Character Journal - Sisters of Rapture

From COMICBITS

Hey everyone! After several long years and countless hours, my oh-so-sexy D&D book is finally complete and now available in PDF format for sale at DriveThruRPG! Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read on!

The Sisters of Rapture is an OGL (Open Gaming License, which means d20 3.5 edition) compatible sourcebook written by T.Catt (hey, that’s me!). The 72-page PDF features information on the Sisters of Rapture, an organization of warrior-priestesses dedicated to fighting evil and darkness in the names of the various goddesses of love and beauty, most specifically Aphrodite, Freya and Isis. The book contains a base 20-level class, 4 sexy prestige classes, new spells, feats, magic items and monsters and, of course, lots of brand new erotic fantasy art by T.Catt (hey, that’s me again!), Miravi, Oni, Anthony Carpenter, Thom Chiaramonte and many others! And it can all be yours for only $12.00!

If you’d like to see an exclusive sneak peek, you can download the Chapter 1 preview on the official Sisters of Rapture web-page (generously put together and hosted by my publishing partners on this project, Fantastic Gallery OGL, featured on the new -and mostly incomplete- gaming website, Arcane-Marks.com. Check out their awesome character sheets!). Eventually I plan on having more supplemental stuff on the SoR page, including a T.Catt sketch gallery and an extra prestige class and other fun free stuff. I just need to get it all put together first. Trust me, I’m working on it.

You can also see a preview of the 1st chapter (which features the base class) on the DriveThruRPG product page. So if you’re interested GO BUY IT RIGHT NOW! (Seriously. I need the money.) If you do buy the book, (and you will, because you’re an awesome person with excellent taste), feel free to leave a review on DriveThru’s site (there’s a link on the product page). Given the adult nature of the content, I didn’t submit the book for review with DriveThru’s official reviewers, so I’m counting on y’all to spread the word about it’s awesomeness! So please help me out, there.

As a little incentive, here’s the art from the cover! Thanks, everyone, for your support and I hope you enjoy the book!

A new character class emphasizing the romantic and erotic side of women and adventure. Available only through Drivethru RPG. Free bonus PDFs available through Arcane Marks

Relics of Power
The Golden Tresses of Sif
by Jarrod Camire
From Kobold Quarterly

Aura strong enchantment, strong illusion, strong transmutation; CL 16th
Slot head; Weight 3 lbs

Description

Loki once shorn the golden locks of the beautiful Sif and her husband Donar forced the trickster to have a golden headpiece made to replace the hairs of his beloved wife. This magical wig attaches itself to the wearer’s head and the hairs then grow like real ones, although the owner can change her hairstyle, coloration, and hairs’ length on a whim.

The golden tresses of Sif grant the wearer an enhancement bonus to Charisma of +8 for as long as the headpiece is worn; note that when the character specifically opts for blond hues (ash-blond, flaxen, golden blond, strawberry blond, etc.) the tresses grant an enhancement bonus to Charisma of +10. These magical tresses also greatly improve the effectiveness of a disguise, and this regardless how much the character is changing her appearance (no check modifier to your Disguise check, regardless the age, gender, race, or character’s size you chose to impersonate). Moreover, if you ever impersonate a particular individual, those who know about that person don’t get a bonus on their Perception checks when looking at you except if they intimately know the subject.

The tresses also provide advantages with all the skills that are based on Charisma as follow:

Bluff: Your opponents are blinded by your otherworldly beauty and you always succeed when feinting (for more information on feinting in combat see Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, Chapter 8).

Diplomacy: Creatures always become friendly in your presence, unless you have taken aggressive actions towards them first. If you ever attack the creature won’t remain friendly of course and won’t fall for the same trick twice.

Handle Animal: All Handle Animal DC checks are lower by a factor of 5 in your case.

Intimidate: Your comeliness is almost alien to some and when you successfully demoralize an opponent the target is stunned instead of shaken.

Perform: When a bard, skald, or any performer rolls a Perform check during a Bardic Performance or else, she receives a +5 circumstance bonus.

Use Magic Device: When a character tries to emulate an alignment, class feature, or race the Use Magic Device checks are lowered by a factor of 5 in that case.

Finally, a lock cut from the golden tresses of Sif looks like gold filaments; a single lock is worth 1 gp, even though the wig cannot produce more than 1d100 gp per day in this fashion. Locks cut after that will turn out to be made of copper instead of gold.

Destruction
The gold used to fashion the golden tresses of Sif can be melted down only in the forge where the artifact has been originally created, that of the Sons of Ivaldi. If someone ever discovered the scissors used by Loki to cut the genuine hairs of Sif and employed them on the golden tresses the wig would be utterly destroyed.

