The Music Tree Rings Produce

We all know that the Lorax speaks for the trees, but what do they sound like when they speak for
themselves?

Rings on a tree can give information about the age of the tree, as well as indicate environmental conditions such as rain levels, disease, and even forest fire. Light colored rings indicate quick growth, while darker rings indicate times when the tree did not grow as quickly. Slices of trees are not uniform, and they all tell a story about the tree’s history.

Bartholomäus Traubeck created equipment that would translate tree rings into music by playing them on a turntable. Rather than use a needle like a record, sensors gather information about the wood’s color and texture and use an algorithm that translates variations into piano notes. The breadth of variation between individual trees results in a individualized tune. The album, appropriately titled “Years,” features spruce, ash, oak, maple, alder, walnut, and beech trees. It is available to download now, though it will be available to purchase on vinyl in August. The end product of these arbor “records” is haunting and beautiful and you need to check it out.

Carine Paynaud

French sculptor Carine Peynaud is inspired and influenced by the human condition and the hidden beauty that lies beneath. This series, titled “Figure d’écorché” shows her using the human body as a canvas for her anatomical drawings. Source

The Ouija board possesses 3 people who are taken to the hospital afterwards.

Alexandra Huerta, her brother Sergio and their cousin Fernando Cuevas had been playing around with a Ouija Board in the Mexican village of San Juan Tlacotenco when all three of them started to exhibit strange behavior. Within minutes of beginning the session, Alexandra was said to have fallen in to a deep trance-like state before growling maniacally like a dog and thrashing around uncontrollably. Sergio and Fernando soon began to experience strange symptoms of their own including vivid hallucinations, blindness and deafness. A local Catholic priest was called in to perform an exorcism but he allegedly refused to do so because none of them were regular churchgoers. Paramedics who eventually attended the scene found themselves having to forcibly restrain Alexandra for her own safety before taking all three of them to hospital. A combination of painkillers and anti-stress medication was said to have been effective at treating their symptoms. "The medical rescue of these three young people was very complicated," said public safety director Victor Demeza. "It appeared as if they were in a trance-like state, apparently after playing with the Ouija board. They spoke of feeling numbness, double vision, blindness, deafness, hallucinations, muscle spasm and difficulty swallowing. source

New Space Telescope in the works!

Known as ATLAST ( Advanced Technology Large-Aperture Space Telescope ), the telescope will be so large that it will be necessary to ferry its components in to space where astronauts will construct it in orbit at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth - four times further away than the Moon. The telescope's primary mission will be to seek out signs of life on other worlds by looking for certain biosignatures (such as oxygen, methane etc. ) in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. "This telescope could see Earth-like planets around stars up to 30 light years away," said astrophysics professor Martin Barstow. "There are tens of thousands of stars within that distance and we estimate that at least a few thousand of those will be similar to the sun. Our guess is that we could find around 60 such planets." The ambitious project will however require backing on a global scale. "NASA will have to take the lead as it is the biggest space agency, but it is already in discussion with the European Space Agency," said Prof Barstow. "We are looking at a launch date around 2030 because that is how long these projects take." Source

End of the world epidemic revealed!

A team of experts investigating the Funerary Complex of Harwa and Akhimenru in what was once the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes came upon the remains of a number of people who had been covered in lime, a substance that was commonly used as a disinfectant during ancient times. The find also lead them to the discovery of three kilns where the lime would have been made and the remnants of a huge bonfire which also contained signs of human remains. These discoveries are believed to date back to what is known as the "Plague of Cyprian", a third century epidemic which brought about widespread death across the Roman Empire with more than 5,000 succumbing to the disease every day in Rome alone at its height. Saint Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage during the plague, described it as an event so devastating that he believed the world was about to come to an end. It would go on to take more than two decades for the epidemic to finally cease.

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