Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon who claims to have visited the afterlife. Dr.
Eben Alexander claims to have visited the afterlife (Twitter) Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.
But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven. "According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent," Alexander writes in the cover story of this week's edition of Newsweek.
So what exactly does heaven look like? "You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. " "You have nothing to fear. " "There is nothing you can do wrong. " Mystery of King Tut's death solved? The mystery of King Tut's death might finally be solved, according to one scientist who argues that the secret to the young pharaoh's demise is hidden in plain sight.
Dr. Hutan Ashrafian, a lecturer and surgeon at the Imperial College London, says the key to the mystery lies in the art from the period, which depicted King Tut with highly feminine features, including enlarged breasts. The enlarged breasts, he argues, are indicative of a condition known as gynecomastia, which, when added to a host of historical and familial evidence, indicates that Tutankhamun might have suffered and eventually died from temporal lobe epilepsy.
Ashrafian says the first clue is in the relatively early deaths of other rulers who were directly related to Tutankhamun. "For all of them to die sequentially at younger ages is a sign of a genetic inheritance of some sort," Ashrafian said, adding "you could argue one of them died in battle, one of them was poisoned but none of them did die in battle. Fukushima 'caused mutant butterflies' Genetic mutations have been found in three generations of butterflies from near Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, scientists said Tuesday, raising fears radiation could affect other species.
Around 12 percent of pale grass blue butterflies that were exposed to nuclear fallout as larvae immediately after the tsunami-sparked disaster had abnormalities, including smaller wings and damaged eyes, researchers said. The insects were mated in a laboratory well outside the fallout zone and 18 percent of their offspring displayed similar problems, said Joji Otaki, associate professor at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, southwestern Japan. That figure rose to 34 percent in the third generation of butterflies, he said, even though one parent from each coupling was from an unaffected population.
The researchers also collected another 240 butterflies in Fukushima in September last year, six months after the disaster. "This is just one study," Noguchi said. Y! Big Story: In search of a simple explanation of Higgs boson, aka the God Particle. Click image to see more photos.
Higgs boson verified at Level 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV????? Yowza. OK, let's try this again: Scientists are now within reach of finding the so-called God particle. About 5,000 researchers divided into two teams--ATLAS and CMS--found a subatomic particle, and it could be the elusive Higgs, the polka-dotted unicorn of the physics world. Here's a "simple" explanation of what has physicists agog the world over: That Video Site.
New material class developed: Pentamode metamaterial. A research team lead by Professor Martin Wegener at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has succeeded in realizing a new material class through the manufacturing of a stable crystalline metafluid, a pentamode metamaterial.
Using new nanostructuring methods, these materials can now be realized for the first time with any conceivable mechanical properties. The researchers will present their results in the cover story of the May issue of Applied Physics Letters. The Rubicon was crossed, so to speak, at the DFG Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) and at the Institute of Applied Physics (AP) in Karlsruhe during the past few months. Eventually, numerous three-dimensional transformation acoustics ideas, for example inaudibility cloaks, acoustic prisms or new loudspeaker concepts, could become reality in the near future.
Astronomy. Tech. Nature.