Guardian Angel Changes Trajectory Of Car To Save Driver? - Ghost Theory

In the strange world we live in, there happens things that are hard to explain. The following video depicts just such an occurrence.

According to the commentary on the video, the young man in the car hit a horse (edited out) which sent him careening across the center median. Just as he crosses the median, a figure appears out of the dust and seemingly causes the car to change direction.

Is this a Guardian Angel or something else entirely? Lets look in on the incident and see:

So, there you have it! Is this some sort of saving grace or just our eyes playing tricks on us.

If you look where the car ends up, you can see that it just misses an obstacle that could possibly have thrown the driver through the windshield or worse. Did this “helper” redirect the young man enough for him to avoid the obstacle? Are we seeing a mere dust shadow of the horse-tender in another cars headlights? Is there even something there at all? Could this be just a hoax?

It’s all up to you the reader to decide.

Thanks to NYC812 for providing the Guardian Angel video.

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Return to Antikythera: Divers revisit wreck where ancient computer found - Guardian

It took more than 100 years to work out from its corroded remains how the Antikythera mechanism worked. Video: New Scientist

In 1900, Greek sponge divers stumbled across "a pile of dead, naked women" on the seabed near the tiny island of Antikythera. It turned out the figures were not corpses but bronze and marble statues, part of a cargo of stolen Greek treasure that was lost when the Roman ship carrying them sank two thousand years ago on the island's treacherous rocks.

It was the first marine wreck to be studied by archaeologists, and yielded the greatest haul of ancient treasure that had ever been found. Yet the salvage project – carried out in treacherous conditions with desperately crude equipment – was never completed. So this month, armed with the latest diving technology, scientists are going back.

Between 1900 and 1901, the sponge divers retrieved a string of stunning antiquities, including weapons, jewellery, furniture and some exquisite statues. But their most famous find was a battered lump that sat unnoticed for months in the courtyard of Athens' National Archaeological Museum, before it cracked open to reveal a bundle of cogwheels, dials and inscriptions.

It has taken scientists over a hundred years to decode the inner workings of those corroded fragments, with x-ray and CT scans finally revealing a sophisticated clockwork machine used to calculate the workings of the heavens (video).

Dubbed the Antikythera mechanism, it had pointers that displayed the positions of the sun, moon and planets in the sky, as well as a star calendar, eclipse prediction dial and a timetable of athletics events including the Olympics.

It's a stunning piece of technology that revolutionises our understanding of the abilities of the ancient Greeks. Nothing close to its complexity is known to have been created for well over a thousand years afterwards, and the emergence of mechanical clocks in medieval Europe.

There are questions that remain unanswered, such as where it's from and who built it (Posidonius, a philosopher who lived on Rhodes during the first century BC, is one candidate, while the third century BC genius Archimedes may have invented this type of device). But one of the most intriguing mysteries relates to the wreck on which it was found. What's still down there?

The wreck lies in around 60 metres of cold, rocky, current-swirled water – not an easy place to visit. The sponge divers who salvaged its cargo worked in clunky metal diving suits with little understanding of the dangers of diving at such depth. By the time they abandoned their project, two of them had been paralysed by the bends, and one was dead. They left behind stories of abandoned treasures, including giant marble statues that rolled down the steep slope from the wreck and out of reach.

The undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau spent a couple of days at the wreck site in 1978 and brought up some precious smaller items, including some coins from the Asia Minor coast, which suggested that the ship sailed from there around 70-60 BC (probably carrying war booty from Greek colonies back to Rome). But even with their sleek scuba gear, Cousteau's divers could spend only brief minutes on the seabed without risking the bends.

No one has been back since. Now, after years of negotiations with the Greek authorities, Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist based at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, finally has permission to dive at Antikythera. He's working with Greek archaeologists including Theotokis Theodoulou of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities.

This week, the team begins a three-week survey using rebreather technology, which recycles unused oxygen from each breath and allows divers to stay deeper for longer. The aim is to survey the wreck site properly for the first time, to find out once and for all what has been left down there – and to check down the slope, to 70 metres depth or more, to see if those stories of runaway statues are true.

Any items found on the wreck site could provide further clues to the origin or ownership of the ship. And not all of the pieces of the Antikythera mechanism were ever found. It's a long shot, but those missing bits could still be on the seabed.

This isn't what gets Foley most excited about the project, however. His team will also dive around the entire island, a distance of about 17 nautical miles, using James Bond-style propellers to cover ground quickly. Foley hopes this could reveal a whole clutch of previously unknown wrecks.

