DARPA THINKS TARDIGRADES COULD HELP SCIENTISTS 'FREEZE' INJURED SOLDIERS IN TIME

13-04-2019 om 01:51 geschreven door peter  

13-04-2019 om 01:18 geschreven door peter  

The Weakening of Earth’s Magnetic Field Has Greatly Accelerated; That Could Have Apocalyptic Implications For All of Us

By Michael Synder / Economic Collapse

Earth’s magnetic field is getting significantly weaker, the magnetic north pole is shifting at an accelerating pace, and scientists readily admit that a sudden pole shift could potentially cause “trillions of dollars” in damage.  Today, most of us take the protection provided by Earth’s magnetic field completely for granted.  It is essentially a colossal force field which surrounds our planet and makes life possible.  And even with such protection, a giant solar storm could still potentially hit our planet and completely fry our power grid.  But as our magnetic field continues to get weaker and weaker, even much smaller solar storms will have the potential to be cataclysmic.  And once the magnetic field gets weak enough, we will be facing much bigger problems.  As you will see below, if enough solar radiation starts reaching our planet none of us will survive.

Previously, scientists had told us that the magnetic field was weakening by about 5 percent every 100 years.

But now we are being told that data collected from the SWARM satellite indicate that the rate of decay is now 5 percent per decade…

It’s well established that in modern times, the axial dipole component of Earth’s main magnetic field is decreasing by approximately 5% per century. Recently, scientists using the SWARM satellite announced that their data indicate a decay rate ten times faster, or 5% per decade.

In case you didn’t quite get that, 5 percent per decade is 10 times faster than 5 percent per century.

If the rate of decay continues at this pace, or if it speeds up even more, we could be looking at a mass extinction event that is beyond what most people would dare to imagine.

As more solar radiation reaches Earth, we would expect to see a rise in cancer rates, and this is something that even National Geographic has acknowledged…

However, if the magnetic field gets substantially weaker and stays that way for an appreciable amount of time Earth will be less protected from the oodles of high-energy particles that are constantly flying around in space. This means that everything on the planet will be exposed to higher levels of radiation, which over time could produce an increase in diseases like cancer, as well as harm delicate spacecraft and power grids on Earth.

Of course we are already seeing this.  Cancer rates have been rising all over the world, and if you live in the United States there is a one in three chance that you will get cancer in your lifetime.

But as the magnetic field continues to weaken, things will get worse.

A lot worse.

The weaker the magnetic field gets, the amount of solar radiation that will reach us will rise, and eventually it would get so bad that the entire human race would be in jeopardy.  The following comes from Futurism…

Radiation and cosmic rays are a real concern for NASA, especially when it comes to long-term spaceflight.  Astronauts on a mission to Mars could undergo up to 1000 times the exposure to radiation and cosmic rays that they would get on Earth.  If Earth’s magnetic field disappeared, the entire human race – and all of life, in fact –  would be in serious danger.  Cosmic rays would bombard our bodies and could even damage our DNA, increasing worldwide risk of cancer and other illnesses.  The flashes of light visible when we close our eyes would be the least of our problems.

And even if some of us found a way to survive underground for a while, we still wouldn’t be able to survive because solar winds would strip away our planet’s atmosphere and oceans…

Without Earth’s magnetic field, solar winds — streams of electrically charged particles that flow from the sun — would strip away the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. As such, Earth’s magnetic field helped to make life on the planet possible, researchers have said.

So could such a scenario actually happen?

Well,  some scientists are saying that our magnetic field “could be gone in as little as 500 years”, but they are telling us not to worry because Earth’s magnetic poles will “flip” and things will eventually return to normal…

The magnetic field surrounding Earth is weakening, and scientists say it could be gone in as little as 500 years.

The result? Earth’s magnetic poles could, literally, flip upside down.

Of course most scientists believe that a pole flip takes hundreds or thousands of years to happen, but they don’t actually know because they have never seen one take place.

They also believe that we would potentially be facing “trillions of dollars in damage”to our power grid and electrical infrastructure because the magnetic field would be so weak during a flip…

Storms far less powerful than these could cause much more damage if they happened to hit while Earth’s magnetic field was in the midst of a reversal, Roberts said. The result would likely be trillions of dollars in damage to our electrical infrastructure, and right now, there’s no plan for dealing with an event of that magnitude.

“Hopefully, such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future technologies to avoid huge damage,” Roberts concluded. Keep your fingers (but not your magnetic-field lines) crossed.

Most of the experts also believe that a pole flip is still a long way off, but what everybody agrees on is that the magnetic north pole is moving toward Russia at an accelerating pace…

But what’s really catching attention is the acceleration in movement. Around the mid-1990s, the pole suddenly sped up its movements from just over 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year to 34 miles (55 kilometers) annually. As of last year, the pole careened over the international date line toward the Eastern Hemisphere.

And earlier this year, authorities had to issue an emergency update to global positioning systems because “the magnetic field is changing so rapidly”…

The most recent version of the model came out in 2015 and was supposed to last until 2020 — but the magnetic field is changing so rapidly that researchers have to fix the model now. “The error is increasing all the time,” says Arnaud Chulliat, a geomagnetist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Centers for Environmental Information.

I know that I must sound like a broken record by now, but this is important.  Our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and we are seeing things happen that we have never seen before.

Everyone agrees that the Earth’s magnetic field is rapidly getting weaker, and that is making us more vulnerable with each passing day.

Most of the experts are trying to put a happy face on things and are assuring us that everything is going to be okay.

Hopefully they are right, but I wouldn’t count on it.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The Endand Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

• http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-weakening-of-earths-magnetic-field-has-greatly-accelerated-and-that-could-have-apocalyptic-implications-for-all-of-us

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

13-04-2019 om 00:52 geschreven door peter  

Crash and Burn: Israel’s Moon Shot Ends in Disaster.

With the settler state more divided than ever, and tensions between the native Palestinians as high as ever, this event was meant to be Israel’s “unifying moment” that would bring all Israelis (but not its Arab residents) and globally Jewry together with a shared purpose for one glorious moment. 

The attempted moon landing by the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet was broadcast live last night, on the side of the spacecraft read the slogan, “Small country, big dreams.”

However, the Jewish state’s lunar dream crashed and burned, in spectacular fashion, as one of the craft’s main engines blew up on its final descent, crashing into the Moon.

The explosion is said to have marked the end of Israel’s fledgling satellite industry, effectively denying the Jewish state a seat in the elite global club of countries who’ve executed successful lunar landings.

The timing of this grand process – culminating at the exact moment when the Israeli election results were announced – was perhaps too much a coincidence for even the most ardent non-skeptic. Somewhat poetically, Israel’s shallow 2019 election campaign ended as it deserved: A farce.

