answer to this question. It involves little known and hitherto neglected crystal defects, known as 'disclinations', which are located at the boundaries between the mineral grains that make up rocks. Focusing on olivine, the researchers have for the first time managed to observe such defects and model the behavior of grain boundaries when subjected to a mechanical stress.

The findings, which have just been published in Nature, go well beyond the scope of the geosciences: they provide a new, extremely powerful tool for the study of the dynamics of solids and for the materials sciences in general.

Earth continuously releases its heat via convective motion in Earth's mantle, which underlies the crust. Understanding this convection is therefore fundamental to the study of plate tectonics. The mantle is made up of solid rocks. In order for convective motion to occur, it must be possible for the crystal lattice of these rocks to deform. Until now, this was a paradox that science was unable to fully resolve. While defects in the crystal lattice, called dislocations, provide a very good explanation of the plasticity of metals, they are insufficient to explain the deformations undergone by certain mantle rocks.

The researchers suspected that the solution was to be found at the boundaries between the mineral grains that make up rocks. However, they lacked the conceptual tools needed to describe and model the role played by these boundaries in the plasticity of rocks. Researchers at the Unité Matériaux et Transformations (CNRS/Université Lille 1/Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Lille) in collaboration with researchers at the Laboratoire Géosciences Montpellier (CNRS/Université Montpellier 2) and the Laboratoire d'Etude des Microstructures et de Mécanique des Matériaux (CNRS/Université de Lorraine/Arts et Métiers ParisTech/Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Metz) have now explained this role. They have shown that the crystal lattice of the grain boundaries exhibits highly specific defects known as 'disclinations', which had hitherto been neglected. The researchers succeeded in observing them for the first time in samples of olivine (which makes up as much as 60% of the upper mantle) by using an electron microscope and specific image processing. They even went further: based on a mathematical model, they showed that these disclinations provided an explanation for the plasticity of olivine. When mechanical stress is applied, the disclinations enable the grain boundaries to move, thus allowing olivine to deform in any direction. Flow in the mantle is thus no longer incompatible with its rigidity.

Read more at Science Daily

There's No Planet X

There's no evidence for the existence of Planet X, despite a NASA space telescope’s best efforts to track it down.

The hypothetical world that may or may not be orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto has inspired many a doomsday theory. In the run-up to the much anticipated “Mayan Doomsday” of Dec. 21, 2012, the marauding Planet X was scheduled to make a inner-solar system dash, sparking gravitational mayhem, triggering civilization-ending solar flares. Some doomsayers held onto the crackpot notion that Planet X could be the fictional planet “Nibiru” that is inhabited by the Annunaki, an alien race hellbent on re-claiming Earth as their own.

15 months later, we all know how that alien invasion went — apparently we won.

All this doomsday nonsense to one side, the hunt for “Planet X” actually has roots in real science. In the mid- to late-19th Century, astronomers were tracking the gravitational perturbations of the gas giant planets in an effort to track down an undiscovered world in the outermost reaches of the solar system — this hypothetical massive planet was dubbed “Planet X.” However, this fascinating trail of discovery ended at the discovery of tiny Pluto in 1930. Lacking the gravitational oomph to explain the gravitational perturbations, it turned out that Pluto wasn’t the Planet X astronomers thought it would be. After the realization that the gravitational perturbations observed were more likely observational error, Planet X became a story of legend.

The idea that the sun may have a stellar partner has also been investigated — perhaps there’s a brown dwarf (a failed star) going unnoticed out there. Nicknamed “Nemesis,” this binary partner could be evading detection.

A few oddities in the outer solar system have given astronomers pause to think that something massive might be lurking out there, however, whether it be a massive planet or sub-standard star. One strong piece of evidence laid in the discovery of the “Kuiper Cliff,” a sudden drop-off of Kuiper Belt objects in the region just beyond Pluto. Could the Cliff be caused by a previously overlooked world? Also, geological record has suggested there’s a regularity to mass extinctions on Earth linked to comet impacts — could a distant orbiting body be perturbing comets, sending them our way on a cyclical basis?

“The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star,” said Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, University Park, Pa.

Luhman and his team have analyzed data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope that carried out a detailed infrared survey of the entire sky from 2010 to 2011. If something big is lurking out there, WISE would easily have spotted it. Alas, WISE has turned up no Planet X candidate. Previous observations by WISE have also ruled out the Planet X-comet perturbation theory.

According to a NASA news release, “no object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (AU), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 AU. One astronomical unit equals 93 million miles. Earth is 1 AU, and Pluto about 40 AU, from the sun.”

