Egypt: Source of the first secret society?

Naming the first secret society that's similar to those in the current era is a difficult task. The Egyptians had innumerable secret fraternities - most having to do with their complex and ritual-drenched religion. But one secret society wasn't quite as much a priesthood as the others. The society grew up out of one of the first figures in history who wasn't a pharaoh or a king. His name was Imhotep, and he was the chancellor, or grand vizier, for the pharaoh Zoser (also spelled "Djoser") in the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom.

Apart from being a master builder of the first recognizable Egyptian pyramid, Imhotep was also a physician, the father of Egyptian medicine. And as if these laurels weren't enough, he was an astronomer, a sculptor, a poet, and a philosopher whose sayings were cherished 20 centuries after his death. Later, Imhotep was made a god, with a highly imaginative lineage from a mating between a mortal woman and the god Ptah. But for the men of the cult of Imhotep that developed in the city of Memphis, he wasn't a god but a man, and was revered as such.

This cult had an inner secret society, a Brotherhood of Imhotep, that worshipped his ability as a builder and that created a metaphor for god as an architect, making for a striking similarity with the Freemasons who don't come along for at least another 4,000 years.

The ageless everyman: Count de St. Germain

St. Germain: An alchemist used the Philosopher's Stone – TV Series Warehouse 13

Just in case you think sightings of the "walking dead" are purely a modern phenomenon, consider this: In 1742, a curious man appeared in Europe. He claimed he had just arrived from Persia, and he seemed to be well acquainted with the customs of the East. He also claimed to be an alchemist, who'd learned the art of fusing jewels like diamonds to make larger stones. To all who met him, he looked to be in his 40s, and he was fluent in the major European languages, as well as Sanskrit, Latin, Arabic, and Chinese. He was a virtuoso violinist, a painter, and he seemed to possess incredible wealth, with no real source for his endless funds. He was known in social circles as the Count de Saint- Germain, and many believe that he discovered the secret elixir to eternal life.

Many sources claim that St. Germain was hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. Voltaire said he was "a man who never dies and who knows everything," and the legendary Casanova overheard the Count say that he was more than 300 years old. Variously, he's been identified as a high priest of Atlantis; the biblical character Samuel; the Greek philosopher Plato; Joseph, husband of Mary and father of Jesus; St. Alban, fourth-century English martyr; Merlin the Magician; Christen Rosenkreuz, legendary founder of Rosicrucianism; Christopher Columbus; and Francis Bacon.

During the Enlightenment period of the 18th and 19th centuries, he became a world-famous alchemist. Some have claimed that he was a secret advisor to Freemasons George Washington and Benjamin Franklin during the formative years of the founding of the United States, and it's been said that he tended to Franklin's painful gout while the aging diplomat was in Paris. Today, he's a regular figure in fantasy novels, frequently appearing as a vampire.

In the 1740s, St. Germain became a diplomat to France's King Louis XV. In the 1760s, he was in Russia as part of a plot to install Catherine the Great on the throne. And after warning France's Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of the impending French Revolution nearly 15 years before it occurred, he managed to traipse in and out of Paris during the Terror in the 1790s without losing his head.

Some records claim that he died in Germany in 1784. Yet, France's Comtesse d'Adhémar saw him many times between 1789 and the 1820s, and he never looked older than his 40s. Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky claimed to know him in the 1870s, and French singer Emma Calve said she knew him as late as 1897.

A French magician named Richard Chanfray appeared in Paris in 1972, claiming to be the ageless Count, and briefly made a name for himself on television by transmuting lead into gold. Money troubles led him and his girlfriend to take massive amounts of drugs and lock themselves into a garage with their car running in 1983, so questions about this suicidal final appearance of the Count throw questions on his immortality.

Astronomers find most Earth-like planets yet

A NASA diagram compares the planets of the inner solar system to Kepler-62, a five-planet system about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra.

An artist's concept depicts Kepler-62f, roughly 40 per cent larger than Earth, and to its right Kepler-62e, roughly 60 percent larger than Earth.

Astronomers using a potent NASA space telescope to search for life say they have found planets which are the most Earth-like candidates yet.

Two of the five planets orbiting a Sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in the habitable zone - not too hot, not too cold and possibly bearing water, NASA scientists report in the journal Science.

"These are the most similar objects to Earth that we have found yet," said Justin Crepp, assistant professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame.

The two planets are slightly larger than ours, with radiuses measuring 1.41 and 1.61 times the radius of the Earth.

Scientists do not yet know if their surfaces are rocky or watery, or if they have atmospheres that could sustain life.

But their location and size suggest they "could plausibly be composed of condensable compounds and be solid, either as a dry, rocky super-Earth or one composed of a significant amount of water," the study said.

Other studies have indicated that planets with a radius under 1.6 "have been found to have densities indicative of a rocky composition".

Astronomers detected the planets by observing their star dim when the planets pass in front of it, a process known as a "transit".

Professor Crepp first saw a dot near Kepler-62 about a year ago, and has studied the movements of the system for months in order to confirm the discovery.

"What really helped is that this star has five planets," he said.

"You can mimic one planet with another event, but when you have five of them and they're all periodic, that helps to put the nail in the coffin.

"It's hard to make that kind of signature with anything else that you can dream up."

In late 2011, NASA confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system - Kepler 22b, spinning around its star some 600 light years away.

However, the large size of that exoplanet, at 2.4 times the size of the Earth, has left some doubt over whether the planet is rocky, gaseous or liquid.

Kepler is NASA's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours.

It is equipped with the largest camera ever sent into space in its search for planets as small as Earth, including those orbiting stars in a warm, habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet.

