Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
19-09-2017
ASTRONAUT APPEARS TO BE TRYING TO HIDE UFOS NEAR ISS
ASTRONAUT APPEARS TO BE TRYING TO HIDE UFOS NEAR ISS
NASA has been accused of cutting their ISS live feed a number of times over the last few years as alleged UFO’s have flown into the view of the camera. Like clockwork each time, the feed goes down. Here’s thefirst timeit happened, and here is the second.
Now there are often claims that what we see floating around in space is nothing more than space junk. While there is obviously space junk floating around in space, space junk doesn’t tend to slow down, make sharp turns and speed up as an intelligently controlled craft would. Precisely why the videos above and the one we are going to explore below are obviously not space junk.
It’s also commonly brought up that NASA would have no reason to hide anything, this usually comes up as a result of people not quite understanding the depth of the UFO and ET coverup that has been going on for many decades. While this can be a complicated subject, many people have gone into very credible detail describing precisely how this works. In fact, a new film called Unacknowledged goes into this in extraordinary detail. I highly suggest checking it out as it’s important to be informed on this issue vs simply blindly dismissing it.
Millions of files have been disclosed to the public via declassification and FOIA that have brought forth more evidence than anyone could possibly need to approach this subject seriously. This is why I encourage people to watch the film Unacknowledged because it details the bevy of hard evidence from verified declassified documents and credible whistleblowers. Our governments, military and high profile personnel take this matter very seriously, but on a public level we are being manipulated into seeing it as a mockery. But that’s changing, and disclosure is becoming one of the most sought after subjects in the world.
Along with the blind denial, there is a mockery made of the subject. People have been trained to think about it as a joke by the media so as to keep the subject covered up and quiet, and there are many reasons for that. It is often said by experts in this field that the UFO cover up is one of the greatest criminal cover ups of all time. You can hear our extended Richard Dolan interview to learn more about this.
“There is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, that civilizations have been visiting us for a very long time. That their appearance is bizarre from any kind of traditional materialistic western point of view, that these visitors use the technologies of consciousness, they use toroids, they use co-rotating magnetic disks for their propulsion systems, that seems to be a common denominator of the UFO phenomenon.”
In the video below you will see a UFO come into frame. This is followed by the astronaut bringing his/her hand up and covering the area where the camera would be able to see.
Then, you see a number of objects fly by, but you will see a number of other flying objects. Then the astronaut pans the camera away from the area.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Astronaut lijkt UFO’s bij ISS te willen verbergen. Wat gebeurt hier?
Astronaut lijkt UFO’s bij ISS te willen verbergen. Wat gebeurt hier?
NASA is al een aantal keren beschuldigd van het uitschakelen van de livestream nadat er een UFO in beeld verschenen was.
Iedere keer als er een onbekend object verschijnt, gaat het beeld op zwart. Veel mensen stellen dat het ruimteagentschap iets te verbergen heeft.
Dat blijkt ook uit de film Unacknowledged, die onlangs op Netflix is gezet. De recente docu onthult hoe de Amerikaanse geheime diensten alle bewijzen over het bestaan van buitenaardse wezens in de doofpot hebben gestopt.
Hand
Eén van de theorieën die in de film geopperd worden is dat Marilyn Monroe vermoord is door de CIA omdat ze gesproken had met een journalist die onderzoek deed naar het Roswellincident.
Astronauten aan boord van het internationale ruimtestation ISS zouden zelfs doelbewust bewijs voor UFO’s verbergen.
In een filmpje op YouTube is een astronaut van het ISS te zien met op de achtergrond de aarde. Op het moment dat in de verte mysterieuze lichten in beeld komen, doet hij zijn hand voor de camera.
Liegt
Hetzelfde gebeurt in een ander fragment, waarin een oplichtend object voor de aarde langs zoeft. Opnieuw wordt het beeld afgedekt door een witte handschoen.
Complottheoretici zien hier bewijs in dat we niet alleen zijn in het heelal en dat de overheid tegen ons liegt.
“Dit zijn indrukwekkende beelden,” reageerde iemand. “Ik heb zoiets nog nooit gezien. Hoe kan iemand dit debunken?”
ASTRONOMERS DISCOVERED AN OBJECT TRAVELING AT 99.99999999999999999999951% OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT
ASTRONOMERS DISCOVERED AN OBJECT TRAVELING AT 99.99999999999999999999951% OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT
One of the most entertaining names that I’ve come across in the physics sector is the “Oh My God Particle.” Scientists also refer to this particle as the “ermahgerd particle” (kidding, kidding. It’s not really called that, but it is called the “Oh My God Particle”). Now, the first thing that may pop into some of your minds is the Higgs Boson, which was discovered in 2012. This isn’t too surprising as the media went around calling it the “God Particle.” However, these two particles are very different. So what is the Oh My God Particle? Well it is a simple, lowly proton. So why the name?
This proton had the effective mass-energy of a baseball traveling at 90 km/h (56 mph)! This type of particle is known as a cosmic ray, they’re generally just protons but can sometimes be a Helium atom or even an electron. What makes them so interesting is that they’re traveling very near the speed of light, and the Oh My God Particle is the fastest ever found.
Discovered back in 1991 in Utah, this very high energy particle is likely to have originated from around the Supermassive Black Hole in the galaxy Centaurus A before it made its journey to the Earth. Now we mentioned that it was traveling near the speed of light… Well how near? Well this proton had a energy level of about 50 joules of energy, which is enough to briefly light up a 50 Watt light bulb. This may not seem like much energy, but since a single proton weighs 1.67e-27 kg (or 0.167 with 26 zeroes before it), it must have had an incredible speed. And that speed has been calculated to being about 99.9999999999999999999995% of the speed of light! That means that, per a second, it was traveling only 1.5 quadrillionths of a meter slower than the speed of light. Not to worry though, even though this particle had the mass-energy of a baseball, if you were to be hit by one of these in the head while walking down the street, you wouldn’t be knocked unconscious. I hope now you can appreciate why it is called the Oh My God Particle…the scientists that detected this particle probably yelled that out when they worked out how fast that single proton was traveling.
The hidden world under Antarctica: Researchers reveal what lies beneath the ice
The hidden world under Antarctica: Researchers reveal what lies beneath the ice
Researchers have revealed what actually lies under the western parts of the icy continent of Antarctica.
There is a hidden world under Antarctica, in a new study, researchers have shown giant ‘wetlands’ 800 metres beneath the Ice in western Antarctica. Thanks to the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project financed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) researchers are one step closer to discovering exactly what lies beneath the thick ice sheets covering most parts of the icy continent.
Reports indicate that Lake Whillans — first discovered in 2007, covering a staggering area of 20sq miles— which lies beneath 800 meters of ice in Western Antarctica is eerily similar to a ‘wetland.’
Researchers hope that further studies will allow them to understand how sea levels rise, and how ice behaves in response to global warming.
“It is amazing to think that we did not know that this lake even existed until a decade ago.,’ said Helen Amanda Fricker of Scripps, who initially discovered Subglacial Lake Whillans in 2007 from satellite data.
‘It is exciting to see such a rich dataset from the lake, and these new data are helping us understand how lakes function as part of the ice-sheet system.”
Researchers now know that Subglacial Lake Shillans is fed by ice ad contains small amounts of seawater from ancient marine sediments which can be found on the seabed of the lake. The water of the lake periodically drains to the ocean through some channels connecting the lake, however, with insufficient energy to carry much sediment.
The new data will allow researcher to better comprehend the extensive biogeochemistry and mechanics of Lake Whillans, but will also help them improve current models of how Antarctic subglacial lake systems interact with the ice located on the surface and the sediments located below it
Three separate papers analyzed the studies obtained in January of 2013, when the WISSARD project managed to successfully drill through the ice sheet reaching Subglacial Lake Whillan, retrieving water and sediment samples from a body of water that had remained in isolation from direct contact with Earths Atmosphere for thousands of years.
