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Tiny turtle causes taxiing plane to return to gate

A caged, 2-inch turtle traveling with a 10-year-old girl caused a crew to turn around a taxiing plane, take the girl and her sisters off the flight and tell them they couldn't bring their pet along.

The sisters threw the animal and cage in the trash and returned to their seats crying Tuesday after AirTran Airways employees on the jetway said they couldn't care for the turtle while their father drove to retrieve it. Two days later, however, Carley Helm was reunited with Neytiri even though at first the family thought the pet was emptied with the trash.

Carley was heading home to Milwaukee after visiting her father in Atlanta with sisters Annie, 13, and Rebecca, 22, when the flap unfolded.

Rebecca said the three were led onto the jetway and told they'd have to get rid of the baby red ear slider -- named Neytiri after the princess in the movie "Avatar" -- if they wanted to reboard.

"I asked, 'What do you mean get rid of it?' and they said throw it away," she said. "I was very sad, and I felt bad for my littlest sister because it was her first pet and she was planning to take care of it herself."

While the sisters say they were told to put the animal in the trash, AirTran says they chose that themselves, despite an offer to fly later at no extra charge.

AirTran company policy bars animals other than cats, dogs and household birds in the cabin, said spokesman Christopher White. White cited a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that says the reptiles have been known to carry salmonella bacteria.

The sisters say they made it past security screeners and an AirTran gate agent before boarding. One flight attendant told them to stow the cage under their seat, they say.

But with the flight rolling toward its takeoff, an attendant told them the turtle wasn't allowed in the cabin.

Rebecca Helm called their father, and he began driving back to the airport. She asked an AirTran employee to make arrangements with her father to look after the pet until he could get there, but the employee refused.

"I basically had to make a really fast decision because the whole plane was being delayed," Rebecca Helm said. The bin wasn't very full and she thought the turtle could be found easily once her dad arrived, she said.

Rebecca twice declined the offer to take a later flight, White said.

"We don't have the personnel or the facilities to care for people's pets," White said.

Rebecca asked if throwing the pet away would allow for them to get back on the flight, White said. The gate agent did not tell the sisters what to do but said they could not get on the plane with the turtle, White said.

"At no time did any AirTran Airways crew member order or suggest that they put the turtle in the trash," he said.

Half an hour later, the sisters' father called, saying he wanted to come look through the trash, White said. The gate agent looked, couldn't find the turtle and assumed it had been emptied, he said.

The airline, a unit of AirTran Holdings Inc. discovered Wednesday that the ramp supervisor had rescued the turtle from the trash "out of his own compassion" and given it to another crew member, who took it home for her 5-year-old son, White said.

AirTran told that crew member the original owners wanted it back, and the airline arranged for the turtle to fly as cargo to Milwaukee on Thursday, White said.

The sisters' mother reported what happened to animal rights group PETA, which sent a letter to AirTran demanding an investigation and disciplinary action.

For their part, Rebecca Helm says her sisters "are very happy to have the turtle back."

source

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Shangri-La, China














Originally called Zhongdian, Shangri-La was renamed in 2001 in a effort to boost tourism. A gateway for travelers into Tibet, the cobblestone-lined old town offers a charming look into local life, which is as close as you can get to experiencing Tibet without actually being there.

A mere four-hour drive from Lijiang and six from Dali, Shangri-La is an excellent hub, conveniently located near attractions like the Songzanlin Monastery, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Pudacuo National Park, Napa Lake, Xiagei Hot Springs and Haba Village.

Despite the rustic, mountain-town atmosphere, Shangri-La has a number of cafes, bars and hotels that cater to foreign visitors, offering mixtures of local and Western food and simple or extravagant amenities.

  • History

Archaeological evidence dates human existence in this area back to the Western Zhou Dynasty (1050 - 771 BC). For hundreds of years the area was home to several tribes. During the Han Dynasty (206BC - 220AD) Shangri-La finally made contact with Central China. Today, the town is more Tibetan than Han Chinese with Tibetan architecture, customs and most of the 130,000 population who celebrate New Year according to the Tibetan calendar. As tourism continues to increase, Shangri-La will continue to develop at a rapid rate.

