I am almost sure that Anacondas were not of interest to you before you believed in the fine Hollywood hit movie and the story behind Jennifer Lopez last Anaconda encounter. In fact, there are only a handful of people that have ever asked about what do Anaconda snakes eat, neither of these people are within a 10,000 mile ratio of such amazing creatures within their country.

For any situation, entertaining or study reasoning maybe, anacondas are totally apart from all of the other snakes because of the daily habit of hunting, stalking a prey, eating and getting to grow. But very important before we delve into detail and stress this enough: anacondas do not eat people or aren't some sort of compulsive prey eater! That is way too much HBO!

Anaconda snakes are guided by the way their appetite and the way they hunt. The snakes just coil the body of the prey and they squeeze until the last breathe of air is expunged from the animal. They can easily weight over 200 pounds and be longer than 30 feet.

So what do anaconda snakes eat? They eat any animal they can overpower. Usually: fishes, sheep, fully grown deeps and even dogs. Chewing or tearing the flesh of the prey I guess is just another Hollywood effect they can always get away and evolve the emotion of the uncertain. Hollywood is just that great. With a bit of humor, just make sure you focus more on Mr. Lopez than the next bigger snake featured on TV for any of the following sequel of such great movie!

Ancondas are one of the species you can freely learn in the Reptile Information Center with videos and facts from such amazing animals. You can now take a live look at them by going to Anaconda Snakes portal.

Along with the increasing availability of exotic pets online is people in need of a manner to display exotic pets. Anybody can through a reptile in an empty fish tank but is that really worthy of your exotic pet and how you want to present it to the world? Let's face it, you probably purchased an exotic pet online or elsewhere, because at least a part of you wants to be different than everybody else. So why should your pet's display be the same old thing everybody else already has?

Granted, you can buy a second hand aquarium and throw your iguana or your python in there without any real concerns for their health or safety. Still, there is just something missing when it comes to the way that most people select to display their exotic pets. An aquarium, as convenient as it may be, may not be the way to go.

Hinges cost very little and some people already have a few laying around in their garage or in a spare parts drawer somewhere in their house. Screen mesh is cheaply purchased at any hardware store and mix that with a piece of plywood and a couple of straight one by two inch pieces of wood and you have all of the makings for a custom display for your exotic animals.

Making the entire housing structure for your pet out of plywood is never a good idea for a display. This will actually defeat the entire purpose as people will not actually be able to see your newly acquired exotic pets. Make at least one side of the structure and the top out of the small lumber and wire mesh. In this way, people will be able to see the exotic pet inside.

If you want to make your exotic pet cage even nicer, you can always stain the outside and round the edges so that you have a more pleasant visual appearance on the outside of the exotic pet cage. Do not stain or varnish the inside as the varnish may crack and you may very well kill your exotic animals.

For further visual effects, you can add paintings or posters on the back portion of the exotic animal's cage. Pictures of the desert go very well for iguanas and while it may or may not actually make the iguana feel any better, it will be much more appealing to the human eye. For pythons or boa constrictors, try using a forested river scene or something else with a lot of green. Again, the actual reaction your pets have may not be noticeable but it will certainly give your friends and visitors something to talk about when they come to your house.

The size you build it may have to depend on many factors like how much work you are willing to put into it, how much money you have for parts and how fancy you want to make what you have. However, your biggest concern should be that your new exotic animal display is placed somewhere that people can see it and where it will not have to be moved a lot.

With the ever increasing popularity of finding exotic pets online, make sure that you still have something that is as unique as you are. If you own an exotic pet, you probably want to be different and maybe even a little bit better and that does not mean tossing an iguana in a second-hand aquarium.

CS Swarens is the president of Find a Pet Online. 800 998-7065

For additional information on dogs, cats, birds, horses, and exotic pets visit the internet's pet resource including pet classifieds and exotic pets for sale at http://www.findapetonline.com

Research over 430 pet breed profiles http://www.findapetonline.com/breeds.html

Blame the scientist who almost discovered uranium on why this atomic element is named after the seventh planet from the sun. Imagine if the sequence below had taken place in any other way. What would we now be calling the yellowcake that powers nuclear reactors across the world? You would be surprised. This is the story behind uraniums name.

The word uranium has a confusing past, but through no fault of its own. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, in a silver mining town in an area which is now part of the Czech Republic, miners discovered a black mineral they called pechblende. Pitchblende, or uraninite as it is now better known, is a uranium-rich mineral which is also comprised of lead, thorium, radio and rare earths. In the late 19th century, it was from this same northwest Bohemian town where Marie Curie got her pitchblende and isolated radium and polonium from the ore.

