Herodotus, the man referred to by the Roman orator Cicero as “The Father of History”(and who are we to argue with Cicero?), wrote in 440 BCE what is considered to be the founding work of history in Western literature — The Histories. In that book, Herodotus mentions a strange and mysterious river boat he saw in Egypt called a “baris” – strange because the extremely long boat had one rudder that passed through a hole in the keel, and mysterious because no one else in recorded history has ever seen one since … until now. Underwater archeologists excavating the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion in Abu Qir Bay near Alexandria have discovered the wreck of a long boat that meets the description by Herodotus, restoring faith in the writings of the historian and the endorsement by Cicero.

“(The builders) cut planks two cubits long [100 cm or 40 inches] and arrange them like bricks. On the strong and long tenons [pieces of wood] they insert two-cubit planks. When they have built their ship in this way, they stretch beams over them… They obturate the seams from within with papyrus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the keel. The mast is of acacia and the sails of papyrus…”

Title page of Herodotus’ The Histories

With that excellent account of the building of one of these 92 foot (28 meters) barges, archaeologists have long known what to look for … they just never found an Egyptian baris, whole or wrecked. Their luck changed in 2000 with the discovery by French archaeologist Franck Goddio of the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion (the former is its Egyptian name, the latter Roman) in the bay of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile, 2.5 miles off the coast. Since then, over 70 ships have been found in the area and given numbers. Archeologists noticed that Ship 17, with over 70 % of its original hull intact, had an unusual arrangement of planks that no one had ever seen before.

“Herodotus describes the boats as having long internal ribs. Nobody really knew what that meant. … That structure’s never been seen archaeologically before. Then, we discovered this form of construction on this particular boat and it absolutely is what Herodotus has been saying.”

Damian Robinson, the director of Oxford University’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology, said this in an interview with The Guardian about the recent release of a paper by Alexander Belov, an archaeologist and shipwreck specialist who worked with Franck Goddio, entitled “Ship 17: A Baris From Thonis-Heracleion.” Robinson believes the baris was used on the Nile to move imports from Greece and Persia and Egyptian exports of grain and salt.

Even though his writings have generally been proven to be historically accurate, Herodotus has often been criticized as being just an entertaining but not always factual historian. This discovery helps his reputation and also gives a little vindication to his promoter Cicero, who was killed, beheaded, mutilated and disparaged for his opposition to Mark Antony.

We’re here to help.

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

22-03-2019 om 16:36 geschreven door peter  

Anjouan is a remote tropical island in the Indian Ocean that’s making headlines for being the location of one of the biggest geological mysteries of all time. The small island, which is located between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa, is 163 square miles, has lots of vegetation and has a population of approximately 277,000 people. Anjouan, which is one of the Comoro Islands, was created 4 million years ago from undersea volcanoes and has steep, mountainous terrain as well as beaches containing black sand.

Since the island was formed by volcanoes, it consists of a lava-derived rock called basalt, but that’s not all. There are sedimentary rocks which are lighter in color that are found all over the island and should not be there as they aren’t part of the volcanic rock that formed this island millions of years ago. The rocks are made from a type of sandstone called quartzite.

Cornelia Class, who is a geochemist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said, “It doesn’t look like anything that could have formed on an island like that,” adding, “There is nothing there that could form a quartzite.”

Quartzite

Class led an expedition to the island in order to further research the rocks and found that there was much more quartzite than expected as it made up nearly half of a mountain. The scientists searched around the town of Tsembehou and found large boulders of quartzite. Then they climbed up a ridge called Habakari N’gani and found that the top was made almost entirely of the substance. Some locals use the quartzite to sharpen knives, as pieces of it have made their way to the villages by travelling down rivers and stream beds.

Sometimes crust ends up in the ocean after breaking off of a continent, and since quartzite comes from continental crust, it somehow must have made its way into the ocean basin and was lifted up with the volcanic rock to form the island.

There is still much more research that needs to be done in order to explain how the quartzite ended up on a volcanically made island. First, the researchers need to find out how old the quartzite is and find out where exactly it originated from. While Class thinks that it originated from Madagascar or East Africa, the substance needs to be studied much more thoroughly to find out for sure. She also said that additional geochemical measurements of the volcanic rocks need to be conducted in hopes of figuring out the geological history of the island.

Anjouan Island

This is definitely an interesting and mysterious find, “This is what nature presents, sometimes,” Class stated, “It’s something we consider impossible, but then we find it, and once we find it, we have to explain it.”

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

22-03-2019 om 16:31 geschreven door peter  

Maj. George Filer Presents UFO Investigations

Retired Air Force intelligence officer George Filer will discuss his experiences onboard an aircraft tanker over the UK when he and his crew were asked to check out a UFO on radar. Later, while serving at Ft. Dix, he was asked to brief generals on an incident involving the shooting of an alien that had landed its craft on their runway. George Filer is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. He is now a MUFON regional director and produces a weekly UFO newsletter called Filer’s Files.

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

22-03-2019 om 15:45 geschreven door peter  

UFO filmed over the Moon, 2019

New UFO video filmed in Edirne, Turkey on 17th March 2019.

Witness report:

 I am doing astrophotography as an amateur.I saw an object on the moon when I prepared my equipment for the moon shot.got it on record very quickly.At 6 seconds, my computer is locked because there is no more space.I thought it was the space station pass that day, but it wasn’t at that hour.I hesitated and sent it to you..Thank You. 

My equipment 

Celestron Avx mount 
Meade 6000 80mm Apo Telescope 
Qhy5-iii 174mm camera 
SharpCap 3.1 
File type:Ser

Source: MUFON

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

22-03-2019 om 15:41 geschreven door peter  

The Pentagon Wants to Test a Space-Based 'Particle Beam' by 2023

The exotic directed energy weapon would be used to shoot down enemy missiles moments after takeoff.

