What Lies In This Abandoned Mine In England Is Astonishing. Check Out These Underground Photos.

Mike Deere is an urban adventurer and photographer who decided to explore beyond the surface level – literally. In an era when everything is documented and recorded, Deere finds forgotten spaces in the British underground.

He took a trip to Box Freestone Mine located in Wiltshire, England and took some amazing shots of what’s been left. The mine was used to quarry stones all the way from the Roman era into the modern period. It was taken over by the MOD (Ministry of Defense) in the 20th century as air intake for the secret Cold War complex next door, the Burlington Bunker.

Today, the mine is an important roosting spot for bats and is categorized as a biological Site of Specific Scientific Interest.

Here are some highlights from Deere’s exploration of the mine:

A particularly cavernous area of the mine.

Anti-personal grating that has long since been breached by explorers.

A winch truck left in the tunnels.

Workers who left their bottles, work tools, boots, and other supplies in the mine when work was stopped in 1968.

In one part of the mine, there are a series of brick monuments and “robots” built by other visitors to the site.

At some points in the mine, no visible light penetrates. About 90 km of the tunnels are completely dark.

This part of the mine is called the Cathedral. It’s more like a rabbit hole!

These photos are fascinating. Who knows what’s lying directly under our feet? There’s only one way to find out as Deere proves to us.

Sources: Viral Nova, Mike Deere

New layer in human eye discovered

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown layer lurking in the human eye.

The newfound body part, dubbed Dua's layer, is a skinny but tough structure measuring just 15 microns thick, where one micron is one-millionth of a meter and more than 25,000 microns equal an inch. It sits at the back of the cornea, the sensitive, transparent tissue at the very front of the human eye that helps to focus incoming light, researchers say.

The feature is named for its discoverer, Harminder Dua, a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Nottingham. Dua said in a statement that the finding will not only change what ophthalmologists know about human eye anatomy, but it will also make operations safer and simpler for patients with an injury in this layer.

"From a clinical perspective, there are many diseases that affect the back of the cornea, which clinicians across the world are already beginning to relate to the presence, absence or tear in this layer," Dua said in a statement.

Dua and colleagues, for example, believe that a tear in the Dua layer is what causes corneal hydrops, which occurs when water from inside the eye rushes in and leads to a fluid buildup in the cornea. This phenomenon is seen in patients with keratoconus, a degenerative eye disorder that causes the cornea to take on a cone shape.

Dua's layer adds to the five previously known layers of the cornea: the corneal epithelium at the very front, followed by Bowman's layer, the corneal stroma, Descemet's membrane and the corneal endothelium at the very back.

Dua and colleagues found the new layer between the corneal stroma and Descemet's membrane through corneal transplants and grafts on eyes donated for research. They injected tiny air bubbles to separate the different layers of the cornea and scanned each using an electron microscope.

Oldest cave art discovered in US shows prehistoric southern living

The oldest collection of prehistoric cave and rock art in the United States has been discovered in and around Tenessee. 

A large polychrome pictograph depicts humans, serpents and circles. 

The oldest and most widespread collection of prehistoric cave and rock art in the United States has been found in and around Tennessee, according to a new paper in the journal Antiquity that documents the art. It provides intriguing clues about what life was like for Native American societies more than 6,000 years ago. That is the age of the newly discovered cave art, one of which is seen here, showing what appears to be a human hunting. Other images are of a more direct spiritual/mythological nature.

Lead author Jan Simek, president emeritus and a distinguished professor of science at the University of Tennessee’s Department of Anthropology, told Discovery News, “The discoveries tell us that prehistoric peoples in the Cumberland Plateau used this rather distinctive upland environment for a variety of purposes and that religion was part of that broader sense of place.” Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood/Antiquity Publications Ltd.

A very large polychrome pictograph depicts humans, serpents and circles. The image, from the same overall site, but extending into Alabama, likely illustrated a myth spread across generations via word of mouth, with such permanent imagery further preserving its meaning, lost to history.

Simek explained, “Human images are often shown in activities suggesting heroic or ceremonial action, flying, transforming into animal shapes or reaching through the rock surface.” 

Simek said one of the images is “a black charcoal pictograph from an East Tennessee cave showing a transformational animal with the head, body, and tail of a dog or cat and the curving talons of a bird. Transformation is depicted in prehistoric art in both open-air sites and in dark zone caves in Tennessee.”