European scientists Roentgen, Becquerel, Villard, and others were aggressively experimenting with pitchblende and discovered ionizing radiation, X-rays, beta radiation and gamma rays. Pierre and Marie Curie named the gamma ray phenomenon, attributed to the radium in pitchblende, radioactivity. MIT professor of biology Samuel Prescott, who was closely following Madam Curies research, began testing those gamma rays on food. He discovered the gamma rays destroyed bacteria in food. From Prescotts work, food manufacturers discovered they could extend the shelf life of canned goods. Since then, radiation and radioactivity have become an integral part of both the medical profession and the food industry.

Lets go back about one century. In 1789, Martin Heinrich Klaproth presented his discovery of a strange kind of half metal to Berlins Royal Academy of Sciences. The German chemist had, on the face of it, isolated uranium oxide from pitchblende. Klaproth suggested this new atomic element (number 92 on the periodic chart) be called uran.

Not until 1841 did another European scientist, Eugene-Melchior Peligot, finally isolate uranium as an atomic element. Klaproth was just stabbing in the dark when he tried to identify what uranium was. He failed to explain what uranium was, or even to understand it. Nonetheless, his credibility remained intact as a pioneering scientist. Martin Klaproth was later credited for isolating zirconium, chromium and cerium.

Klaproths naming ceremony for uranium was a political move, moreso than a scientific christening of the 92nd element. It was because of Dr. Bode. His Royal Academy colleague, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, had been fuming since Englands William Herschel had discovered the seventh planet. Herschel honored King George III by calling this planet, the Georgium Sidus (the Georgian Planet). Bode argued the new planet be renamed to conform to the classically mythological names of the other planets, such as Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Bode chose Uranus, the Greek name for the earliest supreme god.

The Uranus planetary debate went on for about, and was finally settled in 1850, about the same time that a British firm began using uranium in glass to give it a fluorescent yellow or greenish appearance. The point is this: If Klaproth hadnt contributed to the Uranus-versus-Georgium Sidus debate by naming his strange half metal uran, we might be calling uranium stocks something else.

COPYRIGHT 2007 by StockInterview, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

James Finch contributes to StockInterview.com and other publications. StockInterviews Investing in the Great Uranium Bull Market has become the most popular book ever published for uranium mining stock investors. Visit http://www.stockinterview.com

Recently the fossil of a creature, named Tiktaalik (pronounced tick-TAH-lick), which seems to blur the line between fish-like creatures and four-legged animals, was discovered on Ellesmere Island, in Arctic Canada. It's been touted as evolution's "missing link," a life form in transition from one species to another.

Does scientists' interpretation represent a case of following preconceived notions, while neglecting other more logical explanations that are actually supported by independent empirical evidence?

Caterpillars are crawling creatures that go through a stage called pupa, in which they undergo a complete metamorphosis and emerge as flying creatures. Tadpoles are aquatic, gill-breathing, legless creatures that develop lungs, legs, and other organs to roam on dry land. Some salamanders undergo a metamorphosis which also takes them from an aquatic environment to an air-breathing one.

Although these creatures undergo such drastic changes in only one generation, not one has, in the millions of known cases, ever evolved into anything beyond their usual, known final stage. There is obviously no random evolution going on here. A limited number of creatures apparently have the genetic blueprint for transforming into very specific new forms.

There are humans with both male and female physical characteristics. Are males evolving into females, or vise versa? Of course not. These are simply anomalies, and don't seem to drastically effect the course of the species.

Then, of course, there are organisms, humans included, which are occasionally born diseased or deformed. They either die out or pass on their aberrations to offspring. Again, in the millions of known cases, they haven't been known to drastically change the course of a species.

The question now is, given the realities of biological aberrations and limited metamorphosis, have scientist considered these phenomena as possible explanations for Tiktaalik?

Have scientists considered perhaps even that there could have been a species that had some of the characteristics of both aquatic and dry-land creatures, and didn't necessarily evolve from or to any other creature?

The discovery of Tiktaalik has been widely reported on network television, in newspapers, in magazines, and on the internet, all claiming it to be proof of evolution. I have thus far not seen a single account of an evolutionist even listing other possibilities, let alone describe by what rationale or evidence explanations other than evolution were eliminated.

We have ample independent, modern-day evidence of several explanations for Tiktaalik. Yet, scientists decided on the one explanation for which there is no independent proof, evolution, and then have the temerity to claim that this PROVES evolution.

Throwing out an explanation and saying, go ahead disprove it, is easy. Coming up with several explanations and disproving them yourself one by one until you're left with the one you claim to believe, that's another story. What scientists have done is employed "used car salesmanship" to sell us "science;" they've told us "it's a great car," but neglected to tell us about the holes, cracks and leaks. Tiktaalik is proof of only one thing: the public can be subjected to some really bad science.

Perhaps these scientists should be working for General Motors -- a little slick salesmanship could do wonders for the auto industry.