Two of the most interesting papers were those published in Geology and the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
According to lead author Alexander Michaud, of Montana State University, they used data taken from a 38-centimeter (15-inch) long core of lake sediment to characterize the water chemistry of the subglacial lake and its sediments. They discovered that lake water primarily originates from melting at the base of the ice sheet covering the subglacial lake and that there was a minor contribution from seawater, trapped in the sediments under the ice during the last interglacial period, a time when the Antarctic ice sheet eventually retreated.
Scientists have found that the ancient, isolated reservoir of ocean water has the ability to affect the biogeochemistry of this lake system.
The second paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, lead author Timothy Hodson of Northern Illinois University and his colleagues looked at core sediments taken fro the lake in hopes of discovering more about the relationship of the ice sheet, subglacial hydrology, and underlying sediments. Their discoveries show that while numerous floods pass through the lake every once in a while, the flow of the floods lacks energy in order to erode extensive drainage channels.
Researchers concluded that that the environment beneath the Icy continent is very similar to a wetland within the coastal plain on other parts of the planet.
What we have to understand is that around 170 million years ago, Antarctica was part of the supercontinent called Gondwana. Around 25 million years ago, Antarctica as we know it, gradually broke apart from Gondwana.
According to research, Antarctica was not always cold, dry, and covered in ice sheets. Au contraire, during its long history, Antarctica was located farther north and experienced a tropical or temperate climate, meaning that it was covered in forests, and inhabited by various ancient life forms.
UFOs in the sky above Cessnock and Singleton weren't from another planet
UFOs in the sky above Cessnock and Singleton weren't from another planet
Damon Cronshaw
UFO: A strange triangular-shaped craft spotted in the sky, south-west
UFO south-west of Cessnock.
UFO: Strange triangular-shaped lights in the sky spotted south-west of Cessnock
... UFO sighting in Hunter Valley sky | VIDEO, PHOTOS, POLL .
Could they be UFOs or some kind of military craft?
This thought came to mind when a man reported dozens of lights in the night sky south-west of Cessnock and north towards Singleton.
The man captured the lights on video. Some lights were still, some were flashing.
The man, who did not want to be named, first saw the lights while out on his deck, calling his dog in.
He lives in an area surrounded by bush and state forest near the Watagan Mountains, not far from the Laguna area.
“Looking to the north, I noticed three flashing lights coming towards me,” he said.
“All of a sudden one went to the left, the other to the right, and the third one kept coming our way.”
Soon others came over the horizon, shocking the man and his wife.
They’d lived in the area for years, but had never noticed so many lights in the sky before.
“I noticed most of them did a U-turn and went back again. I thought ‘this is strange, am I in a movie, like one of those attacks from Mars,” he said.
“There were so many out there, it was such a spectacle.”
The man said that helicopters and aeroplanes occasionally fly over, but “this seemed quite odd” because the craft were “flying together”.
“Normally when an aeroplane or helicopter goes by, we can hear it – even in the house.
“These were quiet.”
The Singleton Military Area is to the north of the man’s property. A Department of Defence spokesman said Singleton barracks “didn’t have anything going on which they think could have been responsible”.
The man said the craft first appeared in the sky about 8pm on Thursday.
“Most had three or four flashing lights on them,” he said.
“They turned around and went back north. By 8.30pm, they were all gone and the sky was clear of these flashing lights.”
About 15 to 20 minutes later, the aircraft had returned.
He could see them for another half hour or so.
“At the very end, there was only one or two I could see doing this strange kind of loop,” he said.
“They were coming out from north to south, then they turned around and went back north again.”
Did he think they were UFOs?
“The first thing my wife said was ‘they’re UFOs’, but I don’t really believe in UFOs.”
He thought they could possibly be military drones.
He wondered if someone could help identify the craft.
“I’m curious because it’s an odd thing and I don’t have an explanation,” the man said.
“I’m one of those people that likes to have an answer to these things. Maybe somebody else saw it. If a number of people saw it, there could be different perspectives on it.
“Someone in the aeronautics industry might recognise the lights and know what kind of craft it is.”
Topics posted the man’s story on Reddit and YouTube.
Thankfully someone out there in internet land was able to solve the mystery.
A post under the name HydraMonkey, said the lights came from “regional link flights placed into holding whilst waiting to land” at Sydney Airport.
“The article says the flights started at about 8pm. At that time there were three flights in holding just south of the Singleton Military Area with a Virgin flight just breaking from holding and moving south.
“To the west three larger jets are moving to final approach for Sydney.”
But why did the man not hear any sound coming from the planes?
“There was a very strong westerly blowing wind on Thursday that went as far to affect normal flights at Sydney,” HydraMonkey said.
“Depending on where he was, the wind might have been moving sound away from him.”
If anyone has a UFO story to share, let us know at topics@theherald.com.au.
A Plymouth man is among three people who claim they have photographed and filmed a UFO in skies over Plymouth.
The Herald reported last week how Alan Kingwell, 62, shot a timelapse video in his garden - and later discovered the mysterious dark shapes when he edited the film.
The video shows two dark shapes "flying" motionlessly in the blue sky and sometimes being covered by clouds.
The suspected UFO over Plymouth, filmed from Liskeard(Image: Alan Kingwell)
And after seeing similar shapes on one of his photographs, David Shepherd, from Plymstock, believes he may have seen the same thing.
Mr Shepherd reckons he photographed a "block blob" earlier in the summer.
After his eye was caught by an ‘X’ shape of airplane contrails in the sky, David noticed a little black shape beneath them which he believes “looked similar” to the one seen in Mr Kingwell's footage.
Like the potential UFO seen on the video sent in by Alan, the black shape seemed to linger for “about 10 minutes” and then disappeared suddenly.
David Shepherd, from Plymstock, took this photograph(Image: David Shepherd)
And John Mooner, from Newton Abbot, has also seen a similar thing on September 15.
"I was sky watching looking for anything out of the ordinary when I started to look around the edge of some far off clouds through my Nikon P900 camera viewfinder," he said.
"The camera was zoomed in about half way and that's when I spotted it. There was an object that was hovering just above one of the clouds.
"The object was stationary so I quickly took a photograph and watched as the object remained in that position for about a minute before it finally began to move.
John Mooner took this photograph (zoomed in, inset)(Image: John Mooner)
"The object flew off at incredible rate of speed heading towards some thick cloud cover where by I lost sight of it."
Whilst many experts are quick to dismiss such photos as being down to camera faults, birds or balloons, the resemblance is there and we may have to admit that we aren’t alone in the universe.
Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFOs and other mysteries for the Ministry of Defence, told MailOnline : "In cases where nothing unusual is seen at the time, but where something strange is noticed when viewing film footage later, a suspicion must be that there's an issue with the camera.
"I appreciate that the witness saw something later, through his binoculars, when he returned to the scene, but this could be totally unconnected, and by his own admission he only glimpsed this for seconds.
'It could have been something quite ordinary, like birds or balloons, but by that time the witness was thinking 'UFOs', and may well have had that classic X-Files "I want to believe' mindset.'
The shapes over Plymouth follow a number of recent UFO sightings across the UK.
Last week a group of alien experts claimed a nudist beach in Wales could be attracting visitors from outer space.
A series of strange glowing objects have recently been spotted above Morfa Dyffryn, a beach between Harlech and Barmouth famous for its naturist area.
NASA's InSight Mars lander will be the first mission to examine the deep interior of the Red Planet to boost our understanding of how all rocky planets form. It will also provide data for other Mars missions, including possible manned SpaceX flights.
DEEP INTO THE PAST
NASA’s next mission to Mars will see the spacecraft InSight exploring the deep interior of the Red Planet, in the hopes of discovering more about how all rocky planets — including Earth — formed. Preparations for the 2018 mission have ratcheted up this summer, and NASA says it is on track for a May launch from central California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base. This will be the first mission to focus on the deep interior of Mars.