  • Climate

Shangri-La is about 3,300 meters above the sea level. The weather has a tendency to be humid with temperatures varying both at night and during the four seasons. Winters are cold with lots of snow and summers are the rainy season. The best seasons to go are spring and autumn, specifically May to July and September to October. Although visits during Spring Festival are not recommend as temperatures are generally quite low and indoor heating is still somewhat hard to find in Shangri-La.

Entertainment

Shangri-La has a pretty low-key scene. The area is famous for its natural beauty and outdoor attractions rather than a hopping nightlife. However, there are some worthwhile festivals in spring, a few nice pubs and a dance hall where you can check out some Tibetan cultural dance.

  • Bars & Clubs

Try Shangri-La wine. The bottle has an image of a church on the label and costs 30 RMB. Jovial French missionaries taught the Tibetans many things, one of which was wine making. It seems the religious education didn't stick over the years, but the secular one has paid off with bottles of wine that are actually palatable. Unfortunately, the French failed in teaching cheese and baguette making, but no one can fault them for choosing their battles. If you fancy a drink, the foreign-owned Cow Pub in the old town is the most atmospheric option set in an old Tibetan house. The Raven is cheaper and also foreign-owned but has less atmosphere. The cafes and pubs are a place to pick up information about what is happening in the area, most have notice boards and function as informal travel bureaus. As of yet, there are no clubs in town.

  • Performing Arts

Beside the folk song and dance performed by Diqingzhou Song and Dance Ensemble, the Black-necked Crane Dance Hall is an interesting place to check out. Exhibiting the culture and customs of the Tibetan nationality, the dance hall holds many sing-a-long events and events for different ethnic groups. It also offers laser films, karaoke and a skating rink with entrance fees ranging from RMB 30 to 50.

  • Festivals & Events

The Tibetan Horse Racing Festival (May 5th by the Chinese lunar calendar) is held in the nearby pastureland at an altitude is 3288 meters above sea level. During the festival, people go out with other family members, set up tents at the foot of mountain and have picnics. At the beginning of the festival, people will come to the broad grassland to see a parade and performance by the riders from each region. There are various competitions, ie. for speed, agility, jumping, capturing the flags, etc.

Xianzi Festival (May 7th to 9th by the Chinese lunar calendar) take place when the surrounding towns and villages send folk art and literature teams to participate in an art and literature performance and a costume show in Deqin Town. The programs include such activities as Xianzi, Reba and Deqin folk dances, songs of the pledge and general folk customs and national culture.

Dunbar Festival (July 15th by the Chinese lunar year) is defined by everyone dressing in their best clothes to worship the mountain god and chant Yumani Scripture to get rid of bad luck.

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The Baigong Pipes

Do modern metal pipes buried in ancient Chinese stone prove that aliens must have visited?

Should you happen to visit Tibet anytime soon, be sure to stop by the city of Delingha. It's a town of most extraordinary beauty, nestled on the edge of the Qaidam Basin below a range of Himalayan hills. There you'll find the local residents proudly displaying their most famous distinction. For a few yuan you can probably get someone to take you to see it. Only a short journey outside of town is said to be a cave, and in this cave are a series of ancient metal pipes. These pipes predate all known history, and are embedded into the rock itself. They are said to lead through the very mountain, and connect to a nearby salt lake. The explanation? Ruins of a construction project 150,000 years ago, by alien visitors.

The Baigong Pipes are an example of what paranormal enthusiasts refer to as "out of place artifacts", modern objects discovered in ancient surroundings. The Baigong Pipes are described as a sophisticated system of metal pipes, buried in geology in such a way that precludes the possibility of having been installed in modern times. They are located on Mt. Baigong in the Qinghai province of China, about 40 kilometers southwest of Delingha. Most accounts describe a pyramid-shaped outcropping on the mountain, and the cave containing the pipes is on this pyramid. 80 meters from the mouth of this cave is a salt lake (the twin of an adjacent freshwater lake), and more pipes can be found poking up along the shore. Most of the information you can find online about the Baigong Pipes appears to be originally sourced from a 2002 article from the Xinhua News Agency, talking about preparations by a team of scientists about to embark to this remote area to study the pipes. "Nature is harsh here," said one. "There are no residents let alone modern industry in the area, only a few migrant herdsmen to the north of the mountain."

