04-09-2019 om 17:49 geschreven door peter  

ROBBERT VAN DEN BROEKE ZIET ZE VLIEGEN ( VIDEO )

Enkele dagen geleden is er in Noord Brabant een bijzondere opname gemaakt van ufo’s die rondom een ballon hangen. 

Die beelden zijn bijzonder en ook degene die ze maakte, Robbert van den Broeke, kan als bijzonder worden omschreven.

Er zijn door de jaren heen heel wat beschuldigen richting Robbert van den Broeke geuit, zoals bijvoorbeeld de volgende uit de Telegraaf van 1 augustus 2012. 

Robbert van den Broeke (32) is zwaar teleurgesteld. Het medium, dat zeven jaar geleden zogenaamd werd ’ontmaskerd’ tijdens het tv-programma Er is Zoveel Meer met Irene Moors, ligt weer onder vuur. Ditmaal beweert een boze boerin dat Robbert zelf graancirkels heeft gemaakt op haar land. Robbert: „Nu moet ik mezelf weer verdedigen.” 

Nu komt hij weer in het nieuws en wel met twee heel verschillende berichten. 

De eerste betreft een ufo-waarneming die door Robbert enkele dagen geleden is gefilmd en waarover hij zelf het volgende schrijft: 

29 augustus rond 19:00 uur in Hoeven kreeg ik het gevoel dat ik naar buiten moest lopen en in de lucht moest kijken en zag een luchtballon met daarnaast 4 lichtbollen, saturnusachtige lichtbollen. Ik pakte mijn telefoon om deze te filmen.In deze video kunt u de lichtbollen zien, op het einde van de video is de video 400% ingezoomd om zo beter de bewegende lichtbollen te zien. ufo's laten zich steeds meer zien om mensen bewust te maken en ze willen dat we stoppen met oorlog voeren en discrimineren en dat liefde en respect de enige weg is. Ik probeer contact op te nemen met de ballonvaarders om te vragen of zij deze ook hebben gezien ik houd u op de hoogte. 

Ufoloog Scott Waring heeft een artikel gewijd aan deze waarneming en is er heilig van overtuigd dat we hier met een bijzondere opname te maken hebben en dat deze ufo’s echt zijn. 

Naast dit verhaal, verschijnt er enkele dagen eerder ook een heel ander verhaal. 

Robbert van den Broeke dreigt ten val te worden gebracht door nieuwe videobeelden. Daarop is het Hoevens medium te zien waarop hij met een kartonnen afbeelding van Maria en een UFO op een stokje voor een telefoonlens beweegt. Het suggereert oplichting, maar volgens Van den Broeke is hij het slachtoffer van zijn kinderlijke onschuld en bovendien van chantage. Hij spreekt zelfs van een poging tot karaktermoord. 

De Amerikaanse filmmaker William Gazeck leek voor Robbert van den Broeke degene die de wereld zou laten zien dat het Hoevense medium géén oplichter is. Recent was hij naar eigen zeggen getuige van de voorspelling én ontdekking van de grootste graancirkelformatie van Nederland. "Hij is een beroemdheid en was de hele week bij mij en is dus overtuigd van de echtheid. Helaas denken mensen nog steeds wel eens dat ik de graancirkels zelf maak, maar tussen de voorspelling en het ontdekken van de formatie ben ik niet van zijn zijde geweken", zo zei Van den Broeke twee maanden geleden. 

Gazecki, die zelfs een Emmy Award voor één van zijn documentaires in de wacht sleepte, zou zo onder de indruk van het leven van Robbert van den Broeke en zijn ontdekkingen zijn dat hij er een reallifesoap van wilde maken. "Het is echt te mooi om waar te zijn. Het is sowieso geweldig dat zo'n gerespecteerd filmmaker overtuigd is van de echtheid. Dat hij mij voor lange tijd 24 uur per dag wil filmen is heftig, maar voor mij dé kans om te laten zien dat het allemaal echt is", zo sprak het medium. 

Nu blijkt het écht te mooi om waar te zijn. Er zijn namelijk beelden online verschenen waarop hij zichzelf filmt terwijl hij met een foto van Maria op een stokje geplakt te zwaaien. Ook is er een tweede video waarop er een afbeelding van een UFO op een stokje is geplakt. Volgens sceptici betekent dit de val van Van den Broeke en is het duidelijk dat het medium zich schuldig maakt aan oplichting. 