The Mars lander portion of NASA’s InSight spacecraft is lifted from the base of a storage container to be tested in a Lockheed Martin clean room facility in Littleton, Colorado. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin
After the spacecraft lands on Mars near the equator, it will place two main instruments permanently on the surface using a robotic arm: a seismometer to detect seismic waves from earthquakes and meteor impacts, and a heat probe to measure heat coming from the core. Scientists hope they will gain insight into the inner layers of the planet using these tools.
Meanwhile, a third experiment will assess perturbations in how Mars rotates on its axis, using radio transmissions in order to make better guesses about the size of the planet’s core.
The launch was originally set for March 2016, but problems with equipment necessitated a delay, with the launch rescheduled for sometime during the two weeks beginning May 5, 2018. The lander should reach Mars the Monday after Thanksgiving of the same year.
Depending on what they discover about the Red Planet, NASA may gain more insight into the stability of Mars and its history since formation. This in turn might yield information about its potential for colonization — something on the minds of everyone thinking about Mars today, including Elon Musk of SpaceX, who is partnering with NASA for a 2018 mission. Fans of SpaceX are also waiting for a possible September update on the company’s plans for Mars missions, including possible manned flights.
Eindelijk ontcijferen wiskundigen dit 3.700 jaar oude Babylonische kleitablet
Eindelijk ontcijferen wiskundigen dit 3.700 jaar oude Babylonische kleitablet
Tim Kraaijvanger
Het 3.700 jaar oude Babylonische kleitablet Plimpton 322 is aan het begin van de vorige eeuw gevonden, maar kon niet ontcijferd worden. Eindelijk is het wiskundigen gelukt om het mysterie op te lossen.
Op het kleitablet is een goniometrische tabel te zien. Dit bewijst dat de Babyloniërs – en niet de Grieken – voor het eerst goniometrie (of trigonometrie) bestudeerden. De goniometrie is een tak van de wiskunde die zich bezighoudt met driehoeken en op driehoeken gebaseerde goniometrische functies. Waarschijnlijk gebruikten de Babyloniërs de tabel om te berekenen hoe paleizen, tempels, kanalen en piramides gebouwd moesten worden.
Eerste voorbeeld: 1 spijker x 60 + 9 spijkers. Tweede voorbeeld: 2 spijkers x 60 + 2 spijkers. Derde voorbeeld: het visje betekent 10, dus 10 visjes x 60 + 2 spijkers.
Bron: Wikipedia.
Het kleitablet is ooit gevonden door Edgar Banks, de persoon waar het personage Indiana Jones op is gebaseerd. Op het tablet staan vier kolommen en vijftien rijen met cijfers. Het is spijkerschrift gebaseerd op het sexagesimale stelsel. Dat wil zeggen dat zestig het grondtal is. Een mooi voorbeeld van dit positiestelsel is hiernaast te zien.
Lange tijd dachten onderzoekers dat kleitablet Plimpton 322 door docenten werd gebruikt om de rekensommen van studenten te controleren. “Ons onderzoek laat echter zien dat Plimpton 322 voorbeelden van rechthoekige driehoeken beschrijft”, vertelt onderzoeker Norman Wildberger. Het paper van hem en Dr Daniel Mansfield is te lezen in het wetenschappelijke vakblad Historia Mathematica. “Daarbij wordt gebruik gemaakt van trigonometrie op basis van ratio’s en niet op basis van hoeken en cirkels. Het is het werk van een genie.”
Dit kleitablet ligt in een bibliotheek van de Columbia Universiteit in New York.
Vaak wordt de Griekse astronoom Hipparchus genoemd als de grondlegger van de trigonometrie met zijn bekende tabel. “Het tabel op Plimpton 322 is echter meer dan duizend jaar ouder”, vervolgt Wildberger. “We kunnen veel leren van dit kleitablet. En dan te bedenken dat er nog veel meer soortgelijke tabletten zijn, die nog onvoldoende bestudeerd zijn.”
Volgnes Mansfield en Wildberger beschrijven de vijftien rijen op het tablet een reeks van vijftien rechthoekige driehoeken. Iedere driehoek is minder steil dan de vorige.
Het kleitablet is niet compleet. De linkerkant is afgebroken. De onderzoekers laten in het paper wiskundige bewijzen zien dat de oorspronkelijke tabel uit zes kolommen en 38 rijen bestond.
Kleitabletten Het komt regelmatig voor dat kleitabletten nieuwe inzichten geven. In 2014 concludeerde een curator van het British Museum in Londen dat de ark van Noach rond was en niet langwerpig. Hij kreeg een kleitablet onder ogen, waarop de ark tot in de kleinste details beschreven wordt. Een ander kleitablet onthulde dat de eerste bieren mogelijk geen echte alcoholhoudende bieren waren.
The Most Interesting Science News Articles of the Week
The Most Interesting Science News Articles of the Week
By Live Science Staff
Each week we uncover the most interesting and informative articles from around the world, here are 10 of the coolest stories in science this week.
Farewell, Spacecraft
The Cassini spacecraft has plunged into Saturn, sending back its final communications before burning up in the ringed planet's atmosphere.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
And just like that, it was gone.
The final stream of data from Cassini was received at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California. The spacecraft communicated with Earth via the Deep Space Network, a series of telescopes around the world that keep contact with spacecraft that fly beyond the moon. The Deep Space Network is managed from JPL. [Read more about the end of Cassini.]
Intelligent Laughter
What brings together Nobel Prize winners, unconventional research, a mini-opera about incompetence, and not one, but two barrages of paper airplanes? The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, of course.
Credit: M. Weisberger/Live Science
Many important questions are asked in the pursuit of science, but here's one that isn't heard very often: Why so serious?
At the 2017 Ig Nobels, held in the Sanders Theatre at Harvard University, researchers representing five continents made an appearance to acknowledge the dubious achievement of acquiring an Ig Nobel. [Read more about the funny research.]
One Extreme or the Other?
Two pages of the 240-page Voynich Manuscript.
Credit: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
The story was tailor-made for headlines: The indecipherable Voynich Manuscript that once stumped the best code breakers of World War II had finally been cracked, and it was a simple health-and-wellness guide for medieval women.
Hurricane Harvey stranded a mysterious fanged eel on the beach in Texas, leaving the animal to die, rot and bloat. But despite its untimely end, the creature has since become an internet star.
Illustration by Evald Hansen based on the original plan of grave Bj 581 by excavator Hjalmar Stolpe; published in 1889 (Stolpe, 1889)
Credit: Evald Hansen/American Journal of Physical Anthropology
A high-status Viking warrior who was thought to be a man turns out to be a woman, a new DNA analysis finds.
One of the graves was that of a presumed Viking warrior, whose remains were buried with a range of warlike weapons. For decades, however, researchers assumed that the burial was that of a high-status male officer. [Read more about the new find.]
SpaceX Videos
Successful rockets are all alike, but every unsuccessful rocket is unsuccessful in its own way.
Credit: SpaceX/YouTube
Get ready for out-of-this-world fiery blasts on "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster," a new SpaceX blooper reel produced by Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO.
The conflagrations really are like no other, and Elon insists that they're "just a scratch" or a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in some cases. [Read more about the bloopers.]
To the Rescue!
Two territorial hippopotamuses foiled a crocodile that tried to wrestle a wildebeest into a water hole, as seen in a dramatic video of the encounter. [Read more about animal superheroes.]
Endangered Peoples
Uncontacted Indians in the Brazilian Amazon, filmed from the air in 2010.
Credit: Survival International
Brazilian authorities are investigating reports that gold miners killed about 10 members of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon rainforest.
The indigenous rights group Survival International warned that such an attack could mean that a large percentage of the tribe has been wiped out. [Read more about the story.]
