What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

ROSS ANDERSEN

Liu’s trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. The civilization that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn’t care; the Red Guard’s grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive. En route to our planet, the extraterrestrial civilization disrupts our particle accelerators to prevent us from making advancements in the physics of warfare, such as the one that brought the atomic bomb into being less than a century after the invention of the repeating rifle.

Science fiction is sometimes described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its dominant modes. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical Rome, and Frank Herbert’s Dune borrows plot points from the past of the Bedouin Arabs. Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history of Earth’s civilizations, “especially the encounters between more technologically advanced civilizations and the original settlers of a place.” One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the “Middle Kingdom” of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw the ships of Europe’s seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome.

This past summer, I traveled to China to visit its new observatory, but first I met up with Liu in Beijing. By way of small talk, I asked him about the film adaptationof The Three-Body Problem. “People here want it to be China’s Star Wars,” he said, looking pained. The pricey shoot ended in mid-2015, but the film is still in postproduction. At one point, the entire special-effects team was replaced. “When it comes to making science-fiction movies, our system is not mature,” Liu said.

The next morning, I went down to my hotel lobby to meet the driver I’d hired to take me to the observatory. Two hours into what was supposed to be a four-hour drive, he pulled over in the rain and waded 30 yards into a field where an older woman was harvesting rice, to ask for directions to a radio observatory more than 100 miles away. After much frustrated gesturing by both parties, she pointed the way with her scythe.

We set off again, making our way through a string of small villages, beep-beeping motorbike riders and pedestrians out of our way. Some of the buildings along the road were centuries old, with upturned eaves; others were freshly built, their residents having been relocated by the state to clear ground for the new observatory. A group of the displaced villagers had complained about their new housing, attracting bad press—a rarity for a government project in China. Western reporters took notice. “China Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials,” read a headline in The New York Times.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (seti) is often derided as a kind of religious mysticism, even within the scientific community. Nearly a quarter century ago, the United States Congress defunded America’s seti program with a budget amendment proposed by Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, who said he hoped it would “be the end of Martian-hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense.” That’s one reason it is China, and not the United States, that has built the first world-class radio observatory with seti as a core scientific goal.

seti does share some traits with religion. It is motivated by deep human desires for connection and transcendence. It concerns itself with questions about human origins, about the raw creative power of nature, and about our future in this universe—and it does all this at a time when traditional religions have become unpersuasive to many. Why these aspects of seti should count against it is unclear. Nor is it clear why Congress should find seti unworthy of funding, given that the government has previously been happy to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on ambitious searches for phenomena whose existence was still in question. The expensive, decades-long missions that found black holes and gravitational waves both commenced when their targets were mere speculative possibilities. That intelligent life can evolve on a planet is not a speculative possibility, as Darwin demonstrated. Indeed, seti might be the most intriguing scientific project suggested by Darwinism.

Even without federal funding in the United States, seti is now in the midst of a global renaissance. Today’s telescopes have brought the distant stars nearer, and in their orbits we can see planets. The next generation of observatories is now clicking on, and with them we will zoom into these planets’ atmospheres. setiresearchers have been preparing for this moment. In their exile, they have become philosophers of the future. They have tried to imagine what technologies an advanced civilization might use, and what imprints those technologies would make on the observable universe. They have figured out how to spot the chemical traces of artificial pollutants from afar. They know how to scan dense star fields for giant structures designed to shield planets from a supernova’s shock waves.

In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner poured $100 million of his own cash into a new seti program led by scientists at UC Berkeley. The team performs more seti observations in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016, Milner sank another $100 million into an interstellar-probe mission. A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes’ cameras might be able to make out individual continents. The Alpha Centauri team modeled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious “fast radio bursts” that Earth’s astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.

Andrew Siemion, the leader of Milner’s seti team, is actively looking into this possibility. He visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a growing network of radio observatories that will cooperate on seti research, including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. When I joined Siemion for overnight seti observations at a radio observatory in West Virginia last fall, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was the world’s most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is “classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial transmitter.”

Before I left for China, Siemion warned me that the roads around the observatory were difficult to navigate, but he said I’d know I was close when my phone reception went wobbly. Radio transmissions are forbidden near the dish, lest scientists there mistake stray electromagnetic radiation for a signal from the deep. Supercomputers are still sifting through billions of false positives collected during previous seti observations, most caused by human technological interference.

My driver was on the verge of turning back when my phone reception finally began to wane. The sky had darkened in the five hours since we’d left sunny Guiyang. High winds were whipping between the Avatar-style mountains, making the long bamboo stalks sway like giant green feathers. A downpour of fat droplets began splattering the windshield just as I lost service for good.

The week before, Liu and I had visited a stargazing site of a much older vintage. In 1442, after the Ming dynasty moved China’s capital to Beijing, the emperor broke ground on a new observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 40 feet high, the elegant, castlelike structure came to house China’s most precious astronomical instruments.

No civilization on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a “mandate of heaven.” More than 3,500 years ago, China’s court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these “oracle bones” bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.

Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory’s stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing’s yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard’s edge, a staircase led up to a turretlike observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons. The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory’s prized instruments.

The instruments were eventually returned, but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the “century of humiliation,” the nadir of China’s long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the latter’s ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet’s largest complex social organization. They commanded tribute payments from China’s neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors’ pleasure.

In the first volume of his landmark series, Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham asked why the scientific revolution hadn’t happened in China, given its sophisticated intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens’ mastery of classical texts. This inquiry has since become known as the “Needham Question,” though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition. Other historians blamed China’s remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.

Still others have accused premodern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe’s age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.

Whatever the reason, China paid a dear price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King George III stocked a ship with the British empire’s most dazzling inventions and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had “no use” for England’s trinkets. Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India’s opium harvest. China’s emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium. Her Majesty’s Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the “unequal treaties” that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction. After the French made a colony of Vietnam, they joined in this “slicing of the Chinese melon,” as it came to be called, along with the Germans, who occupied a significant portion of Shandong province.

Meanwhile Japan, a “little brother” as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernizing its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China’s fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan’s brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilizational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-leveling nukes.

China’s humiliations multiplied with America’s rise. After sending 200,000 laborers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids’ table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.

Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China’s most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country’s journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.

It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China’s persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein’s theories “counterrevolutionary.” But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country’s “great firewall” handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.

China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The “Celestial Kingdom” looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.

China has largely focused on the applied sciences. It built the world’s fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a “great green wall” of forests in its northwest as a last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert’s spread. Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of “god particles” out of the ether, in the same time it took cern’s Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolize China’s rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps, first contact.

At a security station 10 miles from the dish, I handed my cellphone to a guard. He locked it away in a secure compartment and escorted me to a pair of metal detectors so I could demonstrate that I wasn’t carrying any other electronics. A different guard drove me on a narrow access road to a switchback-laden stairway that climbed 800 steps up a mountainside, through buzzing clouds of blue dragonflies, to a platform overlooking the observatory.

