Astronomers have detected a repeating fast radio burst (FRB) – a mysterious, ultra-brief but extremely powerful burst of energy far away in space – for only the second time in history.

FRBs were first discovered a decade ago, uber-energetic pulses of radio waves travelling through the Universe. They are brief, lasting just a few milliseconds, but carry more power than 500 million Suns. Researchers still don't know what generates these bursts – some have even dubiously speculated that they could be aliens communicating with us.

Results published in the scientific journal Nature today could herald a fresh dawn in our understanding of FRBs. Scientists used a new telescope in British Columbia, Canada, called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), to spot another 13 new signals including the second repeater.

“There are still a lot of viable models [for their origin] out there, but if we can find even more FRBs, we can hope to narrow down that set in future,” says Ingrid Stairs from the University of British Columbia, part of the CHIME team.

The main goal of CHIME, which began science operations in September 2018, is to probe the expansion of the Universe using its vast radio receivers. It works differently to the traditional radio telescopes with their large dishes, such as the Parkes telescope in Australia, the Lovell telescope in Jodrell Bank near Manchester or Green Bank telescope in the US.

• What if everything we know about dark matter is totally wrong?
• WIRED on Space
• What if everything we know about dark matter is totally wrong?

Unlike those telescopes, CHIME has so-called “light buckets” that collect very faint signals that arrive from space. Each of its stationary four large reflectors, curved like a half-pipe, collects radio waves from the whole sky as Earth rotates, giving a large scale map of cosmic radio waves.

And CHIME has already proven extremely useful in searching for short-lived radio phenomena like FRBs, with potentially thousands more discoveries expected in the future.

Most of the FRBs detected by CHIME were at lower frequencies than expected, down to 400 MHz. This is well within CHIME’s range, meaning the telescope – which was still only in a commissioning phase when it made these discoveries – could be expected to find lots more FRBs in the future.

“We need to find many more of them, say 1,000, and we need to identify the host galaxies for a decent sample, say 20,” said says Simon Johnston from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia. “The number of detections will certainly shoot up as a result of CHIME finding FRBs.”

And then there is the second repeater. Repeating FRBs are important, because they tell us their source cannot be something that destroys itself – and we can pin down their origin. That's how scientists knew that the first repeater lives in a faint dwarf galaxy more than three billion light-years away.

Astronomers still don’t know the source for the second one, though, nor what caused it. “It can’t be cataclysmic,” said Shami Chatterjee from Cornell University in the US, who was not involved in the publication of the Nature papers. “It has to be a mechanism that allows whatever it is producing to survive. You could imagine two neutron stars smashing into each other and producing an explosion and pulse of radio waves, but that would destroy the neutron stars, so you couldn’t have it repeat after that.”

What is also still unclear is whether repeating FRBs are produced in a different way to non-repeating ones – although these could perhaps also repeat if observed for long enough. Finding more FRBs will be crucial to narrowing down the answer, and thanks to CHIME we’re on the cusp of learning a great deal more.

“It’s really exciting because you can see science being done in real-time,” said Chatterjee. “It’s just a tremendously exciting time for the field.”

{ https://www.wired.co.uk/ }

19-01-2019 om 00:50 geschreven door peter  

Nasa says bright lights over Georgia were ‘not a meteor’

Nasa says that a series of slow, bright lights seen across the southeastern United States on Monday evening “was not a meteor or fireball”.

The space agency says that from the data it currently has about the event, which was caught on camera and reported more than 150 times on the American Meteor Society website (and more “enthusiastically” on Twitter), indicates it was too slow to be a natural (and well timed) visitor from above.

Nasa says that a series of slow, bright lights seen across the southeastern United States on Monday evening "was not a meteor or fireball".

The space agency says that from the data it currently has about the event, which was caught on camera and reported more than 150 times on the American Meteor Society website (and more "enthusiastically" on Twitter), indicates it was too slow to be a natural (and well timed) visitor from above. One witness said the event was marked by, "two bright objects close together, both with long tails...gradually separated as they crossed the sky".

Instead Nasa thinks the object, which moved at about 14,500 miles per hour across the night sky at around 12.30am, was possibly the reentry of a piece of space debris.

Exactly what the debris was is not clear, however. Bill Cooke, Nasa's head of the Meteoroid Environment Office, said that the object was reported to "have multiple colours and to have broken up into multiple pieces".

Below are some of the videos captured of the event:

"It wasn't a meteor, it moved too slowly. This thing hit the atmosphere moving between 14,000 and 16,000 miles per hour," said Cooke. While that sounds fast, meteors move at 24MPH or slower... and the angle it hit the atmosphere was very shallow, that's not typical of a meteor either."

What it definitely was not, despite what legions of Twitter sky watchers had to say, was an alien spacecraft. "There are four distinct objects, a bright object ahead of the main one... and two fainter ones after that... That's typically what you see in a re-entry," he said. So no, not aliens -- but not an asteroid either. While that might have been pleasing in PR terms for the team at Asteroid Day, it's probably a good thing for the people living directly below the event.

{ https://www.wired.co.uk/ }

19-01-2019 om 00:36 geschreven door peter  

160 UFO sightings reported in Wash. state last year

DAVENPORT, Wash. - Some 160 UFO sightings were reported in Washington state last year - about one every 55 hours on average, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.

The center, based in Davenport, Wash., receives UFO reports from all around the world, but says it makes no claims as to the validity of the information in any of these reports.

“Obvious hoaxes have been omitted, however most reports have been posted exactly as received in the author's own words," the center says. "We hope that this information will prove to be useful to the general public and the UFO community at large.”

The center reports that Washington state has the third-highest number of total sightings in its database, behind California (No. 1) and Florida (No. 2).

