{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

09-07-2019 om 02:02 geschreven door peter  

No, it’s not pseudoscience. Does a regular alignment of planets make a strong-enough tug to regulate the sun’s 11- and 22-year cycles? Read more in this story via Eos – a source for news and perspectives about Earth and space science – from the American Geophysical Union.

An ultraviolet image of the sun, overlaid with a map of its magnetic field lines.

Image via NASA/SDO/AIA/LMSAL.

By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, reprinted with permission from Eos.

For more than 1,000 years, the number of sunspots hit a minimum within a few years of a major planetary alignment. A recent study showed that tides created by this alignment every 11 years are strong enough to tug on material near the sun’s surface and synchronize localized changes in its magnetic field.

Frank Stefani, lead author of the study, told Eos.

We noticed from historical data that there is an astonishing degree of regularity in the sunspot cycle.

Stefani is a fluid dynamics research fellow at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Dresden, Germany. He said:

We definitely have a clocked process. But then the question was, What is the clock?

The study expands upon the commonly accepted model for the solar dynamo and supports a long-held theory that planetary configurations are responsible for the sunspot cycle and magnetic solar cycle.

Wound, Twisted, and Unstable

As a giant spinning ball of plasma, the sun’s magnetic field is extremely complicated. Its magnetic field lines start as parallel lines running from the north to the south pole. But because the sun rotates faster at its equator than at its poles, those pole-to-pole magnetic field lines slowly wind and wrap around the sun, stretching like taffy from the middle of the line to become horizontal.

A simplified schematic of a single magnetic field line as it wraps around the sun (omega effect) and then twists upon itself (alpha effect). The arrows indicate the direction that solar material moves as it drags the field line with it.

Image via NASA/MSFC.

On top of the rotational motion of solar plasma, convection moves material from the equator to the poles and back again. That twists the field lines around each other into loops and spirals.

The winding and twisting of the sun’s magnetic field lines are described by the alpha-omega dynamo model. In that model, alpha represents the twisting, and omega represents the wrapping. Tangled field lines can create instabilities in the local magnetic field and cause sunspots, flares, or mass ejections.

This model is the commonly accepted explanation for the behavior of the sun’s magnetic field, but it’s not perfect, Stefani explained. It predicts that the instabilities’ twistedness will oscillate randomly every few years. But the model can’t explain why the number of sunspots waxes and wanes on a roughly 11-year cycle or why the sun’s magnetic field flips polarity every 22 years.

Low Tide, Low Activity

Another solar system phenomenon happens every 11 years: Venus, Earth, and Jupiter align in their orbits. These three planets have the strongest tidal effect on the sun, the first two because of their proximity to the sun and the third because of its mass. Past observational studies have shown that minima in the sunspot cycle have occurred within a few years of this alignment for the past 1,000 years or so. Stefani said:

If you look at the trend, it has an amazing parallelism.

The researchers wanted to test whether the planetary alignment could influence the sun’s alpha effect and force an interplanetary low tide at regular intervals. The team started with a standard alpha-omega dynamo model and added a small tidal tug to the alpha effect every 11 years to simulate the alignment. Stefani explained:

Our dynamo model is not a completely new one. We’re really building on the old-fashioned, or conventional, alpha-omega dynamo.

The simulation showed that even a weak tidal tug of 1 meter [about 1 yard] per second every 11 years forced unstable magnetic twists to pulse with that same period. The simulated dynamo’s polarity oscillated with a 22-year period just like the real solar dynamo. Stefani said:

With a little bit of this periodic alpha, we can indeed synchronize the dynamo period to 22 years [with] planetary forcing.

Because those magnetic instabilities are connected with solar activity, the researchers argue, this synchronization could also suppress (or generate) sunspots across the sun at roughly the same time – in other words, the sunspot cycle. The team published these results in Solar Physics in late May 2019.

A Counterintuitive Result?

Steve Tobias is a solar dynamo researcher at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom who was not involved with this research. He said:

This is an intriguing paper.

Tobias argued that the combined planetary tides are too weak to directly set the length of the solar cycle. Plasma dynamics deep within the sun are the more likely cause, he told Eos.

Nevertheless, he said, this study

… seems to show that even a tiny amount of forcing from tidal processes can resonantly synchronize the cycle. This counterintuitive result should be explored further by investigating the behavior of proxies for solar activity such as the production rates of isotopes of beryllium deposited in ice cores.

It’s possible that other planetary systems might have tidally dominant planets that resonate with their suns like ours do, Stefani said, but it’s not likely that we’ll be able to prove it. For most stars, he said:

… we have observations going back about 40 years. And people are happy if they can identify two or three or four periods. Only for our Sun do we have all the historical observations. We have beryllium data. We can go back for thousands of years.

Our sun is quite an ordinary star, but it is quite special in that sense.

Bottom line: New research suggests that a regular alignment of the planets makes a strong enough tug to regulate the sun’s 11- and 22-year cycles.

• Via Eos

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

09-07-2019 om 00:56 geschreven door peter  

The Long, Strange History of People Filing Flying Saucer Patents

From the “Discopter” of Alexander Weygers to a soaring car.

BY ERNIE SMITH

• A VERSION OF THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON TEDIUM, A TWICE-WEEKLY NEWSLETTER THAT HUNTS FOR THE END OF THE LONG TAIL.

Early in the summer of 1947, an amateur pilot from Idaho named Kenneth Arnold spotted something in the Washington skies that kind of blew his mind.

Despite the skies being clear that day, he saw a series of nine flashes of horizontal light. He landed, told others what he saw, and his story spread through the popular consciousness, taking on a life on its own, as well as a name—the flying saucer.

Two weeks later, a much more famous incident in Roswell, New Mexico, involving a weather balloon (if you believe what the government tells you), further cemented the idea of the flying saucer in the public consciousness.

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Not long after, hobbyists of all kinds suddenly felt inspired make their own—and they’ve been flooding the patent offices globally ever since.

But the guy who got to the U.S. Patent Office first, surprisingly, wasn’t actually inspired by the popular perception of the UFO at all. He had the idea, in fact, years before Kenneth Arnold took his fateful flight.

The Dutch painter and sculpture artist Alexander Weygers, who grew up in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—and spent most of his adult life in the U.S., was something of a 20th-century Leonardo da Vinci. He had both an engineering and artistic background, and his work spanned sculpture, illustrations, photography, and many other fields.

In 1927, he conceptualized a device that predicted the infatuation with flying saucers before they even had that name. And as an engineer, he did so with a practical eye toward the failings of the device he hoped to replace.

“Helicopters are vulnerable,” he said in an interview with UPI in 1985. “People were being killed in them during the 1920s. They go down like a brick. The saucer became the logical answer.”

His creativity was driven by tragedy. In 1928, his wife died during childbirth, as did his son. The painful incident ended up pushing him closer to art, with the losses inspiring some of his most notable sculptures.

A similar tragedy—the capture of his family, still in the Dutch East Indies, by Japanese forces during World War II—pushed him in the early 1940s to complete his saucer project, which he had first started in the 1920s. He called the device a “Discopter.”

The idea was inspired not by spaceships or science fiction, but by a practical desire to create a vehicle that could be used to rescue people in incidents not unlike the one that faced his family members. His frame of reference was his own prior work.

