Scientists Have Created Heat-Sensing “Skin” for Robots

 HBO / John P. Johnson

IN BRIEF

• This transparent film can detect a warm body the size of a teddy bear from a meter away and is twice as sensitive as human skin at sensing temperature changes.
• Because it is made of low-cost pectin, the material could prove very useful in creating heat-sensitive humanoid robots that could navigate crowds or assist in search and rescue missions.

INSPIRED BY NATURE

Drawing inspiration from nature, scientists have created a heat-sensing film that would allow robots to detect temperature changes in their environment.

Developed by the team from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the material mimics how the natural membrane of a snake works to help the animal identify nearby prey. Surprisingly, the researchers were able to achieve this using pectin — a low-cost substance that’s primarily used to thicken jam.

To make the film, a pectin solution was mixed with calcium chloride and then dehydrated to create a transparent, flexible material. Unlike traditional electronics, which detect temperature changes via currents of electrons, this film senses temperature variations through ion currents, which is the process used by snakes. Any change in the nearby temperature would affect the film’s resistance, which the researchers could measure via electrodes along the film’s edges.

To test the film, the team microwaved a teddy bear to 37° C (98.6° F) and measured how it affected the film from various distances. Results showed that the membrane was able to recognize the warmed bear from as far away as one meter. It could also detect temperature changes as small as 10 millikelvin — that’s twice as sensitive as human skin.

HEAT-SENSING FOR MACHINES AND AI

“Pectin films are ultra-low cost and scalable, insensitive to pressure and bending, and can be used to augment temperature sensing when integrated in synthetic skin platforms,” the researchers explain in their published study. This could be particularly useful in creating artificially intelligent (AI) robots, as covering a robot’s entire body with this film would essentially give it a layer of “skin” capable of 360-degree thermal sensing.

“The most important thing about combining AI and humanoid robots is that this AI needs to be shaped by its senses like we are,” research lead Raffaele Di Giacomo told New Scientist. “You need to provide full sensory feedback so the AI can build up a picture of the world.” Indeed, heat-sensing features could help robots learn more about their environment and function more efficiently. For starters, the technology could allow robots to seamlessly navigate crowded areas. It would also make it easier for robots developed for emergency response to locate humans during search and rescue missions.

Because the film makes it possible to give nearly any object temperature-sensing capabilities, it has applications outside of robotics as well. It could be used in prosthetics to help provide sensory feedback for wearers, and given the film’s flexibility, it could easily be fitted around mechanical parts, too. The team says that it can be applied either as a spray-on or dip-coating — yet another example of the technology featured on the show “Westworld” potentially cropping up in real life.

References: 

• New Scientist, 
• https://arxiv.org

{https://futurism.com/ }

24-01-2017 om 23:53 geschreven door peter  

Roswell - What's Next?

The other day someone asked me, “What’s the next step for Roswell?”

It was a question that I hadn’t thought about much but is one that needs to be addressed though I thought I had made a note of this in Roswell in the 21^st Century. (Sure, some of you might be annoyed at these little promotional mentions, but hey, I don’t charge you a membership to visit here.)

One of the displays in the Roswell UFO

Museum. Copyright by Randle.

Let’s look at it this way. If there is a first-hand witness still alive who saw anything, if he or she has not come forward and we all who have been searching for every possible witness hasn’t found that person, I would bet that person simply didn’t see much at all or is long past providing us with any useful information. Certainly nothing that would break the case open and provide the smoking gun. Everyone at the top levels of the Roswell command structure, whether officer or NCO, is dead. Some of the lower ranking and therefore younger members might still be out there, but the odds are that they are deep into their nineties with the 70^th anniversary looming. There has been an effort to find papers, documents, diaries, journals, letters, anything that mentions the crash and recovery and written prior to 1978 when Jesse Marcel first burst onto the scene. To this point there is simply nothing of value found, certainly nothing that can be properly dated and nothing that leads us into the realm of the alien.

So, witnesses can no longer be interviewed, unless you resort to talking to the children or the grandchildren of those stationed at Roswell. This is something that I don’t think bears much fruit. Those former service members certainly could have been spinning a tale or two, the listeners could have misinterpreted what was said, or thought they heard things that weren’t said. If someone had written it down in one of those seemingly nonexistent diaries or journals at the time the tale was uttered, then we might have something interesting or something that would provide a lead, but none of that has borne fruit either.

There really isn’t a next step, except for the search for documents, and that hasn’t gone all that well. Personally, I’ve made dozens of FOIA requests and I’m not alone in that. Hundreds, if not thousands, have been made, and I’m still waiting for responses on some of them. (Or I get snide letters such as the one from the CIA… I had asked about the analysis of the Ramey Memo done in the mid-1990s by an organization that was, at that time, part of the CIA… I mentioned that the photo had been taken in 1947 and they told me that the CIA didn’t exist in 1947. I didn’t bother telling that the Central Intelligence Group did but my question dealt with the Air Force inquiry that came in the 1990s not something from 1947).

We can review the information already collected. Many, if not most, of the interviews were conducted on audio and videotape so that a record of them exists that might provide some clues. These can be reviewed. As I was doing that, I did find some interesting tidbits overlooked at the time. Oh, nothing that would alter anyone’s view, but interesting tidbits that helped complete an overall picture. And, of course, we can compare later statements with earlier ones to see if any, or rather how much, those statements have changed. Sometimes it’s just little things and other times it is a major alteration. That also can provide information but that sort of data won’t lead us to the extraterrestrial, or any other answer for that matter.

We can continue the onslaught of FOIA, but the records sought, if they even exist, would be so highly classified that national security would come into play and the records would be withheld. We would be told that the specific agency under FOIA could neither confirm nor deny the existence of the records sought. And that’s if they even bother to look for them. We just might just be told that they have no records that are responsive to our requests. I once FOIAed a document, giving the title, the date it was written, the author, and the overall topic and was told that my request hadn’t been specific enough. I’m not sure that if I have even given them the first page or two that would have been specific enough. I just don’t know what else I could have included to make it clearer to them and there seemed to be nowhere to go with the next request.

Thinking about this carefully, I just can’t seem to think of anything more to be done except another “cold case” review of the information. The testimony has been collected, the documentation has been sought, and archives have been searched. A review might suggest something to someone who has not been immersed in the case for decades, or he or she might think of an avenue of research that hasn’t been explored, but I don’t know what it would be. We are now dead in the water, waiting for inspiration.

{ http://kevinrandle.blogspot.be/ }

24-01-2017 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

Sci-fi holograms a step closer

Date:

January 24, 2017

Source:

Australian National University

Summary:

Physicists have invented a tiny device that creates the highest quality holographic images ever achieved, opening the door to imaging technologies seen in science fiction movies such as 'Star Wars.'

Concept artwork of the holographic image that was created with the ANU invention.

