-
SO LITTLE TIME AND MUCH TO DO DEPARTMENT -
Is Time Disappearing From the Universe?
On a desert highway in Australia's flat, dry centre sits a petrol station by a watering hole where extraterrestrials have been stopping off for millennia, or so "witnesses" say.
If truck drivers or passing tourists find themselves nodding off on the long drive between Alice Springs and Darwin, a pitstop at Australia's self-proclaimed UFO capital might just revive them.
While filling up the tank or their stomachs at Wycliffe Well's roadhouse, they might notice little green men holding out their hands or staring out at them from nearby walls.
That may be no cause for concern because these are probably just statues and paintings put there for the visitors' benefit. But according to locals the real thing is so common around here that people hardly even blink when they see it.
Lights in the sky, blue domed discs, silvery beings — all common stuff in Wycliffe Well, say locals, who see a secret connection with Australia's nearby spy facility of Pine Gap.
Sceptics, on the other hand, say the large number of sightings may rather reflect the high levels of alcohol consumption, for which Australia's Northern Territory is famous.
"When I came down here it was just a common occurrence. It was just one of those things. Even the previous owner just mentioned it to me in passing," said Lew Farkas, who has run the Wycliffe Well roadhouse and caravan park for 23 years and claims around half a dozen sightings of his own.
This tiny dot on the map, 400 kilometres north of Alice Springs, surrounded by scrubland, now attracts international visits from "experts," occasional UFO conventions and constant local media coverage of the unusual sightings in the vicinity.
"It is recognised throughout the world UFO industry," said Farkas.
Suggestions that the sightings could be caused by such normal phenomena as birds and aircraft landing lights are promptly dismissed by the UFO watchers.
"You take that with a pinch of salt. It's a lot of rubbish," said Farkas.
It's a quiet life for Farkas providing food and petrol for the dozens of cars that drive past daily on the monotonous route up the Stuart Highway punctuated only by flat scrub, termite mounds and the occasional dead kangaroo or wandering emu.
"There were lights doing manoeuvres in the sky"
But the night time visitations are more than enough to liven things up, he says, describing the most memorable of his own encounters.
There were lights doing manoeuvres in the sky, little ones dancing around the big ones, doing figures of eight, he said.
Farkas (59) was a physical training instructor in the Australian navy before he took over the roadhouse and says this sighting reminded him of manoeuvres around an aircraft carrier.
"That is how we used to do exercises, in exactly the same way. It looked exactly the same as we used to do at sea," he said.
"Over the years I have had quite a few sightings, mainly lights. I have had a close up encounter where I have actually seen the portholes — just like you read in the comic books of the past."
Farkas claims Wycliffe Well is one of only four or five places in the world where there are constant sightings of extraterrestrials and UFOs, probably the most famous being the Nevada Desert in the United States.
The remoteness of the Australian outback has made it harder for people to become aware of Wycliffe Well, but it seems the news is slowly spreading.
It was truck drivers who in modern times first noticed the unusual goings on, during World War II, when the waterhole gave rise to market gardens that fed the war effort against the Japanese up north in Darwin. Their stories were mainly of strange lights in the sky.
But local Aboriginals also report that extraterrestrials have been visiting the area for thousands of years, hanging out around some of the area's stunning rock formations, such as the Devil's Marbles, a sandstone formation just to the north along the Stuart Highway.
Recently, a group of Aboriginal women in a local community reported their own close encounter. They were sitting around playing cards when a big beam of light appeared.
"There is no airport so they have got to land somewhere"
UFOs apparently also land in the nearby Tanami desert, according to the believers. "There is no airport so they have got to land somewhere," said Farkas.
It used to be easy to tell when there was UFO activity, he said. The electronic banking and telephone lines would go out. But with a change to fibre optic technology that problem has disappeared.
Farkas dismisses claims that he might want to drum up interest in UFOs to boost business at his roadhouse, saying he has plenty of business from the constant stream of motorists passing by.
Barry Williams, editor of Australia's quarterly journal "The Skeptic" which attempts to debunk all kinds of suspect science, has other explanations for the sightings. Many could be of the planet Venus, others would be aircraft landing lights, he says.
"We are not sceptical of people sighting things. We are sceptical of some of the conclusions they come to from what they have seen. They don't stand up to any crucial thinking at all," he told AFP.
