Vague d’ovnis triangulaires aux Etats-Unis ?

25-12-2016 om 11:33 geschreven door peter  

Katharine Trendacosta

As a special treat this holiday season, the very first trailer for Alien: Covenantwas released at midnight. So sit back and be filled with best feelings of the season: fear.

Also, sex in the shower looks terrifying.

Here’s the official synopsis from Fox:

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created, with ALIEN: COVENANT, a new chapter in his groundbreaking ALIEN franchise. The crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world. When they uncover a threat beyond their imagination, they must attempt a harrowing escape.

Alien: Covenant comes out May 19, 2017.

{ http://gizmodo.com/ }

25-12-2016 om 10:54 geschreven door peter  

Scientific study claims: Human DNA carries a message from Extraterrestrials

According to scientists from Kazakhstan, the human DNA was encoded with an extraterrestrial signal by an advanced ancient alien civilization in the distant past.

In a study called “The “Wow! signal” of the terrestrial genetic code“, researchers Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukovfrom the a Department of Mathematics, al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan and the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan respectively believe in the existence of a “Biological SETI” as they are calling it, which is a mathematical code located within the human DNA, something that cannot be explained by the process of evolution as traditional theories claim.

And all of a sudden the Ancient Astronaut theory and the idea that humans are in fact an engineered species doesn’t sound as provocative as it did in the past. Ancient Texts mention how humans were created in the image of the “Gods”, now science is a step closer to proving it.

According to writing in the Journal Icarus, the duo states: “Once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature. Once the genome is appropriately rewritten the new code with a signature will stay frozen in the cell and its progeny, which might then be delivered through space and time.” The theory presented by the two scientists suggests the human DNA is structured so precisely that it reveals an “ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language”.

The above mentioned study has led other researchers to suggest that humans were in fact engineered or designed outside of our solar system by our creators several billion years ago, a suggestions that goes hand to hand with numerous ancient texts that speak about the creation of mankind and the creator ‘gods’.7

However, this also supports the hypothesis that life on Earth is in fact the result of interstellar life being distributed across the cosmos by asteroids and comets, which act as transporting devices which seed life onto certain planets.

shCherbak and Makukov argue that their detailed analysis of the human genome shows a previously ignored precision-type orderliness in the mapping between the DNA’s nucleotides and amino acids.

In the study, shCherbak and Makukov state that: “Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of symbolic language.” They say this includes the use of decimal notation, logical transformations, and the use of the abstract symbol of zero. “Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing,”

Two versions of the code

In the study shCherbak and Makukov state there are versions of the code: “The nearly symmetric code version with arithmetical patterns acts as the universal standard code. With this code at hand it is intuitively easy to infer the symmetric version with its ideography. Vice versa, if the symmetric version were the universal one, it would be hardly possible to infer the nearly symmetric code with all its arithmetical patterns. Therefore, with the standard version alone it is possible to “receive” both arithmetical and ideographical components of the signal, even if the symmetric version was not found in nature. There are two possible reasons why it is actually found in euplotid ciliates: either originally when Earth was seeded there were both versions of the code with one of them remaining currently in euplotid ciliates, or originally there was only the standard version, and later casual modification in euplotid lineage coincided with the symmetric version. What concerns other known rare versions of the code, they seem neither to have profound pattern ensembles, nor to be easily inferable from the standard code. As commonly accepted, they represent later casual deviations of the standard code caused by ambiguous intermediates or codon captures (Moura et al., 2010).”  (source)

What theory sounds more plausible in this case? A Religious view, suggesting that a higher entity called God Created the universe and life as we know it on Earth, or that perhaps somewhere out there, in the distant corners of the universe, intelligent beings inhabit the cosmos, these beings manipulated our DNA and created mankind, perhaps in ‘their image’ as some ancient texts suggest?

While panspermia could have occurred naturally in the universe, seeding life on planets and moons, it is plausible to think about life on Earth and how it might have bee created by far more intelligent species with the ability to ‘create life’.

Source www.ancient-code.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/  }

25-12-2016 om 01:41 geschreven door peter  

Alien worlds: most stars have planets in the habitable zone

When Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay in 1770, we did not know how many planets were in our solar system. We only knew about Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Based on the orbits of these planets, 18th century European astronomers invented what is now called the Titius-Bode relation. It’s a simple empirical relation that describes the relative distances between the planets and the sun. It predicted the orbit of another planet beyond Saturn and another planet in the gap between Mars and Jupiter.

In 1781, William Herschel found Uranus – without relying on the Titius-Bode relation – but he found it in the orbit beyond Saturn where the Titius-Bode relation said it would be.

After this success, astronomers started looking for a planet between Mars and Jupiter in the orbit predicted by the Titus-Bode relation.

In 1801, Giuseppi Piazzi found a planet in the predicted position and called it Ceres. The Titius-Bode relation was on a roll.

