“We’ve found 20 fast radio bursts in a year, almost doubling the number detected worldwide since they were discovered in 2007.”

They’re ba-ack! Well, actually, they never went away. Neither did the theories (or hopes) that they’re signals from or sign of alien life. We’re talking, of course, about fast radio bursts – those rare and mysterious millisecond pulses from deep space that have baffled astronomers since the first one was discovered in 2007. An excited Dr. Ryan Shannon from the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia co-authored a new studyin Nature describing the recent discovery of more FRBs, including both the closest and the brightest bursts seen so far. Are they any closer to a bright answer as to what they are?

“Our analysis shows that beams used for powering large light sails could yield parameters that are consistent with FRBs.”

In a different study published in 2017, Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb speculated that the fast radio bursts are signs that extraterrestrials think like we do about using light sails and laser beams to traverse the stars, only on a much bigger scale. That’s tough to prove for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that fact that, at the time, only 36 FRBs had been detected. That number is now 56 with the new discoveries by Shannon and his team using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder to scan a much wider piece of the sky than in previous searches. While their cause has not been determined (yet), the new study shed light on where FRBs are coming from.

Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder

“Using the new technology of the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), we’ve also proved that fast radio bursts are coming from the other side of the Universe rather than from our own galactic neighbourhood.”

In a statement from The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Shannon explains that timing the wavelengths as they reached the telescope told them how far the bursts had traveled, along with how much matter they passed through. The big reveal was that the FRBs are coming from galaxies outside of our own. Almost as exciting, when extrapolating what the ASKAP might find if it were able to scan the entire sky at once, they determined that FRBs are arriving at a rate between 30 and 45 per day. Finally, the bursts seem to have an upper threshold of energy, indicating that whatever is creating them has some limits.

So, the discovery of so many more fast radio bursts is big, but far from moving us any closer to determining what … or who … is sending them. “From where?” will probably be solved as the scanning continues. The rest will have to wait … unless a giant sail suddenly shows up.

Throughout human history and across cultures there has been one aspect of the paranormal world that has seemingly always been with us, that of ghosts, wraiths, specters, whatever you want to call them. These apparitions have always roamed about the periphery of our understanding, lurking in the shadows and the spooky places of our world to incite wonder, speculation, and of course fear and terror. Yet for all of their pervasiveness throughout the world and their presence upon the landscape of the human psyche, there has always been a profound question lingering, and that is: just what exactly are ghosts? What is their nature and what place do they hold in reality as we know it? The question of just what ghosts are has been contemplated, discussed, and debated for a very long time, but what answers do we really have, and do you think you know the solution? Here are just some of the musings on what these mysterious entities might be.

The most traditional idea, and the one most pervasive among most people, is the idea that ghosts are the spirits of the dead, that the soul has somehow transcended the death of the physical body to continue on to inhabit our realm for reasons unknown. In this view, ghosts are basically us, just living on into the afterlife while tethered to the world of the living for reasons we cannot comprehend. Maybe they are unwilling to “move on,” or maybe it is that some tragedy or unfulfilled goal has fueled some power to linger on the physical plane. When people think of ghosts, this is perhaps the most common vision that many will have, and how most people would probably define them, that they are our lost dead.

One of the interesting conundrums about this particularly prevalent idea, other than the fact there is no proof at all that anything survives us after death, is that there are innumerable religions, faiths, each with ideas on the afterlife as varied as the cultures who believe them. In some there is a form of Heaven or some form of Hell, some new realm away from the we are in now, while in others we are reincarnated or even become one with the universe. There is often little mention, if any, of wandering spirits loitering about Earth and interacting with it, or details on what those spirits should be like. There is also the oddity that despite all of these different ideas on death and the afterlife, regardless of the differences ghostly phenomena are often remarkably similar across the spectrum in many ways, so what are we to make of this? Is there any chance that ghosts are not the spirits of the living at all, and if not what could they be?