The Company of the Scarlet Rapture

Sybilathe Firestar

Wintermoon

Clearbrooke

Gaming Journal - The Icelandic volcano

Icelandic Volcano Began Rumbling in March
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: April 15, 2010
Source

The Eyjafjallajokull volcano, one of Iceland’s largest, had been dormant for nearly two centuries before returning gently to life in the late evening of March 20, noticeable at first not by any great seismic activity but by the emergence of a red cloud glowing above the vast glacier that covers it.

In the following days, fire fountains jetted from a dozen vents on the volcano, reaching as high as 100 meters, according to the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland. That spectacular show, along with lava flows up to 20 meters thick, and “lava falls” to the volcano’s northeast, turned it into a full-fledged tourist attraction.

The volcano seemed to return to somnolence early this month. Then on Wednesday, an explosion sent clouds of ash soaring as high as 11,000 meters, disrupting air traffic in Northern Europe, with ripple effects far beyond.

The latest eruption led to the evacuation of hundreds of rural Icelanders. Although in an area where many people keep packed suitcases near the door for just such an eventuality, the movement to emergency shelters was efficient, reports said.
About 450 people had registered by Thursday morning at a shelter in the Hvolsvollur Elementary School, Iceland Review reported. Hundreds of other people were staying with friends or relatives.

But people throughout the affected area had to wear protective masks, and farmers and rescue workers scurried to herd thousands of sheep and other livestock away from the area of ash fall, amid fears of the deleterious effects of fluorine or other toxic elements in the ash.

Sigurlaug Sigurdardottir, a farmer from Herjolfsstadir, told the mbl.is news site that the ash had turned a bright day so dark that it was impossible to see a nearby house.

Another farmer, Ingunn Magnusdottir, described a desolate scene, saying: “There is gray dust covering everything. The cars are gray.” She said that her animals were all being kept in barns but that livestock at other farms had to be evacuated to safer areas.

A thick layer of gray to black ash — which residents described as fine, like flour or sugar — covered thousands of hectares of land. The authorities were monitoring drinking water in islands that draw their water from Eyjafjallajokull glacier melt, Iceland Review’s Web site reported.

The eruption showed no sign of abating, Pall Einarsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland, told Reuters.
“The seismographs are showing that since this morning the intensity of the eruption seems to be growing,” he said.
As much a third of the glacial ice above the crater has melted — it had been up to 250 meters thick in spots — raising the level of a nearby river by nearly a meter and covering some roads. But the worst danger of flash flooding appeared to be over, and some nearby residents had been able to return home.

Bridges over the Markarfljot river were damaged. The police restricted travel on some roads in the east, and the authorities warned that further flooding was possible.

At one point, the authorities decided to use heavy construction equipment to dig a break through the main highway to Reykjavik, Highway 1, rather than risk an overflow thought capable of destroying a key bridge.

The latest eruption is the fourth by Eyjafjallajokull (pronounced EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl) in 1,100 years, vulcanologists say.
The last one, in 1821, which began with days of explosive eruptions, left deep layers of dark-gray ash through vast areas of southern Iceland — some of it nearly reached Reykjavik — and it caused the Markarfljot and the Holtsa rivers to flood.
The fluorine in its ash was blamed for the deaths or debilitation of large numbers of livestock.

As Eyjafjallajokull was settling down, the Katla volcano erupted in the spring of 1823.

Some vulcanologists and geologists said Thursday that the latest eruption might last just a few days. But the possibility remained of a longer event, like Eyjafjallajokull’s eruption of more than a year in the 1820s.

What a difference 48 hours makes: Clear skies above as volcano cools down after its violent outburst

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Source

With clear blue skies and a small cloud rising up to the heavens, Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano looks a picture of calm today compared with 48 hours earlier.

Back then, with fire and 1,250C lava spitting out from its core, it presented a far more violent image to the world.

Dust particles were shot up into the skies above and drifted down over the Atlantic, closing vast swathes of European airspace.

The volcano has now simmered to 80 per cent of its intensity, but scientists are warning that earth tremors could cause an even larger eruption at a neighbouring crater.

An eruption at the Katla volcano would be ten times stronger and shoot higher and larger plumes of ash into the air than its smaller neighbour.

The two volcanoes are side by side in southern Iceland, about 12 miles apart, and thought to be connected by a network of magma channels.

Katla is buried under one of Iceland's largest glaciers, the Myrdalsjokull, which is 500m deep. This means it has more than twice the amount of ice than the current eruption has burned through, threatening a new and possibly longer aviation standstill across Europe.

Katla showed no signs of activity Tuesday, according to scientists who monitor it with seismic sensors, but they were still wary.