War toys
Archaeologists in England are excavating the ruins of the fort of Vindolanda, which was once at the northern edge of the Roman Empire.
Credit: The Vindolanda Trust
Military brats of ancient Rome probably played soldier to pass the time.
Birley's team discovered the toys after lifting the stone foundations from a more recent renovation of the fort. They found damp, black, oxygen-free soil sealed underneath —good conditions for preserving artifacts. [Read more about the toys.]
Coolin' Off
A new technique pushes the limits of how cold molecules can get to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero. [Read more about absolute zero.]
$100 Million E.T. Hunt Spots 15 Mysterious Light Flashes
$100 Million E.T. Hunt Spots 15 Mysterious Light Flashes
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist's illustration of a fast radio burst reaching Earth, with colors signifying different wavelengths.
Credit: Jingchuan Yu, Beijing Planetarium
A $100 million search for intelligent aliens has spied 15 bizarre, repeating flashes of light coming from a distant galaxy.
The galaxy — a dwarf known as FRB 121102 that lies 3 billion light-years from Earth — is a known source of such brief, high-energy fast radio bursts (FRBs). But the newly detected pulses stand out, astronomers said.
"Bursts from this source have never been seen at this high a frequency," Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. [Are Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Propelling Alien Spacecraft? (Video)]
Siemion is a team member with Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that's searching for potential signals from alien civilizations from the 1 million stars closest to the sun, the 100 galaxies nearest our own Milky Way, and the galactic plane.
Some researchers think FRBs — which were discovered in 2007 and remain mysterious today — could be such alien signals. For example, astronomers have speculated that FRBs may be generated by powerful lasers designed to blast alien craft through space at high speeds — a propulsion method akin to that being developed by Breakthrough Listen's ambitious sister project, Breakthrough Starshot. (Aliens aren't the only possible explanation, of course; some scientists think FRBs are likely emitted by fast-rotating neutron stars, for instance.)
So, FRB 121102 — which, as its name suggests, was discovered on Nov. 2, 2012 — was a natural target for the Breakthrough Listen team, researchers said. The scientists, led by Berkeley SETI Research Center postdoctoral researcher Vishal Gajjar, detected the 15 new pulses on Saturday (Aug. 26) using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
"As well as confirming that the source is in a newly active state, the high resolution of the data obtained by the Listen instrument will allow measurement of the properties of these mysterious bursts at a higher precision than ever possible before," Gajjar said in the same statement.
A sequence of 14 of 15 fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected by the Breakthrough Listen team using the Green Bank Telescope. The streaks across the colored energy plot are the FRBs appearing at different times and different energies because of dispersion caused by 3 billion years of travel through intergalactic space.
Credit: Breakthrough Listen/UC Berkeley
To be clear, the Breakthrough Listen team isn't claiming that FRB 121102's pulses are evidence of alien life. But the new observations, and others like it, could lead to a better understanding of FRBs and other puzzling phenomena, researchers said.
"Whether or not fast radio bursts turn out to be signatures of extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen is helping to push the frontiers of a new and rapidly growing area of our understanding of the universe around us," Siemion said.
The Breakthrough Listen project was announced in July 2015 by billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner and a team of scientists, including famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
Special relativity teaches us that the three dimensions of space and the solitary dimension of time are woven together like a fabric. It's impossible to think of them as separate entities, only a singular unified entity — space-time. We can't think of motion through space without being mindful of motion through time, and vice versa. Left-right, up-down, back-forth and past-future are all on equal footing.
And yet, time does seem a little different. We have complete freedom of movement within space, but we cannot avoid our future. Time seems to have an "arrow," whereas the spatial dimensions are ambidextrous. Given the unity between time and space, it leads to the obvious question: Is time travel, of any sort, possible? Under any circumstances? At all? [How Time Travel Works in Science Fiction (Infographic)]
Many science fiction stories explore humanity's desire to travel back in time. Is such a thing really possible in our universe?
Credit: Universal
Into the future: Sure
Oddly enough, the answer is yes! We cannot avoid moving into our futures, but we can control the rate that we move through time. This is a consequence of another lesson from relativity: Not all clocks are the same.
The speed at which you move through space determines the speed at which you move through time. In the succinct phrase: Moving clocks run slow.
IF you could build a big enough rocket (don't ask me how, that's an engineering problem) to provide a constant acceleration of 1g (9.8 meters per second per second; the same acceleration as provided by the Earth's gravity at its surface), you could reach the center of the Milky Way galaxy — a healthy 20,000 light-years away — in just a couple decades of your personal time.
You could stop for a few hours, have a picnic near Sagittarius A* (the black hole at the center of the galaxy), and then hop back in to your rocket and come back to Earth.
By the time you return you'll be eligible for retirement benefits, if the institution providing those benefits is even around, because while you only traveled for a few decades according to the clock on your ship, about 40,000 years would've passed on the Earth.
Closing the loop
Time is relative, but it still flows in the same direction for everyone. To ask if we can go into reverse is the domain of general relativity (GR) — this is the mathematical language we use to not only understand gravity, but the full connection between space-time and motion.
In GR, we ask a slightly more technical question: Is there any arrangement of matter and energy (the stuff that warps space-time) to permit the existence of closed time-like curves, or CTCs? I know this is jargon but it's a fun phrase to toss around at parties. "Curve" here means a path, "time-like" means you never go faster than the speed of light, and "closed" means it returns to its starting point — in other words, its own past.
So, Oracle of Einstein, are CTCs permitted?
Yes!
Well….
Creators of science fiction love to play with time travel, but is such a thing possible in the real universe?
Credit: BBC
The possibilities are finite
There are about half a dozen known configurations of space-time that allow CTCs, or time travel into the past. For example, Kurt Gödel (of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem fame) discovered that if the expansion of the universe was accelerating (which it is) and the universe is also rotating, CTCs would be allowed and we could travel into our past on a whim.
As far as I can tell, Gödel used this solution to point out to Albert Einstein that perhaps GR wasn't all it was cracked up to be — I mean, come on, shouldn't any self-respecting theory of the natural world avoid such an obviously absurd solution?
But Gödel's point was moot — all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating, so that particular solution does not apply to our universe, and time travel into the past is verboten.
Ah! But what if we were to construct an infinitely long massive cylinder and set it spinning on its axis near the speed of light. It would drag on space-time around it, and certain paths around that spinning cylinder would end up in their own past. Good thing there are no infinitely long massive cylinders in the universe, or we might have to worry.
Wait, I've got one: If you make a wormhole (a shortcut between two distant locations in space-time) and send one end racing off near the speed of light and bring it back, the normal time-dilation effects would put one end in the "future" of the other, so you could waltz right through the wormhole throat and end up in your past. What's that? Wormholes require "negative mass" to exist, and negative mass does not exist in the universe? Well, hmm.
Into the past: Nope
It's the same story every time (pardon the too-hard-to-resist pun). For every scenario we concoct in general relativity to allow CTCs and time travel into our own past, nature finds a way to confound our plans and rule out the scenario.
What's going on? General relativity allows — in principle — time travel into the past, but it appears to be ruled out in every case. It seems like something funny is afoot, that there ought to be some fundamental rule to disallow time travel. But there isn't one. We can't point to any particle interaction at the subatomic level that clearly prevents the formation of CTCs.
The inevitable progression of time from the past to the future resembles another indomitable law of nature: entropy. That's the iron law of thermodynamics that states that closed systems go from ordered to disordered. (This law explains why an egg will never just happen to unscramble itself if you leave it alone long enough). Is time linked to entropy? Maybe, but that's the subject of another article….
In 1947 troffen wetenschappers een 550 miljoen jaar oud fossiel aan. Het mysterieuze dier kreeg de naam Dickinsonia. Maar was het wel echt een dier? Ja, bevestigt nieuw wetenschappelijk onderzoek.