But when Neptune was found in 1846 it wasn’t exactly where the Titus-Bode relation predicted it would be. And over the years so many small bodies have been found in orbits between Mars and Jupiter that Ceres was plutoed – demoted to an “asteroid”.

And so the Titus-Bode relation lost its shine. And like an old horse, it was put out to pasture. It was only taken seriously by numerologists and cranks.

The search for extrasolar planets

But then along came NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Over the past few years Kepler has been able to detect thousands of exoplanets and hundreds of multi-exoplanet systems.

Along with my PhD student Tim Bovaird and Master’s student Steffen Jacobsen, we reasoned that if the TB relation had been such a useful (if somewhat imperfect) guide for predicting planets in our solar system, maybe it would be useful in predicting planets in the new exoplanetary systems detected by Kepler.

We checked the hundred or so systems where Kepler had found at least a few planets and we found that the majority of these exoplanetary systems adhered to the Titus-Bode relation even somewhat better than our solar system did.

Thus, we became convinced that the horse still had some miles left in her – that the semi-taboo Titus-Bode relation could provide useful hints about the periods of as-yet-undetected planets around other stars.

Resurrection

Last year we used a generalised Titus-Bode relation to analyse 68 multi-planet systems with four or more detected exoplanets. We made predictions for the existence of more planets in these systems, based on the Titus-Bode relation.

So far, 5% of our predictions have been confirmed. This may sound like a small percentage, but given the inability of the Kepler telescope to see Earth-sized planets or smaller, a 5% detection rate is what you would expect to see if all the predictions were true.

Almost all of the exoplanets detected by Kepler are larger than Earth and very close to their host stars. This is almost certainly aselection bias.

It is very difficult for the Kepler telescope to spot planets that are far enough away from their host stars to be in the habitable zone (where the temperatures are in the range where H₂O will be liquid water).

Using the Titus-Bode relation is a controversial indirect technique, but I think it’s the best one we have if we are interested in answering the question: How many planets (on average) are in the habitable zones of stars?

How many potentially habitable planets?

Our answer to this question is 2 ± 1 and was published this weekin the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The figures (above and below) illustrate our result.

With about 300 billion stars in our galaxy, our result means there are 600 ± 300 billion planets in circumstellar habitable zones in our galaxy.

In the observable universe there are about 100 billion galaxies. Thus there are approximately 10²² stars in the observable universe and twice that many planets in circumstellar habitable zones in the universe.

That’s a lot of real estate for alien development. Not all of these habitable zone planets will be wet and rocky like the Earth, but a fair fraction (about 30%) should be. Now we need some zippy interstellar spaceships to colonise and over-populate all these worlds before the aliens do.

Source theconversation.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

25-12-2016 om 01:35 geschreven door peter  

Scientists think they can finally explain the weirdness that is the ‘alien megastructure’ star

We all knew it was coming, and it might finally be here – scientists say they have a solution to the ‘alien megastructure’ star that doesn’t involve aliens, and unlike previous explanations, this one is extremely consistent with previous observations of the star’s activity.

The solution doesn’t involve dubious comet swarms or interstellar junk, but instead suggests that the star is undergoing an internal phase transition, which is causing powerful outbursts on the surface that are occasionally blocking the light emissions that our telescopes detect.

In other words, instead of something else getting in the way of the star and blocking its light from us, this new study suggests that internal conditions in the star itself are causing the dips in its brightness.

In case you have no idea what all this ‘alien megastructure’ business is, back in October 2015, scientists discovered a strange pattern of light surrounding a distant star called KIC 8462852, and it was like nothing we’d ever seen before.

When a planet orbits a star, the star’s brightness will periodically dip by around 1 percent, but KIC 8462852 has been experiencing erratic dips of up to 22 percent. This immediately got scientists speculating that something very, very big had been zooming past it.

A massive swarm of comets was thrown out there as an explanation, but that’s been more or less debunked. More recently, researchers have suggested that the bizarre dimming is the result of some kind of clutter in interstellar space.

The there was the now-notorious suggestion from Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, that the solution could be something from the realm of science fiction – a gigantic Dyson Sphere made of solar panels that completely encircles a star.

“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build,” he told The Atlantic last year.

But no explanation – aliens or otherwise – has fit the data well enough to convince the scientific community to run with it, so the ‘alien megastructure’ star remained shrouded in mystery.

Until now, perhaps, because a team from the University of Illinois says we’ve been looking at the problem all wrong, and a different perspective could give us a pretty solid answer to KIC 8462852’s weirdness.

The researchers have been studying how the star’s large and small dips in brightness relate to each other, and when they applied a number of mathematical models to the data, they came up with patterns that also appear in what’s known as avalanche statistics.

Avalanche statistics have turned up in all kinds of natural phenomena, including solar flares, gamma-ray bursts, and neural activity in the brain, and while the maths is pretty complicated, in basic terms, it reveals patterns where small dips in the data occurring between the larger dips ultimately equate to even larger dips.

