Persistent Earth Hum Anomaly Phenomenon Resolved?

""The noise has been talked about worldwide and also made local newspaper headlines in the UK. It is often referred to as a “phenomenon” and “the hum”, usually prefixed with the location of where it is heard.

In Britain, the most famous example was the “Bristol hum” that made the news in the late 1970s. One newspaper asked readers in the city: “Have you heard the Hum?” and at least 800 people said they had – according to the BBC – and some had suffered headaches and nosebleeds from it.

It has been described like “a diesel car idling in the distance” by a BBC interviewee and the maddening sound has driven people stir-crazy in trying to figure it out. Especially when they can only hear it at home and during the night.

People living on the south coast have complained this week of a constant and low-pitched sound for which they have found no cause – as reported by Plymouth Herald.

It has been mistaken for leaking pipes, phone masts, wind farms, low-frequency submarine communications and even mating fish.

“For the first few years I lost sleep, couldn’t concentrate and was unable to do anything. I was constantly in tears, which put a great strain on my husband. It has changed me from an active, creative person to a stifled, angry pessimist,” a woman told The Independent back in 1994.

Doctors blamed patients’ abilities to hear it on tinnitus, until Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge had confirmed sometime in the 1990s that the cause is external.

However, the search for the truth could now be over as researchers claim that microseismic activity from long ocean waves impacting the sea bed is what makes our planet vibrate and produces the droning sound.

The pressure of the waves on the seafloor generates seismic waves that cause the Earth to oscillate, said Fabrice Ardhuin, a senior research scientist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.

The continuous waves produce sounds lasting from 13 to 300 seconds. They can be heard by a relatively small proportion of people – who are sensitive to the hums – and also by seismic instruments.""

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/have-you-heard-the-hum-mystery-of-earths-low-droning-noise-could-now-be-solved-10182111.html

Urban Archaeologist Solves Mystery of Missing Civil War's Submarines?

""A local historian and urban archaeologist thinks he's solved a mystery: What happened to four Confederate submersibles known to be in Shreveport the last two years of the Civil War, but missing in action since then.

Marty Loschen, director of the Spring Street Museum in downtown Shreveport, thinks he's found remnants of the hand-propelled craft in the banks of a branch of Cross Bayou about a half-mile west of where the Confederate Navy had a shipyard. At Cross Bayou's mouth on Red River it was home to the leaky ironclad CSS Missouri and a fast packet, the Webb, whose presence overshadowed the humbler underwater vessels.

Several months ago, before recent rains raised water levels on Cross Bayou and its feeder streams, Loschen and his brother found decades-old rusted metal and some oddly formed tree roots whose shape suggested they had grown over something curved that had long rotted or rusted away. The site was on a bank revealed by low water on Bowman's chute, near Bowman and Dowling Streets in Allendale north of the Canaan Village apartments.

"It's breathtakingly beautiful out there," says Loschen, who spends much of his time exploring the more remote, forgotten and forbidding parts of old Shreveport. He points to the 1864 Venable Map of the defenses of Shreveport which shows several small buildings near where he found the artifacts.

"There's your sub base," he said. "On the Venable map there's an island out there. My theory is if you're going to have a clandestine sub base, you're going to put it out there. Look, there are structures out there, near what I found out beached — it has to be."

He's waiting for another period of low water.

"It's under at least 10 feet of water now," he said. "I'm trying to wait for the water to go down to go see those subs."

Famed diver Ralph Wilbanks, who found the wreck of the submarine CSS Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995, visited Shreveport twice in the last 15 years to search for the local submarines at the behest of best-selling author Clive Cussler, who also drove the search for the Hunley.

Wilbanks and a team of well-known fellow diver-researchers performed sonar and magnetometer searches of Red River and parts of Cross Bayou and Cross Lake, finding traces of old trucks from the flapper era, a dock that once served as a ferry link between Shreveport and Bossier City before bridges were built across the Red, and the remains of a Civil War gunboat, the Iron Duke.

But Wilbanks never went as far back into the murkier and shallower waters of Cross Bayou near where it traces its way through Ledbetter Heights and Allendale on its way to Cross Lake. Loschen's sub site is just west of where Wilbanks' surveys stopped.""

Finish Article:

http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/2015/01/23/civil-war-subs-lost/22232231/

Dark Matter Mystery Deepens: We Know Less About Dark Matter Than We Did Before," Asserts Lead Author Matt Walker, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics.

"""Our measurements contradict a basic prediction about the structure of cold dark matter in dwarf galaxies. Unless or until theorists can modify that prediction, cold dark matter is inconsistent with our observational data," Walker stated.

Dwarf galaxies are composed of up to 99 percent dark matter and only one percent normal matter like stars. This disparity makes dwarf galaxies ideal targets for astronomers seeking to understand dark matter.

Walker and his co-author Jorge Peñarrubia (University of Cambridge, UK) analyzed the dark matter distribution in two Milky Way neighbors: the Fornax and Sculptor dwarf galaxies. These galaxies hold one million to 10 million stars, compared to about 400 billion in our galaxy. The team measured the locations, speeds and basic chemical compositions of 1500 to 2500 stars.

"Stars in a dwarf galaxy swarm like bees in a beehive instead of moving in nice, circular orbits like a spiral galaxy," explained Peñarrubia. "That makes it much more challenging to determine the distribution of dark matter."

Their data showed that in both cases, the dark matter is distributed uniformly over a relatively large region, several hundred light-years across. This contradicts the prediction that the density of dark matter should increase sharply toward the centers of these galaxies.

"If a dwarf galaxy were a peach, the standard cosmological model says we should find a dark matter 'pit' at the center. Instead, the first two dwarf galaxies we studied are like pitless peaches," said Peñarrubia.

Some have suggested that interactions between normal and dark matter could spread out the dark matter, but current simulations don't indicate that this happens in dwarf galaxies. The new measurements imply that either normal matter affects dark matter more than expected, or dark matter isn't "cold." The team hopes to determine which is true by studying more dwarf galaxies, particularly galaxies with an even higher percentage of dark matter.

The paper discussing this research was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.""

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2011/pr201129.html