Credit: Lei Wang, ANU

{ https://www.sciencedaily.com/ }

24-01-2017 om 23:34 geschreven door peter  

Forget solar panels, optical ‘rectenna’ converts light directly to electricity

From Georgia Tech, a news release that we missed when it first came out, but still well worth talking about.

First Optical Rectenna – Combined Rectifier and Antenna – Converts Light to DC Current

Using nanometer-scale components, researchers have demonstrated the first optical rectenna, a device that combines the functions of an antenna and a rectifier diode to convert light directly into DC current.

This schematic shows the components of the optical rectenna developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (Credit: Thomas Bougher, Georgia Tech)

Based on multiwall carbon nanotubes and tiny rectifiers fabricated onto them, the optical rectennas could provide a new technology for photodetectors that would operate without the need for cooling, energy harvesters that would convert waste heat to electricity – and ultimately for a new way to efficiently capture solar energy.

In the new devices, developed by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the carbon nanotubes act as antennas to capture light from the sun or other sources. As the waves of light hit the nanotube antennas, they create an oscillating charge that moves through rectifier devices attached to them. The rectifiers switch on and off at record high petahertz speeds, creating a small direct current.

Billions of rectennas in an array can produce significant current, though the efficiency of the devices demonstrated so far remains below one percent. The researchers hope to boost that output through optimization techniques, and believe that a rectenna with commercial potential may be available within a year.

“We could ultimately make solar cells that are twice as efficient at a cost that is ten times lower, and that is to me an opportunity to change the world in a very big way” said Baratunde Cola, an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “As a robust, high-temperature detector, these rectennas could be a completely disruptive technology if we can get to one percent efficiency. If we can get to higher efficiencies, we could apply it to energy conversion technologies and solar energy capture.”

The research, supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center and the Army Research Office (ARO), was reported September 28 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Developed in the 1960s and 1970s, rectennas have operated at wavelengths as short as ten microns, but for more than 40 years researchers have been attempting to make devices at optical wavelengths. There were many challenges: making the antennas small enough to couple optical wavelengths, and fabricating a matching rectifier diode small enough and able to operate fast enough to capture the electromagnetic wave oscillations. But the potential of high efficiency and low cost kept scientists working on the technology.

“The physics and the scientific concepts have been out there,” said Cola. “Now was the perfect time to try some new things and make a device work, thanks to advances in fabrication technology.”

Using metallic multiwall carbon nanotubes and nanoscale fabrication techniques, Cola and collaborators Asha Sharma, Virendra Singh and Thomas Bougher constructed devices that utilize the wave nature of light rather than its particle nature. They also used a long series of tests – and more than a thousand devices – to verify measurements of both current and voltage to confirm the existence of rectenna functions that had been predicted theoretically. The devices operated at a range of temperatures from 5 to 77 degrees Celsius.

Fabricating the rectennas begins with growing forests of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes on a conductive substrate. Using atomic layer chemical vapor deposition, the nanotubes are coated with an aluminum oxide material to insulate them. Finally, physical vapor deposition is used to deposit optically-transparent thin layers of calcium then aluminum metals atop the nanotube forest. The difference of work functions between the nanotubes and the calcium provides a potential of about two electron volts, enough to drive electrons out of the carbon nanotube antennas when they are excited by light.

In operation, oscillating waves of light pass through the transparent calcium-aluminum electrode and interact with the nanotubes. The metal-insulator-metal junctions at the nanotube tips serve as rectifiers switching on and off at femtosecond intervals, allowing electrons generated by the antenna to flow one way into the top electrode. Ultra-low capacitance, on the order of a few attofarads, enables the 10-nanometer diameter diode to operate at these exceptional frequencies.

“A rectenna is basically an antenna coupled to a diode, but when you move into the optical spectrum, that usually means a nanoscale antenna coupled to a metal-insulator-metal diode,” Cola explained. “The closer you can get the antenna to the diode, the more efficient it is. So the ideal structure uses the antenna as one of the metals in the diode – which is the structure we made.”

The rectennas fabricated by Cola’s group are grown on rigid substrates, but the goal is to grow them on a foil or other material that would produce flexible solar cells or photodetectors.

Cola sees the rectennas built so far as simple proof of principle. He has ideas for how to improve the efficiency by changing the materials, opening the carbon nanotubes to allow multiple conduction channels, and reducing resistance in the structures.

“We think we can reduce the resistance by several orders of magnitude just by improving the fabrication of our device structures,” he said. “Based on what others have done and what the theory is showing us, I believe that these devices could get to greater than 40 percent efficiency.”

This work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center, Pacific under YFA grant N66001-09-1-2091, and by the Army Research Office (ARO), through the Young Investigator Program (YIP), under agreement W911NF-13-1-0491. The statements in this release are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of DARPA, SPAWAR or ARO. Georgia Tech has filed international patent applications related to this work under PCT/US2013/065918 in the United States (U.S.S.N. 14/434,118), Europe (No. 13847632.0), Japan (No. 2015-538110) and China (No. 201380060639.2)

CITATION: Asha Sharma, Virendra Singh, Thomas L. Bougher and Baratunde A. Cola, “A carbon nanotube optical rectenna,” (Nature Nanotechnology, 2015).http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2015.220

24-01-2017 om 23:19 geschreven door peter  

FBI document: We’ve been visited by ‘beings from ANOTHER dimension’

While most people are clinched into a worldwide debate about aliens, discussing UFO sightings in space, on Earth, and the sheer number of whistleblowers who have come forward saying that we aren’t alone in the universe, the FBI has a very interesting document posted on their website.

The declassified document states that not only have we’ve been visited by ET, apparently we’ve been visited by “beings from other dimensions.”

However, it is noteworthy to mention that the document itself DID NOT ORIGINATE within the FBI. The document –which is an extract from a 69-page document called ufo1.pdf— was written by a former university head.

Nevertheless, the document was treated with great importance by the FBI, which is something I find VERY interesting.

The official link from the FBI vault can be found here: 

http://vault.fbi.gov/UFO/UFO%20Part%201%20of%2016/view

A rewritten copy of the report can be found below. (NOTE) some words in the original text are illegible due to the numerous notations and stamps.

The document, which was received on July 8, 1947, states:

This memorandum is respectfully addressed to certain scientists of distinction, to important aeronautical and military authorities, to a number of public officials and to a few publications. The writer has little expectation that anything of import will be accomplished by this gesture. The mere fact that the data here-in were obtained by so-called supernormal means is probably sufficient to ensure its disregard by nearly all the persons addressed: nevertheless it seems a public duty to make it available. (The present writer has several university degrees and was formerly a university department head).

A very serious situation may develop at any time with regard to the “flying saucers”. If one of these should be attacked, the attacking plane will almost certainly be destroyed. In the public mind, this might create near panic and international suspicion. The principal data concerning these craft is now at hand and must be offered, no matter how fantastic and unintelligible it may seem to minds not previously instructed in thinking of this type.