Until a few months before his death this past September, the radio astronomer Nan Rendong was the observatory’s scientific leader, and its soul. It was Nan who had made sure the new dish was customized to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He’d been with the project since its inception, in the early 1990s, when he used satellite imagery to pick out hundreds of candidate sites among the deep depressions in China’s Karst mountain region.

Apart from microwaves, such as those that make up the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, radio waves are the weakest form of electromagnetic radiation. The collective energy of all the radio waves caught by Earth’s observatories in a year is less than the kinetic energy released when a single snowflake comes softly to rest on bare soil. Collecting these ethereal signals requires technological silence. That’s why China plans to one day put a radio observatory on the dark side of the moon, a place more technologically silent than anywhere on Earth. It’s why, over the course of the past century, radio observatories have sprouted, like cool white mushrooms, in the blank spots between this planet’s glittering cities. And it’s why Nan went looking for a dish site in the remote Karst mountains. Tall, jagged, and covered in subtropical vegetation, these limestone mountains rise up abruptly from the planet’s crust, forming barriers that can protect an observatory’s sensitive ear from wind and radio noise.

After making a shortlist of candidate locations, Nan set out to inspect them on foot. Hiking into the center of the Dawodang depression, he found himself at the bottom of a roughly symmetrical bowl, guarded by a nearly perfect ring of green mountains, all formed by the blind processes of upheaval and erosion. More than 20 years and $180 million later, Nan positioned the dish for its inaugural observation—its “first light,” in the parlance of astronomy. He pointed it at the fading radio glow of a supernova, or “guest star,” as Chinese astronomers had called it when they recorded the unusual brightness of its initial explosion almost 1,000 years earlier.

In Beijing, I told Liu that I was holding out hope for a beacon. I told him I thought dark-forest theory was based on too narrow a reading of history. It may infer too much about the general behavior of civilizations from specific encounters between China and the West. Liu replied, convincingly, that China’s experience with the West is representative of larger patterns. Across history, it is easy to find examples of expansive civilizations that used advanced technologies to bully others. “In China’s imperial history, too,” he said, referring to the country’s long-standing domination of its neighbors.

But even if these patterns extend back across all of recorded history, and even if they extend back to the murky epochs of prehistory, to when the Neanderthals vanished sometime after first contact with modern humans, that still might not tell us much about galactic civilizations. For a civilization that has learned to survive across cosmic timescales, humanity’s entire existence would be but a single moment in a long, bright dawn. And no civilization could last tens of millions of years without learning to live in peace internally. Human beings have already created weapons that put our entire species at risk; an advanced civilization’s weapons would likely far outstrip ours.

I told Liu that our civilization’s relative youth would suggest we’re an outlier on the spectrum of civilizational behavior, not a Platonic case to generalize from. The Milky Way has been habitable for billions of years. Anyone we make contact with will almost certainly be older, and perhaps wiser.

Moreover, the night sky contains no evidence that older civilizations treat expansion as a first principle. setiresearchers have looked for civilizations that shoot outward in all directions from a single origin point, becoming an ever-growing sphere of technology, until they colonize entire galaxies. If they were consuming lots of energy, as expected, these civilizations would give off a telltale infrared glow, and yet we don’t see any in our all-sky scans. Maybe the self-replicating machinery required to spread rapidly across 100 billion stars would be doomed by runaway coding errors. Or maybe civilizations spread unevenly throughout a galaxy, just as humans have spread unevenly across the Earth. But even a civilization that captured a tenth of a galaxy’s stars would be easy to find, and we haven’t found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.

Some seti researchers have wondered about stealthier modes of expansion. They have looked into the feasibility of “Genesis probes,” spacecraft that can seed a planet with microbes, or accelerate evolution on its surface, by sparking a Cambrian explosion, like the one that juiced biological creativity on Earth. Some have even searched for evidence that such spacecraft might have visited this planet, by looking for encoded messages in our DNA—which is, after all, the most robust informational storage medium known to science. They too have come up empty. The idea that civilizations expand ever outward might be woefully anthropocentric.

Liu did not concede this point. To him, the absence of these signals is just further evidence that hunters are good at hiding. He told me that we are limited in how we think about other civilizations. “Especially those that may last millions or billions of years,” he said. “When we wonder why they don’t use certain technologies to spread across a galaxy, we might be like spiders wondering why humans don’t use webs to catch insects.” And anyway, an older civilization that has achieved internal peace may still behave like a hunter, Liu said, in part because it would grasp the difficulty of “understanding one another across cosmic distances.” And it would know that the stakes of a misunderstanding could be existential.

First contact would be trickier still if we encountered a postbiological artificial intelligence that had taken control of its planet. Its worldview might be doubly alien. It might not feel empathy, which is not an essential feature of intelligence but instead an emotion installed by a particular evolutionary history and culture. The logic behind its actions could be beyond the powers of the human imagination. It might have transformed its entire planet into a supercomputer, and, according to a trio of Oxford researchers, it might find the current cosmos too warm for truly long-term, energy-efficient computing. It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more epochs of computing.

{ https://www.theatlantic.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 22:38 geschreven door peter  

A wolf has been spotted in Belgium for the first time in 100 years

 BY ELENA MOTIVANS

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the wolf disappeared from most areas of Western Europe. They were seen as dangerous pests and were actively hunted or restricted by industrialization and landscape fragmentation. However, the tides have turned and the wolf is viewed as an important protected species. Its return to Europe has been accordingly encouraged.

Wolves are back

Wolves are important keystone predators. They control prey species populations, like deer, which then causes positive effects that trickle down to other animals, plants, and even the landscape. The largest documented success has been in Yellowstone Park, where the recent reintroduction of wolves has the caused the increase of a large number of unexpected species, such as trout, birds of prey, and the pronghorn.

The Bern Convention in 1979 was fundamental in changing the way that wolves are viewed. They are now considered “a fundamental element of our natural European heritage” andgiven protection and there are strategies in place to aid their re-colonization of Europe.

A European grey wolf.

Image credits: Katerina Hlavata.

The last country in continental Europe to have wolves return is Belgium. Now a wolf has been spotted earlier this month in Flanders, a region in the north of the country. It had an electronic tracking collar and was thus identified as coming from Germany. It had previously been touring in the Netherlands around Christmas time. A camera may have captured night footage of a wolf in southern Belgium in 2011, but it was never confirmed and therefore not considered an official spotting.

“Our country was the only one in continental Europe to have not been visited by a wolf,” since the animal began recolonizing the continent, the environmental group Landschap said.

Coexisting

Environmental groups have welcomed the news and are asking the government to further encourage the wolves’ return and to implement a system where farmers whose livestock is killed by wolves are compensated. Indeed, the social aspect is a very important one to consider when bringing back large predators to Western Europe.

The greatest conflicts since the return of wolves have been with farmers. In areas that have always had wolves, like Romania and Poland, a livestock attack is considered an unfortunate accident. However, in areas where wolves are newly returning to, farmers are unhappy with their presence. In France, wolves killed over 8,000 farm animals (mostly sheep) in 2017 alone. The government responded by ordering a wolf cull of up to 40 wolves by July 2018. It is a careful balance between supporting farmers and wolves. It is critical to include the social aspect in making wolf introduction plans to aid their success.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 21:57 geschreven door peter  

Fermi’s Paradox — how life and space intertwine

BY CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR

This is an opinion post by Justin Curmi and does not necessarily represent the position or opinion of ZME Science.