However, the modern search for a Planet X was never WISE’s prime mission. In a second study, the discovery of 3,525 stars and brown dwarfs within 500 light-years of the sun are detailed. In cosmic distances, these objects are right on our galactic doorstep. Both studies have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“Neighboring star systems that have been hiding in plain sight just jump out in the WISE data,” said WISE principal investigator Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Read more at Discovery News

Infrared Stellar Mystery Solved With Magnetic Fuzz

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has helped solve an infrared mystery surrounding baby star systems that has puzzled astronomers since the 1980s.

A star is born from the gravitational collapse of clouds of dust and gas. When the compressed star-forming cloud reaches a certain density, fusion reactions are triggered in the core — a young star is born. However, during this collapse, there is a natural rotation in the cloud, a rotation that is preserved by the star as it reaches maturity. Any leftovers from the stellar formation accumulates around the new star forming a spinning, flat protoplanetary disk that creates rocky bodies like asteroids and eventually planets.

During the 1980s, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) mission surveyed young star systems measuring the infrared light they emitted. The protoplanetary disk of gas and dust generates a strong infrared signal — the young star heats up the disk, which radiates in infrared wavelengths.

However, even during those early observations, astronomers noticed a discrepancy; the young star systems were generating too much infrared radiation.

Over the years, further infrared observations and more refined models have suggested that the simple “flat” structure of protoplanetary disks may need to be revisited. Revised theoretical models included a modification of the ‘classic’ protoplanetary disk, adding a halo of dusty material encapsulating the young, hot star. By doing this, more dust is heated than the disk scenario and could perhaps explain the excess in infrared radiation.

However, with the help of Spitzer and new 3-D models, astronomers think they have a more refined answer.

As the star-forming cloud collapses, the new star not only retains the angular momentum of the spinning cloud, it also collapses any magnetic fields contained within it. The magnetic field will thread through the protoplanetary disk creating huge loops, trapping gas, dust and plasma, enhancing the disk’s atmosphere. These huge arcs — like the bright coronal loops that are filled with hot plasma reaching high above the sun’s photosphere — could be what is responsible for the excess; starlight is blocked by the huge arcs, which are then heated to generate more infrared radiation.

“If you could somehow stand on one of these planet-forming disks and look at the star in the center through the disk atmosphere, you would see what looks like a sunset,” said Neal Turner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The disk, in this case, is not smooth or flat — the magnetic fields crate a fuzziness, forcing the starlight to heat more dust.

Read more at Discovery News

The 28-Foot Sea Monster That Can Survive Being Cut in Half

In 1973, American soldiers on the Mekong River in Laos killed and hauled ashore a massive 24-foot ribbon of a fish. It was the “Queen of the Naga,” claimed a postcard still widely circulated in Southeast Asia with the above photo, a mythical serpent thought to patrol these waters and that apparently enjoys the embrace of enlisted men.

In reality, though, the soldier had not caught a mythical beast. They weren’t even in Laos and it wasn’t even 1973. That picture with over a dozen men straining to lift the creature, one soldier so exhausted, it seems, that he had to remove his shirt and pants, was taken in 1996 near San Diego. What the men had in fact found on their early-morning jog was a stranded giant oarfish, aka “the king of the herrings,” from the Scandinavian folklore that claimed schools of the little fish dotingly followed their gargantuan leader about.

The creature’s proclivity for such strandings, and for surfacing on the open seas when sick or injured, has for thousands of years served as the likely inspiration for sea serpent legends the world over (Japanese lore says their strandings presage earthquakes and tsunamis — they don’t). Even with such history, we’re still struggling to understand this bizarre giant, which can grow to 28 feet long and, like a lizard jettisoning its tail, self-amputate up to 75 percent of its body, perhaps in anticipation of bikini season.

This could be the ocean’s most enigmatic and widely mythologized critter. One of the few people to observe a live specimen in its natural habitat, not simply stranded on a shoreline, is marine biologist Mark Benfield, who in 2013 published a paper detailing five sightings from a remotely operated underwater vehicle.

These are the first observations of healthy oarfish from an ROV. The remarkable footage, in convenient GIF format at right, captures a fish that glows almost as if lit by LEDs, thanks to a layer of guanine molecules, whose shine helps so many fish in the sea confuse and evade predators. With the oarfish, this shimmering compound will actually rub off on your hands when handling the creature, as if it’s wearing body glitter, or whatever the kids are doing to be sparkly these days.

