The Secrets of Coral Castle

Image Source: en.wikipedia.org

Coral Castle in Homestead, Florida, is one of the most amazing structures ever built. In terms of accomplishment, it's been compared to Stonehenge, ancient Greek temples, and even the great pyramids of Egypt. It is amazing - some even say miraculous - because it was quarried, fashioned, transported, and constructed by one man: Edward Leedskalnin, a 5-ft. tall, 100-lb. Latvian immigrant.

Many men have single-handedly built their own homes, but Leedskalnin's choice of building materials is what makes his undertaking so incredible. He used huge blocks of coral rock, some weighing as much as 30 tons, and somehow was able to move them and set them in place without assistance or the use of modern machinery. And therein lies the mystery. How did he do it?

It's estimated that 1,000 tons of coral rock were used in construction of the walls and towers, and an additional 100 tons of it were carved into furniture and art objects:

• An obelisk he raised weighs 28 tons.
• The wall surrounding Coral Castle stands 8 ft. tall and consists of large blocks each weighing several tons.
• Large stone crescents are perched atop 20-ft.-high walls.
• A 9-ton swinging gate that moves at the touch of a finger guards the eastern wall.
• The largest rock on the property weighs an estimated 35 tons.
• Some stones are twice the weight of the largest blocks in the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Working alone, Leedskalnin labored for 20 years - from 1920 to 1940 - to build the home he originally called "Rock Gate Park" in Florida City. The story goes that he built it after being jilted by his fiancée, who changed her mind about marrying him because he was too old and too poor. After wandering around the U.S. and Canada for several years, Leedskalnin settled in Florida City for health reasons; he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. He began building his coral home in 1920. Then in 1936, when a planned new subdivision of homes threatened his privacy, Leedskalnin moved his entire home 10 miles to Homestead, where he completed it, and where it still stands as a tourist attraction.

How Leedskalnin managed this feat of engineering has remained a mystery all these years because, incredibly, no one saw him do it. A secretive man, Leedskalnin often worked at night by lantern light. And so there are no credible witnesses to how the small, frail man was able to move the huge blocks of rock. Even when he moved the entire structure to Homestead, neighbors saw the coral blocks being transported on a borrowed truck, but no one seems to know how Leedskalnin got them on and off the vehicle.

Source: http://paranormal.about.com/od/moremadscience/a/coral-castle-secrets.htm

Secret cities of the Indus

A civilization that has disappeared even from legend

Even in ruins, the ancient cities of Indus Valley (now in Pakistan) look better planned than most modern cities in the Indian sub-continent. Indeed, they recall the symmetry of modern American towns, with regular grids of streets, brick buildings and sewers for sanitation.

The archaeologists who uncovered the Indus Valley ruins early in 1900s realized they had stumbled on an original culture, contemporary with ancient Sumer and Egypt (around 2400 BC). But in some ways (such as in its plumbing and town planning) it was more advanced than either. It had its own system of writing - so far undeciphered - and trade links with ancient Mesopotamia, as well as outposts near modern Bombay (now Mumbai), more than 1000 km (600 miles) distant.

Where did the creators of this civilization come from? What language did they speak? Did the same rulers govern all its remarkably similar cities - more than 100 built on the same pattern have been discovered, stretching over an area larger than Egypt or Sumer? And why did the civilization collapse around 1700 BC? These mysteries all remain unsolved.

Town planners

The major cities, which include Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, had citadels with huge walls, with towers at regular intervals, set on mounds about 12 m (40 ft) high. Archaeologists have also found remains of gigantic granaries and of huge public baths.

It had been suggested that the idea of building cities came from Mesopotamia, along the trade routes. Trade links with Sumer became so close that there were official Sumerian translators of the Indus language. But the few surviving examples of Indus writing are too fragmented to give us any real clues as to what that language was like.

Why did this culture collapse so completely? Possibly the River Indus altered its course, condemning the cities to either flodding or desert; possibly the desert was man-made, caused by excessive tree-felling to provide fuel for baking bricks; perhaps epidemics and famines played a part.

Grisly clue

The end, however, may have come more violently. At Mohenjo-Daro, archaeologists found 13 skeletons, some with axe or sword blows to the head. These may have been inflicted by the invading Aryans - ancestors of the modern Hindus - who dominated India after the Indus civilization.