Avalanche statistics appear to be associated with things going through certain phase transitions – most commonly between solid, liquid, and gaseous states of matter, and in rare cases, plasma.

“Examples of such transitions are magnetic systems that are slowly driven with a magnetic field, or the slow deformation of somewhat brittle materials where there is often first little crackling that gets louder and louder until there is a big snap when the material breaks,” says one of the team, Karin Dahmen.

“The small events in our star analysis would be like the little crackles while the large events would be the analogue of the big snap.”

Phase transitions are thought to be associated with solar activity such as solar flares and solar storms, so it could be that KIC 8462852’s internal materials are transitioning, and the result is erratic outbursts that block its light.

“Their analysis shows that the avalanche model is extremely consistent with what’s observed,” astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains for Forbes.

“In other words, this could just be a star that’s intensely active in some poorly understood way, giving off periodic massive outbursts that cause a dimming of the light. And the fact that stars like this are rare is what’s been fooling us all along.”

Only time will tell if this is the right answer, but it’s fitting the existing data pretty nicely so far.

And even if KIC 8462852 doesn’t ultimately live up to its “Aliens!” hype, we still have a phenomenon on our hands that’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before, and that’s awesome.

The study has been published in Physical Review Letters.

Source www.sciencealert.com

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

25-12-2016 om 01:26 geschreven door peter  

How Realistic Is the Interstellar Ship from 'Passengers'?

The movie "Passengers," which opened yesterday (Dec. 21), explores the fascinations and perils of interstellar travel, but could the kind of starship portrayed in the movie ever exist in real life?  

The film begins on board the Starship Avalon, which is carrying more than 5,000 passengers to a distant, habitable planet known as Homestead II. 

Travelling at half the speed of light, the crew and passengers are expected to hibernate for 120 years before arriving. That is, until somebody accidentally wakes up 90 years early. ['Passengers': An Interstellar Space Film in Pictures]

Is there anything remotely realistic about this spaceship? Space.com posed that question to several space travel experts, as well as Guy Hendrix Dyas, the film's production designer. Dyas looked at the history of movie spaceships (including the vehicles from the "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" universes) in his quest to come up with something unique for the new film.

The ship's design

The Avalon has three long, thin modules that wrap around a common center and spin (sort of like stripes on a barbershop pole). Dyas said he based that design on sycamore seeds. It appears that the spin also provides the ship with artificial gravity, similar to fictional ships in the movies "Interstellar" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." The ship is powered by eight nuclear fusion reactors, Dyas said, and can run autonomously, healing most systems even with the crew asleep (as seen in the film). 

The ship's immense structure is about 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) in length, and Dyas said he imagines that it was assembled in space over decades. The film takes place at an indeterminate point in the future, Dyas said, but he assumed that by the time the ship was being built, humans would have the ability to mine some of the materials from nearby asteroids or the moon to save on transportation costs.

"My approach to the [ship] design was that I tried to go about it as though I was a cruise liner ship designer," Dyas told Space.com. "I wanted to put myself in the shoes of somebody who had been designing a craft that had a portion of it dedicated to entertainment, and of course that led to the array of colors and textual changes in the ship." 

This approach led Dyas to design the more functional areas (such as the mess hall) in stainless steel, while a classy passenger pub was decorated in rich oranges, golds and reds, for example.

Banks of hibernation pods occupy huge halls in the ship. The crew slumbers in separate quarters, inaccessible to the passengers. The pods are clustered into small groups, perhaps (Dyas suggests) so that if one group's cluster fails, at least the other 5,000 passengers are theoretically unaffected.

The hibernation procedure is not really described in the film, but what's clear to moviegoers is what happens afterward: passengers are soothed by a holographic figure explaining where they are. They are escorted to an elevator, then guided to their individual cabin, where they can relax for the last four months of the journey. 

In between resting in their quarters, passengers can also get to know the rest of the 5,000 people in common areas, such as the mess hall, the grand concourse, the pool or the bar. [Interstellar Glitz: Designing the 'Passengers' Starship, Inside and Out]

Hibernation

While "Passengers" shows people placed in a hibernation state for decades at a time, that kind of technology does not exist today. There are situations, however, where patients can be put into induced comas with cooled saline solutions for a few days to allow traumatic injuries to heal. 

In 2015, a company called SpaceWorks received a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts grant to investigate the possibility of extending the timeframe of an induced stasis in humans even further than what is currently possible. Aerospace engineer John Bradford, the company's COO, told Space.com that induced stasis should be possible given that some mammals can hibernate for months. (NIAC grants are for early-stage work in far-off technologies.)

"We're not trying to extend the human lifetime," Bradford said, so the technology that SpaceWorks is pursuing is different from what is shown in "Passengers." But in other respects, the movie shows essentially the same thing his company strives for. 

"We're trying to put people in a small container to minimize the mass and power requirements, and the consumables [during spaceflight]," he added, saying that during a long Mars journey of perhaps six months, putting astronauts into stasis would cut down on the amount of food required for the mission, not to mention the possibility of crew boredom.