He filed for a patent in 1944, and that patent was granted the next year. A key passage from that patent:

To a helicopter, a craft constructed on the principles of my invention bears a superficial resemblance in that both types are sustained by at least one horizontal rotor. From this point on, however, all similarity between the two types of flying craft ends. A craft embodying my invention is distinguished from a helicopter in that the rotor or rotors in my craft are enclosed within a substantially vertical tunnel, the rotor regarded as a whole is mainshaftless and the external form of the craft is not very different from the familiar discus of the athlete, in common with which the craft enjoys certain aerodynamic advantages characteristic of the passage of the discus thru the air. Not only the rotors and power plant compartments but all of the usual moving and fixed protruding parts, present in both airplanes and helicopters, such as stabilizing and directing means and otherwise, are entirely enclosed within the strikingly simple and cleanly streamlined contour line of the craft when regarded from exteriorly thereof in any elevation view, thereby concealing from the casual view such parts.

Alexander Weygers wasn’t trying to invent the flying saucer. He was trying to reinvent the helicopter, along with aviation in general, so that it could be used more practically. (It should be noted that the device was never built.)

But the existence of everything that came afterwards meant that his name would forever be associated with futurism and science fiction, elements that didn’t actually inspire his invention.

Soon after the flying saucer hit the public consciousness in the late 1940s, people noticed what Weygers had done. A 1950 article in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, dedicated column space to a dentist named Dr. Harold T. Frendt, who used the existence of the patent to argue against the existence of aliens. Frendt suggested that the patents were being used to create these saucers, despite his only evidence being Weygers’ patent.

“They should be operated at high altitudes instead of exposing them for observation to the general public and the pro-communistically inclined, and thereby stimulating a trend of foolish speculation,” Frendt told the newspaper at the time.

Frendt’s statement is ironic, because he’s also speculating. There probably was no flying saucer.

While Weygers was certainly first, the folks that followed him clearly were inspired by whatever happened in Washington and New Mexico back in 1947, perhaps with a little touch of H.G. Wells in the mix as well.

As soon as there was a popular “spark,” the inspiration that had us looking up in the sky and wondering what if, the saucer was everywhere. It’s been keeping patent offices around the world busy ever since—first, with a spate of flying saucer toys in the early 1950sthat looked like frisbees, and soon, in the form of aircraft clearly inspired by flying saucers, like this 1953 design and this helicopter/flying saucer hybrid.

Buried in the USPTO’s many classifications for airplanes and helicopters is the indexing code “B64C 39/001,” which represents “flying vehicles characterised by sustainment without aerodynamic lift, often flying disks having a UFO-shape.” Yes, USPTO got so many patent applications for flying saucers that it earned its own classification.

So how many flying saucer patents are we talking about? According to Google Patents, around 192 items in this specific classification are listed as being produced in the U.S., with three particular surges in their creation—an initial jump in the years between 1953 and 1956, a second wind between 1965 and 1971, and an unusually dramatic surge in such inventions between the years 2001 and 2004. USPTO handled 37 flying saucer-related patents during that particularly busy time in U.S. diplomatic history.

There’s a lot to look at, and it’s entirely possible that due to the complexity of the patent system, this doesn’t cover everything. Fortunately, someone with a pseudonym and apparently a large amount of time already did a huge amount of curation for you.

Earlier this year, an Internet Archive user named Superboy collected more than 100 flying saucer patent filings spanning the past 75 years or so. It took the user over three months to gather the documents from the U.S. patent offices and other patent offices globally, and is split upover two pages.

(Superboy helpfully noted that the documents prove “that humans have obtained and incorporated flying saucers for personal and secret use.”)

Some of the patents look like massive frisbees; others like tiny, squat planets; and others still look like they’ve taken clear inspiration from movies set in space. (And of course, Weygers’ groundbreaking craft made the list. It had to.)

Most patents were credited to individuals, with a handful of companies involved.

The weirdest such applications—though eventually withdrawn—came from a man named John Quincy St. Clair. People have been wonderingabout St. Clair for years. During the 2000s, he filed for for dozens of patents for all sorts of bizarre things. (It should be noted that filing for a patent isn’t cheap, even if it’s withdrawn.) Among his greatest hits: a “magnetic vortex wormhole generator” and a “walking through walls training system,” which comes complete with instructions on how to print the “training system” using a home printer.

One of his applications, from 2006, was for something called a “photon spacecraft.” “This invention is a spacecraft propulsion system that employs photon particles to generate a field of negative energy in order to produce lift on the hull,” he wrote.

Of course, not every flying saucer patent has been produced by a hobbyist, an eccentric inventor, or an engineer who turned tragedy into creativity.

Some of the largest companies in the world have occasionally taken interest in the flying saucer idea. In 2014, for example, Airbus invented a device that has a lot in common with the modern flying saucer, but also looks like a stealth fighter jet with a donut in the middle.

As CNBC reported at the time, it wasn’t intended for either outer space or the military—it was a reinvention of the passenger jet that was intended to help reduce cabin pressure. And there’s a good chance we’ll never even see it.

“It’s just one of many ideas,” a company spokesman told Fortune. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to be working on making it a reality.”

That actually sounds somewhat sedated compared to an attempt by the British Rail to patent a spacecraft that relied on “controlled thermonuclear fusion reaction.”

And of course, the future may have room for a flying saucer—or at least a flying car—yet. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported last year, Google co-founder Larry Page has been investing in the idea of flying cars for years through his startups Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk, with Weygers cited as an early inspiration for what could come next.

Earlier this year, Kitty Hawk released a video for a product that, if you squint hard enough, shares a lineage with what Weygers did way back when, with maybe inspiration from all the things that have come along since.

• A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

{ https://www.atlasobscura.com/ }

09-07-2019 om 00:17 geschreven door peter  

Nature is a fantastic thing that offers many weird and wonderful occurrences. One of these things is light. With different colors, patterns, and shapes, light can create beautiful scenes for so many people to admire. The Northern Lights are probably the most famous example of this, but that doesn't mean there aren't others. For example, a similar occurrence which took place in the province of Sulu this year has been captured in several photos shared by netizens. Now, they've spread all over the world for everyone to see, and they're spectacular.

Amarkhan Jidara, who has shared several photos of the spectacular dance of lights in the night sky, has said that the latest celestial show the province has witnessed was last Sunday, June 30th, 2019 at 7 p.m. local time. There have also been a number of other sightings throughout this year, as well as previous years with Sulu residents claiming to see at least one or two of these peculiar light shows every year. According to Jidara, the residents were awestruck at the sight of lights in the sky, as anyone would be. Just looking at these stunning images is enough to blow anyone away, that's for sure.

What are they?

As with any strange event, people want to know what it is and what's causing it. Here, it's not that simple. There are a huge number of theories and names for these lights but no one has been proved right as of yet. Local Tausugs call the lights "Lansuk-Lansuk" or candles but have opposing beliefs about the appearance of the lights. Some think it brings bad luck or tragedy, while others look at it as a sign of good luck and fortune.

Many scientists have said that, similar to the Northern Lights, it's simply electrons and gases interacting in such a way where they release photons giving off light and creating the beautiful aurora that is seen from Earth. That said, these aren't the Northern Lights and there really is any number of possible events that could be causing it.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

08-07-2019 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

NASA proof of aliens? Did NASA photograph a flying bird on Mars? UFO expert stunned

{ https://verytopsecret.info/ }

08-07-2019 om 22:31 geschreven door peter  

Artificiële intelligentie: het einde van menselijke controle of niet?

Wat is artificiële intelligentie?

In een vorig artikel hadden we het al over digitale assistenten zoals Siri, Alexa en Cortana die bijvoorbeeld je digitale agenda bijhouden, je favoriete muziek afspelen en je leven op allerhande manieren efficiënter maken. Een digitale assistent is een voorbeeld van artificiële intelligentie, maar het gaat nog veel verder dan dat.