Except in Hindu myths like the Rigveda, which speaks of a dark-skinned, wealthy people overcome by the Aryan invaders, and in the worship of Siva, a Hindu deity who in his aspect as Lord of the Beasts is strikingly like the god of the Indus religion, this short-lived, mysterious culture has vanished almost without trace.

The Enduring Mystery of Light

It goes through walls, but slows to a standstill in ultra-cold gases. It carries electronic information for radios and TVs, but destroys genetic information in cells. It bends around buildings and squeezes through pinholes, but ricochets off tiny electrons.

It's light. And although we know it primarily as the opposite of darkness, most of light is not visible to our eyes. From low energy radio waves to high energy gamma rays, light zips around us, bounces off us, and sometimes goes through us.

Because it is so many things, defining light is a bit of a philosophical quandary. It doesn't help that light continue to surprise us, with novel materials that alter light's speed and trajectory in unexpected ways.

Is it a wave?

What ties together microwaves, X-rays and the colors of the rainbow is that they are all waves—electromagnetic waves to be exact. The substance that sloshes back and forth isn't water or air, but a combination of electric and magnetic fields.

These fluctuating fields exert forces on charged particles—sometimes causing them to bob up and down like buoys in the ocean.

What separates all the various forms of light is wavelength. Our eyes are sensitive to light with wavelengths between 750 nanometers (red) and 380 nanometers (violet), where a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or about the size of a single molecule.

But the visible spectrum—seen through a prism—is only a small chunk of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The wavelength of light ranges from hundreds of miles for long radio waves to one millionth of a nanometer for gamma rays.

The energy of light is inversely proportional to the wavelength, such that gamma rays are a billion billion times more energetic than radio waves.

Or is it a particle?

But waves are not the whole story. Light is composed of particles called photons. This is most obvious with higher energy light, like X-rays and gamma rays, but it is true all the way down to radio waves.

The classic example of particleness is the photoelectric effect, in which light hitting a metal sheet causes electrons to fly out of the surface. Surprisingly, light longer than a certain wavelength cannot liberate electrons, no matter how bright the source is.

A strict wave theory of light cannot explain this wavelength threshold, since many long waves should pack the same total energy as a few short waves.

Albert Einstein deciphered the mystery in 1905 by assuming that particles of light smacked into the electrons, like colliding billiard balls. Only particles from short wavelength light can give a hard enough kick.

Despite this success, the particle theory never replaced the wave theory, since only waves can describe how light interferes with itself when it passes through two slits. We therefore have to live with light being both a particle and a wave—sometimes acting as hard as a rock, sometimes as soft as a ripple.

Physicists rectify light's split personality by thinking in terms of wave packets, which one can imagine as a group of light waves traveling together in a tight, particle-like bundle.

Making a spectacle

Instead of worrying about what light is, it might be better to concentrate on what light does. Light shakes, twists and shoves the charged particles (like electrons) that reside in all materials.

These light actions are wavelength-specific. Or to say it another way, each material responds only to a particular set of wavelengths.

Take an apple, for instance. Radio waves and X-rays go essentially straight through it, whereas visible light is stopped by various apple molecules that either absorb the light as heat or reflect it back out.

If the reflected light enters our eyes, it will stimulate color receptors (cones) that are specifically "tuned" to either long, medium or short wavelengths. The brain compares the different cone responses to determine that the apple reflects "red" light.

Here are some other examples of light's specific activities.

* Radio waves from a local station cause the free electrons in a radio's antenna to oscillate. Electronics tuned to the station's frequency (or wavelength) can decode the oscillating signal into music or words.

* A microwave oven heats food from the inside out because microwaves penetrate the surface to rotate water molecules contained in the food. This molecular shuffling generates heat.

* Standing next to a camp fire, infrared light vibrates molecules in our skin to make us warm. Conversely, we constantly lose heat when these same molecules emit infrared light.

* In sunlight, several visible and ultraviolet wavelengths are missing, or dark. These "shadows" are due to the capture of photons by atoms, like hydrogen and helium, that make up the sun. The captured photon energy is used to boost the atoms' electrons from one energy level to another.

* An X-ray image of a skeleton is due to the fact that X-rays pass through soft tissue but are blocked by dense bone. However, even when just passing through, X-rays and gamma rays ionize molecules along their path, meaning they strip electrons from the molecules. The ionized molecules can directly or indirectly damage DNA in a cell. Some of these genetic alterations may lead to cancer.