AFP

Major asteroid site found in Aussie outback

The impact crater was caused by an asteroid slamming into Earth between 298 and 360 million years ago, which places it in the same epoch as the Late Devonian mass extinction(Source: Fredrik/WikiMedia)

Stuart Gary
ABC

One of the largest ancient asteroid impact zones on Earth has been discovered in outback Australia.
The impact zone, which centres on the East Warburton Basin in north-eastern South Australia, was caused by an asteroid up to 20 kilometres-wide that slammed into the planet between 298 and 360 million years ago, report scientists from the Australian National University and University of Queensland.

Terrain around the impact site shows evidence of changes caused by shock-wave related deformation and heating of the ground by an impact event, says study co-author, Dr Andrew Glikson from the Australian National University.

"This shock metamorphic terrain covers an area of over 30,000 square kilometres making it the third-largest site of its kind ever discovered on Earth," says Glikson.

The team report their discovery in the journal Tectonophysics.

To confirm the area was an impact zone, Glikson and colleagues studied quartz grains retrieved from drill holes.

Optical and electron microscopic examination revealed tiny fractures, which indicate the quartz grains had been shocked by an asteroid or meteor impact.

"This is the only way these features are formed," says Glikson.

Follow up observations detected deep seismic anomalies below the terrain where the samples were taken.

"This allowed us to determine the scale of the impact site which is buried under four kilometers of younger sediments," he says.

Multiple hits

Glikson believes there is a link between this impact site and three or four other large impact sites of the same age scattered around Australia.

"Asteroid impacts commonly occur in clusters of two or more projectiles," he says.

"Where impacts are near-contemporaneous they're usually fragments of a larger body broken apart by the gravitational effect of the Earth-Moon system."

"This new discovery is a twin for one we reported on last year in the Eromanga Basin in south-western Queensland called the Tookoonooka Crater.

"It looks like both impacted at the same time."

He also believes there is a link between this site and a nearby potential impact site on the South Australian/Northern Territory border known as the West Warburton geophysical anomaly, and another site at Woodleigh in Western Australia.

Past and future

Glikson says the discovery shows that research into past asteroid impacts is essential if we are to prepare for future asteroid encounters and their effects.

"The 280 to 360 million years old impact window places this in the same epoch as the late Devonian mass extinction event".

The late Devonian mass extinction was one of five major extinction events in Earth's history, wiping out large groups of marine species.

"There are indications of mass extinction at this time caused by an impact winter, with the huge flash of the asteroid, major fires and seismic events with magnitudes of 10, 11 and 12, which would have disrupted habitats," says Glikson.

Mega eruptions caused mass extinction

Scientists have narrowed down the time frame for a mega-volcanic eruption to within a few thousand years of the end-Triassic-extinction.

Stuart Gary
ABC

A mass extinction event 200 million years ago that wiped out half of all species on Earth was caused by volcanic activity, a new study says.

The finding reported today in the journal Science, provides the tightest link yet between the release of huge amounts of volatile gases during a series of mega-eruptions and a global die-off of marine and terrestrial species known as the end-Triassic-extinction.

The researchers say these eruptions may have triggered climate changes so sudden that many creatures were unable to adapt and add the situation is analagous to the pace of human-induced climate change today.

"This set the stage for dinosaurs to dominate Earth for the next 135 million years, until they too were wiped out by an extinction event," says lead author Dr Terrence Blackburn, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists had previously connected the timing of volcanic mega-eruptions with several mass extinction events, but these estimates have a margin of error of one to three million years.

Blackburn and colleagues developed a significantly more precise date with a margin of error of only a few thousand years (the blink of an eye in geologic time) by analysing samples of basalts from a formation called the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province.

Supercontinent

This basalt formed through the separation of North America and northern Africa during the rifting of the Pangean supercontinent to form the Atlantic Ocean basin.

"As the sea floor spread, the massive outpouring of basaltic magma released gases including carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans," says Blackburn.

"Over 600,000 years more than three million cubic kilometres of basaltic lava was produced in four pulses."

Blackburn and colleagues used the decay of uranium isotopes contained in zircon crystals embedded in basalt samples to get exact dates for the eruption events. The samples were collected from New Jersey, Nova Scotia and Morocco.

"Zircon crystals form in solidifying magma and contain uranium which decays at a set rate that we can measure precisely," says Blackburn.

The first of these pulses, found in samples from Morocco, produced more than a million cubic kilometres of magma and coincides exactly with the start of the end-Triassic-extinction 201,564,000 years ago.

This date is supported by changes in a layer of sedimentary mineral grains linked to one of Earth's periodic magnetic pole reversals known as the E23r event.

Evidence of the reversal is consistently found in sedimentary rock located just below the extinction event, making it a convenient marker.

The samples from Nova Scotia indicate eruptions occurred about 3000 years later, while those from New Jersey point to an eruption about 13,000 years after the Morroccan event.

Sediments below that time contain pollen, spores and other fossils characteristic of the Triassic era, while in those sediments above the fossils disappear.

The researchers say that among the creatures that disappeared were early crocodilians, tree lizards and many broad-leaved plants.
 

Lessons for today

According to Blackburn, the initial mass extinction event lasted no more than 20,000 years.

This conclusion was reached by correlating the precisely dated basalts with surrounding sedimentary layers generated by temperature changes that affected lake water levels.

These layers are the result of a 20,000-year cyclic change in the orientation of the Earth's axis toward the sun.

The study shows the extinction event occurred in just one layer - meaning the event took 20,000 years at the most.

Blackburn says there are lessons to be learned from this study.

"In some ways, the end-Triassic-extinction is analogous to what's happening today," says Blackburn.
"It's operating on a similar time scale.

"So we can gain an insight on the future impact of increasing atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels on global temperatures, ocean acidity and life, by studying the geologic record."