The Northern Territory in general has the reputation of having a large number of sightings of UFOs, he said, which he suggests might be connected with the local drinking habits.
"I don't know whether this is in any way connected with the fact that the Northern Territory has the biggest beer consumption of anywhere on earth," he said.
Keith Douglass, a cleaner at Alice Springs hospital who follows UFOs on the side, says he has been up to Wycliffe Well about half a dozen times but has never seen anything.
Nevertheless, he has heard lots of tales, for example of an Aboriginal woman who was chased by a UFO.
"It is a flat disc with a blue dome. It has been sighted around Alice Springs a couple of times. It chased this lady into town. She saw it again up at Wycliffe Well," he said.
"Wycliffe Well — that's been going for years."
Source: Travel
http://travel.iafrica.com/destin/australasia/669822.htm
Is Time Disappearing From the Universe?
Remember a little thing called
the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation
was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is
slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish
completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery
that has baffled scientists for years.
Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".
However, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. Professor Jose Senovilla, and his colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards.
Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured
The team's proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.
“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion," he explains. "What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion - that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate."
If time gradually slows "but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of 'a standard flow of time', then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an "effective accelerated rate of the expansion" takes place."
Currently, astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique. This technique relies on the understanding that stars moving away appear redder in color than ones moving towards us. Scientists look for supernovae of certain types that provide a sort of benchmark. However, the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe. If time is slowing down, according to this new theory, our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.
"Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," says Prof Senovilla. The theory bases it’s idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk". In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.
"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Senovilla told New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then."
Though radical and in many way unprecedented, these ideas are not without support. Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, say the concept has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect."
Source: The Daily Galaxy
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/01/scientist-says.html
Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".
However, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. Professor Jose Senovilla, and his colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards.
Senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured
The team's proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.
“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion," he explains. "What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion - that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate."
If time gradually slows "but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of 'a standard flow of time', then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an "effective accelerated rate of the expansion" takes place."
Currently, astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called "red shift" technique. This technique relies on the understanding that stars moving away appear redder in color than ones moving towards us. Scientists look for supernovae of certain types that provide a sort of benchmark. However, the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe. If time is slowing down, according to this new theory, our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.
"Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating," says Prof Senovilla. The theory bases it’s idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the "bulk". In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.
"Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever," Senovilla told New Scientist magazine. "Our planet will be long gone by then."
Though radical and in many way unprecedented, these ideas are not without support. Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, say the concept has merit. "We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear - that's just the reverse effect."
Source: The Daily Galaxy
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/01/scientist-says.html
-
I COME FROM A LAND DOWN UNDER DEPARTMENT -
Australia - Strange Lights, Beings, Beams
Australia - Strange Lights, Beings, Beams
On a desert highway in Australia's flat, dry centre sits a petrol station by a watering hole where extraterrestrials have been stopping off for millennia, or so "witnesses" say.
If truck drivers or passing tourists find themselves nodding off on the long drive between Alice Springs and Darwin, a pitstop at Australia's self-proclaimed UFO capital might just revive them.
While filling up the tank or their stomachs at Wycliffe Well's roadhouse, they might notice little green men holding out their hands or staring out at them from nearby walls.
That may be no cause for concern because these are probably just statues and paintings put there for the visitors' benefit. But according to locals the real thing is so common around here that people hardly even blink when they see it.
Lights in the sky, blue domed discs, silvery beings — all common stuff in Wycliffe Well, say locals, who see a secret connection with Australia's nearby spy facility of Pine Gap.
Sceptics, on the other hand, say the large number of sightings may rather reflect the high levels of alcohol consumption, for which Australia's Northern Territory is famous.
"When I came down here it was just a common occurrence. It was just one of those things. Even the previous owner just mentioned it to me in passing," said Lew Farkas, who has run the Wycliffe Well roadhouse and caravan park for 23 years and claims around half a dozen sightings of his own.
This tiny dot on the map, 400 kilometres north of Alice Springs, surrounded by scrubland, now attracts international visits from "experts," occasional UFO conventions and constant local media coverage of the unusual sightings in the vicinity.
"It is recognised throughout the world UFO industry," said Farkas.