The Fermi’s Paradox explores the idea of how there are is a virtually limitless number of stars, but you don’t see much life floating around. What is the reason for this paradox?

Perhaps Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, addressed this matter incorrectly. There could be two other explanations for this: firstly, the way we conceptualize space might be incorrect. We might be a part of a larger whole — just like some indigenous groups are still isolated from advanced technology around them, we might be unaware of the broader picture.

Alternatively, space might be at a specific phase of its development. In this case, the question should be “In what phase are we in space’s development?” Let’s elaborate.

Planetary systems emerge at different times but they can be viewed in a similar light as the inhabitants of Earth, in a sense. Evolution tends to leave clues of its work (for example neanderthal DNA in humans), which can be an indication of the rate that a sentient life takes time to form, as well as the other random variables that influence it. So, if a planetary system has the potentiality of supporting life, one should consider these inner and outside (meteorites, radiation, gravity, and so on) influences that affect life.

In addition, life has so far been the process of surpassing different spatial dimensions, therefore one needs to calculate why one life form transcends and another does not. Moreover, it seems that sentient life forms, like humans, tend to want to surpass these spatial dimensions. Would it be possible to go breach the current three spatial dimensions? That is still an open question.

A diagram of the geological timescale.

Image via Wikipedia.

In a way, geological formations also follow a similar path as evolution, though the rate for geological formations is much slower than life’s evolution; th

s one could speculate that space must have variables and a rate influencing its development. The only thing to figure is the rate at which space develops. This rate might be much slower than geological formations. Once we found this rate out, it could have large implications on human society in general. For instance, spaceships may be viewed as the wheel of our time because we are just learning how to probe the vast depths of space and traverse it. In addition, what does this mean for humans? Will we start developing around these new discoveries and technologies we are creating as earlier humans did for math?

It’s not just about practicality. If humans are able to conceptualize different worlds through math, this could also lead to revolutions in the arts. Artist could utilize simple maths to design their works. Future humans might employ a more advanced system of mathematics to create their art, and an advanced structure to construct it. All the arts they may create would be beyond current human comprehension due to the fact their senses will develop around this new form of thinking. Ultimately, art will increasingly become more advanced as our brains continue to develop new systems of conceptualizing our world.

Almost everything else will become increasingly more complex: interstellar infrastructure, universal agriculture, planetary currency, and so on. Mankind is continually in the process of dominating their surroundings, which will lead us to model our different collective belief and philosophical systems around the new information and thoughts we develop.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 21:45 geschreven door peter  

Chinese AI outperforms humans in language comprehension test — the first time a machine ever has

BY ALEXANDRU MICU

A new artificial intelligence (AI) developed by the Alibaba Group has humans beaten on their own turf — the software has outperformed humans in a global reading comprehension test.

Image credits herval / Flickr.

China’s biggest online commerce company is making big strides in the field of artificial intelligence. The Alibaba Group has developed a machine-learning model which scored higher than human users on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQAD), a large-scale reading comprehension test with more than 100,000 questions. On January 11, the AI scored 82.44 on the test, compared to 82.304 scored by humans.

It’s the first time an AI has outperformed people in this task and has done so in style — SQAD is considered one of the world’s most authoritative machine-reading gauges.

Computer speak good now

Computers have shown they can gain the upper hand against human players in all sort of complex tasks now — most strikingly in games such as chess. However, all these tasks had one common feature: they were all structured in such a way that a sharp memory and awesome computing capability represented huge assets.

Up to now, however, languages were always seen as a human field par excellence. So this win might be a bit more nerve-wracking than those before. Looking towards the future, the win has huge implications in society, especially in the customer service sector.

These jobs were traditionally insulated from the effects of automation, relying on armies of call-center employees even while factories swapped workers for robots. As someone who has had the distinct misfortune of working in a call center, I can only wish the robots good luck, endless patience, and a blanket apology. However, the advent of this AI points to profound shifts to come in the sector, and many people, unlike me, actually like/need those jobs — for them, this does not bode well.

It’s also a nerve-wracking to see AIs make such huge strides since, just two months ago, another Chinese AI passed the medical exam.

The Alibaba Group has worked closely with Ali Xiaomi, a mobile customer service chatbot which can be customised by retailers on Alibaba’s online market platform to suit their needs. Si Luo, a chief scientist at Alibaba’s research arm, said that the result means simple questions, such as “why does it rain?”, can be answered with a high degree of accuracy by machines.

“We believe the underlying technology can be gradually applied to numerous applications such as customer service, museum tutorials, and online response to inquiries from patients, freeing up human efforts in an unprecedented way,” Si said.

Ali Xiaomi was designed to identify the questions raised by customers and then look for the most relevant answers from pre-prepared documents. This made it a suitable platform for the new AI, as the processes that Ali Xiaomi uses are, in broad lines, the same ones that underpin the Stanford test.

Still, despite its superhuman result, Alibaba researchers say that the system is still somewhat limited. It works best with questions that have clear-cut answers; if the language is too vague, or the expression too ungrammatical, the bot likely won’t work properly. Similarly, if there’s no prepared answer, the bot will likely malfunction.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 21:32 geschreven door peter  

Crowdsourcing astronomy: Citizen scientists discover new rocky planets locked in resonance

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

It’s easier than ever to contribute to science, and this study proves it best. Amateur astronomers using an online platform have discovered five rocky planets orbiting a far-off star.

To make things even more exciting, the planets are orbiting in an interesting mathematical relationship called a resonance chain — every planet takes 50% longer to orbit than the previous one.

Artist’s concept of a top-down view of the K2-138 system discovered by citizen scientists, showing the orbits and relative sizes of the five known planets. Orbital periods of the five planets, shown to scale, fall close to a series of 3:2 mean motion resonances. This indicates that the planets orbiting K2-138, which likely formed much farther away from the star, migrated inward slowly and smoothly.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Citizen scientists

In March 2017, the initial prototype of Exoplanet Explorers was set up on Zooniverse, a citizen science web portal headquartered at Oxford University. Exoplanet Explorers had amateur astronomers analyze data from NASA’s Kepler telescope trails — it was data which had never been analyzed by astronomers. Just 48 hours after the project was launched, researchers had received 2 million classifications from more than 10,000 users.

“People anywhere can log on and learn what real signals from exoplanets look like, and then look through actual data collected from the Kepler telescope to vote on whether or not to classify a given signal as a transit, or just noise,” said co-author Dr Jessie Christiansen, from Caltech in Pasadena.

The system required several people to look at the data and indicate an interesting objective.

“We have each potential transit signal looked at by a minimum of 10 people, and each needs a minimum of 90 percent of ‘yes’ votes to be considered for further characterization,” Christiansen.

After going through the entire dataset, scientists analyzed the demographics of the discovered planets: 44 Jupiter-sized planets, 72 Neptune-sized, 44 Earth-sized, and 53 so-called Super Earth’s — rocky planets larger than Earths but smaller than Neptune.