All this shows that light wears many different hats in its manipulation of matter. It is perhaps fitting then that light's true identity—wave or particle—is unanswerable.


Stumble It!

One-horned Deer

A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday.

"This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. "The unicorn has always been a mythological animal."

The 1-year-old Roe Deer — nicknamed "Unicorn" — was born in captivity in the research center's park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence, Tozzi said.

He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.
Calling it the first time he has seen such a case, Tozzi said such anomalies among deer may have inspired the myth of the unicorn.

The unicorn, a horse-like creature with magical healing powers, has appeared in legends and stories throughout history, from ancient and medieval texts to the adventures of Harry Potter.
"This shows that even in past times, there could have been animals with this anomaly," he said by telephone. "It's not like they dreamed it up."

Single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of — but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn, experts said.

"Generally, the horn is on one side (of the head) rather than being at the center. This looks like a complex case," said Fulvio Fraticelli, scientific director of Rome's zoo. He said the position of the horn could also be the result of a trauma early in the animal's life.

Other mammals are believed to contribute to the myth of the unicorn, including the narwhal, a whale with a long, spiraling tusk.

The Science of Fairy Tales

Kids of any age love to read fairy tales because the storyline never limits the possibility that anything could happen. Curses, spells, and handsome princes reign in worlds beyond the reader’s imagination.

But are the most magical moments from some of our favorite stories actually possible? Basic physical principles and recent scientific research suggest that what readers might mistake for fantasies and exaggeration could be rooted in reality.

So suspend your imagination for a moment, and look at the following fairy tales as a hard-core scientist might.

Rapunzel

In the Brothers Grimm story of Rapunzel, a witch holds a beautiful young woman captive in a tower. Rapunzel is blessed with a lovely singing voice and long, long blond hair. One day, her voice enchants a prince passing through a nearby forest. They fall in love, and Rapunzel lets down her hair so that the prince may use it to climb the tower to meet her. This chain of events begs readers to ask a question. Can human hair support the weight of another person?

On average one strand of hair can support about three and one-half ounces, or about the weight of two candy bars. Each strand of dark hair is generally thicker, and therefore stronger, than blond hair.

But, alas, Rapunzel must make do with blond locks. Given that blondes generally have about 140,000 hairs on their heads, her hair should easily support the weight of many, many princes. However, there is more to this story.

If Rapunzel simply let down her hair and the prince started climbing immediately, her hair would not break, but it might rip out. Also, the rest of her body might not be able to support the weight. Thankfully, there are strategies that she can use to help reduce the strain on her head and body.

Nathan Harshman, Assistant Professor of Physics at American University in Washington, DC, suggests Rapunzel would be safer and more secure if she tied her hair around something before lowering it. “The whole idea is that you can use the friction of the hair against itself in the knot, and whatever it is tied around will support the weight of the prince.” That is a much better idea than making Rapunzel’s scalp the anchor point.

The Little Mermaid

In the Disney version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Ariel (the mermaid) asks a witch to make her human because she has fallen in love with a human prince. The witch bargains with Ariel and takes her voice in exchange for performing the transformation. For a considerable part of the story Ariel cannot speak, which is a problem because the prince can only recognize her by her incredibly beautiful singing voice. Later, she recovers her voice and wins the love of the prince (sorry to spoil the ending).

In the story, Ariel loses her voice because of a curse. However, a less skilled sorceress could use a different method to silence a singing mermaid. Scientists have figured out a way to bend sound waves around an object and, can even prevent the escape of all sounds created inside a given area (important for keeping a transformed, singing mermaid from being heard).

Recently, Steve Cummer, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University announced that it is theoretically possible to create such a sound shield. Building on research demonstrating how light waves can be bent around an object to make it appear invisible, Cummer and his collaborators used mathematical analysis to show how to do the same thing with sound. They established that it is possible to create a material that bends sound waves around walls, pillars, or any enclosed area, where the sound waves emerge as if nothing had been in their way. It would be like someone in the bedroom being able to hear what someone in the living room said, but as if there were no wall between them.

