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A Matter of Gravity - If all matter has gravity, does that not mean that matter is giving off energy? - John

Gravity and energy can get intertwined, but they are not the same thing. Perhaps we should start with talking about what gravity actually is.

Einstein's theory of relativity says that gravity is the curvature of space due to the presence of mass or energy. The classic illustration of this is picturing space as a sheet of rubber stretched tightly across a frame. Now imagine a large bowling ball plopped into the middle of the sheet. It sinks into the rubber creating a depression. In the same way objects with mass, like the Earth, deform space. If you were to roll a ping pong ball across the rubber sheet so it just grazed the depression, it would wind up swinging around and around the bowling ball, getting closer and closer, as it lost speed. This is very similar to what can happen with an asteroid caught in Earth's gravity. It can start orbiting the Earth closer and closer until it finally crashes to the ground or is burned up in the atmosphere.

This illustration shows us that the Earth doesn't really "pull" anything toward it, the object simply follows a path though the fabric of space which has been warped by the presence of something very heavy. (It would be more accurate to say the space is pushing the asteroid making its path curve). The Earth doesn't expend any energy in this process just like the bowling ball doesn't spend energy to pull the ping pong ball towards it.

Now that doesn't mean that most matter doesn't radiate energy. For example, most objects if they have a temperature greater then absolute zero will radiate thermal energy. Think about an iron bar that has been heated until it glows a cherry red. It is radiating energy in the visible spectrum that we can see. Even objects that don't glow visibility can radiate heat in the form of infra-red waves.

Probably the most famous application of this was in 1965 when two scientists in New Jersey were trying to figure out why there was static in their newly built radiometer antenna. The found a hissing sound at 3.5 degrees Kelvin that they could not account for. After some phone calls they figured out that that they were listening to the sound of material left over from the "Big Bang." Over the course of a billions years it had cooled down to radiate heat at just a few degrees about absolute zero. Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson shared a Nobel Prize for their accidental discovery.

The Filthy Facts - What is dirt made of? - John

By dirt I assume you are referring not just to that stuff that we find under our fingernails, but to that stuff that's under our feet when we step outside our houses into the back yard. If so, then more technical word for this material is soil.

Though the exact ingredients change from location to location, soil is about 45% minerals, 25% water, 25% air, and 5% organic material. The mineral portion is simply rock that has been broken and crushed down to tiny particles over time. There are a number of different processes that help break a large boulder down into gains. The most obvious of these is water. In a climate where the temperature drops below zero at night for part of the year, water from rain or snow can work its way into tiny cracks in the rock. When the temperature goes down the water turns to ice and expands, cracking the rock. This widens the fissures allowing more water into the rock so that the process is repeated over and over again.

Plants can also break rock apart. Even in rock newly created from cooling volcanic lava, certain plants can find a foothold by locating nutrient-bearing water in pores in the rock. The plant's roots support a fungus called mycorrhiza that generates chemicals that break up the rock. As the roots grow they can also mechanically widen the pores to cracks, furthering the process.

Both water and wind can also act to erode rock and break it down by scraping tiny particles against it like sandpaper. These broken up gains of rock are known as "parent material" (With the parent being the original rock).

Although organic material only composes about 5% of soil, it's one of the most important parts and absolutely necessary for plants to grow. A single shovel full of topsoil can contain billions of tiny plants, animals and microorganisms. These include bacteria, fungi, and protozoa that can eat the minerals and convert them to nutrients that plants can use.

Soil has definite layers. Starting at ground level we have the area where surface plants and animals live. When living material dies up here it is attacked by bacteria and broken down and turns into humus. Humus is simply organic material that has reached a point where it can be broken down no further and will remain just as it is for centuries.

The next level is known as topsoil and this is where most of the organic material in the soil, dead and alive is. Much of the topsoil is in the form of the aforementioned humus.

The level below that is subsoil. The subsoil has much less organic matter than topsoil, but plenty of nutrients and water, so plants shoot their roots down to this level to get these and pull them back up to the surface.

Weathered parent material is the next level. This has almost no organic material at all and is composed of minerals broken down into small particles. The parent material that created this isn't necessary the same as the bedrock below this level as wind and water may have displaced the granulated minerals from distant locations.

The lowest level is solid bedrock. The distance from the surface to the bedrock varies a lot from location to location, but on average it is about eight inches. It takes about a thousand years for a half inch of soil to develop in nature, but this is dependent of many factors like climate and the hardness of the parent rock material, as well as whether soil itself is eroded away by water and wind.

Night With the Devil - In the movie Fantasia there is a work called "A Night On Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky and during the intro it says that the Bald Mountain is a real location and according to tradition, is the gathering place of Satan and is followers. My question is this has there been any sighting of paranormal activity around the mountain? - Ben

The piece you are referring to was written by the innovative Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1867. This work, unfortunately, was never performed before Mussorgsky's death in 1870. In 1881 his friend composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov did an arrangement of it and this premiered in 1886 quickly becoming a favorite of concert goers the world round. Leopold Stokowski also did a new arrangement of it in the early 20th century and this version that is used in the 1940 Disney film.

Many of Mussorgsky's works were inspired by Russian folklore and Night on Bald Mountain is no exception. The use of the word "bald" is a direct translation from the Russian, but in this case it really means "bare" as in a mountain with no trees. The idea stems from the folklore of Eastern Europe in which witches would meet at midnight on bare hilltops to perform unholy rites. As Mussorgsky himself wrote "So far as my memory doesn't deceive me, the witches used to gather on this mountain, gossip, play tricks and await their chief - Satan. On his arrival they, i.e. the witches, formed a circle round the throne on which he sat, in the form of a kid, and sang his praise. When Satan was worked up into a sufficient passion by the witches' praises, he gave the command for the Sabbath, in which he chose for himself the witches who caught his fancy."

Night on Bald Mountain had a long history. In 1858 Mussorgsky started working an Opera called St. John's Eve using elements from Nikolai Gogol's short story St. John's Eve about a Russian peasant who makes a deal with a witch that costs him his immortal sole. The project was never completed, but some of the pieces may have been transferred to The Witch an 1860 opera project by Mussorgsky based on a play by the same name written by Baron Georgy Mengden, a friend of the composer.

It was Mengden's play the first introduced the idea of a witches' Sabbath as the centerpiece of the music. The Witch was never completed, but Mussorgsky used elements of it to compose St. John's Night on the Bare Mountain (the original title of the piece) in 1867. The work was meant to be a "tone poem" which means it is meant to illustrate a poem, story or picture. In this case the music is used to evoke in the listener a picture of a meeting of witches with their master, Satan.

So where is the Bald Mountain at? Lysa Hora is the location identified by Mussorgsky in his notes. Lysa Hora is not so much a mountain as a low hill located inside the boundaries of the Ukrainian capital city Kiev. The name translated into English comes out as "Barren Mount" or "Bald Mount." Though today the hill is fairly wooded, in earlier times much of it had no trees. It is referred to as a meeting place of witches in works by Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov.

In 1872 the Russian Army built a fort on the hill. Later this was converted to a storehouse. Beginning in 1906 the Tsarist government used it as an execution place for over 200 prisoners. Today it is a nature preserve.

There are claims that the place is haunted and people have allegedly had paranormal experiences there, but whether this is because there is something abnormal about the place, or people are simply being affected by its reputation is unknown.

Lysa Hora is just one of a number of "bald" mountains in Eastern Europe that have an evil reputation. Zamkova Hora, also in Kiev, has a similar status. In Germany the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz mountain range, is also known as a bare mountain where witches meet. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used it in his in his play Faust. The Brocken spectre, an optical illusion that looks a bit like a ghost, but is caused by fog and bright sun behind a person, maybe the one of the reasons that this particular peak has a reputation for paranormal events.

Despite the popularity of the Rimsky-Korsakov version, modern music historians suggest that in "fixing" Mussorgsky's music Rimsky-Korsakov was really changing the character of the work and making it more bland and acceptable to audiences. The original version has now been recorded and it is a quite a bit more of the nightmare that Mussorgsky meant it to be.

Without the Moon - My question is a hypothetical one: what if, for whatever reason, the moon would suddenly be gone? Would it gravely affect life on Earth? I understand life would probably not have started if it weren't for the tides caused by the Moon, but are humans still depending on tides, directly or indirectly? And what about the weather in a Moonless world? - Johan W.