Dit hele verhaal staat in meer detail beschreven op deze website. 

Oplichter, fantast of medium die in een verkeerd daglicht wordt gesteld? Wie het weet mag het zeggen. 

En om dit verhaal compleet te maken is het misschien wel leuk om een stukje terug te gaan naar de tijd dat de helaas overleden Sandra Reemer nog actief was bij Niburu. Naar de tijd dat zij Robbert ging interviewen.

Op jonge leeftijd blijkt dat Robbert meer ziet dan zijn ouders zich kunnen voorstellen. Hij heeft een moeilijke jeugd en er ontstaan bij Robbert trauma’s, fobieën, onzekerheden en angstsyndromen.

Op 4 mei 2005 fotografeerde Robbert een buitenruimtelijk wezen. Hij besloot met zijn waarneming naar buiten te komen en de media wisten hem te vinden. De KRO besteedde in een aflevering van Wonderen Bestaan aandacht aan hem en ook Omroep Brabant maakte een documentaire over het leven van Robbert.

Vervolgens was hij regelmatig te gast bij het programma Life and Cooking met Irene Moors en Carlo Boszhard. Het resultaat van elke uitzending was een lawine aan reacties. Dit leidde tot de ontwikkeling van het televisieprogramma Er is zoveel meer.

{ http://niburu.co/ }

04-09-2019 om 17:42 geschreven door peter  

Records show thousands of UFO sightings in Manitoba

Selection of videos by peter2011

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

04-09-2019 om 17:16 geschreven door peter  

Fleet of UFOs Pass the Moon Filmed From an Earth Based Telescope

It looks like it is a fleet of UFOs, a large Mothership followed by several smaller UFOs. The video captured last month, August 2019, shows the fleet of UFOs passing the moon until they disappear behind the moon.

 

• https://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/

{  https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

04-09-2019 om 16:34 geschreven door peter  

Brain Waves Detected in Lab Grown Mini-brains

Brain organoids in a laboratory dish.

Credit: UC San Diego Health Sciences

Brain organoids — also called mini-brains — are 3D cellular models that represent aspects of the human brain in the laboratory. Brain organoids help researchers track human development, unravel the molecular events that lead to disease and test new treatments. They aren’t prefect replicas, of course. Brain organoids do not replicate cognitive function, but researchers can check how an organoid’s physical structure or gene expression changes over time or as a result of a virus or drug.

University of California San Diego researchers have now taken brain organoids one step further, achieving an unprecedented level of neural network activity — electrical impulses that can be recorded by multi-electrode arrays. Using data from babies born up to three-and-a-half months premature, the team developed an algorithm to predict their age based upon EEG patterns. The algorithm then read lab-grown brain organoids the same way, and assigned them an age.

The electrical impulse pattern for nine-month-old brain organoids revealed similar features to those of a premature infant who had reached full-term (40 weeks gestation).

These new optimized brain organoids may make it possible for researchers to study mental illnesses that aren’t caused by or result in overt physiological changes, but instead involve disturbances in brain cell network activity, such as autism or epilepsy. For many of these conditions, there are no relevant laboratory or animal models.

“We couldn’t believe it at first — we thought our electrodes were malfunctioning,” said co-senior author Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. “Because the data were so striking, I think many people were kind of skeptical about it, and understandably so.” Muotri led the study with Bradley Voytek, PhD, associate professor of cognitive science in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences.

Brain organoid construction begins with a perhaps surprising source: an adult skin sample. In the lab, researchers convert the skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Like most stem cells, with the right cocktail of molecular factors, iPSCs can be directed to specialize into any cell type. In this case, they become brain cells — different types of neurons and glia, for example.

At UC San Diego, brain organoids have been used to produce the first direct experimental proof that the Brazilian Zika virus can cause severe birth defects and to repurpose existing HIV drugs for a rare, inherited neurological disorder. Muotri and team also recently sent their brain organoids to the International Space Station to test microgravity’s effect on brain development — and maybe prospects for human life beyond Earth.

In the latest study, Muotri and colleagues optimized every step of brain organoid construction. For example, they started from single cells, rather than the clumps of cells used in most protocols. They also tweaked the precise timing and concentration of factors added to prompt brain cell organization. There wasn’t a single secret ingredient or innovation, he said, but rather several improvements over time.

The optimization paid off in terms of cellular diversity and cellular network activity. For example, the team detected a particular primate-specific neuron, called a cortical GABAergic neuron, that had never before been generated in a lab dish. According to Muotri, these cells are important players in the sophistication of neural networks.