The two lakes are broad, shallow sinks at the low point of the vast Qaidam Basin. Searching for Mt. Baigong is likely to be fruitless: First, the area is largely flat and the nearest mountains are 20 or 30 kilometers away; second, baigong is a local word for hill and could mean anything in this context. The southernmost of the two lakes, Toson Hu or Lake Toson, has some low bluffs here and there along its southern and western sides (Google Maps link), and it is in one of these bluffs (about 50 or 60 meters in height) that author Bai Yu once happened to find what he described as a small cave, according to his book Into the Qaidam.

Bai was traveling the area in 1996, and described a lifeless lake surrounded by cone-shaped hills. The cave appeared to have been artificially dug, and was triangular, about six meters deep. Nearby were two similar caves, but they had collapsed and could not be entered. But what struck Bai was the array of manufactured metal pipes protruding up through the floor of the cave and embedded within its walls, one 40 cm wide. Following their path outside, Bai discovered more pipes protruding from the surface of the conical hill, and even more of them 80 meters away from the cave along the shore of the lake. Excited, he removed a sample and sent it to the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry. The result was 92% common minerals and metals, and 8% of unknown composition.

Bai proceeded about 70 kilometers to the Delhi branch of China's Purple Mountain Observatory, a high vantage point from where he knew he could get a birds-eye view of the whole region. He saw great expanses of flat, open terrain, and putting two and two together, he concluded that this would make for a fine alien landing site. Unknown minerals and plentiful landing space meant that the Baigong Pipes had to be of alien origin.

Scientists from the China Seismological Bureau visited the lake in 2001 to examine the pipes. Samples brought back to the Beijing Institute of Geology were examined by thermoluminescence dating, a technique that can determine how long it's been since a crystalline mineral was either heated or exposed to sunlight. The result came back that if these were indeed iron pipes that had been smelted, they were made 140-150,000 years ago. Human history in the region only goes back some 30,000 years, and so the alien theory seemed to have been confirmed. The following year the Xinhua news story was published, and the Baigong Pipes entered pop culture as, supposedly, genuine, tangible evidence of alien visitation.

If you visit the area today, you'll find a locally-built monument to the aliens off the main highway, replete with a mockup metallic satellite dish. Internet forums buzz with the absence of followup articles by Xinhua; the natural conclusion is that it turned out the alien explanation was the true one and the Chinese government is suppressing any further reporting. Cracked.com touts the Baigong Pipes as one of Six Insane Discoveries that Science Can't Explain.

And although that's where most reporting of the Baigong Pipes stops, it's also where responsible inquiry should begin. When you settle on a paranormal explanation, it means you've decided there is no natural explanation. In fact, when you don't yet know the explanation, you don't yet know the explanation; so you can't reasonably decide that the time is right to stop investigating. But so many do.

Skeptical hypotheses have already been put forward, seeking a natural explanation for the Baigong Pipes that doesn't require the introduction of a wild assumption like alien visitation. The first thing we turn to are geological processes that might explain them. The Chinese have put forth several such hypotheses, including one involving the seepage of iron-rich magma into existing fissures in the rock.

A 2003 article in Xinmin Weekly described how this might work. Fractures caused by the uplift of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau could have left the ground riddled with such fissures, into which the highly pressurized magma driving the uplift would have been forced. Assuming this magma was of the right composition that, when combined with the chemical effects of subsequent geological processes, we might very likely expect to see such rusty iron structures in the local rock. But evidence of this has never surfaced, and the Chinese dismissed this theory. They also noted that the Qaidam oil field would not be able to exist if there were active volcanism in the area as recently as 150,000 years ago.