Het fossiel van Dickinsonia costata wordt vaak vergeleken met een luchtbed. Het dier had een flexibele lichaamswand, die kon uitzetten en krimpen. De afgelopen decennia werd er flink gediscussieerd over Dickinsonia. Was het een dier? Een korstmos? Of toch een schimmel?
In een paper in het wetenschappelijke vakblad Proceedings of the Royal Society B. concluderen onderzoekers dat Dickinsonia toch echt een dier was. “Dickinsonia behoort tot de Ediacarische biota”, vertelt onderzoeker Dr Renee Hoekzema van de Oxford universiteit. Deze groep bestaat uit meercellige organismen zonder harde delen, die ruwweg 540 tot 580 miljoen jaar geleden op aarde leefden. “Toch lijken de fossielen van deze dieren niet op andere levende of uitgestorven organismen. Het is een palaeontologisch raadsel.”
Groei De onderzoekers focusten zich op de manier waarop Dickinsonia groeide. Groeide het dier als een organisme of als een schimmel? Eerder onderzoek toonde aan dat Dickinsonia vanuit het kleinste en tevens jongste punt groeide. “Dit blijkt echter niet te kloppen,” beweert Hoekzema.
“Dickinsonia groeide doordat vanuit het midden nieuwe lagen ontstonden, die vervolgens groter werden”, zegt Hoekzema. “Als we gegevens over de groei combineren met informatie over hoe Dickinsonia bewoog en morfologische kenmerken, dan kunnen we alle niet-biologische mogelijkheden uitsluiten.”
Cambrische explosie “Dit onderzoek laat zien dat dieren miljoenen jaren voor de Cambrische explosie al evolueerden”, vertelt medeauteur Dr Alex Liu van de universiteit van Cambridge. Tijdens deze 25 miljoen jaar durende periode nam de diversiteit toe en ontstonden de meeste moderne dierenfamilies, zoals gewervelden, sponzen, geleedpotigen, weekdieren en kwallen.
De Ediacarische biota verdwenen overigens snel. Nieuwe diersoorten veranderden het milieu, waardoor de Ediacarische biota moeilijk konden overleven.
Autonome wapens – ‘killer robots’ die zelf beslissen of ze iemand doden of niet – komen eraan. En de politiek hult zich in stilzwijgen.
Begin dit jaar luidden 116 deskundigen in een open brief – gericht aan de Verenigde Naties – de noodklok. In de brief waarschuwen ze voor de derde revolutie in oorlogsvoering. Na het buskruit en de nucleaire wapens zijn nu de volledig autonome wapens in aantocht. En daar waren de ondertekenaars van de brief heel stellig over. “Zodra ze ontworpen zijn, zullen ze ervoor zorgen dat gewapende conflicten op een grotere schaal dan ooit en veel sneller dan mensen kunnen begrijpen, worden uitgevochten. Het kunnen wapens van terreur zijn, wapens die dictators en terroristen gebruiken tegen onschuldige populaties, maar ook gehackte wapens die zich op ongewenste manieren gedragen.” Ferme taal. Maar er zit geen overdreven woord bij, zo verzekert Koen Hindriks, oprichter en CEO van Interactive Robotics en één van de ondertekenaars van de brief ons. Want de autonome wapens komen er – als we geen actie ondernemen – echt aan.
In de loop “Simpel gezegd moet je dan denken aan machines die zelf kunnen bewegen, dus zonder aansturing van de mens en machines die zelf kunnen schieten,” vertelt Hindriks aan Scientias.nl. “Dus bijvoorbeeld een drone die uitgerust is met wapentuig.” Gewapende drones zijn er natuurlijk al. Maar nu worden ze nog op afstand, door mensen bestuurd. “En wij willen voorkomen dat de mens uit de loop gehaald wordt.”
“MACHINES MOETEN NIET GAAN BEPALEN OP WIE ER WEL OF NIET GESCHOTEN WORDT”
Selectie In theorie zou een gewapende drone al zonder mens uit de voeten kunnen. “Het grootste probleem is echter de kwaliteit van handelen. Zo kan een drone in theorie zelf zijn target bepalen, maar dat gaat dan op basis van beweging en is dus niet heel gedifferentieerd.” In andere woorden: de drone schiet op alles wat beweegt en gaat dus niet eerst rustig na wie er in zijn gezichtsveld loopt en of het wenselijk is dat die persoon wordt neergeschoten. “En daar gaat de brief in feite over,” stelt Hindriks. “Machines moeten niet gaan bepalen op wie er wel of niet geschoten wordt.”
EERDERE BRIEF
De brief van Hindriks en collega’s is een vervolg op een soortgelijke brief die eerder verscheen en voornamelijk ondertekend werd door wetenschappers. Wat de meest recente brief zo bijzonder maakt, is dat de namen van bedrijven die zich bezighouden met robotica en kunstmatige intelligentie onder de brief staan. “Dat maakt direct duidelijk dat deze bedrijven zich in ieder geval niet bezighouden met de ontwikkeling van autonome wapens,” merkt Hindriks op. Zo is Hindriks zelf bezig met het tegenovergestelde van killer robots: sociale robots. “Humanoïde robots die ontworpen zijn om de interactie met mensen aan te gaan.” De robots kunnen bijvoorbeeld ingezet worden in het onderwijs, de verpleging of in kantoren voor de ontvangst van mensen. “Deze robots gaan er echt aankomen, we moeten alleen nog uitvinden welke robot het meest geschikt is voor welke taak.”
Tijdspan Op dit moment lijkt dat ook nog niet aan de orde te zijn, simpelweg omdat we nog geen machines kunnen bouwen die geheel zelfstandig hun doelwitten kunnen selecteren, identificeren en elimineren. Maar dat gaat veranderen. Wanneer? Dat is lastig te voorspellen, stelt Hindriks. “Wij stellen – zeker hier in het westen – hoge eisen aan onze precisie-wapens. Als we die eisen ook aan onze autonome wapens stellen en ze in een onbekende omgeving in willen gaan zetten, kan het nog wel meer dan twintig jaar duren voor we zover zijn. Maar dat betekent dat we in die twintig jaar verschillende stappen moeten gaan zetten waarbij van alles mis kan gaan. Want dit soort technologieën werkt niet van de ene op de andere dag: die moet je doorontwikkelen.”
Zorg Maar het is niet de wellicht door fatale fouten getergde ontwikkelingsfase waar Hindriks zich het meeste zorgen over maakt. “Mijn grootste zorg is dat de autonome wapens in verkeerde handen terecht komen. Hier in het westen gaan we de discussie over deze wapens nog aan. Maar er zijn samenlevingen waarin er – op nationaal niveau, want ik zie terroristische groeperingen zich niet zo snel ontwikkelen tot experts in dit soort technologieën – minder scrupuleus over wordt nagedacht. En hoe houd je daar grip op?”
Voorkomen In het beste scenario hoeft er nergens grip op te worden gehouden en wordt de productie van autonome wapens voorkomen. Maar of het gaat lukken om ervoor te zorgen dat alle landen wereldwijd zich achter zo’n ban scharen? Dat lijkt twijfelachtig. En als autonome wapens in een paar landen toch geproduceerd gaan worden, zal het voor andere landen lastig zijn om achter te blijven. “Over de volgende stap wil je eigenlijk niet nadenken, maar dat is dat je je legers voor moet gaan bereiden op het feit dat anderen deze wapens in kunnen gaan zetten.” Dat kan eigenlijk maar op één manier: door ze zelf ook te omarmen. “En voor je het weet, zit je midden in een wapenwedloop.”