Pall Einarsson, professor of geophysics at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland, said one volcanic eruption sometimes caused a nearby volcano to explode, and Katla and Eyjafjallajokull have been active in tandem in the past.

The last three tiimes that Eyjafjallajokull erupted, Katla followed.

Katla also typically awakens every 80 years or so, and is slightly overdue having last erupted in 1918.

That notion is frightening for nearby villagers, who would have to quickly evacuate to avoid the flash floods that would rip down Katla's slopes.

Even last week's eruption generated spectacular cascades of melted water and ice chunks the size of houses when burning gases and molten earth carved through the glacier.

Svenn Palsson, the 48-year-old mayor of the coastal village of Vik, said residents were going over evacuation plans just in case.

With a population of 300, Vik has been covered in three millimeters of ash from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, but the real concern is Katla.

Residents would have two to three hours to reach the safety of a shelter if the volcano erupted and caused the ice to melt quickly.

'We have practiced and can do it in 30 minutes,' Palsson said.

Other areas around the mountain, however, would have no more than 20 minutes to evacuate, he said.

Katla's substantial ice cap is a major worry because it is the mixture of melting cold water and lava that causes explosions, and for ash to shoot into high altitudes.

Strong winds can then carry it on over Europe.

So far there have been minor tremors at Katla, which scientists believe to be movements in the glacier ice, but the activity from Eyjafjallajokull is making measurements more difficult to read and an eruption more tricky to predict.

'It is more difficult to see inside Katla,' said Kristin Vogfjord, geologist at the Icelandic Met Office.

Vogfjord says Katla's sensitivity to eruptions at Eyjafjallajokull may have to do with pressure shifts in the Earth's crust that are caused by an eruption's magma flow.

'Katla can start tomorrow or in 100 years, you don't know,' said Palsson. 'All we can do is be ready.'

Gaming Journal - The Oldest Boats

Explorers find ancient boat in Black Sea
Vessel discovered by fishermen trailing nets along the sea bottom

From the Associated Press
Source: MSNBC
updated 9:19 a.m. PT, Sat., Nov . 29, 2008

SOFIA, Bulgaria - A well-preserved wooden dugout canoe, likely dating back to the prehistoric age, has been discovered at the bottom of the Black Sea, scientists said Saturday. The vessel was discovered by fishermen trailing nets along the sea bottom some 15 miles off the coast, said Dimitar Nedkov, head of the Archaeological Museum in the port city of Sozopol. "The dugout is 8.5 feet long and 27.5 inches wide, and it is made most probably of oak," Nedkov said. Bulgarian explorers have found 4 ancient vessels in remarkably good condition in the Black Sea, whose oxygen-depleted deep water preserves wrecks without the worm damage and deterioration that normally affects wooden vessels. "Nowhere else can you find similar dugouts, as well as any kind of wooden vessels over 300 years old, because water rots the wood away," Dimitrov said. "In the Black Sea, however, there is dissolved hydrogen sulfide below a certain depth which preserves all organic materials."

Ancient Boat
Source:AGI
Archeology: 8000 year-old Pirogue found in Lake Bracciano

(AGI) - Rome, Italy, Aug 1 - An 8,000 year-old pirogue was found in Lake Bracciano, in the area of the neolithic village La Marmotta. "It's an exceptional example of ancient ship engineering, which proves the advanced knowledge of the peoples who lived here in 6000 BC" say the archaeologists who made the discovery, of the Prehistoric Museum 'Luigi Pigorini' in Rome. More than 10m long, made out of a single oak trunk, the pirogue was still being made when it was abandoned for reasons we still don't know. It was found at a depth of 10 metres. The boat will be displayed in late September, at the town hall of Anguillara Sabazia. Research at La Marmotta is being carried out by a team led by Maria Antonietta Fugazzola, with the cooperation of Lazio's archaeology superintendence. (AGI) -

COPYRIGHTS 2002-2005 AGI S.p.A.

Shifting Gears - Biometric Palm Readers

Giving biometrics a hand
Palm-reading system used to safeguard patient records

By Bryn Nelson
Source: msnbc.com

A perceptive palm reader is helping one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S. divine the true identities of its patients, ushering in a new era of biometric identity verification.

The device, resembling a small black cube and manufactured by Tokyo-based Fujitsu Corp., uses a vascular pattern recognition system to accurately identify people while they hold their palm just above the cube. The scan, requiring less than a second, captures the unique branching pattern of blood veins and instantly converts key data points into a numerical code that can be compared with other palm scans to identify matches. The miniaturized device can plug into a laptop computer via a USB port, while an alternative version released last year incorporates the palm scanner into a computer mouse to facilitate secure logins.