An artist’s depiction of K2-138. This is brutally inaccurate, as all five planets are in close proximity to the host star. There’s no way water would exist on the surface, as portrayed here. Come on NASA, you’re better than this. 

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech).

Astronomers were thrilled to see that among the finds there was a system of five planets, all of which were slightly larger than Earth, ranging between 1.6 and 3.3 times the radius of Earth. The planets are locked in a phenomenon called orbital resonance. This means that there’s a simple mathematical relationship between the planets’ orbital periods. In this case, it’s 3:2 — each planet’s orbit is 50% longer than the previous one. This resonance chain of five planets is the longest one ever discovered, though other chains have also been discovered.

“The clockwork-like orbital architecture of this planetary system is keenly reminiscent of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter,” says Konstantin Batygin, assistant professor of planetary science and Van Nuys Page Scholar, who was not involved with the study. “Orbital commensurabilities among planets are fundamentally fragile, so the present-day configuration of the K2-138 planets clearly points to a rather gentle and laminar formation environment of these distant worlds.”

Space music

This unusual relationship gets even more interesting. Data also revealed a sixth planet, still in resonance, but which it skips two slots in the resonance chain. This might indicate a missing planet, or it might indicate another, unknown process.

It’s even more intriguing that this resonance coincides with a perfect fifth, an interval found commonly found in music. However, the interval isn’t exactly perfect. Instead of the ratio being exactly 1.5 (3:2), it’s 1.513, 1.518, 1.528, and 1.544 respectively. This yields another similarity to music, where musicians often tune their instruments just slightly off from a perfect-fifth to avoid the annoying “beat” that occurs when the tuning is too perfect.

The planets are locked in orbital resonance — like a musical perfect fifth.

Image via Wikipedia.

Even so, the most interesting thing about these planets is the way they were found. Nowadays, there’s just too much available data and not enough researchers to look at it. Algorithms are also limited in their scope. Having the sheer brain processing power of thousands of volunteers is simply irreplaceable.

“It’s really hard to tell the computer to find everything that looks like a blip, but not ‘that’ kind of blip or ‘that’ kind of blip or ‘that’ kind of blip. So we just tell the computer to find all the blips and we’ll check.”

“We just uploaded 55,000 new potential planetary signals,” Christiansen says. “We would never be able to get through all of the signals we have without our volunteers.”

The study was published in the online edition of The Astronomical Journal.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 21:19 geschreven door peter  

AI brain implants tested on humans by US military

WASHINGTON - The US military has begun testing AI brain implants that can change a person’s mood on humans. These ‘mind control’ chips emit electronic pulses that alter brain chemistry in a process called ‘deep brainstimulation.’

If they prove successful, the devices could be used to treat a number of mental health conditions and to ensure a better response to therapy.

The chips are the work of scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a branch of the USDepartment of Defense which develops new technologies for the military.

Researchers from the University of California (UC) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) designed them to use artificial intelligence algorithms that detect patterns of activity associated with mood disorders. 

Once detected, they can shock a patient’s brain back into a healthy state automatically. Experts believe the chips could be beneficial to patients with a range of illnesses, from Parkinson’s disease to chronic depression.

Speaking to Nature, Edward Chang, a neuroscientist at the University of California, said: ‘We’ve learned a lot about the limitations of our current technology.

‘The exciting thing about these technologies is that for the first time we’re going to have a window on the brainwhere we know what’s happening in the brain when someone relapses.’

The chips were tested in six people who have epilepsy and already have electrodes implanted in their brains to track their seizures.  Through these electrodes, the researchers were able to track what was happening in their brains throughout the day.

Older implants are constantly doing this, but the new approach lets the team deliver a shock as and when is needed.

{ https://nation.com.pk/ }

15-01-2018 om 20:50 geschreven door peter  

Government UFO Disclosure Begins

Astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell said after his Apollo 14 Moon flight in 1971 that UFOs are real and all humanity should ask is where do they come from.

The prospect of UFOs has indeed raised countless questions for centuries. Many are afraid of the occupants as they may be hostile, but others think they may be friendly. Others argue that those UFOs have no occupants at all.

Researchers have been finding ways to communicate them, but so far no result or not yet disclosed. It is not yet determined what power these travelers are using. There have inquiries if aliens believe in God. Questions about UFOs and alien occupants are seemingly endless.

However, one question has been finally answered. UFOs exist as the world now knows. The Pentagon had spent $22 million on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program up until 2012. The program tested theories about alien craft interfering in the airspace and even reportedly collected physical evidence from them.

According to the billionaire investor of the project Robert Bigelow, who is also a longtime UFO researcher, his company collected audio and video recordings of reported UFO incidents for the American military. Among the videos was the one that involved a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet surrounded by a radiant glow moving at high speed and gyrating as it moved. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are witnessing.

Interestingly, Bigelow also claims that his company stored different materials recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena, including metal alloys. He further states that he is convinced of the existence of aliens and that UFOs have visited Earth.

The Department of Defense has never before announced – in collaboration with major news corporations and private sector – with such intentional solemnity that unidentified flying objects are real. It may be just logical to assume that official disclosure is coming or when the public is ready to accept what happened entirely. The speculation and denial of this subject for much too long may be coming to an end and that everything is about to change. The disclosure will most likely a paradigm shift in the way humanity perceives our place in the universe.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

15-01-2018 om 20:34 geschreven door peter  

Two linked UFOs over Memphis, Tennessee

This UFO sighting video was filmed over Memphis, Tennessee on 24th December 2017.

Witness report: 

I saw two objects in the sky which seemed to be orbs floating in sky

I was headed back home after Christmas celebrations with my brother. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful sunset. I grabbed my phone and took a few pictures. I decided to get closer to get better pics. I was headed West on I40 when i got to the Sycamore View exit is when I saw these two objects. Turned on video on phone and headed toward these things. Found a safe space to pull over and began recording. These glowing orbs would set real still when a plane would pass and after plane was past them they seemed to move close to each other and what seemed to me tried to communicate with each other. You can see on video that one hides behind a cloud as a plane passes. The clouds seemed not to be moving. I was thrilled to see these things because I kept my wits this time.(saw the UFO ya’ll did a show on from a UFO that was seen in Memphis back in 77 and i freaked out and was scared because I was only 17 which I would love to tell about also cause i was less than 500 yards from that UFO even seeing the top of that UFO). I finally lost sight when I tried to readjust my camera

Author (source: MUFON)

15-01-2018 om 20:33 geschreven door peter  

15-01-2018 om 20:15 geschreven door peter  

15-01-2018 om 20:09 geschreven door peter  

On January 7th, a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral on a classified mission called Zuma which involved deploying a mysterious Northrup Grumman satellite for an undisclosed U.S. government agency. As usual, SpaceX broadcast the launch live on its website … until the satellite was about to be launched. Then, according to what was later described as standard procedure for secret payloads, the video feed was shut down. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell called the mission a success … sort of.