He and his colleagues suspect that the open-air rock art and the cave art were connected as part of “an organized alteration of the landscape,” with the creators of the images mapping “their conceptual universe onto the natural world in which they lived.” This happened in three dimensions, with upper (celestial in nature), middle (plants and animals) and lower (darkness, death and danger) worlds matching content with where it was placed in the region.

Simek describes another image of a bird was incised in wet mud banks deep inside Mud Glyph Cave in Tennessee. Mud, which is associated with the origin of the world by many Southeast native American peoples, was often used as a medium by prehistoric cave artists. This example is still plastic and therefore extremely fragile.”

Analysis of rock and cave art often employs non-destructive, high-tech tools, such as this high-resolution laser scanner operated by the RLS group in Chattanooga, Tenn. It precisely records the ancient art for conservation and analysis.

According to Simek, “Many of the images, like this black charcoal pictograph of a rayed circle from Dunbar Cave in Tennessee, can also be seen on portable religious objects found in temple mounds and other prehistoric religious contexts.”

Scorpions, with their painful stings, appear to have been part of the Native American vision of the “lower world.” At this extensive site, scorpion images were found in deep caves and not in the upper “celestial” area. In this case, an artist, or artists, produced the images by painting wet ashes onto the cave wall.

“These tiny turkey engravings from Tennessee were extremely difficult to photograph, since they are only a few centimeters long and composed of very shallow lines made with a fine pointed tool,” Alan Cressler, project photographer, told Discovery News.

“One of the best-known examples of Southeast cave art, these engravings of weapons and bird-human transformations form a complex composition in the dark zone of Devilstep Hollow Cave in Tennessee,” Simek said.

Co-author Sarah Sherwood of The University of the South, added, “Rock art sites are only one type of specialized activity site we see in the area; we know that people came to the Plateau to find specific foods, including animals and plants (in fact, certain native plants were domesticated in the area more than 3,000 years ago) and to obtain non-food resources; rock art was an integral part of how people conceived and used their landscapes.”

For a full list of paintings visit Discovery.com.

Photo shows 'UFO' above medieval castle

This image from the Netherlands appears to show some kind of object flying above Muiderslot Castle outside Amsterdam. (Elyktra Photoart)

What started out as a casual sightseeing trip to a historic castle in the Netherlands took a bizarre turn for one Dutch woman, who claims she may have spotted some kind of UFO.

Corrine Federer, 43, a business manager and amateur photographer, was visiting medieval Muiderslot Castle outside Amsterdam last month when she started taking pictures using her camera's high-dynamic range, or HDR, feature.

"In order to create HDR images, you take three or more exposures at the same time, because you then overlap the images and it gives you the full spectrum of light," Federer told The Huffington Post. [Top 10 Alien Encounters Debunked]

'It was completely quiet out. The more I flipped through the frames, it was kind of creepy.'

- Amateur photographer Corrine Federer

Federer took dozens of photos that day, but it wasn't until sometime later that she reviewed her HDR photos and saw a startling airborne shape in some of the images.

"It was a tubular-shaped object that had an S-shaped fin on it," Federer said. "If it had been any type of missile, it would've had multiple fins, but facing the same direction. We heard nothing. It was completely quiet out. The more I flipped through the frames, it was kind of creepy."

In HDR photography, several images are captured within a second, with each image using a different exposure level. The images are then combined to create a composite picture with a higher degree of clarity, depth and detail than would be possible with a single image.

Using photographic software, Federer was able to enhance the contrast in one of her images to reveal the object seen in the photo above.

Federer's images were analyzed by Ben Hansen, a former FBI special agent and host of the Syfy Channel's program "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files." He believes the images were not faked or manipulated.

"Having reviewed the raw files, there's no overt indication that the photos have been manipulated with post-editing software," Hansen told the Post. "The object's appearance is internally consistent with the rest of the photo."

Hansen, however, isn't convinced that the photographs show an aircraft of any kind.

"If I had to place my money on it, I would say that we're looking at insects," he said. "We typically see many wing protrusions on insect rod cases, but they do come in the single pair variety, too. It all depends on the shutter speeds and motion of the insects."

Indeed, insects are often the real culprit behind alleged UFO sightings, according to experts like Larry Engel, associate director of American University's Center for Environmental Filmmaking.

Insects are a consistent problem for filmmakers and photographers, Engel told LiveScience, "especially with wide-angle cameras or small-format cameras, as each emphasizes or records objects, including dust and bugs, close to the lens."

Other possibile explanations for the strange image captured in Federer's photographs include an airplane, a missile test or a weather balloon.