A side effect of this discovery is that sound waves generated inside the enclosed area would never escape. If the witch had been extremely clever, she could have built this material, and there would have been no need for a curse. Or maybe she did, and a transparent sound shield based on these principles was what enveloped Ariel until her love for the Prince melted it away, finally releasing her melodious voice for the Prince to hear.

1,001 Arabian Nights

One of the most exciting objects found in fairy tales is the flying carpet. In tales from a wide variety of cultures, including 1,001 Arabian Nights, these tangled tapestries take flight to carry people vast distances. Flying carpets are clearly impossible, right?

Three scientists recently published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters showing that there are conditions under which a carpet could fly. They used the basic laws of physics to show that a small, thin carpet could fly if the air were vibrating at the right frequency, much like how a piece of tissue paper floats softly to the ground when it is dropped. Their calculations showed that small waves of air in repeated fast pulses could steer a carpet at a speed of around one foot per second.

Don’t expect to see Aladdin flying by anytime soon, but the scientists write that all of their conditions “are within the realm of possibilities in nature and in technology. Making a heavy carpet fly would, of course, require a much more powerful engine, and our
[calculations] suggest it will remain in the magical, mystical, and virtual realm as it has existed for millennia.”

Perhaps some fairy tales are more grounded in reality than others. Or maybe these precious stories are exactly what we thought they were. An idea is fertilized by the imagination and expanded beyond what seems possible. Or maybe science has come so far over the years that scientists are looking beyond the problems of the physical world and into the imaginations of children for their inspiration.

What could be next? Perhaps a scientific debate over the temperature at which porridge is considered “just right.”



This article was provided by Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

Arthritis and copper bracelets

There are around 200 kinds of arthritis, the two most common being osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. People with osteoarthritis should improve their diet by cutting down on highly refined and processed foods, saturated animal fats, sugar and salt, and by eating more wholegrain cereals and fresh fruit and vegetables. A healthy diet boosts the immune system and provides the sufferer with extra energy to fight the disease.

Many people who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis claim that wearing a copper bracelet reduces their discomfort. However, research into this controversial area has come up with no scientific explanation. It is thought that if wearers believe in the power of such bracelets to help them, then this belief may trigger some form of self-healing. Medical science called this type of self-healing effect generated by our own feelings and thinking as 'placebo'.

Dig Begins at Stonehenge Site

Some of England's most sacred soil was disturbed for the first time in more than four decades as archaeologists worked to solve the enduring riddle of Stonehenge: When and why was the prehistoric monument built?

The excavation project, which started Monday and is set to last until April 11, is designed to unearth materials that can be used to establish a firm date for when the first mysterious set of bluestones was put in place at Stonehenge, one of Britain's best known and least understood landmarks.

The World Heritage site, a favorite with visitors the world over, has become popular with Druids, neo-Pagans and New Agers who attach mystical significance to the strangely shaped circle of stones, but there remains great debate about the actual purpose of the structure.

The dig will be led by Timothy Darvill, a leading Stonehenge scholar from Bournemouth University, and Geoffrey Wainwright, president of the Society of Antiquaries. Both experts have worked to pinpoint the site in the Preseli Mountains in south Wales where the bluestones -- the earliest of the large rocks erected at the site -- came from. They will be able to compare the samples found in Wales to those at Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain.

"The excavation will date the arrival of the bluestones following their 153-mile journey from Preseli to Salisbury Plain and contribute to our definition of the society which undertook such an ambitious project," Wainright said. "We will be able to say not only why, but when the first stone monument was built."

Scientists believe the bluestones were first put in place about 2600 B.C., but they concede the date is only an approximation at best. The original bluestones were removed about 200 years later and scientists hope to find bits of them embedded in the earth.

Darvill said the excavation marks the first opportunity to bring the power of modern scientific archaeology to bear on a problem that has taxed the minds of so many experts since medieval times: Why were the bluestones so important to have warranted bringing them from so far away?

The excavation goal is to find remnants of the original bluestones, or related materials, that can be subjected to modern radiocarbon dating techniques to establish a more precise timeline for the construction of Stonehenge, said Dave Batchelor, an archaeologist with English Heritage, which oversees the Stonehenge site.

"We have to find the material that will give us a good date," he said. "That's where the luck comes in. We could get an absolute blank or we could get something magnificent or we could get something in between."