One alternative idea to the theory of ghosts as the spirits of the dead involves the concept that these are not independent entities at all, but rather a sort of echo of what once was. Commonly referred to as “residual hauntings,” the basic idea is that for some reason past events have been imprinted upon the building or the landscape and are merely playing back like images on camera film, or sounds on an audiotape, residual memories of a time lost. In this theory, what we see are not spirits in the traditional sense at all, but more like watching a video, with the film being the area around it.

This theory is especially applied to those cases wherein the apparitions seem to mindlessly repeat the same series of actions over and over again, perhaps for all eternity, and do not seem to realize that they are being watched or that they are dead, no more than an image on film “knows” it is being looked at. Why and how these particular past events should have been transplanted onto the landscape, as well as how they are played back, are unknown, but there has been speculation. For instance, it has been postulated that death, pain, suffering, tragedy, and other events involving strong emotions might somehow stain the location, imprint upon it, and cause these incidents to be replayed, and this fits in with hauntings often occurring at places where something terrible has happened. There is also the idea that the composition of the surrounding soil or rocks itself may have some part to play in these residual hauntings. Are ghosts perhaps, at least in some cases, merely history playing back on an endless loop?

Another intriguing theory is that ghosts do not come from the outside world atb all, but rather from within. In this line of reasoning, ghosts are not a product of supernatural energy or strange forces of nature, but are rather extensions of the mind reaching out through little understood psychic powers, creating seemingly real constructs projected onto the physical world solely through the power of the subconscious mind. These thought forms are often referred to as tulpas, and can even be generated by people who are not even aware that they are doing it, the forms often appearing to materialize or vanish at will, depending on the mental state of the individual or individuals projecting them.

An interesting historical example of a ghost as a tulpa occurred in the 1960s, when a paranormal researcher by the name of Hanz Holzer was looking into a series of hauntings in the building at 12 Gay Street, in New York City, which involved an apparition most commonly described as a tall gentleman dressed in black formal clothing and with a top hat, black cape, and cane. This phantom was said to walk about the darkened premises and surrounding area at night startling people only to disappear, Holzer would go on to publish the case in his 1966 paranormal book Yankee Ghosts, and this is where things get rather bizarre indeed.

According to an author named Walter B. Gibson, he had lived in that very same building not long before Holzer began his investigation. Gibson claimed that he had been living there in order to do research for an installment for his series of novels starring a Batman-like crime fighter called The Shadow. So absorbed was he in his writing and in envisioning The Shadow roaming about the streets and the premises that he would often even hallucinate his character, who just happened to wield a cane and wear formal evening clothes, a cape, and a top hat. The author likely would have attributed this to pure tiredness and obsession with his character if he had not happened to read Holzer’s book. He was immediately taken aback by the similarities between the ghost and his character, as well as the fact that the sightings were taking place in the exact same place he had lived while writing his novel at around the same time, and he became convinced that what had been seen was an actual projection of his character from his mind, which had somehow been transferred into reality.

Related to the idea of these thought forms materializing into reality from the mind are mental powers running amok in other ways. For instance, it is believed even among many paranormal researchers that some poltergeist infestations could be caused by psychokinetic energy, that is, the mind reaching out to touch the physical world, unleashed to cause disturbances such as moving objects or anomalous noises. As with some cases of tulpas, these outbursts can strike out even without the knowledge of the person producing them, but they usually follow some general tendencies, for instance in most cases, psychokinetic poltergeist activity originates with younger individuals, and is most likely linked to some inner turmoil, stress, or emotional strife. This sort of ghostly activity is typically not confined to any one location, as it is tethered to a person or persons, and it could be a possible explanation of “hauntings” that follow a family from place to place.

Even more outlandish than any of those theories is the idea that ghostly phenomena come from neither our physical or mental worlds, but rather a whole other realm beyond ours entirely. The idea has to do with the concept of multiple dimensions, parallel realities beyond our own that may bump up against ours and may even allow us to travel between them. This idea is dependent on the theory that rather than just one reality or physical universe as we know it, there is “multiverse” of many other, possibly even infinite other universes that all lie side by side with each other, but which are generally imperceptible to us. If this is so, then the reasoning is that inhabitants of these parallel dimension may bleed over into ours or even intentionally break through the mysterious veil that separates us from time to time.