Noa Landau from Haaretz summed the irony up as follows:

“This is why the loss of communications with the spacecraft, just a moment before the anticipated landing, and just a moment before the announcement of the final election vote results, which at the very last moment went awry – exactly like the landing – felt like one big metaphor. Like the country that could have been, but we have missed out on. In the high-tech superpower filled with traffic jams and embarassing trains, where it’s impossible to receive a package in the mail, and votes can’t be correctly counted, everything is so close, but not quite.” 

RT International reports…

Beresheet’s engine stopped working around 10 kilometers from the surface, with the vehicle crashing into the Moon at a speed of over 130 meters per second.

View image on Twitter

Everyday Astronaut@Erdayastronaut

It looks like the #beresheet lander (the first private lander trying to land on the moon) hit the surface going 134 m/s (wayyyyyy too fast) after its main engine cut out around 10 km in altitude

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The blunder occurred on a live feed in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, who arrived at the control center for the occasion.

View image on Twitter

Elad Ratson 

✔@EladRatson

Just received from SpaceIL communication team what appears to be the last image #Beresheet spacecraft managed to beam to earth before it crashed on the moons surface

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However, the space explorers didn’t seem shaken by the setback as they all chanted a solemn song to show that getting so close to the goal was an achievement in itself.

Netanyahu has already promised that an Israeli spacecraft will be back to the Moon in the next two or three years.

View image on Twitter

Israel To The Moon@TeamSpaceIL

22 kilometers from the Moon! #IsraelToTheMoon #SpaceIL #Beresheet

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Beresheet, which is Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning,” could have also become the first private spacecraft to land on the Moon. It was constructed by Israeli nonprofit space venture SpaceIL and state-owned defense contractor Israel Aerospace Industries. The $100 million needed for the ambitious project came from private investors.

Only Russia, the US, and China have so far managed to perform controlled “soft” landings on the lunar surface.

• READ MORE SPACE NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Space Files

{ https://21stcenturywire.com/ }

13-04-2019 om 00:33 geschreven door peter  

It’s time for the latest edition of “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”, the game show that pits seemingly unethical science against potentially catastrophic predictions. In today’s competition, scientists in China (one point already for the catastrophic team) announce they used gene-editing to place human brain genes in rhesus macaque monkeys and it made their brains smarter. Cue the music from every “Planet of the Apes” movie and let the game begin!

“The presented data represents the first attempt to experimentally interrogate the genetic basis of human brain origin using a transgenic monkey model, and it values the use of nonhuman primates in understanding human unique traits.”

If the opening paragraph of the new study, “Transgenic rhesus monkeys carrying the human MCPH1 gene copies show human-like neoteny of brain development,” published recently in the journal National Science Review, is any indication, scientists are learning from lawyers how to protect their clients/experiments by hiding them in clouds of big, confusing words and phrases. Experimentally interrogate?

This is interesting.

China Daily reports that researchers from the Beijing-based National Science Review, the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of North Carolina (that’s in the U.S. – looks like it’s playing for the Seemingly Unethicals) edited human MCPH1 genes – a gene that is critical in fetal brain development because it controls brain size and rate of growth – and created 11 transgenic (a cloud word meaning “artificially carrying DNA from an unrelated organism”) monkeys. Eight of those monkeys were first-generation and three were second-generation, obliterating the ‘artificial’ part of ‘transgenic’ by getting their human genes from their monkey parents.

“According to the research article, brain imaging and tissue section analysis showed an altered pattern of neuron differentiation and a delayed maturation of the neural system, which is similar to the developmental delay (neoteny) in humans.”

In other words, the monkeys showed the human trait of slow brain development (neoteny) rather than the rapid growth of normal monkey brains. What was the benefit of this slow growth?

“The study also found that the transgenic monkeys exhibited better short-term memory and shorter reaction time compared to wild rhesus monkeys in the control group.”

To put it bluntly — even the monkeys could understand the results because the human genes made them smarter!

Ding-ding-ding! That bell means it’s time to play the lightning “What could possibly go wrong?” round.

Time-out called by the Potentially Catastrophics. In a shocking and somewhat honorable display of conscience, Martin Styner, a University of North Carolina computer scientist and coauthor of the Chinese report, told the MIT Technology Review that his role was merely to train Chinese student on how to extract brain volume data from MRI images and, after learning the true purpose, considered removing his name from the paper, which he claims could not find a publisher in the West. Styner then throws his “What could possibly go wrong?” pitch:

“I don’t think that is a good direction. Now we have created this animal which is different than it is supposed to be. When we do experiments, we have to have a good understanding of what we are trying to learn, to help society, and that is not the case here.”

Is this going to be a sequel to Planet of the Apes or Flowers for Algernon?

Unfortunately, that pitch didn’t strike out Bing Su, the geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology who led the research. He told the MIT Technology Review he is planning to create more smart monkeys and is planning to test another gene — SRGAP2C – which has been called the “humanity switch” and the “missing genetic link” because it appeared about two million years ago when Australopithecus (the Southern Ape) was being replaced by the smarter Homo habilis.

Putting the “humanity switch” in a monkey? What could possibly go wrong? This game isn’t over … it’s barely starting. Is this progress … or an unethical march down the field to unforeseen consequences?

If we’ve learned anything from “Planet of the Apes,” it’s that if this game goes into overtime, it won’t be a sudden death.

But not everyone is on board.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-04-2019 om 00:10 geschreven door peter  

In the summer of 1997, one of the most controversial UFO-themed books ever written was published. Its title was The Day After Roswell. It was written by William Birnes (the editor of the now-defunct UFO Magazine and of History Channel’s also defunct UFO Hunters) and Philip Corso (the subject of the book). Specifically, he was Lieutenant Colonel. Philip J. Corso. U.S. Army. Corso’s story was both amazing and groundbreaking. But, was it true? That, quite possibly, was the biggest and most important question of all. While some in the field of Ufology firmly embraced the story, many certainly did not, preferring instead to view the book as either government disinformation – intended to confuse the truth of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico back in the summer of 1947 – or nothing more than an elaborate and ingenious hoax designed to make money from the gullible and the “I want to believe” crowd.

According to Corso, in near-singlehanded fashion he spearheaded a top secret program designed to seed alleged alien technology and wreckage – recovered from the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico by the U.S. Army Air Force’s 509^th Bomb Wing in July 1947 – into the private sector. As a result of this wholly clandestine operation, so Corso maintained, the United States was soon able to understand, and even back-engineer, at least some of the extraterrestrial materials found on the ranch. Fiber-optics, transistors, night-vision equipment, and computer chips, were all, allegedly, a direct outgrowth of the extensive studies of the Roswell materials. But, it’s not so much the technology reportedly found at Roswell that I’m focusing my attentions on. Rather, it’s the bodies of the beings allegedly found strewn around the crash site.