He said bluestones have an "inky, bluey, black" appearance and come from the Preseli Mountains in South Wales. About 6 feet tall, they are the smaller stones that make up part of the monument, alongside the larger sarsen stones, which are about twice as tall and were added later.

Source : Discovery News

Mysterious monolith - grows and shrinks with the moon

Ranchi, Jharkhand, India - It is a treasure of the bygone era. The capital's heart was named after it. Shady trees stood by it to protect its sheen. Tribals worshipped it, foreigners used to see with astonishment and locals used to measure it on every full moon and no-moon nights.

The thar pakhna (thar: stone, pakhna: living) might have gone into oblivion, but not its characteristic. Considered as a blessing to the tribal people, the living stone, now sandwiched between the hostel of the Government Girls' Polytechnic and its boundary wall, once enjoyed pride of place at Charan Pahan's garden.

Charan, the Munda headman of the locality in 1860, did not know how the stone increased and decreased every fortnight, but took the trouble to get the fact entered in the District Gazetteer, lest people forget it.

Documentary evidences support the fact that the monolith increased by a foot or so on every full-moon night and again shrunk within the next fortnight. A few books and souvenirs published from Ranchi in the late 19th and early 20th century, have mentioned about the monolith and its interesting characteristic.

According to geologist Nitish Priyadarshi, it is a rock with perforations that soak water during high tide. "It is a tidal occurrence. The rock being porous, it absorbs water during the phase of full moon. By the night of full moon it attains its maximum height. As it gradually exudes water during the no-moon phase, the height decreases and on the no-moon night it has the minimum height," explained Priyadarshi.

He, however, pointed out that Ranchi rocks do not have the similar kind of characteristic. "The rock must have been planted at its place years ago (may be thousand years ago). Other rocks in this region are not porous," he added.

Ironically, very few residents of the city now know the monolith, which remained the talk of the town till 1985. The guards of the Government Girls' Polytechnic do not know about it, neither the students putting up at the hostel. Not even the girls know about the uniqueness of the stone whose room is situated just opposite to it on the hostel premises.

"How do you expect young girls to know about the history of this place? No one has made any effort to popularise it," said the tribal gardener, Mahesh Mahato, of the hostel. "I know because we worship it," he added.

Jalendar, the little cook of the hostel, too knows about it, because he heard about the stone's peculiarity from an old guard of Chhotanagpur Girls High School (opposite the polytechnic). "The stone is more than seven feet, my hands do not reach to measure it on new-moon or no-moon nights. I wish I could measure it," said Jalender.

The teachers of the polytechnic feel that it is a real treasure that should have been protected by the Government, but refuse to talk about it, fearing it would draw unwanted visitors to the girls hostel.

"Had it been protected before construction of the hostel and the polytechnic, we would have had nothing to say. But now the institution is functioning and we do not want any kind of disturbances here," said a teacher.

Gosse Bluff - A mysterious crater

While dinosaurs forage in the green heart of Australia, a huge fireball plunges into the plain, shattering the landscape with a force hundreds of thousands of times greater than that of the nuclear bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. Slowly, a huge mushroom cloud of dust and debris rises from the scene, blotting out the sun and darkening the skies of the Southern Hemisphere for months.
Such was the dramatic birth of Gosse Bluff, a massive, rock-rimmed crater gouged out by the impact of a comet 130 million years ago. The comet - a ball of frozen carbon dioxide, ice and dust one-third of a mile (660m) across became a flaming furnace as it hurled to Earth. It penetrated only about half a mile (800m) into the ground, but blew up some 150sq miles (400sq km) of the surrounding land, sending shock waves across the globe and flinging up gigantic rings of earth and stone like ripples in a pond.