AI (artificiële intelligentie) is een enorm uitgebreid wetenschappelijk domein waarin onderzocht wordt hoe computers, machines en apparaten zelfstandig problemen kunnen oplossen. Met behulp van ingewikkelde algoritmes verwerken de systemen gigantische hoeveelheden data om daaruit te leren en zo menselijke intelligentie te imiteren.

Artificiële intelligentie leert de menselijke intelligentie te imiteren.

Zo’n zelflerend algoritme kan patronen herkennen, en door te leren uit de eigen fouten, levert het achteraf een beter resultaat. Op dit moment zijn de meeste intelligente systemen nog maar gespecialiseerd in één taak, en ze zijn zich niet bewust van de taken die ze uitvoeren. Zo kunnen ze bijvoorbeeld wel een kat herkennen op een foto, maar ze beseffen zelf niet wat een kat precies is. Daarvoor moet AI nog verder ontwikkeld worden.

Waarschijnlijk maak jij ook al gebruik van AI in je dagelijkse leven, bijvoorbeeld met:

• Waze, een navigatie-app die de reisgegevens van jou en andere gebruikers inzet om de snelste route te berekenen,
• Online chatbots, soms word je op een website te woord gestaan door een chatbot die antwoorden kan formuleren op vaak gestelde vragen,
• Facebook, de manier waarop en welke berichten je te zien krijgt in je nieuwsoverzicht, ja hoor, daar is ook AI mee gemoeid.

Bedreiging voor de mensheid?

AI evolueert aan een razendsnel tempo. Daarom waarschuwen sommige experts voor de risico’s die het met zich meebrengt.

Zo kan het voor een stuk de controle van de mens wegnemen als er steeds meer beslissingen automatisch genomen worden. Daarom vreest men dat we op langere termijn onze kennis en initiatiefzin kwijtraken.

Daarnaast zijn het vooral grote bedrijven en overheden die inzetten op AI. Wat als ze alle data die de systemen vergaren gaan misbruiken en inzetten als een politiek wapen? Of als een oorlogswapen? Legers over de hele wereld hebben de afgelopen jaren hun investeringen in autonome technologie aanzienlijk verhoogd. Daarmee zouden ze wel eens wapens kunnen ontwikkelen die zichzelf besturen en kille, onmenselijke beslissingen kunnen nemen.

Andere experts voorspellen dan weer dat artificiële intelligentie veel jobs zal overnemen en dat er hierdoor een chaos in de samenleving zal ontstaan.

Of verrijking voor mensheid?

• Gezondheidszorg

De overgrote meerderheid van experts in het domein zien de toekomst positiever in en verwachten grootse dingen van AI, vooral in de gezondheidszorg. Zo kan AI de levenskwaliteit en overlevingskansenverhogen van patiënten in de gezondheids- en ouderenzorg.

AI kan nu al beter dan 'echte' artsen longontstekingen detecteren en autisme voorspellen.Intelligente software kan bijvoorbeeld net zo goed als artsen symptomen interpreteren en diagnoses stellen bij bepaalde aandoeningen. Volgens het Amerikaanse wetenschappelijke tijdschrift IEEE Spectrum is AI vandaag zelfs al beter dan ‘echte’ artsen in staat om longontstekingen te diagnosticeren en autisme te voorspellen op basis van hersenscans.

Daarnaast kan AI je helpen om langer, veiliger en comfortabel thuis te blijven wonen. Slimme toestellen kunnen iemand verwittigen in noodsituaties, je eraan herinneren je medicijnen te nemen of zelfs detecteren wanneer je gevallen bent of wanneer je hartslag onregelmatig is.

• Ogen voor blinden en slechtzienden

Verschillende bedrijven ontwikkelen software die beelden omschrijft aan blinden en slechtzienden met spraaktechnologie. Zo maakt de app ‘Lookout’ van Google handig gebruik van artificiële intelligentie: het enige wat de gebruiker moet doen, is z’n smartphone richten naar iets dat ie wilt zien, en de app vertelt welke personen, tekst of objecten zich voor de camera bevinden. In de eerste fase heeft Google de app beperkt uitgebracht in de VS om hem te blijven verbeteren op basis van feedback de gebruikers. (Foto: Google Play)

Ook Facebook en Instagram werken aan een tool die de inhoud van beelden herkent, zodat ook blinden en slechtzienden sociale media kunnen gebruiken.

• Eerlijkere rechtspraak?

Juridische processen kunnen zeer traag en inefficiënt verlopen. Artificiële intelligentie zou hier een oplossing voor kunnen bieden en ook vandaag wordt het al ingezet. Zo berekenen algoritmes hoe groot de kans is dat iemand een misdrijf nog eens zal plegen en helpen ze rechters te beslissen of ze een borgtocht weigeren of aanvaarden.

Er zijn onvolkomenheden aan deze aanpak, omdat de software gevoed wordt door criminele feiten uit het verleden en op die manier zelf verbanden leert leggen die misschien niet altijd kloppen voor de persoon over wie een oordeel geveld moet worden. Toch kan AI ook een meerwaarde betekenen voor het gerecht: algoritmes worden bijvoorbeeld niet beïnvloed door een slechte nachtrust, aankomende verkiezingen of een voetbalwedstrijd die ze willen bijwonen, rechters wel.   

• Robocop

Politierobots waren een paar jaar geleden misschien nog sciencefiction, maar we zullen ze in de toekomst steeds vaker tegenkomen. Politierobots kunnen repetitief of saai werk overnemen, maar ze kunnen ook ingezet worden op gevaarlijke of moeilijk bereikbare plekken. Zo vergroten ze de veiligheid van zowel de burgers als de ‘echte’ politieagenten en vullen ze het groeiende tekort aan politieagenten op.

Verschillende politiekorpsen ter wereld maken al gebruik van robotica, en sinds dit jaar is de eerste robotagente in dienst in een korps in India. De KP-Bot, een vrouwelijke onderofficier, zit aan de balie in het politiebureau en begeleidt bezoekers naar de juiste afdelingen. Ze kan verbaal met mensen communiceren, klachten opnemen en informatie tonen op haar scherm.

Veel onderzoek nodig

Er zijn nog een heleboel andere toepassingen van artificiële intelligentie, maar het is duidelijk: AI biedt ons de mogelijkheid om enerzijds het werk efficiënter aan te pakken in verschillende bedrijfstakken en anderzijds om ons leven op allerhande manieren makkelijker te maken. Om de risico’s en knelpunten aan te pakken, is er nog veel onderzoek en tijd nodig om artificiële intelligentie een waardesysteem aan te leren en zelfs een gevoel voor empathie.

Om deze complexe technologie te ontwikkelen, en de systemen te controleren, onderhouden en blijven verbeteren, blijven er natuurlijk mensen nodig. AI zal sommige jobs overbodig maken, andere aanvullen, maar het zal er ook heel veel creëren.

Wij zijn alvast benieuwd wat de toekomst brengt! En jij?

Auteur: BEEGO

{ https://www.seniorennet.be/nieuws }

08-07-2019 om 21:59 geschreven door peter  

Space station mold can survive 200 times more radiation than you or me

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU

Unlike our pinkish, frail frames, mold may be able to survive on the outside walls of our spaceships. Even when drenched in hard radiation.

Image via Pixabay.

The International Space Station isn’t as squeaky-clean as you’d expect: in fact, it turns out that our current home in space is plagued by mold. Every week, astronauts spend several hours scrubbing and cleaning its inside walls to prevent this mold from impacting their health.