As you noted, if Earth had never acquired the moon our planet would be very different place. In fact, it might not have intelligent life, or perhaps no life at all. The moon was created when a Mars-sized body struck the Earth about 30 million years ago after the Earth itself formed. This caused a huge amount of the Earth's crust to be blown into orbit. Eventually it coalesced into a single, large body that was an unusually large moon given the size of its mother planet. The fact that a large portion of Earth's crust found its way into orbit may be responsible for us having the multi-plate tectonics that have created our continents (Because the moon's gravitational forces help keep the Earth's guts warm and moving). Without continents we might find ourselves living on a "waterworld" with no land. This might not mean there wouldn't be any life, but without dry land fire and other technologies might not have developed limiting the expansion of civilization.

The sun would still give the oceans tides, but they would be weak. Without the moons helping to "mix" Earth's oceans life might not have appeared, or it might have developed much more slowly. Also the moon's tides have also been responsible for slowing the Earth's rotation. Without this we would probably have shorter days and typical wind speeds of over 200 mph.

So if there was not moon from the beginning, the Earth would look like a much different place. But suppose, as in your question, it just suddenly disappeared someday. Would we notice?

The changes would be more subtle, but still significant. The moons tides create moving stream of water in the oceans which can affect our weather. These tides carry much heat away from the equator and up towards the poles. Without them we would expect the lower latitudes to be much warmer, which might change weather patterns. For example, without the moon we might find that the Pacific Ocean's El Nińo winds might simply go away or change. We might also expect to see some rain-soaked lands turn into deserts or visa versa. Undoubtedly this would also affect storm patterns across the globe.

The gravity of the moon also causes the ocean levels to be higher near the equator, and lower toward the poles. If the moon suddenly vanished we would find coastlines changing as water moved from lower latitudes to higher ones. Your beach front condo might suddenly be miles from the ocean.

We might find a number of animals unhappy with the sudden loss of the moon. Many creatures along the shore are highly affected by tides and depend on them. A number of nocturnal creatures are adapted to operate on moonlight so we would probably see these die out to be replaced with other species adapted to just starlight.

Humans have also benefited from moonlight, but with our invention of electric lights the loss of lunar illumination, might only be a minor annoyance. Even in our modern world, however, certain human patterns, like conception, seem still to be linked to the phases of the moon. Perhaps these are just psychological, but they are still real.

Humans, of course, need to take into account the movement of tides in ship navigation, so without the moon, this would change. There is some technology now that uses tides to generate electricity (by driving turbines as water moves in and out of a bay) and these would become much less efficient if the weak tides associated with the sun were the only forces moving the ocean. The lack of large tides would also impact at least one popular sport and, as one scientist put it "The surfing would suck."

So we would see quite a few significant changes to the Earth's environment, with no moon, but they won't necessary be catastrophic. And course there is an upside: we wouldn't have to worry about werewolves.

German Strategic Bombing - I came across a reference to a General Walther Wever. He seemed to be the main proponent of [German] strategic bombing until he died (some say mysteriously) in 1936. My question is what do you think would have happened had he lived? Might he have convinced Germany of the need for powerful long range bombers, like the ones the Allies used on Germany, sooner rather than later? What effect might it have had if the Germans could do the same to the Allies as they did to them? - Michael

Let me start by giving a little history of General Wever for those not familiar with him. He was born in 1887 and served as a German staff officer in WWI. During the period in between the war he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe and was a proponent of a balanced German air force that was both capable of tactical operations in support of front line troops and strategic operations designed to destroy an enemy's resources and ultimately his ability to make war. Wever died in 1936 flying back from Dresden to Berlin when the plane he was aboard crashed shortly after takeoff. An examination of the wreckage revealed that locks designed to keep the control surfaces of the plane from being damaged by high winds while parked had not been removed during the pre-flight check. This rendered the plane uncontrollable in the air.

Certainly if Wever had prevailed in convincing the Germans to build more strategic bombers it would have changed the course of the war. Wever recognized that the Soviet Union would be a particularly hard enemy to beat if the Russian industrial production located beyond the Ural Mountains could not be damaged. This required a bomber capable of flying at least 1,240 miles carrying a bomb load of 3,300 pounds (a type of plane nicknamed the "Ural Bomber"). Wever got two prototypes of such a bomber ordered before his death: The Dornier Do 19 and the Junkers Ju 89. By the time they were delivered, however, Wever was dead and, Albert Kesselring had taken his place. Kesselring didn't see a need for Germany to invest in heavy bombers and convinced his boss, Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, to cancel the program. Perhaps Göring felt that such bombers would be of limited use against a strong air defense. He seemed to think Germany would be able to fend them off. In 1939 he boasted "The Ruhr will not be subjected to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring!" It seems as if Göring regretted his decision as time went on, however, when the Allies started reducing German cities to rubble. He blamed the bad call on his advisors who said heavy bombers weren't as effective as medium ones, "Well, those inferior heavy bombers of the other side are doing a wonderful job of wrecking Germany from end to end," he said, bitterly.

If Wever had lived could he had talked Göring into seeing the need for strategic bombing? Perhaps. Working against him was the general belief, however, that the German's had that the war would be relatively short. Only three years. They didn't expect it to drag out and become a war of attrition. This timeline colored the German thinking in many ways including the decision not to invest heavily in the atomic bomb (which was a four or five year-long project).

Ironically if Wever had lived and convinced Göring to build a heavy bomber force it might have actually shortened the war dramatically by tipping the scales in Germany's favor during the Battle of Britain. The German air force was ill equipped for the job of gaining air superiority over Britain by destroying its aircraft industry and fighter squadrons. The Junkers Ju 87 "Stuka" dive bomber, in which the German's had heavily invested, and which had performed so well during the blitzkrieg victories early in the war, were easy targets for the well-organized British fighter defense and had to be withdrawn from the battle.

One can only wonder what might have happened if Wever was around and his heavy bombers had pounded Britain the way the Allied bombers pounded the Germans later in the war. If the Germans had managed to gain air superiority, Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain, would have followed. If successful this would have stopped the British strategic bombing of Germany before it really got started and deprived the U.S. of airbases it needed to attack Germany with its B-17 squadrons.

This would have left the United States and Germany peering at each other across the Atlantic. Germany could have then proceeded with its "Amerika Bomber" program and the U.S. would have been forced to develop its own trans-Atlantic bomber. How the war would have ended is anybody's guess, but whoever invented the atomic bomb first probably would have been the winner.

Steam Punk Sub and Plane - Could someone build a steam powered submarine or airplane? - Jacob

Both of these feats have already been done! The first steam powered submarine was the the Ictíneo II built by Spanish inventor Narcís Monturiol Estarrol in 1864 and modified from human to steam power in 1867. The problem with powering any kind of submarine is the most engines burn oxygen and quickly use up the limited air inside a submerged vessel stopping the engine and killing the crew. Estarrol powered his sub, however, by using a chemical reaction between potassium chlorate, zinc and manganese dioxide. This reaction generated enough heat to turn water into steam and drive a turbine engine to push the sub forward. As a bonus the reaction also produced oxygen which allowed the crew to remain underwater to eight hours. Unfortunately this history making boat was destoryed after only 20 demonstration dives when the shipyard that built it scrapped it when Estarrol couldn't pay his bills!

It wasn't until 1913 that anybody tried to use a steam engine on board a submarine again. The British were interested in making their subs fast enough to keep up with the rest of the fleet, so they put a boiler and steam engines into their K-Class subs. The steam engines only worked on the surface, however, and when the boat submerged they had to use standard batteries.

During WW II the German's developed a steam powered sub using the same principals as Estarrol. The boat carried a tank of hydrogen peroxide which when run through a catalyst produces oxygen. The oxygen, burned with diesel created the heat to make steam and drive a turbine. The United States experimented with this idea after WWII, but dropped further development in favor of subs with nuclear power plants.

Now for the airplane. As early as 1842 two enterprising Brits, William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow, patented a design for an "Aerial Steam Carriage" which would carry passengers. The two had more success at publicizing the device using beautiful lithograph advertisements of the plane flying over exotic locations like the Egyptian pyramids (left), than actually getting it into the air, however. The problem they had was that steam engines, compared to the modern internal combustion engine, has a much poorer power to-weight ratio. This is less of a concern with something like a railroad locomotive that stays on the ground, but is a critical factor for an airplane.