“WE STAAN AAN HET BEGIN VAN EEN DISCUSSIE DIE OP DIT MOMENT NOG TE VEEL VANUIT DE ACADEMISCHE WERELD GEVOERD WORDT”
Net als chemische wapens Maar als een complete ban geen optie is, wat moeten we dan? “Ik denk dat je de autonome wapens op termijn goed vergelijken kan met chemische wapens,” vertelt Hindriks. “De technieken om chemische wapens te maken, zijn redelijk gemakkelijk te achterhalen en in de toekomst zal dat ook voor autonome wapens gelden.” Als het zover komt, moeten we die autonome wapens misschien wel net zo aanpakken als de chemische wapens. “Dat betekent dat je allereerst moet voorkomen dat die autonome wapens er komen. En als ze er toch komen, moet alles in het werk gesteld worden om ze weer op te ruimen.”
Een gewapende drone. Dergelijke drones worden reeds door verschillende landen ingezet, maar als er geschoten moet worden, zijn het nog altijd mensen die – op afstand – op de knop drukken. Afbeelding: Paul Ridgeway / Amerikaanse luchtmacht (via Wikimedia Commons).
De overheid Hoewel nog onduidelijk is hoe we grip gaan houden op de autonome wapens, is wel duidelijk wie hierin een voortrekkersrol moeten spelen: overheden wereldwijd. “Maar het is lastig om overheden te mobiliseren,” weet Hindriks. Daar zijn verschillende redenen voor te bedenken. Allereerst zijn er wereldwijd genoeg andere crises die de aandacht vragen en urgenter lijken dan killer robots die wellicht over enkele decennia pas het levenslicht gaan zien. Daarnaast zullen veel van de technologieën achter de autonome wapens de gemiddelde politicus boven de pet gaan, waardoor de urgentie van dit probleem wellicht wordt onderschat. “We staan aan het begin van een discussie die op dit moment nog te veel vanuit de academische wereld gevoerd wordt,” erkent Hindriks. En dat is ook één van de redenen dat deze open brief de wereld is in geslingerd. “Er moet in de volle breedte het besef komen dat dit eraan zit te komen.”
De meeste landen hebben nog geen standpunt ingenomen over autonome wapens. Het Verenigd Koninkrijk vormt daarop een uitzondering en sprak zich in 2015 al uit tegen een ban. Maar inmiddels is het land – mede door de brief van Hindriks en collega’s – daarop teruggekomen. Het Verenigd Koninkrijk omarmde een week geleden een nieuwe militaire doctrine: wapens moeten altijd onder directe controle van mensen blijven.
De huidige stand van zaken De meeste landen hebben zich nog niet over de kwestie uitgelaten (zie ook het kader hiernaast). De VN lijkt iets meer doordrongen van het dreigende gevaar en heeft een Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems samengesteld. In deze groep zitten deskundigen die onderzoek zullen gaan doen naar robotica en kunstmatige intelligentie en de VN op basis van hun onderzoek kunnen adviseren. Het is hoopvol. Maar met die werkgroep zijn we er zeker nog niet, zo benadrukt Hindriks. Want het is zaak dat ook alle lidstaten in de zorgen van de VN gaan delen. “En dat zien we nu nog niet. Het ene land heeft het hoger op de agenda staan dan het andere.” En zoals gezegd houden veel landen zich in deze discussie afzijdig. En dat terwijl er een grote behoefte is aan een helder standpunt van landen. Zo’n standpunt kan namelijk weer dienen als startpunt voor verdere discussies over manieren om de autonome wapens onder controle te houden.
Enige haast is wel geboden. “Ik denk dat we nog net op tijd aan de bel hebben getrokken.” Want het eerste autonome wapen mag dan nog enige tijd op zich laten wachten: ook een wereldwijde consensus die erop gericht is om grip te houden op deze wapens is er niet van de ene op de andere dag. En dit is duidelijk geen technologische ontwikkeling waarbij je het je kunt veroorloven om achter de feiten aan te lopen…
Bronmateriaal:
Interview met Koen Hindriks Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: Powie / Pixabay
Most of today's scientists agree the universe as we know it started with the Big Bang. But one question still puzzles experts: What happened before that?
For most of history, it was assumed the universe was fixed, running from the infinite past to the infinite future — meaning, the universe always was, and will always continue to be.
But with Albert Einstein's proposed theory of relativity and the rise of quantum mechanics, new ideas began sprouting up everywhere.
Cosmologists Sean Carroll and Alan Guth proposed one theory known as Two-Headed Time. This is similar to the infinite cosmos idea, except the Big Bang happened in the middle.
According to the theory, a distorted mirror of our universe contracted until 14 billion years ago when it eventually reached its minimum size. Then the Big Bang happened, and our universe has been expanding ever since.
Other physicists have suggested we live in a multiverse, in which our universe sprouted from a parent universe and could be one of many.
Another theory is our universe could be the output of a black hole in another universe: The black hole attracts matter, which gushes out a hole at the other end and gives birth to our universe.
Others propose what's known as the Big Bounce. The idea here is one universe collapsed inward and then bounced back to make an entirely different one.
But perhaps there was nothing before the Big Bang, not even time itself. This is the most widely accepted theory, with some well-known supporters, like cosmologists Alexander Vilenkin and Stephen Hawking.
Scientists currently don't have a way to test any of these proposals; today's telescopes can't even see as far back as the Big Bang, let alone what came before it.
Humanity is on the verge of discovering alien life, NASA higher-ups say.
Physicists hope within the next few decades, any of these theories or one that's yet-to-be-discovered might finally help explain how the universe began.
Let's assume for a minute that intelligent extraterrestrials exist and that they're just as curious about the universe as we are. If they were looking for habitable exoplanets, how would they find Earth?
It might be easier than you think. Radio signals have been expanding into space since we first harnessed the technology in the 1900s. We've even purposely broadcast messages directly at other stars in the hopes that aliens are listening. So far, they haven't returned our calls.
And if transmissions don't give us away, our emissions might. Since the mid-1700s, we've been filling the atmosphere with a multitude of greenhouse gases. This pollution could be visible to alien astronomers — in the same way they could detect oxygen in our atmosphere. More emissions would slightly alter our atmospheric makeup, indicating that Earth is habitable and that we're a tech-savvy civilization.
There are also maps to Earth currently gliding through space aboard NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. If aliens ever intercept and decode it, they'll have a handy set of directions.
Or, extraterrestrials might employ one of our most commonly used methods to find exoplanets — transits. Every time a planet crosses in front of its host star, the star's light dims at regular intervals. One team of researchers plotted out which parts of the sky would have the best view of our solar system and found that out of the thousands of known exoplanets, nine are ideally placed to observe Earth transits.
But even if aliens searching for habitable worlds do happen to spot Earth, it could take upward of thousands of years to make contact.
Astronomers have long searched for life on other planets, but could aliens someday spot our humble terrestrial home? As the SciShow’s Hank Green explains in the video below, this type of encounter looks pretty unlikely. That's because many exoplanets simply aren’t lined up correctly to see any of the planets in our solar system transit the Sun, which is the way Earth-bound scientists often find other planets.
Don’t despair, however, that we won't ever find faraway life: Astronomers went through all of the known exoplanets, and found about 65 of them that are positioned in the right place to see one of the planets in our solar system, including nine that could see Earth. Meanwhile, there may also be 10 nearby Earth-like planets that we can’t see, but from which life forms could see Earth transiting the Sun.
So, who knows? Maybe one day, we'll make contact with a brand-new space species. Until then, we'll keep looking (and wondering whether we're being looked at).
Learn more about our potential to be spotted by aliens, as well as how galaxies get their magnetic fields, by watching the SciShow's video below:
500-Million-Year-Old Creature Looks Like Space Alien in Re-Creation
500-Million-Year-Old Creature Looks Like Space Alien in Re-Creation
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor
A dinner-plate-sized sculpture of a pea-sized Cambrian sea creature, Agnostus pisiformis. This trilobite-like creature dates back 500 million years.
Credit: Esben Horn
It looks like a space alien, or maybe a very deformed clam. But really, it's a re-creation of a 500-million-year-old life-form.