Contrary to what the UFommunity said or assumed at the time and since, Corso never explicitly stated that the Roswell corpses were extraterrestrial. In fact, what he really said was quite the opposite. In Corso’s story the so-called “Grey aliens” are actually created, built, or grown to perform specific tasks. As for the creators of the Greys, it was they, Corso repeatedly maintained, who were the real aliens. Corso also said that, as far as he was personally aware, no one has ever seen the real aliens, only ever their black-eyed, large-headed worker-drones that are so well known in the field of Ufology. As for Corso himself, he stated: “…perhaps we should consider the EBEs [Extraterrestrial Biological Entities] as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather than lifeforms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.”

Corso expanded on this, outlining the profoundly weird nature of the Greys: “While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.”

Today, more than two decades after The Day After Roswellsurfaced, the undeniably strange story of Colonel Corsocontinues to divide the UFO research field. It probably always will. Me? I’m sticking to the scenario laid out in my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

12-04-2019 om 23:57 geschreven door peter  

Surprise! Sun's Magnetic Field Is Stronger Than We Thought

12-04-2019 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

By Brian McCready, Patch National Staff 

Here are some of the reported accounts as recorded by the National UFO Reporting Center:

"Several blinking red, white, blue, and green objects in sky moving to one spot.I woke up a little after midnight. I looked out the bathroom window and a red and white blinking object was in the sky. t stayed in one spot for about 3 minutes and proceeded to move faster and blink red. It went towards the backyard.

"I looked out the back window and saw one white, another white, and red flashing lights light up the sky in a line. Looking around the sky, several more triangle shaped objects all oddly moved DOWN towards this line of flashing lights. Two were disc shaped and were fastly blinking red, white, blue, and even green. My mom and I also heard a powerful unordinary sound. Once ALL these objects made it to this line of flashing lights, we saw continued blinking but the objects seemed to vanish," reported in Hamden.

"2 bright greenish flashes illuminated the entire area greenish light. Second flash was very alarming and unnatural giving all three of us in vehicle a panicked bracing for impact feeling. No sounds at all heard. Silent," reported in Killingworth.

"Bright green slow flashes (2) one after another lasting 2-3 secs. through solid cloud deck. No aircraft heard in vicinity.Walking while looking directly north (clouds deck overhead no visibility of stars) first one slow 2 to 3 sec flash GREEN like maybe a meteor, but extremely bright to be able to see thru clouds, followed by a second slow 2-3 sec flash of equal brightness.

"Best guess 2 green meteors coming down. Both were lighting the sky from horizon up to 60' above north horizon and from northwest to northeast expansion. No sound or blast wave followed. But they did look close to be so bright through a solid cloud deck. I was standing just 50 yards north of highway 80 and totoket road intersection walking north in RV park. I am a pilot and amatuer astronomer and well versed in sky phenomenon.

"I only saw the flashes which were green and lit up the cloud deck above me as described above. No other visible indications. I waited but nothing followed. I can say by the color of flash etc... it was not a ground vehicle lights or any ground based lights causing this. Nothing to north but trees and countryside," reported in North Branford. 

"On 91 ramp in (Windsor Locks) saw a flat disk with two bright lights hovering.I was on an on ramp to get onto 91 south in the Windsor Locks area and I saw a flat dark disk with two bright lights on it. I initially thought it was an airplane however when I pulled my car over to take a longer look it had disappeared. There were no trees or faulty sight lines blocking it--it was too high up in the air. It disappeared in less than ten seconds," reported in Windsor.

• The NUFORC has existed since 1974 and investigates reported sightings around the world. There have been more than 90,000 reports made globally.
• Check out all the Connecticut sightings dating back several decades as reported to the UFORC here.

{ https://patch.com/connecticut/newington }

12-04-2019 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

Israel's Beresheet Spacecraft Crashes Into Moon During Landing Attempt

The competition ended last year without a winner, but SpaceIL and IAI, the country's biggest aerospace and defense company, continued working on the 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet. (Some other former GLXP teams, such as Florida-based Moon Express, have kept going as well.)

Last month, the X Prize Foundation announced that SpaceIL could win a special $1 million Moonshot Award if Beresheet successfully landed on the lunar surface.  Just minutes after the moon crash,  X Prize founder and Executive Chairman Peter Diamandis and CEO Anousheh Ansari said SpaceIL and IAI will receive the award despite failing to land. 

"I think they managed to touch the surface of the moon, and that's what we were looking for for our Moonshot Award," Ansari said. 

"And also, besides touching the surface of the moon, they touched the lives and the hearts of an entire nation, an entire world, schoolkids around the world," Diamandis said. 

Peter Diamandis

✔@PeterDiamandis

XPRIZE to award $1 Million Moonshot Award to SpaceIL team for them to continue their work and pursue Beresheet 2.0. Space is hard!!! ⁦@xprize⁩ ⁦@TeamSpaceIL⁩

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The lander launched on the night of Feb. 21, soaring into Earth orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Beresheet continued looping around our planet for the next six weeks, performing engine burns now and again to push its elliptical orbit closer and closer to the moon.

Beresheet ended up covering about 4 million miles (6.5 million kilometers) during this phase of the mission, team members said. No other spacecraft has taken such a long road to the moon. 

Beresheet's slow-and-steady strategy paid off on April 4, when the moon's gravity captured the lander. Beresheet then lowered its lunar orbit via a series of burns, the last of which occurred yesterday (April 10). That 32-second maneuver shifted the spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit with a closest lunar approach of just 9 to 10 miles (15 to 17 kilometers) and a most-distant point 125 miles (200 km) from the gray dirt, mission team members said.

Surface plans

Today's landing was scheduled to occur autonomously, on a patch of the lunar near side known as Mare Serenitatis ("Sea of Serenity"). (All lunar surface craft to date have explored the near side, with one exception: China's Chang'e 4 mission touched down on the far side this past December.)

Beresheet was designed to make some measurements of the local gravity field around its landing site during its two or three Earth days of work on the moon. The craft also toted a small laser retroreflector array built by NASA, a technology demonstration that could increase the precision of future touchdowns on the moon and other celestial bodies. But Beresheet was not a science mission at heart.

The main goals, SpaceIL and IAI representatives have said, involved advancing Israel's space program, increasing the nation's technological knowhow and getting young people more interested in science, technology, engineering and math. 