And what about exercise? Bradford said it would be possible to keep up an astronaut's muscle mass using neuromuscular electric stimulation; there have been some positive results in comatose patients using that technique, he said. 

Bradford said he had been lucky enough to see "Passengers" before its release, and that he was really pleased to see an emphasis on hibernation, and what happens in the moments after waking up, when the passengers are disoriented and extremely tired (since hibernation or stasis is not the same as sleep).

"That part of the storyline is usually jumped over," he said.

Interstellar propulsion

Nuclear fusion is a possible source of propulsion for interstellar ships, but the problem is the size of the reactors that would need to be assembled in space, or launched there, according to some scientists we talked to. So other methods are being considered to get spacecraft going at interstellar speeds.

One idea under consideration by Philip Lubin, a physics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, uses lasers. Under another NIAC grant, he is developing a concept known as Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration, which would generate propulsion from laser photons reflected in a mirror. The long-term goal is to create a spacecraft that can, like in "Passengers," move at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Antimatter engines are another possibility for fueling interstellar ships, said Andreas Tziolas, the co-founder and president of Icarus Interstellar. Antimatter particles are naturally occurring particles that are "opposites" to regular matter particles — so the positron is the antimatter equivalent to the electron; the particles have the same mass but are different in other ways, including electric charge (the electron is negative, the positron is positive). When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate, and release energy.

"The energy [an antimatter engine] generates is very pure in that it generates a lot of photons when matter reacts with antimatter," he told Space.com. "All of the matter is annihilated and it turns into pure photonic energy. However, the photons themselves are hard to capture."

Though it's not stated directly it the film, it's possible the "Passengers" ship is being fueled by the interstellar medium — the tenuous collection of hydrogen particles that populate much of the universe. This concept was proposed in a 1960 thought experiment by American physicist Robert Bussard, who argued it would allow a ship to travel without having to haul fuel along for the ride. 

But there's a problem with that idea, according to Geoffrey Landis, a science fiction author and NASA physicist. Since 1960, scientists have discovered that the medium is too sparse to allow fusion to happen, Landis said.

"The idea was, if you don't carry your fuel with you, you might be able to avoid having a simply enormous fuel tank," he said. But with that theory debunked, the problem remains about how to get to such an incredible speed while still hauling fuel with you. [Does Humanity's Destiny Lie in Interstellar Space Travel? (Op-Ed)]

From a practical standpoint, Landis also agreed that a ship that size would likely have to be built largely in space, and that will probably require asteroid mining.

While asteroid mining is still in the future, there are a couple of companies that are getting started on prospecting. Both Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources have plans to scout out nearby asteroids to learn about their composition, and the possibilities for getting spacecraft out there. Asteroid-mining technology is in an early stage, but both companies are generating other products (such as Earth observation) that have received some support from customers.

Building a business case would take some time, but Landis said it would be very possible to create a spacecraft from extraterrestrial resources. 

"In the long term, if we're going to build these enormous habitats, we are going to have to build them from material in space," he said. "That's a very feasible idea. There's literally millions of asteroids out there from which we could harvest materials without having to drag it out of the gravity well of the Earth."

Ship design

Landis also seemed to think that the Avalon creates gravity by rotating. 

"I'm getting a little tired of artificial gravity in 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars,'" he said, referring to the ability of the ships in these long-standing franchises to generate gravity by more theoretical means.

Experts interviewed for the story agreed that, in general, the ship also appears to take into account human factors, which means designing an environment so that it can best accommodate how humans operate. 

An example is how the environment is decorated. Even on the International Space Station, the sterile gray interior is populated with pictures, signs and other mementoes from past crews. Individual astronauts can decorate their quarters to their liking, so that they have family pictures to look at during their six-month missions. So the décor choices that Dyas made are important in real-world spaceflight as well.

Looking at previews for the movie, Tziolas said he thinks the Starship Avalon is similar to the concept that Icarus Interstellar has proposed for an  spaceship. Called Project Hyperion, this craft also has cruise ship-like amenities, room for 5,000 passengers and a spinning design for artificial gravity.

Tziolas added that he is so pleased that Hollywood is getting more realistic with its ship designs in general.

So could the ship from Passengers really exist? Our experts seemed to agree that there are some aspects that reflect real-world science, but some key questions remain about how such a massive vessel would make an interstellar trek. 

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• Sci-Fi Gets Science Right: 'Passengers' Nails the Physics
• 'Passengers' Deal With Spacecraft Malfunction and Romance In New Movie Trailer
• Real Science Inspires Voyage to the Stars in 'Passengers'

{ http://www.space.com }

24-12-2016 om 18:18 geschreven door peter  

UFO filmed from a space station

Here’s one interesting footage of an unidentified flying object flying in the orbit of Earth. This was filmed from an International Space Station and was taken on 18th December 2016.