By Kyle Mizokami

U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO BY TECH. SGT. ANDREW SATRAN

The U.S. Department of Defense wants to test a directed energy weapon in space, one that it hopes will someday destroy ballistic missiles moments after launch. The weapon, a so-called neutral particle beam, would be boosted into space and tested from orbit in 2023.

Neutral particle beams don’t get as much attention as lasers but are attractive in their own right. The weapons work by accelerating particles without an electric charge—particularly neutrons—to speeds close to the speed of light and directing them against a target. The neutrons knock protons out of the nuclei of other particles they encounter, generating heat on the target object.

Promo for the 1953 movie "The War of the World", which featured alien invaders with heat rays.

MOVIE POSTER IMAGE ARTGETTY IMAGES

Particle beams are effectively the “heat rays” or even “death rays” of science fiction. Unlike lasers, which burn the surface of a target, particle beams penetrate beyond the surface to affect its interior. This makes particle beams immune to measures that can deflect lasers, like brightly polished, mirror-like surfaces. A sufficiently powerful beam could generate enough heat to burn a target, igniting its fuel supply, melting it and rendering it aerodynamically unstable, or frying a missile’s onboard electronics.

A neutral particle beam requires an accelerator to produce the atomic or subatomic particles that make up the beam. The accelerator must produce a tremendous amount of particles in very short amount of time, then release them in a focused beam. A weaponized neutral particle beam would also need a power supply, a power storage system, and staging system to feed energy to the accelerator. Finally it would require an aiming system and either onboard sensors or communications links allowing it to take targeting cues from other space or air-based sensors or a centralized battle management system.

A piece of aluminum burned by a ground test of the BEAR particle beam.

BETTMANNGETTY IMAGES

In 1989, as part of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) the U.S. launched a neutral particle beam accelerator into space aboard a rocket. The Beam Experiments Aboard Rocket (BEAR) project launched the accelerator from White Sands Missile Range to an altitude of 124 miles, where it successfully tested, “(neutral particle beam) propagation characteristics in space and the effects on spacecraft components.” The satellite was recovered intact after reentry.

According to DefenseOne, the Pentagon wants to test a neutral particle beam weapon from orbit in 2023. Officials believe technological advances over the past three decades make such a weapon more viable, especially the getting it small enough to launch into space part. Previous particle beam designs had large accelerators and power supplies, but officials believe they could probably design a weapon that could be launched into orbit. The Pentagon is holding the door open for the possibility such a system still isn’t doable, but is setting the goal for a 2023 test.

The Pentagon evidently hopes to use particle beams to destroy ballistic missiles for the so-called “boost phase intercept” missile defense role. Once launched, ballistic missiles swiftly accelerate through and beyond Earth’s atmosphere to low earth orbit. Once there, one or more individual warheads separate from the missile and then continue on their own trajectories to the same or separate targets.

Boost phase missile defense would target missile such as this North Korean Hwasong-14 moments after launch.

AFP CONTRIBUTORGETTY IMAGES

Boost phase missile defense calls for shooting down ballistic missiles seconds after launch, while they are still accelerating, and before they have released their warheads. This simplifies matters greatly for the defender but has a number of problems, particularly getting the interceptor close enough to enemy territory to hit the missiles in time. The Pentagon evidently believes that space-based directed energy weapons—like lasers or particle beams—could react fast enough to shoot down ballistic missiles in the boost phase.

Will it work? There are a lot of technical issues that need to be resolved to make space-based particle beams work. The neutral particle beam will need to hold a coherent beam over the 1,000 kilometers or so from low-earth orbit to the ground. The system will need a sufficiently portable power supply. The Pentagon will need to figure out how to detect a launching missile, pass the data to a satellite, and then have that satellite engage the missile. It will also have to figure out how many satellites it will need, and since objects in low-earth orbit do not remain stationary, will need a fleet of satellites to ensure that one or more will be over the target in the event of a launch. These are all issues Washington wrestled with in the 1980s—and then failed to deploy a usable system. Only time will tell if things are different this time around. 

Source: DefenseOne

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

22-03-2019 om 12:15 geschreven door peter  

The stakes in the looming war in space keep getting higher and higher. This week, budget documents released by the Missile Defense Agency, or MDA show that the usual suspects in spooky weapons research are hard at work turning science fiction into reality by aiming to put a directed energy weapon in orbit. According to the proposed budget, the MDA wants the Pentagon to grant it $380 million in order to get a working “ Neutral Particle Beam” directed energy weapon in space by 2022. Why does the Pentagon want to put a particle beam in space?

For now, the beam’s intended purpose on paper is to shoot down enemy missiles. The Defense Department released documents this week outlining the Neutral Particle Beam’s budget along with the program’s aims. The documents state the Neutral Particle Beam is “a new directed energy capability to defeat the emerging threat” of ballistic missiles and is “a game changing space-based directed energy capability for strategic and regional missile defense.”  

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office, Department of Energy, and the Air Force are all working collaboratively on the research and development of this new directed energy weapon. The ultimate plan is to “execute a directed energy kill chain; acquisition, tracking and lethality” using the Neutral Particle Beam.

