On Saturday, March 3rd, two men armed with instructions on how to contact extraterrestrials and a protocol on what to do if they show up tried to contact aliens on the shore of a lake in Sicamous, British Columbia, Canada. After a few hours of meditating and watching, they left without a successful contact. Did they leave too soon?

On the morning of Sunday, March 4th, a woman walked to the very same lake and spotted a series of mysterious ice circles on the lake’s frozen surface. Coincidence? Contact? Something else?

Let’s start with the location. Shuswap Lake is in south-central British Columbia, Canada, and is known for (among other things) its odd shape – the four fingers of the lake look like the letter H from the air. The name comes from the Shuswap or Secwepemc First Nations people and it’s now a popular recreational lake centered around the city of Salmon Arm, which gets ITS name from the fish and the lake’s appendage. Besides salmon and trout, Shuswap Lake is Like many other lakes, Shuswap Lake has a legendary 25-foot long monster known as the Shuswap Lake Monster or Shuswaggi.

Does it also have close encounters of the third-thru-fifth kind? The Salmon Arm Observer reports that local (Sunnybrae) area resident Grace Edwards was walking on the lake shore in nearby Tappen when she spotted and photographed the ice circles on the frozen lake. These were not ice discs, which are circular pieces of ice formed in cold rivers as the chunks break off and are swirled and worn into circles. What Edwards saw were more like swirling patterns made in the ice – kind of like frozen crop circles. One thought is that they were made by spinning snowmobilers who someone managed to make perfect circles without leaving any other visible tracks. Another thought might be …

Aliens!

Grace Edwards’s photos (see here) were published by the Salmon Arm Observer and other local media, where they eventually were shown to Dan Berg (Berg? As in iceberg? Another coincidence?). Berg is the man who attempted to contact aliens on the night of March 3rd in Sicamous, another small town on Shuswap Lake. He told the Observer that he and a friend from Salmon Arm he met through SETI social media decided to celebrate International CE-5 day by conducting a Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind (direct communications with ETs) using the CE-5 protocol developed by Steven M. Greer of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). For Berg, that was “meditation through consciousness.”

“In my meditation all I did was concentrate on the edge of the Rocky Mountains and Shuswap Lake for 40 minutes nonstop.”

After scanning the skies and their minds for a few hours and seeing nor hearing nothing, Berg and his friend left and thought no more about the incident until someone showed the article about Edwards and the ice circles to Berg. What did he think now?

“I think it was kind of cool and kind of ironic that something as strange as those circles that no one has ever seen before showed up the night that we were out here.”

As with crop circles, the Shuswap Lake ice circles could be explained by humans making very precise patterns in the dark on snowmobiles. Possible? Yes, but the perfection leaves an opening. Is the lake’s H pattern a beacon or marker for aliens? What about the Shuswaggi? Some crytozoologists believe these creatures are visitors from other planets.

Berg has piqued the interest of others and will probably have a crowd with him the next time he tries a CE-5. Let’s hope they bring cameras and a net for the Shuswaggi.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-03-2018 om 10:17 geschreven door peter  

Triangle-shaped formation filmed over Colorado Springs 3-Mar-2018

This UFO sighting was filmed in the sky above Colorado Springs on 3rd March 2018.

Witness report: 

Bright large stationary orbs disappearing then reappearing. Vacationing with friends and spouse at Cheyanne Mountain resort in Colorado Springs, Co. After a long day of outside activities we returned to the resort for dinner. Afterwards we went to the outside patio to sit at the fire pit and talk about our day.

At first I didn’t notice anything strange but my friend pointed out a weird light in the sky that just hovered. When I looked to where he was pointing I pulled out my iPhone and began recording it. Shortly after a 2nd orb materialized above the 1st. Once they were both visible they simultaneously got brighter and slightly larger.

At the time I was confused as to what I was looking at. There was a lake between the orbs and myself and the lights were reflecting off the water. The lower light suddenly disappeared and another orb appeared ABOVE the remaining one. At one point there were 3 visible orbs that from my angle appeared to be in a relatively straight line. I wondered if maybe they were flares but every orb held it’s place in the sky with no apparent descent or change. I tried at various times to zoom in but it would not hold focus. This went on for over 2min so I felt I was neglecting my group. I stopped the recording and returned to the fire pit, which was about 30’ away.

