Esoterica

World's oldest known beer factory may have been unearthed in Egypt

American and Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed what could be the oldest known beer factory at one of the most prominent archaeological sites of ancient Egypt, a top antiquities official said on Saturday.

Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the factory was found in Abydos, an ancient burial ground located in the desert west of the Nile River, more than 450km (280 miles) south of Cairo.

He said the factory apparently dates back to the region of King Narmer, who is widely known for his unification of ancient Egypt at the beginning of the first dynastic period (3150BC-2613BC).

Archaeologists found eight huge units – each is 20 metres (about 65ft) long and 2.5 metres (about 8ft) wide. Each unit includes about 40 pottery basins in two rows, which were used to heat a mixture of grains and water to produce beer, Waziri said.

Esoterica

13-foot-long 'Book of the Dead' scroll found in burial shaft in Egypt

A funerary temple belonging to Queen Nearit has been discovered in the ancient Egyptian burial ground Saqqara next to the pyramid of her husband, pharaoh Teti, who ruled Egypt from around 2323 B.C. to 2291 B.C., the Egyptian antiquities ministry said in a statement.

Made of stone, the temple has three mud-brick warehouses on its southeastern side that held offerings made to the queen and her husband.

Near the pyramid, the team of Egyptian archaeologists also found a series of burial shafts containing the remains of people who lived during the 18th and 19th dynasties of Egypt (1550 B.C. - 1186 B.C.), the ministry said in the statement, which was released Jan. 16. These burials were likely part of a Teti-worshipping cult that formed after the pharaoh's death. The cult seems to have remained active for more than a millennium, with people wanting to be buried near the pharaoh's pyramid. So far, the team has uncovered more than 50 wooden coffins in these shafts, along with a wide array of objects.

One of the most fascinating objects found in the burial shafts is a 13-foot-long (4 meters) papyrus that contains Chapter 17 of the "Book of the Dead," a manuscript that ancient Egyptians used to help guide the deceased through the afterlife. The name of the papyrus's owner, Pwkhaef, is written on it; that same name was also found on one of the wooden coffins and on four shabti figurines meant to serve the deceased in the afterlife.

Esoterica

Why The Jupiter And Saturn Conjunction During The 2020 Winter Solstice Is Extra Special

A rare celestial event will help mark the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere on Monday, Dec. 21.

Jupiter and Saturn are currently appearing very close together from an earthly vantage point. These two gas giants are in conjunction, an occurrence that happens every 20 years or so.

This one though, is extra special.

“Really, really close conjunctions like this one are quite rare," said Hal Bidlack with the Colorado Springs Astronomical Society. "We haven’t been able to observe Jupiter and Saturn this close since the year 1226. And we won’t see them again this close for decades and decades to come.”

The two planets were last about this close together in the year 1623. But the pairing occurred while the planets were close to the sun from earth's perspective, Bidlack said, and the sight was basically washed out in the sun’s glare.

Esoterica

Will a Church Get Away With Making a Teen Listen to Recording of Her Rape?

The victim was 15 years old when she says church elders called her into a room with her mother and stepfather, sat her down, and made her listen to a recording of her own rape. A lifelong Jehovah’s Witness, the girl—who we’ll call Anna—says she was sexually assaulted by an older church member on multiple occasions. But when the church learned of it, they decided to investigate not her assailant, but her—for the crime of having sex outside of marriage. And now it’s down to the Utah Supreme Court to decide if they should get away with it.

The court cases rests on the question of eccleiastical abstention, or whether the court can intervene in matters of religion. The Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses of Roy, Utah, claims it was engaging in regular religious practice when it forced the teenager to relive to her own rape. And so far, the courts have agreed. But lawyers for the woman, now in her late 20s, argue that their conduct is so “utterly intolerable” that it transcends this rule.

. . .

In court filings, the church disputes Anna’s factual allegations and denies mistreating her “in any manner,” while at the same time describing her interrogation as a “common and accepted religious practice.” Anna, it claims, “voluntarily associated with the religious organization and chose to participate in the judicial tribunal with her parents”—something that, they argue, “would not ordinarily cause severe unmanageable mental distress.” At a hearing last week, a Supreme Court justice described the practice as akin to “emotional waterboarding.” A lawyer for the church said she would draw the line at anything physical.

Esoterica

Leader of Alleged Sex Cult NXIVM Hit With Child Porn Charges

Keith Raniere, the founder of an alleged sex-cult that masqueraded as a self-help organization, has been hit with yet another charge, per Reuters: child pornography.

In March 2018, Raniere was arrested and charged with sex trafficking for his involvement in NXIVM, an organization that allegedly brainwashed, manipulated, and blackmailed women into being “sex slaves.” He also, according to new court filings, coerced underage girls into his operation. At a Brooklyn hearing on Wednesday, federal prosecutors said that Raniere had sex with a 15-year-old girl who later became his first “slave,” and that he had a sexual relationship with at least one other child.

. . .

In the year since Raniere’s arrest, a growing number of individuals with ties to the operation have been arrested and faced charges. NXIVM’s foundation has also increasingly cracked. In April, Smallville actress Allison Mack, who claims she instituted the ritual of branding sex slaves with Raniere’s initials, was arrested and charged with sex trafficking and forced labor; and in July, Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman, former bookkeeper Kathy Russell, and co-founder Nancy Salzman and her daughter, Lauren Salzman, were charged with racketeering conspiracy for their involvement in a criminal organization. (Since Raniere’s arrest, he’s also been charged with forced labor, wire fraud conspiracy, and human trafficking.)

