Articles tagged with "rock"

I had YouTube running as background noise while marking some essays the other day, and my playlist decided to reward my lack of attention with a new video by one of my favourite channels, Keya's World. It's a great channel that follows the various scams and scammers in the entrepreneurial and health & wellness spaces. Keya has an interesting perspective on it all, having once been deep into the woo. Her commentary style won't be to everyone's taste, but I'm always fascinated by what she finds; her videos on Matthew McConaughey's foray into motivational speaking/self-improvement are appointment viewing. This time, however, it wasn't McConaughey that pulled me away from my stack of essays.

Originally published in Issue 26 of the NZ Skeptic, February 1993

On Wednesday a group of us skeptics visited the Ark Man, Rod Walsh, who has been over in New Zealand from Australia on tour. Rod's schtick is that god told him in the '90s to build a scale model of Noah's Ark from Genesis. Apparently the day after he was told this by god, he turned on the radio and two people were having a conversation about the ark - which proved to him that god's voice had been real. Rod has now built 6 scale replicas of Noah's Ark over the last 20 years, and has been touring the world with his scale models since the '90s.

It's often said that scientists long rejected the idea of meteorites, but the evidence for this assertion is far from convincing.

A New Zealander's quest to find Noah's Ark has suffered a double blow, with two samples he gathered in Turkey turning out to be rock, not petrified timber. Ross Patterson delivered the samples to crown research institute Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) in Wellington. Senior geologist Hamish Campbell, who examined the samples, said they were not wood or fossil material, but volcanic rock. One of the samples had "a lovely platey fabric" and Dr Campbell said he could see why Mr Patterson thought they might be fossil wood. "I'm all for somebody chasing something like this - it makes life interesting. GNS offers a service and we are very happy to sample rock in this way."

Did the ancestors of the Celts sail to New Zealand and establish a network of megalithic survey points and astronomical sight lines? Some think so

Ancient Phoenicians in New Zealand? A recent book makes the claim, but the evidence doesn't bear scrutiny.

There is no "face" on the Red Planet, according to pictures sent back from the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor. The BBC's science correspondent says the news will dampen down the controversy that has raged since images were transmitted back to Earth in 1976 from the Viking spacecraft.

Surely the Kaimanawa Wall story was one of the great beat-ups of all time. Here was a natural rock outcrop, which experts immediately told us was of a kind common in the area, raised to status of "great mystery" and worthy of the other "X Files puzzles" of Easter Island, South America and so on.

New Zealand Skeptics walk happily on red-hot embers, protected by the laws of physics. Fijian firewalkers, however, are said to stroll across white-hot stones. How do they do it?