When I turned back around all of the orbs were gone. I still don’t know what I saw but during the incident the server came out and my friend asked if he knew what it was. His reply was, “I’ve been here for 10 yrs and have never seen anything like it”, which adds to the mystery. There were other vacations making some noise in the pool but we’re no airplanes in the sky and other than those talking it was silent.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

20-03-2018 om 10:08 geschreven door peter  

Mysterious Loch Ness like sea creature washes up on South Georgia Beach

A mysterious sea creature washed ashore in St. Simons Island and it has beachgoers scratching their heads.

Credit images: News4Jax and Jeff Warren.

Jeff Warren and his son were at Wolf Island National Wildlife Refuge just north of St. Simons Island in Georgia Friday when they came upon the creature on a barrier island.

Warren thought it was a dead seal, but said when he got a closer look it resembled more of the Loch Ness monster.

Warren sent the photo to News4Jax and said the creature was about 4 to 5 feet long with two fins.

Credit images: News4Jax and Jeff Warren.

A local writer and novelist contacted News4Jax saying he believes the mysterious sea creature looks exactly like the legendary Altamaha-ha, a river monster of the Altamaha River located just west of Wolf Island and could be a survivor of the Mesozoic Era.

  

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

20-03-2018 om 10:00 geschreven door peter  

'It's a space WAR' Alien ‘battle’ near Area 51 baffles UFO hunters

ALIEN hunters were left in a frenzy when they spotted what they believed to be a UFO ‘battle’ in the skies above a city in Nevada which is just a two hour driver from Area 51 – an alleged extraterrestrial hotspot.

20-03-2018 om 01:33 geschreven door peter  

Did UFO 'chase' military plane? Bizarre footage shows saucer-shaped object 'following' aircraft through sky

In the strange footage, a mysterious object emerges from behind the plane's contrails and appears to follow the aircraft

A bizarre video which conspiracy theorists believe shows a military jet being 'chased' by a UFO has sparked speculation online.

In the footage, the mysterious, saucer-shaped object emerges from behind the plane's contrails and appears to follow the aircraft.

It then eventually overtakes it.

The cameraman was reading at home when they zoomed in to capture the bright object flying near the jet in the skies over Lincoln, New Hampshire.

They said: "I was reading on my deck around 7 o'clock.

"I am told that military pilots train in the mountains around where I live and I've always enjoyed seeing them fly through."

"This happens all the time, jets and helicopters are a common sighting. So I naturally saw the jet and did a double take, because there was something following it.

"I immediately thought I was witnessing some strange aircraft, possibly military but it was not a jet.

"I knew it wasn't a jet because it was actually right behind one. The jet it was chasing left a long contrail behind it, but the UFO did not.

"The UFO was gaining on a jet. No helicopter could do that. I was blown away and luckily got out my phone in time to take a video.”

The footage was originally captured in 2016, but reemerged on YouTube this week where it has racked up thousands of views.

"I watched the object gaining on the jet for about 10 seconds when I lost them in the trees," the witness added.

"I was very excited and anxious. I felt I has witnessed something very hard to dismiss as a 'weather balloon' or some obvious type of aircraft.

"Shortly after the jet and object left my range of sight I saw three more jets and 1 helicopters going the same direction (in my opinion chasing the UFO)."

But not all viewers were convinced the video was proof of alien visitors , with many thinking the object was just another plane.

One viewer commented: “Two planes flying at different height which causes the contrail.”

Another added: "It's two planes traveling at different altitudes, one creating a vapor trail."

{ https://www.mirror.co.uk/ }

20-03-2018 om 01:23 geschreven door peter  

UFO filmed ‘chasing’ passenger jet as witnesses watch on in HORROR

BIZARRE footage has emerged online that appears to show an unidentified flying object chasing a plane. 

By Callum Hoare 

The video displays the vehicle zooming through the sky at pace, leaving a thick contrail behind it.

It was captured in the US in 2016, but has only been shared now.

A witness said: "I am told that military pilots train in the mountains around where I live and I’ve always enjoyed seeing them fly through.

"This happens all the time. jets and helicopters are a common sighting. So I naturally saw the jet and did a double take, because there was something following it.”

The clip was uploaded to YouTube channel NowYouKnow on Saturday and has already racked up over 16,000 hits.

And some users were convinced it is proof of alien life.

One comment read: “I am actually baffled. This looks legit, as to why — who knows.”

And another added: “No s*** the UFO is following a jet that's leaving a stream of chemtrail.”

The chemtrail theory is a conspiracy that aims to prove the condensation trails left in the sky are deliberately sprayed with harmful chemicals in order to control weather modification, radiation management and a number of other claims.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

20-03-2018 om 01:11 geschreven door peter  

Researchers Find ‘Advanced’ 320,000-Year-Old Human Tools In Kenya

This evidence of early innovation pushes back the human evolutionary timeline, effectively rewriting history and everything we knew about our ancestors. This also means that complex human cultures are much older than previously thought.