Carolinas HealthCare System, the nation’s third largest public healthcare provider, began using PalmSecure last year in several major hospitals as part of the nation’s first biometric patient identification system based on vascular recognition technology. Now deployed at eight locations and two urgent care facilities, the identification program has enrolled about 170,000 patients in all. Once patients have registered their unique biometric “vein template,” it can be linked directly to their medical records.

“We have had excellent patient response and the product has performed well with no failures or replacements required to date after more than one year of use,” said Carolinas spokesman Jim Burke in an e-mail interview. The main challenge, Burke said, has been educating patients on the program’s benefits.

By accurately identifying patients when they check in, he said, the palm-based system has virtually eliminated the risk that a person’s Social Security number or health insurance identification card could be used by someone else to fraudulently access their records or access healthcare services.

How it works
At its core, the palm-reading system works by recording subdermal vein patterns.

“Subdermal means the information resides inside a person’s skin, and it cannot be altered by external factors such as cuts, burns, abrasions and any other skin condition,” said Hiroko Naito, business development manager at Fujitsu Computer Products of America. The technology extracts enough information from the vein pattern to create a unique template.

To acquire each vein pattern template, the technology uses “near-infrared reflection photography,” in which a high-performance camera essentially snaps a digital picture of the vein pattern within a person’s palm. The method exploits a distinctive characteristic of deoxygenated hemoglobin carried by blood: its ability to absorb near-infrared light and create a unique distortion of the light reflected back.

A computer algorithm extracts several data points from the resulting image and converts them into a compressed, encrypted and numbered vein template. The number can be correlated with bank, medical or other personal accounts, and a matching algorithm produces a similarity score for every new palm scan, deciding whether a similarity threshold has been exceeded and the pair can be scored as a match.

More accurate than fingerprints
Many banks in Japan have similarly begun using palm-based recognition as an extra level of security in case ATM cards are lost or stolen, Naito said.

“Japanese banks use PalmSecure for verifying the ATM card owner at the point of transaction via an ATM machine,” she said. Japanese ATM cards are typically “smart cards” embedded with a micro memory chip that can hold additional identification information. The card owner’s PalmSecure vein template is stored in each smart card, she said, and the owner must provide the proper biometric information plus the PIN code to complete a card transaction.

The technology, which debuted in Japan in 2004, has begun catching on in the U.S., and Naito said similar systems could be used for self-service kiosks and terminals, to record work time and attendance, or to control physical access to secure areas. Beyond the system’s high accuracy, she said, palm-based identification boasts the advantage of being more widely applicable than biometrics based on conventional comparisons such as fingerprints.

Although fingerprint recognition is more widely used for identifying people, Naito said fingerprint sensors often don’t provide enough data points for critical verification decisions. (Typically, 12 to 18 data points are needed.)

“The sensor device typically requires direct contact of a finger and is dependent upon the surface condition of the skin,” she said, meaning that dry or abraded skin can interfere with the system’s reliability. Skin diseases such as psoriasis can also impede print recognition. And some people with genetic disorders are born without fingerprints at all, limiting the system’s applicability among the general public.

Researchers generally agree that iris scanning generates the highest level of accuracy in biometrics, but Naito contends the technology is not well accepted because of its highly intrusive nature.

“People are uncomfortable exposing their eyes to some unfamiliar lights,” she said, adding that the system can force people to change their normal behavior, such as wearing contact lenses or long bangs. The technology also can be cost prohibitive and challenging to install and operate, requiring frequent adjustments for the height and angle of different faces to obtain a good eye scan.

Security Features
Carolinas determined that the palm recognition technology’s accuracy and security features offered the best option for its patient network, Burke said.

Because a computer algorithm immediately translates the image of palm veins into a number, the image cannot be stolen and reused, and patient privacy can be better safeguarded. In addition, database retrieval is faster because a number, not an image, is accessed, he said. Improved accuracy reduces that chance that patient records could be accidentally confused. Finally, patients place their hand a few inches above the device instead of actually touching it, eliminating the need for frequent cleanings and decreasing the potential for equipment damage.

“During our analysis and research, we also determined that other types of biometric identification either required touch (fingerprint), or were deemed too invasive by the general public (retinal scanning),” Burke said.

Naito stressed that because the PalmSecure system stores numbers instead of images, the vein pattern information would be incomprehensible to anyone who tapped into the system illegally. But perhaps one the best selling points of all, she said, is the algorithm’s low “false acceptance ratio” of 0.00008 percent, meaning that it incorrectly matches a vein template less than once per million tries — an error rate that even the best human palm-reader would be hard-pressed to match.

© 2009 msnbc.com

Shifting Gears: Metallic Glass

Solving the Mysteries of Metallic Glass

by David Chandler PhysOrg.com

-- Researchers at MIT and the National University of Singapore have made significant progress in understanding a class of materials that has resisted analysis for decades. Their findings could lead to the rapid discovery of a variety of useful new kinds of glass made of metallic alloys with potentially significant mechanical, chemical and magnetic applications.