Suggestions that the sightings could be caused by such normal phenomena as birds and aircraft landing lights are promptly dismissed by the UFO watchers.
"You take that with a pinch of salt. It's a lot of rubbish," said Farkas.
It's a quiet life for Farkas providing food and petrol for the dozens of cars that drive past daily on the monotonous route up the Stuart Highway punctuated only by flat scrub, termite mounds and the occasional dead kangaroo or wandering emu.
"There were lights doing manoeuvres in the sky"
But the night time visitations are more than enough to liven things up, he says, describing the most memorable of his own encounters.
There were lights doing manoeuvres in the sky, little ones dancing around the big ones, doing figures of eight, he said.
Farkas (59) was a physical training instructor in the Australian navy before he took over the roadhouse and says this sighting reminded him of manoeuvres around an aircraft carrier.
"That is how we used to do exercises, in exactly the same way. It looked exactly the same as we used to do at sea," he said.
"Over the years I have had quite a few sightings, mainly lights. I have had a close up encounter where I have actually seen the portholes — just like you read in the comic books of the past."
Farkas claims Wycliffe Well is one of only four or five places in the world where there are constant sightings of extraterrestrials and UFOs, probably the most famous being the Nevada Desert in the United States.
The remoteness of the Australian outback has made it harder for people to become aware of Wycliffe Well, but it seems the news is slowly spreading.
It was truck drivers who in modern times first noticed the unusual goings on, during World War II, when the waterhole gave rise to market gardens that fed the war effort against the Japanese up north in Darwin. Their stories were mainly of strange lights in the sky.
But local Aboriginals also report that extraterrestrials have been visiting the area for thousands of years, hanging out around some of the area's stunning rock formations, such as the Devil's Marbles, a sandstone formation just to the north along the Stuart Highway.
Recently, a group of Aboriginal women in a local community reported their own close encounter. They were sitting around playing cards when a big beam of light appeared.
"There is no airport so they have got to land somewhere"
UFOs apparently also land in the nearby Tanami desert, according to the believers. "There is no airport so they have got to land somewhere," said Farkas.
It used to be easy to tell when there was UFO activity, he said. The electronic banking and telephone lines would go out. But with a change to fibre optic technology that problem has disappeared.
Farkas dismisses claims that he might want to drum up interest in UFOs to boost business at his roadhouse, saying he has plenty of business from the constant stream of motorists passing by.
Barry Williams, editor of Australia's quarterly journal "The Skeptic" which attempts to debunk all kinds of suspect science, has other explanations for the sightings. Many could be of the planet Venus, others would be aircraft landing lights, he says.
"We are not sceptical of people sighting things. We are sceptical of some of the conclusions they come to from what they have seen. They don't stand up to any crucial thinking at all," he told AFP.
The Northern Territory in general has the reputation of having a large number of sightings of UFOs, he said, which he suggests might be connected with the local drinking habits.
"I don't know whether this is in any way connected with the fact that the Northern Territory has the biggest beer consumption of anywhere on earth," he said.
Keith Douglass, a cleaner at Alice Springs hospital who follows UFOs on the side, says he has been up to Wycliffe Well about half a dozen times but has never seen anything.
Nevertheless, he has heard lots of tales, for example of an Aboriginal woman who was chased by a UFO.
"It is a flat disc with a blue dome. It has been sighted around Alice Springs a couple of times. It chased this lady into town. She saw it again up at Wycliffe Well," he said.
"Wycliffe Well — that's been going for years."
Source: Travel
http://travel.iafrica.com/destin/australasia/669822.htm
-
SEARCHING FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE DEPARTMENT -
Strange Science Takes Time
Strange Science Takes Time
The late astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the saying that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," in reference to reports of alien visitations. Generating low-cost commercial fusion power, isolating antimatter and tracing reverse-time causality aren't as far out there as UFOs, but a similar rule might well apply: Extraordinary science requires extraordinary effort.
With that in mind, here's a progress report on three extraordinary science projects that have popped up in the news:
Reverse-time
causality
It's been more than a year since University of Washington physicist John Cramer proposed to test a spooky corollary of quantum theory: that it might be possible to receive a laser signal before you send it. The problem was that Cramer didn't really have enough research money to build the experiment, which required sending entangled photons through prisms, filters, optical fibers and other devices. What's more, Cramer worried that the apparatus he planned to use would be available only for a limited time.