And the lander has certainly done all of that. It managed to make it to lunar orbit, after all, send back a photograph from near the moon's surface, and almost nail the landing. And Beresheet did all of this for a total mission cost of just $100 million, including launch. 

In addition, project team members have met with more than 1 million Israeli schoolkids over the past eight years, taking the space-exploration message to the young masses. Some of those children will eventually become scientists — and perhaps help design, build or operate spacecraft themselves someday.

"Well, we didn't make it but we definitely tried," Morris Kahn, an entrepreneur who helped found the Beresheet mission, said shortly after the spacecraft's failed landing attempt. "I think we can be proud."

 Space.com senior writer Meghan Bartels contributed to this report. 

•  Israel's 1st Moon Lander: The SpaceIL Beresheet Lunar Mission in Pictures 
•  Why It'll Take Israel's Lunar Lander 8 Weeks to Get to the Moon 
•  Israeli Moon Lander Snaps Epic Space Selfie with a Full Earth 

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/ }

12-04-2019 om 23:15 geschreven door peter  

See the X-ray Neighborhood of the First-Ever Black Hole Photo in This Space Telescope View

12-04-2019 om 22:47 geschreven door peter  

Here are some glorious photos of rare lenticular clouds, sometimes called UFO clouds, plus a word about how they form.

Beautiful shot of lenticular cloud at sunset by Chris Walker in Dayton, Nevada.

Enjoy these photos of beautiful lenticular clouds taken in places around the world, and shared with us by our community at EarthSky Facebook and EarthSky Community Photos.

These lens-shaped clouds typically form where stable moist air flows over a mountain or a range of mountains. When this happens, a series of large-scale standing waves may form on the mountain’s downwind side. If the temperature at the crest of the wave drops to the dew point, moisture in the air may condense to form lenticular clouds. As the moist air moves back down into the trough of the wave, the cloud may evaporate back into vapor. So lenticular clouds can appear and disappear relatively quickly. Plus they’re not familiar to people who live in low-lying or flat terrain. And, just to confound things, lenticular clouds have also been known to form in non-mountainous places, as the result of shear winds created by a front. For all of these reasons, lenticular clouds are often mistaken for UFOs (or “visual cover” for UFOs). Enjoy the photos! Thank you to all who posted.

View at EarthSky Community Photos. | Richard Hasbrouck caught this photo in Truchas, New Mexico.

View at EarthSky Community Photos. | David Roberts caught this photo of lenticular clouds over Mt. Rainier, Washington.

View larger at EarthSky Community Photos. | Richard Doyle captured this lenticular cloud at Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Canada.

Alba Evangelista Ramos, a Brazilian biologist, captured these rare images of a lenticular cloud from a moving vehicle, near the Haute-Provence Observatory, situated in southeastern France. In this particular case, the “UFO cloud” seems to have been produced by the cold mistral wind that strongly blows over southern France, as it was pushed up the 2,132-foot-high (650-meter-high) plateau of the observatory.

Jan Whiteman captured this photo at Lord Howe Island, a volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.

Shared with EarthSky by Jay Lundstrom, who caught this lenticular cloud near Mount Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine.

Sarah Fischer wrote, “I came out of my apartment building, and these were right above my head.”

Lenticular cloud over Roque del Conde, on the island of Tenerife, via Roberto Porto.

“Lenticular cloud outside my window in Dublin, Ireland, this morning. I was surprised to see this as we don’t get them too often here,” said Anthony Lynch Photography.

View larger. | Lenticular cloud over Iceland by Anne Greschuk.

View larger. | Lenticular clouds over Sangre de Cristo mountains, New Mexico, by EarthSky Facebookfriend Geraint Smith.

Angela Mosley caught this lenticular cloud from Denver, Colorado.

Lenticular clouds by Richard T. Hasbrouck in Truchas, New Mexico.

David Marshall captured this lenticular cloud above the Alps in northern Italy.

John Lloyd Griffith in north Wales captured this lenticular cloud.

This photo comes from Michel Studinger of Operation IceBridge. It’s a lenticular cloud over Antarctica.

Radek Zek Photography caught this lenticular cloud.

Emilio Lepeley captured this lenticular cloud over Vicuña, Chile.

Jackie Phillips caught this lenticular cloud over Virginia.

Bottom line: Photos of lenticular clouds in various parts of the world, from the EarthSky community. Click here to submit your photo.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

12-04-2019 om 22:16 geschreven door peter  

Les momies de Nazca, l'A.D.N a parlé

Découvrez l’histoire des momies de Nazca, également appelées les reliques du Pérou, ou encore, les momies tridactyles. Quand les Houaqueros, des pilleurs de tombe d’Amérique latine dévoilent une partie de leur découverte et transmettent à un français, Thierry Jamin, ce qui pourrait être la plus impressionnante découverte de notre Histoire, nous nous retrouvons face à une nouvelle facette de notre passé et de nos origines. Mais quand les analyses ADN de ces restes biologiques parlent, les questions se réveillent…

19/11/18 Momies de Nazca : Résultats Alien Project 2018 - NURÉA TV / GREPP

Momies de Nasca : Résultats Alien Project 2018

Lundi 19 novembre 2018 à 15h00 (09h00 heure péruvienne)

Sous l’égide du congressiste Armando Villanueva, auteur du projet de loi sur les momies de Nasca, présentation officielle des résultats d’analyses au congrès de la République du Pérou (métaux , histologie, datation C14, analyses ADN, scanners HD)

Voilà déjà un long moment que nous suivons de très près le dossier des corps « exotiques » découvertes en 2016 par des Waquerros dans le désert de Nasca au Pérou (dossier ensuite pris en charge sur place par les équipes d’Inkari Cusco et Alien Project) et que nous partageons sur notre antenne les avancées sur les analyses et les interprétations qui peuvent être faites sur ces corps. Après des mois de travail et de nombreuses analyses effectuées par des laboratoires indépendants (C14, ADN, métaux, scanners, tomographies, histologie) l’équipe Alien Project a décidé de présenter officiellement les résultats obtenus lors d’une réunion programmée le 19 novembre à Lima en présence de membres du Congrès péruvien.

A cette occasion, nous avons décidé de dépêcher sur place plusieurs membres des équipes de Nuréa TV et du GREPP afin de vous faire vivre cet évènement au plus près et de vous informer au mieux des éléments nouveaux qui s’ajoutent au dossier « Momies de Nasca ». Notre objectif : récolter un maximum d'infos sur le dossier, essayer de séparer le vrai du faux, l'interprétation du factuel et ainsi donner à chacun la possibilité de se faire un avis sur ces découvertes.