I guess we may be in the future after all: the U.S. military industrial complex is working on putting a giant particle beam in space. While it’s objectively awesome, it’s pretty terrifying as well. The MDA’s request for a particle beam weapon comes just a few months after Chinese scientists announced plans for an allegedly peaceful solar-powered microwave energy beam in orbit. While that beam could theoretically be aimed at a collector below and converted into electricity, it could also likely melt other nation’s satellites or missiles in the process. Why not? Could it be used to burn whole swaths of the Earth at a time like a Bond villain’s superweapon? Is the Pentagon’s Neutral Particle Beam an effort to keep up with the Chinese and not allow a particle beam gap?

The whole document is worth a read and shows just what kind of threats these research agencies have to plan for each day. I found it interesting that in the MDA’s Fiscal Year 2020 Budget Estimate Overview section, the document states of course that the Neutral Particle Beam is only one of the new capabilities being tested for ballistic missile defense systems. Included in the MDA’s research are programs looking into “hypersonic defense technology” and “high-powered lasers” and as part of this research, the MDA is “conducting ground, airborne, and space-based technology experiments to track representative hypersonic threats.” Anyone who’s followed my research into mystery booms knows that I’ve been saying for years now that a large number of the booms are likely caused by military testing of new hypersonic aerospace and defense technologies. Could this tiny section of the MDA’s overview be in any way related to the mystery boom phenomenon?

The war for space weapon supremacy has been heating up in the last few years, and each of the world’s major space-faring superpowers has some form of ‘killer’ satellite in orbit. It’s believed the Russians may have even put secret killer satellites in orbit by ‘birthing’ them Matryoshka doll style because of course they would: they’re Russian. With so many mysterious launches worldwide lately, there’s no telling what’s up there at this point. Will the Neutral Particle Beam be able to save us in time?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

22-03-2019 om 12:00 geschreven door peter  

Two UFOs Over Moons Surface Flying Side By Side, Recorded From Telescope, March 17, 2019. Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 17, 2019

Location of sighting: Earths moon

Source: MUFON #99274

 

A person in Edirne, Turkey was observing the moon through a telescope and was lucky enough to catch a great shot of not one, but two UFOs flying low over the moons surface. Yes I said that right. This object is actually two UFOs flying side by side, like a military wingman for USAF fighter jets. 

 

Both objects are diamond shaped, yet one is twice the size of the other. If these were meteors, they would be leaving a trail of debris behind them, and there is no way they would be perfect diamond flying side by side. These are alien craft flying over our moon!

 

Now, I wonder...if the eyewitness caught this while observing for a half hour...then how often does this occur on our moon daily? Well, if you say 24 hours in a day, and divide it by 30 minutes, we get 48. Thats a lot on only the side that we can see. I imagine its much more on the side we cannot see. This is 100% proof that aliens are actively using our moon not just as a base, but as a home.

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

22-03-2019 om 11:49 geschreven door peter  

Chinese Film 'The Wandering Earth' Imagines a Journey to a New Sun

22-03-2019 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

Why This Poisonous Gas Could Be a Sign of Alien Life

By Mike Wall 

Artist’s illustration of the exoplanet Proxima b, the Earth-size world that orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri.

(Image: © ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Scientists hunting for signs of alien life shouldn't be so quick to dismiss carbon monoxide (CO), a new study suggests.

The substance is highly poisonous to people and most other animal life here on Earth because it latches firmly onto hemoglobin, preventing this blood protein from carrying vital oxygen in the required quantities. 

And the gas hasn't typically rated as a promising "biosignature" that astrobiologists should target in the search for ET. Indeed, many researchers regard CO as an anti-biosignature, because it's a readily available source of carbon and energy that life-forms should theoretically gobble up. So, finding lots of CO in an exoplanet's atmosphere would suggest the absence of life as we know it, according to this line of thinking.

• Related: 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life

But it may be time to revise such reasoning, the new study said. In it, researchers used computer models to better understand the atmospheric chemistry of Earth about 3 billion years ago, when our planet's air contained very little oxygen. Microbial life was common on Earth back then, but animal life was a long way off. (The earliest fossils of multicellular organisms date to about 600 million years ago.)

The team's results indicated that CO could have accumulated in significant quantities in those long-gone days, reaching concentrations of around 100 parts per million (ppm), or about 1,000 times higher than current levels.

"That means we could expect high carbon-monoxide abundances in the atmospheres of inhabited but oxygen-poor exoplanets orbiting stars like our own sun," study co-author Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), said in a statement. 

The scientists also applied their models to exoplanetary systems — specifically, those centered on red dwarfs, the small, dim stars that make up about 75 percent of the Milky Way galaxy's stellar population. 

The team found that inhabited red-dwarf planets with lots of oxygen in their atmospheres likely sport high levels of CO as well. In fact, CO concentrations on such worlds could be as high as several percent.

"Given the different astrophysical context for these planets, we should not be surprised to find microbial biospheres promoting high levels of carbon monoxide," study lead author Edward Schwieterman, a postdoctoral researcher in UCR's Department of Earth Sciences, said in the same statement. 

"However, these would certainly not be good places for human or animal life as we know it on Earth," he added.

The new study, which was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal, serves as a reminder that the hunt for alien life is a very complicated endeavor. Given the incredible abundance and diversity of alien worlds, there's certainly no reason to assume that ET will look like Earth life or employ the same biochemical pathways.

So, researchers, such as Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are greatly expanding the list of possible biosignatures beyond the handful (such as methane and oxygen) that work for Earth-like life. 

Such work will likely have practical applications, and soon. NASA's $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope will search for biosignatures in the air of some nearby exoplanets after the observatory's planned March 2021 launch. And three huge, ground-based scopes scheduled to come online in the mid-2020s — the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope — will do some atmosphere-sniffing as well after they come online in the mid-2020s.

• 9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• 7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now.

Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. 