Once the general public found out about Cramer's plight, the contributions started flowing in: Donors provided more than $40,000 - which allowed Cramer to move forward with the backward-time research. He was also able to find alternate lab space, which meant he didn't have to worry so much about running out of ... well, time.
Cramer's backward research took the No. 2 spot in our recent Weird Science Awards competition. So how have things turned out?
It's taken longer than he expected to set up all the equipment for the first phase of the experiment, but this week Cramer told me that he's finally setting up the avalanche photodiodes required for making the fine measurements of single photons that will be required. "They're sort of like little geiger counters, made of silicon," he explained.
Cramer expected to start making measurements this week, but it will take still more time and effort to track down the retrocausality effect, if it exists. Happily, money is no longer an immediate concern. "I'm fine for the moment, as far as financial support goes," Cramer said.
Trapping
anti-atoms
During last summer's visit to the CERN particle physics center on the French-Swiss border, I looked in on the ALPHA experiment to trap stable atoms of antihydrogen - which would afford the first-ever opportunity to study the properties of antimatter in the lab.
The ALPHA team, led by University of Aarhus physicist Jeffrey Hangst, has been engaged in a friendly competition to achieve the feat, vying with another team of researchers headquartered just a few yards away at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator. "As usual, it's a race here - it's a race hour to hour," Hangst told me.
By all accounts, the race continues. Hangst e-mailed me this progress report just before Christmas:
"... The short answer is that we don't have any headlines for you. We made some nice progress this year, and our understanding improved greatly, but we did not yet succeed in trapping antihydrogen. We gave it a go at the end of the run. Although we see lots of evidence for positron-antiproton interaction in the magnetic trap, we have as yet no evidence that antihydrogen atoms can be caught.
"The good news is that we have much-improved techniques for manipulating antiprotons and keeping them in a very small radius cloud in order to maximize the chance of catching the produced antihydrogen. We also began commissioning our imaging detector for antiproton annihilations. This should really help us next year in diagnosing what is going on.
"I'll keep you up to date on our progress next year. We are looking forward to it."
Low-cost
fusion power
Every time I write about the quest to develop a nuclear fusion reactor, I'm reminded that the $13 billion international ITER project in France is not the only game in town. Over the past year or so, there's been a lot of buzz on the Internet about under-the-radar research into what some believe could be a low-cost fusion technology. The technology, known as inertial electrostatic confinement or Polywell fusion, was championed by physicist Robert Bussard - who passed away in October after a long battle with cancer.
Bussard's mantle has been picked up by a small team led by Richard Nebel, who has taken a leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory to head up Bussard's EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. Backed by a Navy contract, Nebel's five-person team is trying to pick up the technology where Bussard left it.
"What's there is interesting, OK?" Nebel told me today. "And the bottom line of it is, what we've been charged to do is reproduce that. Find out if it's real. Find out if or if not all this stuff is what it seems to be."
EMC2 Fusion has built an upgraded model of Bussard's last experimental plasma containment device, which was known as WB-6. (The WB stands for Wiffle Ball, a whimsical reference to the structure of the device.) "We got first plasma yesterday," Nebel said - but he and his colleagues in Santa Fe, N.M., still have a long way to get the WB-7 experiment up to the power levels Bussard was working with.
"We're not out trying to make a big splash on any of this stuff at this point," Nebel said. But he said he's hoping to find out by this spring whether or not Bussard's concept is worth pursuing with a larger demonstration project.
The initial analysis showed that Bussard's data on energy yields were consistent with expectations, Nebel said.
"We don't know for sure whether all that's right," he said, "but it'd be horrible for Mother Nature to give you what you expect to see, and have it all be bogus."
Sure, there's a chance that all this - a low-cost route to fusion power, the ability to trap antimatter atoms, the potential for quantum causality to turn back the clock - will turn out to be bogus. But maybe that's what extraordinary science is all about. Stay tuned.
Source: Cosmic Log
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/09/566532.aspx
-
WHEN YOU WITCH UPON A STREAM DEPARTMENT -
Witch Upon A Well
WATERFORD -- Phillip Stine gripped a forked willow branch tightly in his hands and set out across a freshly plowed field. He traversed the area for quite a while, with no result. To motorists driving past the field, Stine was a curious sight: just a man out walking with a stick.