Vous pourrez suivre ici cette réunion en direct du congrès péruvien à Lima et traduite simultanément en français.

Merci d’avance pour vos partages et invitations.

Nora & Guillaume

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12-04-2019 om 21:39 geschreven door peter  

This is the last image Israel’s lunar lander took before it crashed into the moon

{ https://www.technologyreview.com/ }

12-04-2019 om 21:26 geschreven door peter  

What Exactly Is a Black Hole Event Horizon (and What Happens There)?

12-04-2019 om 18:27 geschreven door peter  

When Secrecy is Better than Official Disclosure of Extraterrestrial Life

MICHAEL SALLA

Dr. Steven Greer, a leading figure in the UFO disclosure movement, has just proposed an audacious idea concerning official disclosure of extraterrestrial life. In his expert opinion, acquired over more than 25 years of disclosure advocacy, continued secrecy is better than disclosing the truth about visiting aliens if they are depicted in any other way than peaceful nonviolent beings attempting to advance the evolution of human life on Earth.

In the February 5 installment of Gaia TV’s Disclosure series, Greer was interviewed on the topic of the “Architecture of Secrecy” and explained his view about how official disclosure should be handled. He asserted his controversial idea that continued secrecy is better than any disclosure scenario that depicts extraterrestrials as in any way constituting a threat:

My biggest concern is that there’s a hijacking of disclosure around a narrative of a threat, of an us versus them scenario. That is the sort of thing that can lead to the worst possible outcome.  I wrote a paper called “When Disclosure Serves Secrecy”. Disclosure that would serve the secret agenda is not something that we need. I’d rather have the secrecy continue, frankly. But a disclosure that would be truthful and would be forward looking, and that would have an interplanetary peace initiative, and communication and contact initiative, and that would have the release of these technologies for peaceful energy generation, transportation and what have you, that would transform the planet very quickly  (Video: 9:45)

Greer explicitly referred to Luiz Elizondo and Dr. Hal Puthoff, who are senior figures in Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy, as a major part of the threat scenario that is being currently put out into the public arena through the major news media. On that score, I would agree with Greer that the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) which was created within the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2007, and headed by Elizondo up to 2017, was unnecessarily framing the UFO issue in terms of it being a threat to national security.

If Greer only limited himself to critiquing depictions of UFOs and all extraterrestrial visitors as a threat, which AATIP appeared to be doing, he would be on solid ground. However, Greer in the Disclosure interview, as well as in past public statements, made it clear that he is against researcher that depict any extraterrestrials, even if only a small percentage, as a threat in any way.

On May 2, 2006, Greer launched an extraordinary public attack on my exopolitics research for having committed the egregious sin of proposing that extraterrestrials could in any way behave similarly to humans in terms of a wide range of motivations. My research dividing extraterrestrials into different motivational categories, e.g., the good, the bad and the indifferent, was lambasted by Greer as fueled by disinformation.

Greer is no doubt correct that elements of the Military Industrial Complex are exaggerating the threat narrative when it comes to UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation, which AATIP appeared to be currently doing and which I acknowledged back in my 2006 response to Greer. In it, however, I also pointed out that Greer’s bold assertion that there is no evidence of hostile extraterrestrial behavior, can be easily shown to be wrong by examining multiple sources revealing the egregious behavior of some extraterrestrial visitors.

On July 26, 2010, Greer was confronted by Project Camelot founders, Kerry Cassidy and Bill Ryan, over the same issue, and they presented their own evidentiary sources that some extraterrestrial visitors were behaving unethically and maliciously.

In 2018, Greer attacked two of the insider sources I have cited extensively in my secret space program book series, Corey Goode and William Tompkins, as putting out disinformation about aggressive extraterrestrials, Draconian Reptilians, who are described as a prominent part of the planetary control system. In this case, he speculated that both Goode and Tompkins were implanted with false memories and were unwittingly spreading disinformation.

Again, I responded to Greer by pointing out the abundant evidence refuting his audacious assertion that no extraterrestrials behave in ways that are unethical or malicious. Indeed, I showed how his dismissal of Tompkins claims, in particular, ignored the impressive documentation substantiating his information.

With that brief background on Greer’s past public statements on the issue of some, not all, extraterrestrials being unethical and malicious, the context has been set for better understanding the implications of what Greer had to say next in the February 5 interview.

Greer repeated his assertion that continued secrecy is preferable to any official disclosure announcement describing aliens as a threat, even if only partially or a subset of the entire alien visitation scenario:

The disclosure of this subject is the most important announcement in the history of the human race. How it’s handled, it has to be handled with great wisdom and great care. If it is handled with the kind of buffoonery and clumsiness that is evolving, or with partial truths, mixed in with disinformation, with frightening scenarios that scare the hell out of the public, I actually prefer the secrecy. (17:34)

What makes Greer’s views significant is that he claims to be in touch with members of the oversight group of up to 200 members commonly referred to as the MAJIC committee. Greer asserts that he is providing them with an expert civilian perspective on disclosure, where, incredibly, he appears to be advocating continued secrecy if an official disclosure statement is not framed in the way he prescribes.

In short, what is widely regarded as “full disclosure”, where all the facts and evidence of visiting extraterrestrials – good and bad – along with the truth about secret space programs is publicly revealed in an official announcement, is not supported by Greer. On the contrary, he only supports a “limited disclosure” statement where all references to unethical or malicious aliens is sanitized.

It’s hard to envisage that a leading figure in the disclosure advocacy movement could support continued secrecy on any grounds, let alone the dubious grounds Greer asserts, which I and others have shown ignores a large body of evidence. As to why Greer is taking such an extreme position, there are a number of explanations that come to mind. One is that he is personally invested in a secret Vatican initiative to establish a “New Cosmic Esoteric World Religion” through a “false flag alien savior event” as described elsewhere. Another is that Greer has been co-opted or compromised by the MAJIC Committee in charge of extraterrestrial related projects and is sabotaging the disclosure movement by imposing unreasonable demands for a future official disclosure announcement.

Greer’s position that continued secrecy is better than an official disclosure announcement which contains reference to any extraterrestrial visitors as a threat, is a position that he will find increasingly difficult to defend given the public’s growing awareness of all the available evidence of visiting aliens, and the diverse motivations behind their activities. Full disclosure is already well underway through multiple public initiatives  disclosing all aspects of visiting extraterrestrial life and secret space programs, and any effort to filter or curtail such information in ways favored by Greer, are certain to fail.

© Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. Copyright Notice

Further Reading

• Are Secret Space Program Disclosures Prelude to a False Flag Alien Invasion?
• Secret Space Program Disclosures & False Flag Alien Events
• Exopolitics versus Exospin: A Response to Dr Steven Greer
• Leaked Document Recommends False Flag Alien Invasion to save Clinton Campaign
• Trump Victory Due to FBI Stopping False Flag Alien Invasion
• Will Vatican declaration of an alien savior spark a religious war?

{ https://exonews.org/ }

12-04-2019 om 18:01 geschreven door peter  

12-04-2019 om 17:46 geschreven door peter  

In February, the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience referred to an idea made famous by some books and TV shows: that an image of the Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, carved onto the lid of his sarcophagus when he died in 683 C.E., shows him taking off in a spaceship. Host Rogan was skeptical of the notion, which has been used to argue that extraterrestrial visitors seeded sophisticated ancient societies like the Maya. He asked what mainstream archaeologists made of it.

For David Anderson, that request was a call to action. Anderson, an archaeologist at Radford University in Virginia, jumped on Twitter: “Dear @joerogan, speaking as a ‘mainstream’ archaeologist … it depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death.” The rocket-propelling “fire” below Pakal is a personification of the underworld, and the “spaceship” is a world tree, a common feature in Mayan art. Rogan retweeted Anderson’s thread, bringing him more than 1000 likes and many grateful comments—plus some angry ones.

Pakal’s supposed seat in a spaceship is just one example of what Anderson and others call “pseudoarchaeology,” which ignores the cultural context of ancient artifacts and uses them to support predetermined ideas, rather than test hypotheses, about the past. Common beliefs include that aliens helped build the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, that refugees escaping Atlantis brought technology to cultures around the world, and that European immigrants were the original inhabitants of North America.

These outlandish beliefs have been circulating for decades, but archaeologists like Anderson are now mobilizing to counter them. They are taking to Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and newspapers to debunk false claims and explain real archaeological methods, and they plan to compare notes this week during a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting here. “My profession … needs to do a better job of speaking out,” Anderson says.

He and others are alarmed by the rising popularity of pseudoarchaeological ideas. According to the annual Survey of American Fears by Chapman University in Orange, California, which catalogs paranormal beliefs, in 2018, 41% of Americans believed that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past, and 57% believed that Atlantis or other advanced ancient civilizations existed. Those numbers are up from 2016, when the survey found that 27% of Americans believed in ancient aliens and 40% believed in Atlantis.

“I look at these numbers and say … something has gone massively wrong,” Anderson says. He can’t say exactly what is driving the rise in such ideas, but cable TV shows like Ancient Aliens (which has run for 13 seasons) propagate them, as does the internet.

These beliefs may seem harmless or even amusing, says Jason Colavito, an author in Albany who covers pseudoarchaeology in books and on his blog. But they have “a dark side,” he says. Almost all such claims assume that ancient non-European societies weren’t capable of inventing sophisticated architecture, calendars, math, and sciences like astronomy on their own. “It’s racist at its core,” says Kenneth Feder, an archaeologist at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, who is slated to present at the SAA session and began to write about the dangers of these ideas long before most other scholars paid attention to them.

Adding to archaeologists’ sense of responsibility is that “many of these ideas started within mainstream archaeology,” says Jeb Card, an archaeologist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “We have to own these stories.”

For example, white settlers and early archaeologists in 19th century North America excavated elaborate pre-Columbian burial mounds—but ascribed them to a lost “moundbuilder race” that was killed by the ancestors of Native Americans. Former President Andrew Jackson used those ideas to justify displacing Native Americans from their lands.

Today, white nationalists make similar claims. To argue for Europeans’ deep roots in the Americas, they have latched onto Vinland, a short-lived medieval Viking settlement in eastern Canada, and the “Solutrean hypothesis,” which argues that the Americas were first peopled by arrivals from Western Europe. Neither claim started as pseudoarchaeology—Vinland was real, and the Solutrean hypothesis was proposed by mainstream archaeologists, then tested and ruled out—but they have been twisted for ideological ends. A white supremacist accused of murdering two people on a train in Portland, Oregon, in 2017 included the words “Hail Vinland!!!” in a Facebook post less than a month before the attack.

“It’s really a life-or-death issue,” says Stephennie Mulder, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Texas in Austin, who organized a 30 March symposium there called “Aliens, Atlantis, and Aryanism: ‘Fake News’ in Archaeology and Heritage,” at which Anderson was the keynote speaker.

Yet archaeologists have historically been hesitant to tackle pseudoarchaeology. As the field matured in the 20th century, archaeologists moved into the academy and abdicated the public sphere, says Sara Head, an independent cultural resources archaeologist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the author of the Archaeological Fantasies blog, who is co-organizing the SAA session. “We’ve created a vacuum” that pseudoarchaeology has filled.

Today, “Most archaeological research is unavailable to the public,” she says, obscured by jargon and locked behind paywalls. “But you want something from pseudoarchaeology? I can find you 15 references,” all easily accessible online and on TV.

Re-engaging with the public is an uphill battle, Head says. Debunking specific claims, as Anderson did with Pakal’s “spaceship,” is merely a first step. To make a lasting impact, she and others say, archaeologists must proactively share their work and, in particular, explain their methods step by step. That’s important to counter the common pseudoarchaeological claim that researchers are hiding evidence for aliens or Atlantis.

This isn’t easy work, especially online. All the women interviewed for this article have been harassed online after tackling pseudoarchaeological interpretations. Mulder recently fielded replies that included a knife emoji after she tweeted about research showing that people of diverse ancestries, rather than only Western Europeans, lived in Roman Britain. Colavito reports receiving death threats after a host of Ancient Aliens urged his fans to send Colavito hate mail.

Ironically, the popularity of pseudoarchaeology also reveals intense public interest in the past. Anderson understands: His own interest in archaeology was spurred at age 18 when he read a book about a now-vanished advanced civilization that supposedly helped develop the cultures of ancient Egypt and the Maya. He was inspired to take archaeology courses in college—and found that the reality was even more exciting than the myths. “Archaeology was even better than [the book] had presented it.”

{ http://science.sciencemag.org/ }

12-04-2019 om 17:37 geschreven door peter  

6 of history’s strangest ever theories about outer space

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union's famous satellite Sputnik was launched into orbit, and the space age began. Or did it? SD Tucker, author of Space Oddities, explains that while Sputnik may have marked the beginning of humanity's physical exploration of the universe, we had already been exploring it with our minds for thousands of years…

Here, SD Tucker seeks out the strangest, most surprising and downright silliest theories about outer space that have arisen throughout history.