Notice the oarfish’s famous red fins sprouting from the top of its head, which likely aid in species recognition, according to ichthyologist Tyson R. Roberts, who wrote an epic 266-page paper on the creature. (The lasers you see here and in other ROV videos, by the way, are called scalers — they allow scientists to take accurate length measurements.) The fish hovers vertically, hypnotically undulating its dorsal fin up and down, then retreats by switching to horizontal swimming, waving its whole body back and forth like an eel.


So if it can move like a typical fish, why bother going vertical? “We know that they feed on krill, the euphausiids, and if you’re looking for euphausiids and you’re in the ocean, then looking straight up will allow you to silhouette them against light from the surface,” said Benfield. “So that’s probably why they orient vertically. It also means that when a predator is looking downwards towards you, you’re presenting the minimal cross section to that animal.”

While the oarfish has typically been described as a deep-sea creature, Benfield suspects that it may not necessarily be sequestered to such a zone. While the specimen he filmed was 1,500 feet deep, that was during the day. That’s important because many sea creatures are vertical migrators — hanging out in the darkness of the depths by day, then moving toward the surface at night. Indeed, the oarfish’s favorite food, krill, embark on such endeavors, so the beast could be pursuing them.

You may notice that the fish Benfield filmed looks rather … abbreviated compared to the oarfish held by the soldiers. It’s a younger specimen, sure, but its proportions are definitely awry. And it could well be that the creature had at some point gone and popped its own tail right off.


Such self-mutilation, more formally known as autotomy, meaning “self-cutting,” is perhaps most famously demonstrated by lizards, which shed their tails when grasped. Not only does auto-amputation free the creature from its predator, but the wiggling tail left behind serves as a distraction. It’s a brilliant adaptation to escape predation and to terrify 8-year-old me, who didn’t mean to snap that lizard in half, honest.

Anyway, anatomically, the oarfish consists of a head and an abdomen, where all the guts are stored, followed by an enormous tail. At nearly 30 feet, the oarfish can have 416 dorsal fin rays, but one specimen in the Australian Museum has only 95 — coming up more than 300 short, according to Roberts. But the end of the thing is a “healed stump with the typical shape of the terminus,” making it unlikely that it was simply the victim of a shark attack.

This particular oarfish, says Roberts, had willingly amputated damn near the entirety of its body. He further writes that oarfish have few if any predators, noting that dead or dying specimens do not attract sharks and that no oarfish have been found in shark stomach contents, perhaps ruling out amputation by predator.

(Now’s as good a time as any to mention that the oarfish’s gelatinous, flabby meat is apparently pretty awful. Roberts cites an account from 1798 that claimed that not even “dogs would not eat the flesh either raw or boiled,” confirming that science in the 18th century consisted at least in part of cooking rarely seen species and feeding them to your pets. Even seagulls, which would probably eat your suntan lotion given the opportunity, are said to avoid oarfish corpses.)

Read more at Wired Science

Nutty Bible Quotes

Nutty bible quotes is a project started by the Swedish magician, Jakob Ståhle, who is a former christian believer. He started "Tokiga bibelord" (Nutty bible quotes) a few years ago on the web and is now making a book with the same quotes from the bible. To fund his project he needs your help. He needs $9000 to be able to pay the illustrator and the printing of the book. You don't have to contribute with much. Every little dollar counts but please hurry. There's not much time left.

Please go to Nutty Bible Quotes on Indiegogo and contribute with a few dollars so he can make this project a reality. I'll bet that you feel good in the process.

Nutty Bible Quotes on Indiegogo

New Dino Ranks as Europe's Largest-Ever Predator

A new dinosaur from Portugal is Europe’s largest-ever terrestrial predator and was the biggest carnivorous dinosaur of the Jurassic Period, according to paleontologists who studied its remains.

The dinosaur, named Torvosaurus gurneyi, measured close to 33 feet long and weighed over 2,200 pounds, according to a paper in the latest PLoS ONE. The predator was at the top of Europe’s terrestrial food chain roughly 150 million years ago.

“The fauna of what is now Portugal was extremely diverse in the Late Jurassic,” paleontologist Octavio Mateus of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and co-author of the study, said in a press release. “This new species of carnivorous dinosaur is adding a little more (to the) diversity of dinosaurs of Portugal.

He added that the dinosaur lived at a time “when the Atlantic was well formed and Europe was an archipelago.”

Fossils for the dinosaur were found north of what is now Lisbon. The upper jaw retains eleven of the dinosaur’s teeth, each of which measures about 4 inches long.