The first examples of metallic alloys that could be made into glass were discovered back in the late 1950s and led to a flurry of research activity, but, despite intense study, so far nobody had solved the riddle of why some specific alloys could form glasses and others could not, or how to identify the promising candidates, said Carl. V. Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and director of the Materials Processing Center at MIT. A report on the new work, which describes a way to systematically find the promising mixes from among dozens of candidates, was published last week in Science.

Glasses are solids whose structure is essentially that of a liquid, with atoms arranged randomly instead of in the ordered patterns of a crystal. Generally, they are produced by quickly cooling a material from a molten state, a process called quenching.

“It is very difficult to make glasses from metals compared to any other class of materials, such as semiconductors, ceramics and polymers,” Thompson said. Decades of effort by scientists around the world have focused on “understanding and on exploiting the remarkable properties of these materials, and on understanding why some alloy compositions can be made into glasses and others cannot,” he said.

They still haven’t solved that “why,” Thompson said. But this new work does “provide a very specific and quantitative new insight into the characteristics of liquid alloys that can most readily be quenched into the glassy state,” he said, and thus provides a much more rapid way of discovering new alloys that have the right properties.

The research was the result of a collaboration between Thompson and MIT post-doc Johannes A. Kalb with Professor Yi Li and graduate student Qiang Guo at the National University of Singapore, working together across thousands of miles of separation through the Singapore-MIT Alliance. Essentially, the work consisted of producing an array of different alloys with slightly varying proportions of two metals, each deposited on a separate microscopic finger of metal. Then, they analyzed the changes in density of each different mixture when the glass crystallized, and found that there were a few specific proportions that had significantly higher density than the others — and those particular alloys were the ones that could readily form glasses. Of three of these special proportions they found, two were already known glass-forming alloys, but the third was a new discovery.

The new work could even lead to a solution to the longstanding puzzle of why only certain alloys make glasses, he said. “I expect these new results, and the technique we developed to obtain them, will play a key, and hopefully decisive, role in solving the mystery of metallic glass formation.”

Such materials could have a variety of applications because of their unusual physical and magnetic properties, Thompson said. They are “soft” magnetically, meaning that it’s very easy to change the magnetic orientation of the material. This is a highly desirable characteristic for the cores of transformers, for example, which must switch their magnetic orientation dozens of times per second. Transformers made from metallic glasses could potentially greatly reduce the amount of electricity wasted as excess heat in conventional transformers, reducing the need for new generating plants.

In addition, these glasses are unusually hard mechanically and have a high degree of springiness (known technically as a high “elastic modulus”). This springiness could make them a useful material for some sports equipment such as golf clubs or tennis rackets, Thompson said. Although metallic glasses are relatively expensive, he said, for some people interested in the best-performing sports equipment, or in virtually unbreakable housings for cellphones, for example, “no expense is too high.”

The new research is a major accomplishment for the Singapore-MIT Alliance, Thompson said, and would not have been possible without the high-quality communications and collaboration tools it provides. Despite their physical separation, “Prof. Li and I have been working together now for almost ten years,” he said. “We routinely meet via video conferencing and have both been deeply involved in the co-supervision of the remarkable PhD student, Qiang Guo, who carried out this research.”

Thompson said he sees such collaborations as a significant example of a growing trend. “I think this and other accomplishments within the SMA program demonstrate that the future of research lies in technology-mediated collaborations among people with common interests and complementary capabilities, regardless of where the different parts of the team are located,” he said.

Provided by MIT

Gaming Journal: Bbbzzzzzzzzz, Or One the Day the Insects Will Rule the Earth!

Giant Insects Might Reign If Only There Was More Oxygen in the Air

PhysOrg.Com

The delicate lady bug in your garden could be frighteningly large if only there was a greater concentration of oxygen in the air, a new study concludes. The study adds support to the theory that some insects were much larger during the late Paleozoic period because they had a much richer oxygen supply, said the study’s lead author Alexander Kaiser.

The study, “No giants today: tracheal oxygen supply to the legs limits beetle size,’’ was presented at Comparative Physiology 2006: Integrating Diversity.

The Paleozoic period, about 300 million years ago, was a time of huge and abundant plant life and rather large insects -- dragonflies had two-and-a-half-foot wing spans, for example. The air’s oxygen content was 35% during this period, compared to the 21% we breathe now, Kaiser said. Researchers have speculated that the higher oxygen concentration allowed insects to grow much bigger.