An international group of scientists has discovered that more than 320,000 years ago, humans were much more developed than initially thought.

The new discovery proves how ancient people developed impressive social structures and technological innovations used color pigments and manufactured more sophisticated tools than previously thought.

 

Image Credit: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

As noted by the Smithsonian, these newly discovered activities approximately date to the oldest known fossil record of Homo sapiens and occur tens of thousands of years earlier than previous evidence has shown in eastern Africa.

Evidence for mankind’s ancient milestones originates from the Olorgesailie Basin in southern Kenya, where experts have excavated an archaeological site that offers an unprecedented record of early human life spanning more than a million years.

Archeologists say that many of the tools discovered on the site were crafted from obsidian – a hard, dark, glass-like volcanic rock.

In addition to the numerous tools, experts also found that ancient cultures used color pigments much sooner than previously thought.

The new findings are reported in three different studies published in the journal Science. The papers suggest that trading of different artifacts emerged during a period of tremendous environmental upheaval in the region when earthquakes ravaged the area and temperatures, and the climate, in general, fluctuated between wet and dry periods.

The Excavation site in Kenya.

Image credit: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

“This change to a very sophisticated set of behaviors that involved greater mental abilities and more complex social lives may have been the leading edge that distinguished our lineage from other early humans,” said Dr Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s human origins program in the United States, and author of one of the three studies.

Experts say that trading networks, early communication, and technological innovation helped ancient people survive by obtaining all necessary resources they needed through crafting or trading.

Dr. Potts notes that first evidence of human life in the Olorgesailie Basin dates back to around 1.2 million years ago.

There, for hundreds of thousands of years, people living in the region used large stone-cutting tools called handaxes. In addition to being used as tools, researchers have found evidence that some were also used as projectile weapons, while others were shaped into tools to craft and sculpt wood.

Then, in 2002, researchers discovered smaller, more carefully shaped tools in the Olorgesailie Basin.

Using isotopic dating, researchers found that the tools were incredibly old; between 320,000 and 305,000 years ago. These tools, researchers note, were carefully crafted and were more specialized than the all-purpose handaxes.

Furthermore, experts found that the smaller, more sophisticated handaxes were crafted from a wide range of obsidian, not found locally, but up to 90 kilometers away.

The Smithsonian team found small stone points (above) made of non-local obsidian at their Middle Stone Age sites. 

Image credit: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

In addition, experts discovered black and red rocks, evidence that the rocks had been ‘processed’ for use as a coloring material.

“We don’t know what the coloring was used on, but the coloring is often taken by archaeologists as the root of complex symbolic communication. Just as color is used today in clothing or flags to express identity, these pigments may have helped people communicate membership in alliances and maintain ties with distant groups.”

After integrating data from a variety of sources, researchers wanted to understand what may have driven such changes in early human behavior. Their findings suggest that the period when these changes appeared was one of changing landscapes and climate, and resources would have been extremely scarce.

Scientists discovered that geological, geochemical, paleobotanical and faunal evidence indicates that an extended period of climate instability affected the region, beginning approximately 360,000 years ago.

Source: Scientists Discover Evidence of Early Human Innovation, Pushing Back Evolutionary Timeline

Featured image credit: Human Origins Program, Smithsonian

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 00:56 geschreven door peter  

Here Are Five Ways Stephen Hawking Predicted The World Could End

Not long ago, the great Stephen Hawking left us to travel among the stars.

The last great scientists on Earth died aged 76, and the news shocked the scientific world. But before leaving on his eternal trip, professor Hawking left us a lot to think about.

The Earth will disappear and become a massive ball of fire. By that time, 600 years from now, humanity must have colonized another planet. These warnings would not be given credit were it not because they came from famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, one of the voices that have spoken the most about the end of the world.

Hawking argued that the Alpha Centauri star system could be the most viable option for humanity, reason why he worked on the Breakthrough Starshot project, so future spacecraft could travel to this planet in the next 20 years using small spaceship that could travel at the speed of light.

Resumed, professor Hawking was THE scientist who made science more appealing and exciting to the general public. He Loved science, and science loved him back.

Dubbed as one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century, professor Hawking had become famous not only for his intelligence but also for his status as a celebrity, being one of the few people who had survived amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for so many years.