Federer, however, believes it's possible that the object she photographed could be some kind of UFO, even an extraterrestrial one. "I don't find it unreasonable to believe that there's another habitable planet somewhere that has started exploring space," Federer told the Post. "Maybe they're more advanced than we are and they've come by to see what's going on here."

Native American Lore #9: How the Great Chiefs Made the Moon and the Sun

How the Great Chiefs Made the Moon and the Sun

Hopi

Native American Lore

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Once upon a time, when our people first came up from the villages of the underworld, there was no sun. There was no moon. They saw only dreary darkness and felt the coldness. They looked hard for firewood, but in the darkness they found little.One day as they stumbled around, they saw a light in the distance. The Chief sent a messenger to see what caused the light. As the messenger approached it, he saw a small field containing corn, beans, squash, watermelons, and other foods. All around the field a great fire was burning. Nearby stood a straight, handsome man wearing around his neck a turquoise necklace of four strands. Turquoise pendants hung from his ears.
"Who are you?" the owner of the field asked the messenger.
"My people and I have come from the cave world below," the messenger replied. "And we suffer from the lack of light and the lack of food."
"My name is Skeleton," said the owner of the field. He showed the stranger the terrible mask he often wore and then gave him some food. "Now return to your people and guide them to my field."
When all the people had arrived, Skeleton began to give them food from his field. They marvelled that, although the crops seemed so small, there was enough food for everyone. He gave them ears of corn for roasting; he gave them beans, squashes, and watermelons. The people built fires for themselves and were happy.
Later, Skeleton helped them prepare fields of their own and to make fires around them. There they planted corn and soon harvested a good crop.
"Now we should move on," the people said. "We want to find the place where we will live always."
Away from the fires it was still dark. The Great Chiefs, at a council with Skeleton, decided to make a moon like the one they had enjoyed in the underworld.
They took a piece of well-prepared buffalo hide and cut from it a great circle. They stretched the circle tightly over a wooden hoop and then painted it carefully with white paint. When it was entirely dry, they mixed some black paint and painted, all around its edge, completing the picture of the moon. When all of this was done, they attached a stick to the disk and placed it on a large square of white cloth. Thus they made a symbol of the moon.
Then the Great Chiefs selected one of the young men and bade him
to stand on top of the moon symbol. They took up the cloth by its corners and began to swing it back and forth, higher and higher. As they were swinging it, they sang a magic song. Finally, with a mighty heave, they threw the moon disk upward. It continued to fly swiftly, upward and eastward.
As the people watched, they suddenly saw light in the eastern sky. The light became brighter and brighter. Surely something was burning there, they thought. Then something bright with light rose in the east. That was the moon!
Although the moon made it possible for the people to move around with less stumbling, its light was so dim that frequently the workers in the fields would cut up their food plants instead of the weeds. It was so cold that fires had to be kept burning around the fields all the time.
Again the Great Chiefs held a council with Skeleton, and again they decided that something better must be done.
This time, instead of taking a piece of buffalo hide, they took a piece of warm cloth that they themselves had woven while they were still in the underworld. They fashioned this as they had fashioned the disk of buffalo hide, except that this time they painted the face of the circle with a copper-coloured paint.
They painted eyes and a mouth on the disk and decorated the forehead with colours that the Great Chiefs decided upon according to their desires. Around the circle, they then wove a ring of corn husks, arranged in a zig zag design. Around the circle of corn husks, they threaded a string of red hair from some animal. To the back of the disk, they fastened a small ring of corn husks. Through that ring they poked a circle of eagle feathers.
To the top of each eagle feather, the old Chief tied a few little red feathers taken from the top of the head of a small bird. On the forehead of the circle, he attached an abalone shell. Then the sun disk was completed.
Again the Great Chiefs chose a young man to stand on top of the disk, which they had placed on a large sheet. As they had done with the moon disk, they raised the cloth by holding its corners. Then they swung the sun disk back and forth, back and forth, again and again. With a mighty thrust, they threw the man and the disk far into the air. It travelled fast into the eastern sky and disappeared.
All the people watched it carefully. In a short time, they saw light in the east as if a great fire were burning. Soon the new sun rose and warmed the earth with its kindly rays.
Now with the moon to light the earth at night and the sun to light and warm it by day, all the people decided to pick up their provisions and go on. As they started, the White people took a trail that led them far to the south. The Hopis took one to the north, and the Pueblos took one midway between the two. Thus they wandered on to the places where they were to live.
The Hopis wandered a long time, building houses and planting crops until they reached the mesas where they now live. The ruins of the ancient villages are scattered to the very beginnings of the great river of the canyon--the Colorado.