Tubes carry oxygen

First, a bit of background: Insects don’t breathe like we do and don’t use blood to transport oxygen. They take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide through holes in their bodies called spiracles. These holes connect to branching and interconnecting tubes, called tracheae, Kaiser explained.

Whereas humans have one trachea, insects have a whole tracheal system that transports oxygen to all areas of their bodies and removes carbon dioxide. As the insect grows, tracheal tubes get longer to reach central tissue, and get wider or more numerous to meet the additional oxygen demands of a larger body.

Insects can limit oxygen flow by closing their spiracles. In fact, one reason insects are so hardy is that they can close their spiracles and live off the oxygen they already have in their tracheae. Kaiser recalled a caterpillar that fell into a bucket of water in his lab. When the creature was discovered the next day, lab workers thought it had drowned. But when they removed its apparently lifeless little body from the water, they were surprised to see it crawl away.

Tracheae grow disproportionately

This experiment was designed to find out:

• how much room the tracheal system takes up in the bodies of different-sized beetles
• whether tracheal dimensions increase proportionately as the beetles get larger
• whether there is a limit to the size a beetle could grow in the current atmosphere

The researchers used x-ray images to compare the tracheal dimensions of four species of beetles, ranging in size from 3mm (Tribolium castaneum, about one-tenth of an inch) to about 3.5 cm (Eleodes obscura, about 1.5 inches). Beetles were not in existence during the Paleozoic period, but Kaiser’s team used the insect because they are much easier to maintain in the laboratory than dragonflies, which are quite difficult.

The study found that the tracheae of the larger beetles take up a greater proportion of their bodies, about 20% more, than the increase in their body size would predict, Kaiser said. This is because the tracheal system is not only becoming longer to reach longer limbs, but the tubes increase in diameter or number to take in more air to handle the additional oxygen demands.

The disproportionate increase in tracheal size reaches a critical point at the opening where the leg and body meet, the researchers found. This opening can get only so big, and limits the size of the trachea that runs through it. When tracheal size is limited, so is oxygen supply and so is growth, Kaiser explained.

Using the disproportional increases they observed among the beetles, the researchers calculated that beetles could not grow larger than about 15 centimeters. And this is the size of the largest beetle known: the Titanic longhorn beetle, Titanus giganteus, from South America, which grows 15-17 cm, Kaiser said.

And why wouldn’t the opening between the body and the leg limit insect size in the Paleozoic era, too? After all, dragonflies and some other insects back then had the same body architecture, but they were much bigger.

It is because when the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere is high, the insect needs smaller quantities of air to meet its oxygen demands. The tracheal diameter can be narrower and still deliver enough oxygen for a much larger insect, Kaiser concluded.

The research was carried out by Alexander Kaiser and Michael C. Quinlan of Midwestern University, Glendale, Arizona; J. Jake Socha and Wah-Keat Lee, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL; and Jaco Klok and Jon F. Harrison, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Harrison is the principal investigator.

Source: American Physiological Society

Amalgam Creatures
Seigebeast
Ankheg/Purple Worm (Amalgam Template)

This horror as the name applies is bred to do what it does. Destroy non-insect fortifications.

Avolakia/Ankheg (Amalgam Template)

Ankheg Steeds – Plated carapace for better protection

Swam Drones – Twisted Lore

Of Ages Lost: Treasures of a Dark Age

Huge Anglo-Saxon Gold Hoard Found
From The BBC

The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried in a field in Staffordshire.

Experts say the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date to the 7th Century, is unparalleled in size and worth "a seven-figure sum". It has been declared treasure by South Staffordshire coroner Andrew Haigh, meaning it belongs to the Crown. Terry Herbert, who found it on farmland using a metal detector, said it "was what metal detectorists dream of". It could take more than a year for it to be valued. Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: "This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries.

"(It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells." The Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels are intricately illuminated manuscripts of the four New Testament Gospels dating from the 9th and 8th Centuries.

'Just unbelievable'

Mr Herbert, 55, of Burntwood in Staffordshire, who has been metal detecting for 18 years, came across the hoard as he searched land belonging to a farmer friend over five days in July. The exact location has not been disclosed. "I have this phrase that I say sometimes; 'spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear', but on that day I changed coins to gold," he said. "I don't know why I said it that day but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it.

Duncan Slarke, Portable Antiquities: ''It is a hugely important find''

"This is what metal detectorists dream of, finding stuff like this. But the vast amount there is just unbelievable."

BBC correspondent Nick Higham said the hoard would be valued by the British Museum and the money passed on to Mr Herbert and the landowner. A total of 1,345 items have been examined by experts, although the list includes 56 clods of earth which have been X-rayed and are known to contain further metal artifacts. This means the total number of items found is likely to rise to about 1,500. Following the initial find, Alex Jones, director of Birmingham Archaeology and his colleagues were invited to excavate the site, Birmingham University said.