From the Big Bang theory to studies on black holes, his contributions to these fields will forever remain in the analogs of science, and his legacy will live on.

However, the British physicist was not only a great scientist, but he was also very concerned about our planet, our civilization, and the future that awaits us.

In this article, we take a look at five of the most worrying future predictions made by Hawking.

1. A deadly Virus destroying mankind

In 2001 Stephen Hawking warned that a virus would end the human race in this millennium. According to the researcher, “it will be a virus and not an atomic bomb” that will bring Earth’s population to its knees. However, the scientist offered a solution to the problem; establishing colonies in space.

2. Nuclear war and climate change

Stephen Hawking and other scientists announced in 2007 that Doomsday Clock was set at five minutes before midnight. Since 1947, the board of directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of the University of Chicago, of which Hawking is a member, manage to Doomsday clock as a symbol that represents how close we are to the end of civilization because of a nuclear war. In 2018 the clock was set two minutes to midnight. The failure of world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change. This is the clock’s closest approach to midnight, matching that of 1953.

On the effects of climate change, Hawking has warned that “the worst scenario for the Earth would be to become something like its sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees and rain of sulfuric acid.”

3. Alien Invasion

Like many other scientists, Professor Hawking was convinced there’s life elsewhere in the universe. However, Professor Hawking believed that these beings might have exhausted resources and become space nomads in search of new planets and resources. “If aliens visited us, the result would be similar to when Columbus arrived in America, which was not very good for Native Americans.”

4. Artificial Intelligence

Like many other futurists and researchers, professor Stephen Hawking too warned of the dangers of Artificial Intelligence.

“Unless we learn to prepare for the potential risks and avoid them, Artificial Intelligence could be the worst event in the history of our civilization” the astrophysicist has stated on more than one occasion.

For Hawking, humans must be aware of the dangers posed by robots, identify them and prepare for their consequences in advance. In addition to Hawking, Elon Musk also spoke out about the potential dangers Artificial Intelligence poses for humans.

5. Humans, and our need for another world

The constant increase in the world population and the abusive consumption of resources and energy are too much for our planet to handle. Our civilization seems to be losing its grip on reality, and we are abusing our planet, bringing it to the limit.

Professor Hawking has warned that if we are to survive as a species, we must look for other planets other than Earth, and colonize them as soon as possible.

Hawking argued that the best option, perhaps, is the Alpha Centauri star system, which is the closest to our solar system.

The Breakthrough Starshot project, in which the physicist was involved, is precisely looking for the way to reach this system in 20 years through the development of spacecraft capable of traveling at the speed of light.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

20-03-2018 om 00:48 geschreven door peter  

Check Out These Amazing Images Snapped By NASA’s $1 Billion Spacecraft Orbiting Jupiter

Jupiter is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating planets in our solar system.

Jupiter is huge. Mysterious. Colorful. Hypnotizing. And did I say it so big it doesn’t actually ‘orbit’ the sun?

Anyway, the gas giant has remained one of the most studied and revered planets since ancient times.

After the Sun, Jupiter is the largest celestial body in the solar system, with a mass almost two and a half times that of the other planets together (with a mass 318 times greater than that of Earth and three times greater than Saturn), besides being  in terms of volume, 1317 times larger than Earth).

It is also the oldest planet in the solar system, being even older than the sun; this discovery was made by researchers from the University of Münster in Germany.

The Gas Giant has been explored on several occasions by spacecraft, most notably during the early Pioneer and Voyager flyby missions and later by the Galileo orbiter. In late February 2007, Jupiter was visited by the New Horizons probe, which used Jupiter’s gravity to increase its speed and bend its trajectory en route to Pluto. The latest probe to visit the planet is Juno, which entered into orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016.

Jupiter is the planet with the largest mass in the solar system: it is about 2.48 times the sum of the masses of all the other planets together.

Despite this, it is not the most massive planet known: more than a hundred extrasolar planets that have been discovered have masses similar or superior to Jupiter.

Jupiter also has the fastest rotation speed of the planets of the solar system: it rotates in less than ten hours on its axis.

Altogether, it is one heck of a planet.

The main satellites of Jupiter were discovered by Galileo Galilei on January 7, 1610, which is why they are called Galilean satellites.

They receive their names from Greek mythology although, in Galileo’s time, they were referred to by Roman numerals depending on their order of proximity to the planet.

The discovery of these satellites constituted a point of inflection in the already long dispute between those who supported the idea of a geocentric system, that is, with the Earth at the center of the universe, and the Copernican (or heliocentric system, that is, with the Sun at the center of the solar system), in which it was much easier to explain the movement and the very existence of Jupiter’s natural satellites.