And, just hours before Raniere was hit with the most recent child pornography charges, Nancy Salzman plead guilty to her racketeering charge, making her the first person from the operation to be convicted. In the courtroom, SFGate reports that she broke down, saying, “It has taken me some time and some soul-searching to come to this place.”

Esoterica

Gay people should not join Catholic clergy, Pope Francis says

Pope Francis is “concerned” about what he describes as the “serious issue” of homosexuality, saying in an interview published on Saturday that being gay is a “fashion” to which the clergy is susceptible.

“The issue of homosexuality is a very serious issue that must be adequately discerned from the beginning with the candidates,” the pontiff said with regards to would-be priests.

“In our societies it even seems that homosexuality is fashionable and that mentality, in some way, also influences the life of the church,” he says in the book The Strength of a Vocation, released in Italy on Saturday.

“This is something I am concerned about, because perhaps at one time it did not receive much attention,” he says in the book, a transcript of an interview that will be released in 10 languages.

Esoterica

Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

Some conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. But historians and archaeologists knew the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexica culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether the tzompantli had ever existed.

Archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) here can now say with certainty that it did. Beginning in 2015, they discovered and excavated the remains of the skull rack and one of the towers underneath a colonial period house on the street that runs behind Mexico City's cathedral. (The other tower, they suspect, lies under the cathedral's back courtyard.) The scale of the rack and tower suggests they held thousands of skulls, testimony to an industry of human sacrifice unlike any other in the world. Now, archaeologists are beginning to study the skulls in detail, hoping to learn more about Mexica rituals and the postmortem treatment of the bodies of the sacrificed. The researchers also wonder who the victims were, where they lived, and what their lives were like before they ended up marked for a brutal death at the Templo Mayor.

"This is a world of information," says archaeologist Raùl Barrera Rodríguez, director of INAH's Urban Archaeology Program and leader of the team that found the tzompantli. "It's an amazing thing, and just the kind of discovery many of us had hoped for," agrees John Verano, a bioarchaeologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, who studies human sacrifice. He and other researchers hope the skulls will clarify the role of large-scale human sacrifice in Mexica religion and culture—and whether, as scholars suspect, it played a key part in building their empire.

Esoterica

The Weird Little Industry Behind a Mesmerizing Instrument

Josiah Collett, a 10-year-old autistic boy from Broxbourne, England, had always struggled with social interactions. But things were getting worse. In school, his peers told him that he shouldn’t be alive. He spent nights crying, unable to explain to his parents what had happened.

“He was retreating into his own world,” his mother Georgia told me. “We couldn’t get through to him, and he couldn’t get through to us.”

During a family vacation to Belgium, the Collett family heard a “gorgeous, hypnotic sound” coming from the distance. They followed it down the street and found a busker playing something that looked like a cross between a caveman tool and a flying saucer. The busker tapped the instrument, called a “handpan,” which emitted both drum-like rhythms and delicate harmonies.

The mix of percussion and melody intrigued Georgia, Josiah’s mother. Josiah was always preternaturally talented when it came to music—he taught himself to play drums when he was two years old—and Georgia wondered if this new instrument, which so resembled a drum but was more expressive, might be good for Josiah.

Esoterica

The Brain Literally Starts Eating Itself When It Doesn't Get Enough Sleep

The reason we sleep goes far beyond simply replenishing our energy levels every 12 hours - our brains actually change states when we sleep to clear away the toxic byproducts of neural activity left behind during the day.

Weirdly enough, the same process starts to occur in brains that are chronically sleep-deprived too - except it's kicked into hyperdrive. Researchers have found that persistently poor sleep causes the brain to clear a significant amount of neurons and synaptic connections, and recovering sleep might not be able to reverse the damage.

A team led by neuroscientist Michele Bellesi from the Marche Polytechnic University in Italy has examined the mammalian brain's response to poor sleeping habits, and found a bizarre similarity between the well-rested and sleepless mice.

. . .

Think of it like the garbage being cleared out while you're asleep, versus someone coming into your house after several sleepless nights and indiscriminately tossing out your television, fridge, and family dog.

Esoterica

Physicists Just Came Up With a Mathematical Model For a Viable Time Machine

Physicists have come up with what they claim is a mathematical model of a theoretical "time machine" - a box that can move backwards and forwards through time and space.

The trick, they say, is to use the curvature of space-time in the Universe to bend time into a circle for hypothetical passengers sitting in the box, and that circle allows them to skip into the future and the past.

. . .

The model is based on the idea that instead of looking at the Universe in three spatial dimensions, with the fourth dimension (time) separated, we should be imagining those four dimensions simultaneously.

That allows us to consider the possibility of a space-time continuum, where different directions in space and time are all connected within the curved fabric of the Universe.

Esoterica

This Little-Known Math Genius Helped America Reach the Stars

In 1958, a woman stumped the panelists on “What’s My Line?” It took the actors Arlene Francis and Jack Lemmon, journalist Dorothy Kilgallen and publisher Bennet Cerf, celebrity panelists of the popular television game show, quite a while to figure out her M.O.

When they finally discovered what she did, the show’s host admitted that he, himself, was surprised by her occupation. The panel consisted of the stars of the day, but it was Mary Golda Ross who helped people reach them as the first female engineer at an elite, top-secret think tank.

Ross’s gender alone made her a hidden figure in the world of early spaceflight. But something else the panelists didn’t know about Ross was her Native American heritage.

Her great-great grandfather, John Ross, was the longest-serving chief of the Cherokee Nation. During his tenure, he fought to preserve his nation from white settlers’ incursions—and later was forced to lead his people along the march that became known as the Trail of Tears.