Showing posts with label WKU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WKU. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Kentucky NASA EPSCoR



Western Kentucky University is the home of the Kentucky NASA EPSCoR Program, whose stated purpose is to support "the human endeavor in space, by contributing technological applications relating to space habitats, exploration, microgravity, and physiological adaptation" for missions such as the International Space Station.


Their research projects include an extensive Nanotechnology lab working on "Nanofabrication of Photonic Crystals, Nanotube Spin Electronics, and Nano Electro-Mechanical Structures", and a program called "Human Health Maintenance/Countermeasures and Spacecraft Environmental Monitoring, Safety, and Protection".


You can actually apply for research grants from KY NASA EPSCoR. Click here for more information about cutting-edge scientific funding opportunities.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Cosmic Dust in Kentucky


In the January 1914 issue of a professional medical journal called The Medical Council, there's an article entitled "Dust and the Genesis of New Diseases". t provides some fascinating nuggets of antiquated info on the subject of microscopic and near-microscopic dust, a key interest of mine.


A choice chunk of the article:

Cosmic dust, of which thousands of tons annually fall on the Earth, is often charged with living organisms...

Darwin described a fall of strange organisms covering an area of over a million square miles. Weber found myriads of germs in a fall of yellow snow in Peckeloh, Germany... In October 1846 over one hundred unknown organisms were observed as charging a fall of cosmic dust in France. Ehrenberg estimated that forty-five tons of organic forms fell in this shower.

But then, most interestingly of all, it says:

Palestine and Western Kentucky have also been experienced immense showers of dust charged with organic life.

The article's author uses "cosmic dust" to refer to any dust falling from the sky, and freely admits that there is no way to determine with certainty whether the substances in question came from outer space, other worlds, or just blew here from somewhere else on Earth.

A century later, we are now pretty sure that it's the latter, and that any mass rains of living organic materials were somehow deposited by the Jet Stream or other winds. Dust from the Sahara Desert, for example, blows high into the atmosphere and then comes back down to land on Jamaica regularly.

(The huge Bauxite deposits in Jamaica, by the way, are a direct result of millions of years of this trans-Saharan dust migration. Most aluminum soda cans in North America are actually made from this Bauxite, so next time you pop open a can a Coke, ponder that you are holding something derived entirely of ancient Saharan sand particles that made their way to the Caribbean, one particle at a time over millenia, to be mined in the present day and turned into aluminum cans for you and me.)


But we also now know that actual cosmic dust from space is falling on Kentucky today - and everywhere else, for that matter. According to the must-read book The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes:

The Earth is still gathering a hundred tons of space dust every day - to the delight of scientists... "Since every atom in our bodies came from inside of stars", explains astrophysicist Don Brownlee, "by studying these interstellar dust particles, we can learn about our cosmic roots".

The Earth grows fatter every day, snowed under by a continuous microscopic flurry of space specks. Rare as they are, on average, every square yard of the planet should nonetheless receive one speck each day. Statistically, it's a good bet that there's a fresh piece of space dust on the hood of your car daily...

They're everywhere", Brownlee says. "You eat them all the time. Any carpet would have them."


As for the cryptic reference to falls of organic material from space occurring in Kentucky, that may be a reference to the "nostoc" incidents referred to by Charles Fort as....

"The Kentucky Phenomenon."

So it was called, in its day, and now we have an occurrence that attracted a great deal of attention in its own time. Usually these things of the accursed have been hushed up or disregarded—suppressed like the seven black rains of Slains—but, upon March 3, 1876, something occurred, in Bath County, Kentucky, that brought many newspaper correspondents to the scene.

The substance that looked like beef that fell from the sky.

Upon March 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky—"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky. It fell in flakes of various sizes; some two inches square, one, three or four inches square. The flake-formation is interesting: later we shall think of it as signifying pressure—somewhere. It was a thick shower, on the ground, on trees, on fences, but it was narrowly localized: or upon a strip of land about 100 yards long and about 50 yards wide. For the first account, see the Scientific American, 34-197, and the New York Times, March 10, 1876.

Meanwhile, the dusty material falling to Earth that is verifiably interstellar in origin is studied routinely in the astrophysics departments of Kentucky universities, such as UK's 2D Dusty project ("2D radiative transfer in astrophysical dust") and Western Kentucky University's paper "Detecting Dust-Generating Stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and Beyond".

Considering that our planet is nestled inside an immense disk of zodiacal dust, there should be plenty of interesting research in this field unto infinity.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Eckankar


The Eckankar religion has a considerable presence in Kentucky, and why not? Their founder, Paul Twitchell, was a Kentuckian.

Twitchell was born in Paducah in 1909, and went on to attend Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green and Murray State University. He dropped out of both colleges each time.

After returning from a stint in the Navy during World War II, he began dabbling in mysticism, Eastern religion, and New Age belief systems. He followed Swami Premananda for a time, then Scientology, then Kirpal Singh.

In 1965 he announced that he had been chosen by an ancient society of holy masters, to become the new leader of the formerly secret religion known as "Eckankar" to the world. He claimed a 500-year-old man (who supposedly still lives to this day) named Rebazar Tarzs visited him regularly in his apartment to guide him in his writings. According to Wikipedia:

Rebazar Tarzs presently resides in the Hindu Kush mountains, and is "the emissary of ECKANKAR in the physical universe". There are several essays by ECKANKAR followers who report having met him, including one who describes Rebazar Tarzs's guiding him to herbs that cured his heart condition, and one who tells of receiving a gift from Rebazar Tarzs during the Korean War, the gift later being traded for desperately needed food.

There is a story of a taxicab driver who picked up Rebazar Tarzs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in around 1952, and during the ride, Rebazar Tarzs was able, among other things, to read the driver's "secret prayers." In a second incident, Rebazar Tarzs miraculously repaired the driver's automobile.


Twitchell claimed that past members of the secret ECK society included Plato, Pythagoras, and St. Francis of Assisi. He also made some pretty lousy predictions, such as that the Vietnam War would end in 1968, and that Lyndon Johnson would be elected US President for a second time.

So what exactly do Eckists (followers of Eckankar) believe? Their website says this:

"Eckankar teaches that there is an audible life current known as the ECK, or Holy Spirit, that connects each of us with the heart of God. We can experience the ECK as Light and Sound. Through study and practice of the Spiritual Exercises of ECK, we learn to recognize the Light and Sound of God as It touches our lives and brings increased divine love."


They also believe in the power of HU, which is a Sufi vocal ritual considered by Eckists to be "a love song to God". Reincarnation and astral travel are also important parts of the religion.


Twitchell died in 1971, which also dashed another of his predictions; he said he would live into the 1980s. Currently Eckankar is headed by one Harold Klemp (pictured above), who attended Indiana University and was connected to military intelligence before joining the ECK movement while in Japan. Klemp is regarded to be "the 973rd Living Eck Master" in an unbroken line that goes back to the dawn of human life.