1. Part of the disks carry crews, others are under remote control.
   1. Their mission is peaceful. The visitors contemplate settling on this plane.
   2. These visitors are human-like but much larger in size.
   3. They are not excarnate Earth people but come from their own world.
   4. They do NOT come from a planet as we use the word, but from an etheric planet which interpenetrates with our own and is not perceptible to us.
   5. The bodies of the visitors, and the craft, automatically materialize on entering the vibratory rate of our dense matter.
   6. The disks possess a type of radiant energy or a ray, which will easily disintegrate any attacking ship. They reenter the etheric at will, and so simply disappear from our vision, without a trace.
   7. The region from which they come is not the “astral plane”, but corresponds to the Lokas or Talas. Students of esoteric matters will understand these terms.
   8. They probably cannot be reached by radio, but probably can be by radar. if a signal system can be devised for that apparatus.

We give information and warning and can do no more. Let the newcomers be treated with every kindness. Unless the disks are with-(illegible) a (illegible, illegible) with which our culture and science are incapable of dealing. A heavy responsibility rests upon the few in authority who are able to understand this matter.

Addendum: The Lokas are oval-shaped, fluted length, oval with a heat-resisting metal or alloy not yet known, the front cage contains the controls, the middle portion a laboratory; the rear contains armament, which consists essentially of a powerful energy apparatus, perhaps a ray…

{ http://www.ancient-code.com/ }

24-01-2017 om 23:09 geschreven door peter  

The hollow Earth theory

One of the most interesting question many people have asked for centuries is whether there is a possibility that our planet is hollow? For many years it was believed that the earth was hollow, but even though many have come up with theories, until 1968 there was no proof. That year, pictures taken by a satellite orbiting Earth clearly showed a gaping hole located at the North Pole; enough evidence to support the hollow Earth theory according to many.

In the early 1970’s, ESSA, a project belonging to the Department of Commerce of the United States, gave media access to images of the North Pole taken by the ESSA-7 satellite on November 23, 1968. One of the photographs showed the North Pole covered by the usual cloud; the other one showed the same area without clouds, revealing a huge hole where the pole was supposed to be located. Little did ESSA’s team know that these images would awake the interest of researchers around the globe who had already suspected of anomalies at the north Pole, anomalies that would fuel the research of unidentified flying objects that according to many, were deeply connected to the North Pole and the hollow Earth theory.

For a long time, ufologist Ray Palmer and others believed that the Earth was in fact hollow and that UFOs came and returned to a civilization of superior beings hidden in its unexplored interior. In 1970, with support from the images that proved the existence of the hole at the North Pole, Palmer was finally able to conclude that the underground civilization existed and that it could probably be reached through the holes in the North and South poles.

Vice Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the US Navy was a distinguished pioneer aviator and polar explorer who flew over the North Pole on May 9, 1926 and led numerous expeditions to Antarctica, including a flight over the South Pole on 29 November 1929. Between 1946 and 1947, he and his team carried out a large-scale operation called “High Jump”, during which he discovered and mapped 1,390,000 km² of the Antarctic territory.

The famous Byrd expeditions first entered in dispute of the hollow Earth theroies when several articles and books like Worlds beyond the Poles by Amadeo Giannini claimed that Byrd had not flown over the Pole but inwardly through large holes leading into the Earth. Ray Palmer, mainly based on the book by Giannini, introduced his theory in the December 1959 issue of its magazine and obtained very positive results form the audience because of his theories and ideas regarding the Hollow Earth theory.

According to Giannini and Palmer, Vice Admiral Byrd announced on February of 1947, just before venturing into a  2,750 km journey across the North Pole, “I like to see the land beyond the Pole. That area beyond the Pole is the center of the Great Enigma.”

According to Giannini and Palmer during Vice Admiral Byrd’s alleged flight over the North Pole in 1947, Admiral Byrd radioed that he saw beneath him, not snow, but areas of land with mountains, forests, vegetation, lakes and rivers and in the undergrowth, a strange animal that looked like a mammoth. Also in January of 1956, after leading an expedition to Antarctica, Admiral Byrd had stated that his expedition had explored 3,700 km beyond the South Pole and also just before his death, Byrd had said there existed a land beyond the Pole that was “an enchanted continent in the sky, a permanent mystery of Earth.” That land, according to other theories, was the legendary Rainbow City, home to a fabulous lost civilization.

To Giannini and Palmer, these stories from Admiral Byrd did nothing but confirm what they had always suspected: that the Earth has “strange” Poles, and that the Earth was essentially like a donut, where at the center, these is an access going many kilometers  into the earth, forming a giant hole passing through the axis of the earth, from one pole to another.

Due to geographical reasons, it is impossible to fly 2,750 miles beyond the North Pole or 3,700 miles beyond the South Pole without seeing water, according to Palmer, Admiral Byrd must have flown into the huge convex cavities of the poles. Researchers also believe that, had he ahead, it would have taken him to the secret base of UFO’s that belongs to the hidden civilization inside our planet

The possibility that the earth is hollow, and that it can be accessed  through the North and South poles, and that secret civilizations flourish within it, has spurred the imagination of people through centuries. Evidence of this we find in the history of countless ancient civilizations. The Babylonian hero Gilgamesh visited his ancestor Utnapishtim in the bowels of the earth; in Greek mythology, Orpheus tries to rescue Eurydice from the underground hell; it was said that the Pharaohs of Egypt communicated with the underworld, which could be accessed via secret tunnels hidden in the pyramids; and Buddhists believed (and still believe) that millions of people live in Agharta, an underground paradise ruled by the king of the world. So just when you think that these theories could be nothing more than excessive imaginations, you actually come across evidence in ancient history pointing towards the possibility of a world inside Earth.

Before the advancements in technology of the twentieth century man could only guess what planet Earth actually looked like. Today, the Earth has been photographed from space and analyzed with high-tech equipment, allowing researchers and scientists to get to know ur planet in a much more complex way.

Leonard Euler, a mathematical genius of the eighteenth century, concluded that the Earth was hollow, containing a central sun and was inhabited; and Dr. Edmund Halley, discoverer of Comet Halley and Royal Astronomer of England also believed that the Earth was hollow on the inside with three “Floors”. Regrettably none of these theories were supported scientifically, on the other hand these theories were present in several works of fiction on the same subject, the most important of which were The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe (1833), in which the hero and his companion have a terrifying encounter with beings from within the Earth; and Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864), where an adventurous teacher, his nephew and a guide manage to enter into the interior of the Earth through an extinct volcano finding new skies, gigantic seas seas and gigantic prehistoric reptiles that populate the forests Earth’s interior.