The reports from the Evergreen State are diverse. Many described triangular- or cigar-shaped objects, spheres, lights, disks, fireballs and even formations of multiple objects.

The reports came from all over the state at all times of the day and night. Some sightings lasted only two or three seconds while others continued for several minutes or, in rare cases, an hour or more.

Some examples:

• Oct. 24 sighting by a former pilot in University Place: "Object was spherical in shape and emitted a brilliant, extremely coherent orange glow. ... The object made zero noise. As it approached my direction it just skimmed the bottom of the cloud layers, moving through cloud material and lighting it up with the same orange color it was emitting. It sped up and slowed down erratically and quickly, moving very much as a living creature would as apposed to human aircraft or drone would. ... It was quite strange."
• Dec. 7 sighting in Issaquah: "I was at a gas station taking my dog for a walk. At approx. 18:20 I saw a starfish-shaped object floating and changing shape. It was covered in small bright red colored lights. Floating quickly. It was visible for 11 seconds and quickly disappeared. It made no noise."
• June 24 sighting from a passenger in a Boeing 737 near Mount St. Helens: "Altitude 23,000 ft, heading 295 degrees mag, craft descended out of clouds off left wing tip. Closed to 5 miles or so out. Held formation for appx 30 to 45 seconds then ascended at almost nose up 45 degrees into clouds in what seemed instantly. Time 8:15 Seattle time. Just east of volcano on horizon. (The report notes that the witness is a pilot and experienced aircraft mechanic of "unimpeachable integrity.")
• May 26 sighting in Auburn: "Last night on an evening bike ride with my fiance, we saw objects steadily heading up into the sky. I counted 8 in all. We saw a helicopter approaching than turn away. Others on social media heard helicopters over Auburn for 3 plus hours around the same time, no one found out why."
• April 2 sighting in Kittitas: "I was outside smoking, when I noticed flashing in the distance. Grabbed my cell phone to zoom in on object. I started recording the object. It would move in a circular motion. Flash red, blue, white, green. Resembled a fireball of energy bursting repeatedly. Move across the sky in a unpredictable manner. I was terrified."
• Feb, 23 sighting in Wenatchee: "I noticed ... 3 lights forming a massive triangle these were moving fairly slow but perfectly in unison with each other, then right next to it there was another one and behind it another one, there were about 5 to 6 giant triangles that I saw all moving together. ... I ran inside and grabbed my camera and tried to get a picture of the formation but could only get 2 lights in the pictures I took."
• Jan. 25 sighting reportedly seen by multiple witnesses in Yakima: "Three of us watched these Lights blink off and on as they did not move (in a clear sky). Then suddenly three smaller craft arrived. They showed up out of nowhere! Two moved slow to the right and one began to climb at an incredible rate higher then the other objects and it was very bright. As we watch this the largest object began to turn ... and I can see that it's disk-shaped, and it's huge! Then suddenly the area it was in seemed to magically have a cloud for it to vanish behind..it was as if it made it's own camo, and it was gone (for 13 minutes) ... and now it's back!!!!

The National UFO Reporting Center said it has recently seen a high volume of prank calls on its hotline, “typically dozens per day we suspect that the same problem may spill over to the stream of incoming written reports.”

However, it said, “there are, nevertheless, many excellent reports, submitted by anonymous parties, that deserve a reader’s attention, so an anonymous report is not necessarily unreliable.”

• View all the reports from Washington state here ...
• View reports from other states and countries here ...

{ https://komonews.com/ }

19-01-2019 om 00:19 geschreven door peter  

The Polar Vortex Is Collapsing — Here's What That Means for Your Winter Weather

18-01-2019 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

Polaire vortex breekt, maar laat ons nog met rust

De wervelwinden tienduizenden meters hoog boven de Noordpool hebben zich opgebroken in drie afzonderlijke wervels. De Oostkust van de Verenigde Staten heeft daar de eerste gevolgen al van gevoeld, zo schrijft de Washington Post, en hun experten voorspellen ook voor Europa extreme koude.

De splitsing van de polaire vortex betekent immers dat de grote luchtstromen die gewoonlijk van oost naar west stromen, lichtjes verschuiven richting het noorden en zuiden. Dat betekent dat koude poollucht makkelijker richting Europa getrokken wordt.

Voorlopig lijkt het er echter niet op dat de poolwervel ons veel schade zal berokkenen. Weerman Frank Deboosere ziet de temperaturen de komende weken niet al te fel meer dalen. ‘Overdag blijven de temperaturen net boven het vriespunt, alleen ’s nachts duiken we eronder.’ In de nacht van vrijdag op zaterdag en de nacht erna kan het zelfs vriezen met temperaturen tot -7 graden.

Daarna wordt het weer wat warmer met dinsdag kans op sneeuwbuien en woensdag kans op winterse neerslag.

{ http://www.standaard.be/ }

18-01-2019 om 23:47 geschreven door peter  

ASTRONAUT OF APOLLO 15 SAID THAT HUMANS ARE DESCENDANTS OF ALIENS

The astronaut and engineer Alfred Worden (or Al Worden) was a leading pilot and participated in the Apollo 15 lunar mission in 1971. He was the pilot of the Command Module of the same mission, as well as being one of the 24 people they went to the moon Who better than him to reveal the best kept secrets of space missions.

Worden also has a Guinness Record for being the “longest isolated human being” because of the long time he spent alone in the Endeavor Module Command.

While speaking to Good Morning Britain , Al Worden, the astronaut who flew around the moon 75 times, and spent six days in orbit around our satellite, was asked if he thought the aliens were real.

The answer probably surprised everyone who watched the interview.

The former Apollo 15 member said that not only aliens are real, but they came to Earth from far away and created our civilization, and if we wanted to look for evidence, all we had to do was look at ancient Sumerian literature .