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 23:53 geschreven door peter  

Mercury is the planet closest to Earth — contrary to popular belief

BY MIHAI ANDREI

If you’d ask most people what; the closest planet to Earth, you’d probably come across one answer: Venus. That answer, while apparently logical, is not really true. Mercury is the planet closest to us.

Even more surprising is the fact that Mercury is the closest neighbor, on average, to each of the other seven planets in the solar system. How can this be?

Image credits: Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington (Wikimedia Commons).

Mercury’s in retrograde

What’s the planet closest to the Earth? Even without any prior knowledge, a decent guess would be Venus or Mars — these are our planetary neighbors, after all. A simple Google search reveals that Venus’ orbit is closer to that of Earth’s so, naturally, Venus must be the answer, right?

Wrong. Mercury is the planet closest to Earth — at least on average.

As it turns out, Venus being the closest planet to Earth is simply a misconception — one that has propagated greatly through the years.

“By some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularisers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets,” write engineers Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe, and Samuel Cordner in a commentary published in Physics Today.

Instead, they recommend a different method of measuring which planet is closest, which they demonstrated using the motions of the planets within the last 10,000 years.

“By using a more accurate method for estimating the average distance between two orbiting bodies, we find that this distance is proportional to the relative radius of the inner orbit.”

Using this method, Mercury is closer to Earth on average. A GIF created by Reddit user u/CharcoalCharts does a great job at depicting this (the Earth is in Blue). The Earth is usually closest to Mercury, although, at some points of the year, it’s closest to Venus or Mars.

Non-intuitive

It feels intuitive that the average distance between every point on two concentric ellipses is closer than ellipses which are farther apart, but this is not necessarily the case. While Venus can get very close to the Earth (at only 0.28 Astronomical Units, with 1 AU being the distance from the Earth to the Sun), the two planets can also be quite far apart, at 1.72 AU. In total, Venus is 1.14 AU from Earth, but Mercury is a much closer 1.04 AU.

There are also two other shocking conclusions from this: first of all, on average, the Sun is closest to the Earth than any other planet (because it’s at 1 AU by definition). Secondly, it’s not just the Earth — Mercury is the closest neighbor of all planets in the solar system. In other words, Uranus is, on average, closer to Mercury than its presumed neighbor, Neptune. The same stands for even the dwarf planet Pluto (we still love you, Pluto!).

The whirly-dirly corollary

Researchers also found that the distance between two orbiting bodies is at a minimum when the inner orbit is at a minimum — something which they call the “whirly-dirly corollary” — after an episode of the cartoon Rick and Morty.

The method might also be useful in estimating distances between other orbiting bodies such as satellites or extrasolar planets or stars. In the Physics Today commentary, the researchers explain:

“As best we can tell, no one has come up with a concept like PCM to compare orbits. With the right assumptions, PCM could possibly be used to get a quick estimate of the average distance between any set of orbiting bodies. Perhaps it can be useful for quickly estimating satellite communication relays, for which signal strength falls off with the square of distance. In any case, at least we know now that Venus is not our closest neighbor—and that Mercury is everybody’s.”

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 23:38 geschreven door peter  

Physicists propose a new way to levitate and propel spacecraft-sized objects with light

BY TIBI PUIU 

In the future, spacecraft could travel to other stars faster than anything currently available by using laser light sources that are millions of miles away. For the moment, this prospect has been explored only theoretically by physicists at Caltech. In their new study, the researchers propose levitating and propelling objects using a beam of light by etching the surface of those objects with specific nanoscale patterns.

Conceptual illustration of a nano-patterned object reorienting itself to remain in a beam of light. 

(Credit: Courtesy of the Atwater laboratory)

A pattern that keeps objects afloat

For decades, researchers have been using so-called optical tweezers to move and manipulate microscopic objects (i.e. nanoparticles) using a focused laser beam. Nanoparticles can be suspended mid-air due to the light scattering and gradient forces resulting from the interaction of the particle with the light. Such devices have been used to trap small metal particles, but also viruses, bacteria, living cells, and even strands of DNA. For his contributions to developing optical tweezers, Arthur Ashkin was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics.

However, optical tweezers are limited by distance and the size of the objects. Essentially, only very small objects can be manipulated with light in this fashion and only from close range.

“One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer. But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on,” Ognjen Ilic, a postdoc at Caltech and the study’s first author, said in a statement.

In their new study, Ilic and colleagues have proposed a radical new way to use light in order to trap or even propel objects. Theoretically, their method is not limited by an object’s size or distance from the source, which means macroscopic objects such a spacecraft could be accelerated, perhaps even close to relativistic speeds, using the force of light alone.

For this to work, certain nanoscale patterns need to be etched on an object’s surface. When the concentrated laser beam hits this patterned surface, the object should begin to “self-stabilize” by generating torque to keep it in the light beam. The authors say that the patterning is designed in such a way as to encode the object’s stability.

This would work for any kind of object, from a grain of rice to a spaceship in size. The light source could also be millions of miles away which would make this technology ideal to power a light sail for space exploration.

“We have come up with a method that could levitate macroscopic objects,” said Harry Atwater, Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft. We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”

The findings were reported in the journal Nature Photonics.

{https://www.zmescience.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

Controversial Book Argues: Humans Are Not From Earth

A researcher argues that humans evolved on a different planet and were eventually brought to Earth in the very distant past.

What if we are the aliens we’ve been searching for all along?

Despite the progress made in various branches of science like biology, chemistry, and astrophysics, we are still unable to say for certain how life started on Earth.

Was this a unique event across the universe? Or is it possible that there are out there planets eerily similar to Earth, which also harbor life, even if it is just primitive?

The truth is that we have theorized about the origins of life, ever since the human mind was capable of thinking.