Josh Greenberger: A computer consultant for over two decades, the author has developed software for such organizations as NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, AT&T, Charles Schwab, Bell Laboratories and Chase Manhattan Bank. Since 1984, the author's literary works have appeared in such periodicals as The New York Post, The Daily News, The Village Voice, The Jewish Press, and others. His articles have ranged from humor to scientific to topical events. Visit his site: shopndrop.com

There have been many depictions of the human energy field and subtle bodies in the metaphysical and religious literature. The interesting observation in these depictions is the many signature features that can be associated with plasma. This suggests that the human energy field and the subtle body can be modeled as a bioplasma body. A brief excursion of the images in the literature and their similarity with structures often seen in plasma will be carried out below.

1. Magnetosphere

It is well-known in general metaphysics that the (relatively) dense bioplasma body sits inside an ovoid which is enclosed by a sheath. This ovoid is similar to the magnetosphere around the Earth as it protects the dense bioplasma body (inside the ovoid) from unwanted radiation, just as the Earth's magnetosphere protects the physical-dense Earth from harmful solar radiation. The ovoid usually contains a dense body (relative to the rest of the ovoid) along the longer axis of the ovoid with low density (weakly ionized) magnetic plasma filling the rest of the ovoid. The field lines of the primary dipolar magnetic field generated by the central vertical currents (see #10 below) within the bioplasma body is largely embedded within the ovoid.

2. Concentric Shells

Plasma crystals, generated in the laboratory, are in the form of collections of particles which are held in a crystal-like array by a plasma of weakly ionized gas. When the assembly of microscopic particles was contained between two electrodes and illuminated by a laser beam, it could be seen, even with the naked eye, that the particles naturally arranged themselves regularly into as many as 18 planes parallel to the electrodes. In a subsequent experiment, the particles in the plasma crystal arranged themselves into neat concentric shells, to a total ball diameter of several millimeters. These orderly Coulomb balls, consisting of aligned, concentric shells of dust particles, survived for long periods. This onion-like layered structure, comprising of concentric shells, is also often seen in depictions of the human energy field or subtle bodies in the metaphysical literature.

3. Double Helix (Birkeland) Currents

The helical shape of the magnetic field around the gas cloud in the constellation Orion is believed to be caused by matter in the interstellar cloud moving in a straight line along the length of the filament. When this happens, it causes the magnetic field around the cloud to spiral around in a corkscrew pattern. Researchers were able to detect this spiral shape using the Green Bank Telescope, a radio observatory in Virginia. When helical magnetic fields form in plasma, charged particles move along the field lines generating helical currents.

Kundalini is a Sanskrit term is derived from the term kundala, which means a "ring" or "coil". Kundalini currents have often been depicted in the metaphysical literature as a serpent coiled around the back part of the root chakra in three and a half turns (comparable to a solenoid or a compressed helical current) around the sacrum. The energy is supposed to originate from an apparent reservoir of subtle bio-energy at the base of the spine. The central vertical currents in the subtle body (described as Ida, Pingala and Sushumna in the yoga literature) are often depicted in the metaphysical (particularly the yoga) literature as a pair of mutually entangled helical currents with straight currents passing through them.

Mutually entangled (double spirals) currents are frequently seen in space and laboratory plasmas. Helical structures can also be found in dusty (or complex) plasma. This shows that there is a strong connection between plasma dynamics and the formation of the central kundalini and pranic currents in the (supersymmetric) bioplasma body as described by plasma metaphysics.

4. Hot Spots or Plasmoids

Plasmas can take up a variety of shapes and have "hot spots" which are visible. It has been observed that these hot spots in plasma emanate along axes. Secondly, these hotspots have different colors and temperatures than the rest of the mass. These observations agree with the bright blobs of light of different colors often found depicted in subtle body and human energy field literature along the spinal axis of the human body.

The hot spots are believed to be sources of intense X-ray emission as well as pulsed electron and ion beams. Hot spots require intense heating rates more commonly associated with focused laser beams. Pulsed beams have also been depicted in the metaphysical literature (see #6 below). Presumably these are generated by the hot spots, exit out of the vortexes (see #9 below), and undergo "lensing effects" while being ejected from the ovoid and being refracted by the clear material in the ovoid which could produce convergent and collimated beams.

5. Coronas, Spicules and Granulations

Coronal auras and discharges, granulation and spicules are all features associated with the Sun and our subtle energy bodies - the latter, as seen by clairvoyants. Coronal discharges and flares can occur suddenly on the Sun. The various particles that are discharged, together with these flares, are carried by the Sun's plasma wind to cause magnetic storms on Earth. Spicules are short-lived phenomena, corresponding to rising jets of gas that move upward and last only a few minutes on the Sun. Spicules can also be seen in the coronas of bioplasma bodies. In addition, striations (which can also be associated with plasma and are seen on gas giants like Jupiter) are also seen. Coronas and spicules can also be seen in Kirlian representations of the aura. (In laboratory tests, it has been found that Kirlian representations of the aura correlate with the colors and shapes that human "seers" see.)