This is what Worden said:

We are the aliens, but we believe they are others. But we are the ones who came from another side, because someone else had to survive, and they got into small spaceships, they came here and they landed, and civilization started here . And if you do not believe me, go find books about the ancient Sumerians and see what they have to say. They’ll tell you from the beginning. “

It should be noted that not only ancient Sumeria has evidence of ancient space visitors, other cultures have also mentioned beings from the stars that created man and gave him a lot of knowledge. Our origin is in the sky, in the stars.

{ https://www.sightings.info/ }

18-01-2019 om 23:34 geschreven door peter  

In 2017, movies like Alien: Covenant and Life pushed the banal idea that aliens, if we encounter them, will be hostile. Yawn. Far more interesting was the premise posited by Arrival, which suggested that aliens may come in peace, though we’d only know if we could communicate with them. That notion may not be strictly fictional: In a Reddit AMA on Thursday, the famed theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, Ph.D., explained that the latter scenario is far more likely to play out in real life.

It was inevitable that, while Kaku was promoting his boldly titled new book The Future of Humanity, curious fans would ask whether the future of humanity would involve aliens. Kaku, unsurprisingly, said yes — much of his work deals with the Kardashev Scale, a ranking system for the technological prowess of alien civilizations — but his thoughts on what first contact might be like were a little more unexpected.

Asked what would happen when we make contact with alien civilizations and how we would communicate with them, Kaku said that the outcome of our interaction would largely depend on the aliens’ position on the Kardashev Scale but that, in all likelihood, they wouldn’t be bothered to deal with us:

Let me stick my neck out. I personally feel is that within this century, we will make contact with an alien civilization, by listening in on their radio communications. But talking to them will be difficult, since they could be tens of light years away. So, in the meantime, we must decipher their language to understand their level of technology. Are they Type I, II, or III??? And what are their intentions. Are they expansive and aggressive, or peaceful. Another possibility is that they land on the White House lawn and announce their existence. But I think that is unlikely, since we would be like forest animals to them, i.e. not worth communicating with.

Another user asked Kaku how much more advanced an alien society might be morally and philosophically, and in his response he doubled down on the idea that we’d probably be too insignificant to really engage with them on that level.

I get asked if the aliens are evil and want to destroy us. Maybe, but I think in the main they will be peaceful because they have had thousands of years to resolve sectarian, fundamentalist, nationalist questions. However, they still might be dangerous if they simply don’t care about us and we get in the way. In War of the Worlds, the aliens did not hate us. We were simply in the way. In the same way that a developer is a threat to forest animals because he can pave the first, the danger there is from someone who sees that we are just in the way. But for the most part, I think they will be peaceful, but view us like we view forest animals.

Kaku doesn’t seem to think too highly of humanity, but perhaps that’s for the best. On the Kardashev Scale, a Type 1 civilization can harness and use all the energy from its nearby star, and a Type 4 (the highest ranking, which Kaku proposed) would control all the energy within the universe and perhaps even outside it; somewhat pathetically, we’re ranked around 0.7. Meanwhile, any aliens that manage to contact us from outside our solar system must be at least a Type 1.

Like any human that steps into the woods, aliens that arrive on Earth may be there to hunt — or simply there to camp or go for a swim. If they show up, there’ll be no way of knowing their intentions. However, as Kaku points out, in that scenario it’ll be better to remain insignificant, like chipmunks and sparrows, than to immediately draw the aliens’ attention, like formidable, threatening bears.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

18-01-2019 om 23:10 geschreven door peter  

What’s Really Affecting Climate Change & How Can We Fix It?

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report foretells an inhospitable Earth unless we drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Globally, people are already subjected to hardships caused by extreme weather events, such as blizzards, droughts, floods, hurricanes and wildfires. Combined with the havoc overpopulation creates on finite disaster recovery resources, these problems are going to get significantly worse without immediate action.

Climate change is a natural event unnaturally exacerbated by humans, especially since the industrial revolution. There are dozens of high-profile causes such as agriculture, fossil fuel powered manufacturing plants and deforestation. However, the main culprits are 100 fossil fuel companies.

Outside of political intervention or attacking these companies’ bottom lines, it’s unlikely we’ll effectively curb that 71 percent. However, there are meaningful methods we can use to address the other 29 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

1. Grow More Trees

Every minute, about 27 football pitches’ worth of forests are destroyed, according to the World Wildlife Foundation. The blatant destruction of forests, grasslands and mangroves creates significant amounts of greenhouse gases while simultaneously reducing nature’s capacity for capturing and storing CO2 and methane. The solution is simple: stop rampant deforestation and plant more trees.

The consequences of planting more trees are significant. Like most photosynthesizers, trees offer carbon sequestration and storage. With enough trees, we can achieve 37 percent of the greenhouse gas reduction target by 2050. That’s because one tree stores nearly 48 pounds of carbon dioxide in one year, according to a recent study by Scientific American. Furthermore, forests can store enough carbon dioxide emissions to equal the entire CO2 output of countries like Peru and Colombia, the Scientific American article states.

Image in public domain.

2. Carbon Capture Storage

Carbon capture storage is a necessary method to achieve the global greenhouse gas reductions needed by 2050. With carbon capture facilities, we can achieve 14 percent of the IPCC’s greenhouse gas reduction goals. That’s because carbon capture allows industrial manufacturers to prevent more than 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions from being ejected into the atmosphere.