The belief in a hollow Earth was so widespread that even Edgar Rice Burroughs, the celebrated author of Tarzan, felt compelled to write Tarzan in the bowels of the Earth (1929). Thanks to these and other science fiction titles, interest in the hollow earth theories has is still alive and has kept the interest flames burning in the possibility that the Earth is or once was hollow and that it hides countless mysteries.

The possibility of the Hollow Earth theory has also been present every time when we see one of those strange UFO videos where unidentified objects enter volcanoes, like the Popocatepetl.

So are the UFO sightings really related to extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet? Or is there a possibility that these strange sightings are actually connected to beings living inside the Earth, like the Hollow Earth Theory. All of these theories fueled researchers to search for “lost” civilizations like Atlantis.

So what’s to the Hollow Earth theory?

It is possible that “the land beyond the Pole” and “Great Enigma” refried to by Byrd are actually reference to unexplored regions of Earth rather than inside the Earth itself. The “enchanted continent in the sky” could have been only a description of a common phenomenon in Antarctic latitudes: a kind of mirage that brings the reflection of distant lands. All of the wild goose chases can be attributed to misinterpretation of words actually.

According to the diary of Byrd, “We have flown a total of about 25,900 km² beyond the Pole. As expected, although  disappointing to say, we have not observed any significant feature beyond the Pole. Only the immense white desert that covered the horizon. As for the legendary Rainbow city it might have been just the description referring to the geological features: The planet is composed of crust, mantle and core; no hollow areas than in the imagination

However, could it be that the hollow Earth theory is correct? Well its something that cannot be disproved. there are countless stories that can lead you to believe that there is something inside the Earth beyond a core, we have seen it in ancient mythology of countless stories that lead toward the interior of the planet. Some believe that there is nothing to find and that the theories regarding civilizations living deep under the surface of the Earth are spikes of imagination.

Given the fact that the physical properties and structure of the interior of the Earth can be measured today “exactly” with seismographs and electronic measurements researchers can conclude that far from being hollow, the Earth is composed of four main layers: the crust, mantle, core and the nucleolus. The crust of granite and basalt rock has a thickness of 30-40 km. Under the crust researchers believe the mantle is found, which extends down to around 2,900 km. It is a solid formation that consists of silicates of magnesium, iron, calcium and aluminum. Below that we find the core, believed to be primarily composed of melted iron. Finally, at a depth of about 5,090 km is the nucleolus, which may be solid as a result of freezing iron under extraordinary pressure. Although many details are only hypotheses waiting to be reviewed as sciences progress allowing all of the theories to be confirmed.

As for the huge hole that can be seen in the photograph of the Arctic, Well the explanation is ridiculously simple:

The picture is a mosaic of images taken by the satellite for 24 hours, showing the Earth from different angles. The images were processed by a computer to form a complete view of the Earth as if the observer was located in a point directly above the Pole. During those 24 hours, some of the points in equatorial latitudes received sunlight for some time, and look bright in the composite photograph. But the regions near the Pole were in darkness, therefore there is an unlit area in the center of the photo. So apparently there are no holes at the poles and the Earth isn’t hollow as some believed it to be for centuries.

Ivan

Ivan is a freelance writer, editor-in-chief of ancient-code.com, he also writes for EWAO, Share Knowledge, Svemir Online and Ancient Origins.

History, Archaeology, Space and world’s mysteries are some of the topics he writes about.

{ http://www.ancient-code.com }

24-01-2017 om 22:50 geschreven door peter  

“Ten zuiden van Area 51 liggen buitenaardse schepen opgeslagen”

Area 51 is een topgeheime vliegbasis van de CIA en het Amerikaanse leger waar onder meer spionagevliegtuigen worden getest.

“Voor zover wij weten zijn daar geen UFO’s of aliens,” zegt MUFON-directeur Jan Harzan in een interview met Forbes.

“Maar er is ook nog een gebied ten zuiden van Area 51 genaamd S4,” gaat hij verder. “Op basis van informatie van ingewijden kunnen we zeggen dat daar wordt gewerkt aan geborgen buitenaardse schepen.”

Verbergen

Als de president of andere functionarissen stellen dat er geen UFO’s of aliens zijn in Area 51, liegen ze technisch gesproken niet omdat ze kunnen worden gevonden in S4, aldus Harzan.

Waarschuwingsbord bij Area 51

“Als ze niets te verbergen hebben moeten we die basis toch gewoon kunnen bezoeken?” vraagt hij zich af.

Volgens Harzan kun je topgeheime Amerikaanse vliegtuigen en buitenaardse schepen gemakkelijk uit elkaar houden.

Bemachtigd

“Onze toestellen zijn erg hoekig en hebben uitsteeksels,” zegt hij. “Ook kun je duidelijk naden zien.”

“Het oppervlak van buitenaardse schepen is volkomen glad en alles is geïntegreerd,” vervolgt hij. “Er zijn geen naden of uitsteeksels te zien.”

Harzan stelt dat de Amerikaanse overheid al buitenaardse technologie heeft bemachtigd door te sleutelen aan vliegende schotels.

Kloppen

“Eén bron die ik kan aanraden is kolonel Corso,” zegt Harzan. “In zijn boek The Day After Roswell zegt hij dat hij aan het hoofd stond van een afdeling van het Pentagon die moest onderzoeken hoe de technologie van gecrashte UFO’s precies werkte.”

“Een andere bron is Bob Lazar die claimt in S4 te hebben gewerkt aan geborgen buitenaardse toestellen,” gaat hij verder.

“Zijn verhaal is uitgeplozen door verslaggever George Knapp van KLAS-TV en blijkt te kloppen,” zegt hij.

Harzan merkt op dat er nog meer mensen zijn die zich hierover hebben uitgesproken, maar dat de inlichtingengemeenschap steeds probeert om deze mensen in diskrediet te brengen.

[Forbes]

© Copyright (c) NineForNews.nl

24-01-2017 om 22:18 geschreven door peter  

Here's the true story behind those strange 'alien' signals from outer space

{ http://uk.businessinsider.com/ }

24-01-2017 om 17:40 geschreven door peter  

Japan AIrlines UFO Encounter

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

24-01-2017 om 15:11 geschreven door peter  

Witness the Power of a Supermassive Black Hole in this Animation

Rosalie Chan

By definition, black holes are so horrendously dense that not even light can escape them. And this means we’ve never actually gotten a good look at a black hole — we have no idea what they really look like. Nevertheless, we know what their effects are on their surroundings — and this animation provides a better glimpse of how that works.

The UCLA Galactic Center Group and the W.M. Keck Observatory Laser Team created an animation using images from 1995 to 2013 tracking stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, called Sagittarius A*. These orbits provide some solid evidence of that black hole’s existence — they move around in ways that can only be explained by the presence of an object in the middle possessing an intense degree of gravitational power.

The European Southern Observatory also captured images of stars orbiting around the black hole over the course of 16 years. The time-lapse below might just look like faded white dots, but it’s actually the images of real stars accelerated by a factor of 32 million.