Did life come from space? Or did life originate on the planet, without ‘extraterrestrial’ (Comets, Asteroids, etc.) influence?

If amino acids arrived with comet impacts, it would suggest, as some experts argue, that life may be widespread in our solar system.

But what if things are not so simple? What if the origins of life are anything but rational? And what if humans are NOT from Earth?

That’s a controversial subject touched by a book written by American ecologist Dr. Ellis Silver.

His book, titled ‘Humans are not from Earth: a scientific evaluation of the evidence‘ suggests that our species is not native to Earth and that it is very possible we’ve come from elsewhere.

Dr. Silver provides arguments based on various subjects like human psychology, arguing that mankind did not evolve alongside other life forms on Earth. Instead, the researcher indicates that humans came into existence on a different planet, and we were ‘brought to Earth’, in the very distant past.

The book offers five distinctive points:

• 53 factors that prove we couldn’t have evolved on Earth.
• Why we’re here on Earth, and how and when we got here.
• Where our true home planet is, and what it’s like to live there.
• Why valid evidence is ignored, denied and covered up by scientists and governments. (There’s actually a very good reason.)
• What we really know about extraterrestrials and their spacecraft.

The researcher explained that his book is based on the scientific differences between humans and other animals on Earth.

The Earth approximately meets our needs as a species, but perhaps not as strongly as whoever brought us here initially thought,” explained Dr. Silver in an interview.

The researcher points towards chronic diseases that affect the human race, like back pain, indicating it could be a sign that proves our species formed on another world, with much less gravity.

Dr. Silver also mentions other uniquely human traits: humans have 223 extra genes, not found in any other species.

The American researcher further suggests the human race has a number of ‘serious flaws’ that point to the possibility we are not from this planet.

“We are all chronically ill,” Dr. Silver explains.

“Indeed, if you can find a single person who is 100% fit and healthy and not suffering from some (perhaps hidden or unstated) condition or disorder (there’s an extensive list in the book) I would be extremely surprised – I have not been able to find anyone.”

{ https://curiosmos.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 23:10 geschreven door peter  

That’s not what Heath said he saw Dec. 16, 2018, but he’s glad there are other people talking about UFOs. Heath posted the video of what he saw on YouTube and immediately called his mom.

On Tuesday, he brought the video to The Herald.

He said he saw the flying object — a rotating silver orb with two lights on one side, and one on another — near his home, flying above the AMC Classic Rock Hill 7 movie theater on Cherry and Anderson roads. He said the object was just feet above the movie theater roof, but later flew higher in the sky.

Heath said he followed the object down Interstate 77 to Chester, where he lost sight of it over the treeline. He said it was difficult to get the object on video. His phone wouldn’t pick it up on camera, so he had to use a digital camera.

“My hands were shaking so bad,” he said. “Because I saw it up close. I was freaked out.”

Heath and the Kiawah Island woman aren’t alone. The National UFO Reporting Center database shows 76 reports of UFO sightings in South Carolina from 2018.

The UFO database lists 1,797 reports from South Carolina total, going back to 1939 and as recent as a report from Tega Cay on March 11, of three unidentifiable orange lights in the sky near Lake Wylie.

Some of the reports are pretty out there. One person in Lancaster reported seeing something that looked like a “jiggly ball of bright white vibrating jello” in the sky on Dec. 21, 2017.

Other reports have scientific explanations. The National UFO Reporting Center notes a report from North Myrtle Beach on July 15, 2018, of a “single fireball shape hovering high over the water” may have been a Mars sighting.

The organization said two reports from June 29, 2015m, one from Rock Hill and one from Chester, of space debris and a “fireball with a long tail,” respectively, were sightings of satellite debris re-entering the atmosphere. The American Meteor Society said the organization was sent 150 reports from Georgia and the Carolinas of “a bright fiery object” that day in 2015, which they also said was likely satellite debris.

Other South Carolinians have even reported seeing an orb with rotating lights, like Heath.

One person reported seeing three orange orbs that rotated in Myrtle Beach on May 15, 2017. Someone in Fort Mill reported seeing three objects rotating vertically and horizontally in the sky Oct. 18, 2014, according to the UFO Reporting Center database.

RICHARD HEATH

Dwayne Brown, head of NASA’s science communications office in Washington, D.C., said it’s common to see meteorites or objects re-entering the atmosphere. But he said the office hasn’t seen any recent reports.

NASA experts have not evaluated Heath’s video yet, but Brown said he would take a look.

UFO usually refers to supposed alien technology in common use, but UFO technically just means any “unidentified flying object.”

Heath said he’s never seen anything like the orb, which at one point seemed to change color and shape and do flips. He said he believes it was either extraterrestrial tech or a top secret government project.

Heath didn’t always believe in the unexplainable.

“I felt like anything was possible, but I was skeptical,” he said.

But now?

“To be honest with you, I think it had to be a UFO,” he said.

{ https://www.heraldonline.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 22:48 geschreven door peter  

More than one reality exists, shocking study says

By Chris Ciaccia | Fox News

Shocking study says more than one reality exists

A shocking new study suggest that, at a quantum level at least, two different versions of reality exist. The new study comes from the idea brought to the forefront in Eugene Wigner's friend scenario, which states that two people could see the same photon, or light particle, and have different observations of the photon. Even though the observations, and the conclusions drawn from those observations, are different, they would both be correct.

If you've ever questioned the nature of your reality, a new study suggests that there are actually two different versions of it — at least at the quantum level.

The pre-published study, found in arXiv, sheds new light on the complex idea that two people could see the same photon, come to different conclusions about the photon, yet still both be correct.