24-12-2016 om 18:02 geschreven door peter  

China Is Working on Creating Its Own Colossal Stealth Bomber

 

NORTHRUP GRUMMAN

IN BRIEF

• China's military is working on its first-ever strategic stealth bomber, which is expected to feature a similar subsonic low-observable "flying wing" design as the U.S.'s B-2 Spirit.
• Though it may take 10 years to develop, the H-20 would be a significant step forward on China's path to modernizing its military.

H-20 concept

As the latest move in the country’s ambitious military modernization program, China is in the process of developing its first-ever strategic stealth bomber. The aircraft, called the Xian H-20, is expected to be able to deploy long-range weapons — something their current Xian H-6 models aren’t capable of doing.

The Director of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) Expert Consultation Committee, Rear Admiral Yin Zhuo, said that the H-20 will be on the same level as the U.S.’s Nothtrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, which was made operational in 1997. Expected similarities with the B-2 Spirit include a subsonic low-observable flying wing design.

Adm. Zhuo believes that all the pieces are in place for this project, as China has gained a working knowledge of stealth technology and heavy transport design, both of which will be useful in creating the H-20. He also revealed that all the weapons that will arm the new aircraft, like nuclear bombs and cruise missiles, are ready.

The Xian H-20 will be produced by Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation, the same company that produces the H-6 models currently in use. Adm. Zhuo noted that the creation process could take a long time, so the bomber might not be in service until 2025.

References: 

• Sputniknews, 
• China Topix

{https://futurism.com/ }

24-12-2016 om 17:53 geschreven door peter  

China Is Working on Creating Its Own Colossal Stealth Bomber

 

NORTHRUP GRUMMAN

IN BRIEF

• China's military is working on its first-ever strategic stealth bomber, which is expected to feature a similar subsonic low-observable "flying wing" design as the U.S.'s B-2 Spirit.
• Though it may take 10 years to develop, the H-20 would be a significant step forward on China's path to modernizing its military.

As the latest move in the country’s ambitious military modernization program, China is in the process of developing its first-ever strategic stealth bomber. The aircraft, called the Xian H-20, is expected to be able to deploy long-range weapons — something their current Xian H-6 models aren’t capable of doing.

The Director of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) Expert Consultation Committee, Rear Admiral Yin Zhuo, said that the H-20 will be on the same level as the U.S.’s Nothtrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, which was made operational in 1997. Expected similarities with the B-2 Spirit include a subsonic low-observable flying wing design.

Adm. Zhuo believes that all the pieces are in place for this project, as China has gained a working knowledge of stealth technology and heavy transport design, both of which will be useful in creating the H-20. He also revealed that all the weapons that will arm the new aircraft, like nuclear bombs and cruise missiles, are ready.

The Xian H-20 will be produced by Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation, the same company that produces the H-6 models currently in use. Adm. Zhuo noted that the creation process could take a long time, so the bomber might not be in service until 2025.

References: 

• Sputniknews, 
• China Topix

{https://futurism.com/ }

24-12-2016 om 17:51 geschreven door peter  

UFO Sightings 2016 Increase Worldwide, Year-end Witness To Many Of Them; Are Aliens For Real? [Video]

• alien, 
• Alien Invasion, 
• UFO, 
• UFO Sighting, 
• ufo sighting 2016, 
• Alien Existence, 
• alien invasion 2017

24-12-2016 om 17:05 geschreven door peter  

Don't Be Fooled by This Giant 'Mech' Robot

New video clips purporting to show a 13-foot-tall (4 meters) humanoid robot piloted by a person in its torso look like something straight out of "Avatar" or "Transformers," but a Live Science investigation has revealed reasons to believe some skepticism might be in order. 

The robot clips have been picked up by a variety of online news and technology outlets, including Kotaku and Wired UK. But the South Korean company that is supposedly developing the robot has virtually no online presence and was unfamiliar to robotics researchers contacted by Live Science.

Furthermore, the only source for the videos or any information about them is the Facebook and Instagram pages of a designer whose website mentions a conceptual art project about a "fictional robotics corporation that develops its products in a not-so-distant future."

The designer, Vitaly Bulgarov, told Live Science that the robot is real. However, he declined to share the names of scientists or engineers working on the project, and messages to the purported CEO of the company went unreturned. [Gallery: See Images of the Giant Humanoid Robot]

Mystery business

According to Bulgarov's Facebook page, the videos were taken in South Korea at a company called Korea Future Technology. Almost all references to this company online appear to be associated with Bulgarov's posts and the subsequent news pieces on the robot. Bulgarov said the company has been operating for several years.

The domain name of the supposed company, found on Bulgarov's file names, hankookmirae.com, meaning "South Korea Future," was registered in February to is Lim Hyun Kuk, the name of the person Bulgarov said was CEO of the company. There is no active website associated with the domain; Bulgarov said one is slated to go online next week.