The island of Antikythera sits in the middle of what has been a busy trade route since ancient times: a treacherous shard of rock notorious for downing ships in a storm. In Roman times, it was also an infamous centre for pirates. So it's a good bet that there are plenty of other wrecks here, from all periods of history.

On a two-day reconnaissance survey in June this year, Foley and his team discovered the wreck of a British warship called HMS Nautilus, lost in 1807, plus a range of ancient anchors, ceramics and a 19th-century naval gun.

This suggests the area hasn't been looted (which makes sense given the difficulty of diving here), so any new wrecks found could be pristine. "Everyone is very, very excited," Foley says of the upcoming mission. "This ought to be extraordinary."

He also points out that the Antikythera ship, with its valuable cargo, is unlikely to have been travelling alone. When it sank, others in its fleet may have gone down too. Could one of them have been carrying another Antikythera mechanism? For the past hundred years, this awe-inspiring device has stood alone, our only glimpse into a technology lost for millennia. That might – just might – now change.

Jo Marchant is the author of a book about the mechanism, Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World's First Computer

If Slime Mold Ruled The World - The Guardian

Slime mould grows on agar continents between oat flakes in Andrew Adamatzky's experiments on world colonisation. Photograph: University of the West of England

One question never far from scientists' minds is how events might unfold were a giant slime mould to emerge in the Far East and embark on global domination.

History tells us what happened when restless humans set out into the world. Kingdoms rose and fell as wars raged. Urban centres grew and connected. Trade networks spread, first across countries, later spanning whole continents.

But slime mould is a different beast. Would the same scenarios play out as it colonised the world? After a series of simple experiments involving agar, a globe, a bag of oats, and an obliging slime mould, an answer, of sorts, is now at hand.

Andy Adamatzky, director of the Unconventional Computing Centre at the University of the West of England in Bristol, picked slime mould – an amoeba-like, single-celled organism, Physarum polycephalum – as a harmless and friendly creature to work with. In its vegetative phase, it goes in search of food by extending "protoplasmic tubes", which transport nutrients and metabolites through the organism's body.

Left to their own devices, slime moulds establish protoplasmic networks that maximise the nutrients they can draw from nearby food sources. This ability makes them natural path-computing machines, says Adamatzky. In the arcane language of the field, he says the organism "acts like an amorphous massively parallel computer, with distributed inputs, or sensors, decentralised information processing and decision making and parallel actuation."

The impressive behaviour of P. polycephalum has been likened to a primitive form of intelligence. The Japanese scientist Toshiyuki Nakagaki at Hokkaido University has reported "smart behaviour" in a slime mould that solved a maze after morsels of food were placed at the start and finish points. The slime mould grew through the maze, stumbled upon the food and then withdrew its protoplasmic tubes from dead ends. Not bad for a creature with no brain.

Adamatzky took a different tack. "I poured hot agar gel on a globe to make several good layers, then cut out continents and removed agar corresponding to oceans, seas, and large lakes. Then I placed oat flakes in the locations of the most populated cities and inoculated slime mould in Beijing."

That's a globe of agar continents with oat flakes in place of major conurbations, and a starter colony of slime mould in the capital of China.

Science is not for the impatient. Covering a globe with agar takes time. You have to pour it on layer by layer and let it cool. Then you have to cut round the continents and peel off the seas.

And that's before you even get started. It takes over a week for slime mould to colonise a 15cm-diameter globe. "The real challenge was to be patient," says Adamatzky.

Typically, Physarum set out from Beijing and hooked up with oat flakes in Seoul and Tokyo, before colonising both Koreas and Japan in less than a day. From there it moved on to Hong Kong and Hanoi. A short branch would link up with Ho Chi Minh and Jakarta, and occasionally bridge over to New Zealand and Australia. The main branch pressed on, from Hanoi to Kolkata, Delhi, Tehran, Istanbul and London.

Most surprising to Adamatzky were the patterns that emerged over time. The slime mould recreated more than 76% of the Great Silk Road trading routes and parts of the Asian Highway Network.

"It is not just [taking] the shortest path," said Adamatsky. "The slime mould's behaviour is affected by a combination of chemo-attractant gradients released by several metropolitan areas and shapes of continents."

Here's an early version of the paper, due to be published in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos.

And what does all this tell us? Adamatzky thinks we have plenty to learn from these brainless organisms. He wants the work to inspire fresh thinking on how ancient roads came to be.

But that's not all. The creature's behaviour might spur unorthodox approaches to planning future traffic routes, or predicting the spread of global disease. In taking over the planet, slime mould might help us find our own way in the world.