And while I can continue writing about Jupiter the rest of the day, words can’t describe just how beautiful the largest planet in our solar system is.

Thankfully, images speak a thousand words so here we bring you some of the most fascinating images of Jupiter taken by the Juno Spacecraft.

Enjoy!

Image Credit: NASA

Image Credit: NASA

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstaedt/John Rogers

Image Credit: NASA / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Seán Doran

Earth-size storms on Jupiter’s South Pole. Image Credit: NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko

Jupiter you SEXY beast! Image Credit: NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Uriel

Image Credit: NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko

This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles

A swirling white spot captured by Juno. Image Credit: NASA / MSSS / JPL / SwRI / Bjorn Jonsson

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/}

20-03-2018 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

UFO chases passenger jet

Bizarre footage appears to have captured the moment a UFO appears to chase a passenger jet through the sky. The incident was caught on camera by a baffled resident in the US who has recently uploaded the footage in a bid to get some answers.

The witness told the Mutual UFO Network : “I am told that military pilots train in the mountains around where I live and I’ve always enjoyed seeing them fly through. “This happens all the time. Jets and helicopters are a common sighting. So I naturally saw the jet and did a double take, because there was something following it.”

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

20-03-2018 om 00:14 geschreven door peter  

Deep-Space Radiation May Be Getting More Dangerous for Future Astronauts

20-03-2018 om 00:08 geschreven door peter  

Martian oceans may have been aided by massive volcanoes, research suggests

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

The putative oceans on Mars may have been aided by an unlikely ally: volcanoes.

A depiction of how oceans on Mars might have looked like.

Image credits: Kevin McGill / Flickr.

The saga of Martian oceans — and if they truly existed or not — continues with a new episode. A team of geophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that volcanoes may have helped pave the way for liquid water, by raising temperatures.

“Volcanoes may be important in creating the conditions for Mars to be wet,” said Michael Manga, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science and senior author of a paper appearing in Nature this week and posted online March 19.

While there is significant evidence that Mars once had oceans of liquid water, not everybody is convinced of their existence. The main argument against this existence is that… we don’t see them today. The estimated mass of the oceans just doesn’t fit with the how much water could be hidden today as permafrost underground and how much could have escaped into space. In other words, if Mars once had oceans, we should still see some water.

But Manga and his colleagues developed a new model which would help explain this disparity. They propose that the first ocean on the Red Planet (called Arabia) formed at about the same time as the planet’s largest volcanic feature, Tharsis, or even a bit sooner — instead of after it, as previous models suggested.

“The assumption was that Tharsis formed quickly and early, rather than gradually, and that the oceans came later,” Manga said. “We’re saying that the oceans predate and accompany the lava outpourings that made Tharsis.”

In particular, because Tharsis was smaller in its earlier days, it didn’t distort the seabed as much, meaning that the oceans were much shallower than previously assumed. This theory can also explain another counterargument to Martian oceans: the seashore problem. The proposed seashores are highly irregular, varying in height by up to 1 kilometer (0.6 miles), whereas on Earth seashores are largely at the same level (sea level).

If oceans were formed in the initial stages of Tharsis’ development, the volcano would have significantly depressed the land and deformed the shoreline, which would help explain the irregularity.

“These shorelines could have been emplaced by a large body of liquid water that existed before and during the emplacement of Tharsis, instead of afterwards,” said first author Robert Citron, a UC Berkeley graduate student.

Lastly, this model also proposes that Tharsis spewed gases into the atmosphere that created a global warming or greenhouse effect, which favored the formation of liquid water. However, more studies will be needed to confirm this theory.

The study has not been peer-reviewed, but Citron will present a paper about the new analysis on March 20 at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science conference in Texas.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

19-03-2018 om 23:45 geschreven door peter  

AI spots thousands of craters on the Moon — including over 6,000 previously undiscovered ones

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

Without an atmosphere to protect it, the Moon is under constant assault from meteorites and asteroids, hitting the satellite and leaving behind a horde of craters. Using a novel AI-based technique, a team of researchers has developed a new way to identify and count these craters.

An artificially colored mosaic constructed from a series of 53 images taken by the Galileo Spacecraft. Can you see the craters?

“When it comes to counting craters on the moon, it’s a pretty archaic method,” says Mohamad Ali-Dib, a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Planetary Sciences (CPS).

Indeed, while astronomy has benefitted from the automation of many processes, crater counting had lagged behind — but not anymore.