"If you look at this from a Western point of view, then yeah, that might seem strange, but in that part of the world, the culture is a little different. The company wants to make something first before they advertise themselves," Bulgarov said of the inactive website. [Gallery: Disaster-Response Robots Face Off]

The person who answered the phone number associated with the domain registration said Lim worked at that address but was not available to talk. Lim did not return a message left at that number or emails sent to three addresses possibly associated with him.   

Bulgarov told Live Science in an email that the release of the videos was intended for his circle of followers only, and that the company would do a "proper press release" when the robot is completed in 2017. He said a "Professor Park" was associated with the work but would not provide a given name or affiliation for that researcher. ("Park" is the third-most-common surname in Korea.) He also declined to answer questions about funding for the project.

"Frankly, right now, we don't even really care if people think this is legit because we didn't try to promote it," Bulgarov said.

Technical difficulties

The robot itself looks like one of the military robots in the movie "Avatar." A pilot inside the torso moves his arms to control the robot's upper limbs. (This kind of design is known as a "mech.") The robot is tethered by a power cable above, but walks several steps in the video clips. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

The technology shown in the video is plausible, said Ronald Fearing, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has developed a jumping robot.

The robot looks a bit top-heavy, Fearing said, but its external power source could mean it would be light enough to function. The idea of developing robots steered by a person inside goes back to at least the 1960s, Fearing said. Several research teams are developing robotic exoskeletons to help people lift heavier loads or to allow paralyzed people to walk again. 

Bipedal robots much more graceful than the one shown in the new video are already a reality. Robotics company Boston Dynamics has Atlas, an approximately human-sized bipedal automaton that can even navigate rough ground. And Georgia Tech's DURUS robot walks with a heel-to-toe gait, just like a human.

Fearing said the technology in the video would be a "nice piece of work." He estimated that something like it might cost $20 million and take a couple of years to make.

But there are also questions about the video. Though Bulgarov wrote on his Instagram page that the ground shakes as the giant robot walks, the camera and nearby objects appear steady. The lab itself is also remarkably sleek and futuristic compared to academic labs in the United States and even industry labs like those of Boston Dynamics.

"Robots are messy business," said Christian Hubicki, a postdoctoral robotics researcher at Georgia Tech who worked on the DURUS robot. "They get torn apart and put back together over and over, and transmission grease gets all over the place. Even the nice white floor is beautifully unscuffed [in these videos]. Never once during likely hundreds of hours of debugging the giant robot did it kick in a way that scratched it up?"

The people around the robot also appear to be too close for safety and are not following the standard practice of wearing safety goggles, Hubicki said.

Bulgarov said the company's CEO required that the lab be clean, and that the videos had been brightened in postproduction. Fearing said robotics labs in Asia can be relatively neat.

However, there's another problem: Hubicki told Live Science that the robot's leg joints look unusually smooth given the force that the step of a 1.5-ton robot would exert on the motors. [5 Reasons to Fear Robots]

"When I look at the bulk of the leg — say, above the ankle — it still stops its downward motion extremely quickly (I think within a frame of the video)," Hubicki wrote in an email. "[N]ot impossible, but if it is real, I'd be really curious about how the effects of that impact are being handled."

Bulgarov said dampers in the robot's feet make its motion smooth. He also said the robot wasn't built for use as is but as a platform to show off various technical feats, like the human-machine interface for moving the arms or the bipedal locomotion. Right now, he said the robot couldn't walk on an uneven surface but might be useful for industrial purposes, though there are no plans to use the robot in its current state. The cockpit and arms could be attached to a wheeled vehicle for rough terrain, Bulgarov said. The company is considering applications such as cleanup at the Fukushima power plant, which was damaged during the 2011 tsunami in Japan, Bulgarov said. 

Some companies do make demonstration robots without many practical applications, Fearing and Hubicki said. However, building a 1.5-ton robot for this purpose would be a quite extreme, Hubicki added.

"To me, building a giant, walking mech to showcase your arm technology is a bit like building a rocket ship to demonstrate your cockpit technology," he said. 

When asked directly if the robot was real, Bulgarov said, "It is real, and more footage is coming."

Fearing wondered if perhaps the company was intentionally obscuring its origins and goals to create more interest. There have also been situations where companies have exaggerated reality, he said.

"I don't know of this group, but unfortunately, I know other groups have mixed CAD [computer-aided design] images and reality to raise money and [have] not disclosed the mixture," Fearing said.

Hubicki urged skepticism. "As intriguing as the video is," he said, "at some point, you have to ask yourself, 'Did a secret company with no obvious ties to existing humanoid robotics groups actually develop a giant humanoid robot with likely unparalleled power and torque, and instead of sending out a press release, they unveil the robot by dribbling out low-resolution videos on Instagram via an affiliate who just so happens to be a visual effects artist?'"

Original article on Live Science.