Then something strange happened.
The tip of the willow branch quivered and, like a magnet drawn to metal, started to pull. Stine tightened his grip as the sudden force threatened to yank the wood from his hands. "OK, there it goes," he said.
He smiled broadly, youthfully, his face suddenly lit with all the excitement of a child opening a present. Even at 76, finding water is a thrill that never grows old for him. As Stine continued to walk, the tip of the branch bent backward and headed for his face. He turned his head to the side and the branch thudded against his shoulder. Had he not been in the way, the tip would have twisted until it pointed directly toward the ground. Right where the water is.
"It's crazy," he said. "I have had some good success finding water over the years, but really I don't know how or why it works. I've never found any scientific reasoning that explains it. Maybe it's the proportion of lead you've got in your butt."
That last sentence is one of Stein's trademark lines, and he delivered it with a gleam in his eye. It's easy to tell he really does get a charge out of this. As he talked about the odd -- and mildly controversial -- art of witching wells, Stine stood near a patch of ground marked by a couple of red flags. It's the precise spot where in a few weeks workers will drill hundreds of feet to put in a well to tap the network of streams that flow hundreds of feet below the earth's surface.
"I'll be the first one to tell you it's amazing," Stine said. "It's still amazing to me, and I've been doing it for a long time."
There is no doubting that Stine's branch moved; the debate lies in what caused the branch (some use metal rods) to move. The phenomenon's explanations couldn't be more far reaching: everything from electromagnetic or other subtle geological forces to ESP and other paranormal explanations. Clearly, there is no definitive answer.
As with most any topic, the Internet is rife with debate about the merits of well witching. Some point out there's no way to prove well witchers are any better at
finding water than anyone else would be, and that drilling will prove successful in any area where water is geologically possible. Others point to experiments that reveal the rods or branches also move when above objects such as metal and golf balls. And there's no explaining why some have the ability while others don't.
But believe it or not, well witching is an age-old practice that has gone on throughout this area as long as people have been digging wells here. Even though many area farmers can't explain it, most wouldn't think of drilling a well without having someone locate the water first. And that's where people like Stine come in.
In the early 1980s, Stine spent several hours walking a ranch in Farmington with a man who used metal rods to find water. When the man offered to show Stine the technique, he gave it a try and it worked. He's been doing it ever since. Along the way, he gave up metal rods in favor of the forked branches of willow trees that grow in watery areas.
When Stine's wife, Myrna, learned about her husband's new hobby, she was -- like many -- rather skeptical.
"When he first started doing this, I thought he was crazy," she said. "I tried it and it didn't work for me. And then I held his hand while he was doing it, and that's when I felt it. After that, I was convinced."
Trace Thomas had a similar conversion. Thomas, 46, said Stine has picked out the placement of all four of the wells on the family's 900-acre ranch in Hickman. Still, Thomas had his doubts. That changed a couple of years ago when Stine was witching a well on a nearby property. After Stine located what he thought was an ideal spot, he handed the branch to Thomas and showed him what to do.
"The branch started twisting until it was pointing straight back at me," Thomas said. "Then it pointed straight toward the ground. It was pulling so hard I could barely hold onto it. I couldn't believe it.
"If you put a willow branch in the ground and keep a lot of water on it, it'll become a tree. To me, it felt like the branch wanted to go into that spot on the ground because that's where the water was. It was pretty amazing. I wasn't skeptical about it after that."
Stine never has charged for his well-witching services, but as the founder of Waterford Irrigation Supply, it served his best interests to help his customers avoid digging dry wells. He sold the business about five years ago but still offers his services to former customers and mostly anyone else who calls upon him (friendly notice: he's not actively looking for more requests). He doesn't keep track of the numbers, but he figures he's spotted several hundreds of wells over the past 25 years.
These days, Stine, a former Waterford mayor, mostly spends his time overseeing operations of his walnut and almond orchards, as well as helping organize various community-service projects. But to farmers in these parts, Stine's greatest gift is one that's imperative to growing crops: He's the man who finds water.
And in an area where water tables are slowly and steadily in decline, that's no small thing.
Source: The Modesto Bee
http://www.modbee.com/life/friendsfamily/story/170598.html