Nevertheless, we’re still stuck without any data that can give us a direct snapshot of what the supermassive black hole looks like. That might change soon thanks to the upcoming Event Horizon Telescope.

This isn’t like any normal telescope. It’s a global network of nine radio telescopes that together will form a telescope as large as the Earth, and it will produce the first image of the event horizon of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Scientists think the black hole might look like this:

Scientists have made steady progress on improving the capability of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at short wavelengths. In other words, they have linked together radio telescopes in different places to create a space telescope and gather data. The final telescopes of the Event Horizon Telescope are expected to come online this spring. We might get our first picture this year.

The black hole above weighs 4 million solar masses, or has the same mass as 4 million suns. And a VLBI detection has marked Sagittarius A*’s likely location. During this decade, scientists plan to probe this region for the black hole’s event horizon. So far, the Event Horizon Telescope has made the first ever measurements of magnetic fields just outside the black hole’s event horizon.

Black holes are still much of a mystery to us. They streak through space, suck up and stretch out stars, and hurl spitballs. Detecting gravitational waves took us one step closer, as they were the first-ever observation of a collision of two black holes. But the Event Horizon Telescope would help us better understand black holes and black hole physics and also advance the study of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. We’ll find out if Einstein was right after all.

Photos via TheUCLA Galactic Center Group and the W.M. Keck Observatory Laser Team

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24-01-2017 om 15:00 geschreven door peter  

Lights Out: Asteroid Triggered Freezing Darkness That Killed Dinos

When a giant asteroid careened into Earth about 66 million years ago, the enormous collision led to the formation of an airborne "curtain" of sulfate molecules that blocked the sun's light and led to years of freezing cold and darkness, a new study finds.

The finding shows how these droplets, or aerosols, of sulfuric acid formed high in the atmosphere, and likely contributed to the deaths of 75 percent of all animals on Earth, including nonavian dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and long-necked sauropods, the researchers said.

Earlier studies suggested that the dino-killing asteroid kicked up dust and debris that hung in the air and blocked sunlight in the short term. But by using computer simulations, the researchers of the new study showed how droplets of sulfuric acid contributed to long-term cooling. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Extinctions]

Moreover, the sudden, drastic drop in temperature likely caused the surface of the oceans to cool, which would have massively disturbed the marine ecosystems, the researchers said.

"The big chill following the impact of the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater in Mexico is a turning point in Earth history," the study's lead researcher Julia Brugger, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany, said in a statement. "We can now contribute new insights for understanding the much debated ultimate cause for the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous era."

Brugger and her colleagues employed a type of computer simulation typically used for climate modeling. The model showed that gases containing sulfur evaporated during the violent impact. These sulfuric molecules were the main ingredients that blocked the sun's light on Earth and led to plummeting temperatures, they said.

For instance, before the asteroid hit, the tropics were an average temperature of 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius). But after the massive impact, the average temperature was 41 F (5 C), the researchers said.

Hans Sues, a scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, excavates a dinosaur fossil at Dzharakuduk in the Kyzylkum Desert of  Uzbekistan, September 2006.

 HANS SUES, SMITHSONIAN

"It became cold, I mean, really cold," Brugger said. Globally, temperatures fell at least 47 F (26 C). For at least three years following the asteroid's crash, the average annual temperature fell below freezing, and the polar ice caps grew in size.

"The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate aerosols was much more important for the mass extinction than the dust that stays in the atmosphere for only a relatively short time," study co-researcher Georg Feulner, a climate scientist at PIK, said in the statement. "It was also more important than local events like the extreme heat close to the impact, wildfires or tsunamis."

In all, it took 30 years for Earth's climate to recover, the researchers said.

As the air cooled, so did the ocean's surface waters. This cold water became denser and thus heavier, and sank into the depths of the ocean. Meanwhile, warmer water from the deeper ocean rose, bringing up nutrients that likely led to giant algal blooms, the researchers said.

It's possible these algal blooms produced toxic substances that affected life along the coasts, the researchers said. But regardless of whether they were toxic or not, the ocean's massive mixing would have disrupted the marine ecosystem, and likely contributed to the extinction of its species, including the ammonites and the reptilian sea beasts known as plesiosaurs.

The new research illustrates what might happen to Earth if another asteroid were to cross its path, the researchers said.

“It is fascinating to see how evolution is partly driven by an accident like an asteroid’s impact — mass extinctions show that life on Earth is vulnerable," Feulner said. "It also illustrates how important the climate is for all life-forms on our planet. Ironically today, the most immediate threat is not from natural cooling but from human-made global warming."

A team of American and European researchers have confirmed that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction — the event that wiped out roughly 75% of the planet’s species, including almost every dinosaur — was caused by an asteroid impact in Mexico 66 million years ago. The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction was the last great extinction event to 

The study was published online Jan. 13 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Original article on Live Science.

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24-01-2017 om 14:47 geschreven door peter  

Preserving Bodies in a Deep Freeze: 50 Years Later

(Inside Science) -- Early in the 1960s, a group of enthusiasts advanced the concept of freezing humans as soon as they die, in hopes of reviving them after the arrival of medical advances able to cure the conditions that killed them. The idea went into practice for the first time 50 years ago.

On Jan. 12, 1967, James Bedford, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, became the first person to be "cyropreserved." A small team of doctors and other enthusiasts froze him a few hours after he died from liver cancer that had spread to his lungs.

A few days later the team placed the body into an insulated container packed with dry ice. Later still, Bedford was immersed in liquid nitrogen in a large Dewar container. Fifteen years on, after a series of moves from one cryopreservation facility to another, his body found a home at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it still resides.

By current standards of cryonics, the procedure was remarkably untidy and disorganized. Nevertheless, a visual evaluation of Bedford's condition in 1991 found that his body had remained frozen and suffered no obvious deterioration.

"There's no date set for another examination," said R. Michael Perry, care services manager at Alcor.

But as promoters of cryopreservation celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bedford's death and freezing -- known to some as "Bedford Day" -- they emphasize improvements to the freezing and preservation procedures that Bedford's experiences advanced.

The community is also undergoing a significant change in its expectations for reviving frozen patients. Rather than planning for a Lazarus-like resuscitation of the entire body, some proponents of the technology focus more on saving individuals' stored memories, and perhaps incorporating them into robots.

A scan of a young woman’s brain after being frozen.

Aura of suspicion

Beyond the cryopreservation community, however, an aura of scientific suspicion that surrounded Bedford's freezing remains.

"Reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the 'cryonics' industry," neuroscientist Michael Hendricks of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, wrote in Technology Review.

Scientists aren't the industry's only critics.

Families of individuals designated for freezing -- including Bedford's own family -- have gone to court to protest or defend loved ones' decisions to undergo freezing.