In the 19th century, however, internal combustion engines were in their infancy. Though they would eventually have a much better power-to-weight ratio than steam engines this wouldn't be until the 20th century. Also early internal combustion engines tended to be unreliable, stopping without warning. Not something you like to see in an airplane engine.

So inventors worked as best they could with steam engines. Hiram Maxim, inventor of the machine gun, also dabbled with aviation and built a massive three and a half ton airplane powered by two 360hp steam engines which he tested on a track near Bexley, England. Unfortunately during a ground test in 1884 the track failed and the machine flew loose. As it was uncontrollable in the air, it immediately crashed and Maxim decided not to rebuild it.

In 1899 there are claims that Gustave Whitehead built and flew a steam-powered airplane near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The plane supposedly got off the ground and crashed into a building. However, there is little historical evidence for this story.

The first clear example of a steam power plane actually achieving a controlled flight was in the 1930's when George D. and William J. Besler converted a Travel Air 2000 aircraft to use a light steam engine. The two brothers started on the project just to see if it could be done and demonstrated some successful flights at the airport in Oakland California. One observer noted the plane, without the roar of an internal combustion engine, was extremely quiet and the pilot could converse with people on the ground from an altitude of 200 feet. It was also capable of very short landings as the propeller could be instantly reversed after the wheels touched the ground to slow the plane. The steam engine also used less flammable type fuel than fuel which saved money and lowered the chances of a fire during a crash.

Despite some enthusiasm for steam-power flight from the press at the time, the plane turned out to be never more than a novelty and an interesting footnote in aviation history.

Atlantis Found On Google Earth? - There is an underwater grid-like structure in the Atlantic Ocean northwest of Africa. This is clearly seen from Google Earth at coordinates 31 29'31.63"N 24 27'49.31"W. I have checked all the accompanying data and there is no logical explanation. - Victor N.

When folks first began noticing this strange looking structure in early 2009 some people thought that it might be evidence for the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis. The grid structure looks a lot like city streets though the size (about 90 miles square) seems a bit big for ancient city.

Dr Charles Orser, a curator of historical archaeology at New York State University and an expert on Atlantis, thought the anomaly was fascinating and warranted further inspection. "The site is one of the most prominent places for the proposed location of Atlantis, as described by Plato. Even if it turns out to be geographical, this definitely deserves a closer look," he added, speaking to the Sun newspaper.

However, a closer inspection of the data reveals that it is only an artifact in the way underwater topography for Google Earth has been put together. As you may guess getting the data needed to map terrain heights underwater is a lot more difficult that getting the same information on land. The data from Google Earth comes from several sources and the information is combined to get as accurate a picture of the ocean floor as is possible.

One set of information comes from satellites that use radar to measure the height of the ocean. Because a large underwater mountain has more mass than an underwater plain, the gravity over the underwater mountain is stronger. This means that over the mountain a "hump" of water forms. This is too small to be visible to the naked eye, but the radar of the satellite can sense it. Because the satellite sees the hump on the surface, we know there must be a mountain underneath it and it gets put on to the map.

This method is great for mapping large areas of the sea bed, but is limited to finding really big things like mountains, valleys and plains which may be miles in size.

Another method of mapping the sea bottom is to get a boat and use downward pointing sonar (bouncing a sound wave off the bottom) to get an exact measurement. This is very, very accurate, but can only give you the depth directly under path of your boat.

When these two sources of information are combined into one map you can get some strange results. For example, information from the boat sonar can tell you that the depth of the water is a little deeper than the satellite data says it is for the same area. This isn't totally unexpected as the satellite data is known to be less accurate. The map favors the boat's sonar (because it is known to be more accurate) so it uses it when it is available. However, since survey information by boat sonar is not available for most of the ocean, the area on either side of where boat sailed still depends on the satellite data. The result can be a straight line across the map following the path of the boat which looks like some kind of artificial structure, but really just an anomaly in the data.

Apparently in the case of this area in the North Atlantic there was a fairly intensive survey done using boat sonar with the boats following a grid pattern. I've found some evidence that this was related to a project to see if this region of the Atlantic Ocean would be a good place to dump radioactive waste. The data is still around, but apparently the project was cancelled.

Good thing too. I don't think those Atlantians would be very happy if we dumped a few hundred tons of atomic waste on their home…

Hope Diamond - I've heard several stories about the 'cursed' Hope diamond. Most stories about the Hope diamond say its owners had a violent death. Is there any proof of this? Thanks! - Kelsey

The curse of the hope diamond, the largest deep, blue diamond in the world, is much like the curse of King Tut's Tomb: It has some roots in actual events, but much of the story has been much exaggerated. In the case of the diamond the culprits include the early 20th century press and a few of its owners hoping to pump up its sales value.

The story has it that the diamond was originally one of two eyes stolen from a statue of the goddess Sita somewhere in India. The priests cursed whoever owned the stones from that point on. There is absolutely no evidence that this story is true, however. It appears to have originated in a New Zealand newspaper article in 1888 as a bit of hoax journalism.

It is believed, however, that the diamond was brought back from India in the form of a 115 carat rough-cut, triangular stone by French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in the 17th century. It is thought that in 1669, Tavernier sold the blue diamond along with a bunch of other valuable stones to the French King Louis XIV. Louis XIV had the court jeweller, Sieur Pitau, recut the stone into a in a 67 carats diamond which became known as the French Blue.

During the French Revolution it was stolen and did not appear again for twenty years when it showed up in the collection of a London diamond merchant named Daniel Eliason. By then it had been re-cut into its current 45.5 carat shape. Although many suspected the Hope was cut from the French Blue, it wasn't certain until a lead cast of the French Blue diamond was discovered in 2007 allowing the two to be compared, so the suspicion could be confirmed.

It is thought that the stone was purchased by King George IV of England, but later sold to cover debts. By 1839, the Hope Diamond was in the gem collection of Henry Philip Hope and it stayed with the family until Lord Francis Hope sold it in the early 20th century to a diamond dealer. It bounced around several dealers until it was bought by Pierre Cartier in 1910. Cartier was able to interest American socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean in the stone and she purchased it in 1912 and wore it at many gatherings until her death in 1947. In 1949 it was sold to diamond merchant Harry Winston who donated it to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in 1958 where it has remained ever since.

As the title of a 1908 Washington Post article, "Hope Diamond Has Brought Trouble To All Who Have Owned It," suggests the stone has been supposedly responsible for much calamity for its owners. The beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette have been blamed on it, but the story seems to ignore the dozens of other royals who didn't own the stone but lost their lives in the French Revolution. The death of a former owner, Selim Habib, was blamed on the diamond, but the truth was it was actually another man who drowned in a shipwreck who happened to have the same name. The insanity and suicide of diamond dealer Jacques Colot has been attributed to the Hope, but there is no historical record that he was associated with it in anyway. The forced abdication of Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid is supposedly the work of the diamond, but evidence shows that though the Sultan was interested in the stone, he never bought it. According to the legend, Tavernier, who brought back the stone from India supposedly died of a fever soon afterward, but in reality lived to the ripe old age of 84 (Quite a longevity achievement for the 17th century).

Actress May Yohe, the former wife of Lord Francis Hope, helped promote the story of the curse, not to just explain misfortunes in her own life, but also to promote her career. In 1921 she persuaded film executive George Kleine to produce a 15-part action serial, The Hope Diamond Mystery, in which she played Lady Francis Hope. She also played the same part in The Mystery of the Hope Diamond.

Of course are some people associated with the diamond that did have tragedy in their life. The last private owner was Evalyn Walsh McLean. She had a son die in a car accident and her husband ran his business, The Washington Post, into the ground (it was purchased and brought back to health in the 1930's). He then left her for another woman and eventually died in a sanitarium. Despite this McLean lived to the age of 60 and never blamed her problems on the curse.

So is there a curse or not? It is extremely difficult to separate the normal amount of tragedy we see in life from what might be caused by some supernatural power. Plus much of what is blamed on the diamond is appears to be just made up. Perhaps it is instructive to look at the first and last owners of the diamond to see how they fared: Tavernier and Winston. Travernier, who is the person blamed for taking the diamond from the idol in the first place and should have borne the brunt of the curse, lived into his eighth decade. Winston, the last owner, was an immigrant who moved to the United States and built a successful jewelry business from nothing. The business continues to be extremely profitable even today. Winston died in 1978 at age 82 never believing in the curse.