The researcher and author John Keel, as well as UFOlogist Jacques Vallée, were among the first in the paranormal world to suggest the link between multiple dimensions and paranormal phenomena when they theorized that UFOs and their occupants may not be from other faraway planets, but rather from parallel dimensions next to our own, beings that he termed “ultra-terrestrials.” This basic concept would later be expanded to include a possible explanation for all manner of paranormal phenomena, from strange entities, to ghosts, demons, and even cryptids or out of place animals. In this case, these phenomena are proposed as being caused by the denizens of these other universes bursting forth into our own, intentionally or otherwise.

With ghostly phenomena this interdimensional angle could go down a few different ways. It could be that these entities are somehow becoming temporarily entangled with our reality, where they are sighted and even interact with our physical world before vanishing back to their own, which could very well be seen as ghosts or phantoms by witnesses. Or it could be that these are basically those ultra-terrestrials Keel spoke of, dimensional travelers coming to visit us for reasons unknown, but in this case rather than coming down in spaceships or UFOs they are appearing as ghosts, wraiths, and specters. It has even been theorized that aliens, ghosts, and other strange entities might all be basically the same thing, merely appearing differently to different individuals depending on witness expectations. So, if they think they are being abducted by aliens, that is what the entities appear as, whereas in a spooky old house they may appear as ghosts because that is what the witness is keyed up for.

With apparitions of recognizable people or those who have died, this could also be indicative of other parallel dimensions that are nearly identical to ours, but a bit different. One of the theories of the multiverse is that there may very well be countless versions of our own dimension, with many of them almost the same but with some subtle or profound differences. For instance, there could be a reality where you wore a red shirt today instead of blue, where you made different choices, have a different job, or where you don’t even exist. Maybe in one reality a different team won the World Series, the Beatles never broke up, or one where dinosaurs never went extinct. Maybe a person who died in your own universe didn’t die in that one, but yet still inhabits the same place, where they go about life overlaid on this version of reality where they died. It this case, it is speculated, they might sort of overflow into our dimension from time to become visible for short durations or with a somewhat intangible or unearthly quality, only to fade away, making us think we’ve seen someone’s spirit rather than just a version of them from a different timeline.

These have so far been ideas that are far from proven and remain mostly in the realm of conjecture and speculation, so what of other, more scientifically grounded explanations for ghosts? One popular theory in recent times has been that ghosts and similar entities could have their basis in naturally occurring phenomena rather than the supernatural, and that the main culprit could be what are known as ultra-low frequency soundwaves, or infrasound. These are sounds that register just below the threshold of human hearing, but which our bodies sense and are affected by all the same. Infrasound is known to create a wide range of physical and mental effects, including disorientation, dizziness, shortness of breath, faintness, increased heart rate and blood pressure, and nausea, as well as emotional and mental effects including fear, sorrow, panic, and anxiety, and also effects on perception, like both aural and visual hallucinations, and since the one being affected cannot actually hear what is causing the disturbances, it could very well seem like the work of supernatural beings. Infrasound is actually quite common in nature as well, created by all manner of physical forces such as earthquakes, volcanoes, waves crashing upon rocks, wind, rain, and thunder, so perhaps the ghosts are really all in our head, the result of natural forces that we can’t hear.

There is also the idea that our minds can play tricks on our perceptions in other ways as well. One good example would be some studies that show that electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain can create a profound sense of other entities nearby or of “shadow people” lurking about taunting us. There was once interesting case illustrating this in action that was published in the journal Nature, which was carried out by researchers from University Hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, and described the case of an epilepsy patient who witnessed a separate entity in the room with her when a region of the brain known as the temporoparietal junction was stimulated.