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{ http://www.livescience.com/ }

24-12-2016 om 16:43 geschreven door peter  

Robots could replace almost half of US jobs by 2036

FILE PHOTO © Issei Kato / Reuters / Reuters

Scientists and economic advisers within the executive branch studied the potential effects of artificial intelligence on the US workforce and economy over the next 20 years, as well as ways to prevent the technological advances from automation from potentially destroying job opportunities for Americans ‒ which they said it could, for up to 47 percent of jobs. Rather, the authors sought to guide the government’s automation policy to create better economic opportunities for the country as a whole.

“These transformations will open up new opportunities for individuals, the economy, and society, but they have the potential to disrupt the current livelihoods of millions of Americans,” the 55-page report said. “Whether AI leads to unemployment and increases in inequality over the long-run depends not only on the technology itself but also on the institutions and policies that are in place.”

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The authors compared use of AI to how the Industrial Revolution introduced mass production to the economy, which negatively affected the livelihoods of skilled craftsman, as well as to the rise of computers in the workplace, which benefited white-collar workers.

“Output per hour rose [in the 19th Century] while inequality declined, driving up average living standards, but the labor of some high-skill workers was no longer as valuable in the market,” they wrote. “The advent of computers and the Internet raised the relative productivity of higher-skilled workers.”

“Shifting demand towards more skilled labor raised the relative pay of this group, contributing to rising inequality,” they continued. “At the same time, a slowdown in the rate of improvement in education, and institutional changes such as the reduction in unionization and decline in the minimum wage, also contributed to inequality—underscoring that technological changes do not uniquely determine outcomes.”

Although the report cautioned that it’s difficult to predict exactly how robots and other AI might change the economy in the future because it’s “not a single technology, but rather a collection of technologies that are applied to specific tasks,” the authors noted that the trend has been similar to what happened with computerization that occurred at the end of the 20th and start of the 21st centuries. AI could affect as little as 9 percent of jobs over the next decade or two ‒ or it could threaten nearly half of all jobs.

A September report released by Forrester Research found that 6 percent of jobs could be taken by “early-stage intelligent agents,” as soon as 2021. In November, a brief from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) claimed that up to two-thirds of all jobs in the developing world could be replaced by automation. More than 1.3 million Brits could lost their jobs to computers by 2030, according to research by Oxford University and consultancy firm Deloitte.

Although “AI-driven automation has yet to have a quantitatively major impact on productivity growth,” the administration’s report said, industries such as transportation and fast food are already seeing the results of automation, thanks to self-driving cars and the use of kiosks and other automated ordering systems.

The authors offered three policy strategies to guide the technological changes in the economy to be “compatible with productivity, high levels of employment, and more broadly shared prosperity.” They then noted: “Most of these strategies would be important regardless of AI-driven automation, but all take on even greater importance to the degree that AI is making major changes to the economy.”

The US must invest in and develop AI in a way that responsibly maximizes its development, especially in the areas of cyber defense and the detection of fraudulent transactions and messages, the report said. In order to fill all the positions to “support and advance the field,” the government should prioritize diversity and inclusion in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Another important way to affect how AI develops is to foster competition from new and existing firms with “sound pro-competition policies.”

It will be important not just to educate and prepare young Americans for careers in AI, but to help current workers with transitioning into the field, including by expanding the availability of job-driven training and improved guidance on how to navigate job and field transitions. The authors recommended “providing all children with access to high-quality early education so that all families can prepare their students for continued education.”

To train the current workforce in AI, the authors called on policymakers to ensure rising wages by modernizing the social safety net and expanding healthcare access, and by introducing new programs such as wage insurance and emergency aid for families in crisis. Other ideas they proffered included strengthening worker bargaining power, modernizing tax policy, and pursuing strategies that prevent AI jobs from clustering in certain areas of the country, the way the automobile industry did in Michigan.

The report was produced by a team assembled by the Obama administration, including staff from the Council of Economic Advisers, Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, Office of Management and Budget, and Office of Science and Technology Policy.

{ https://www.rt.com/ }

24-12-2016 om 16:29 geschreven door peter  

Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re Facing

What the conservative media machine does is much more dangerous.

24-12-2016 om 16:18 geschreven door peter  

Mystery as sightings of 'triangle UFOs' hit 21 this month

SIGHTINGS of triangle UFOs across the world have deepened a long-running mystery with 21 seen just this month.

By Douglas Patient

{ http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news }

24-12-2016 om 16:05 geschreven door peter  

Bizarre triangle UFO mystery continues after yet MORE sightings of 'alien ships'

HUGE triangle UFOs are perplexing people across the globe with yet more sightings reported to paranormal investigators.

24-12-2016 om 15:48 geschreven door peter  

24-12-2016 om 15:17 geschreven door peter  

Are aliens trying to contact Earth? Six new mysterious blasts of radio energy are detected from deep space

• Six bursts of radio waves have been detected 3 billion light years away
• The detection follows 11 previously recorded outbursts from the same location 
• The origin of the radio energy remains unknown, but researchers believe it may be from a young neutron star  

By Shivali Best For Mailonline

It may be three billion light-years away from Earth, but this distant constellation could be trying to contact us.