New images show a sculpture of Agnostus pisiformis, a now-extinct arthropod that used to live in what is today Scandinavia. These creatures, just four-tenths of an inch (1 centimeter) long when they were alive, are nevertheless known in exact anatomical detail because they've been preserved so perfectly in shale and limestones.
"The incredible degree of preservational detail means that we can grasp the entire anatomy of the animal, which, in turn, reveals a lot about its ecology and mode of life," Mats E. Eriksson, a geology professor at Lund University who commissioned the sculpted re-creation as part of a new paper in the journal Earth-Science Reviews, said in a statement.
According to that paper, A. pisiformis started life as a larva and developed into adulthood by repeatedly shedding and regrowing its hard exoskeleton. Its body was protected by two shields that looked a bit like clam shells when the animal curled up. Little is known about the creature's ocean-going lifestyle, but it probably plucked bits of organic matter out of the water for food. [Photos: Strange, Eyeless Creatures from the Cambrian Period]
An assemblage of real Agnostus pisiformis fossils.
Credit: Per Ahlberg
The odd little critter is also useful to modern scientists as what's called an index fossil. Index fossils are fossils that appear in only a particular time period, so they're used to date layers of rock: If the fossils appear in a rock layer, there's no question about when that layer formed.
Artists at 10 Tons studio in Denmark created the new lifelike sculptures of A. pisiformis. The process was painstaking and involved multiple steps with hand-modeled clay, wax molds and silicon casts. The final sculptures were made with translucent silicon, and each is about the size of a dinner plate — much larger than the real creatures, which makes it easier to see their anatomy. The artists made a partially unrolled sculpture, mimicking the arthropod's likely positioning during swimming, as well as a rolled-up version to show how its exoskeletal shields would have protected it. They also made a model of the creature as it appears under a scanning electron microscope.
Agnostus pisiformis is an index fossil used to accurately date the layers of rocks where it is found. Many well-preserved fossils discovered in shale and limestone enable researchers to reconstruct their anatomy, including soft tissue.
Credit: Esben Horn
The researchers and artists hope their creations will go on display in a traveling exhibit about the bizarre animals of the Cambrian seas. In their paper, they called the period "one of the most exciting times in Earth history." The Cambrian period was the time of the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of life that gave rise to a host of oddball creatures.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind suggested that, while light years and galaxies may separate humble humankind and extraterrestrial life, the universal language of music could transcend such differences. Before the mothership opens its glowing gates in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic, its passengers collaborate with human experts on a giddy light and sound symphony.
As the film is re-released in cinemas nearly 40 years later, we seem no closer to making first contact with aliens. But if we did, would music really be the best way to communicate with them?
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was somewhat timely: on September 5, Nasa launched its Voyager programme, which, four decades later, continues to study the solar system. Jonah Katz, a linguistics professor at West Virginia University, tells The Telegraph, “those records were included 'just in case' the probes somehow ended up being discovered by an extraterrestrial; that wasn't the point of the Voyager mission at all”.
Golden Record: Greetings to the Universe contained pictures of life on Earth - such as a woman in a supermarket - as well as music that reflected the diversity of humankind’s creative capabilities. Bach was on there, along with Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky, as well as Azerbaijani folk music and Chuck Berry - a controversial choice at the time as some deemed his song Johnny B Goode to be “adolescent”. (Carl Sagan, the Cornell University academic who chaired the record’s creation, argued that there were “a lot of adolescents on the planet”.)
The discs also came with a diagram of how to play them, in the hope that extraterrestrial life might come across the Voyager spacecraft and discover the record. Two years ago, the contents were uploaded online, so all of humankind could listen to them, too.
In 2008, Nasa beamed a Beatles song towards the North star, but again, this was more for human benefit - a means of celebration of the Beatles' and Nasa's shared anniversaries - than for any aliens.
Nasa engineers installing the 'Golden Record' into Voyager
A couple of years later, scientists from SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, explained at a conference that human art and music would be of far greater interest to alien life than maths or physics, which have previously been used to try and contact aliens.
Douglas Vakoch, the director of interstellar message composition at SETI, said at the time: “If they’re so advanced, we probably can’t teach them about science, but we can tell them what it’s like to be at this precarious point where we don’t know if we’re going to continue as a species.”
But Katz believes that using the fundamentals of mathematics to communicate with aliens is still a better strategy. “[Music] tends to be 'tacked on' to other kinds of messages that represent more fundamental information about the universe and our place in it,” he says. The laws of physics and maths don’t vary between different points of the universe, but the laws of music do. As Katz explains: “There's no particular reason to think that, say, a melody in a major key would be interpretable or pleasant for an alien. The major scales is not even universal across human cultures.”
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) telescope array in CaliforniaCREDIT: REUTERS
Bearing scales in mind, the chances of the aliens using exactly the same 12-note chromatic - as they do in Close Encounters of the Third Kind - is extremely unlikely. “It would be extremely far-fetched for extraterrestrials to coincidentally stumble across the same pitch collections, using the same 12-note chromatic,” says Katz.
Say, however, that our music was heard by aliens and they managed to make sense of its scale, what could we expect to hear back? Spielberg’s symphony isn’t so unrealistic - theoretically speaking, at least: “We often repeat melodies or harmonies more than once, but alter them in some way on the repetitions,” says Katz. “So maybe if we sent a particular kind of melody or harmonic sequence into space, an alien that 'understands' human music could send back a slightly altered repetition to us to show understanding.”
After that, it’s just a case of waiting to see if they want to invade our planet and turn us into slaves, or not.
Octlantis is a just-discovered underwater city engineered by octopuses
Octlantis is a just-discovered underwater city engineered by octopuses
The gloomy octopus, lonely no more in Octlantis. (Scheel et al.)
Gloomy octopuses—also known ascommon Sydney octopuses,or octopus tetricus—have long had a reputation for being loners. Marine biologists once thought they inhabited the subtropical waters off eastern Australia and northern New Zealand in solitude, meeting only to mate, once a year. But now there’s proof these cephalopods sometimes hang out in small cities.
Evicted citizen of Octlantis. (Scheel et al.)
In Jervis Bay, off Eastern Australia, researchers recently spotted 15 gloomy octopuses congregating, communicating, dwelling together, and even evicting each other from dens at a site the scientists named “Octlantis.” The international team of marine biologists, led by professor David Scheel of Alaska Pacific University, filmed these creatures exhibiting complex social behaviors that contradict the received wisdom that these cephalopods are loners. Their study was published in the journal Marine and Freshwater Behavior and Physiology (paywall).
The discovery was a surprise, Scheel told Quartz. “These behaviors are the product of natural selection, and may be remarkably similar to vertebrate complex social behavior. This suggests that when the right conditions occur, evolution may produce very similar outcomes in diverse groups of organisms.”
The mystery of Octopolis
Life in Octlantis. (Peter Godfrey-Smith)
It’s not yet clear what led to the creation of Octlantis or if these sorts of congregations are common.
At least one other gloomy octopus site was found recently, though; it was discovered in 2009, not far away in Jervis Bay, and named Octopolis. At that time it was considered a total anomaly. Researchers believed that the cephalopods gathered there because an unidentifiable human object happened to have formed a central point that the cephalopods surrounded with dens. The unknown artifact was a single object about 30 cm long, heavily encrusted, possibly made of metal. The site has been observed for seven years now, and at any given time, there are somewhere between two and 16 octopuses there.
Gloomy posse (each letter indicates an octopus). (Scheel et al.)
In Octlantis, however, there is no similarly mystifying human object to explain the gloomy octopus congregation.
The likely explanation, said Stephanie Chancellor, a study co-author and doctoral student in biological sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago, in a statement, is that in both Octopolis and Octlantis there were several seafloor rock outcroppings dotting otherwise flat and featureless areas. “In addition to the rock outcroppings, octopuses who had been inhabiting the area had built up piles of shells left over from creatures they ate, most notably clams and scallops. These shell piles, or middens, were further sculpted to create dens, making these octopuses true environmental engineers,” she said.