“Basically we need to manually look at an image, locate and count the craters and then calculate how large they are based off the size of the image. Here we’ve developed a technique from artificial intelligence that can automate this entire process that saves significant time and effort.”

Ali-Dib wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. Several projects have attempted to develop algorithms for the detection of lunar craters, but they performed rather poorly. However, the new algorithm, which was trained on a large dataset covering two-thirds of the moon, performed much better. It was so good at understanding the general shape and characteristics of a crater that it was even able to detect craters on other bodies, such as Mercury.

“It’s the first time we have an algorithm that can detect craters really well for not only parts of the moon, but also areas of Mercury,” says Ali-Dib, who developed the technique along with Ari Silburt, Chenchong Charles Zhu, and a group of researchers at CPS and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA).

They fed 90,000 images of the moon’s surface into an artificial neural network (ANN). ANNs mimic the vast network of neurons in a brain, simulating the biological learning process. After the learning process, the neural network was able to not only identify but also categorize craters larger than five kilometers. The team believes that with further “training” it will also be able to zoom in on smaller craters.

Some lunar craters last for billions of years.

Image credits: NASA.

Since the moon also doesn’t have tectonics or strong erosion, the craters can remain visible for extremely long periods of time, with Ali-Dib’s team finding craters as old as four billion years. However, this is also the main drawback of the algorithm: it requires an atmosphere-less body, without erosion, and clearly visible craters.

• Journal Reference: Ari Silburt et al. Lunar Crater Identification via Deep Learning. arxiv.org/abs/1803.02192

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

19-03-2018 om 23:36 geschreven door peter  

First Man to Walk in Space Explains Why He Almost Died

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. 

By Oscar Gonzalez

{ https://www.inverse.com/}

19-03-2018 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

WRITTEN BY Lila MacLellan

The saga of Steve continues. And this time, the northern lights-like celestial phenomenon is being officially recognized by research published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.

Steve looks like a neon purplish or green strip across the night sky, and it’s visible in Canada, though it’s not a streak of the aurora borealis. When Steve appears, it’s moving from east to West, and might be visible anywhere from Ontario to Alaska. It travels at about 4 miles per second, but appears static from the ground, and is routinely spotted at latitudes far further south than traditional northern lights.

Scientists identified the arc-shaped ribbon as an extremely hot (up to 10,000 degrees F), 16-mile thick river of ionized gas, about 200 miles above the earth’s surface. But much about Steve remains mysterious, even following the publication of the new study led by Elizabeth MacDonald, a space physicist at NASA. The researchers know that Steve is similar to a subauroral ion drift (SAID), except they are normally invisible to the naked eye.

The Alberta Aurora Chasers, a group of photographers who trade tips and images of the famed northern lights, had been capturing images of the gorgeous arc for years. According to the New York Times, the group initially thought the sightings of what would become Steve, which is whitish to the naked eye, might be condensation trails from planes. After manipulating the settings on their cameras, however, they realized that the streaks were self-illuminated and multihued.

In 2016, they met up with some astronomy professors at the University of Calgary at a bar and shared their photos, hoping to find out what caused the mysterious stroke of light. No one had an certain answer, but Eric Donovan, a professor of physics and astronomy, took an interest in the question. He turned to the European Space Agency and their Swarm satellites to begin collecting data.

In the meantime, the arc needed to be called something. Chris Ratzlaff, who runs the Alberta Aurora Chasers’ Facebook page, chose “Steve,” a name pulled from a 2006 children’s movie, Over the Hedge, in which a gang of animals give the random name to an unknown, slightly frightening being they can’t see.

The nickname was far humbler than the titles of most atmospheric optical phenomena, which have titles like Rayleigh scattering, crepuscular ray, or lunar corona, but “Steve” was meant to be temporary. And yet, it stuck. In honor of its origins, scientists have decided to keep the name, but have retroactively made it an acronym for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.

At a talk last year in Banff, Alberta, Donovan told the audience that he still occasionally turned to Ratzlaff’s team of citizen scientists for input as he investigated Steve. Once, when one of Donovan’s colleagues saw something unusual in his data, Donovan explained, “I did something right then and there that I never thought I’d do as part of my professional work.” He logged onto Facebook and typed in: “Did anyone see Steve last night?”

Pretty in pink.

 (Courtesy Paul Zizka)

Subtle. 