In a more recent case, in 2011, a Colorado probate judge upheld a contract that Mary Robbins had signed with Alcor over objections from Robbins' children. And last year the High Court of England upheld a mother's right to seek cryonic treatment of her terminally ill 14-year-old daughter after her death, despite the father's wishes.

Public reaction to the technology reached its nadir in New England in 2002, when court documents revealed that Boston Red Sox baseball icon Ted Williams was frozen in the Alcor facility, with his head severed from his body. Williams' son John Henry, who arranged the process, was himself frozen after he died of leukemia.

Politics has also impacted the technology's progress. In 2004, for example, Michigan's state government voted to license a facility called the Cryonics Institute, located in Clinton, as a cemetery. That move, reversed eight years later, prevented the institute from preparing bodies for cryopreservation on its own, because applying such procedures to a dead body required the services of a licensed funeral director.

The cryonics industry flatly disagrees with its critics.

Alcor asserts on its website that "[t]here are no known credible technical arguments that lead one to conclude that cryonics, carried out under good conditions today, would not work." The company adds: "Cryonics is a belief that no one is really dead until the information content of the brain is lost, and that low temperatures can prevent this loss."

Certainly the controversies have not discouraged candidates for cryopreservation.

Worldwide, more than 250 individuals are now housed in cryonic facilities, at a minimum per-person cost of about $28,000 in the U.S.

Russia's KrioRus company offers a cut-rate level starting at $12,000, with the condition that it stores several human bodies and assorted pets and other animals in communal Dewar containers. Individual contracts can specify the length of storage. At present, the U.S. and Russia are the only countries with facilities that offer human cryopreservation.

Difficult beginning

The first attempt at cryopreservation did not go particularly smoothly.

Bedford died before all preparations for his cryopreservation were complete. So instead of draining his blood and replacing it with a customized antifreeze solution to protect the body's tissues from freezing damage, the team simply injected the antifreeze into Bedford's arteries without removing the blood.

The team then surrounded the body in dry ice, and started it on a series of transfers from one container to another that ended up in a Dewar container in Alcor's facility.

Because of those difficulties, cryonics experts feared that the body had suffered serious damage. But the examination in 1991 quelled those concerns.

"We were really relieved that he was not discolored," Perry recalled. "And corners of the ice cubes [around him] were still sharp; he had stayed frozen all the time."

In recent years, cryonics promoters have borrowed from medical advances in such fields as cryobiology and nanobiology.

To prevent ice crystals from damaging cell walls in the frozen state, cryopreservationists replace the body's blood supply with mixtures of antifreeze compounds and organ preservatives -- a technique developed to preserve frozen eggs for fertility treatments.

Another emerging approach accounts for the separation of Ted Williams' head and body. Based on studies of roundworms, promoters of cryonics argue that freezing can preserve the contents of individuals' brains even if their bodies can't be revived. That opens the possibility of downloading cryopreserved personalities into a robotic future body.

Hendricks disagrees. "While it may be possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that is certainly not happening now," he pointed out in Technology Review.

A distant dream

Scientists such as Barry Fuller, a professor of surgical science and low temperature medicine at England's University College, London, emphasize that even preserving body parts in such a way that they remain viable on thawing remains a distant dream.

"There is ongoing research into these scientific challenges, and a potential future demonstration of the ability to cryopreserve human organs for transplantation would be a major first step into proving the concept," he told The Guardian. "But at the moment we cannot achieve that."

Nevertheless, Perry expresses optimism about a timeline for the revival of frozen humans.

"We think in terms of decades," he said. "Sometimes we say fifty to a hundred years."

David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University Medical Center in Michigan, takes a darker view.

"Fifty years from now," he said, "it's likely that all that will remain of my existence will be some scientific papers and a faint memory held by my nieces and nephews and maybe, if I'm lucky, a few of my youngest readers."

This article is provided by Inside Science News Service, which is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

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24-01-2017 om 14:32 geschreven door peter  

Military Mind Control? Psychic Army Division Revealed in CIA Files

When the CIA recently shared millions of pages of declassified documents online, the agency included a collection of files for what was arguably one of the U.S. Army's strangest initiatives: investigating psychic abilities for use by military intelligence.

Known as Stargate, the program launched in 1978 and lasted for two decades, exploring reports of so-called psychic phenomena that originated behind the Iron Curtain and around the world, and conducting experiments testing "mind control" techniques. [The 10 Most Outrageous Military Experiments]

The Stargate files were recently made available online as part of the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) database, which included a total of 930,000 declassified files containing more than 12 million pages, CIA officials explained in a statement.

One of the CREST documents, a mission statement for Stargate stamped "Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals," described the project's goal: "To establish a program using psychoenergetics for intelligence applications."

A search on the Merriam-Webster dictionary site yields a discouraging "Words fail us" result for the term "psychoenergetics." However, the William A. Tiller Institute for Psychoenergetic Science defines psychoenergetics as energy exchanges that can be influenced by consciousness.

To understand how these energy exchanges could work — and how they might be used to benefit military intelligence — the Stargate project documented numerous reports of people using their minds to manipulate objects or read others' thoughts. The documents include accounts of spiritual healers in Russia and Mexico, "firewalkers" in Greece, assorted tales of poltergeists and hauntings, and experiments testing metal bending through mind control.

Stargate also conducted tests to see if psychic abilities could be performed on command under controlled circumstances. The well-known performer and alleged psychic Uri Geller participated in a series of experiments over eight days in August 1973. During these tests, researchers asked Geller to duplicate drawings that were produced by another person, whom he could neither see nor hear.

In one notable example, the word "bunch" was selected at random, and the control subject drew a bunch of grapes. Meanwhile, Geller was expected to duplicate this drawing while isolated in a room nearby that was shielded electrically and acoustically and had no window openings, the summary of the experiment said.

Geller first mused about seeing "drops of water," then described "purple circles." He finally said he was "quite sure" he had the picture, and proceeded to draw a bunch of grapes that had 24 globes in the cluster, the same number as in the control drawing.

His performance in this and other experiments provided convincing evidence of his psychic abilities, CIA observers wrote in the study. But overall, the Stargate program failed to amass enough data to support or replicate psychoenergetics activities, and was finally dissolved in 1998.

Original article on Live Science.

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24-01-2017 om 14:25 geschreven door peter  

Permanent Structure Discovered on Venus – UFO Hunters Claim it’s Alien-Made

Why isn’t NASA all over this?

Underneath Venus’ acid clouds, UFO hunters claim, rests a permanent structure that seems to suggest the planet was not only visited in the distant past – it was deemed secure enough to house massive outposts!

Today, Venus is a hellhole. Although its size and composition has earned it the nickname of Earth’s Sister, the reality is you wouldn’t last 3 seconds on its surface. Calling Venus’ climate unpleasant would be a gross understatement.