Massive thumbprint
The original crater was about 12 miles (120km) in diameter. Today's crater, only 2.5 miles (4km) across, is just its central core. Aeons of erosion have worn away the innumerable tons of debris that once covered it. The bluff, the crater's double-walled rim of hard sandstone crags, now rises to 590ft (180m) above the plain. This sandstone was pushed up by the explosion - layers of of similar rock have been identified over 1¼ miles (2km) beneath the surface, giving some idea of the massive force involved.
Pictured by space satellite, Gosse Bluff looks like a massive thumbprint on the otherwise flat and featureless Missionary Plain 100 miles (160km) west of Alice Springs. The sandstone ring stands out as one of the most impressive impact scars in a landscape littered with meteor craters.
A 19th-century explorer named Edmund Gosse is credited with its discovery in 1873. Long before this, however, the crater was well known to the Aborigines and the area (now a registered sacred site) is rich in campsite remains, hunting hides and rock shelters decorated with the red hand stencils of long-gone inhabitants.
Earnest Giles, who explored the area in 1875, described it in detail. without the benefit of an aerial view, he was unable to appreciate the symmetry of the crater, and did not realise its significance. Unimpressed, he wrote: 'A few cypress pines are rooted in the rocky, shelving sides of the range, which is not of such elevation as it appeared at a distance. The highest points are not more than from 700 to 800 feet.'
Until recently, the origins of Gosse Bluff were a mystery, and rival theories abounded. One held that gases below the surface may have forced their way up, creating a powerful eruption of soil and water known as a 'mud volcano'. Another theory was that a meteorite could have been the cause, and that the lack of any remaining fragments was because of millions of years of weathering. But scientific research in recent times points to a different origin.
As with most similar sites, Gosse Bluff has a pattern of geological fractures radiating out from the centre. As they weather, the rocks fall apart along the fracture lines in cone-shaped patterns called 'shatter cones'. By studying their formations, scientists have verified that the crater is an impact crater, and that the colliding object had a high speed but a relatively low density - suggesting a comet's composition rather than the rock of a meteorite.
Not far from Gosse Bluff are the Henbury Craters, made by 12 fragments of a meteorite that split as it hurled in from space 4700 years ago. The Aboriginal name, sun walk fire devil rock', suggests that someone saw it happen.

Unexplained mystery of twins

Call it a miracle or God's grace or a scientific imbalance, but a village near Allahabad, India has as many as 33 pairs of twins in a population of just 600! One in every 10 births here is of twins, some identical others not. Even two pairs in a population of 600 is normally considered high.

Scientists call it a 'genetic goldmine', residents an 'upar wale ka karam' (God's grace). Name it what you may but Mohammadpur Umri a village (here 'pur as same as 'pore) has left many curious as to what is in this village that even childless couples are able to reproduce once they descend here.

Entering the village, looking around for identical faces, one finds not one but one at every turn. It feels as if you've entered the sets of some Hollywood sci-fi film on cloning. From a five-year old playing out in the bright sun to a 40-year old handling a small grocery shop - almost everyone has a look-alike.

What is it that makes this village generate twins on a regular basis? You ask the elderly there and they just give that knowing smile before on of them says: "Ye yahan ke paani ka asar hai." (this is the result of water here). They also credit the twins to the soil of the village.

Scientists from across the world, refusing to take the villagers' version, have often converged here to burn the midnight oil in their bid to find out the reason behind this unique feature. Some have even collected blood samples, while others carried away with them the soil and water to various laboratories for testing.

A team from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, collected blood samples of a few twins from the village but could not get to a reason for the twin phenomenon happening here. They then left on the assumption that it could be the result of a mixture of environment, food and living conditions. Another factor that they cite is the high degree of consanguineous or intermarriages in the village.

On the other hand, the villagers are yet to decide whether it's God's gift or a curse they're bearing for the last 60 years. Whatever be the case, they enjoy the attention they have generated worldwide. Teams from national and international media keep visiting them, taking their pictures to publish and telecast, bringing to light this unique place in India.

The strange, till now unexplained phenomenon, is more than a century old. Umri's most famous twins are Haseena-Madeena. The reason being that Haseena had migrated to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) at the time of partition of India. Since the sectarial riots happened at that time, she was killed on her way. People till now talk about her. However, no one knows what happened to her twin.

Since her, twins continue to be born in Umri village and the mystery continues to remain so.

Stonehenge : building a massive and mysterious monument

For more than 800 years, prehistoric people in southern Britain had used the exposed site on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire - today known as Stonehenge - as a place for their rituals. Over those eight centuries two circular banks of earth had been built and two incomplete circles of stones had been erected.

But in about 2000 BC, the most challenging task was still ahead. It was then that workers began the job of erecting the largest structures of Stonehenge - the five trilithons forming a horseshoe at the centre of the circle. Each consists of two 50 ton upright stones around 20ft (6m) high with a 7 ton stone resting across the top.