The new dinosaur is the second known kind of Torvosaurus and is the European equivalent of Torvosaurus tanneri from North America. Both species were discovered in rocks of the same geological age and lived in similar environments dominated by dinosaurs. Both might have been covered with proto-feathers, and both belonged to a two-legged dino group that gave rise to birds.

The Portuguese dinosaur was a distant cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex[/i, and had more teeth than T. tanneri. T. rex still retains its “King of the Dinosaur Predators” title, though, as it was larger than both of the Torvosaurus beasts. (The most complete skeleton for a T. rex suggests it grew to about 40 feet long.)

Paleontologist and co-author Christophe Hendrickx, also of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, said, of the new Portuguese dino, “This is not the largest predatory dinosaur we know. Tyrannosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, and Giganotosaurus from the Cretaceous were bigger animals.”

Read more at Discovery News

'Rocket Cat' Warfare Found in 16th-Century Manual

Color illustrations of rocket-propelled cats and birds have recently been found in a 16th century war manual, according to a University of Pennsylvania researcher.

Written by artillery master Franz Helm of Cologne, who likely fought against the Turks during the mid-16th century, the manual on artillery and siege warfare dates to about 1530.

Among fanciful illustrations, the text in German explains the shocking project to put timed explosives onto birds and cats in order to “set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise.”

Called “Buch von den probierten Künsten” (Book of the tested arts) Helm’s treatise circulated widely in manuscript but was not published until 1625. It was rediscovered by Mitch Fraas, a historian and digital humanities expert at the Penn library.

Fraas began researching the war treatise after finding its unusual and disturbing illustrations on the book blog BibliOdyssey.

Among various illustrations of explosive devices, one image appeared particularly odd. ”It showed a cat and a bird propelled by rockets towards a castle,” Fraas said.

Fraas was able to track the images to Helm’s manual, whose print edition is kept in the Penn collection.

According to Fraas’s translation, in the treatise Helm explained how the poor animals could be used as explosives.

“On cats the text paints a grisly picture of attaching lit sacks of incendiaries onto the animals to have them return to their homes and set fire to them,” Fraas said.

Whether the pyrotechnic warfare technique was ever actually employed by Helm, we may never know.

“But strangely enough the idea of using cats and birds in just this way appears in historical texts from many disparate regions of the world,” Fraas said.

Read more at Discovery News

Impact Crater Origin of Mars Meteorites Discovered

Out of the thousands of craters scarring the face of Mars, one has emerged as the likely source of most of the Martian meteorites that have been recovered on Earth, a new study shows.

Researchers pinpoint Mojave Crater, a 34 mile (55 kilometer) wide basin on the planet’s equator, as the origin of the so-called “shergottites” meteorites, a family that includes about 75 percent of the roughly 150 known Martian meteorites.

The crater is located slightly north and east of Meridian Planum, where NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity landed in January 2004.

Knowing where the meteorites came from would help scientists piecing together the history and evolution of Mars, the planet most like Earth in the solar system.

With clear evidence of past surface water, Mars remains a prime candidate in the search for life beyond Earth.

Researchers homed in on Mojave Crater as the source of the shergottites for several reasons. First, its large size means it was created by an impact powerful enough to launch debris into space. Based on the amount of cosmic ray exposure the meteorites experience in space, scientists estimate the rocks spent 5 million years in interplanetary space before reaching Earth.

The shergottites that have cosmic ray exposures of only about 1 million years broke apart during transit, exposing fresh surfaces and new interiors to radiation, planetary scientist Stephanie Werner, with the University of Oslo in Norway, theorizes in a paper published in this week’s Science.

Second, Mojave Crater is relatively young, formed from an impact that took place less than 5 million years ago on terrain that is roughly 4.3 billion years old. That's the same age, the researchers say, as when the shergottites originally crystallized.

The third and final piece of evidence comes from a chemical analysis of the crater made from data collected by instruments aboard Europe’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellites. Scientists found telltale chemical fingerprints of pyroxene and olivine in and around the crater, two minerals commonly present in the Martian meteorites.

“Only Mojave Crater combines the appropriate site mineralogy, size, and the young crater-formation age of less than 5 million years,” Werner wrote in an email to Discovery News.

“Additionally, the shergottite meteorites are igneous rocks which have formed at the depth of up to a few kilometers, thus most volcanic provinces can be excluded,” Werner added.

Not everyone agrees with the scientists’ conclusions.

Read more at Discovery News