With surface temperatures high enough to melt lead and an atmospheric pressure 90 times greater than what we have here, Venus would be near the bottom on your list of exotic vacation spots. Come for the thrills, stay for the sulphuric acid rains! Just to drive the point home, the longest a man-made probe’s ever survived on its surface was a little over two hours. The Soviet Venera 13 landed, took a few photos and measurements and then succumbed to the infernal conditions.

But, astronomers determined, Venus wasn’t always this way. Like Mars, it is almost certain at one point in the distant past, Venus had a much lighter atmosphere and oceans of liquid water on its surface. It got the way it is today because of global volcanic eruptions and a runaway greenhouse effect. As CO2 and other greenhouse gasses accumulated in the atmosphere, temperatures rose, water turned to steam and the planet’s habitability index dropped below the threshold.

Recently, alien hunters have spotted an enormous, apparently stationary structure underneath Venus’ thick layer of acid clouds. Responsible for the discovery is Tyler Glockner, self-entitled conveyor of the “exposure of the alien phenomenon.”

The video he uploaded to YouTube shows what looks like an enormous curving band that stretches along a portion of the planet’s circumference.

Scientists have yet to ever see something as massive as what is being depicted here on Venus.”

Glockner added: “Maybe this is something else all together. Some sort of massive structure hidden in the clouds. Or possibly a grouping of something. All coming together to form this giant band. […]”

“You always hear about Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto but you really don’t hear about Venus. Maybe there’s something about this planet they don’t want us to know.”

The scientific community was quick to dismiss Glockner’s hypothesis because caution saved the scientist’s career. If prominent figures suddenly started backing every outrageous claim involving aliens, their credibility would drop lower than Venus’ real estate value.

Their explanation for the unusual band on the planet is gravity waves. Not to be confused with gravitational waves (ripples in space-time), gravity waves form when there is a difference in the atmospheric pressure of two neighboring regions. Think of clouds going over a mountain and you’ve got a pretty good picture.

“Gravity waves are an atmospheric phenomenon we often see in mountainous parts of Earth’s surface. Crudely speaking, they form when air ripples over bumpy surfaces,” French astrophysicist and atmospheric climate expert Jean-Loup Bertaux told Fox News. “The waves propagate upwards and grow larger and larger until they break below the cloud top and forms a wave,” he added.

If there’s one thing Venus is known for, it has to be strange cloud formations. So while gravity waves could potentially account for the weird structure, there is no proof it was actually caused by a mountain.

The planet’s strange history parallels our present and its present might foretell ours. Mankind sent only a handful of probes to Venus’ surface and to be completely honest, our knowledge of our next door neighbor is superficial. Taking this into consideration, it would be unwise to claim there are no alien relics on Venus. Until we succeed in mapping its surface (and we might never get to), there is plenty of room for sensible speculation.

At the end of the day, Glockner remains convinced what he saw on Venus is proof of ancient (or even present) alien habitation. He says gravity waves only last for a few days before dissipating. On the other hand, the strange band has been there for a while and shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon.

What do you think – natural or artificial?

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24-01-2017 om 14:15 geschreven door peter  

This Giant Cube UFO Keeps Returning to our Sun. Why?

No one knows what this ginormous cube UFO is doing out there, but it keeps coming back to its position in front of our Sun.

No, we’re not sure it’s a Borg Cube, but that doesn’t mean its intentions are benign.

The enormous cube-shaped UFO was spotted near our Sun on December 22 by myunhauzen74 of YouTube, a conspiracy theorist known for his stance on NASA and the truth he believes they keep hidden.

In the photos released by NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), a cube the size of Earth can be seen hovering near the star that gives us warmth. While some speculate that the cuboid shape is the result of NASA censorship done to hide the actual craft, there are others who invoke pretty convincing arguments in favor of the cube UFO hypothesis.

According to UFO hunter Scott Waring, the object in the photos appears to reflect sunlight and therefore must be a solid object.

“Did you notice the light extending out from the sun and around the cube?” he asked on his blog. “The light is going out further than other places around the sun. This means the light is reflecting off the dark surface of the UFO and the UFO is getting hit by the Sun’s heat.”

If this object is indeed a physical UFO, it definitely has a vetted interest in our Sun. Many UFO experts believe aliens could harness the power of our star and transform it into energy they could use. Some even speculate that the Sun’s immense power output could be manipulated into tearing the space-time around it, opening up a wormhole for the aliens to use.

The precise geometric form of the enigmatic presence could be enough to suspect it has an artificial origin. But that origin could be more prosaic than you think. NASA maintains that it is an image artifact, the result of cameras recalibrating themselves.

This explanation fails to convince UFO hunters who are determined to get the truth out one way or another. They claim that this UFO was photographed dozens of times in the past few years, a testament to the persistent presence of advanced aliens in our Solar System.

What do you think, glitch, cube UFO or the cover-up of something much darker?

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24-01-2017 om 14:11 geschreven door peter  

Early Meteorite Bits Reveal Clues About Solar System's Evolution

Many meteorites found on Earth are remnants of one titanic solar-system collision that took place more than 460 million years ago. But for the first time, researchers have specifically targeted meteorites that fell to Earth just before that asteroid collision and found that the composition of those earlier space rocks is quite different than those today.

By sifting through the minuscule remnants of those ancient solar-system crashes, called micrometeorites, the researchers found that the most common types of meteorites today used to be quite rare — and the rarest ones used to be common. Understanding the makeup of asteroids provides insight into the history of solar-system collisions and the evolution of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, scientists say.

"We spend lots of time studying the debris from the big asteroid destruction event 466 million years ago, but recently, we went a little bit further back in time," said Philipp Heck, a researcher at The Field Museum in Chicago and lead author of the new research paper. "We found it very different from what comes down today — that was our big surprise," Heck told Space.com. [The Strangest Asteriods in the Solar System]

Meteorites come from flying debris after a collision of two bodies in the solar system, and their makeup reflects the asteroid, comet, moon or planet that suffered through the crash. The rarest meteorites found on Earth today come from differentiated or partially differentiated bodies — big clusters of dust and debris that got hot enough to form (or partially form) a core, mantle and crust, as on Earth, Mars or the asteroid Vesta. It's much more common for meteorites today to come from undifferentiated bodies, which remained mixtures of rock, dust and metal.

But according to the new research, that type of meteorite, called an ordinary chondrite, used to be much less common than ones from differentiated bodies were. By avoiding the most recent meteorites, researchers can get a glimpse of more collisions in the solar system's past.

"This is not an event, what we're looking at — this is basically the background," Heck said. "You can say these are tails of different events; the results of different [collision] events in the solar system, in the asteroid belt, that generated fragments … and those fragments arrived to Earth."