Of course, in any case nobody needs to worry about the curse anymore. The Hope Diamond is the property of the Smithsonian Institution which is a part of the United States government so there is no concern that - hummm - Wall Street problems, housing crisis, terrorist concerns, health care costs - perhaps there is something to that curse after all...

Warp Factor One Plus - Two objects move apart each at just over the speed of light. Can they observe each other? - Dave B.

I take your question to be "If I hopped on one spaceship and my friend jumped in another and both took off going faster that the speed of light in opposite directions, could we look behind us and see each other?" The short answer is no. The light coming from your friend's rocket would never catch up to you, so you would never see him. However, things are a little more complex than that.

This is an interesting "thought experiment" of the type that Einstein would use to explore questions in relativity. (One of his thought experiments was "If I rode a bike near the speed of light, what would I see?").

From a practical point of view you couldn't actually do it. Nothing with "rest mass" (which is pretty much anything you need to build a spaceship out of) can go faster, or even as fast as the speed of light, which is a sizzling 186,000 miles a second in the vacuum of space. Things get more and more massive as you accelerate them and you would need more energy than is available in the universe to accelerate a spaceship to the speed of light.

What would you see if you were on a rocketship, or Einstein's bike just approaching the speed of light, however? Would the beam from the bike's headlight slow down to a crawl?

No, from the rider's point of view the light of the beam would still move away from him at the speed of light! That's because while the speed of light is a constant, time isn't. Time would slow down for the rider so that when he measured the speed of his headlight, it would still seem to be going at 186,000 miles a second away from him.

As you approached the speed of light the world behind you would seem to turn shades of red. This is because as you move really fast the light waves coming from behind you are stretched out - a phenomenon known as the Doppler Effect (it's the same one that causes a car horn to appear to lower its pitch as the car passes by you).

Although it is impossible to build spaceships that go at the speed of light, you can actually observe what would happen when you look at the stars with a big telescope. Space is expanding a carrying all the stars and galaxies (collections of stars) along with it. This means the father a galaxy is from us the faster it is moving away from us. In turn the farther a galaxy is away from us the more its light will be "red-shifted" by the Doppler effect (In fact astronomers use the amount of the "red-shift" to tell how far an object is away from Earth). Galaxies very, very far away from us appear to be going near the speed of light. Because they are simply being carried along as space expands, the rules about acceleration to the speed of light do not apply here. As they start to move away from us faster than the speed of light the light waves arriving from them get longer and longer and redder and redder until they simply disappear.

Yet Some More Yeti Questions - For some reason we had a horde of questions on the Yeti (also known as the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas) this month from different people, so I'm just going to go through them one by one:

Is there any evidence that the yeti exists? If so, what is it?

It depends on what you call evidence. There have been any number of cases were people claimed they saw a Yeti or found foot prints. Were they telling the truth? If they were telling the truth, did they think they saw a Yeti, but really saw some other creature and mistook it for a Yeti? In the case of footprints, were they fake? Or were they footprints of some other animal that had been misshapen by the melting effect of the sun?

You see the problems with "evidence." The only really uncontestable evidence would be a dead, or even better, a live Yeti that could be examined by experts. A hair sample might do if it could be used to establish, by checking the DNA, that the creature was not one known to science and a member of the primate family.

Hair samples that were supposed to belong to the Yeti have been analyzed for DNA in the past. They are usually were identified as belonging to either wild goats or bears.

Are the Yeti and Bigfoot related?

Since we can't prove the existence of the either the Bigfoot or the Yeti it is really hard to say if they are related. People who believe in the existence of these creatures seem to think they are primates (the same family of animals as gorillas, chimps and humans). If they are right, then they would be related. If anybody ever finds DNA from these creatures, it could be used to determine if they were not just related, but actually the same species.

Have there been any attacks on humans?

There is a report of a Sherpa girl who was tending her yaks and said she was surprised by a large ape-like creature with black and brown hair. It started to drag her off, but seemed to be startled by her screams and let her go. It then savagely killed two of her yaks. She escaped with her life and the incident was reported to the police, who found footprints.

When was the yeti first seen?

Reports of such creatures go back centuries and are part of the legends of the local peoples. The first Westerner to see a Yeti was probably the Greek photographer, N. A. Tombazi. During an expedition in 1925 he was shown a creature moving across the snow in the distance and told it was a Yeti.

Do you think a polar bear on its hind legs can be mistaken for a Yeti?

As polar bears do not live in the Himalaya Mountains, the supposed range of the Yeti, it seems unlikely. However, a number of people think either the rareTibetan blue bear or the endangered Himalayan Brown Bear may sometimes be misidentified as Yetis. According to mountaineer Reinhold Messner he had an encounter with a Yeti that turned out to be a Himalayan Brown Bear that was upright on his rear legs.

The Mythic Snake - What is a "nãga"? - Jacob

There are several meanings to the word, but the one I think you are interested in comes from Asian cultures. There "nãga" refers to a snake, usually a hooded one, like a cobra. Attached to the name is not only living snakes, however, but a large number of stories from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions about mythical snakes.

In these traditions the nãga is often pictured as a huge snake with both serpent and human traits. Often the nãga can shape-shift from one form to another and are many times depicted in drawings with a human upper half and a snake lower half (much like the traditional image of a mermaid with a human upper half and a fish tail).

Unlike the snakes in many western myths which almost always given evil roles, the n?ga of the east is more often pictured as good or at least neutral. They are associated with water and often seen as guardians of springs, wells and rivers. They can also bring rain (which is extremely important as this grows crops to feed people). Their control over water, however, also has negative aspects and the nãga can bring drought and floods if provoked by human disrespect for the environment. Sometimes they are also the guardians of treasure.

The Chinese version of the dragon is in many ways a type of nãga. Both have long sinuous bodies and are associated with water and treasure.

In Cambodia along the Mekong River on certain days mysterious red fireballs appear from the river and rise rapidly into the nighttime sky. The number of fireballs varies, sometimes there are only a few dozen and on other occasions a few thousand. According to local tradition these fireballs are caused by the nãga under the river shooting off fireworks to celebrate the end of the rainy period in October. The spectacle has been greatly promoted by the government in recent years and many towns hold festivals. There is no good scientific explanation for this phenomenon as yet, though some people think it might be related to gases rising from the water. A 2002 television program argued that the fireballs were tracers from gunshots on the other side of the river, but this was met with furious protests from local villagers who prefer the Nãga explanation.

Nãgas appear in the great Sanskrit epic Mahabharata from India, were they take a more negative role. In the story the sage Kasyapa has two wives, Kadru and Vinata. Kadru's children are the nãga, while Vinata's children are the sun god and the bird, or eagle, god, Garuda. Garuda becomes the sworn enemy of the nãga and devours them for food. Often an amulet of Garuda is worn by people to guard against snake bites.

Pictures of nãga are often carved into temples or as a part of other statuary. In addition to the half-human form they are often shown as snakes with multiple heads. Often the heads will form a fan-shape over a person or object as a sign of protection.

In modern popular culture the nãga occasionally pop up in some form in books or games. The pet snake of Voldemort, from the Harry Potter series of books, is named Nagini which is the female version of nãga. Also in the World of Warcraft game there is a race of aquatic snake-people called Naga.

The Biggest Bomb - Is there anything more powerful than an H-bomb? What would the effects of an H-bomb be on a metropolitan area such as New York? - Jacobn

The largest H-Bomb ever detonated in history was the Tsar Bomba tested by the Soviet Union on October 30, 1961. It exploded with a force equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT. In theory the bomb's design could have yielded as much as 100 megatons, but was scaled down to limit the fallout. Even as it was the detonation was so powerful that the pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb received a fatal dose of radiation despite being 28 miles away.

Though such power is impressive, a bomb that large is not really a useful military weapon. Because of its size it required a special aircraft to deliver it and it could not be put on top of inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM). From a military point of view it made more sense to build many smaller nuclear weapons (perhaps 1 megaton or less). If deployed over a large area they could be much more effective than the one big Tsar Bomba.