3. Green Cities

By 2050, medium-to-large cities will likely contain two-thirds of the planet’s human population, according to a National Geographic article. Currently, urban areas account for 76 percent of energy-related CO2 emissions, with buildings being responsible for approximately one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, the article states. These figures are likely to get worse as the population huddles together. However, cities committed to transitioning toward 100 percent renewable energy sources, such as San Diego, can significantly reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Plus, the National Geographic article theorizes that cities that “go green” and tackle climate change initiatives will also reduce pollution, improve infrastructure, and make their cities more attractive to residents and businesses. These energy renovations include solar panels, growing roof gardens, incentivizing electric and hybrid vehicles, and retrofitting buildings with triple pane windows and energy-efficient HVAC systems.

4. Stratospheric Aerosol Injection

A controversial climate change solution is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI). Most climate solutions target CO2 at its source to prevent greenhouse gases from clogging Earth’s atmosphere.

Stratospheric aerosol injection takes the opposite approach by focusing on preventing solar radiation from warming the planet. The practice mimics what happens after strong volcanic eruptions, like the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.

During an eruption, sulfur dioxide spews into the stratosphere and reflects sunlight back into space. In the aftermath of Pinatubo’s eruption, the Earth cooled by about 0.5°C.

The natural scenarios of SAI are limited in scope and scale, making it difficult to predict how a wide scale implementation would affect the world. For example, a Dezeen report points out that implementing SAI in one area improperly can trigger rain and extreme weather conditions in neighboring territories.

Despite these concerns, SAI has a high predicted success rate and the international climate research community is considering its implementation.

5. Eat Less Meat

Eat more veggies!

At an industrial scale, livestock production is among the largest culprits related to greenhouse gas emissions, air quality degradation, waterway pollution, deforestation and land use, according to the study “options for keeping the food system within environmental limits,” which is published in the journal Nature.

The study states that western countries must cut beef consumption by 90 percent to stave off the ill effects the agriculture industry has on climate change. In the average Western diet, meat and dairy provide 18 percent of calories and 37 percent of protein, according to a report by The Guardian. To produce enough livestock to meet this demand requires 83 percent of farmland and produces 60 percent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, by replacing meat with beans and legumes, we can drastically reduce the required agricultural resources while preventing more CO2 emissions than the entire transportation industry combined.

Climate change affects every single person on the planet. Soon, it’ll affect nearly every aspect of our lives. An unwelcoming climate affects access to clean air and water and harms biodiverses ecosystem that provide us with food. Add in overpopulation, deforestation and weak-willed politicians and we’re in for a challenging fight — but the fight can be won.

We each must make difficult sacrifices to promote a green lifestyle and hold toxic companies and governments accountable. Together, we can create a sustainable world. Our future depends on it.

• This is a guest post by Morgen Henderson.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

18-01-2019 om 22:42 geschreven door peter  

Has the invasion begun? Mysterious blips appear over South Florida, US

18-01-2019 om 21:44 geschreven door peter  

18-01-2019 om 21:30 geschreven door peter  

Man Who Says He Was Abducted By Aliens Breaks 45-Year Silence

PASCAGOULA, Miss. (CBS Local) — A Mississippi man in declining health is telling a story he’s kept secret from his own family for 45 years: he claims he was abducted by aliens.

Calvin Parker says he and his buddy Charles Hickson were fishing in 1973 on the banks of the Pascagoula River, just north of where Ingalls Shipyard now sits, when a “real bright beam appeared all over us and it kind of blinded me for a second and when I got my vision back, I seen three bulky looking creatures coming toward us.”

Parker said the creatures were “probably 4, 4 1/2, 5 foot tall…built like football players. But I noticed they kind of moved mechanical wise and they was floating off the ground. By the time we stood up and turned around, they was there on us all at one time,” he told WALA in a rare interview. “Two of them got a hold of Charlie, one of them got a hold of myself and instantly I felt like, I just got relaxed.”

Parker, who was 19 at the time, claims he and the 42-year-old Hickson were levitated into a space craft.

“There was an examination room, what I call it, and the ole big ugly creature that brought me in, he took me and laid me on the examination table and he just backed up out of the way. I couldn’t move or anything. All I could do was look,” Parker said.

A device about the size of a deck of cards then came down from the ceiling.

“It hovered about a foot in front of my eyes and then it went to the right side of my head and it clicked, went behind my head and it clicked went to the left side of my head and clicked and then straight to the front and then it shot back into the ceiling,” he said.

Then a “more feminine looking creature came out. She looked completely different than what I called the robot,” he said. She “had regular fingers and came over and pinched me on the side of the cheek and then she took her finger and ran it down my throat and got it behind that thing that hangs down back there and tried to come up in my nasal cavity and that is when it started hurting and I started choking and I got scared and she just kind of telepathically told me ‘Don’t be afraid we aren’t going to hurt you.'”

Calvin Parker, who says he was abducted by aliens in 1973, breaks his silence in his book “Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter: My Story.”

(Credit: Calvin Parker)

Parker said the aliens then dropped him and Hickson on the river bank. They called the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office to report the incident.

Former Jackson County Captain Glenn Ryder said he told the men to come in to the station. To test their sincerity, Ryder said deputies secretly placed a tape recorder into an interrogation room and left the two alone.

“I got to get home, get to bed or get some nerve pills or something, see the doctor or something. I can’t stand it. I’m about to go all to pieces,” Parker was recorded saying at the time.

“I tell you, when we get through, I’ll get you something to settle you down so you can get some damn sleep,” Hickson responded.

“Something happened to them, said Ryder. “You don’t fake fear. He was scared. He was scared out of his mind.”

The men would also take lie detector tests and pass. The story quickly went viral.

“It was a circus, a media circus,” former WALA-TV reporter Rennie Brabner said.

Brabner believes something happened that night.

“I do not think they made it up in the sense that they created it out of whole cloth,” Brabner said. “I have been told, particularly Hickson was known to take a drink. Was it in the bottom of a bottle of a John Barleycorn bottle? I don’t know.”