Six bursts of radio waves have been detected from the constellation Auriga, each lasting just a few milliseconds.

While the source of the waves remains unknown, some suggest they mysterious bursts of energy could be a sign of alien life trying to contact us.

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Six bursts of radio waves have been detected from the constellation Auriga, each lasting just a few milliseconds

(stock image)  

The waves were detected by researchers from McGill University in Montreal, using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

In their paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal, the researchers, led by Paul Scholz, wrote: 'We have detected six additional radio bursts from this source: five with the Green Bank Telescope at 2 GHz, and one at 1.4 GHz with the Arecibo Observatory, for a total of 17 bursts from this source.' 

The detection follows 11 previously recorded outbursts from the same location, called FRB 121102. 

This is the only known repeater of fast radio bursts (FRBs) - radio emissions that appear temporarily and randomly.

Despite there being a number of FRBs from the site, the origin of the bursts is an ongoing puzzle to researchers.

But the researchers say that the repeated outbursts imply that whatever is causing the radio bursts is not a one-time event, such as an explosion or collision.

Instead, they say that flares from a young neutron star – the dense core left behind where a star explodes – are a promising candidate. 

The researchers added: 'Whether FRB 121102 is a unique object in the currently known sample of FRBs, or all FRBs are capable of repeating, its characterisation is extremely important to understanding fast extragalactic radio transients.' 

The waves were detected by researchers from McGill University in Montreal, using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia (pictured), and at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico

Previously when waves have been detected, astronomers have also asked Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to take a closer look at whether they could be a message from ET. 

But it is unclear if the McGill researchers will ask Seti to help this time.

If there are any intelligent alien life forms out there, Stephen Hawking thinks we're playing a dangerous game by trying to contact them.

The physicist believes if aliens discovered Earth, they are likely to want to conquer and colonise our planet.

'If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans,' he said in an interview.

In the 2016 film, Arrival, a linguist is hired by the military to assist in translating alien communications. But if there are any intelligent alien life forms out there, Stephen Hawking thinks we're playing a dangerous game by trying to contact them

But co-founder and former director of the Seti Institute, Jill Tarter, doesn't think this will be the case.

She argues any aliens who have managed to travel across the universe will be sophisticated enough to be friendly and peaceful.

'The idea of a civilisation which has managed to survive far longer than we have...and the fact that that technology remains an aggressive one, to me, doesn't make sense,' she said.

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

24-12-2016 om 15:04 geschreven door peter  

24-12-2016 om 14:42 geschreven door peter  

3 EX-NASA SCIENTISTS CLAIM THE GIANT FACE & PYRAMID FOUND ON MARS IN 1976 ARE ACTUALLY REAL

In 1976, the United States sent a pair of space probes, known as Viking 1 and Viking 2, to Mars. Viking 1 was launched on August 20th, 1975, and Viking 2 was launched in September of the same year. Both probes photographed the surface of Mars from orbit, and one studied the planet from the surface. The first one touched down on the surface of Mars on July 20th, 1976 and the second a couple of months later. The main objectives of the mission were to obtain high-resolution images of Mars, to look for any evidence of life, and to learn more about the structure and composition of the atmosphere.

As Viking 1 spacecraft was circling the planet, it spotted the shadowy likeness of a human face. An enormous head nearly two miles from end to end seemed to be staring back at the cameras from a region of the Red Planet called Cydonia. A pyramid structure was also seen. This will be the main topic of this article.

As a quick side note here, for years we’ve been made to believe that Mars is a dry and arid planet, completely devoid of life, but that’s just not the case. Mars actually used to be an Earth-like planet, with giant oceans and extensive greenery. The soil is moist and wet, and there is a very high likelihood that some type of life exists within the interior of Mars today. You can watch that full press conference HERE.

The question to ask here is, did NASA know this information from the Viking data in 1976? According to multiple insiders who have worked for the agency, NASA is not always honest, and we are only being told this now because they believe we are ready to process and accept these facts. For example, Bob Dean, a retired United States Army Command Sergeant Major who also served at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) of NATO as an intelligence analyst, gave a lecture on footage and photos that had been erased and kept hidden for decades:

Ladies and gentlemen, my government, NASA, which many of us in the United States say stands for Never A Straight Answer, proceeded to erase 40 rolls of film of the Apollo Program — the flight to the Moon, the flight around the Moon, the landings on the Moon, the walking guys here and there. They erased, for Christ’s sake, 40 rolls of film of those events. Now we’re talking about several thousand individual frames that were taken that the so-called authorities determined that you did not have a right to see. Oh, they were ‘disruptive,’ ‘socially unacceptable,’ ‘politically unacceptable.’ I’ve become furious. I’m a retired Command Sergeant Major. I was never famous for having a lot of patience.

You can watch the full lecture HERE.

24-12-2016 om 14:33 geschreven door peter  

24-12-2016 om 14:22 geschreven door peter