Have you ever heard of people who went into a coma? Of course you have. Many times it isn't a lasting thing, thank goodness. There are those times when it does last for quite awhile and sometimes people never come out of it. A British woman, who was in a car crash, had parts of her brain crushed. She lay in her hospital bed, in what is called a vegetative state. There was no physical recognition of people or sounds. Doctors decided to give her an MRI. The MRI is used to detect blood flow in the brain.They also decided to conduct a very mild experiment when she was in the machine. They talked to her and as they did, the parts of her brain that are used in language lit up. They were extremely surprised. Next they asked her to imagine visiting different rooms in her house. Apparently she heard them, because the parts of her brain used for navigating space and recognizing places lit up. They asked her to imagine playing tennis and the parts of the brain used for motion then lit up. Her scans were almost the same as for people not in a coma. What was going on here? There is no way to know this, but I suspect that not all people in comas will react the same under a MRI. This lady seemed to hear and understand even though she couldn't react in any noticeable way.

Scientists are mystified. It seems that about two billion metric tons of carbon that are released in the atmosphere every year, are unaccounted for, when everything is added up. Hey is someone stealing this stuff? Just kidding. We are talking about as much as 30% of the carbon discharge. Here is how it works. About 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide are released every year into the atmosphere. Some 3 billion tons of it remain in the atmosphere and 2 billion tons goes into the oceans. So where is the other 2 billion tons? There is a theory that the vegetation on earth might be absorbing it, but so far no way as been found to confirm this. One of the worries is this, what if all that lost carbon is released somehow and floods our atmosphere. That surely would be our death knell, if say 20 years worth dumped all at once. If it wasn't the end of us, it would be a good start as they say. Here is a real surprise for you, scientists in 1999 concluded that most of the lost carbon was being absorbed somewhere above 40Deg. North latitude. That is about where the New York City, City Hall is located. Hey maybe those politicians with their hot air are disrupting the flow of carbon dioxide. Here is what scientists can't understand, if there calculations are correct, why can't we see the accumulation of carbon at these latitudes? Well it turns out that for some unknown reason, the Canadian Boreal forest floor is littered with carbon. In some places it is ankle deep, but in others it can be as deep as seven meters. Seven meters is about 23 feet deep. Yipes! It has been found that some types of forests can take in up to 200 grams of carbon per square meter per year. The Boreal forest is both a sink and source of carbon dioxide and scientists don't know yet if it is more of a sink or more of a source, so the mystery still exists.

How would you like to be this couple? A couple in Florida bought a scratch off lottery ticket and were the winners of $500.000. When they went to collect their prize money, the lottery office wouldn't pay them. The answer from the state was that the ticket was a misprint. Of course the couple said that they bought the ticket in good faith and it wasn't their fault if something was misprinted. The lottery commission said to read the ticket, they were not responsible for misprints. We all know how hard it is to beat the odds and win anything substantial in a lottery, whether it be a scratch off or a drawing, yet a man in Minnesota hit for $25,000 two days in a row. In the first win, the odds were 170,000 to 1 against him. In the second win, lottery experts stated that they couldn't even calculate the odds they were so huge. Not all lottery winners are lucky, one man won the lottery and was hit by a truck and killed a short time after, another was diagnosed with terminal cancer and received his money at the time, on his death. Another man who won $20,000,000 was kidnapped and murdered. One guy had won $37,000,000 and then committed suicide. One winner died within a week of receiving his big check and yet another winner, a woman who won over $65,000,000 was found dead in her home. Maybe winning the lottery isn't a good thing for some people.

Light has always been a bit of a mystery to scientists. Our eyes are only equipped to see a small part of the spectrum of light. Some light can penetrate walls while other frequencies bounce off of them. Some is harmful to our genetic structure and yet other light frequencies pass right through us, presumably doing no harm what so ever. As one person said, we think of light as the opposite of darkness. There is one thing that all light frequencies have in common, it is that light waves are electromagnetic waves. Different frequencies of light are separated by wavelengths. The reason we see what we do is because our eyes are able to detect wavelengths between 380 nanometers which is violet light and 750 nanometers which is red light. Imagine a being on another world who has eyes that are able to pick up much more, what would he see? So what is the maximum and minimum for wavelengths. So far as we know, the minimum is a millionth of a nanometer. That is for a gamma rays. Some long radio waves can be hundreds of miles long. Photons also have to be considered. Light waves under a certain length will cause electrons to fly out of a metal surface when the light hits it, but light above that length, no matter how long or how bright, will not do this. Once the size limit is crossed, it makes no difference how powerful you light is, no electrons will come loose from that metal surface. This is called the photoelectric effect. Light is both a wave and a particle (photon).

Dolphins are very intelligent creatures. Some scientists have thought that they might be smarter than us and have been studying them for years. They suspect that the creatures have mastered their own language. Dolphins seem to love humans for reasons unknown and will follow boats and do tricks for the passengers. Dolphins also do another thing, something that is very strange. They blow shapes into the water. These might be a circular bubble or a ring. Sometimes they can blow a bubble over two feet across. Why are they doing this? Is it to impress us? Some of their large bubbles have the ability to collapse into smaller ones. Could this be Dolphin art? We think of Dolphins as very intelligent and kind creatures. We are not always right in this however. Large adult Dolphins have been observed chasing baby Dolphins and ramming them with their beaks and throwing them up into the air to break their backs. It is hard to figure them out. This behavior seems to be a mystery to us. The animals are actually able to generate a vortex in the water in the form of a air core vortex ring. Dolphins are very playful and the bubbles and rings are created as toys.

ÇATALHÖYÜK, Turkey is the suspected place of the world's first city. A farming community where people decided to live together. Why did people, all of a sudden, feel the need to unite? I guess that is one of the questions that scientists have been trying to answer for hundreds of years. Another question is why did they bury their dead under the floors of their houses? This was a strange ritual indeed. The site is over 9,000 years old and until something older is found, if it ever is, this is the oldest city, as I said above. All the homes had murals painted on the walls. Were these there for religious reasons, for art, or did they have another reason for being that has been lost in the sands of time? The city wasn't discovered until 1958 and came as a surprise to all. It may have had as many as 10,000 people living in it. Quite a large population for the first city, I guess people liked the idea of being together. Could it have been that they felt there was strength in numbers? If they all banded together during an attack, they would have been a formidable force in those days.

The world is full of mysteries and we have only gone over a few. There is plenty of material out there, so I guess this subject will be revisited again sometime in the future.