The woman apparently perceived this shadow figure as a very real autonomous entity separate from herself, rather than just a hallucination, and she often complained that the entity would touch her or embrace her. In some experiments this shadow person was described as interfering with her tasks, such as trying to pull cards out of her hands or distracting her in other ways. This strange phenomenon likely has to do with a crossing of the wires in this part of the brain, which distinguishes oneself from others, and one researcher in the study would say of the patient and the study:

Electrical stimulation repeatedly produced a feeling of the presence of another person in her extra-personal space, a shadow who did not speak or move, and whose position beneath her back was identical to her own. The strange sensation that somebody is nearby when no one is actually present has been described by psychiatric and neurological patients, as well as by healthy subjects. Our findings may be a step towards understanding the mechanisms behind psychiatric manifestations such as paranoia, persecution and alien control.

Similarly, ghostly phenomena could be the result of a range of optical illusions or hallucinations that emerge for a myriad of reasons. Psychological circumstances, stress, sleep deprivation, sleep paralysis, hypnagogia, or when a person is in a dream-like state halfway between sleep and waking, schizophrenia, drugs, side effects of medication, these can all combine with trigger visual cues such as a spooky locale to perhaps produce the perception of paranormal phenomena. The phenomenon known as pareidolia, wherein the human brain tries to make sense of random patterns by giving them a recognizable identity, could also play a role, in that something half glimpsed in one’s peripheral vision could be misconstrued as something more supernatural in nature. Combined with an over active imagination, visual cues, and an expectation to see something strange, all of these things could possibly contribute to experiences of ghostly phenomena when in fact there is nothing really there at all. Is it possible that ghosts are just all in our head?

In the end it is perhaps impossible to explain the full range of ghostly phenomena with any one of these factors. Ghosts seem to be an area of the paranormal that is a lot more varied, nuanced, and complicated than it may at first seem, to the extent that to call something a “ghost” might be considered akin to calling a “dog” a “vertebrate.” The permutations and possible descriptions are vast. There are many factors at play here, all equally strange and all intertwined to the point that they may never be unraveled. What we can be sure of is that people since time unremembered have experienced ghostly phenomena, beyond the scope of mere tall tales and hoaxes, and something truly odd is going on, whatever that may be.

During its brief trip through our solar system, the interstellar space object named ’Oumuamua was at one time or another speculated to be an asteroid, a comet or a spaceship that may or may not be occupied by living beings. It has since left the solar system for destinations unknown, but the arguments about what it is continue. The latest theory replaces “none of the above” with “an ejected protoplanetary disk object.” A what?

The interstellar object ’Oumuamua raced through the solar system a year ago. Astronomers continue to argue about what it is made of.

Its rare cigar shape made ’Oumuamua a puzzle from the start, as did its rotation, which American football-loving astronomers described as not a tight quarterback spiral but a botched end-over-end field goal kick. (Female astronomers assumed their best Captain Picard facepalm poses.) This caused speculation that the object may have been involved in a violent interstellar collision. While its seemingly dry surface said ‘asteroid’, the erratic spin said ‘comet’. This theory was strengthened with other observations that the object seemed to accelerate on its way out, implying it was getting some sort of boost from gases released when the icy surface melted on its close turn around the Sun.

Not football references again!

That was accepted for a while, until it was pointed out that comets have tails and ’Oumuamua didn’t even have a Doberman’s nub, let alone a gaseous trail or fuzzy aura about it. Also, that acceleration combined with the tumbling rotation should have broken a cigar of ice and dirt apart. Then there’s the fact that this was the first interstellar object ever discovered. What kind of force could have propelled it across light years from one sun to another?

“Basically, it’s a messenger from a dead star.”

In a new study, Roman Rafikov, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, proposes that ’Oumuamua is actually a sliver of a planet that was blown to pieces as its sun collapsed and died and transformed into a white dwarf. In an interview with Quanta magazine and in the study’s abstract, Rafikov builds his case by process of process of elimination of other causes combined with a comparison to the behavior of other tidal disruption events like the death of a star and destruction of its planets.