However, new research suggests that efforts to completely de-mold the ISS may be in vain. Mold spores can survive even on the outside walls of the station and can bear radiation levels thousands of times harsher than ourselves. The results also point to mold as a useful ally on space travels, which could help supply the crew with biological products such as antibiotics or vitamins.

Stowaways, cosmic rays

“We now know that [fungal spores] resist radiation much more than we thought they would, to the point where we need to take them into consideration when we are cleaning spacecraft, inside and outside,” said Marta Cortesão, a microbiologist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, who presented the findings at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference.

“If we’re planning a long duration mission, we can plan on having these mold spores with us because probably they will survive the space travel.”

Mold spores can withstand extreme temperatures, ultraviolet light, chemicals and dry conditions. This resiliency makes them hard to kill. Spores of the two most common mold types on the ISS — Aspergillus and Pennicillium — can survive exposure to X-ray levels at over 200 times the deadly dose for humans, the team found. The findings show how important planetary protection protocols designed to prevent spacecraft from contaminating other planets with Earth-borne life are, and that we need to reconsider how much of a threat fungi spores are from this point of view.

The good news is that these two species aren’t generally harmful to humans. They can impact people with weakened immune systems in cases of extreme exposure (i.e. when inhaling a large quantity of these spores). However, Cortesão believes we can coax these molds to work in our favor. Fungi are more similar to us, genetically, than bacteria: they’re made up of complex cells with a structure resembling ours, and they come equipped with the biochemical machinery to synthesize polymers, food, vitamins, and other useful molecules astronauts may need on extended trips beyond Earth.

“Mold can be used to produce important things, compounds like antibiotics and vitamins. It’s not only bad, a human pathogen and a food spoiler, it also can be used to produce antibiotics or other things needed on long missions,” Cortesão said.

In the lab, Cortesão exposed fungal spores with ionizing radiation, high-frequency ultraviolet light, and heavy ions to see how they fared. Ionizing radiation kills cells by damaging their DNA and other essential cellular infrastructure but gets blocked by our planet’s magnetic field (the ISS also benefits from this shielding). Earth’s ozone layer protects us from high-energy UV down here on the surface. However, spacecraft going to the Moon or Mars would be exposed to both.

Cortesão reports that the spores survived exposure to X-rays up to 1000 gray, exposure to heavy ions at 500 gray and exposure to ultraviolet light up to 3000 joules per meter squared. Gray is a measure of absorbed dose of ionizing radiation (joules of radiation energy per kilogram of tissue). Half a gray is the threshold for radiation sickness in humans, while five gray is the lethal threshold.

A 180-day voyage (about as long as we’d need to get to Mars) is estimated to expose passengers to around 0.7 gray. In other words, it could cause some issues for the human crew, but not for the mold.

In the future, the team plans to expand its search to understand how the combination of radiation, vacuum, low temperature, and low gravity in space affects the fungi.

The findings ” Fungal Spore Resistance to Space Radiation” have been presented at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon 2019) on the 28th of June.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

08-07-2019 om 21:39 geschreven door peter  

Are We Really the Smartest Kid on the Cosmic Block?

It’s unlikely, and if we keep thinking otherwise, we might be missing some important clues about the existence of extraterrestrial life

By Abraham Loeb 

Credit: Alberto Ghizzi Panizza Getty Images

It is unclear how many intelligent civilizations have arisen in the Milky Way galaxy so far, but if some have, a pressing question comes to mind: were they or are they more intelligent than we are?

When reading the morning newspaper, it is difficult to avoid the thought that our own intelligence bar is not particularly high nor difficult to surpass. We fight among ourselves in “lose-lose” situations; we do not promote long-term solutions over short-term fixes; and we have been broadcasting our existence to the galaxy with radio waves for over a century without worrying whether about whether there are any predators or competitors in outer space. (If it’s the latter, they might have been ignoring us because we appear so incompetent.)

If other civilizations do exist, one key in becoming aware of them is whether we are intelligent enough to adequately interpret their signals or to identify a piece of their technology if it should appear in our solar system. One fact is clear: if we assign a zero prior probability for such evidence coming our way, as some scientists did in the case of ‘Oumuamua by invoking the principle “it’s never aliens,” we will indeed never find any. We will be like ostriches burying our heads in the sand.

In fact, this attitude may be one sign that our intelligence isn’t very impressive—that the human race as a whole suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which those with mediocre abilities insist that they’re unusually talented or smart.

How can our civilization mature? The same way kids do: by leaving home, going out into the neighborhood, meeting others and comparing notes with them. In other words, we can develop a balanced perspective on our current technological accomplishments by engaging in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Since our own technological development accelerates exponentially with an e-folding time of a few years, it is difficult to imagine what a much more advanced technology crafted by a civilization that had lived for a cosmic timescale—billions of such e-folding times—would look like.

As natural as this suggestion to search might seem, however it is evident that SETI faces a hostile mainstream culture in astronomy. The simple proposal to consider the possibility that ‘Oumumua is technological debrisas an explanation for its unusual properties, for example was met with controversy on social media.

True, SETI carries non-scientific baggage related to unrealistic aspects of the science fiction literature and unsubstantiated reports about unidentified flying objects (UFOs)—something SETI researchers sometimes refer to as the “giggle factor.” But at the same time, it would be a strategic mistake for observers to restrict the interpretation of data from their telescopes and not search for “other kids in our neighborhood” just because of this baggage. The existence of extraterrestrial intelligence has nothing to do with the credibility of science fiction stories of UFO reports. The problem with adopting this wrong attitude is that it delays scientific progress. Grant applicants are frequently asked to forecast the scientific discoveries they will make if their application is approved—but by bracketing the range of possibilities in advance, we might never discover the unexpected. Instead we cultivate a scientific culture that tends to replicate what we already know.

History teaches us that this is a mistake. The search for extrasolar planets encountered mainstream resistance in its early days. Observing proposals to search for low-hanging fruits, such as “hot Jupiters”—which are easiest to detect—were rejected by conservative committees of telescope-time allocation that argued that such planets should not exist in nature based on what we know about the solar system. But discovery forged ahead as some observers dared to challenge this prejudice, demonstrating that hot Jupiters are abundant. There was 40-year delay, however, given that the first theoretical proposal to do such a search was made by Otto Struve as early as in 1952.

Hence, an obvious obstacle to identifying our neighbors is the tendency to limit our imagination to what we already know. But this should not necessarily remain the case in the future. What we imagine for extraterrestrial life should not be solely defined by the natural chemical and geological processes that took place spontaneously on Earth. We could, for example produce synthetic life in the laboratory under a broader range of conditions than those with which we are familiar. Metaphorically, we could bake new kinds of cakes using the same ingredients, expanding the book of recipes handed to us by Mother Earth.

Realizing that life can exist under new conditions will improve our forecasts for where to search for it in space and how to interpret our findings, in just the same way that the laws of physics—which were first revealed in laboratory experiments—allowed astrophysicists to study the universe billions of light years away.

An important survival skill in the company of unknown neighbors is to listen before speaking out. Given our sloppy behavior in transmitting signals to outer space without restraint, we can only hope that we have not become the laughingstock of our galactic neighborhood by now. But even if we have, we can still get our act together and do better in the future. In order to know how to behave, we should find out first who is on our street by searching with our best telescopes for unusual electromagnetic flashes, industrial pollution of planetary atmospheres, artificial light or heat, artificial space debris or something completely unexpected.