A few events and asteroid populations seem to dominate that background, he added: 34 percent of the micrometeorites came from partially differentiated bodies, which had partially melted and begun to separate out, whereas only 0.45 percent of meteorites today are that type. This indicates that many more of those bodies were experiencing collisions in the past, Heck said. The researchers also found micrometeorites that originated from a collision at Vesta, the brightest asteroid visible from Earth, billions of years ago, as well as meteorites that the researchers think came from the formation of the Flora asteroid family, also about a billion years ago. Both reside in the asteroid belt.

Notably, there were very few ordinary chondrites — most were generated later, by the 466-million-year-old collision or by an even later event, which generated another type of ordinary chondrite, Heck said.

"Using relict minerals in the rock record to determine the previous asteroid flux is incredibly inventive," Tasha Dunn, a planetary geologist at Colby College who was not involved in the research, told Space.com by email. "I was quite surprised by the results."

Dunn noted that the proportions of meteorite types that rain down today don't match the populations of asteroids found in the belt — a disparity that has puzzled meteorite researchers. "Trying to understand why the proportion of asteroids in the asteroid belt doesn't match what we see in the meteorite collection has been one of the biggest questions in meteorics for some time," she said.

Dunn said she was particularly interested in seeing the large proportion of meteorites from the Flora family back then, because researchers have wondered why there weren't many of them coming down despite the Floras' good position. Maybe, she said, much of the material was expelled during the initial breakup of the family. [The Asteroid Belt Explained (Infographic)]

"Needle in a haystack"

Understandably, meteorites that fell more than 466 million years ago are difficult to find. Heck's Russian and Swedish colleagues turned to micrometeorites less than 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) across. By sifting through samples of rock from a river valley in Russia that used to be seafloor, they managed to separate some. They chose a location that would have had a slow buildup of sediment, leading to a greater proportion of the desired micrometeorites.

The researchers took advantage of a lucky fact: chromites and chrome spinels, the key grains necessary to determine the age and makeup of a micrometeorite, are resistant to acid. So to find the meteorite compounds, they treated the material with hydrochloric or hydrofluoric acid to eat away the Earthly sediments, leaving the meteorite markers behind.

"The approach is essentially a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and we use the crude method of burning down the haystack to find the needle," Heck said.

Heck's group analyzed samples dating back from the target era, zeroing in on the chromites and chrome spinels whose makeup can help scientists classify the type of object they came from.

"Even almost 500 million years in the sediment didn't change them," Heck said. "They still preserve the original composition, which makes it a really, really good and robust mineral to study meteorites that arrived in the past."

They also measured the oxygen isotopes — that is, oxygen with different numbers of neutrons — whose proportions likely represent how far from the sun the body formed, Heck said.

Going forward, Heck said, researchers should look at different time windows to try to understand those earlier solar system collisions, like the one that blasted fragments off of Vesta.

"We can do that for the different types of fragments from different parent bodies, parent asteroids, and get a better picture of what collisions happened and what were the effects on planets in the inner solar system," he said. One could also track meteorite fragments on places like the moon and Mars for a more complete view. All results can be fitted into models of the events, increasing their accuracy and our understanding of the solar system's evolution — and, potentially, those titanic crashes' impact on Earth's life and climate.

"It's really a multidisciplinary collaboration with different fields — geology, cosmochemistry, planetary science, chemistry — all working together to try to tackle that problem," Heck said.

The new research was detailed today (Jan. 23) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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24-01-2017 om 14:05 geschreven door peter  

The Peak on Saturn's 'Death Star' Moon Mimas

Saturn's moon Mimas glows a shining white in this photo from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Dominating the image is Mimas' defining feature Herschel Crater, named after the astronomer William Herschel who first discovered the moon, where shadows offer a clue into how large the cavity actually is. 

The crater is 88 miles (140 kilometers) wide -- close to one-third the diameter of Mimas itself. Herschel peak, the central mountain feature common in large impact craters, stands a similar height to Earth's Mount Everest on Earth. The distinctive Herschel Crater gives Mimas more than a passing resemblance to the fictional Death Star from the "Star Wars" science fiction universe. You can see more photos of Mimas in our gallery here.

The Cassini spacecraft imaged the icy moon's hemisphere opposite Saturn with north being up and roughly 21 degrees left. Cassini's narrow-angle camera utilized a combination of its special filters to capture the image on Oct. 22, 2016, though NASA only released the image this month. Cassini was almost 115,000 miles (185,000 kilometers) from the moon.  

Cassini, a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency and managed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, has been on its mission to gather data about the outer planets for nearly 20 years. In late 2016, the craft began the first portion of its Grand Finale where it will orbit Saturn more than 20 times gathering data about the planet, its moons and its rings before diving into the planet in late 2017.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original story on Space.com.

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24-01-2017 om 13:52 geschreven door peter  

STEVE QUAYLE: 'SOMETHING CRITICAL IS HAPPENING IN ANTARCTICA'

{ http://7tales.net/ }

24-01-2017 om 13:30 geschreven door peter  

ALIEN ABDUCTION CAUGHT IN A SERIES OF SATELLITE IMAGES

A UFO enthusiast named John Mooner was left ‘speechless’ when he found images of himself attempting to punch an alien in the face on Google Earth. He is convinced that the pictures are incontrovertible proof that he was abducted by an alien species. However, he has absolutely no memory of the bizarre encounter. 

 

MAN DISCOVERS GOOGLE MAPS IMAGES OF HIMSELF BEING ABDUCTED BY ALIENS 

 

Mooner stumbled across the extraordinary images when he was experiencing technical problems with the Google Earth app that was installed on his computer. He went online to look for an alternative where he discovered Google satellite maps. As a test, he decided to look up an area where he had witnessed a UFO in the preceding year. “I was left speechless by what I saw, ” he said. 

 

Mooner discovered that the satellite camera had captured footage of an alien abduction in process. As if that were not shocking enough, he found that he was the victim of the abduction. He said that the satellite image quite clearly shows him grappling and resisting the attack of a grey alien. One of the images actually depicts Mooner trying to fight off the alien by punching it in the face. "Looking at the image it appears that the alien has blocked my punch and has grabbed my fist and must have been able to subdue me, ” said Mooner. 

 

"The strangest thing about this captured incident is that I do not remember this taking place at all, ” said Mooner. However, he said that he did have sporadic episodes throughout 2016 where he had a distinct impression that he was ‘missing time’.

 

 Speaking of the UFO sighting that preceded this presumed abduction, Mooner describes three identical UFOs flying in formation at different altitudes. He said that the UFO at the highest level of altitude was emitting a green light and leaving a red glowing contrail. By contrast, the other two UFOs were glowing with some kind of white energy. He noted that this was very interesting to him at the time as they were very similar to the UFOs that had been filmed hovering over the Nellis air force base in Nevada. 

 

 

 

 

http://www.disclose.tv/

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24-01-2017 om 13:26 geschreven door peter  

MOEDERSCHIP DUIKT DOOR DE WOLKEN IN MEXICO ( VIDEO )

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24-01-2017 om 13:20 geschreven door peter