“Based on these arguments, as well as the lack of direct signs of outgassing, we conclude that the classification of ‘Oumuamua as a comet (invoked to explain its claimed anomalous acceleration) is questionable.”

Exploding star captured by Kepler space telescope.

Well … that settles it — ‘Oumuamua is a messenger from a dead star. Or is it? There’s little chance of tracing it back to its white dwarf because the event occurred millions of years ago. The data on it is limited because it showed up unexpectedly, was not detected until it was leaving and passed through in a hurry. At best, astronomers are hoping to spot another one in the future with a better telescope.

In the meantime, Outgassing would make a great name for a band whose first prog-rock album is “Messenger From A Dead Star.”

I thought they’d been shot. I didn’t realize what had happened. There were parts missing — they were mutilated.

Arizona rancher John Mahan discovered a cow and a bull mysteriously killed and mutilated on his property near the Grand Canyon. Both animals had organs removed including their reproductive organs, and both were drained of blood. Curiously, as in similar cases of unexplained cattle mutilations, there were no tracks and very little blood found around the animals’ carcasses. Who could have done this to these cows?

I just assumed they had been shot. I didn’t realize what had happened to them until the inspector showed me. They didn’t take any edible meat, just the genitals.

Why is it always the genitals? In most of these cases, the sex organs of the animals are surgically removed, sometimes including the entire anal or vaginal cavity. Who – or what – would go to such lengths while leaving the other choice cuts of meat?

Maybe things that don’t meat.

Arizona Livestock Inspector Royal Reidhead examined the dead animals, and says he knew right away that something was amiss when he saw the carcasses. “These animals weren’t shot, these animals were mutilated,” Reidhead told Williams-Grand Canyon News, “They were basically killed for their body parts.” Even stranger, the animals’ carcasses weren’t touched by scavenger animals as they lay undiscovered for a week after their brutal mutilation.

Reidhead has seen several similar cattle mutilations in the Grand Canyon area of Arizona, and says that the wounds inflicted on the animals are always surgically precise and leave behind little blood. While Reidhead believes that poachers are mutilating these animals, I just have to wonder why someone would go to the lengths of surgically removing only a few organs and leaving the rest to rot in the sun. Again – why the genitals? Do people eat those?

Livestock mutilations remain one of the weirdest unexplained phenomena.

Even stranger, how could someone go about draining these animals’ blood and removing their organs without leaving as much as a single footprint or drop of blood? As much as I try to remain skeptical about alien abductions and similar alleged phenomena, these cattle mutilations always leave me wondering what on Earth or off Earth is capable of such clean, precise surgeries with no discernible evidence. But why would aliens be so interested in cow genitals?

On a day when NASA, Roscosmos and the rest of the world breathed a collective sigh of relief as a Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft and its crew returned safely to Earth after an aborted launch, news emerges of a leading Russian astronomer who believes we are not alone in the universe. How soon can one of these civilizations get here with a replacement?

“I admit the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations.”

Dmitry Bisikalo is the director of the Astronomy Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and a specialist in the gas dynamics of interacting binary stars and accretion disks. How does this qualify him to proclaim that aliens exist? It doesn’t, but his research includes studying the components of a star’s gases and those of any exoplanets around them. As he told Sputnik News, those gases – especially oxygen, ozone and methane – are biological markers that can be indicators of civilizations making things and polluting their atmospheres just like we do.

“It is important to note that many biomarkers appear in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum, which will be studied by the Spektr-UF space observatory, which will be launched into orbit in 2024.”

Spoken like a true bureaucratic astronomer making sure he has a job in a few years by plugging the Spektr-UV or World Space Observatory-Ultraviolet (WSO-UV) — a proposed joint (Russia, Spain, Germany, Ukraine and Kazakhstan) space telescope that has been planned since 2007 and needed well before 2024 with the gyroscope problems currently being experienced by the Hubble space telescope. While waiting for the launch, Bisikalo is also generating interest in both astronomy and space travel with comments like his recent one.

“After all, if our civilization exists, by analogy there may be others, and probably many of them.”