Fortunately, we possess instruments that are sensitive enough to find out not only whether we have neighbors but also whether they have noticed us already.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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

08-07-2019 om 21:15 geschreven door peter  

08-07-2019 om 20:48 geschreven door peter  

Ancient humans in east Asia were modifying their SKULL to turn their head into an egg-shape as a signal of wealth and status 12,000 years ago

• Scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating back as far as 12,000 years ago 
• Eleven of the skulls had artificially elongated brain cases and flattened bones
• Researchers know that five belonged to adults with four men and one woman 
• Cranial modification, or skull stretching, was to signify group affiliation or social status, according to the researchers

By VICTORIA BELL FOR MAILONLINE

Excavation of ancient Chinese tombs have revealed the oldest human skulls which were intentionally reshaped as part of a ritual to show status and wealth.

At a site called Houtaomuga, scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating to between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago and 11 had the egg-shaped craniums.  

The practice of skull elongation - to signify group affiliation or social status - originally was thought to date back between 9,000 and 10,000 years.

It was common in various tribal cultures around the world, such as the Mayans, North American natives and Aboriginal people.  

The team, from Texas A&M University in Dallas, say five of the skulls belonged to adults, including four men and one woman. 

Scroll down for video 

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At a site called Houtaomuga, scientists unearthed 25 skeletons dating to between around 12,000 years ago and 5,000 years ago. Of those, 11 featured skulls with artificially elongated braincases and flattened bones at the front and back of the head

The ages of death for all 11 skulls is estimated to range from three years old right up to 40.

According to the study, skull reshaping was reserved for high-status individuals and certain families. 

The three-year-old with the elongated skull was buried with pieces of pottery and other artefacts, suggesting he was from a wealthy family.

The woman had a number of shell ornaments placed on her body, which indicates she was also of high status.

'It is too early to tell whether intentional cranial modification first emerged in East Asia and spread elsewhere or originated independently in different places,' paleoanthropologist Qian Wang.

Cranial modification, or skull stretching, occurred over a long stretch of time at the site than at any other archaeological dig the researchers said. 

Skull stretching it isn't a new phenomenon. The head moulding styles fell into three groups: flat, round or conical.

Artificially remodeled human skulls unearthed at a site in northeastern China include one of a man from around 12,000 years ago (left in this composite image) and another of a woman from about 5,000 years ago (right), the study found

According to the study, skull reshaping was reserved for high-status individuals and certain families. The three-year-old with the elongated skull was buried with pieces of pottery and other artefacts, suggesting he was from a wealthy family

Specific head modifications may have been used as signs of social status. 

Oddly shaped, intentionally stretched  skulls have been found in many parts of the world.

Permanent reshaping of a skull early in life, when cranial bones are soft, can be achieved by compressing an infant's head with one's hands. 

Binding the head with hard, flat surfaces such as boards or tightly wrapping the head in cloth similarly remodels immature cranial bones.   

Houtaomuga was excavated from 2011 to 2015 and the skulls found a the site add to a growing body of evidence of cranial reshaping from the site which stretches back 6,000 years, the study said.

A man's skeleton with a modified skull was found in a tomb dating to between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago, based on styles of pottery found in the same sediment layer. 

Radiocarbon dating of the skeleton placed it at around 12,000 years old. Two sediment layers dating to between 6,300 and 5,000 years old contained 10 skeletons with reshaped skulls. 

The research was published in the Journal of Physical Anthropology. 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

08-07-2019 om 20:19 geschreven door peter  

The oldest human skulls that were intentionally elongated were excavated from ancient Chinese tombs at a site called Houtaomuga from 2011 to 2015 (pictures of the skulls can be seen here). Scientists uncovered 25 skeletons that date back from between 5,000 and 12,000 years ago. Of those 25 that were discovered, 11 of them had elongated egg-shaped skulls with five of those belonging to adults (four men and one woman). The age of death for the eleven skulls was between 3 years of age and 40 years of age. This is significant because it was previously believed that elongated skulls dated back only between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago.

The woman that was uncovered was buried with shell ornaments that were placed on her body which indicated that she was of high social status. Pieces of pottery and several other artifacts were buried with the three-year-old which also indicated that he belonged to a wealthy family. One of the men who were found was buried with pottery that date back between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago.

Copy of a statue showing an elongated skull

The ancients reshaped their skulls in order to demonstrate wealth and social status. It was in fact a quite common ritual in different tribal cultures from different parts of the world, such as Aboriginals, North American natives, and the Mayans. However, it is still uncertain where skull elongation originated from. “It is too early to tell whether intentional cranial modification first emerged in East Asia and spread elsewhere or originated independently in different places,” stated paleoanthropologist Qian Wang.

Cranial modification (or skull stretching) occurred for the longest period of time at the Houtaomuga site, more than any other archaeological site. There were three different types of skull stretching – flat, round, and conical.

(Not one of the elongated skulls found at Houtaomuga)

Skull reshaping was conducted in early childhood when the cranial bones of an infant’s head were soft and the skull was compressed by the hands of an adult. First, the child’s head would be wrapped in a tight cloth. The cloth would stay on the infant’s head beginning when the child was a month old and remained there for around six months. In order to flatten the skull, the head would be placed between two boards.

The research was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology which can be read here.

{  https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

08-07-2019 om 19:58 geschreven door peter  

Photo: Sergey Mironov/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Brian Sharpless woke up in the middle of the night with the haunting feeling that he wasn’t alone. Slowly, his bedroom door creaked open, like a hand was lightly touching it. Moonlight from the hallway window streamed through the open door. He wondered if he was getting robbed. Then Sharpless discovered something even more alarming: He couldn’t move. He lay paralyzed as he watched a dark form with a long, serpentine neck creep through the doorway. “I saw a shadowy face that looked like a ninja mask with red eyes,” Sharpless told me. It stared at him, moving closer and closer, and Sharpless felt … relieved.

Sharpless is a researcher who studies sleep disorders, and as he watched this demonic creature slip into his bedroom, he realized he wasn’t in danger. He was, for the first time, experiencing sleep paralysis himself.

Normally while you’re dreaming, your body is paralyzed so that you don’t act out your dreams. But in sleep paralysis, you wake up while your body is still frozen. And even though you are fully conscious, looking around your real room, part of your brain is still dreaming. People often hallucinate creepy things — shadowy forms, monsters, and aliens — in their bedrooms.

I talked to Sharpless, associate professor at the American School of Professional Psychology and author of Unusual and Rare Psychological Disorders, and Michael Breus, fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and founder of The Sleep Doctor website, to learn more about this mysterious disorder and what you should do if you find yourself in the middle of it.

How common is sleep paralysis?

As weird as waking up to hallucinations sounds, the experts I talked to say it’s more common than you might think. An estimated 8 percent of the worldwide population has experienced it, according to Sharpless, and that’s a conservative estimate. The number jumps to 28 percent for college students and 32 percent for psychiatric patients.

“I think really anybody could have it if the circumstances are right,” Sharpless said. Just being sleep deprived can make someone experience it. In fact, researchers induce sleep paralysis in labs all the time. They wait until a person has fallen asleep and gone into REM, then touch them lightly. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

Even though many haven’t heard of the term “sleep paralysis,” people knew about the disorder long before there were sleep labs or even modern countries. Ancient Greeks called it “Pan ephialtes,” explained Sharpless, which means something like “when the god Pan leaps on your chest.” In fact, the word “nightmare” used to mean to what we now call sleep paralysis. In Middle English, nightmare referred to a “female spirit or monster” that would “settle on and produce a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. (“Mare” used to mean “evil female monster.”) After all, people dealing with sleep paralysis often feel as if a monster — be it a Greek god, a female spirit, or an alien — is sitting on their chests. “Nightmare” only started meaning “bad dream” in the 20th century.

What causes sleep paralysis?