It was their next theory that ultimately led to a satisfactory explanation, and this theory involved the same hypothesized fissures in the sandstone. But, instead of being filled with iron-rich magma, the fissures could have been washed full of iron-rich sediment during floods. Combined with water and the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas, the sediment could have eventually hardened into the rusty metallic pipelike structures of iron pyrite found today. This theory was not fantastic, in part because there was no logical reason why the sandstone might happen to be laced with pipe shaped fissures. But the idea of flooding did make sense, given the geological history of the Qaidam Basin.

Three years before Bai Yu took his first peek into the cave at Lake Toson, researchers Mossa and Schumacher wrote in the Journal of Sedimentary Research about fossil tree casts in Louisiana. They found cylindrical structures in the soil, thermoluminescence dated from 75-95,000 years ago. The chemical composition of the cylinders varied depending on where and when they formed and in what type of soil. The authors found that these were the fossilized casts of tree roots, formed by pedogenesis (the process by which soil is created) and diagenesis (the lithification of soil into rock through compaction and cementation). The result of this process was to create metallic pipelike structures, which by comparing the descriptions offered by researchers, appear to be a perfect match for the Baigong Pipes.

The Chinese scientists eventually did come to the same conclusion, according to the Xinmin Weekly article. They used atomic emission spectroscopy to conduct a detailed chemical analysis of the rusty pipe fragments, and found them to contain organic plant matter. Under the microscope they found tree rings, consistently throughout the samples. Once they established that the Baigong Pipes were simply fossilized tree casts, they set about to discover how they got there.

The Qaidam basin was once a vast lake, which has disappeared as the Qinghai-Tibet plateau uplifted the basin to its current elevation of about 2800 meters. Over the millennia, various floods filled the sink with runoff, alluvium, and debris including such fossils. They can now be found wherever such ancient flows deposited them, and it seems that Bai Yu was lucky enough to discover just such a pocket.

And so we end up with a complete story of how rusty iron pipes, tens of thousands of years older than any people who might have forged them, can end up embedded in solid sandstone in such a way as to baffle the average observer. Like many amateur researchers, Bai Yu stumbled upon an extraordinary discovery, but through his lack of applicable knowledge, misinterpreted what he saw. Those who underestimate the Earth's ability to produce fascinating effects are often left to grope for goofy explanations like alien construction projects. I find that the Baigong Pipes are one of the better examples of the folly of stopping at the paranormal explanation, compared to the rich rewards offered by following the scientific method to uncover what's really going on.

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The Bloop - a deep sea monster

It came from the depths of the South Pacific. Throughout the summer of 1997, a sound never before recorded burst from the abyss. News agencies scrambled; was this some new leviathan, an unknown monster from the deep? Nobody knew, and though this recording has taken its place among the permanent fixtures of the museums of the strange, the Bloop has never been identified.

The Bloop was on the loud side, to be sure. It was picked up on multiple sensors as far as 5,000 kilometers away. By triangulation, we know it came from somewhere right around 50°S, 100°W, which is about 1,750 kilometers west of Chile in the South Pacific. It's about as remote as you can get in any ocean. There are no islands or anything anywhere near it. The water is deep there, very deep, averaging around 4,300 meters. The Bloop was recorded several times during 1997, on the Eastern Equatorial Pacific autonomous hydrophone array, which was deployed in May, 1996 by NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) for long-term monitoring of seismic events on the East Pacific Rise.

Cryptozoologists love the Bloop, because to them it is evidence pointing to the existence of a gigantic unknown creature. Virtually every web page about the Bloop (and there are a lot of them) repeats this same quote, word for word:

Though it matches the audio profile of a living creature, there is no known animal that could have produced the sound. If it is an animal it would have to be huge — much larger than even a Blue whale, according to scientists who have studied the phenomenon.

I've been unable to find the original source of this quote. Only one web site on which I found it gave an attribution, saying it was a quote from NOAA. However this text does not appear on any NOAA web sites, and its wording is inconsistent with NOAA's typical descriptions of unknown sounds. When a sound is unknown, NOAA says it's unknown and leaves it at that; it is not their habit to editorialize or hypothesize about giant cryptids.

So, for now, the identity of these "scientists who have studied the phenomenon" remains a mystery. Many cryptozoologists have written about the Bloop, as is easily shown by a simple Google search; but from what I could tell, few legitimate zoologists have, and none who have concluded the Bloop has a biological origin.