“For clarity: after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night. If we or others find otherwise based on further review, we will report it immediately.”

That statement was in response to claims by media outlets,including ABC News, that satellite trackers could not find the Zuma satellite and that its deployment may have malfunctioned, causing its demise and fatal plunge into the Indian Ocean … an event which was covered up for security reasons.

Or was it?

The degrees of secrecy and finger-pointing surrounding Zuma are unusual, even for the government, defense contractors and the military. Tim Paynter, a spokesman for Northrop Grumman Corp., said, “we cannot comment on classified missions.” Army Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Davis, the Pentagon spokesman for space policy, referred questions to SpaceX. SpaceX is sticking by its story that it did nothing wrong on its part.

So where is Zuma?

One theory by space experts is that there was a problem with the payload fairing — the protective nose cone that covers the payload during the launch. There was some talk that payload fairing issues had been the reason the flight was delayed. Another theory is that payload adapter – the device responsible for launching the satellite – malfunctioned and destroy the payload. The third theory is that SpaceX is telling the truth (sort of) and the satellite (or whatever the payload was) malfunctioned after launch.

And yet, no party involved is willing to confirm or deny any of these possibilities, so … crank up the conspiracy mill.

Could it be possible that Zuma is so far advanced in stealth technology that it’s actually in orbit but even the most sophisticated ground trackers can’t detect it? Was the crash faked to cover this up? Could it be that Zuma’s secret mission was so top secret and brief that whoever owned it intentionally destroyed it? Could it be that Zuma was not a satellite but some sort of space plane or vehicle that was never intended to be placed in orbit but instead flew to the ground? Was it an emergency escape vehicle?

We already distrust the government and traditional defense contractors. Is it time to seriously question the true missions of launches by SpaceX and Elon Musk?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

15-01-2018 om 18:33 geschreven door peter  

Over the last several years, the search for alien life has been heating up thanks to discoveries made both in space and here on Earth, prompting one top SETI researcher to predict that we’re only a decade or two away from finally discovering we’re not alone. While we all wish humanity’s first contact will resemble Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the truth is we are likely going to discover microbial life in space long before we make contact with intelligent bipedal aliens. But hey, microbes are cool right? They’re certainly a lot less frightening than green men with ray guns.

If only.

Two discoveries this week may further add the likelihood that our first cosmic neighbors will be of the microscopic variety. First, a new study found that Jupiter’s moon Europa displays evidence of active plate tectonics, indicating there is likely a subsurface ocean beneath the moon’s surface. Plate tectonics could also mean that the salts on Europa’s surface could potentially be reaching such an ocean and creating nutrients that any alien ocean life would need to survive. So, while not quite a discovery of life, it’s a discovery of a possibility of sustaining life. That’s hopeful.

The icy surface of Jupter’s moon Europa could be hiding a nutrient rich ocean. Or nothing.

Next, a team of scientists from the University of New South Wales in Australia have discovered a form of life unlike anything they’ve seen, and it might indicate that life in space could be more common and robust than we think. The team gathered soil samples from some of the most barren, ice-free parts of Antarctica, and traces of microbial DNA were found in some of the These environments are extremely hostile to life and offer almost no capacity to produce energy even through photosynthesis, so the team was quite surprised to find that any microbes could live there.

Adam’s Flat, Antarctica, where one of the samples was taken.

Study senior author and UNSW scientist Associate Professor Belinda Ferrari says all the evidence points to the bacteria essentially “eating” air, offering us new possibilities for how and where life can be found:

We found that the Antarctic microbes have evolved mechanisms to live on air instead, and they can get most of the energy and carbon they need by scavenging trace atmospheric gases, including hydrogen and carbon monoxide. This new understanding about how life can still exist in physically extreme and nutrient-starved environments like Antarctica opens up the possibility of atmospheric gases supporting life on other planets.

Their findings have been published in Nature. The discovery of these bacteria builds on similar findings which have been showing that microbes can sustain themselves just about anywhere, using whatever resources are available – even eating radiation. Life could be lurking almost anywhere in space, clinging to the surfaces of asteroids or lying at the bottom of deep craters on seemingly barren moons. I mean, to think Earth somehow is unique because it sustains life is kind of narcissistic, right? We’re not that special.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

15-01-2018 om 18:23 geschreven door peter  

It has been thirty years since the original, so-called “MJ12 documents” surfaced. In 1987, Timothy Good’s bestselling book Above Top Secret was published. One of the most-talked-about aspects of Good’s book was the mention of a supposed top secret research and development group established in 1947 to deal with highly classified UFO data. Referred to as either Majestic 12 or MJ12, it was said to have been created in the wake of the notorious events at Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. It was said to have been comprised of military personnel, scientists, and the elite of the U.S. Intelligence community. Not only that: Good published copies of what were said to be leaked MJ12 documents that told of (a) the establishment of the group; (b) the apparent crash of a UFO, complete with alien bodies, at Roswell; and (c) a briefing given in 1952 on the matter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Shortly after Good’s publication of the documents, additional copies surfaced in the United States. They came from the then research team of well-known ufologist Stanton Friedman, William Moore (the co-author, with Charles Berlitz, of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident) and Jaime Shandera (a television producer). Moore had been working quietly with a number of intelligence insiders who had contacted him shortly after publication of The Roswell Incident. From time to time various official-looking papers were passed onto Moore, the implication being that someone in the U.S. Government, military or Intelligence Community wished to make available information on UFOs that would otherwise have remained forever outside of the public domain.

It was as a result of Moore’s insider dealings that a roll of film negatives displaying the MJ12 documents was delivered in the mail to the home of Shandera in December 1984. Moore, Friedman and Shandera worked carefully and quietly for two and a half years in an attempt to determine the authenticity of the documents. With Timothy Good’s release, however, it was decided that the best course of action was to follow suit. As a result, a controversy was created that still continues to this day. At least, it continues to a small degree. Most people in Ufology have moved on from the MJ12 documents. But, they still occasionally cause a brief raising of eyebrows, such as when the latest batch surfaced earlier this year. Who remembers them now? I try not to.

Jacques Vallee, UFO author, investigator, and former principal investigator on Department of Defense computer networking projects-stated in his book Revelations that the FBI turned away from the MJ12 documents in “disgust” and professed no interest in the matter. Papers and comments made to me by the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, however, reflect a somewhat different scenario. It was in 1988 that the FBI’s investigation began – after the late UFO skeptic/debunker Philip Klass contacted the FBI and told them all about the supposedly leaked, highly-classified documents and who had put them in the public domain.

We also know – thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act – that what was possibly a separate autumn 1988 investigation was conducted by the FBI’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence division (operating out of Washington and New York). Some input into the investigation also came from the FBI office in Dallas, Texas – the involvement of the latter confirmed to me by the Dallas office in the early 1990s.