"In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner’s eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities," the researchers wrote in the study. "While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner’s friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test."

• PHYSICISTS MAY HAVE FOUND A WAY TO 'UNTANGLE' INFORMATION TRAPPED IN A BLACK HOLE

They continued: "In a state-of-the-art photon experiment, we here realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not."

One of the study's co-authors, Martin Ringbauer, told Live Science that "you can verify both of them," adding that theoretical advances were needed before they were able to prove Wigner's hypothesis, which was first proposed in 1961.

"Theoretical advances were needed to formulate the problem in a way that is testable. Then, the experimental side needed developments on the control of quantum systems to implement something like that," he told the news outlet.

To test the idea, the researchers designated "two different laboratories, each involving an experimenter and their friend," introducing two pairs of entangled photons, which allowed for their fates to be intertwined. They also introduced "people" (who were not real, but rather represented observers) to measure one photon in the pair, record their results and repeat the process for the second photon using quantum memory.

• STEPHEN HAWKING SAID 'THERE IS NO GOD' AND THAT HUMANS WILL 'LIVE IN SPACE' IN FINAL BOOK

In 1961, when Wigner introduced the idea that would eventually become known as "Wigner's friend," only one scenario was used. With the new experiment, it was doubled and the results that Wigner had first discussed more than 50 years still rang true.

Quantum mechanics gives detail on how the world works at a scale so small that the rules of physics do not apply, Live Science added. With the new findings of the study, the field of quantum mechanics may change if measurements are not the same for everyone.

"It seems that, in contrast to classical physics, measurement results cannot be considered absolute truth but must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement," Ringbauer told Live Science. "The stories we tell about quantum mechanics have to adapt to that."

{ https://www.foxnews.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 21:16 geschreven door peter  

21-03-2019 om 21:10 geschreven door peter  

Flat Earthers Plan Trip Around Antarctica to Prove You Know What

Paul Seaburn

They’re ba-ack! OK, they never left us, but you might have thought they would after Flat Earthers had their core belief system destroyed by their own leaders in an attempt to prove their pancaked planet theory with a gyroscope and instead reinforced the fact that Earth is round, round, get around, it is a-round. They obviously don’t follow Brian Wilson either, but seem to be more prone to John Belushi’s Bluto in “Animal House,” who rallied fellow frat members into action with his battle cry:

“What? Over? Did you say ‘over’? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!… It ain’t over now, ’cause when the goin’ gets tough, the tough get goin’. Who’s with me? Let’s go! Come on!..”

Well, the “tough” Flat Earthers are getting going and they’re going to … Antarctica! For those not familiar with the theory, the continent at the bottom of the planet that’s round to the rest of us is different if a globe were flattened with the North Pole in the center. Then, the outer rim would be a thin band we’d all call Antarctica. For those who know their math, that’s also called a circumference. The circumference of the round Earth is about 24,900 miles (40,000 km) but that’s around the equator and there’s still the southern hemisphere to flatten out and add to the flat map. In an interview with Forbes, flat-earther Jay Decasby, who is developing a flat earth reality series, puts the white ring of Antarctica circling such a round map at over 60,000 miles.

“But, but, but!” you say … didn’t Colin O’Brady just complete the first-ever solo crossing of Antarctica on a trip that took 54 days and measured 932 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean via the South Pole? Decasby scoffs at your question.

“They’ve made laws to not allow any kind of motorized equipment on the ice which would help us prove not only flat earth but what’s beyond the ice wall, but in reality, we don’t even need to get onto the ice to prove flat earth.”

That’s right. He claims the best way to prove the Earth is flat is to sail a ship around the circumference of Antarctica which should be 60,000 miles. Such a trip would also prove that the edge of the Earth is circled by a wall of ice 150 feet high. Captain James Cook did this first, although that claim is obviously disputed by flat earthers like Decasby who says there’s no way Cook sailed 60,000 miles (did you catch the flaw in this logic?), but still quotes Cook’s description of a high wall of ice in which the captain was never able to find an inlet that penetrated it. Never mind that Antarctica has since been circled many times and many inlets have been found.

Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg strove to go around the world in 80 days. Viking Ocean Cruises is offering an Ultimate World Cruise that will circumnavigate the Earth and visit 59 countries in 245 days (for the low, low price of $93,000). Why not, in the name of science or the debunking of science, let these flat earth believers finance and sail a ship around Antarctica and prove their theory to the “the sun-worshipping cult of heliocentrism” or forever hold their peace?

Entertainment could be provided by bands singing flat versions of “I Get Around,” “Roundabout” and “Fat-Bottomed Girls (You Make the Rockin’ World Go Round).” The challenge will be to find a cruse ship with a big enough galley to stock a buffet for 60,000 miles. What would Bluto say?

“Let’s do it!!!”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

21-03-2019 om 20:58 geschreven door peter  

There are a bunch of challenges with Mars, including its lack of a protective magnetosphere and lower surface gravity. But one of the biggest is its thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide. 

If you were standing on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you’d freeze to death and asphyxiate from a lack of oxygen. But you’d also experience less than 1% the atmospheric pressure you enjoy here on Earth.

And it turns out, this thin atmosphere is making it incredibly challenging to get significant payloads safely down to the surface of the Red Planet. In fact, only 53% of missions to Mars have actually worked out properly.

So let’s talk about how missions to Mars have worked in the past, and I’ll show you what the problem is.

Landing on Mars Is the Worst

Historically, missions to Mars are launched from Earth during the flight windows that open up every two years or so when Earth and Mars are closer together. ExoMars flew in 2016, InSight in 2018 and the Mars 2020 rover will fly in, well, 2020.