6. Beams and Jets

Using sophisticated scientific equipment, scientists at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai have shown that "subtle energy" has the properties of an electromagnetic current when flowing through acupuncture meridians but takes on the properties of coherent particle streams, similar to laser light, when projected out from the body through the hands of master Qigong healers who cure diseases by beaming their energy into the patient's body.

There are important vortexes on the palms of the hands (of the subtle body within the ovoid). Jets or directed beams of light have been seen in photographs taken during events where subtle energetic practices take place (for example: Reiki, Qigong and Christian "Praise and Worship"). There are also Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist and Christian images showing jets of light issuing-out from the palms of saints or deities. One of the seers of the Fatima apparitions of "Mary" in 1919, "Lucia", revealed that during one of the apparitions, "Mary" opened her hands and "rays of light" issued from them.

7. Filamentary Currents

Plasma naturally forms filaments in response to electric fields within the subtle body (which according to plasma metaphysics is composed of a complex plasma of negatively-charged, positively-charged and neutral particles). Charged particles are guided within these filaments by magnetic fields and accelerated by electric fields - generating currents. It is a well accepted fact in metaphysics that there are filaments within our subtle body, which have been referred to as "meridians", "nadis" and "channels" - in the Chinese, Indian and Tibetan literature, respectively. In Taoist and Qigong literature, they are also referred to as "circuits" and "orbits". For example, Qigong practitioners may speak of microcosmic and macrocosmic orbits. The microcosmic orbit is really the main meridian through which particles are accelerated in the relevant practices to bring energy to the rest of the subtle body. According to plasma metaphysics, these meridians are "Birkeland currents", i.e. currents in which charged particles flow through and are guided by magnetic field lines.

8. Plasma Focus Device

The plasma focus device produces, by electromagnetic acceleration and compression, a short-lived magnetically-confined, hot spot or plasmoid that is so hot and dense that it becomes a multi-radiation source. These plasmoids emit intense beams of accelerated ions and electrons (see #4 above). The plasma focus device is similar to the plasma gun which is a magnetically driven shock tube that ejects plasma in the form of a plasmoid, without pinching it.

The similarities in the image when we look down at the barrel of a dense plasma focus device and the image of the throat chakra as depicted by Leadbeater are obvious. Plasma focus devices are therefore already embedded in bioplasma bodies, with the vortexes in the bioplasma body acting as delivery systems of intense collimated beams of energetic particles that are seen in many religious depictions of deities (see 6 above).

9. Plasma Vortex

Charged particles in an ionized environment have a tendency to follow magnetic field lines. If the path of the particle is at an angle, i.e. neither parallel nor perpendicular to the magnetic field lines, the particle will spiral around the magnetic field lines using a helical path. When the particles plunge they collide with other particles in the ovoid, generating a light phenomenon similar to the auroras in the atmosphere at Earth's magnetic poles. This process will generate a helical path that will have a cone shape when viewed from the side, with the apex of the cone meeting the surface of the bioplasma body. Dynamically, this can be described as a vortex. Since there are many particles streaming down into the bioplasma body, taking slightly different trajectories, smaller vortexes can also appear within a larger vortex.

Experimental metaphysicist Barbara Brennan has observed, as many other metaphysicists, vortexes within the human energy field or bioplasma body. Within each vortex, residing on the surface of the relatively dense body within the ovoid, there are also small rotating vortexes spinning at very high rates.

10. Fields

It has been observed and recorded in the metaphysical and religious literature that within the bioplasma body are both helical and straight currents (see #3 above) aligned with the longer axis of the bioplasma body. These are the "central currents". In addition, there also numerous filamentary currents interpenetrating the bioplasma body (see #7 above).

A complex network of currents enveloping the bioplasma body has been observed by Barbara Brennan who notes, "The main vertical power current induces other currents at right angles to it to form golden streamers that extend directly from the body. These in turn induce other currents that circle around the field, so that the entire auric field and all the levels below it are surrounded and held within a basket-like network." Moving charges generate magnetic fields which have been depicted often in the metaphysical literature. There are localized fields embedded within global fields.

Copyright Jay Alfred 2007

A comparative image analysis can be found at the author's website: http://www.plasmametaphysics.com

Jay Alfred has been researching on plasma life forms since 2001. He is the author of three books on a new field called "plasma metaphysics". The books include Our Invisible Bodies, Brains and Realities and Between the Moon and Earth which are available on Amazon online bookstores. Plasma metaphysics is the application of plasma and dark matter physics to the study of plasma life forms and their corresponding habitats. This includes the study of bioplasma bodies which co-evolved with carbon-based bodies on this planet.