On September 15, 1988, an agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations contacted Dallas FBI and supplied the Bureau with a copy of the original MJ12 papers. This set of the papers was obtained from a source whose identity, according to documentation released to me by the Bureau, AFOSI has deemed must remain withheld. As a result, on October 25, 1988, the Dallas office transmitted a two-page Secret Airtel to headquarters that read as follows:

“Enclosed for the Bureau is an envelope which contains a possible classified document. Dallas notes that within the last six weeks, there has been local publicity regarding ‘OPERATION MAJESTIC-12’ with at least two appearances on a local radio talk show, discussing the MAJESTIC-12 OPERATION, the individuals involved, and the Government’s attempt to keep it all secret. It is unknown if this is all part of a publicity campaign. [Censored] from OSI, advises that ‘OPERATION BLUE BOOK,’ mentioned in the document on page 4 did exist. Dallas realizes that the purported document is over 35 years old, but does not know if it has been properly declassified. The Bureau is requested to discern if the document is still classified. Dallas will hold any investigation in abeyance until further direction from FBIHQ.”

Partly as a result of the actions of the Dallas FBI Office, and partly as a result of the investigation undertaken by the FBI’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence people, on November 30, 1988 an arranged meeting took place in Washington D.C. between agents of the Bureau and those of AFOSI. If the AFOSI had information on MJ12, said the Bureau, they would very much like to know. A Secret communication back to the Dallas office from Washington on December 2, 1988 read: “This communication is classified Secret in its entirety. Reference Dallas Airtel dated October 25 1988. Reference Airtel requested that FBIHQ determine if the document enclosed by referenced Airtel was classified or not. The Office of Special Investigations, US Air Force, advised on November 30, 1988, that the document was fabricated. Copies of that document have been distributed to various parts of the United States. The document is completely bogus. Dallas is to close captioned investigation.”

At first glance, that would seem to lay matters to rest, once and for all. Unfortunately, it does not; at least, not quite. The FBI was assured by AFOSI that the MJ12 papers were fabricated. The Chief of the Information Release Division at the Investigative Operations Center with the USAF, admitted to me on April 30, 1993 that AFOSI was not maintaining (nor ever had maintained) any records pertaining to either MJ12, or any investigation thereof. This begs an important question. How was AFOSI able to determine that the papers were faked if no investigation on their part was undertaken? I was also advised that while AFOSI did “discuss” the MJ12 documents with the FBI, they made absolutely no written reference to that meeting in any shape or form whatsoever. This is indeed most odd: government and military agencies are methodical when it comes to documenting possible breaches of security.

The Deputy for Security and Investigative Programs with the U.S. Air Force advised me similarly on October 12, 1993: “The Air Force considers the MJ12 (both the group described and the purported documents) to be bogus.” He, too, conceded, however, that there were “no documents responsive” to my request for Air Force files on how just such a determination was reached. Moreover, there is the fact that AFOSI informed the FBI that, “copies of that document have been distributed to various parts of the United States.” To make such a statement AFOSI simply must have conducted some form of investigation or have been in receipt of data from yet another agency. So, there are a few issues that still require answers. Today, however, the FBI’s investigations into MJ12 are in “closed status.” While I agree with the Air Force that the documents are bogus, I would still very much like to see how the determination was made. Was it just an opinion based on the unlikely nature and content of the documents? Very possibly, yes – and which is both understandable and reasonable.

On a final note, I have heard rumors that the FBI got involved again in the 1990s, when Timothy Cooper surfaced with literally hundreds of pages of questionable MJ12-related papers. But, rumors do not amount to evidence or facts. As for the latest MJ12 papers, I have heard nothing about agencies taking an interest in them. Time, methinks, for the rotted corpse to be laid to rest, once and for all.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

15-01-2018 om 18:14 geschreven door peter  

Incredibly Advanced Secret Technology That They Said Did Not Exist

Find out why a lot of advanced technology is being hidden from us but used in secret and black projects around the world.

First you will be introduced to the basics and a case for a “Secret Space Program” will be made.

The TR-3B is a secret "black project" craft that can be flown into space. The allegations are that these crafts are created at top-secret military bases like Area 51 in Nevada, by reverse engineering alien technology.

In this presentation, we will look at the evidence that indicates that a secret space program really does exist.

We will touch on the alleged Nazi Bell project and we will mention disclosures by John Maynard, Edgar Fouche.

We will discuss the research of Nick Cook and mention William Hamilton - what they found suggests there is indeed a hidden space program.

We will also consider what Gary McKinnon said and ask if things like the Apollo and chemical rocket programs are simply a distraction that have the effect of discouraging people from considering there might be far, far more advanced "Black Programs" in existence and in use.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 17:08 geschreven door peter  

What are Nightcrawlers and do they really exist?

According to Native American folklore, these creatures, strange upright standing thin creatures with no arms, have existed for hundreds of years and have lived along-side humans peacefully.

Despite there is very little evidence to prove that these so-called Nightcrawlers are real undiscovered cryptids, in 2011, there have been multiple CCTV camera sightings of strange upright standing thin creatures with no arms walking endlessly at night.

The first appearance of a Nightcrawler took place in Fresno, California and the second appearance took place in Yosemite National Park.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

15-01-2018 om 16:56 geschreven door peter  

Five-Exoplanet System Discovered Thanks to Citizen Scientists

15-01-2018 om 01:14 geschreven door peter  

Jess Bolluyt

The government keeps lots of secrets, including its UFO program and its plans for terrifying disaster scenarios. Only a little less outlandish? The secret airline, called JANET, that the government uses to covertly ferry people around. As it turns out, this secret airline not only flies under the radar, but also flies in and out of commercial airports.

Read on for all the most facts about JANET, including where the airline flies, who it transports, and the measures it takes to keep its mission a secret.

1. The airline is called JANET, but nobody knows why

It hasn’t been made public what JANET stands for. | Alan Wilson/Wikimedia Commons

As Business Insider reports, the government’s secret airline is called JANET. And that’s how pilots identify their aircraft over air traffic radio. But nobody knows exactly what JANET stands for. It may mean “Just Another Non-Existent Terminal.” Or possibly “Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation.” But nobody — at least not anybody who’s spoken to the press — knows for sure.

Next: This is who owns the airline’s planes.

2. JANET’s planes are owned by the U.S Air Force

The planes are owned by the Air Force. | Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images

Interestingly enough, Business Insider reports that the U.S. Air Force owns JANET’s planes. Defense contractor AECOM operates them. The JANET fleet consists of six Boeing 737-600s and five Beechcraft turboprops. According to Popular Mechanics, the Air Force doesn’t hide the fact that it owns these aircraft. You can go to the FAA website and search for the planes’ registration numbers. Then, the website will tell you that the plane is owned by the U.S. Air Force.

Next: These planes look different from other aircraft in one key way.

3. The planes don’t have the usual markings

The planes are left blank. | Beer Root/Wikimedia Commons

When you fly with a commercial airline, you’ll board a plane that bears the airline’s logo in several places. After all, it’s free advertising for the airline, so why wouldn’t they take advantage of it? But as Business Insider notes, JANET’s planes don’t carry identifying markings like the aircraft that belong to other airlines. Instead, they just bear a horizontal red stripe (for the Boeing aircraft). Or, they have blue trim stripes (for the Beechcraft planes), plus their registration numbers. But even those markings are pretty distinctive, and have made the airline’s aircraft recognizable around the Las Vegas airport.