Raising a 7 ton lintel some 20ft (6m) onto its pair of uprights was probably the most dangerous and demanding job in building Stonehenge. Most likely, each lintel was raised on a bed of logs, each end of the lintel being levered up alternately while logs were pushed under it.

The three phases of Stonehenge

Stonehenge was built in three distinct phases over a period of about 1700 years. Professor Gerald Hawkins, formerly of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, has estimated that the entire monument would have taken a total of about 1,500,000 working days to construct, and involved about 1000 workers at a time.

Phase I was begun about 2750 BC, nearly 200 years before the Egyptians started work on the Great Pyramid. It is a circle some 380ft (115m) across consisting of a low outer bank surrounding a ditch, with another bank about 6ft high inside the ditch. Inside the inner bank, the Stone Age Britons dug 56 equally spaced pits, called the Aubrey Holes after the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, who first noticed them as slight dips in the turf. What they were for is not known.

There is an entrance on the north-east side of the circle. Outside it stands a huge block of rough sandstone about 16ft high, known today as the Heel Stone. From the centre of the circle, you can see the sun rise over it on Midsummer's Day.

Phase II of the construction began around 2100 BC, and was carried out by the Beaker Folk, who were so called because of the shape of their pottery. They erected 80 large bluish stones - known today as the bluestones - in two incomplete rings in the centre of the monument. They also built a wide roadway, now called the Avenue, leading north-east towards the River Avon about 2 miles (3 km) away.

The bluestones came from the Preseli Mountains in south-west Wales, 130 miles distant, and were probably brought most of the way by water - loaded on rafts at Milford Haven and shipped up the estuary of the River Severn. By using a network of rivers, only a short overland journey was left, from Amesbury to Stonehenge along the Avenue.

Support for this theory was provided in 1988 when a bluestone block was discovered on the bed of the River Daugleddau at Llangwm in Dyfed. It is of similar size to those used at Stonehenge, and its position suggests that it could have sunk while being floated down the river to the sea.

The pale green, broken Altar Stone, once standing but now lying flat among the central trilithons, came from the shores of Milford Haven, probably also by water.

Phase III, lasting from about 2000 to 1100 BC, was carried out by early Bronze Age people. They removed the bluestone circle and erected a ring of about 30 sandstone uprights (averaging 30 tons in weight), linked by stone lintels. The ring is 16ft high overall, and inside it they put up the five even taller trilithons. Finally they re-erected the bluestones in two groups.

The sandstones, or sarsens, came from the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles (32 kms) away. They must have been manhandled on sledges, with oak logs used as rollers. Professor Hawkins has calculated that 800 men would have been needed to haul one of the giant 50 ton sarsens. Another 200 would have had to clear the route and continually move the heavy oak rollers from the back of the stone to the front.

The stones were shaped by chipping away at the surface with other stones. Larger lumps may have been split off by heating the stones along carefully marked lines, throwing cold water on them and then hitting them.

Christopher Chippindale's Stonehenge Complete gives the derivation of Stonehenge as coming from the Old English words "stān" meaning "stone", and either "hencg" meaning "hinge" (because the stone lintels hinge on the upright stones) or "hen(c)en" meaning "gallows" or "instrument of torture".

Mysterious Whirlwinds

Have flying saucers landed on Earth? Besides the hundreds of reports of weird lights in the night sky and bizarre flying machines seen by day; people convinced that creatures from outer space are constantly visiting our planet have pointed to one incontrovertibly objective piece of evidence for their claim: the curious round, flattened areas found in fields of crops all over the world.

Discoveries of 'crop circles' have often coincided with reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). And the circles usually seem to be made at night. So some believers in UFOs say the circles are the traces of secret landings by alien spacecraft. This is a more plausible explanation than another theory put forward in Britain: that vast herds of hedgehogs had tramped out the circles.

Meteorologists have noted that crop circles bear the classic marks of minor tornadoes: they show clear signs of a circular motion in whatever made them, and a sharp cut-off point between affected and untouched areas. But tornadoes are extremely destructive, and the crops, although flattened, are left undamaged. And tornadoes move along the ground - whatever causes this phenomenon leaves no other trace of its passing.

Nonetheless, scientists from Britain's Tornado and Storm Research Organisation believe that some form of atmospheric vortex or whirlwind, for it seems to consume all its energy as it strikes the ground. They say that it may take decades to work out exactly what makes the circles.