Terry Herbert: "Is there anything better than this to be found?"
Mr Jones said it was fantastic news for the region and raised the importance of heritage research. "Being a partner in one of the most exciting archaeological discoveries of our time is something we can all be proud of," he said. Experts have so far established that there were at least 650 items of gold in the haul, weighing more than 5kgs (11lb), and 530 silver objects totalling more than 1kg (2.2lb) in weight. Copper alloy, garnets and glass objects were also discovered at the site. Duncan Slarke, finds liaison officer for Staffordshire, was the first professional to see the hoard, which contains warfare paraphernalia, including sword pommel caps and hilt plates inlaid with precious stones. He said he was "virtually speechless" when he saw the items. "I saw boxes full of gold, items exhibiting the very finest Anglo-Saxon workmanship," he added. Roger Bland, head of portable antiquities and treasure at the British Museum, said: "The most we can say is, I think we're fairly confident it is likely to be a seven-figure sum."

'Truly remarkable'

The collection is currently being kept in secure storage at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery but a selection of the items is to be displayed at the museum from Friday until 13 October. Dr Kevin Leahy, who has been cataloguing the find for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, said it was "a truly remarkable collection". He said it had been found in the heartland of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. "All the archaeologists who've worked with it have been awestruck," he added. "It's been actually quite scary working on this material to be in the presence of greatness." He said the most striking feature of the find was that it was almost totally weapon fittings with no feminine objects such as dress fittings, brooches or pendants. "Swords and sword fittings were very important in the Anglo-Saxon period," Dr Leahy added. "It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career. "We also cannot say who the original, or the final, owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when.

"It will be debated for decades."

Hoard Shines Light on Dark Ages
By Dr Michael Lewis
Deputy head of Portable Antiquities Scheme, British Museum
From The BBC

This treasure paints a new picture of our past and the Dark Ages.

What makes it outstanding is the sheer quantity - we're talking about 1,500 objects, almost entirely precious metal. Normally you would expect a handful of objects each year of this quality for the period in question, which is the 7th Century. A metal detectorist finding just one of these objects would consider it the find of their life. To find 1,500 is bizarre and it would blow the average person's mind. Now, everybody wants to know who it belongs to and why it was put there. But those questions are tricky to answer. At the moment, we can say what it isn't, even if we can't say what it is. It's not associated with a burial, like Sutton Hoo was, for example.

Precious metal

After that, there are two main possibilities. The first is that this treasure has been purposefully deposited, like an offering to a god. But, from my 21st-Century perspective, I find it bewildering that someone could shove so much metalwork into the ground as an offering. That seems like overkill. The other possibility is it's a treasure chest that got lost, or they couldn't come back for it. That means they're not treasuring the objects as wholes, they're taking the precious metals off and keeping them. Most things we find from the Anglo-Saxon period are what we call "chance finds", in other words the things people lost, or hoards purposefully deposited, or finds from burials. But hoarding is more associated with the Viking period. Things like big coin hoards are more a 10th-Century sort of find. This is a strange phenomenon in this country for the 7th Century. People will now be working to understand when the material was deposited, then we'll look at what we know of the history - which is not a lot - to tie it down. The finds date from a wide period, which is unusual, so the first thing this may do is help us improve our dating of the Anglo-Saxon period. Much of what we know about this period is based on archaeology, not written evidence, because that written evidence is so scant. We've got the objects, but not the historical context. That's a problem because we understand the world based on what's written down, but we're not that good at understanding people from their material culture.

Rulers overlooked

Yet that's what we're trying to do here.

I don't think it's realistic to identify this with a particular individual. We'll probably never find the owners, although the best bet is a ruler from the kingdom of Mercia, where it was found. In this period some Mercian rulers, like Penda and Offa, are quite well-known to us. Penda is a bit before this period, and Offa is right at the end, so it has to be someone in the middle. But our historical sources are limited to people like the monk Bede, who wrote from a Christian perspective. The Mercian rulers at the time are likely to have been pagan, but they could have been overlooked by Bede even though they might have been important, because he wasn't interested in them - for whatever reason. So this will help us look back at those sources, and those historical figures, with more scrutiny than we did before. The Dark Ages were called the Dark Ages because it was seen as a period where, after Roman civilisation, somehow we went backwards in time. But this demonstrates there were still wonderful objects being produced, and produced in this country. It will take years, or decades, to get answers, and we still won't get all of them. We can't just ask questions about this hoard, either - we need to ask questions about how this hoard fits in with everything else we know.

Have we made assumptions elsewhere that aren't right? Those are the things we'd like to know about. It's very, very early days.