Hickson wrote a book on his encounter and spoke numerous times about it before he died in 2011.

Parker stayed out of the limelight for 45 years, but after suffering a stroke and having two open heart surgeries, he decided it was his turn to write a book about the night that changed his life. “Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter: My Story” was published  in July.

“You can’t really pin everything down. You don’t really know and that’s the point I’m holding out. I don’t know what happened, I know something happened,” Parker said.

{ https://detroit.cbslocal.com/ }

18-01-2019 om 21:16 geschreven door peter  

18-01-2019 om 21:05 geschreven door peter  

Of all the lasting themes that have remained prevalent in science fiction over the last century, what would the genre have been without ray guns, lasers, and “death rays”?

One might even argue that lasers have been a part of science fiction as we know it today since the very beginning, or close to it, at least. Some argue that the creation of science fiction harkens all the way back to Mary Shelly’s eerie tale of reanimation, Frankenstein, while others claim that better “early” examples of the genre appeared in the writing of American authors like Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote what are among the earliest stories that incorporated space travel and journey to locations like the Moon.

However, if ever there were a “Shakespeare of Science Fiction,” as some have argued, it might have been H.G. Wells, whose contributions to literature included everything from the first non-anthropomorphic aliens (as well as what may be the earliest use of the word “extraterrestrial” in reference to an alien craft), to the “heat rays” wielded by the Martian antagonists in his War of the Worlds. And, with the appearance of these directed-energy weapons in his story, we also have one of the earliest appearances of lasers or “death rays” in science fiction

It would not be the last, of course. After humanity fumbled their way to triumph over its Martian invaders (with a helping hand from a few friendly terrestrial viruses), later fiction cast these futuristic weapons in the hands of human characters the likes of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and other characters.

Ryan Lambie, writing for Den of Geek, argues that it wasn’t until decades later in the 1950s and 60s that the laser truly claimed its place in science fiction, in part thanks to the real-world development of laser technologies in various industries: 

The production of ray guns of all kinds reached its zenith in the 50s and 60s. Real-world scientific breakthroughs in laser (“light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) and maser (“microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”) saw numerous kinds of ray-gun appear in the sci-fi movies and shows of these decades, which no doubt fed back into the popularity of the huge armory of toy weapons that appeared around the same time.

The trend continues today, of course, with laser weaponry remaining an indelible part of the fictional Star Wars universe, along with other fantastic interpretations of alternate futuristic realities.

Lasers used for weaponry exist in real life too, but nothing like what we see in science fiction. I recently caught up with Jeff Hecht, author of Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon and a fellow of the Optical Society of America. As Hecht puts it, in the early days finding practical uses for lasers may have been more challenging than actually building the lasers themselves:

“At the very beginning, the running joke was, ‘the laser is a solution in search of a problem.’ They would say that because a lot of the problems the laser was supposed to solve didn’t just go away when you brought in a laser and applied it; you had to do a lot of good engineering to make them work. And we’ve had a lot of good engineering, and certainly for telecommunications, the pairing of the advances in lasers and fiberoptics and the advances in electronics, are behind the whole information technology advance. You can’t have one without the other.”

An example of an operational laser system in use by the U.S. Navy.

Of course, most of the lasers in use today have nothing to do with weaponry, and finding ways to concentrate a beam with strength comparable to what we see in science fiction seems a ways off, too. However, that doesn’t mean that lasers haven’t been useful in terms of making existing weapons more deadly. Hecht says that even in the early years of laser innovation, “what they were looking at was using lasers, at first, just to measure the range to a target–how long does it take to get back and forth–that’s the range of a radar. And then there was a device called a laser target designator, and what that would do is send a series of coded, invisible infrared pulses at a target.”

“If you had an infrared sensor, you’d see this code of reflective pulses coming from something and you could aim a weapon at that ‘something.’ That was how a smart bomb worked.”

So lasers certainly have weapons systems applications, and field tested designs in use by the U.S. Navy, for instance, are capable of disarming drones and other objects at a distance, as was demonstrated in the summer of 2017 with the AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System.

Drone being dispatched using a long distance laser system from aboard a U.S. Navy ship in 2017.

While the capabilities of laser weapons described here may remain limited in the present day, this is not to say that someday more powerful lasers won’t still be developed. However, it is obvious that the current state of the art has not caught up with the imaginations of our science fiction luminaries from over the decades.

In short, lasers continue to play an important role in technological development, as they have since the end of World War II. Their influence and relevance to a variety of industries cannot be denied, and yes, lasers even see some practical use in modern weaponry. But despite these innovations, it remains true that the most powerful lasers are the ones on the printed page; so to reappropriate an old adage for our use here, perhaps the pen truly is mightier than the sword… and the same still goes for the laser.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-01-2019 om 20:49 geschreven door peter  

An unidentified aircraft seen circling overhead for days has residents of the Canadian city of Kingston wondering if something strange could be afoot. Kingston sits along Lake Ontario at the mouth of the St. Lawrence river a few hours from the major metropolises of Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. For days now, residents have seen an aircraft with “minimal lighting” flying over the city under the cover of darkness. Even more curious, not one law enforcement agency or branch of the military has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the craft. What’s going on in the skies over Kingston?

It’s probably just another one of those shadow government planes again turning the frogs gay with chemtrail magic.

The Kingston Whig Standard reports that the news paper has received multiple emails and calls about the unidentified aircraft. According to Kingston resident Doug Stewart, the aircraft appears to circle for hours in the dead of night:

It’s a mystery. I can hear it at 2 and 3 a.m., and I’ve only heard it after dark at about 6, 7, 8 p.m. Some nights it’s constant … it seems like it’s circling.