The missions follow interplanetary transfer trajectory designed to either get there the fastest, or with the least amount of fuel. 

As the spacecraft enters the atmosphere of Mars, it’s going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. It has to somehow lose all that velocity before landing gently on the surface of the Red Planet.

Here on Earth, you can use the thick Earthican atmosphere to slow your descent, bleeding off your velocity with a heat shield. The space shuttle’s tiles were designed to absorb the heat of re-entry, as the 77 tonne orbiter went from 28,000 km/h to zero. 

A similar technique could be used on Venus or Titan, where they have thick atmospheres.

The Moon, without any atmosphere at all is relatively straightforward to land on as well. Without any atmosphere at all, there’s no need for a heat shield, you just use propulsion to slow your orbit and land on the surface. As long as you bring enough propellant, you can stick the landing.

Back to Mars, with a spacecraft hurtling into its thin atmosphere at more than 20,000 kilometers per hour. 

Curiosity Is the Limit

Traditionally, missions have started their descent with an aeroshell to remove some of the spacecraft’s velocity. The heaviest mission ever sent to Mars was Curiosity, which weighed in at 1 metric tonne, or 2,200 pounds. 

When it entered the Martian atmosphere, it was going 5.9 kilometers a second, or 22,000 kilometers an hour.

Curiosity had the largest aeroshell ever sent to Mars, measuring 4.5 meters across. This huge aeroshell was tilted at an angle, allowing the spacecraft to maneuver as it hits the thin atmosphere of Mars, aiming for a specific landing zone.

At about 131 kilometers altitude, the spacecraft would start firing thrusters to perfect adjust the trajectory as it approached the surface of Mars.

About 80 seconds of flight through atmosphere, the temperatures on the heat shield rose to 2,100 degrees celsius. In order to not melt, the heat shield used a special material called Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, or PICA. The same material SpaceX uses for its Dragon Capsules, by the way.

Once it had slowed its velocity to lower than Mach 2.2, the spacecraft deployed the largest parachute ever built for a mission to Mars – 16 meters across. This parachute could generate 29,000 kilograms of drag force, slowing it down even more. 

The suspension lines were made of Technora and Kevlar, which are pretty much the strongest and most heat resistant materials we know of.

Then it jettisoned its parachute and used rocket engines to slow its descent even more. When it was close enough, Curiosity deployed a skycrane that lowered the rover down gently to the surface.

This is the quick version. If you want an extensive overview of what Curiosity went through landing on Mars, I highly recommend you check out Emily Lakdawalla’s “The Design and Engineering of Curiosity”.

Curiosity only weighed one tonne. 

Going Heavier Doesn’t Scale

Want to do the same thing with heavier payloads? I’m sure you’re imagining bigger aeroshells, bigger parachutes, bigger skycranes.

In theory, the SpaceX Starship will send 100 tonnes of colonists and their stuff to the surface of Mars. 

Here’s the problem. The methods of decelerating in the Martian atmosphere don’t scale up very well.

First, let’s start with parachutes. To be honest, at 1-tonne, Curiosity is about as heavy as you can get using a parachute. Any heavier and there just aren’t any materials engineers can use that can handle the deceleration load.

A couple of months ago, NASA engineers celebrated the successful test of the Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment, or ASPIRE. This is the parachute that’ll be used for the Mars 2020 rover mission. 

They put the parachute made of advanced composite fabrics, like nylon, Technora and Kevlar, onto a sounding rocket and launched it to an altitude of 37 kilometers, mimicking the conditions the spacecraft will experience as it arrives at Mars.

The parachute deployed in a fraction of a second, and fully inflated, experienced 32,000 kilograms of force. If you were on board at the time, you would experience 3.6 times as much force as crashing into a wall going 100 km/h wearing your seatbelt. In other words, you wouldn’t survive.

If the spacecraft was any heavier, it would need to be made of impossible composite fabrics. And forget about passengers.

NASA has been trying out different ideas to land heavier payloads on Mars, like, as much as 3 tonnes. 

One idea is called the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD. The idea is to use a much larger aerodynamic decelerator that would inflate around the spacecraft like a bouncy castle as it enters the Martian gravity.

In 2015, NASA actually tested this technology, carrying a prototype vehicle on a balloon to an altitude of 36 kilometers. The vehicle then fired its solid rocket, carrying it to an altitude of 55 kilometers. 

As it was rocketing upwards, it inflated its Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator to a diameter of 6 meters (or 20 feet), which then slowed it back down to Mach 2.4. Unfortunately its parachute failed to deploy properly, so it crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

That’s progress. If they can actually work out the engineering and physics, we could someday see 3 tonne spacecraft landing on the surface of Mars. Three whole tonnes.

More Propulsion, Less Cargo

The next idea to scale up a Mars landing is to use more propulsion. In theory, you can just carry more fuel, fire your rockets when you arrive at Mars, and cancel all that velocity. The problem, of course, is that the more mass you have to carry to decelerate, the less mass that you can actually land on the surface of Mars. 

The SpaceX Starship is expected to use a propulsive landing to get 100 tonnes down to the surface of Mars. Because it’s taking a more direct, faster path, the Starship will hit the Martian atmosphere faster than 8.5 km/s and then use aerodynamic forces to slow its entry.

It doesn’t have to go this fast, of course. The Starship could use aerobraking, passing through the upper atmosphere several times to bleed off velocity. In fact, this is the method that orbital spacecraft going to Mars use.

But then passengers on board would need to spend weeks for the spacecraft to slow down and go into orbit around Mars, and then to descend through the atmosphere.