To measure cellular network activity, the researchers grew their newly optimized brain organoids on multi-electrode arrays. The electrodes capture and record electrical impulses, which appear as patterns of waves and spikes in an EEG read-out. With the new protocol, the brain organoids went from producing 3,000 spikes per minute to 300,000 spikes per minute.

In humans, oscillations change with age, as brain cell connectivity develops. Newborn baby brains tend to have periods of rest (no waves) between spikes of electrical activity. Those quiet periods get shorter and shorter as the brain develops. In time, brain activity becomes constant, though levels vary. These brain oscillation patterns often correlate with human cognition and disease states.

Muotri and team compared their brain organoid electrical patterns to a publicly available dataset of 567 EEG recordings from 39 babies born prematurely, between 24 and 38 weeks gestation, and for several weeks after birth. From their initial days to nine months, the brain organoids produced similar levels of electric activity, following a similar pattern: less quiet time, more frequent electrical impulses.

Muotri said he is often asked about the ethical implications of this work, with questions like: “Are we getting too close to re-creating the human brain?” These brain organoids dramatically differ from human brains in many ways, he explained. For example, they are several times smaller than an adult human brain. They do not have hemispheres or blood vessels. And they are not surrounded by protective skulls or connected to other tissues.

“They are far from being functionally equivalent to a full cortex, even in a baby,” said Muotri, who is also director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. “In fact, we don’t yet have a way to even measure consciousness or sentience.”

Muotri’s brain organoids can live for years in the lab, but their activity plateaus at nine months. He said a number of reasons might apply, including the lack of blood vessels or the need for additional neurons to continue maturing.

The better brain organoids can replicate the human brain in the lab, Muotri said, the less researchers will need to rely on animal models and fetal tissue to better understand and treat human disease.

“Our work doesn’t yet replace the need for human fetal brain tissue for research, but it’s very attractive as a potential alternative,” he said.

Reference:

• Trujillo, C. A., Gao, R., Negraes, P. D., Gu, J., Buchanan, J., Preissl, S., … Muotri, A. R. (2019). Complex Oscillatory Waves Emerging from Cortical Organoids Model Early Human Brain Network Development. Cell Stem Cell. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2019.08.002
• This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

{ https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience }

04-09-2019 om 15:53 geschreven door peter  

Over the years there have on occasion appeared remarkable and sensational stories of UFO crashes in which the bodies of the occupants have been captured or otherwise obtained by shady government forces. Undoubtedly the most well known of these is the case of Roswell, New Mexico, but while this may be the one most ingrained in popular culture there are other more obscure reports as well. One of these supposedly occurred in a small, backwater town in Texas, where a strange visitor would purportedly come from some other realm to crash and find its final resting place in a crude grave that has been lost and remains a mystery to this day.

The setting for this bizarre story comes amid a UFO flap that was sweeping the nation at the time. From between the years of 1896 and 1897 some outlandish stories were starting to make the headlines. Beginning in California and working their way east there began to be reported numerous accounts of what were described as mysterious, metallic cigar-shaped “airships” appearing in the skies, said to be slow moving and with powerful spotlights that could pierce the night with great precision. The reports were remarkable because this was an era before airplanes, when even balloons and blimps were not a particularly common site in the skies of these regions, so for so many people to suddenly start reporting giant mystery airships of an unknown design was cause for great concern, making the news on a regular basis.

One town that would be visited by one of these ship was the small, rural farming town of Aurora, Texas. This was an unassuming place that would normally be just another dusty town out in the badlands, nothing remarkable about it or particularly special, a place one could pass right on by without really noticing. Yet according to the Dallas Morning News, on April 15, 1897 one of these mysterious ships allegedly appeared to come sailing down out of the sky to go floating over center of town. This would have been an otherworldly, awe-inspiring sight to begin with, but things would apparently get more spectacular still when the ship meandered off and seemed to experience some sort of mechanical difficulties, purportedly colliding with a windmill on the rural property of a Judge J.S. Proctor, and causing a “terrific explosion” that wrecked the windmill, a water tank, and the airship, sending debris raining down everywhere.