(Courtesy Philip Granrud)

NASA also asked the Chasers and other amateurs for assistance, and named them as co-authors of the new paper. Now NASA has opened their call for images to the general public:

View image on Twitter

NASA

✔@NASA

Seen STEVE? Glowing in purple & green colors, a new celestial phenomenon, known as STEVE, is caused by charged particles from the Sun colliding with Earth's magnetic field. Discover how you can help us study these dancing lights by sending your pictures: http://go.nasa.gov/2phTVT5 

9:13 PM - Mar 15, 2018

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Capturing Steve in an image is said to be easier than shooting the lights of the aurora borealis, which are more active. Steve will sit still for up to 20 minutes, a local photographer in Banff, Alberta, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

It’s almost as if it wanted to be discovered.

• This was been adapted from an earlier post.
  

{https://qz.com/ }

19-03-2018 om 23:13 geschreven door peter  

A Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE) photographed near Regina on the night of July 24, 2016 (Notanee Bourassa)

Notanee Bourassa was a teenager in a run-down part of Regina. His father was dying of lung cancer. School and home were trouble alike. Then he tilted back his neck.

“The Northern Lights allowed me to escape all of that and to realize there’s more to life than where you are right now, and to survive,” he says, 30 years later. In his first sighting, he says bands of light on both sides of the sky appeared to meet in a continuous arc. “The aurora ribbons had actually joined, and I was underneath the ribbons in a back alley because it’s the darkest place I could find. I was hooked.”

Bourassa is an everyday citizen who helped NASA and other scientists identify for the first time a light display in the sky, on which they published a journal article in Science Advances. The purple and green streaks resemble an aurora borealis, but scientists say it’s a different phenomenon that “may be an extraordinary puzzle piece” in understanding Earth’s magnetic fields. Bourassa photographed the light and says he called it “Steve,” a name from an animated movie, for which scientists later matched an acronym: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.

Researchers across North America and in the United Kingdom are now studying STEVEs; NASA has called for more citizens to help collect data on them; the discovery could be important for future aircrafts, and one of the catalysts behind the research was a 45-year-old father with a camera and a celestial coping mechanism.

NASA Goddard

✔@NASAGoddard

For the first time, we have a better understanding of a mysterious phenomenon in the sky called STEVE, thanks to citizen scientist and satellite views. These new findings help us learn how Earth interacts with charged particles in space: https://go.nasa.gov/2FA0Elm 

7:42 PM - Mar 14, 2018

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“The great magician out in the cosmos is making Northern Lights for us,” says Bourassa, who now works as a technical assistant for Sask Tel and, in recent years, has sought out the Lights one to four times per week. “That’s what keeps me going out there—just to get a feeling of, there’s something more to our lives than going to work and going to Walmart.”

On July 24, 2016, around 11 p.m., Bourassa drove to a wheat field 21 km from Regina to photograph the sky, bringing his five- and seven-year-old children because it was not a school night. From other “aurora chasers,” he had heard rumours of an unidentifiable glow, which they inaccurately called a proton arc, and which can last from 20 minutes to one hour.

“As it started to rain a little bit, out of the corner of my peripheral vision on the left, I had noticed there was a streak in the sky,” Bourassa recalls of the summer night. He rushed to change the settings on his camera and reposition it on his tripod on the gravel road. “I was thrilled and a lit bit panicked because I wanted to get good data.”

Bourassa had seen the Dreamworks movie, Over the Hedge, in which a group of animals one day discovers a man-made formation of shrubbery. Lacking a word for the hedge, a squirrel proposes they call it “Steve,” and thus his friends start worshipping “oh great and powerful Steve.” When Bourassa started talking about his sighting with other aurora enthusiasts on Facebook, he applied the name to what scientists later identified as a subauroral ion drift.

RELATED: Weightless waffles and the Northern Lights: Chris Hadfield’s latest photos from orbit

Bourassa tweeted about the light he’d seen, which was also captured by imaging equipment of the University of Calgary and the University of California, Berkeley, and later by other institutions including Athabasca University. Bourassa says he connected on Twitter with a heliophysicist, and soon, a scientist named Elizabeth MacDonald from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, became the lead author on the paper published in March, along with 15 other authors based in Canada, the United States and Britain.

“Steve” stuck, as one American scientist realized the name could appropriately stand for: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (since the initials came before the words, they call it a “back-ronym”).

A traditional aurora borealis is a product of electrically-charged particles interacting with oxygen that get discharged as light, with green and red colours occurring depending on the pressure and violet caused by nitrogen. A STEVE is a similar process but travels on different magnetic field lines, closer to Earth.