The flash would be followed by a shock wave traveling outward at the speed of sound. This would level all buildings, including skyscrapers, within a distance of a little more than a mile. This would be an area the width of the island and from Central Park down to about Greenwich Village. Wooden buildings would be demolished over most of the island. Between the flash, blast wave and following firestorm it is estimated that everybody within a mile and a half of the Empire State Building would be killed. On the rest of Manhattan and much of the surrounding area within about 5 miles of ground zero the casualty rate would be around 50 percent. Interestingly enough the fallout from an air detonation would be a much smaller factor that the heat and the blast as much of the radioactive dust would decay before falling to the ground. (Note that a bomb produced by terrorists would not nearly be as powerful, but might have a greater fallout as it would be exploded close to the ground).

So is there a weapon more powerful than an H-Bomb? In theory an anti-matter bomb would be enormously more potent. While an H-Bomb converts matter to energy with an efficiency of less than one percent, anti-matter coming in contact with matter would turn into energy with 100 percent efficiency. However, anti-matter isn't easy to obtain. In Dan Brown's bestselling book Angels & Demons he suggests anti-matter is stolen from CERN, the European Nuclear Research Center, to create a bomb. However, if all the anti-matter produced by CERN in the last 30 years was preserved and brought together it would only amount to about to 10 billionths of a gram and would have the power of a kitchen match.

There are other agencies with plans to produce anti-matter in larger volumes (like NASA - it would make a great fuel for a spaceship since it is a lot of potential energy in a small package) but the cost of using it to make a bomb would still be far more than building a regular nuclear bomb of the same power. Also for military purposes it is important to have a weapon that can be handled safely and only goes off when you want it too. Since anti-matter will explode whenever it contacts matter, storing it is difficult and should the storage mechanism ever break down a large explosion would result. Even so, the Air Force has expressed some interest in anti-matter, not in order to build an anti-matter bomb itself, but to use anti-matter as a trigger for a regular nuclear bomb.

A Burning Question - Why can aluminum dust burn but a block of aluminum will not? - John

It does seem strange that if I put a match to a small pile of aluminum powder I can get an energetic fire, (in fact powdered aluminum is used in rocket fuel and fireworks) but if that same aluminum is in the form of a block I can hold a match to it all day without anything much happening. Why?

Then again, perhaps it's not quite as strange as we might think. Anybody who has ever attempted to light a camp fire knows that despite wood being very burnable, it is almost impossible to take a large branch, stick a match to it, and get it to burn. However if you take your knife out and carve tiny pieces off the branch until you have a little pile of shavings, you can put a match to it and it will start burning without any problem.

The reason in both the case of aluminum and the wood is that a fire needs three things to burn: Heat, Fuel and Oxygen. Our match provides the heat and the wood or aluminum is the fuel. The missing ingredient is an adequate amount of oxygen.

Of course air is about 20% oxygen. The problem is that the oxygen can only participate in the burning if enough of it can get close enough to the fuel to react with it. It needs a large surface area, in comparison to the volume, to make that contact. Let's look at an example.

A cube of aluminum one inch square has a volume of 1 cubic inch. (1x1x1). The surface area follows the formula of 6L^2 where L is the length of any one side. So the surface area of the one inch cube is 6 square inches.

Suppose we break up our cube into smaller cubes each with the sides a tenth of an inch long. This gives us 10x10x10 = 1000 cubes which still have the same volume of the original cube (1 cubic inch). Each of the smaller cubes would have a surface area of 0.06 inches. If we take this figure a multiple it by the number of small cubes we have we get 60 square inches. So if the aluminum cube is in one piece it has a surface area of just 6 square inches. If we break it up into a 1000 pieces, the surface area jumps to 60 square inches, though the volume has not changed one bit. The more surface area that is available, the better contact the aluminum has with oxygen in the air and the better it will burn.

Since the particles in powdered aluminum are much smaller than one tenth of an inch the surface area of one cubic inch of the stuff is enormous compared to the original solid cube and it burns extremely well.

And, of course, the same thing is true of wood. Take a one inch square block of wood and it is very difficult to get it to burn with a match. Take that same block and turn it into sawdust and it can be lit with a match quite readily. Take that same saw dust, put it into the air as a cloud, so that all sides of particles have the maximum amount of contact with the oxygen in the air and it will actually explode.

Every once in a while you hear about a grain silo exploding. Grain by itself will burn well, but is not explosive. When the grain is poured into a silo, and a cloud of grain dust fills the air then even a small spark can trigger a massive explosion.

So the lesson here is that the smaller the size of the particles, the more readily anything, aluminum, wood or even coffee creamer, burns. Check out what happened when Mythbusters took some powered creamer, blew it up into the air to make a cloud, then lit it.

Ariel's Family - Please, can you tell me more about mermaids? I've become fascinated with them, especially about sightings of mermaids. Thanks! -Mermaid lover

Stories of creatures with a top half that looks like a woman and the bottom half the looks like a fish, go back for thousands of years. Perhaps they first appear around 1000 BC when the Assyrian goddess Atargatis, upset after a love affair gone bad, changes herself into a fish/woman and takes up residence in a local lake. Later stories include the Greek legend of Thessalonike, sister of Alexander the Great, who was turned into a mermaid when she died. Whenever she met a ship she would ask, "Is King Alexander alive?" A sailor with any sense of personal safety knew the right answer was "He lives and reigns and conquers the world" because any other reply would send the mermaid into an rage provoking a storm that would threaten the ship.

Mermaids were often portrayed as extremely beautiful, but troublesome beings. They would often use their female charms, particularly their voices, to lure sailors off a safe course and onto a rocky reef. A mermaid might also try to tempt a sailor to lean over the side of his ship were she could grab him, pull him underwater and drown him. In one tale a Scottish Lord hears a woman in the lake. He runs to her rescue, but is stopped by a servant who warns she is a mermaid. The mermaid then declares to the nobleman that she would have seized him and drowned him if the servant had not intervened.

Even when they didn't go out of their way to cause problems, mermaids were still considered worrying and just seeing one was a bad omen. Observing a mermaid might be a warning that a bad storm was on the way.

Still, in some mermaid tales the creatures turn out to be good. Probably the most famous mermaid story is Hans Christian Andersen's 1836 work The Little Mermaid which is responsible for much of the modern lure surrounding the creatures. In the story a pretty, young mermaid spies a human prince aboard a ship, rescues him when he nearly drowns and gives up her life in the sea to become human in an attempt to gain his love. This story was interpreted into an extremely successful film by Disney in 1989.

The word itself comes from the old English word for sea, mere, and woman, maid. There is an equivalent term for a male creature, merman. The mermen of legend, however, are said to have little interest in humans and are quite ugly.

Through the years there have been many reports of the sighting of mermaids. In 1614, English explorer John Smith wrote that he saw a mermaid in the Caribbean. "Her long green hair imparted to her an original character by no means unattractive." He also said he'd "begun to experience the first effects of love," before the creature dove and revealed the fishy parts of her anatomy.

Columbus also reported seeing mermaids off the Dominican Republic in 1493. He was less impressed than Smith writing that he saw some "female forms" that "rose high out of the sea, but were not as beautiful as they are represented."

In 1610 Capt. Richard Whitbourne also claimed he saw a mermaid in Newfoundland's St. James harbor.

What were these sailors seeing? One theory has it that they may have observed some kind of aquatic animal. One possibility in warmer climates would be the manatee (sometimes referred to as a "Sea Cow"). These creatures live along the coast and in rivers in the equatorial regions like Florida, South America and West Africa. They measure up to twelve feet long, weight up to 3,000 pounds and dine on aquatic plants. They are air breathing mammals adapted to the water and move about using flippers and a large tail fin.

Most people would think it would take a very lonely sailor to mistake one of these creatures for a beautiful woman, but manatee expert James Powell, a biologist with the Wildlife Trust in St. Petersburg, has observed "there have been times when they come up out of the water and the light has been such that they did look like the head of a person." To someone who had been indoctrinated with tales of mermaids, at a distance the mistake might not be that hard to make. "If you were expecting to see a mermaid," he notes, "you'd see this back and tail come up with no dorsal fin" just like in the stories.

The fact that people now recognize mermaids as fully fictional creatures may explain why they are rarely reported these days. People today expect to see manatees, not the alluring half women/half fish people that lonely sailors longed for in the past. Still, an occasional report does surface. The Israeli town of Kiryat Yam had several reports of a mermaid along its beach in 2009 and posted a one million dollar reward for to the first person to photograph the creature. One witness, Shlomo Cohen, said, "I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather, but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail."

The Cruelest Pirate of Them All - I've recently became interested in piracy. Can you tell me who the cruelest pirate was? - Anonymous.

