PHOENICIA

Six volunteers spent 105 days in an isolation module as part of an international experiment in preparation for a manned space mission to Mars.

Under constant surveillance, the all-male crew carried out 72 different experiments to gather data in readyness for a mission to Mars.

All the key aspects of a long spaceship flight were simulated – barring of course the effects of weightlessness and solar radiation, which are more easily researched on the international space station.

The participants found the experiments very interesting and commented that they felt it was important to give the volunteers feedback about the progress of the experiments.

Monotony was the main difficulty encountered by the volunteers.

Samples for analysis were delivered to researchers through a hatch in the isolation module, and researchers also monitored medical data, including exhalation bags as part of on-going research to find efficient non-invasive methods of diagnosing diseases at an early stage. This is important for astranauts but can also help people on earth.

Scientists across Europe are calling this mission a success, although the findings have not yet been disclosed. The analysis of the data will primarily be used to prepare the next stage of the Mars-500 experiment, planned to begin in 2010 with another crew of participants.

The experiments during the 105 days were primarily on the medical effects on the men – that is, in the psychological and physiological fields. Stress linked with cardiovascular problems, effects on the immune system. Of course co-operation and co-existence of the people in the team was also studied, along with dietary aspects.

The main goal was to discover the limits of personal resources in a confined space. There were therefore many psychological experiemtns as well as the physiological ones. How are they sleeping? How are they communicating with their fellow crew members?

Keeping the experience as authentic as possible, the videolink connecting the control centre to the isolation module was set with a time lapse of 20 minutes each way to simulate the time it takes for a radio signal to bounce between Earth and Mars.

The crew had to be completely self reliant, maintaining the module and monitoring each other’s health and behaviour.

Sleep deprivation was also studied. Disturbed sleep leads to changes in irritability levels. The more sleep people lose the more irritable they become and the less perceptive to communication.”

Looking back, the crew members said that those three and a half months didn’t really feel that long – they perceived the time spent in confinement as no more than a few weeks.

The next and final phase of research will be five times as long and inevitably more complicated. The research module in Moscow is being prepared to welcome another international crew for a full-scale simulation of a 250-day trip to Mars, plus 20 days on the red planet and another 250 days to get back to Earth.

The first manned interplanetary mission is expected to take place sometime after the year 2030.

source:euronews

Designed for the desert climate, the beehive homes keep the heat out in a few ways. Their thick mud brick walls trap in the cool and keep the sun out as well (beehive homes have very few, if any, windows). The high domes of the beehive houses also collect the hot air, moving it away from the residents sleeping at the bottom of the house.

Inside, its high dome serves to collect the hotter air, and outside to shed rainfall instantly, before the brick can absorb it and crumble. Its thick roof-cum-wall is an excellent low-velocity heat-exchanger, and keeps interior temperatures between 85° and 75° F. while outside noon-to-midnight extremes range from 140° to 60°.

Few villages left in the desert, because now it's hard way of building. Also people live in it have to renew parts of the beehive house after every winter. It's not easy work for sure..

Syrian Department of Antiquities in Tartous (Syrian city in the Coast) unearthed a mass cemetery carved in rocks near al-Basel Hospital.
The cemetery consists of 7 rooms including burial chambers with some bodies inside. There were no findings or any clay or bone fragments in those chambers, said Marwan Hassan, Director of the Department.

A hole discovered in the western wall of the cemetery, was thought to be a passage to a small hall. Another hole, opposite to this one, was found in the eastern wall leading to another hall which includes two rooms and a solo tomb. Three vessels, two small golden pieces and clay lamp were also discovered inside the tomb.

A room was unearthed in the southern wall of the first hall, inside which a highly constructed basalt sarcophagus was found.

This sarcophagus takes a human shape, consisting of a basin, a lid and a protuberant shelf all around the edges of the basin.

A human face was engraved on the sarcophagus lid with a decorated head cover under which curly hair shows up partly. The forehead appears with a sunken line, signaling the old age of the dead person. Under the thin eyebrows, almond eyes and long straight nose reveal themselves clearly. Pruned mustaches and a neatly trimmed and wavy beard surround the mouth, and both ears are distinctly located on both sides of the head. The body status appears undecorated.

The sarcophagus was transported to the National Museum. Archeologists at the directorate are working on identifying the age of the cemetery and studying its contents, including a crumbled skeleton.

A solo tomb carved in lime rocks was uncovered 23 m to the northeast of the cemetery, including three damaged human skulls as a result of pressure and time. Bronze and gold jewelry and clay jars were also found in the tomb.

The excavation team finished its work at the site and documented all stages of work in photos and geometrical designs.

The wearing of headscarves has been banned in all publicly run schools in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. The decision, by the board of Flemish schools, affects about one fifth of all schools in Flanders.

It follows a week of demonstrations outside two schools which banned headscarves earlier this week, arguing that girls were being pressured into wearing headscarves by their families and peers.

The headmistress of one of those schools, Karin Heremans, said the authorities want all pupils to be equal within the school grounds.

“There is a problem when there is pressure on one group because we want to live together in reciprocity and it’s very important for us. Everyone has to feel good in this school, so a social minority here became majority. So it was a problem,” she said.

Next week a court will decide if the decision is up to individual schools or should be taken at school board level which oversees the whole of Flanders.

Pupils have staged protests outside the two schools at the centre of the row and one girl has filed a complaint with the Belgian Council of State to contest the ban.

A biology teacher in Brazil is being sued for asking students to masturbate for a class project.
The teacher asked three teenagers to provide sperm samples (in other words: masturbate) so the class could study sperm under the microscope.

One of the students told his parents about the incident. His shocked parents immediately notified the police.

A spokesman for the police said: "It is a disrespectful and bizarre thing to ask a student, we are all horrified."

The school, located in Campo Grande, Rio de Janeiro, says it's equally appalled by the biology teacher's behaviour.

source: The New York Times

In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I’m a one-trick monogamist.

Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man’s game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.

In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.

Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast, the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.

“We’re so wedded to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said. “But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic situation goes up and down.”

The new analysis, though preliminary, is derived from one of the more comprehensive and painstaking data sets yet gathered of marriage and reproduction patterns in a non-Western culture. The results underscore the importance of avoiding the breezy generalities of what might be called Evolution Lite, an enterprise too often devoted to proclaiming universal truths about deep human nature based on how college students respond to their professors’ questionnaires. Throughout history and cross-culturally, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, “there has been fantastic variability in women’s reproductive strategies.”

Geoffrey F. Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, agreed. “Evolutionary psychology and anthropology really need to take women’s perspective seriously in all its dimensions,” Dr. Miller said. “You can construe sequential relationships as being driven by male choice, in which case you’d call it polygyny, or by female choice, in which case you’d call it polyandry, but the capacity of women across cultures to dissolve relationships that aren’t working has been much underestimated.”