Other witnesses have estimated that the aircraft is flying fairly low around 3,000 to 5,000 feet and appears to circle the same area every five minutes or so. Naturally, many Kingston residents assumed that the nearby Canadian Forces Base Trenton, Canada’s busiest Air Force base, was to blame. However, Public Affairs Officer Capt. Graeme Scott reports that the aircraft isn’t theirs.

Many law enforcement agencies now operate spy aircraft equipped with incredibly high-resolution video cameras.

Likewise, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have issued a rather opaque, somewhat passive aggressive statement denying any knowledge of the aircraft:

The RCMP’s primary concern is the safety and security of Canadians. We have multiple aircraft that support our mandate in Ontario and elsewhere in the country. To maintain the integrity of our investigations and operations, the location of our aircraft is not disclosed. We therefore have no additional information to share with you at this time.

With such little information to go on, Kingston residents are left in the dark about the plane circling their homes and who it might belong to. While many see this as an invasion of privacy, deciding who owns the airspace above privately-owned homes has proven tricky for federal governments. Should undisclosed, unidentified aircraft be able to loiter in the sky despite the public’s concern or alarm?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-01-2019 om 20:23 geschreven door peter  

An asteroid belt is full of asteroids, so a collision in this narrow and crowded orbiting highway of rock wouldn’t seem to generate anything more than a “Duh!” from astronomers. However, a recent crash in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter caught their attention because of its violent impact which seems to have turned one of the asteroids into a comet with an extremely long tail. Doh?

“On 9 Jan. 2019, the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams issued an electronic telegram reporting that the inner main belt asteroid (6478) Gault had a tail. This made the object a very important target to monitor and we managed to get a few images on two nights.”

That electronic telegram (nice to see someone is still using telegrams) was read by The Virtual Telescope Project – an advanced service provided by the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Italy providing remote Internet access to several robotic telescopes for the general public – and distributed worldwide. 6478 Gault is already somewhat famous, having been discovered in 1988 by the astronomer couple Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory in California. The Shoemakers are best known for discovering the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9, whose collision with Jupiter in July 1994 was televised worldwide.

Asteroid Gault (named for American planetary geologist Donald Gault, a pioneer in the field of impact cratering processes – coincidence?) is part of the Phocaea family of space rocks created 2.2 billion years ago by another collision which resulted in Gault (a large asteroid 3.7 km/ 2.3 miles in diameter, countless other little space rocks and 25 Phocaea, a huge asteroid about 75 km/46 miles in diameter. Researchers with the ATLAS project (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) spotted the sudden appearance of a tail on Gault in late December/early January observations.

View image on Twitter

Alan Fitzsimmons@FitzsimmonsAlan

Active asteroid 6478 Gault last night from the @INGLaPalma after discovery by @TheGenghisKen @fallingstarIfA . The ejected dust extends > 400,000 km, more than the Earth-Moon distance.

From observations by @astrostevanus and @Sun_d_citizen @AstroQUB

• 137

1:05 PM - Jan 12, 2019 · Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland

• 79 people are talking about this

British astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons tweeted that the tail is over 400,000 km/240,000 miles long and would stretch from Earth to the Moon and then some. Astronomer Gianluca Masi posted on the Virtual Telescope Project blog that the tail was most likely created by a collision that blasted a part of Gault into the smithereens that now make up the tail. (See the pictures here.) No one seems to know which rock – if it still exists – collided with 6478) Gault somewhere in November 2018. What the astronomers do know is that an asteroid with a tail is an extremely rare condition that they still don’t seem to fully understand – as evidenced by all of the conflicting stories about whether tail-streaming ’Oumuamua is a comet, an asteroid, a space ship or something else.

Comet or asteroid?

What is 6478 Gault now? If it keeps the tail, and astronomers will be monitoring it closely, then it’s definitely turned into some form of comet. If it loses the tail, it’s still an asteroid. If the collision knocked it hard enough to put it on a collision path with a planet (hopefully not Earth), it will make the Shoemakers famous once again.

Place your bets now.

Mysterious forces destroy asteroid as amazed scientists watch

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-01-2019 om 20:10 geschreven door peter  

Back in the 1970s, Paul Bennewitz – who died in 2003, in Albuquerque, New Mexico – had his own company that stood adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base, also in Albuquerque. Its name was Thunder Scientific. All was good, as Bennewitz had a number of solid contracts with the military. And living and working so close to the base made things comfortable and handy for Bennewitz. It was the perfect relationship. Until, that is, it wasn’t. In shockingly quick time, Bennewitz’s life began to fragment in chaotic fashion. But, how and why did such a thing happen?

It’s important to note that by the late 1970s Bennewitz had been interested in UFOs not just for years but for decades. He had a large library of books on the subject and subscribed to a number of newsletters and magazines on the subject. On occasion, Bennewitz had seen – late at night and in the early hours of the morning – strange, unidentified objects flying over Kirtland Air Force Base and the nearby, huge Manzano Mountains. They could have been early drone-like craft being tested secretly. But, for Bennewitz they were alien craft.

Bennewitz’s head spun: he came to believe that aliens were in league with the U.S. Air Force, and that much of the secret program was run out of Kirtland. And he shared his views with staff at Kirtland, the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, his Senator, his Congressman, and just about anyone and everyone in a position of power and influence. It was all but inevitable that by firing off lengthy letters about a secret alien-human operation at Kirtland someone would take notice. That’s exactly what they did.

While one school of thought suggests that Bennewitz was indeed tracking the movements of UFOs in the skies over Kirtland, another suggests that Bennewitz had actually stumbled on test-flights of new and radical aircraft, of the aforementioned drone kind. In the latter scenario, the government (as a collective term for all of those agencies and individuals that Bennewitz approached) decided to first politely, but quietly, request that Bennewitz bring his research to a halt. This was like a red rag to a bull. Bennewitz would hear none of it. He was primed and ready to go after the U.S. Government and to confirm what he saw as the dark and sinister truth of Uncle Sam’s liaisons with aliens. One man against the government? It was clear who was going to win; although Bennewitz couldn’t envisage such a thing at all.

