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February 08 2011
Sinned Lately? There’s a Vatican-Approved App for That
First, people chiseled the word of god on stone tablets, then the printing press came along and enabled things like religious flyers, handed out to innocent bypasser on street corners. As of today, the ten commandments are available in a handy Vatican-approved iPhone app.
This interactive app helps Catholics prepare for confession with a handy checklist that asks questions such as, “Have I harbored hatred in my heart?”, and “Have I abused alcohol or drugs?”. It’s so hard to remember things these days. Have you ever been angry or resentful? Not sure? You wish you had a checklist to consult, right?
Confession: A Roman Catholic App was developed by Little iApps (it appears to be the sole product that their website offers).
“I was a bit skeptical at first, thinking Now how in blue blazes is it even a good idea, let alone approved by a bishop, for an iPhone or iPad to hear my confession? No freakin’ way!,” explains a reverend named Jeffery Grace, from Los Angeles, on the company’s testimonials page. But he adds that once he realized that the app didn’t actually hear confessions–instead it helps the user ...
October 21 2010
Coming Soon to the Internets: Digitized Dead Sea Scrolls
In a great convergence of old and new, Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority are teaming up to digitize the millennia-old Dead Sea Scrolls.
The scrolls are the oldest known surviving biblical texts, created between 150 BC and 79 AD. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and include nearly every book of the Old Testament (except the Book of Esther), and several other religious texts including the Gospel of Judas.
The scrolls have been tightly guarded because of their delicate nature. Only two scholars are allowed to study the scrolls at a time, which are held in a room where temperature, light, and humidity are all carefully controlled. Public access to the writings will change how they are studied, Rob Enderle told Computer World:
“This is information few have ever seen and a piece of our oldest written history,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. “What makes this epic is that it could be important for generations of religious scholars. This is a project that could have an impact on thousands of years in the future. There are few projects that have that kind of life expectancy.”
As a part of the digitization, the scans will be posted online, and will have accompanying transcription, translations, and bibliography, the press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority said:
…upload not only all of the digitized Scrolls images but also additional data online that will allow users to perform meaningful searches across a broad range of data in a number of languages and formats, which will result in unprecedented scholarly and popular access to the Scrolls and related research and scholarship and should lead to new insights into the world of the Scrolls.
The scans are being done at the highest possible resolution; the picture quality will be equivalent to actually looking at the scrolls, which will help keep the delicate papyrus and parchment from future handling. The scrolls were previously imaged in infrared light (in the 1950s), but the current digitization will be done using light of many spectra, which the press release said may yield new insights:
The technology will also help rediscover writing and letters that have “vanished” over the years; with the help of infra-red light and wavelengths beyond, these writings will be brought “back to life”, facilitating new possibilities in Dead Sea Scrolls research.
The project isn’t just a “plug and chug” exercise. The 900 scrolls have been fragmented into about 3,000 pieces, so the technicians won’t just be sliding papers into a scanner. As Pnina Shor, the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls project manager, told National Geographic:
“You hear ’scrolls’ and you think of something big and rolled up. But we have thousands and thousands of fragments that are some 2,000 years old. A lot of this work is puzzle work, scholars piecing things together”—both physically and philosophically. “Now hopefully we will have a lot of new readings” by scholars worldwide who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to scrutinize the Dead Sea Scrolls in detail, said Shor.
The imaging will begin in early 2011 and the first images will hopefully be available within six months.
Related content:
Discoblog: World’s Oldest Bible, Now Available on Your Laptop
Discoblog: The Science of Virgin Birth
Discoblog: Retracted Study: Biblical Woman Had Flu, Not Demonic Possession
Bad Astronomy: Are the Ten Commandments really the basis for our laws?
DISCOVER: In Search of John the Baptist
Image: IAA
September 15 2010
Mexican Religious Rite Has Created Super Poison-Tolerant Cave Fish
Any culture’s religious ceremonies can seem strange to outsiders: For example, take the indigenous Zoque people of southern Mexico. To ask their gods for bountiful rains during the growing season they head to a sulfur cave where molly fish swim in the subterranean lake. They then toss in leaf bundles that contain a paste made from the mashed-up root of the Barbasco plant, which has a powerful anesthetic effect.
When the stunned fish–which the Zoque people consider a gift from underworld gods–go belly-up, people scoop them from the water and bring them home for supper. This fishy protein helps them make it through until the harvest.
This ritual came to the attention of scientists studying the molly fish, who wondered how the toxic root might be affecting fish populations in the caves. So evolutionary ecologist Michael Tobler and his colleagues did a little field research.
From LiveScience:
“We learned about the ceremony, and actually attended it in 2007,” Tobler recalled. “The families each take a certain amount of the fish home. The way we had ours prepared was that they were just mixed with scrambled eggs, although I hear other families fry them. They had a funny salty taste to them, although I’m not sure if that’s because of their sulfuric environment, or something the cook messed up.”
The researchers got more than a taste of local culture, they also came up with evidence of evolution-in-action that they published in a study in Biology Letters. In lab experiments they compared molly fish from the ritual cave to others from an area upstream that had never swam in poisoned water, and found that the cave fish had a much higher tolerance for the Barbasco toxin.
Study coauthor Mark Tobler of Texas A&M University told New Scientist the results show that within the ritual cave, evolution has selected for fish that can survive the poison.
“The study indicates that the fish have adapted to the local Zoque traditions,” says Tobler, who describes the effect as “an intimate bond between nature and local culture.”
The relationship may be intimate, but the Mexican government is worried that it’s also detrimental–officials have banned the ceremony, saying it’s bad for the fish.
Related Content:
80beats: Unnatural Evolution: Fishing Eliminates Cod Adapted for Shallow Waters
80beats: Researchers Catch Lake Victoria Fish in the Act of Evolving
The Loom: When Love Shocks
Image: Biology Letters
July 01 2010
Shocker: Inventor of DIY Holy Water Device Charged With Fraud
You use a Brita filter to take metal out of your water. But what if you want to stir in divine powers? In that case, one South Korean man said, you run tap water through his special ceramic and paper filters. He now faces fraud charges.
As the BBC reports, the man, identified as “Professor Kim,” claimed he could replicate the holy water from a Virgin Mary shrine in Lourdes, France, known for its supposed healing powers.
The BBC article quotes the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper detailing Kim’s “scientific” methods:
“Professor Kim says if the medical properties are changed into digital signals, and radiated onto any water, the water will adapt those properties.”
What the “professor” taught, we do not know. Digital signals? Radiation? Sure sounds like magic science…. Whatever he was selling, people sure were buying it. Apparently he made 1.7 billion South Korean won, the equivalent of $1.3 million dollars, and sold customized filter systems for different ailments to a total of 5,000 people.
Check out DISCOVER on Facebook.
Related content:
Discoblog: A Bishop Calls for Holy Water Ban to Stop Swine Flu Spread
Discoblog: Copernicus Gets a New Grave, Belated Respect From the Catholic Church
Discoblog: Religion: A Tool to Keep the Parasites Away?
Discoblog: No Time to Pray? No Problem! Your Computer Can Do It For You
Image: flickr / missfitzphotos
May 24 2010
Copernicus Gets a New Grave, Belated Respect From the Catholic Church
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