Sleep is, to drastically understate matters, really complicated. For one thing, the different states of sleep — light dreaming, deep dreaming, etc. — aren’t actually so separate. A lot can go on in the transition between being awake and being asleep.

“The more complicated you make a computer or the more complicated you make a car, the more things can go wrong,” Sharpless explained. In sleep paralysis, you wake up before your brain stem, which stops your muscles from moving while you’re asleep, realizes it’s awake. As a result, it continues sending neurotransmitters that tell your muscles to freeze. Scientists still don’t know why this happens.

How do these hallucinations work?

“The hallucinations seem to happen in stages,” explained Sharpless. First, you wake up with the sense that you’re not alone. “It’s kind of like when you’re walking down a lonely street at night,” Sharpless continued. “You wake up, your eyes open, and you feel this uneasy feeling.”

As your brain tries to make sense of what’s going on, it creates something to explain why you feel so uneasy. It might whip up a menacing figure to watch you, often one that fits into your worldview.

“If you’re in 21st century America, you might see an extraterrestrial,” Sharpless said. “If you were in 15th century France, you might see a witch or a demon.”

It doesn’t stop at seeing imaginary things. You can feel them too. Sharpless says that, just as the brain can create imaginary sights and sounds, it can create imaginary physical sensations, too. People say that the monster in their room sits on them, and they can sense the pressure on their chest. Sharpless notes that the anxiety from seeing monsters may create or add to this feeling, since anxiety can cause chest pain. Sometimes, people experiencing sleep paralysis can’t breathe for a few seconds. In really scary cases, people feel like something is attacking or sexually assaulting them.

Are some people more likely to have sleep paralysis than others?

Sharpless says that anyone who easily dissociates — that is, goes into a kind of trance where they lose awareness of the world around them — may be more likely to have sleep paralysis. That might conjure images of prophets or fortunetellers, but dissociation is usually pretty mundane. If you drive along a highway and you zone out, then come to after a couple miles, you’re dissociating. People who do so more often might be more likely to develop sleep paralysis.

How do you stop sleep paralysis when it happens to you?

Nobody actually knows how to stop sleep paralysis, but there are ways to make it less scary. Simply knowing what’s going on can help. During Sharpless’s own sleep-paralysis episode, just knowing he was hallucinating made “the demonic thing with the giraffe neck” seem silly rather than scary, he explained.

“Either look at it dismissively, ignore it, or find humor in it,” he suggested. “You might say to yourself, ‘“Am I really seeing a demon in the bedroom now? Really?’” You can also try and focus on a body part or reassure yourself that what you’re seeing isn’t real. If your brain is creating an imaginary monster, making your brain pay attention to something else can cause the imaginary thing to cease to exist, or at least not be so scary. Sharpless says some of his patients have tried these methods and reported that they help, as they takes focus off of the monsters.

Is sleep paralysis harmful to your health? Can you die from it? 

“Other than that it scares the crap out of you, it’s not dangerous,” Breus told me. Still, your reaction to sleep paralysis could cause problems. Some people who get recurring sleep paralysis take stimulants at night or try other methods to stay awake, which can be pretty unhealthy. In one 19th-century case, a man paid his manservant to watch him all night in order to wake him up if he got sleep paralysis. (Spoiler: This did not help him sleep.)

And then of course, if you don’t know what’s going on, you could believe all sorts of creepy things when you’re awake. You might think you’re being regularly attacked by demons or kidnapped by aliens. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘the Devil possessed me,’” Breus said.

These sorts of beliefs can really strain your relationships with friends and family. “Some people think they’re going crazy,” said Sharpless. It’s especially tough on people who already have psychosis; they have an even more difficult time distinguishing between reality and hallucination.

How do you treat sleep paralysis?

If you only get sleep paralysis occasionally, you don’t need to treat it. But some people get it every day, or even a few times a night. They may choose to go on antidepressants to help them sleep better. Working on underlying issues like anxiety can help too.

How do you prevent sleep paralysis?

There are some simple things you can do. Sleeping on your side makes sleep paralysis less likely. Avoiding alcohol improves matters since alcohol interferes with sleep. Most importantly, getting regular, quality sleep is the best way to avoid sleep paralysis. Sharpless, for instance, got his moment of sleep paralysis when he was jetlagged from giving a presentation in England on, coincidentally, sleep paralysis.

“Now I’m wondering if I’m going to get sleep paralysis or something,” I told Sharpless after we’d been talking about the disorder long enough to make me nervous.

“You just might,” he said playfully. “They used to talk about it being contagious in ancient Rome, but we don’t have any good data on that.”

{ https://www.thecut.com/ }

08-07-2019 om 16:33 geschreven door peter  

Pilot films two circular objects flying over Grand Canyon sparking UFO conspiracy meltdown

A PILOT captured two UFOs flying in tandem over the Grand Canyon, conspiracy theorists have claimed.

By Katy Gill 

The footage begins by showing a panoramic view of the Grand Canyon National Park, in Arizona, US.

Once it reaches the far left-hand side, two objects come into view.

They seem to be in formation and in tandem as they make their way over the famous site.

Conspiracy YouTuber The Hidden Underbelly later shared the clip, captioning it: “Two UFOs captured lying in tandem over the Grand Canyon in Arizona.”

Thousands have since flooded in to watch the clip.

One person said: “Alien ships!”

Another added: “That’s awesome.”

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

08-07-2019 om 16:05 geschreven door peter  

Over 120,000 alien hunters are planning to ‘storm Area 51’ to discover the truth

Jeff Parsons

Ancient aliens TV guy says he knows when the extraterrestrials are coming back

picture: Getty

Over 120,000 people have pledged to meet up and ‘storm Area 51’ in the Nevada desert to try and find evidence of alien contact.

The audacious plan is set for September 20, 2019 at 3am and is being organised through Facebook. Those taking part will meet at the Area 51 Alien Center in Amargosa Valley, Nevada and then proceed to Area 51 – a classified remote part of the US Air Force’s Edwards Air Force base.

Now, far be it from us to be cynical of such a plan, but the fact the Facebook group proposing the event is called ‘S***posting cause im in shambles’ gives us some cause for concern.

Nevertheless, at the time of writing, 129,000 people have indicated they’ll be taking part in ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All Of Us’ and a further 163,000 have said they are interested.

Clearly not ones to sweat the finer details of such a daring attempt, the group’s organisers have outlined the approach thus:

‘If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.’

Naruto running is a meme inspired by an anime character called Naruto Uzumaki who has a distinctive running style.

The attempt to storm Area 51 is being organised on Facebook

(Metro)

Dodging bullets is something that needs to be considered because last time someone tried to speed past the site, he was shot. In January a man carrying an unidentified cylindrical object was shot by the local sheriff’s office and Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) officers after attempting to drive into the site.

Whether or not the response will be the same when thousands of alien enthusiasts turn up to try and gain access remains to be seen.

The Guard Gate at Area 51 near Rachel, Nevada

(Photo by Barry King/WireImage)

However, given the nature of the group, we’re going to chalk this one up to internet trolling on a grand scale rather than any legitimate attempt to gain access to the mysterious Area 51.

{ https://metro.co.uk/ }

08-07-2019 om 15:46 geschreven door peter  

CHRISTIAN COTRONEO

The galaxy where the signal originated is similar in size to our own, but creates stars at a relatively slow rate.

(Photo: pixelparticle/Shutterstock)

Someone may have forgotten to turn off the TV at the other end of the universe.

Or maybe someone has sent us an emoji from a faraway mothership.

In other words, we don't have a clue what transmitted the single fast radio burst scientists picked up last week. But we do know where it came from: A galaxy far, far away.