Bisikalo is channeling American astronomer Frank Drake and his famous equation putting the probability of the existence of alien civilizations at ‘high’. Unfortunately, like Drake, Bisikalo is dealing in possibilities, not proofs, and he brings in his own theory as to why we haven’t seen any extraterrestrials yet.

“[They] do not want to contact.”

Of course they don’t. We’re big polluters just like themselves and are on our way to destroying our planet, just as they may have. All they need to do is sit quietly and wait.

“For example, until the beginning of the twentieth century, our civilization did not radiate anything. Now the Earth is full of electronic signals at different intervals, but the general tendency is to reduce losses and consequently decrease signal level.”

“Decrease signal level.” In other words, die off. That may be what happens (spoiler alert) to all civilizations before they can change their ways or develop the technology to go somewhere else.

Based on the Soyuz incident today and the previous and still unsolved manmade hole found in the Soyuz capsule currently docked at the International Space Station, our signal level may be decreasing before we can leave too.

Bisikalo is still confident he and the rest of us will be around for the launch and usage of the Spektr-UV space telescope.

“Probably with the help of this infrared space telescope we will see something really interesting.”

Let’s hope it’s a starship delivering reliable space vehicles.

Oh boy, it’s been quite a run for Egyptian archaeology. We’ve had the big and spooky black sarcophagus, discoveries of new Sphinxes, pyramid energy focusing allegations, and now a discovery of a tomb built for a mysterious priest named Kaires who, according to the inscriptions on his statue, was the “sole friend of the king” and the “keeper of the secret of the Morning House.” Which king he’s referring to is unknown, just like everything else about this fellow despite his tomb’s insistence that he’s someone to know about.

Kaires was the sole friend (of the king), overseer of all king’s works, keeper of the secret of the Morning House, steward of the royal palace, foremost of the House of Life, inspector of the priests serving in the pyramid complexes of kings Sahure and Neferirkare, priest of the goddess Hathor, mistress of the sycamore, in Cusae (a city in southern Egypt), custodian of the two thrones (i.e. of southern and northern Egypt), as well as a holder of several other titles.

What remains of the entrance to an ancient Egyptian temple.

While Egytologists aren’t sure which pharaoh Kaires says he was the “sole friend” to, the tomb is near the pyramid built for the pharaoh Neferirkare who ruled from 2446 to 2438 BCE and that’s the pyramid Kaires was apparently the inspector of.

Now, as to the secret of Morning House and what “the foremost of the House of Life” could be, the archaeologists had this to say:

The Morning House was a specific location, where the king would come in the morning to eat breakfast and get dressed, whereas the House of Life was an institution, where Egyptians stored texts recorded on papyrus scrolls containing their knowledge and religious-philosophical treatises.

That’s right, he was the keeper of the secret of breakfast. Who knows, maybe that was an important secret to keep. What if the king was a picky eater? Maybe he only ate cream of wheat. That’s no kind of fit ruler. Perhaps society would have crumbled if the secret was ever let out.

But there’s also the matter of the House of Life, which seems far more important. Being the foremost of a massive library where all knowledge and religious writing was stored probably involved more secret keeping than being the breakfast wizard. There have been remarkably few papyrus scrolls discovered from this time period so we don’t know just what was in the House of Life, but it was likely on the extreme side of impressive.

Egyptian temple at Aswan

The ancients had a certain knack for pompous and egotistical titles that we’ve lost in the 21st century. Go around calling yourself the keeper of anything and likely all that will happen is a truck drives by and splashes you with mud while the driver hangs his head out of the and calls you a nerd. The problem with finding these sorts of titles in archaeological excavations is we don’t know whether or not these people were just old nerds. Now we dig up their tombs and we assume some dude’s made up titles have connotations of esoteric importance, which is exactly what he wanted us to think. We may never know how important this Kaires character was, but one thing has been true since time began: if you have to go around saying you’re the god-king’s only friend, maybe you’re just the breakfast wizard.