At the Bazaar of the Master of Gargoyles - Arcane Spells

Gaming Journal: Lost Worlds - Research Material 05

Shifting Gears: Free Will and the Parietal Cortex

Possible Site of Free Will Found in Brain
by Ewen Callaway

Source: New Scientist

Free will, or at least the place where we decide to act, is sited in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests. When a neurosurgeon electrically jolted this region in patients undergoing surgery, they felt a desire to, say, wiggle their finger, roll their tongue or move a limb. Stronger electrical pulses convinced patients they had actually performed these movements, although their bodies remained motionless.

"What it tells us is there are specific brain regions that are involved in the consciousness of your movement," says Angela Sirigu (pdf format), a neuroscientist at the CNRS Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in Bron, France, who led the study.

Brain Stimulation

Sirigu's team, including neurosurgeon Carmine Mottolese, performed the experiments on seven patients undergoing brain surgery to remove tumours. In all but one case, the cancers were located far from the parietal cortex and other areas that Mottolese stimulated. One patient's tumour sat near the parietal cortex, but did not interfere with the experiments, Sirigu says. And because the patients were awake during the surgery, they could answer questions.

"Did you move?" a researcher asked a 76-year-old man after lightly zapping a point on his parietal cortex.

"No. I had a desire to roll my tongue in my mouth," he responded.

After a stronger pulse to the parietal cortex, a 42-year-old man exclaimed: "My hand, my hand moved." Sirigu's team saw no signs of movement.

Action Loop

Sirigu's team also discovered that stimulating another brain area – the premotor cortex – provoked involuntary, unconscious movements in the same patients. The team's work points to two brain areas involved in the decision to move a limb and then execute the action. Sirigu speculates that the parietal cortex makes predictions about future movements and sends instructions to the premotor cortex, which returns the outcome of the movement to the parietal cortex. In day-to-day life, we rely on both brain regions to move about, she says. "You need both systems, the parietal and premotor cortex to generate intention and check whether this is followed through."

Ground Breaking

Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London, says the experiment breaks ground because it pinpoints volition to a specific part of the brain, allowing scientists to experimentally control it.

"That's extremely interesting, because up to now it has been very difficult for neuroscientists to deal with the idea of intentions or wishes or will," he says.
However, Haggard says no one should be surprised that the experience of volition can be liked to specific brain areas. "I can't think of any way you can have conscious experience other than as a result of neurons in your brain firing."

Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1169896)

Shifting Gears: Memory Scans

Brain Scans Can Read Memories

By Livescience Staff

Humans create memories of locations in physical or virtual space as they move around – and it all shows up on brain scans.

Researchers tracked brain activity related to "spatial memory" as volunteers moved about inside a virtual reality setup. Their new study challenges previous scientific thinking by showing that memories are recorded in regular patterns.

"Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality environment," said Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at the University College London in the U.K. "In other words, we could 'read' their spatial memories."

Maguire and her colleagues focused on the hippocampus, or a small part of the brain that deals with navigation, memory recall and imagining future events. Neurons known as "place cells" activate in the hippocampus and inform people of where they are as they move around.

The researchers used an fMRI scanner to detect blood flow changes in the brain, and study the activity of the place cells as a volunteer controlled movement inside the virtual environment. They then ran the results through a computer algorithm developed by Demis Hassabis, another neuroscientist at University College London.

Earlier studies with rats had also focused on the hippocampus and measured activity at the level of dozens of neurons at most. But that research had suggested that the brain did not record memory in any sort of regular pattern – a trend that this latest study may overturn. Maguire and Hassabis examined thousands of neurons as opposed to just dozens, which allowed them to pick out broader patterns.

"By looking at activity over tens of thousands of neurons, we can see that there must be a functional structure – a pattern – to how these memories are encoded," Maguire said. "Otherwise, our experiment simply would not have been possible to do."

Mind-reading research has grown increasingly sophisticated over the years. Another recent study predicted people's preference for one of two drinks with 80 percent accuracy. And earlier findings showed that people's brains reflect abnormal activity up to half a minute before making errors.

The latest findings on memory could lead to many more studies that examine how actual memories end up encoded across our brain cells, Maguire said. She and Hassabis want to look beyond spatial memories to see if brain scans can pick up patterns in our memories of the past, as well as visions of the future. Such work could also have clinical implications for understanding diseases that attack memory.

"Understanding how we as humans record our memories is critical to helping us learn how information is processed in the hippocampus and how our memories are eroded by diseases such as Alzheimer's," added Demis Hassabis.

Gaming Journal: Lost World - Research Material 04

True20 - Of Worlds Unknown - Research Material 04

Gaming Journal: Lost World - Research Material 03

True20 - Of Worlds Unknown - Research Material 03