In a study published this week, researchers at the California Institute of Technology claim to have traced a single radio burst back to its home nearly 8 billion light-years away.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs — typically lasting anywhere from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds — have been enshrouded in mystery since they were first discovered in 2007. They're so powerful that they can make their way to our neck of the universe from impossibly far away, although it's rare that we receive them.

That's likely to change over the next few years as new pace-scanning equipment that specializes in FRBs comes online.

Back in January, a newly built Canadian telescope picked up no fewer than 13 fast radio bursts, all seeming to originate some 1.5 billion light-years away. But that's considerably easier to find than one solitary FRB.

What all fast radio bursts have in common is mathematical regularity. They beep-beep-beep at exactly the same intervals. But repeating FRBs are a lot easier to pick up and trace than a single radio burst.

"Finding the locations of the one-off FRBs is challenging because it requires a radio telescope that can both discover these extremely short events and locate them with the resolving power of a mile-wide radio dish," study author and Caltech professor Vikram Ravi explained a statement.

The signal appears to hail from a galaxy similar in size to our own, a region with such a low rate of star formation that scientists call it a "mellow" galaxy.

A repeating fast radio burst, by its very nature, is much easier to receive than a one-off signal.

(Photo: solarseven/Shutterstock)

The report comes a week after scientists in Australia announced the signal's discovery, dubbing it FRB 190523. To find that tiniest of blips in the cosmos, the researchers sifted through vast amounts of data collected by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder.

Keith Bannister, who led that study, called it "the big breakthrough that the field has been waiting for since astronomers discovered fast radio bursts."

And now that researchers have zeroed in on its source, we may soon learn what caused it.

In the meantime, that single, incredibly brief transmission can carry a universe of data. Its odyssey across staggering distances could reveal what lies between star systems.

"These bursts are altered by the matter they encounter in space," Jean-Pierre Macquart, the professor who authored last week's study, noted in a statement. "Now we can pinpoint where they come from, we can use them to measure the amount of matter in intergalactic space."

{ https://www.mnn.com/ }

08-07-2019 om 15:23 geschreven door peter  

Here be monsters. This video shows a living giant squid, captured on camera in its natural habitat for only the 2nd time in history.

NOAA researchers released the video above on June 21, 2019, while announcing that – for only the second time ever – they’d captured a giant squid on camera. Nathan Robinson was one of the scientists on a NOAA-funded expedition to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The team was about 100 miles (160 km) southeast of New Orleans, at a depth of 2,490 feet (759 meters), when he saw a tentacle, perhaps 10 to 12 feet (3 meters) long, rising up out of the inky black of his computer screen.

At that point, he said, he was “captivated,” adding:

You feel very alive. There’s something instinctual about these animals that captures the imagination of everyone – the wonder that there are these huge animals out there on our planet that we know so little about, and that we’ve only caught on camera a couple of times.

The squid appeared to wrap its tentacles around the NOAA underwater stealth camera called the MEDUSA before quickly swimming away. Scientists cited the creature’s behavior as a normal reaction any animal would have to what, at first, appeared to be prey.

Here’s a close-up of the giant squid, as it tries to wrap its tentacles around NOAA’s underwater camera in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Image via NOAA.

The scientists on the ship sent the footage to Mike Vecchione, a NOAA Fisheries zoologist and an octopus-and-squid expert, who said he was “nearly certain” that it was a squid of the genus Architeuthis – a giant squid. NOAA explained:

‘Giant squid’ is a term that’s sometimes used to describe a range of larger squid specimens, but scientifically … only squids of the genus Architeuthis can be considered giant squid.

Vecchione added:

The benchmark is taxonomy, rather than size – it’s either genetically a giant squid or not. People will refer to other things as giant squids, but cephalopod biologists don’t.

Left to right: Nathan Robinson, Sonke Johnsen, Tracey Sutton, Nick Allen, Edie Widder, and Megan McCall gather around to watch the squid video.

Image via Danté Fenolio/NOAA.

NOAA added:

The new footage was captured by the MEDUSA, a camera system that’s designed to give scientists a glimpse into the deep ocean without disturbing the light-sensitive creatures that live there. It uses red light, which many deep-dwelling creatures cannot see, as well as a lure modeled off of a bioluminescent jellyfish. The lure is meant to attract larger predators: Since some jellyfish create bioluminescent displays when attacked, some large predators in the deep ocean look out for this ‘burglar alarm’ display, and show up to feed on whatever it is that’s disturbing the jellyfish. The MEDUSA first captured a giant squid on video in 2012 off the coast of Japan.

The two videos can teach scientists a lot about the giant squid. They were both captured at 2,490 feet [760 meters] below the surface, which means the squid lives in a world that’s very dimly lit. They show that giant squids are active creatures – they don’t float around and passively wait for food to drift by, which Vecchione said was a hypothesis at one time. They also have huge eyes – the largest eyes of any animal on the planet — and their attraction to the jellyfish lure means they’re visual predators.

Edie Widder, chief executive officer of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association and the developer of the MEDUSA technology, said:

In the video, we could clearly see that it was visually tracking the electronic jellyfish, which was very exciting to be able to observe.

NOAA also pointed out that that giant squids are “not uncommon” creatures. They wash ashore fairly regularly off the coast of northern Spain, because the noise involved in oil exploration there can be lethal to them. But viewing one in its natural habitat is rare, and NOAA called it:

… a testament to the contributions ocean exploration is making to the public understanding of the ocean.

NOAA Research

✔@NOAAResearch

"What were once monsters to be feared are now curious and magnificent creatures that delight. We like to feel that science and exploration has brought about this change."

Read the story of how scientists captured a giant squid on video: https://go.usa.gov/xyxph 

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• Bottom line: A NOAA-funded expedition has captured rare footage of a giant squid in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the second time a giant squid has been captured on camera in its deepwater habitat.
• Via NOAA

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

08-07-2019 om 14:56 geschreven door peter  

Nederlander legt mysterieuze ruimtevliegtuig X-37B vast op gevoelige plaat. Bekijk hier de foto

Een Nederlandse satellietspotter heeft zeldzame foto’s van het geheimzinnige ruimtevliegtuig X-37B gemaakt. Maandenlang speurde Ralf Vandebergh de hemel af op zoek naar het vaartuig.

Op 30 juni en 2 juli jongstleden slaagde hij erin om foto’s van de X-37B te maken.

“Het is echt een klein object, zelfs op 300 kilometer hoogte, dus verwacht niet dezelfde details zoals op foto’s van de echte spaceshuttle die op de grond zijn gemaakt,” lichtte hij toe.

Vijfde missie

Hij zei onder de indruk te zijn van de details die hij wel wist vast te leggen.

“We herkennen een deel van de neus, het laadruim en de staart van deze minishuttle,” zei Vandebergh.

Het naamloze vliegtuig voert momenteel zijn vijfde missie uit in de ruimte. Op 7 september 2017 werd de X-37B gelanceerd vanuit Florida.

Weinig bekend

Er is weinig bekend over wat zich aan boord van het vaartuig bevindt.

Gedacht wordt dat de missies van de X-37B te maken hebben met de oprichting van het Amerikaanse ruimteleger.

Space Force

President Trump heeft voorgesteld om een nieuwe tak toe te voegen aan het leger: een divisie die de Verenigde Staten ‘moet gaan beschermen in de ruimte’.

Het is de bedoeling dat deze ‘Space Force’ vanaf 2020 in werking zal treden.