Gritty city life
Civilization and its discontents. (Scheel et al)
Like any urban environment, Otocopolis and Octlantis can be tough places to live. Citizens must be scrappy. The company and food are abundant but all the activity in the cities also attracts predators, including sharks.
There’s also a lot of aggression apparently, although the researchers can’t yet explain why. Gloomy octopus males seem to spend a great deal of time chasing each other out of dens. Scheel is hesitant to speculate about what exactly this behavior means. “We are still studying this,” he said.
Lonely no more?
Gloomy octopuses aren’t the only supposedly solitary cephalopods to have been spotted interacting socially in the last decade.
Scheel believes that octopus behavior probably hasn’t changed in that time. Rather, humans’ ability to observe the behavior has. Today more divers are in the water with cameras and better technology to quickly communicate findings amongst divers and scientists.
Complex social behavior evolves over generations. (Scheel et al.)
However, that doesn’t mean cities like Octopolis and Octlantis are super common. “Congregations such as these probably occur wherever shelter is limited to small patches of habitat, and food is plentiful,” he posits. But the marine biologist does suspect the findings show gloomy octopuses have been socializing for a very long time. “Most commonly, the gloomy octopus seems to den by itself,” Scheel writes. “For these complex behaviors to occur, I think that they must encounter one another and interact regularly over generations, even if at any time there are more octopuses living a solitary life than interacting consistently throughout every day.”
The picture above represents a broadcast (known as the “Arecibo” message), put together by Carl Sagan and colleagues that was sent into space via radio waves at a special ceremony to celebrate the remodelling of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Apparently, the received a response, you can read more about that story here. It’s speculative, for sure, but the information below, is not. This article pertains to a real deal document.
Strange signals detected from outer space are becoming quite popular, especially within the past couple of years alone. Here’s one of several studies positing that some of these signals could be from an intelligent extraterrestrial source.
Scientists have discovered six more bursts of radio signals coming from a place in deep space outside our galaxy from where similar signals were detected earlier this year and in 2012. From this specific location, a total of 17 such radio signals have been received, and given their nature, there is also heavy speculation about whether we are being ‘contacted’ by some type of extra-terrestrial life form. You can read more about that here.
This article touches upon an NSA document that was released via a lawsuit. Rumours around the internet say the agency was ordered to declassify the document in 2004, but did not officially release it until 2011, which they did so quietly. Not many details are available about the document, except for the fact that it is real, and published in the NSA database via their technical journal.
“Dr. Campaigne presented a series of 29 messages from outer space…The following article develops a key to these messages.”
A paragraph from the Appendix reads as follows:
“Recently, a series of radio messages was heard coming from outer space. The transmission was not continuous, but cut by pauses into pieces which could be taken as units, for they were repeated over and over again.”
Towards the end of the document, the author states that
“we have penetrated the meaning of basic symbols, and even more important, have learned some of the syntax rules- of the notation, and have caught mistakes in the process. We have a few words for sophisticated concepts, and given more data, with a little labor, we could establish its translation.”
There was no document to be found that actually describes what exactly they found out, and what that translation was.
Quite interesting to say the least.
Keep in mind, this is one of thousands of documents that have been released via FOIA requests, and dozens of global intelligence agencies and governments have now released hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that discuss possible extraterrestrial beings.
For example, here (page 21 & 22) is an FBI document in the form of a memorandum, addressed to “certain scientists of distinction,” to “aeronautical and military authorities,” and to “a number of public officials.”
The document is a letter that was sent to the director of the FBI in Washington from the San Fransisco office, on a matter pertaining to UFOs & extraterrestrials.
“Lt. Colonel (name redacted) of G2 [G2 means army intelligence], San Francisco advised today he has no further information, and that our Seattle office is in possession of all information known by him and is handling the matter at Tacoma, Washington.”
The document goes on to provide a copy of a letter written by someone with “several university degrees” and a former “university department head.”
It contemplates an extraterrestrial presence visiting us.
There is also an important distinction to be made from the UFO phenomenon, and the extraterrestrial phenomena, although there is sufficient evidence to show that, at least in some cases, they are interrelated. That being said, may of of these “UFOs” could be, and probably are, highly sophisticated, black budget (Special Access Programs, human craft).
The existence of UFOs has been officially verified, and thousands of military records show that they are commonly tracked on radar, and perform maneuvers and travel at speeds that no known aircraft can travel. This seems to have started a long time ago, in Germany, and the CIA was keeping tabs.
“A German newspaper recently published an interview with George Klein, famous German engineer and aircraft expert, describing the experimental construction of ‘flying saucers’ carried out by him from 1941 to 1945.”
There are hundreds of cases, and it’s something that still happens today. A quite popular incident comes from Tehran, Iran. This incident occurred on the night of September 18th, 1976. A four page U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and NSA report describes the encounter in detail. Furthermore, both of the pilots involved discussed the event years later.
What happened on this night is an example of what has happened multiple times with regard to military encounters with UFOs. Residents of the city noticed a big bright object in the sky. The airport traffic controller also noticed, “it was an intensely bright object that was not supposed to be there.” The Iranian Air Force was contacted (at the time they were a close ally of the United States, under the rule of the Shah), and they dispatched two F-4 fighter jets to check out the object. The United States took this encounter very seriously; a report of what happened was sent to multiple national security officials and U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, CIA Director.
Both pilots, when approaching the object, experienced weapons systems and electronic failure within their aircraft.
“As the F-4 approached a range of 25 nautical miles it lost all instrumentation and communications. When the F-4 turned away from the object and apparently was no longer a threat to it, the aircraft regained all instrumentation and communications. Another brightly lighted object came out of the original object. The second object headed straight toward the F4.”
Dr. Jacques Vallee, notable for co-developing the first computerized mapping of Mars for NASA, and for his work at SRI International on the network information center for ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet, also published a paper in the Journal of Scientific Explorationtitled “Estimates of Optical Power Output in Six Cases Of Unexplained Ariel Objects With Defined Luminosity Characteristics.”
In it is a great shot of one of these “UFOs” snapped by Canadian Military Pilots (see below).
I’d like to point out that, although the existence of UFOs is verified, the fact that these could be operated by extraterrestrials is not. That being said, just as there was a lot of evidence for the UFO phenomenon before all of this declassification, there is still “abundant evidence that we are being contacted.”
– Dr. Brian O’Leary, Ex Nasa Astronaut and Princeton Physics professor.
What points to this fact, is that those directly involved with these sightings, and those who have held some prominent positions, have clearly stated, hundreds of times that some of these UFOs are indeed operated by extraterrestrials.
“This thing has gotten so highly-classified… it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified”
– FormerSenator Barry Goldwater, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
Whoever is in control or “in the know” with regard to this topic, it’s way above the government, and most likely managed by some sort of “secret government,” atop the “Deep State.”
Given the release of this information within these past few years, those that are mentioned in these files have come forward. One (out of many) examples would be now retired Navy commander pilot Graham Bethune, who held a top-secret clearance. He was a VIP Plane Commander who flew most of the high-ranking officers and civilians from Washington, DC. In his testimony below, he explains how he was flying a group of VIPs and other pilots into Argentia, Newfoundland, when every single person on the plane witnessed a 300 foot object that traveled 10,000 feet straight up in a fraction of a second toward their plane. As you can see from the video below, he has documented the event extensively.
To access the official files pertaining to this particular case, you can visit the government’s ‘Project Bluebook’ files to read them. You can find those links and the files for this case at the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomenon.
In this interview, he states he learned that some of these objects were indeed extraterrestrial, from “the boys upstairs.”
So, as you can see, there is no shortage of information within this realm, in the form of credible sources and documents and statements from credible people. This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
To learn more about the extraterrestrial phenomena, you can visit the exopolitics section of our website and sift through our heavily soured articles.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.