According to Elon Musk, his delightfully unintuitive strategy for handling all that heat is to build the spacecraft out of stainless steel, and then tiny holes in the shell will bleed methane fuel out to keep the windward side of the spacecraft cool.

That said, Elon Musk thinks there’s a way. And before we discount his ideas, let’s watch the twin side boosters from the Falcon Heavy rocket land perfectly together. 

And pay no attention to what happened to the central booster.

A new study from the Aerospace Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign proposes that missions to Mars could take advantage of the thicker atmosphere that’s closer to the surface of Mars.

In their paper titled, “Entry Trajectory Options for High Ballistic Coefficient Vehicles at Mars”, the researchers propose that spacecraft flying to Mars don’t need to be in such a hurry to get rid of their velocity.

As the spacecraft is screaming through the atmosphere, it’ll still be able to generate a lot of aerodynamic lift, which could be used to steer it through the atmosphere.

They ran the calculations and found that the ideal angle was to just point the spacecraft straight down and dive towards the surface. Then, at the last possible moment, pull up using the aerodynamic lift to fly sideways through the thickest part of the atmosphere.

This increases the drag and lets you get rid of the most amount of velocity before you turn on your descent engines and complete your powered landing.

That sounds, um, fun.

If humanity is going to build a viable future on the surface of Mars, we’re going to need to crack this problem. We’re going to need to develop a series of technologies and techniques that make landing on Mars more reliable and safe. 

I suspect it’s going to be much much more challenging than people are expecting, but I’m looking forward to the ideas that will be tested in the coming years.

• A big thank you to Nancy Atkinson who covered this topic here on Universe Today more than a decade ago, and inspired me to work on this video.

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 18:31 geschreven door peter  

Scientists create liquid metal that stretches like Terminator

Credit: American Chemical Society

Come with me if you want to stretch.

In good news, scientists have not created a remorseless Terminator-style killing machine for real. In other good news, they've figured out how to make a liquid metal that can stretch in all sorts of directions. It looks like a sci-fi visual effect made real.

The American Chemical Society released a video on Wednesday of the metal in action to go along with a paper titled Magnetic Liquid Metals Manipulated in the Three-Dimensional Free Space from the Applied Materials & Interfaces journal. 

Robert Patrick as the liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Video screenshot by CNET

The shiny liquid metal can be manipulated with magnets. It stretches like the fictional T-1000 robot from Terminator 2, and can also be used to complete a circuit. 

Scientists at Beihang University in China led the research project.

"They added iron particles to a droplet of a gallium, indium and tin alloy immersed in hydrochloric acid," the ACS reports. "A gallium oxide layer formed on the droplet surface, which lowered the surface tension of the liquid metal." This allows it to stretch out and move without breaking apart.

We're a long way off from morphing androids, but the researchers believe this sort of liquid metal could one day be incorporated into soft robotics. You can almost hear it whispering, "I'll be back."

{ https://www.cnet.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 18:06 geschreven door peter  

Une augmentation récente du nombre d’observations d’avions de type TR-3B présumés a déclenché une panique dans les milieux complotistes en ligne. Les experts craignent que “quelque chose ne se prépare” au cœur des inquiétudes suscitées par les expériences militaires américaines top-secrètes impliquant potentiellement des extraterrestres. Michael, de la chaîne YouTube MrMBB333, a publié sur Youtube la dernière observation du présumé TR-3B à Toledo, Ohio.

Il a dit : 

“D’après le type qui a filmé ça, il avait fait au moins trois fois le tour de son quartier.”

“On dirait un triangle parfait. On ne voit rien d’autre que les lumières.”

“J’ai essayé de mettre différents filtres de lumière pour obtenir une image plus claire, mais tout ce l’on voit sont les lumières vives.”

“Nous en voyons beaucoup ces derniers temps, surtout dans l’Ohio.”

“Il se passe quelque chose.”

La vidéo montre que l’objet possède une grande lumière au centre du triangle, une lumière plus petite à l’avant et trois autres à l’arrière.

Les spectateurs ont remarqué que les “vaisseaux en forme de triangle sont partout de nos jours”.

Un utilisateur a dit : “J’ai l’impression que j’allais commencer à voir beaucoup plus de ce genre de choses bientôt.”

L’observation a eu lieu à quelques kilomètres seulement de la base aérienne de Wright-Patterson, ce qui soulève des inquiétudes quant à la participation militaire américaine.

Les TR-3B sont fréquents dans les observations d’OVNI en tant qu’objets triangulaires noirs, silencieux et de grande taille, souvent observés la nuit.

Selon des fonctionnaires du gouvernement, le TR-3B “n’existe pas”.

La théorie autour de ces vaisseaux prétend qu’ils sont fabriqués dans des bases militaires top-secrètes comme la Zone 51 dans le Nevada, via la rétro-ingénierie des technologies extraterrestres.

D’autres prétendent qu’il s’agit de vrais OVNI pilotés par des extraterrestres en visite sur Terre.

Il y a eu d’autres observations d’OVNI triangulaires récemment en Russie et en Caroline du Nord.

• Source: Express.co.uk, le 28 décembre 2018 – 
• Traduction Nouvelordremondial.cc

L'apparition du mystérieux OVNI "TR-3B" provoque la panique au sujet de "Plans Militaires Américains Top-Secrets"

L'apparition du mystérieux OVNI "TR-3B" provoque la panique au sujet de "Plans Militaires Américains Top-Secrets" Il y a eu une augmentation choquante du nombre d'observations présumées d'OVNI ...

https://www.nouvelordremondial.cc/2018/12/28/lapparitio

{ http://www.blogdelazare.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 17:27 geschreven door peter  

21-03-2019 om 12:35 geschreven door peter