View image on Twitter

SPACE.com

✔@SPACEdotcom

Mysterious X-37B Military Space Plane Caught on Camera (Photo) http://dlvr.it/R7tSH2 

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[Daily Mail]

© Copyright (c) NineForNews.nl

08-07-2019 om 14:25 geschreven door peter  

Dutch astronomer captures rare photographs of mysterious US Air Force X-37B space plane

• Ralf Vandebergh, an astrophotographer and ardent skywatcher in the Netherlands, said he had been trying to spot the X-37B space plane for months
• He finally spotted it in May but wasn't able to get photos of it until last week
• The X-37B is currently on its 667th day of its fifth flight mission, called OTV-5 
• Officials have revealed few details about the OTV-5 mission but there has been a suggestion it could be part of a push for a US Space Force 

By MEGAN SHEETS FOR DAILYMAIL.COM 

A Dutch astronomer captured rare photographs of the US Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane after searching for it for months.  

Ralf Vandebergh, an astrophotographer and ardent skywatcher in the Netherlands, said he had been trying to spot the robotic spacecraft for months and finally managed to track it down in May. 

It wasn't until last week that he was able to take photographs of the elusive X-37B as it passed overhead on June 30 and July 2.  

'It is really a small object, even at only 300 kilometers [186 miles] altitude, so don't expect the detail level of ground-based images of the real space shuttle,' Vandebergh said of the vehicle, according to Live Science. 

He said he was impressed by the level of detail he was able to capture on the spacecraft, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV), which looks like a miniature version of NASA's retired space shuttle.  

'We can recognize a bit of the nose, payload bay and tail of this mini-shuttle, with even a sign of some smaller detail,' Vandebergh said.

He was shooting with a 10-inch F/4,8 aperture Newtonian telescope and an Astrolumina ALccd 5L-11 mono CMOS camera after having tracked the X-37B manually with a 6×30 finderscope. 

Dutch astronomer Ralf Vandebergh captured rare photographs of the US Air Force's mysterious X-37B space plane last week after searching for it for months

The unmanned plane is currently on its 667th day of its fifth flight mission, called OTV-5. 

It launched from one of Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on September 7, 2017. 

Officials have revealed few details about the OTV-5 mission but there has been a suggestion it could be part of a push for a US Space Force. 

The space plane is 29 feet long, 9.6 feet tall and weighs around 11,000 lbs. 

It is orbiting at around 200 miles high and is powered by solar cells with lithium-ion batteries.  

Little is known about what it is carrying but on board OTV-5's payload is a US thermal spreader which will test the longevity of electronics and heat pipes in the space environment. 

The X-37B is currently on its 667th day of its fifth flight mission, called OTV-5. The artist rendition above shows what the unmanned plane might look like orbiting the earth

Known as the Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader, or ASETS-II, it was developed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), to test experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipes for long-duration stints in the space environment.

According to the AFRL, the payload’s three primary science objectives are to measure the initial on-orbit thermal performance, to measure long-duration thermal performance and to assess any lifetime degradation

In June last year, President Donald Trump announced that he is directing the Pentagon to a new Space Force as an independent service branch aimed at ensuring American dominance in space.

The president framed space as a national security issue, saying he does not want 'China and Russia and other countries leading us'.

One expert has suggested that this aircraft could already be part of an early US Space Force.

'Ironically, the X-37B is exactly the type of program — toward giving the U.S. flexibility of operations in space — that seems to be prompting the current push for a Space Force, yet are already underway,' said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Space.com reported.

Four previous X-37B missions have been launched by United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets. 

Each time the unmanned space plane has carried a mystery payload on long-duration flights in Earth orbit.    

WHAT IS THE X-37B SPACE PLANE?

The U.S. Air Force's unmanned X-37B space plane looks similar to Nasa's space shuttle but is much smaller. 

The space plane is 29 feet (8.8 metres) long, 9.6 feet (2.9 metres) tall and weighs around 11,000 lbs. (4,990 kilograms).

It is orbiting at around 200 miles (320 kilometres) high. 

The U.S. Air Force's unmanned X-37B space plane looks similar to Nasa's space shuttle but is much smaller. The space plane is 29 feet (8.8 metres) long, 9.6 feet (2.9 metres) tall and weighs around 11,000 lbs. (4,990 kilograms) 

Officials have revealed few details about the OTV-5 mission (the aircraft's fifth) but according to the Air Force, one on board OTV-5 payload is US thermal spreader which will test the longevity of electronics and heat pipes in the space environment.

The craft is powered by solar cells with lithium-ion batteries.

Four previous X-37B missions have been launched by United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets. 

Each time the unmanned space plane has carried a mystery payload on long-duration flights in Earth orbit.   

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

08-07-2019 om 14:23 geschreven door peter  

“This was the formal weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. More skill than simple sight was required for its use. An elegant weapon. It was a symbol as well. Anyone can use a blaster or a fusioncutter—but to use a lightsaber well was a mark of someone a cut above the ordinary.”
―Obi-Wan Kenobi

It’s the dream of every Jedi wannabe, especially those who played with the plastic flashlight versions and realized just how far off into the future the real thing must be. Take hope, young Skywalkers … that day may be coming sooner than you think. Physicists have discovered a new and easy way to make hybrid light particles that behave more like matter. Can the mechanism fit in a light sword handle and how many batteries will it need?

“First, we show that periodically modulating an excited state of rubidium splits its spectral weight to generate new lines—beyond those that are ordinarily characteristic of the atom—separated by multiples of the modulation frequency. Second, we use this capability to simultaneously generate spectral lines that are resonant with two chosen spatial modes of a non-degenerate optical cavity, enabling what we name ‘Floquet polaritons’ to exist in both modes. Because both spectral lines correspond to the same Floquet-engineered atomic state, adding a single-frequency field is sufficient to couple both modes to a Rydberg excitation. We demonstrate that the resulting polaritons interact strongly in both cavity modes simultaneously. The production of Floquet polaritons provides a promising new route to the realization of ordered states of strongly correlated photons, including crystals and topological fluids, as well as quantum information technologies such as multimode photon-by-photon switching.”

There’s your blueprint, junior Jedis – courtesy of physicists at the University of Chicago who published details of their research this week in the journal Nature. ‘Floquet’ sounds like a bunch of wet flowers but it’s a branch of differential equations. ‘Polariton’ sounds like an arctic movie monster but it’s actually a “quasiparticle resulting from the strong coupling of photons with a dipole-carrying excitation.” That simple description is explained in greater detail by the scientific blog Mapping Ignorance (thanks for rubbing our noses in it) with a video that helps non-physicists wrap their heads around the idea of an excited hybrid light particle which acts like it has mass and can cut through the limbs of the Sith. Or can it?

“Floquet polaritons are full of surprises; we’re still continuing to understand them better. Our next order of business, though, will be to use these colliding photons to make topological ‘fluids’ of light. It is a tremendously exciting time.”

Study co-author Logan Clark explained in a press release how others had first created polaritons as a bi-product in other quantum experiments but his team was the first to make them intentionally by making a simple change to the shaking technique used to excite them. Unfortunately, he doesn’t see these new easy polaritons as a solid form of light for lightsabers but rather as a kind of fluid. Light-supersoakers? Clark might go for that idea.

“It turns out shaking things is not only a lot of fun, but can lead to some really fascinating science.”

Can? Do or not do, junior Jedi. There is no “can.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

08-07-2019 om 13:59 geschreven door peter  

Strange UK UFO Emits Light and Sound!

Very strange UFO in the skies over the United Kingdom recently posted on Youtube on July 6th.  Listen to the strange sounds it makes when the light flashes near the beginning of the video.  It’s not thunder that’s for sure!   Never seen anything like this one before.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

08-07-2019 om 13:26 geschreven door peter