The Mystery of the Magi: Mistery “king star”; “El Dio de Los Tres Reyes Magos”

When the Christ child was born in a humble stable in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago tonight, shepherds may have first witnessed the coming of the Messiah, but it’s the three eastern travellers who followed that heightened the Nativity’s significance.

Call them the Three Wise Men, the Three Kings of the Orient, the Magi - but who were they?

It’s one of the Nativity’s greatest mysteries and the subject of constant conjecture. The Book of Matthew states they came to Jerusalem to worship the Christ child, navigating by way of a bright star. They may have been Median or Zoroastrian priests from Ancient Persia who were proficient at astrology.

The ambitious King Herod, wary of predictions that a child saviour would usurp his throne, plotted to trick them into revealling the location of the baby Jesus. The three travellers eventually found the child in Bethlehem, presenting Him with gifts. An angel then warned the three men of Herod’s evil intentions, prompting them to return home by a different route. Mary and Joseph fled with Jesus to Egypt, thus escaping the massacre of all the newborns in Bethlehem.

Where did these mysterious travellers hail from? While many countries have laid claim to the Magi, three lead the pack of contenders: Persia, Babylon or Arabia. Byzantine art depicted them as wearing Persian dress, supporting the view that they were from Persia. Most theories support the contention that they were astrologists (”watchers of the sky” in the old texts), astronomers or priests. Persia had the most advanced science in the region. Read more …

Scientific Sub Makes Deep-Sea Discoveries

A four-week expedition to explore the deep ocean south-west of Tasmania has revealed new species of animals and more evidence of impacts of increasing carbon dioxide on deep-sea corals.

The collaborative voyage of US and Australian researchers was led by chief scientists Dr Jess Adkins from the California Institute of Technology and Dr Ron Thresher from CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation and Wealth from Oceans Flagships.

“We set out to search for life deeper than any previous voyage in Australian waters,” Dr Thresher says. “We also gathered data to assess the threat posed by ocean acidification and climate change on Australia’s unique deep-water coral reefs.” Read more …

First Glimpse of Extrasolar Atmosphere Detected

Two separate teams of scientists reported Wednesday the first-ever detection from Earth of the atmosphere of planets outside our solar system. Taken together, the studies open a new frontier in the study of exoplanets, hard-to-detect celestial bodies circling stars beyond our own solar system.

Barely 300 exoplanets — some of which may have conditions similar to those that gave rise to life on Earth — have been identified so far, though astronomers assume that far more are waiting to be discovered.

Up to now, virtually everything known about the atmosphere of exoplanets has come from data collected by the space-based Spitzer infrared telescope.

Not all is Mystery ( “Mysterium Fidei” )

NOW that the dust of commerce whipped up for Christmas has settled, let’s try to recover what’s left of “the reason for the season.” Actually the Christmas season in the liturgical calendar lasts until the second Sunday of January marking the Baptism of Jesus. In the Philippines, there is one more week of tawad—up to the third Sunday for the Feast of Sto. Niño.

Swamped by sense overload, the Christmas season (and later, Easter) is deep down a hushed season wrapped in mystery, profound, ineffable and holy.

That a baby could be born in abject poverty, that the man would suffer and be “crucified”; such is possible for mortals, such has happened down the lanes of history and such is happening right now in the most wretched ways. Read more …

Video: Revelations of Christ - “Does Satan exist?”

Revelations of  Christ

Proclaimed by Paramhansa Yogananda presented by his disciple, Swami Kriyananda

An Interview with Swami Kriyananda about the book and Christ’s teachings.

For years, our faith has been severely shaken by a growing series of attacks, including: the breakdown of church authority, the repeated discovery of ancient texts that supposedly contradict long-held beliefs, and the sometimes outlandish historical analyses of Scripture by academics. Read more …

Awesome Science:Magnetized Gas Points to New Physics

It would be tough to stick it to your refrigerator, but an ultra-cold gas magnetizes itself just as do metals such as iron or nickel, a team of atomic physicists reports. That cool trick shows that the messy physics within solids can be modeled with pristine gases, the researchers say. But others are skeptical that the team has actually seen what they claim.

Condensed matter physicists can tell you essentially all there is to know about how common metals carry electricity and heat. Why some of them are magnetic is a trickier question. Physicists know the basics: The electrons that flow through iron, nickel, and other magnetic materials act like little bar magnets. Below a certain temperature the electrons align so that they all point in the same direction, at least within relatively large “domains” in the crystalline material. The question is why do the electrons align themselves?

An answer was proposed in the 1930s by British theorist E. C. Stoner. Read more …

The Consequences of a Boozy Youth

Boozing it up in adolescence contributes to risky behavior in adulthood, according to a new study with rats. Some researchers suspect that the same is true for people, but they’ve had a hard time establishing whether adolescent drinking makes people prone to risk-taking or whether risk-prone people are simply more likely to start drinking as teenagers. Although the new work doesn’t settle the issue, it bolsters the case that early alcohol use can cause lasting changes in behavior.

Some of the best data available show that people who start drinking as adolescents and drink more heavily then are more likely to have problems with alcohol and drug abuse later in life, says Ilene Bernstein, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the senior author of the new study. But those studies have fallen short of determining cause and effect, Bernstein says. To get around this pitfall, she and her colleagues turned to rats, assigning individuals from a genetically identical strain to either drinking or teetotaling groups.

Although rats don’t voluntarily like to drink alcohol, the researchers found they could entice the rodents with spiked gelatin–the murine equivalent of the Jell-O shots beloved by college students everywhere. Adolescent rats assigned to the drinking group had access to the stuff for 20 days. They consumed the equivalent of “multiple, multiple drinks” a day but spread their drinking over many hours and never appeared visibly drunk, Bernstein says. Read more …