Before we try an answer who was the cruelest pirate, maybe we should explore why pirates seem to be associated with being barbarous at all. Yes, they were "bad guys" clearly breaking the laws of their time, but did they needlessly inflict pain and suffering? Were they really any crueler than the "good guys?"

The truth is that many seamen became pirates often to escape the difficult conditions on other ships. The British Navy was perhaps one of the fiercest opponents of the pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy (1500AD to 1750AD) and life on a British Naval ship was no picnic. The captain had absolute power on the vessel and could have his men whipped and beaten at his whim. Most regular sailors in the British Navy got only half as much as was paid for seamen on a merchant ship. Of the money they did get, much of was taken away in deductions to pay for the ship's chaplain and/or doctor. Oh, and by the way, the Navy withheld your pay for six months to keep you from deserting the ship.

With pay so low and bad conditions you might wonder why anybody would want to join the British Navy at all. Well, many people didn't. To fill out their ranks ships would send ashore a "press gang" that would, capture men and force them back to the vessel where they would be working away from their families and homes for years at a time. You didn't even need to be a British citizen to have this done to you and the practice of pressing American sailors into service on British Naval ships was one of the causes of the War of 1812.

Let's compare this to conditions on pirate ships. Almost always everyone on a pirate ship was a volunteer. The ships were usually democracies and the crew would elect the captain and the quartermaster who would then appoint the rest of the officers. The pirates would often have a code of conduct and rules agreed to by the crew before the voyage started. The system also had a set of checks and balances to make sure that nobody had too much power. The Captain was often in charge in battle, but at other times the Quartermaster was in charge or could at least veto the Captain's orders.

The pay was better on pirate ships too. Whatever loot was captured was split equally among the crew with responsible officers getting a double share. Some of the money was set aside in a primitive type of insurance policy to make sure that crew members that lost a limb or eye in battle would get compensated.

Pirates were also very equanimous accepting people on the crew from many nationalities and races. Often almost half of pirate crews were often made up from escaped slaves.

So how did pirates get the reputations a being cruel even to one another? Well, often this was a result of public relations. The pirates wanted everybody to think they were tough so that no ship's crew would challenge them in battle. Some of them used the rule "No quarter after first blood" which meant if a ship put up a fight instead of surrendering immediately, the pirates would show no mercy when they won.

Movies and books often pictures pirates as loving a good fight, but the truth is they much preferred it if the ship simply surrendered to them. If it did, the crew and passengers were usually treated well and not killed. However wealthy passengers might find themselves guests of the pirates until a ransom was paid. Any pirate that was foolish enough to have a policy of not taking any prisoners alive would find himself in constant battles as the crews of the merchant ships would then be forced to fight to the bitter end.

Usually when people think of cruel pirates the name Blackbeard comes to mind. Blackbeard, whose real name is thought to be Edward Teach, was well-known pirate that roamed the coast of the Americas in the early 18th century. Blackbeard, who was tall and powerfully built, cultivated a fearsome image to scare his enemies. Many strange stories grew up about Blackbeard after his death, but there is no record that he ever mistreated or murdered his captives. Blackbeard, like almost all pirate Captains, was elected by his crew.

Certainly there were a few pirates that did act in a cruel manner toward their prisoners. One name stands out among these and that's Roche Braziliano. We are not sure of Braziliano's real name and his nickname is translated as "Rock the Brazilian," though Braziliano was actually Dutch. He apparently acquired his name after being exiled to Brazil for an extended length of time.

Braziliano had numerous conflicts with the Spanish and hated them. There are stories of Braziliano taking Spanish prisoners, tying them to a spit set between two fires and roasting alive them like they were pigs. Braziliano's cruelty didn't stop there, however. He was a drunkard and would wander the streets of Port Royal, a notorious pirate haven, assaulting people and threatening them if they refused to have a drink with him.

If these stories are true then indeed Braziliano certainly ranks up there as one of the cruelest pirates of all time.

The Fate of the Young Duchess - I have recently been researching the Romanov family out of curiosity. I have heard the legends about Anastasia or one of the other children surviving. I was wondering if it was likely that a Romanov child really did escape the firing squad. Thank you! - Kelsey

What happened to Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, was a mystery through much of the 20th century. Nicholas II was forced to abdicate his throne on March 15, 1917 after a series of governing missteps threw the country into chaos. Nicholas' family - his wife Alexandra, daughters Olga, Tatiana, Marie, Anastasia and son Tsarevich along with several personal servants - was moved for safety by the provisional government to a residence in the Ural mountains. In October of 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power and imprisoned the family over several months in different locations. In April of 1918 they were moved to a house in the city of Yekaterinburg. At 2 AM on July 17, they were awoken and told to get their things as they were being moved to a new location. The family and servants were taken to the building's basement, where the Bolsheviks, fearing that the White Army (which was loyal to the throne) would soon take the city, had them executed by gunfire and bayonets.

Anastasia had just turned 17 at the time. She was by all accounts a vivacious and energetic girl with blue eyes and strawberry-blonde hair. Growing up she was given to pranks and misbehavior and according to one source "undoubtedly held the record for punishable deeds in her family, for in naughtiness she was a true genius." During World War I she was too young to serve as a nurse, but with her sister Maria visited the nearby military hospital and played games of checkers and billiards with the injured to lift their spirits. One soldier who knew her noted that she had a "laugh like a squirrel."

It isn't clear how the rumor that Anastasia and possibly other members of the family, survived the execution started, but it may have been a result of the Bolsheviks trying to cover up the murders. Since the princesses were of German blood, the German government sent telegrams to Russia demanding their safety. Since this was several days after the murders the demand was too late to save their lives. The Russians, not wanting to upset the Germans, with whom they had just signed a peace treaty, did not acknowledge the executions, but told them that the girls had been moved.

Over the next few decades as many as ten women came forward and claimed they were Anastasia. The most famous of these was Anna Anderson, who said she had faked death by lying still among the bodies of her family and was rescued later by a sympathetic guard. She fought a legal battle with the German government for recognition from 1938 to 1970, but was never accepted as the missing woman. Though Anderson was cremated after her death, in 1994 DNA was obtained from a tissue sample gathered during a hospital stay and compared to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a known Anastasia relation. The results clearly proved that Anderson was not the missing Duchess.

In the early 1980's the graves of the family were found, but kept secret until after the fall of the Soviet government. The find was officially announced in 1991, but the grave was missing two bodies: That of the son, Tsarevich and one of the sisters, either Maria or Anastasia. This gave hope that perhaps the story of an escape from the execution was true. However, in August of 2007 a Russian archaeologist discovered two burned skeletons at a bonfire site near Yekaterinburg. They were the right age to be Tsarevich and the missing sister. This was later confirmed by DNA, though scientists still disagree on whether the body at the bonfire site was Maria or Anastasia.

This discovery matches records that had been locked away for most of the history of the Soviet Union. A report by Yakov Yurovsky, who was in charge of the execution, to his superiors indicated that all the family and servants were killed that night. Initially the bodies were dumped down a mineshaft, but when rumors started to spread about that as a possible burial location, Yurovsky said that he had the bodies moved and finally buried at a site 12 miles outside the city. Later two of the bodies were removed and destroyed in a bonfire. This was done so that if the burial site was found, the remains there would not match the expected number of bodies leaving some doubt as to whether it really was the Romanov family.

The mystery has finally been solved and the bodies of all four daughters, the former Tsar and his wife and son have been accounted for and confirmed by DNA testing. As much as the story of the young princess escaping death may engaged our imaginations over the years, history has spoken and her life, along with that of her family, was cruelly ended on that cold morning in 1918.

Dragon Vs. Drake - What is the difference between a dragon and a drake? - Anonymous

Let's first start by defining the word dragon. As most people might know it's a legendary creature with many reptilian characteristics. Dragons are often depicted covered in scales with a lizard-like or snake-like body. Sometimes they breath fire and the number of feet they can have vary from none to four or even more. Sometimes they are also shown as flying creatures with bat-like wings.

Dragons, or dragon-like creatures, have been found in folklore traditions around the world, though they often differ in many details. For example, dragons in the Chinese culture are depicted as good, wise, magical creatures with long snake-like bodies and no wings. This is very much different from the dragon pictured in European traditions. Dragons in the western countries are often shown as malevolent monsters happy to eat sheep, goats, children and the occasional maiden. European dragons also are often shown jealously guarding treasure.