Next: This is the airline’s home base.

4. The airline operates out of a private terminal at McCarran in Las Vegas

They operate out of the Las Vegas airport. | littleny/iStock/Getty Images

Business Insider reports that the secret airline operates out of a private terminal at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Popular Mechanics reports that JANET’s area of the airport bears the codename, “Gold Coast Terminal.” The publication notes that each morning, the parking lot for the terminal “fills up with hundreds of cars.” Then, planes take off to shuttle people to their destinations. (More on those in the coming pages.) In the evening, “the planes come back, and the cars leave.”

Next: We aren’t certain about this key information on the Gold Coast Terminal.

5. We’re not sure who runs the terminal

It’s not clear who it belongs to. | Airforceproud95 via Youtube

Though it’s been reported that AECOM operates JANET’s aircraft, Popular Mechanics reports that we’re not 100% sure who runs the Gold Coast Terminal. That used to be the job of a defense contractor called EG&G (which helped to develop nuclear weapons). EG&G originally operated the terminal, but the Carlyle Group acquired the contractor in 1999. Then, the URS Corporation acquired Carlyle in 2002. And finally, AECOM acquired URS in 2014. As far as we know, AECOM currently operates the terminal — and the flights.

Next: Even flight attendants need this to work for JANET.

6. Even flight attendants have to have top secret security clearance

Everyone aboard needs Top Secret security clearance. | Tomás Del Coro/Wikimedia Commons

Not many people get to fly with JANET. And we’d guess that even fewer work for the secret airline. As Business Insider reports, even flight attendants who work for the airline have to qualify for and maintain a Top Secret security clearance. Getting that clearance — the highest level — can be a pretty arduous process. The application requires you to divulge “nearly every bit of information about yourself relating to personal and business finances, residences, employment history, criminal behavior, prior military service, citizenship, and criminal behavior.” An investigator also interviews your employers, neighbors, spouse, and acquaintances. And you have to take a polygraph exam. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through to get a job as a flight attendant!

Next: But the airline does do this like a normal company.

7. But the airline makes a splash every few years when it publishes a job posting

It would be pretty interesting to work for them. | Tomás Del Coro/Wikimedia Commons

Not everybody can qualify for or obtain a Top Secret security clearance — a clearance that allows access to sensitive information that affects national security. But JANET makes a splash every few years by publishing a job posting, such as for flight attendants or pilots. Everybody speculates about what it would be like to work for the secretive airline, and what the requirements of the job reveal about JANET. Even if you don’t like heights or wouldn’t want to live in Las Vegas, you can probably see the appeal of getting an up-close-and-personal look at some of the most secretive government facilities in the United States.

Next: JANET flies to this fascinating location.

8. JANET transports employees to Area 51

They fly to several top secret locations. | Tim1337/Wikimedia Commons

Curious where the airline actually flies? It reportedly shuttles employees and contractors to Area 51, the most famous of the U.S. government’s top secret military bases. (Conspiracy theorists have posited that the government is hiding everything from aliens to a moon landing movie set on the base.) But the remote Air Force facility isn’t the only mysterious destination that the airline services. JANET aircraft also fly to the Tonopah Test Range, Air Force Plant 42, the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, and the Edwards Air Force Base.

Next: Here’s how flights to Area 51 stay under the radar.

9. Many JANET flights turn off their transponders and disappear from trackers

Many of them disappear from the radar. | Eddie Maloney/Wikimedia Commons

Popular Mechanics reports that “most of the time,” JANET’s planes take off from Las Vegas, head north, then turn off their transponders and disappear from trackers after spending just 15 minutes in the air. The U.S. government still maintains that Area 51 doesn’t exist. So according to Popular Mechanics, “every sign would point to these JANET flights being the Area 51 employee shuttles for personnel living in Las Vegas. The airspace around Area 51, known as Airspace 4808 North, qualifies as some of the most protected airspace in the world, with fighter jets on duty to shoot down intruders. But JANET’s aircraft regularly go in and out of Airspace 4808 North without incident.

Next: JANET even does this as an aircraft approaches the protected airspace.

10. The airline even changes the plane’s callsigns in the airspace over Area 51

They change the names once they’re over Area 51 airspace. | PD/Wikimedia Commons

Jalopnik reports that when JANET flights take off from Las Vegas, they communicate with McCarran Departure Control using a callsign such as “Janet 210” or “Janet 301.” Once airborne, flights that go to Area 51 check in with Nellis Control, which supervises the airspace across southern Nevada. Then, when the airline continues into the airspace over Area 51, the flight switches to a different frequency — and also changes its callsign. Jalopnik explains, “It’s no longer ‘Janet 210’ or ‘Janet 301,’ it’s now something else entirely, like ‘Racer 25’ or ‘Bones 58.’ It’s flying inside the most restricted airspace on Earth, heading directly towards a veritable black hole of information.”

Next: But not every JANET flight needs to stay so secretive.

11. But not all of the airline’s planes turn off their transponders, even when going to some secretive facilities

We do know some places they fly for sure. | Tomás Del Coro/Wikimedia Commons

We don’t actually know for sure that the airline flies to Area 51, since the flights suspected to go there turn off their transponders. But we can track other JANET flights that don’t turn off their transponders, even when they fly to secretive facilities. Popular Mechanics reports that we know without a doubt that the airline flies to Tonopah, where the U.S. military develops and tests many of its weapons. JANET planes also go to China Lake, a Navy research and development site. We also know for certain that they go to Plant 42, where the Air Force builds its planes. And the airline also flies to Edwards Air Force Base, home of classified research and development projects.

Next: These probably aren’t the only places where the airline flies.

12. JANET likely flies to other destinations, too

There are undoubtedly plenty of destinations we don’t know about. | Eddie Maloney/Wikimedia Commons

Jalopnik notes that though we know about the destinations where the airline flies regularly, JANET “may serve other locations throughout the military and intelligence apparatus, and very likely make unique visits to atypical destinations under special circumstances.” As the publication explains, “Some of these places are in or near southern Nevada, and others are many thousands of miles away.” JANET flights likely go to destinations in New Mexico, California, Utah, and beyond.

Next: Many, many people fly with JANET each day.

13. The airline transports hundreds or maybe thousands of people per day

There are plenty of cars in the parking lot every day. | ADVENTURES with Christian via Youtube

Popular Mechanics reports that though many facts about the secret airline are up for debate, we do know that JANET must fly hundreds of even thousands of people per day. As Jalopnik explains, “Circulating key people among the litany of bases and ranges is the reason why Janet flights exist.” We may not know who all these people are. But we do have some idea of what they’re doing. When the airline boards its aircraft each weekday morning, its casually-dressed passengers are on their way to “places where some of the most advanced development work in all of aerospace is occurring.”

Next: You may be able to spot a JANET plane.

14. You can see the airplanes if you travel through Las Vegas

There are plenty to see at the McCarran airport. | LAX Videography and Spotting via Youtube

Have you booked a flight in or out of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas? Then Popular Mechanics reports that you may be able to see JANET’s aircraft in plain sight. You’d think that if the U.S. governments want to keep JANET secret, then it would keep its aircraft away from curious onlookers. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, and you may be able to spot a JANET plane the next time you fly through MacCarran.