1. An ice idea

The renegade Austrian astronomer Hanns Hörbiger (1860–1931) didn’t believe in stars, and in an influential 1913 book made the startling assertion that the Milky Way was made entirely out of ice. According to Hörbiger, a series of massive, planet-sized ice-blocks was floating up there in space, encircling our entire solar system in an impenetrable white ring. Light from a few actual suns lurking beyond the ice-ring then shone through this frozen barrier, reflecting off its massed ice-crystals and giving observers on Earth the mere illusion of billions of stars twinkling down at us from the inky blackness.

Read more:

• Ye final frontier: the 17th-century space race
• 5 historical space travel facts

Other astronomers might attempt to show off photographs of the Milky Way’s alleged ‘stars’ to prove their case, but Hörbiger had an easy answer ready to these arguments: all such images were simply fakes. As to any tedious mathematical objections which might have been made to his proposal, Hörbiger had an even more emphatic response in store. “Mathematics,” he once pronounced, “is nothing but lies!”.

Hörbiger’s full, entirely maths-less, theory was termed the Welteislehre, or ‘world ice theory’. Basically, it held that at some distant point in our galaxy’s past there had been a gigantic super-sun, millions of times the size of our own, next to which had orbited a massive planet, covered by layers of ice hundreds of miles thick. Eventually, this ice-planet fell into the super-sun, melted, and transformed into jets of super-charged steam that blew the sun apart, spewing out lumps of rock and fire which ultimately settled down to become the planets of our own current solar system.

Vast clouds of oxygen were also released from the explosion, and reacted with thin layers of hydrogen gases already swirling through space, creating masses of space-water which, space being cold, soon froze into the gigantic ring of interstellar icebergs which now encircled us all. Sometimes, said Hörbiger, one of these ice-blocks breaks away and floats into the pull of our sun’s gravitational field, falling into it and creating sun-spots, which are really colossal melting ice-cubes. Hörbiger’s theory was later taken up by various leading Nazis, including Adolf Hitler.

Hanns Hörbiger, founder of the World Ice Theory. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)

2. Through a glass

During the 1950s, John Bradbury, a chiropodist from Ashton-under-Lyne, UK, developed a new kind of telescope filled with an amazing 15 lenses. According to Bradbury, the more lenses in your telescope, the better the view of the heavens you would get, something which allowed him to see the very edge of the universe itself, which he said was rectangular, made of metal, and magnetic. His special telescope also somehow allowed Bradbury to discern that the Earth was not spherical at all, but flat on the top, where mankind lived, and hemispherical on the bottom, like a grapefruit cut in half.

Read more:

• Opinion: Was the Moon landing really a great leap for mankind? (exclusive to The Library)
• Star Wars: why did the film make history?

As for the moon, Bradbury determined it was constructed of a thin shell of carbon one or two inches thick, and slightly convex. As it travelled through the sky, it accumulated large amounts of phosphorescent plasticine from some unknown source – more and more each day, until it was completely covered in the stuff, leading to what we call a full moon. Then, as the weight of this plasticine grew too heavy, it all started to drop back off again, until we were left with no visible moon at all. One night in 1953, Bradbury claimed to have seen a giant finger made of plasticine emerging from the top of the moon, a remarkable sight indeed, but one which nobody else was able to confirm because no other astronomers possessed one of his multi-lensed telescopes. The reason nobody possessed one of these devices was because, by filling it up with so many pieces of glass, Bradbury ended up with massively distorted images bearing no resemblance whatsoever to reality.

Samuel Shenton, founder of the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS). (Photo by Kent Photo News (K.P.N.)/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

3. Falling flat

Samuel Shenton (1903–71) was the Devon-based leader of the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), which he founded in 1956. Shenton’s beloved ‘flat earth’, he said, was best imagined as being a kind of giant Rich Tea biscuit surrounded by a big circular wall of ice cubes. In 1962, Shenton explained the basics of his theory thus: “You see, the world is flat, like a plate. It is steady, and doesn’t move or revolve. It is surrounded by a solid ice-barrier, and the whole lot is at the bottom of a [cylindrical] pit in what we call ‘Mother Earth’, which is a flat plain so large that it is endless. When you travel around the world and arrive back at the same place, it is like walking around the edge of a plate.” Shenton further speculated that missing persons who leave their homes one day and then never return may simply have walked too far by accident and then fallen off the edge of the world whilst trying to navigate the ice-barrier.

Read more:

• What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke Island?
• The Tudor guide to colonising the world (exclusive to The Library)

Given the nature of Shenton’s beliefs, the advent of the space age proved quite an irritation for him. On 24 December 1968, Shenton observed Nasa perpetrate the ultimate lie. To a live TV audience of an estimated 500 million, the Apollo 8 astronauts turned their camera down upon Earth itself, displaying disturbing evidence it was round. Seeing as Shenton believed that the Bible proved Earth was flat, he reasoned this footage was simply a “deceptive cloak” on Nasa’s behalf, and by April 1969 he was putting the Apollo 8 crew right in a shocking interview with the Birmingham Evening Echo. Above our Earth, he said, was a giant mass of water, which we were currently protected from by a big air-bubble. An atomic explosion or giant earthquake could make this air-bubble pop any day now, flooding the world once more as in the days of Noah, when the world was apparently square. The shock of a second ‘Great Flood’, predicted Shenton, could be so huge that it would make the disc-shaped flat earth revert back to its hitherto-unknown original form, transforming the Rich Tea world-biscuit into a giant Jacobs cream cracker. From this, many people might conclude that Mr Shenton was somewhat cream crackers himself.

Earth rising over curvature of the moon as seen from Apollo 8. (Photo by NASA/NASA/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

4. The planet of love

The mad Frenchman Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was most famous as a leftwing political theoriser, whose particular brand of thinking was eventually dubbed ‘utopian socialism’, but he was also a very bizarre cosmological theoriser. Basically, Fourier thought that the work of Isaac Newton was fine so far as it went, but that the major attractive force keeping planets in orbit around their suns was not really gravity, as Sir Isaac had said, but passion or love. Fourier proposed that the planets, moons and stars were in some sense living animals, with senses like sight, touch and taste, and who were seemingly obsessed with having sex with one another; most notoriously, Fourier declared that eclipses were really caused by the sun engaging in a “conjugal embrace” of the moon.