Manzano Mountains

In ingenious fashion – but from the perspective of Bennewitz, in terrible fashion – a plot was initiated to, in essence, give Bennewitz exactly what he wanted to hear. So, well-placed government agents, intelligence operatives, and experts in the fields of counterintelligence and disinformation, all fed Bennewitz fictitious tales of dangerous ETs, of thousands of people abducted and mind-controlled in slave-like fashion by the aliens, of terrible experiments undertaken on people held below a huge “underground base” in the town of Dulce, New Mexico, and of a looming confrontation between the human race and the deadly creatures from another galaxy.

That the data was all coming to him from verifiable insider sources impressed Bennewitz and led him to believe their every word – which is precisely what the government was gambling on. The government then tightened the noose even tighter around Bennewitz’s neck: they fed him more and more horror-stories of the alien variety. And, slowly and bit by bit, Bennewitz’s paranoia grew. He couldn’t sleep, he became stressed to the point where he required medication, and eventually had a nervous collapse and was hospitalized. The result: he walked away from UFOs, secret projects, and cosmic conspiracies as a crushed man. Which may well have been the intent of the government, anyway.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-01-2019 om 19:45 geschreven door peter  

Megalodons were enormous sharks that went extinct around 2.6 million years ago ( Karen Carr )

How do you wipe out an entire species of 60 ft long giant sharks? Blow up a star, of course. According to a recent paper, supernovas may have been the cause of a number of unexplained mass extinctions throughout earth’s history, including the monstrous and fantastically named giant shark species Megalodon, a relative of the great white shark, whose mysterious extinction some 2.6 million years ago has long puzzled scientists.

There are enough out there to confidently say that stars are exploding all the time. Luckily for us, space is big and our lives are relatively short, so the chance of us getting blasted by a supernova are pretty small. Still, sometimes it happens (roughly every 100 million years) and the earth gets whacked by a cloud of radiation that once made up some other poor solar system’s sun. Scientists have been looking for evidence of how cosmic events like supernovas impact earth and the recent study attempts to discover the role that they play in the rise and fall of species here on earth and the impact that they might have had on evolution. If you guessed that an exploding star would be really good at killing things, you’re right!

Fossilized Megalodon tooth.

According to Adrian Melott, astrophysicist at the University of Kansas and the author of the new paper, the mass extinction of megafauna like the Megalodon lines up with evidence of a supernova impacting earth. Isotopes of iron-60, which is extremely rare on earth yet common in supernovas, were found on the sea floor and the surface of the moon. Dating these isotopes reveals that, if they were dropped here by a supernova, that supernova rolled through our solar system 2.6 million years ago—right about when the Megalodon checked out. According to Melott:

“A lot of things would not leave a definite residue. [Iron-60] is smoking-gun evidence of something happening.”

The blast from a supernova could end species in a few ways. Other theories on how supernovas could impact mass extinctions point to indirect causes. The blast from a supernova could strip the earth’s ozone layer, for example, leaving species vulnerable to solar radiation and destroying ocean food sources like plankton and coral reefs. Cosmic rays could also seed clouds and create a “cosmic-ray winter,” according to Henrik Svensmark of the Technical University of Denmark, which would also result in the destruction of food sources.

Melott thinks that the supernova may have been a much more direct cause of the extinction, however. Supernovas release highly charged radioactive particles called muons. Getting hit by a cloud of muons probably wouldn’t feel like much at first, but the radiation exposure would soon cause irreparable genetic damage and mutations that, depending on the species, could be catastrophic. The bigger the animal, the worse the impact would be. For an animal the size of a human, the muon storm would increase cancer rates by 50 percent. Considering that the Megalodon was about the size of a school bus, it would get hit pretty hard.

Artist’s depiction of a supernova.

As evidence for his theory, Melott points to the sudden extinction of 36 percent of ocean species 2.6 million years ago at the end of the Pliocene era and the beginning of the Pleistocene. The extinct species were largely coastal dwelling, where the impact from muon radiation would be the most devastating. Unfortunately, highly radioactive particles like muons don’t leave any record of their presence, so it’s hard to tell just how catastrophic an impact it was. Yet there does seem to be a correlation between a supernova and a mass extinction, so it is likely that there was some sort of connection.

So, if you have a fear of shark infested waters, just remember: there’s always something bigger and badder on its way (but probably not for another 97 million years).

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-01-2019 om 18:58 geschreven door peter  

A radar mystery that began in the skies over parts of the United States late last year has some experts questioning whether the government is involved in secret tests, while others think odd weather might be to blame.

In early December, the National Weather Service reported on what they termed an “anomaly” over parts of the midwestern United States. Here at MU Brett Tingley reported on the incident, which was observed on radar over parts of Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana. “Whatever was on radar appeared to be as dense as a thunderstorm,” Brett wrote, “but with the night clear and temperatures low, that theory was ruled improbable.” It was determined that the likely cause of the radar traces had been chaff, a substance composed mostly of aluminum that is released from aircraft during military operations and exercises to “confuse enemy radar.” However, as Brett noted at the time, meteorologist Greg Meffert with the NWS stated that he had “never seen [chaff] quite this hot.”

A few days later, Joseph Trevithick over at The Warzone wrote about a second radar incident, reporting that similar anomalous traces had appeared over parts of Maine and Florida just two days later. The National Weather Service confirmed on their Twitter account that the new radar anomalies also resembled chaff, although Trevithick noted that the December radar blips seemed to last longer than chaff typically does.