The children of photographer Notanee Bourassa gaze at a STEVE, or “Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement” near Regina on the night of July 24, 2016. (Notanee Bourassa)

“It seems to be a channel of very hot air, very high up, that gets hot enough that it starts to glow,” explains Martin Connors, a physics professor at Athabasca University and an author of the recent journal article on STEVEs. “When you find a channel of gas as hot as the surface as the sun, and it’s 100 km above our heads, you kind of want to know why.”

RELATED: Burst of energy from the sun will create spectacular northern lights across Canada

An aurora borealis appears in broad bands of light sometimes called “curtains,” but a STEVE comes with skinny off-shoots. “It seems to have these green fingers associated with it,” says Connors. “To me those are very mysterious.”

Understanding this phenomenon could be still more important if future aircrafts fly at altitudes where STEVEs appear, Connors says. “If you’re suddenly in a channel of really hot gas, you’d want to be prepared for that.”

Climate change is highly unlikely to be a cause of STEVEs, Connors says. Rather, he suspects they are being seen every few weeks because technology is improving, enabling even iPhones to capture them—“less climate change than camera change,” he says.

RELATED: How to build a culture of science

Bourassa’s sightings reinforce the value of citizen science and also reinforce memories of his father, who he watched wither from a 230-pound man to a skeletal figure with a tube draining his lung. He died after two and a half years of severe illness when Bourassa was 15.

“I hadn’t really told him that I was watching the Northern Lights in the alleyway,” Bourassa admits. The Lights are miraculous, he says, for when a person is grieving, “it doesn’t make sense to a rational-thinking person, but it seems like they, for you, are dancing.”

{ http://www.macleans.ca/ }

19-03-2018 om 22:58 geschreven door peter  

Un OVNI filmé dans le ciel de Littau en Suisse

Source

www.20min.ch 

19-03-2018 om 20:41 geschreven door peter  

Inside the Navy’s 2015 encounter with a UFO

19-03-2018 om 20:33 geschreven door peter  

Leaked WikiLeaks Cable Confirms Alien Life On Other Planets

“…He asserted the existence of life on other planets, caveating this by noting that we should focus on solving our problems on Earth. End Summary…”

A cable released by Wikileaks seems to have confirmed what millions of people around the globe believe for decades: we are not the only “intelligent” lifeforms in the universe.

WikiLeaks is an international non-profit media organization, which publishes anonymous reports and leaked documents with sensitive content of public interest on its website, preserving the anonymity of its sources.

The site was launched in December 2006, although its activity began in July 2007-2008.

Since then its database has grown steadily to accumulate 1.2 million documents.

Its creator is Julian Assange and is managed by The Sunshine Press.

The website itself is a treasure-trove of ‘secret’ or better said sensitive information, and unsurprisingly, among the 1.2 million leaked documents posted on Wikileaks, we find a couple for them that directly speak about extraterrestrial life.

A document titled: “MAYOR MEETS AMBASSADOR, CONFIRMS EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE” seems to confirm what many of us have known for decades, there is life on other planets in the universe.

The leaked document was posted in January of 2010 and was originally classified as ‘Confidential’ according to Wikileaks.

The document reads:

REASON: 1.4 (b), (d)

1. (C) Summary: In a platitude-ridden meeting, Dushanbe Mayor Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev said upcoming elections would be free and fair, that contributions to the Roghun Dam were voluntary, and that the losses suffered by the United States in Afghanistan were felt by Tajiks as their own. Ubaidulloev asked for help in getting Tajik students admitted to Harvard University but effectively declined to help find a new location for an American Corner in Dushanbe. He asserted the existence of life on other planets, caveating this by noting that we should focus on solving our problems on Earth. End Summary.

AFGHANISTAN

2. (SBU) On January 13 Ambassador called on Dushanbe Mayor and Chairman of the upper house of Parliament Mahmadsaid Ubaidulloev at his parliamentary office. The Mayor began the meeting with a lengthy discourse on Afghanistan, thanking the United States for its contributions and sacrifices there, and saying that U.S. activities there were very important “as we enter the third millennium and the 21st century.” Ubaidulloev thought the main task there was to build a sense of national identity among ethnically disparate groups, and said the United States was an example for this. He noted that “war is very dangerous”, and said, “we know there is life on other planets, but we must make peace here first.”

Check out the originally leaked document here. 

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

19-03-2018 om 19:06 geschreven door peter  

China plans to develop a multipurpose, reusable space plane

by Staff Writers
Beijing (XNA) 

illustration only

{ http://www.spacedaily.com/ }

19-03-2018 om 18:53 geschreven door peter