Let’s say you’re living on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean with a population far larger than the supply of available fresh drinking water, which is limited to rainwater. Let’s say you and your fellow islanders have adapted to drinking brackish, slightly-salty water that occasionally springs from the ground, but those springs and reservoirs are difficult to find. When you do find them, wouldn’t it be a good idea to leave a marker so you can locate it again … a marker big enough to see from remote spots on your island? Believe it or not, that’s the new theory being proposed as to why the people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) built their huge iconic Moai statues. Does it hold water?

“The porous volcanic soils quickly absorb rain, resulting in a lack of streams and rivers.”

In a study published in Hydrogeology Journal and reported in Newsweek, Binghamton University (New York) Professor of Anthropology Carl Lipo explained the major problem prehistoric Easter islanders faced in trying to survive on Rapa Nui. With no rivers and just two small lakes located in extremely remote areas, one would expect that the first inhabitants would build cisterns or ponds to capture and retain rainwater. While a few small ones were found, they’re not sufficient to support the thousands of residents inhabiting the island at its peak.

While they lacked fresh water, they had brackish water, and the explorers who eventually visited the island saw the residents drinking it without suffering any ill effects. What the islanders also had was a volcano sloped to run any kind of water downhill to the coastal areas. That’s where Lipo and his team found evidence of discharge points where brackish water would have been collected in reservoirs or trenches. That’s where they also found the statues.

nowing the details of the island’s hydrology and understanding that fresh water was a key ingredient in monument location now allows us to start generating hypotheses about the role that statues/monuments played in the community … This may well help unravel the secret to why this island boasts so many massive statues.”

Lots of water holding points … lots of statues. While there is definitely a connection between them, the team isn’t sure if the statues were carved and hauled there as markers, offerings of thanks to some brackish water god or for some other reason. Whatever the case, the water points are symbols of how a large population not only survived but thrived for centuries, growing food and working together to quarry, carve, haul and position the enormous statues precisely at the sources of their success.

“What they did was an incredible feat—but one that has been misinterpreted by outsiders who make European assumptions about what the island ‘should look like.’”

European assumptions … will we ever escape them?

Planet Earth is weird. Some of us might like to think of ourselves as separate from or somehow apart from the Earth, but the fact is we are the Earth. All living things are intertwined in the massive, complex chemical reaction that is planet Earth. Photosynthesis, respiration, decay – all of the various natural processes and reactions all stem from the fact that our home is one big ball of elements being pulled together by their own gravity. As our scientific instruments and techniques continue to improve, we’re beginning to discover that all things living and nonliving are much more interconnected than we think.

Case in point: a new paper published in the journal Current Opinion in Microbiology suggests that massive colonies of microorganisms floating high above us in the stratosphere might actually have a profound influence on the weather down here on the surface. Scientists have been uncovering evidence of this atmospheric bacteria for a few decades, but this study is the first to suggest that this ecosystem has an impact on weather.

The process, known as bioprecipitation, is fairly simple: ice crystals and droplets of water more condense more easily around the membranes of tiny microorganisms; thus, the more microorganisms in the sky, the more precipitation and cloud coverage there is. Understanding this process is difficult, as collecting specimens or even reaching this upper layer of the atmosphere is expensive and doing so without contaminating samples with terrestrial microbes is near-impossible.

Forget HAARP: these are the real weather manipulators.

Even more worrisome, this study suggests that this microbial layer of our atmosphere has the potential to spread diseases around the world – although some scientists think that claim might be far-fetched without more data to support it. Still, as the Earth’s climate continues to change in unexpected ways, understanding and identifying the role of these atmospheric bacteria becomes increasingly important.

This study adds to the growing body of research which suggests tiny microbes play much more important roles in nearly every biological or natural process than we realize. Human beings are basically all singing, all dancing colonies of microbes and our bacterial passengers have been found to exert a profound influence on all sorts of functions like metabolism, immune function, and even mental health. Might human beings merely be the giant exosuits of colonies of intelligent bacteria? It’s a neat thought.