Chaff, as depicted on a radar visual display

(Wikimedia Commons).

“We have already reached out to the National Guard Bureau,” Trevithick wrote, “but at the time of writing, we have not received any additional information about this new incident over Maine. We’re reaching out to additional commands regarding the plume in Florida, as well.”

Since that time, little else was reported about the incidents. That is, until today, when Jon Webb with the Evansville Courier & Press wrote about the peculiar December incidents. While they do appear to be related to military operations involving chaff, a few questions do remain.

“Whatever it is, it’s exceedingly strange,” Webb wrote, citing an email exchange he had with a member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) who told him, “We believe there is more to the story than what the FAA and military and publications such as ‘The War Zone’ are telling us.” (Does it matter to the unnamed MUFON investigator that even The Warzone’sTrevithick noted having some problems of his own with the chaff theory? Maybe they didn’t read to the end of the article… who knows.)

“More NWS hubs will get confused,” Webb concluded, “And more conspiracies will be born.”

So what was going on back in December, and does the assertion by Trevithick and others that certain aspects of the incidents didn’t resemble “typical” military exercises involving chaff amount to anything?

A pair of B-1B Lancers, 28th Bomb Squadron, deploy chaff and flares during a military exercise

(public domain).

According to a Department of National Defense study from 2008, chaff is described as “a radiofrequency countermeasure released by military aircraft (ships and ground vehicles) to confuse enemy radar.” At the time this report was produced, chaff was used in approximately 26 U.S. states.

The report states that “the effective use of chaff can be maintained only by practicing in-flight deployments during training issues.” It goes on to say that, “The release of chaff into the environment during these exercises has raised concerns among both public-interest groups and the government regarding the fate and environmental impact of chaff particles.”

Concerns about the environmental effects of chaff go back to at least 1993, resulting in a military report that indicated that there were few–if any–significant environmental risks associated with its use in military exercises. However, a 1998 report by the congressional General Accounting Office continued to argue that chaff could have negative environmental effects, in addition to potentially interfering with civilian ATC radar systems.

More recently, controversies arose over the use of chaff last year in relation to the companies that produce it, and their potential future ownership by foreign entities. Presently, Esterline Defense Technologies (also known by the name Armtec) is the only company in the United States that produces chaff for use in military activities. In 2018, it was reported that Esterline/Armtec would be acquired by the UK-based TransDigm Group Inc. The news prompted a bipartisan letter from Congress to Jim Mattis, then-U.S. Defense Secretary, calling for the U.S. government to block the deal.

“TransDigm has repeatedly purchased companies that are the sole providers of Department of Defense items and engaged in price gouging,” the letter, co-authored by California Democratic representative Jackie Speier and North Carolina Republican Walter Jones, argued. “The abuses have been sufficiently common and severe enough to warrant a DoD inspector general investigation. Unsurprisingly, Esterline is the sole DoD chaff provider and one of two flare providers. The alarm bells should be ringing.”

In essence, the controversies surrounding chaff and its use seem to have been an ongoing point of contention for decades. But in sum, do military exercises account for the odd radar returns that were occurring late last year? Also, could it be possible that the military is testing a new kind of chaff or similar substance, following the news that Esterline/Armtec could be acquired by TransDigm? There is no proof that this is the case, but if we were to speculate, it might account for some of the more unusual aspects reported with the December incidents, as well as why so many were reported around that time.

Then again, for all we know maybe the December radar incidents were just good old, Esterline/Armtec chaff that was clouding up radar systems over the Midwest and parts of the East Coast. At present, no further information about the incidents has been made available to the public, nor have any similar radar anomalies been reported… so the rest is left (as per usual) to our imaginations.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

18-01-2019 om 18:48 geschreven door peter  

Area51 UFO “Fastwalker” Caught By Drone

Brian Hanley who has published the UFO footage on January 9, 2019, states: I usually cover politics, but when Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie came to me with this exclusive UAP footage, I had to break the story.

At first there was a lot of doubt whether the recording was real or faked on which Brian Hanley decided to release the raw footage which was recorded by a DJI Inspire Drone over Beaver, Utah, just a couple of hours (by car) from Area51.

The first original footage shows the object that moves at an incredible speed. The second footage shows the object in slow motion making it easily recognizable.

I do not exclude that the object is of extraterrestrial origin but since this UFO fastwalker has been filmed near Area51 it is quite possible that the object, which is very similar to other fastwalkers that fly through our atmosphere, belongs to one of their secret projects.

 

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

18-01-2019 om 18:36 geschreven door peter  

Massive Disk UFO Found Floating In Maine River

New England has been dumped with snow due to winter storms that also brought bone-chilling cold this week. However, the occurrences have been shrouded with a strange ice formation to one Maine river.

In Westbrook City in Maine, around 20-minute drive east of Portland, a mysterious disk of ice has appeared in the Presumpscot River.

City officials estimated the disk to be around 300 feet wide and about the size of a football field.

UFO enthusiasts who saw the disk formation believe the disk is an alien spaceship disguising itself as a natural phenomenon caused by winter storms.  They said that the disk was spinning on a frozen river signifying that it was conducting an activity under the river.

City officials went the extra mile with the use of a camera drone to capture stunning images of the disk from above.

According to the official explanations, the varying currents of the river formed the disk. Part of the river flows in a rapid straight line movement, but currents near the other bank flow slowly in a semi-circle. That portion of the river freezes because of the slower currents. The formation of the ice disk is due to the clockwise motion.

However, UFO enthusiasts argue that the formation is a perfect disk and aliens operating under the river have something to do with it. They said that it could be extraterrestrials carrying out a mission under the river.

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

18-01-2019 om 17:36 geschreven door peter