When the wreckage was investigated by stunned locals, they apparently found that much of the debris was a strange, light metal that none of them had ever seen before, like a “mixture of aluminum and silver.” According to the report they also found the pilot of the craft sprawled out on the ground dead amongst the wreckage, and although there was no really detailed description it was described as a petite humanoid figure and called “a Martian,” with the report stating of its appearance, “while his remains are badly disfigured enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.” On the creature’s person were supposedly sheets of a paper-like material upon which were scrawled some sort of strange symbols like hieroglyphs, the meaning of which was as enigmatic as the pilot and his weird ship. So, now there seemed to be an actual crashed mystery ship and an alien body, so what did the locals do? Well, according to the tale they tossed the wreckage into an old well, sealed it off, and then had the tiny “alien” given a Christian burial in the nearby Aurora Cemetery in a grave with a small, unassuming headstone with a crude etching of the alien’s ship on it. Newspapers at the time ran with this story, and before long it was being talked about all over the place while curiosity seekers came to town to see the area and its cemetery for themselves.

While it might be easy to say that the Dallas Morning Newsreport, which happened to have been written by an Aurora local, must surely have been a made-up joke piece, there were soon numerous other witnesses coming forward to corroborate the story, saying that they had also seen the craft or had even witnessed the crash and the dead alien body, giving weight to the strange account. There was also the odd claim from the new owner of Judge Proctor’s property, a Mr. Brawley Oates, who claimed in 1945 that he had found pieces of the alien ship buried in the well, which had made him ill and forced him to cover the site with cement to seal it away.

As amazing as all of this was at the time, it oddly all sort of faded away and became sort of an obscure historical oddity for decades, the location of the grave forgotten until the account was picked up on by UFO enthusiasts. The case quickly became popular with the UFO hunting crowd in later years, with many investigations of the claims launched over the years. One of the first of these was carried out by Bill Case, an aviation writer for the Dallas Times Herald and the Texas state director of Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), who interviewed surviving witnesses and checked out the cemetery. He would claim in 1973 to have found the gravestone of what he believed to be the alien’s grave, not much more than a rock, really, small in size and half-broken, carrying what appeared to be part of an etching of a “saucer shaped structure.” Using a metal detector, it was determined that there seemed to be large metal pieces buried down there in the ground, and the excited investigator tried to get permission from the city to exhume the grave with no success. Making the story more bizarre was that he would claim that upon his next visit the metal pieces had seemingly disappeared, possibly moved by someone. Not long after this the gravestone itself was stolen, and the location of the body lost once more.

Aurora Cemetery

Another notable investigation was carried out by the television show UFO Hunters in 2008. The team approached the current owner of the Judge Proctor property Tim Oates, nephew of Brawley Oates, the one who had sealed the well. Oates gave them permission for the well to be unsealed, but no pieces of alien wreckage were found and the water tested was fairly normal except for heightened levels of aluminum present. If there had ever been pieces of an alien airship in there they had since been removed and lost. UFO Hunters also investigated Aurora Cemetery, looking for the lost unmarked grave with ground penetrating radar. It seems they found a promising spot and tried to get permission to dig it up but were denied. Without being able to exhume the remains it was impossible to determine if they were human or not, and so the mystery has remained. To this day the location of the grave, or indeed if it ever existed at all, is unknown, although the cemetery itself still bears a plaque listing the alien as one of those interred there.

The tale of Aurora’s UFO crash and its lost alien grave has been much discussed and picked apart in recent years. One prominent idea is that this was all merely a publicity stunt to get more people to come to the town. They had been suffering from a string of calamities such as a disease epidemic, a devastating fire, and lost crops, so it is possible that the original article was a ploy to get people to go there. After all, at the time it doesn’t seem that any one really ever followed up on the original report, and there is also the fact if there was a dead alien of all things, how could it possibly be buried and then its resting place forgotten about? Wouldn’t someone desecrate the grave or even rob it? Other ideas are that the crash really was an alien craft and the grave is either still out there waiting to be found or the body whisked away by the government Roswell style. There has also been the idea that this might have really happened, but rather than some alien or interdimensional traveler it was perhaps some mad scientist testing out his own airship contraption. Considering the verifiable facts are thin and no evidence has ever really been found that any of this happened as described we are left to wonder. Did a UFO crash at Aurora and is there an alien buried in the cemetery there?  Whether it is true or not, it is an strange little historical oddity that stokes the imagination.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

04-09-2019 om 15:36 geschreven door peter  

Two UFOs Seen Over New York During Day, Sep 2, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Sept 2, 2019
Location of sighting: Clayville, New York, USA
Source: MUFON #103083