Fortunately, we are not entirely without our own resources to test this suggestion that the Bloop "matches the audio profile of a living creature". There are three basic types of sounds in the oceans: Natural sounds like volcanoes and earthquakes, biological sounds from sea creatures, and man-made sounds from boats or other machinery. Usually you can take your unknown sound and compare it to a selection of known sounds, and get a pretty good idea what it is. Sounds can be represented on colorful graphs called spectrograms. Time is one dimension, and frequency is the other.

The amplitude is represented by the color. An ongoing sound with a certain frequency range, like a boat engine, creates a solid band across the spectrogram. A chirp from a dolphin would make a little streak. This gives us a two-pronged approach to trying to match the Bloop to a known source: We can listen to it to get a subjective feel for it, and we can also compare its spectrogram to known spectrograms to get a firmer, more quantifiable comparison.




The frequency of the sound meant it had to be much louder than any recognised animal noise, including that produced by the largest whales.

So is it a huge octopus? Although dead giant squid have been washed up on beaches, and tell-tale sucker marks have been seen on whales, there has never been a confirmed sighting of one of the elusive cephalopods in the wild.

The largest dead squid on record measured about 60ft including the length of its tentacles, but no one knows how big the creatures might grow.

For years sailors have told tales of monsters of the deep including the huge, many-tentacled kraken that could reach as high as a ship's mainmast and sink the biggest ships.

However Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University, Massachusetts, doubts that giant squid are the source of Bloop.

"Cephalopods have no gas-filled sac, so they have no way to make that type of noise," he said. "Though you can never rule anything out completely, I doubt it."

Nevertheless he agrees that the sound is most likely to be biological in origin.

The system picking up Bloop and other strange noises from the deep is a military relic of the Cold War.

In the 1960s the U.S. Navy set up an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, around the globe to track Soviet submarines. The network was known as SOSUS, short for Sound Surveillance System.

The listening stations lie hundreds of yards below the ocean surface, at a depth where sound waves become trapped in a layer of water known as the "deep sound channel".

Here temperature and pressure cause sound waves to keep travelling without being scattered by the ocean surface or bottom.

Most of the sounds detected obviously emanate from whales, ships or earthquakes, but some very low frequency noises have proved baffling.

Scientist Christopher Fox of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Acoustic Monitoring Project at Portland, Oregon, has given the signals names such as Train, Whistle, Slowdown, Upsweep and even Gregorian Chant.

He told New Scientist that most can be explained by ocean currents, volcanic activity -- Upsweep was tracked to an undersea South Pacific mountain that had not been identified as "live."

"The sound waves are almost like voice prints. You're able to look at the characteristics of the sound and say: 'There's a blue whale, there's a fin whale, there's a boat, there's a humpback whale and here comes and earchquake," he says.

But some sounds remain a mystery he says. Like Bloop -- monster of the deep?

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Napalm cave in Russia, Icicles of red brick



These are the consequences of the use of an alternative to napalm by Russsian army back then. It was done as a test inside of the brick houses. The temperature was so high that it made bricks to melt and form such icicles.
This abandoned Russian fortress is one of the creepiest places we’ve seen. The reason it looks this way is that the Russian army used the abandoned fortress to test the influence of Russian alternative to napalm inside of the brick houses. Due to very high temperature of napalm the bricks started melting just like ice melts in the spring forming the icicles, however these icicles are made of red brick.








If you like this post just click here Posted By crkota with 1 comment

Napalm cave in Russia, Icicles of red brick



These are the consequences of the use of an alternative to napalm by Russsian army back then. It was done as a test inside of the brick houses. The temperature was so high that it made bricks to melt and form such icicles.
This abandoned Russian fortress is one of the creepiest places we’ve seen. The reason it looks this way is that the Russian army used the abandoned fortress to test the influence of Russian alternative to napalm inside of the brick houses. Due to very high temperature of napalm the bricks started melting just like ice melts in the spring forming the icicles, however these icicles are made of red brick.








If you like this post just click here Posted By crkota with No comments
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