The actual word dragon goes back to the ancient Greeks. The Greeks thought that snake and dragon-like creatures had sharp, penetrating vision so from a root word meaning sharp-eyed, they came up with the name drako (which referred to both dragons and large snakes). From The Greeks the Romans took the word and modified a bit to draco. As the Romans marched all over Europe they carried the word with them and in English it became drake and in French dragon.

So you see that the words in the beginning really had the same meaning. However, over time the word dragon became the more popular term and started to be used to refer to any creature from any tradition around the world that seemed to fit the bill. The term drake, however, still only refers to the European type maiden-eating-treasure-guarding version of the dragon.

In recent years authors compiling fictional bestiaries and people creating rules for role-playing games have given the term drake new meanings. For example, some define a drake as a dragon without wings, or as a young immature dragon. These are newly created definitions, however, and do not really represent the original meaning of the word.

Drake and dragon aren't the only terms used for these mythical beasts. The old German word wurm, originally meaning serpent, is used for dragons that appear in Germanic mythology. In old English this became the word wyrm and is used in the reference to the story of a wingless dragon in England called the Lambton Worm. The word wyvern also comes from this root and is often used to refer to a dragon with wings and only two legs.

Why are dragons legends found all over the world? When dinosaur (which look as much like a legendary dragon as any real animal could) bones were first discovered and revealed to be giant reptiles someone suggested that humans had some kind of racial memory of these creatures that was translated into the dragon legend. Dinosaurs, however, lived so many years before anything even remotely human was walking on the planet it seems unlikely we continue to have even an innate memory of them. It is more likely that the fossils themselves have inspired the creation of dragon tales as people stumbled across them over the centuries.

Another idea had been forwarded by anthropologist David E. Jones. Jones has suggested that humans have inherited instinctive reactions to snakes, large cats and birds of prey. His hypothesis is that mythical dragons combine all these features of these real animals and perhaps represent the worst of all our fears.

Holy Legends - I've heard several legends about the Holy Grail, and I was wondering if there's any evidence of an actual Holy Grail. If there is, that what can it do? Can it grant immortal life like in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?"

It seems likely that there was once a "Holy Grail." Despite some naysayers there seems to be good evidence of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth and a Passover supper attended by him and his disciples just before his crucifixion. It was at this dinner that the sacrament of communion was established using wine and bread. Wine certainly implies that a cup was used (though perhaps a larger communal one - more like a bowl - than we might normally think of a cup today).

After that, though, the story gets a very fuzzy. There is not much in the Bible about a Grail and there is no real significance attached to the cup in that holy set of scripture. Most of the legend of the Grail seems to be connected with an individual named Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph was a rich, follower of Jesus that took possession of his body after the crucifixion. With the help of another follower named Nicodemus, he prepared the body of Jesus to be placed in his own (Joseph's) tomb. During this process, the legend says that he used the grail to catch some of Jesus's blood.

However, the story about Joseph of Arimathea and the Grail doesn't appear in any document we know about until the Robert de Boron wrote his poem Joseph d'Arimathe around the 12th century. The poem says that Joseph was imprisoned for his burial of Jesus's body and the Grail sustained him during this period. He later left the middle-east and traveled to Britain taking the Grail with him. From the Boron story came a whole wealth of Grail fictional literature emerged having to do with King Arthur and his knights and their seach for the Grail.

Boron's poem was clearly a work of fiction, but later writers seem to have taken it at face value. In a history of Glastonbury Abbey written around 1350 AD claims were made that Joseph came to Britain bringing the cup with him and it was at the Abbey.

As for the remarkable powers of the cup, one of the earliest references to this seems to be in the story of The Fisher King written by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes around 1190 AD. Here the Grail seems to have the strange power to keep people alive with them only eating a small mass-wafer (like they would serve during the sacrament of Holy Communion) a day as long as it is served in the cup. However, the Grail clearly does not have the full healing powers in this story as is often described in later tales.

The power of the Holy Grail to heal and give eternal life might actually be connected with pagan stories that pre-dated Christianity in Europe. In many of these stories special lakes or pools had the power to grant eternal life if one drank or bathed in them (One version of this story is the Fountain of Youth). As the myths evolved the pool changed into a bowl (symbolic of a pool) and this legend was later probably mixed with the legend of the Grail when Christianity was brought to Europe.

The Grail story has also been mixed in with the history of the Knights Templar, a order of knights sworn to protect pilgrams to the holy land. In the story the Knights find the Grail and transport it back to Europe. There is no historical record to support this story however.

Another completely separate story has the Grail left in the house of St Mark where the Last Supper took place. Mark then takes it to Rome where it was used as the Papal Chalice until it was moved out of Rome in 3rd century during a period of persecution. From there it went to a Spanish soldier and onto Spanish monks who hid it during the Muslim occupation of Spain during the 6th century. For a while it was held in the treasury of several Spanish Kings until it was given to the Cathedral of Valencia, where it remains today.

So is the Holy Grail actually in a church in Valencia, Spain? Some people might think so. However, there are a number of bowls that are reputed to be "the one, true grail." Another contender for the title is Nanteos Cup. For many years the cup was kept at the Nanteos Mansion near Aberystwyth in Wales. Legend connects this bowl with the story of the Grail held at Glastonbury Abbey. According to the story, monks fleeing Thomas Cromwell's persecution took the cup with them. The monks were hidden by the Powells at Nanteos. When the last monk died the bowl was passed to the Lord Powell and kept by the family ever since. An recent examination of the cup by experts, however, revealed that it is typical of mazer bowls, a type of medieval vessel, probably created in the 14th century - far too recent to be the real Grail. However, there are stories that people have been healed after drinking from the vessel and the current owner of the cup, Fiona Mirylees, still sends water that has been in the cup to people with life threatening illnesses.

When the script was written for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade they combined many of these myths. Where is the real Grail? Well, I suspect that after the Last Supper everybody was so concerned with the events that followed that nobody bothered with the cup and it simply disappeared into the mists of history.

Big Birds of Death - Are there any real accounts of large birds of prey attacking or carrying off people? - Gary S.

As to the first part of your question, there are certainly examples of eagles and hawks attacking human beings that violated their territory. Get a little too close to a nest and you could find yourself on the wrong end of some very sharp talons. One sad example of this happened in Mendocino County, CA, in 1895. According to the New York Times two brothers, age 13 and 11, were climbing a mountain to find a Bald Eagle's nest when the creature suddenly attacked them. The boys escaped, but the younger was badly injured and lost his sight to the eagle's talons and beak.

However, the question about whether an eagle or other large bird has ever attacked a person (with the intent of eating them) and managed to fly off with them is a more complicated question. There are certainly a number of reports of large birds attacking and carrying off small children. For example, in August of 1881 the New York Times reported that an eagle with a seven-foot wingspan swooped down and tried to carry off a 2-year-old boy. Witnesses said that it might have succeeded if the child's clothes had not torn, allowing him to escape.

More recently in 1977 ten-year-old Marlon Lowe was playing with friends near his home in Illinois when two large birds - thought to be condors with wingspans from eight to ten feet across according to witnesses - swept down on the children. One of the birds picked up Marlon by the straps of his sleeveless shirt and carried him into the air. His screams brought his parents outside to see him lifted to the height of two feet for a distance of about 40 feet before the creature let him go.

In both of these accounts, the monster birds did not get far with their human burdens, but there are other stories where the avian giants were more successful. The best documented of these occurred in Leka, Norway, on June 5, 1932 when Svanhild Hansen, a five-year-old, forty-pound girl, was picked up by a huge eagle and carried more than a mile to a high ledge. She was found there safe and asleep by a rescue party. With the exception of a few scratches, she was unharmed. Zoologist Hartvig Huitfeldt-Kaas was so interested in the story he spent a month at the time investigating it and pronounced it "completely reliable."

There are also many less well document stories including the sad tale of five-year-old Marie Delex from the French Alps in 1838. The girl was playing with friends when she was picked up by a large eagle and carried away. The eagle's nest was checked, but only piles of goat and sheep bones were found. Two months later her horribly mutilated remains were discovered by a local shepherd on a rock several miles from where she had disappeared.

In May of 1904 the New York Times published the story of 18-month old girl in England that was apparently picked up by an eagle while she played just outside her parent's cottage door. Searchers at first assumed that the girl had been kidnapped, but a game warden found her body in a rocky crevasse at the crest of a hill. The girl's eyes had been plucked out and part of her cheek was missing.