Read more:

• Yuri Gagarin: 8 things you (probably) didn’t know about the first man in space
• In thrall to the red planet: 5 facts about our view of Mars through history (exclusive to The Library)

In Fourier’s own words: “A planet is a being which has two souls and two sexes, and which procreates like animal or vegetable beings by the meeting of the two generative substances,” which are emitted from their two poles. By this, Fourier meant that the north pole of every planet was male, and that the south pole of every planet was female. Each pole was actually a giant genital, emitting a sort of subtle, airy, sperm-like substance of either male or female quality, termed ‘aroma’. Throughout his work, Fourier constantly talks about planets emitting aromas onto one another in order to turn each other on prior to mating. These ‘aromas’ are best thought of as being a virtually incorporeal ‘fluid’ which connects the planets together into their own little solar systems throughout the universe. Basically, such ‘aromal fields’ were an erotic form of gravity, making planets orbit around their larger suns, or moons around their parent-planets, in much the same way that love-struck teenagers might follow the object of their affections around everywhere they go. So, according to Fourier, the next time you look up into the night sky, you’re really peeping in upon a giant galactic orgy!

Portrait of French social theorist Charles Fourier. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

5. Hive mind

Gerald Heard (1889–1971) was a highly erudite Cambridge graduate, writer, broadcaster and mystic of Anglo-Irish origins who later found his true home in California, the early centre of post-Second World War flying saucer mania. Heard was a man of many remarkable ideas, the most remarkable of which was laid out in his 1950 book The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: Is Another World Watching? which holds a place in the record books as the first full-length, non-fiction book about the subject published by a British author. The title was serialised in the Sunday Express throughout October 1950, giving his countrymen ample opportunity to consider Heard’s peculiar idea that the UFOs then being sighted all across the globe were piloted not by humanoid ETs, as you may have presumed, but by alien super-bees from Mars who were watching over us from afar, and perhaps even planning an invasion.

Heard speculated that the Martian bees, having access to various advanced (though presumably tiny) items of super-technology, might well have got around the flower-free conditions of their desert-like homeworld by creating a form of artificial sugar from some unspecified “synthetic substance” which would in effect be a new industrial form of chlorophyll. By mixing this with water and exposing it to air and sunlight, the natural chemical processes of certain plants could then be imitated on a vast scale, said Heard, creating huge supplies of sugar for the bees to eat virtually on-demand.

Read more:

• 9 unsolved historical mysteries
• Great British eccentrics: 7 of the most peculiar people in history

Following America’s dropping of atom bombs on Japan in 1945, it appeared to Heard that the alien bees’ monitoring of Earth had stepped up a gear. Maybe the bees were worried we would blow up the entire planet through our foolishness? Worse yet, maybe the dust from our ruined Earth would float into space and hover in a big belt around Mars, blocking out the sun’s light and thereby impeding alien honey production? The potential reasons for the bees to fear and hate us seemed endless. Heard did propose training up Earth-bees to become diplomats who could speak to their Martian cousins and work out some kind of peace treaty, but sadly nothing ever came of the idea.

6. Fallen Angel

During the 19th century, before we had the technology to really know what conditions on other nearby planets were like, strange crossovers began to emerge between astronomy and spiritualism, with self-styled psychics claiming to have travelled to places such as Mars and Venus using their astral bodies. For example, in 1895 one Colonel Albert de Rochas (1837–1914), a Frenchman with a liking for both psychical research and hypnotism, was called out to help a family friend, given the pseudonym ‘Mireille’, who was suffering some ailment.

Knowing of his skills in hypnotism, Mireille hoped de Rochas could help alleviate her sufferings. He did, but during one trance session Mireille claimed to be rising up through outer space, which she deemed to be luminous and full of “phantoms”, one of whom was a dead childhood friend of hers named Victor. Mireille spoke of visiting Mars in astral form, before one day it seemed as if her body had been suddenly taken over by the spirit of Victor. He was initially puzzled as to why he was wearing women’s clothing, but once he had calmed down Victor explained that, following his death, he lived on among the planets – a form of existence about which he could give little information beyond the curious detail that all dead people had arms which also functioned as genitalia, or “organs of affection”. According to Victor, these arms grew larger and larger over time and were often mistaken for angel wings, when they were really giant celestial penises. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Colonel de Rochas refused to believe ‘Victor’s’ story.

Space Oddities by SD Tucker is published by Amberley Books. To find out more, click here.

{ https://www.historyextra.com/ }

12-04-2019 om 17:25 geschreven door peter  

MOON WATER

{ https://futurism.com/ }

12-04-2019 om 17:05 geschreven door peter  

Why Is the First-Ever Black Hole Photo an Orange Ring?

By Mindy Weisberger

It took eight telescopes and more than 200 astronomers to produce an astonishing, never-before-seen image of a distant black hole.

(Image: © Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, et al.)

Orange you glad you've just seen the first-ever image of a black hole?

Today (April 10), a global collaboration of more than 200 astronomers presented the first image of a directly-observed black hole. The picture of a glowing orange-yellow ring around a dark core, was compiled from observations by eight ground-based radio telescopes known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

Researchers' data showed the black hole at the heart of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy within the Virgo cluster located about 55 million light-years from Earth. But what exactly is the image showing, and why is the irregular ring orange? [IT'S HERE: The First-Ever Close-Up of a Black Hole]

This is the first-ever image of a black hole.
Credit: NSF

Though black holes are compact objects, they are exceptionally massive — the mass of M87's black hole is about 6.5 billion times that of our sun, the National Science Foundation (NSF) said in a statement. Because of this enormous mass, black holes warp spacetime, heating the dust and gas around them to extreme temperatures, according to NSF.

By definition, black holes are invisible, because no light escapes from them. But a prediction made by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity stated that under certain circumstances, an outline of a black hole and its light-swallowing event horizon could be seen, according to representatives of the Haystack Observatory at MIT, which houses one of the EHT telescopes.

"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow," EHT Science Council chair Heino Falcke, a professor of radio astronomy and astroparticle physics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in the NSF statement.

The black hole in M87 isn't the closest to Earth, but it's among the biggest, which made it a very promising target for the EHT, Derek Fox, an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University, told Live Science (Fox was not affiliated with the EHT discovery).

In the image, the dark circle represents the "shadow" of the black hole and its boundary, created by the glowing material that surrounds it. However, the colors of the bright ring in the image aren't the actual hues of the gas; rather, they represent a color map chosen by EHT researchers to depict the brightness of the emissions, Fox explained.

"The yellow is the most intense emission, the red is less intense, and then black is little or no emission at all," Fox said. In the optical range, the ring around the black hole would likely appear white, perhaps tinged with blue or red, according to Fox.

"I'd expect it to be more of a whitish glow that is brighter along the crescent, dimmer at the other points, and then black where the black hole is casting its shadow," he said.

• 9 Facts About Black Holes That Will Blow Your Mind
• The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe
• Stephen Hawking's Most Far-Out Ideas About Black Holes

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

12-04-2019 om 16:47 geschreven door peter