Next: The airline’s planes have also been spotted at this major airport. 

15. The planes undergo maintenance in Atlanta

They’ve been seen receiving maintenance in Atlanta. | Tomás Del Coro/Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, you may spot a JANET aircraft if you fly through Atlanta. Though the secretive airline is based in Las Vegas, Jalopnik reports that JANET’s planes are occasionally seen undergoing maintenance in Atlanta. They head to Delta Air Lines’ TechOps maintenance facility, the same place where USAF C-40 Clipper jets — a military version of the Boeing 737-700 — also undergo maintenance. Additionally, JANET 737s reportedly get serviced at Paine Field in Everett, Washington.

Next: Many of JANET’s planes have an interesting history. 

16. JANET’s current planes used to belong to a Chinese airline

Many used to belong to Air China. | Twistedpictures1/Wikimedia Commons

The airline has owned numerous aircraft over the years, and some have an interesting history. Jalopnik reports that JANET became official in 1972 with a Douglas DC-6B. The airline added an additional C-6B in 1976. The two aircraft served until 1981. Then, the government replaced them with Boeing 737-200 Advanced jets. Six 737-200s eventually joined the fleet. Of the six, five had been converted from prior service as USAF T-43A trainers. The sixth had flown for Western Airlines before the government acquired it. The airline upgraded its fleet sometime between 2008 and 2009 — but bought pre-owned instead of new. The Boeing 737-600 airliners that fly for JANET today were all previously in service with Air China.

Next: Many things about JANET remain a mystery.

17. Plenty of information about the airline remains a mystery

Many aspects are still a mystery. | LAX Videography and Spotting via Youtube

Even though the secret airline’s planes may be in plain sight at the Las Vegas airport, there are still plenty of things that we don’t know about JANET. As Popular Mechanics notes, we can’t say with 100% certainty where — or whom — these planes fly. And while it seems safe to guess that thousands of people have flown with JANET over the years, we certainly don’t know who they all were or what they’ve been working on.

Read more: The Secret Codes That Airlines Don’t Want You to Know

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{ https://www.cheatsheet.com/  }

15-01-2018 om 00:54 geschreven door peter  

Have aliens finally visited Earth? Mysterious UFO looks humanoid as it hovers in the sky above busy road

Bewildered driver captures jaw-dropping footage of a humanoid figure hovering in the sky

By Jeff Parsons Tech/Science Reporter

A strange humanoid-shaped UFO has been filmed hovering in the sky alongside a busy road in Mexico.

Puzzled drivers were left wondering if they had captured evidence of ALIENS visiting Earth as the footage went viral and was quickly picked up by conspiracy theory websites.

"You can see that the tubular UFO is flying vertically over the city" wrote UFO expert Pedro Ramirez who described it as the "first sighting of 2018".

The sighting occurred in the city of Mexicali in the state of Baja California in Mexico.

The upright shape remains suspended in the air and is distinctly different from rounded "flying saucer" UFOs that are conventionally thought of as evidence of alien visitors.

The unusual object is clearly visible in the recording, silhouetted against the dramatic skyline.

Ramirez says that the increased space activity in recent years from the likes of NASA and SpaceX have led to an increased interest in Earth from alien visitors.

"Aliens are aware that we have made a number of space launches recently and have identified that we have been sending up 'war material'," he claimed to the CEN news agency.

"Concerned by our activity, they have been increasingly monitoring our planet. This year will be very important for those of us who follow this phenomenon closely."

The video of the mysterious UFO has been shared over 50,000 times online and other theories have emerged about what it could be. One of which is that it's a pilot testing a jet pack.

Others have said that the video is a clever fake.

{ http://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

15-01-2018 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

Rocket Booster Falls from Sky and Explodes in Chinese Town After Satellite Launch

ChinaSpaceflight@cnspaceflight

另外一段视频

7:21 AM - Jan 12, 2018

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Andrew Jones

@AJ_FI

Up close to the booster from the Long March 3B that landed near buildings in Guangxi province shortly after launch

• 8:12 AM - Jan 12, 2018
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In the GBTimes article, author Andrew Jones wrote, "Minutes after launch as the rocket flew downrange, four strap-on boosters separated from the core, with one dropping near the town of Xiangdu in Tiandeng Country, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, around 700 kilometers [435 miles] from the launch site."

"With Tiandeng County being within the designated drop zones for debris for the launch, some locals were evidently ready to capture footage in the case that discarded rocket boosters fell from the sky," Jones wrote.

The Xichang Satellite Launch Center is near China's southern border with Myanmar, and more than 500 miles (800 km) from the ocean.

Andrew Jones@AJ_FI

Rocket booster drops from sky and explodes near town after Chinese space launch. Article: https://goo.gl/5Dw9w1 

• 1:11 PM - Jan 12, 2018

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In addition to today's launch, China has reported two other successful rocket launches in 2018. Most recently, a Long March 2D rocket successfully launched two new Earth-observing satellites into orbit for Beijing Space View Technology in China on Tuesday (Jan. 10). The Long March 2D lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China's Shanxi Province.

China is anticipating that its uncrewed Tiangong-1 space laboratory will fall to Earth sometime in mid-March. It's possible that pieces of debris from that event will reach the ground intact. The Chinese space agency lost control of the orbiting spacecraft in early 2016.

15-01-2018 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

Researchers Probe Origin of Superpowerful Radio Blasts from Space

Much remains a mystery about the origins of FRBs, because their brief nature makes it difficult to pinpoint where they come from. Among the possibilities that prior work suggested are cataclysmic events such as the evaporation of black holes and collisions between neutron stars.

However, in 2016, scientists discovered that a fast radio burst known as FRB 121102 could release multiple bursts. "It is the only known repeating fast radio burst source," study co-lead author Jason Hessels, an astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, told Space.com. 

That FRB 121102 can explode over and over again suggests it does not come from some one-time cataclysmic event, Hessels said. "A key question in the field is whether this repeating fast radio burst source is fundamentally different compared to all the other apparently nonrepeating sources," he said.

To learn more about this FRB, scientists used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to analyze data on 16 bursts from object. FRB 121102 is located in a star-forming region of a dwarf galaxy found about 3 billion light-years from Earth, Hessels said. Because astronomers can see it from such a great distance, the amount of energy in a single millisecond of each of these bursts must be about as much as the sun releases in an entire day, Hessels and his colleagues said in a statement.

In studying these emissions, the researchers focused on a feature of radio waves known as polarization. This property occurs because all light waves, including radio waves, can ripple up and down, left and right, or at any angle in between. The radio waves from FRB 121102 were short in duration and strongly polarized (with most of the radio waves all rippling in the same direction), similar to radio emissions from young energetic neutron stars previously seen in the Milky Way galaxy, Andrew Seymour, co-author on the study and a researcher at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center at Arecibo Observatory, said in the statement.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

14-01-2018 om 23:34 geschreven door peter