Despite many stories though the years like these modern experts are skeptical. Mike Jacobson, an eagle management specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, has been quoted as saying, "There used to be stories about eagles carrying off babies and little kids, and none of that has ever been documented. They can pick up and carry four or five pounds, maximum, and actually fly off with it.They can lift a little more and hop it along, but they can't carry it off."

That's from a dead stop, however. An eagle already in motion can lift much more. "On a wide-open beach, I have no doubt that an eagle with a full head of steam could pick up a six- or eight-pound dog and just keep on going," says biologist and predatory bird expert Ronald Clarke. "If it landed to kill a ten-pounder, and then tried to pick up and fly from a dead stop, could it get off the ground? Probably not."

An eagle swooping down on animal on the side of mountain and then carrying it to a lower altitude, might be even able to carry more weight as such a maneuver requires only a downward glide (See a video of an eagle doing this with a small goat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3n4qPpL8T0&feature=related).

Of course, there are always sightings of giant unknown birds - like those in the American Indian thunderbird legend - whose huge wingspans that might be able to carry very heavy loads. However, most experts doubt these stories, if for no other reason, then legions of bird watchers in the United States that could hardly miss noticing a bird with a twelve-foot-plus wingspan.

If not today, then scientists tell us that certainly in the past there were eagles and other large birds that could kill a child and fly away with them. The Haast's Eagle of New Zealand is only known from fossil remains, but it is estimated they weighed as much as 40 pounds and were still living at the time that New Zealand was first populated by humans about 750 years ago. The evidence about Haast's seems to match legendary stories told by Maori people of New Zealand about a bird so powerful it could sweep down and kill a small child. With a lift capacity of as much as ľ of their weight, they could undoubtedly have flown off with the victim too.

Death Ray for Sale? - This is the link to "death ray tubes." These are a workable model of a death ray gun, you can buy it for 350 US$ and it works for carving rock. It does exist and as seen in the site united nuclear.. So are lots of other sci-fi inventions… And they do work too.. You get warnings to not direct them toward humans… They will melt... - Agnar Kiil

The "Death Ray" offered by United Nuclear, is not the death ray as was once envisioned by the mysterious inventor Nikola Tesla in the 1930's that has garnered so much press over the years. That weapon was better known as a charged particle beam. Tesla designed a device that would send a beam of particles out at high speed and saw it as a defensive weapon that would ensure peace. He claimed such a device would be able to "bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation's border…"

Though no nations at the time acted on Tesla's idea, during the cold war both the Soviet Union and the United States experimented with charged particle weapons, but could not make them practical.

The "Death Ray" on the United Nuclear site is actually an infrared laser (Infrared means the light the laser is generating is of frequency too low to be visible to the human eye). Lasers, of course, have become common devices found in such everyday objects such as DVD players, supermarket checkout terminals and screen pointers. The ones offered by United Nuclear, of course, are of considerably more power. A laser pointer uses about 1 mill watt of power, where the United Nuclear infrared laser can be bought with a power supply of up to 100 watts. This is enough to cut thin metal and crack rock. Commercial sealed CO2 lasers, however, can often be found at powers of 3000 watts or more and can be used to cut carbon steel as thick as a ˝ inch.

Even lasers with power levels less than a watt can be dangerous, however, if directed into a human eye. The light the laser puts out is "coherent" with all the light particles (or photons) going in the same direction, at the same frequency in the same phase. This results in the beam focusing a lot of energy into a very small space causing the target to heat up and burn or melt. Even a fairly low powered laser that enters an eye will be concentrated on the retina causing damage and potential blindness. For this reason engineers and scientists working with lasers always wear eye protection.

As powerful as lasers are, the military up to this point, has not found them to be effective weapons. The amount of power they require limits their mobility, especially compared with traditional weapons like bombs and rockets. Lasers have still been used on the battlefield, however, to guide traditional weapons to their targets. First a laser is pointed toward a target, say a tank. Then the laser light reflected back from the tank can be used to guide a rocket or bomb accurately to its destination.

The U.S. military has not completely given up on lasers, however, and has recently has some success with electric lasers that are small enough to fit into a truck and have an output of over 100 kilowatt. With this much power they hope they will be able to use them in the future to zap incoming rockets or mortars.

About the site itself: United Nuclear seems like a fascinating place to purchase off-beat science items and reminds me a lot of Edmund Scientific, a similar company in operation near where I grew up. Although Edmund is now only a catalog and web business, when I was in High School it had a showroom complete with a demonstration area for lasers and other cool science products. My high school science teacher advised us geeks that this was a good place to take a girl for a cheap date.

I see that United Nuclear has a showroom in Laingsburg, Michigan, and if anybody living in the area has a girl friend who is into death rays, it sounds like you might want to take her there for an inexpensive outing.

Dudleytown Hauntings - I was wondering what the Curator's thought was on the stories of the Dudleytown hauntings in Connecticut . Could Dudleytown be haunted by the spirits of the old town that once resided there? - Tim A.

I have to admit that I have no special knowledge of the Dudleytown legend. However, it is a fascinating story and thanks for suggesting we talk about it here in Ask the Curator. Let me go over the account so that anybody not familiar with the tale will know what we're talking about.

The legend of Dudleytown supposedly starts in 1510 when Edmund Dudley was beheaded for plotting to overthrow the King of England. The story has it that a curse was placed on his family. In 1747 brothers Abiel and Barzillai Dudley, supposedly Edmund's descendants, settled in the area giving the town its name. The location was too rocky and dark for farming so the town people made a business out of making charcoal from the abundant trees. The town prospered for while, but then, according to the legend, things turned bad.

As the story goes it all started when one of the Dudley brothers when insane. Then there were a series of unfortunate accidents and mysterious deaths. A woman was struck by lightning while sitting on her porch. People got sick, children disappeared and houses burned down. Finally, in despair, the villagers abandoned the town. Soon the dark woods closed in around it and now only the ever present owls inhabit the area. According to the legend most other animals avoid it.

So is the place really haunted? Well, if you talk to Dudleytown's neighbors they will tell you it is all a bunch of hokum and the legend has caused all kinds of problems for them. A number of years ago some of the property owners in the area formed an association - Dark Entry Forest, Inc. - purchased the land designated the location a nature preserve. For many years it was possible to visit the location without a problem. However, after the 1999 release of the movie The Blair Witch Project the area was inundated by thrill seeking teenagers and paranormal investigators. Now The Blair Witch Project was supposed to have taken place in Maryland, but the location in the film, a dark woods, was so similar to Dudleytown that people in Connecticut decided this local location was a good place to try and have a Blair Witch type adventure. The problems this caused - like late night drinking parties and theft from the historic ruins - forced Dark Entry Forest, Inc. to close the location to visitors.

(Dudleytown isn't the only historic site to have problems caused by it supposed haunted connections - See The Haunted Church of Gravity Hill )

Teenagers continued to find their way into the town, however. In one incident, perhaps even a little bit like the Blair Witch movie, a group of five teens found themselves so lost that at 1:30 in the morning they had to call 911 to get rescued. Fortunately, instead of losing their lives, as in the film, they each just got a $77 ticket from the Connecticut State Police for trespassing.

Some argue that the association is just trying to down play the ghostly history to avoid any more paranormal mayhem, but at least one author agrees with them that the legend is all bunk. The Rev. Gary P. Dudley, of Texas, became interested in the story because of the connection with his name. After researching the historical records he wrote The Legend of Dudleytown: Solving Legends through Genealogical and Historical Research (Heritage Books, 2001). In his book Dudley argues that most of the stories associated with the town are complete fiction or have been twisted to fit the legend. For example, the wife of Dr. William Clarke, who owned a vacation home on the site, supposedly went mad and killed herself when she was left alone there one night. Dudley found that Mrs. Clarke did indeed commit suicide, but that occurred in New York City, not in Dudleytown.

So is Dudleytown really haunted? Well, according to people who have visited the site the surrounding hills and heavy forest certainly make it dark and gloomy location worthy of a haunting. However, spooky places do not necessary mean there are spooks (Check The Science of Ghosts and Hauntings).

If you want to see what Rev. Dudley has to say about it, buy his book or visit his website at http://www.legendofdudleytown.com/

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Copyright Lee Krystek 2000. All Rights Reserved.