This report just came into MUFON today. Two UFOs were seen passing over trees in the small town of Clayville, New York. Clayville has a population of 350-400 residents. The daytime footage is 56 seconds long. If it were CGI often its so hard to make it that people will only make about 10-15 seconds of footage. So this rules out CGI. The UFOs are also matching color with the clouds in the sky as many UFOs have done in past reports. It is however very rare to see them traveling outside the cloud. Usually they dart from cloud to cloud. 
Scott C. Waring-Taiwan

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

04-09-2019 om 15:17 geschreven door peter  

Two Black UFOs Found Landed In Craters On Mars, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Sept 4, 2019

Location of discovery: Mars

Source photo: 

• http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/212251

I found two interesting structures today in a Mars gigapan photo. The two structures appear to be ships that landed at the center of craters. You can see the black shinyness of the objects. One is very round and dome like the other is less thick and more turtle shell shaped. I believe both are ships that can leave at any time. By landing in the craters, astronomers and others who record them will assume that they are mere shadows. But as you see, they are real objects hiding in the craters. 

Scott C. Waring

 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

04-09-2019 om 15:13 geschreven door peter  

04-09-2019 om 01:57 geschreven door peter  

It’s likely Mars was once a water world with rivers, lakes and maybe even an ocean. New research lends support to the possibility that an asteroid slammed into Mars’ ocean 3.5 billion years ago, creating a vast tsunami.

Artist’s concept showing a proposed Mars ocean, some 4 billion years ago. According to some researchers, the young planet Mars then would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 500 feet (140 meters) deep. But it’s more likely the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere, in some regions reaching depths greater than a mile (1.6 km).

Image via ESO/M. Kornmesser.

It’s now commonly accepted among scientists that Mars used to be a lot wetter than it is today, a few billion years ago. As well as rivers and lakes, there has been growing evidence for a former ocean in the northern hemisphere. Now, new research is lending support to the possibility that an asteroid slammed into that ocean 3.5 billion years ago, creating a mega-tsunami 1,000 feet (309 meters) high!

The new peer-reviewed findings, from Francois Costard, a scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), were first published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets on June 26, 2019.

Costard has advocated his theory since 2017 to explain some unusual surface features called Thumbprint Terrain – concentric ridges that look like those in a thumbprint – in Mars’ Arabia Terra region. A very similar theory had also been suggested by two other groups of astronomers back in 2016. In their scenario, the asteroid impact caused not one but twotsunamis.

Part of the Thumbprint Terrain in the Arabia Terra region of Mars, that might have been created by a mega-tsunami 3.5 billion years ago.

Image via American Geophysical Union/Discover.

Now, Costard thinks he has found the impact crater that the asteroid created. He attempted to trace back the direction that the tsunami would have originated from, away from the Thumbprint Terrain. He narrowed down the possible impact location to 10 craters, before focusing on Lomonosov Crater. The shape of the crater indicates it was under water at the time, and it’s the right age (about 3 billion years old) and size (75 miles – 120 km – in diameter). From the new paper:

We attribute its broad and shallow rim, in part, to an impact into a shallow ocean as well as its subsequent erosion from the collapsing transient water cavity. The likely marine formation of the Lomonosov crater, and the apparent agreement in its age with that of the Thumbprint Terrain unit strongly suggests that it was the source crater of the tsunami. These results have implications for the stability of a late northern ocean on Mars.

If the tsunami scenario is correct, it has implications for the potential habitability of ancient Mars, since that means the northern ocean was still around 3.5 billion years ago. Until now, it has been thought that the planet lost most of its water closer to 3.7 billion years ago. That would allow an extra couple hundred million years in which life could have started. Alexis Rodriguez, a Mars geomorphologist at the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) in Tucson, Arizona, noted that the ocean sediments:

… may be a window into the subsurface habitability of Mars.

Orbital view of Lomonosov Crater, as seen by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. This crater may have been formed by the asteroid impact that caused the tsunami(s) in the ancient ocean.

Image via NASA/JPL/MSSS/NASA Photojournal.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about water on ancient Mars and the climate conditions that allowed it to exist on Mars’ surface, something it does not do today. As Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University, said:

It’s fair to say that we don’t yet fully understand the history of Mars’s climate, and certainly, the climate models we use will continue to be improved.

While evidence for the possible ocean has grown, it’s still not absolutely definitive. But if the findings regarding the Thumbprint Terrain are accurate, that would be pretty compelling evidence for the ocean. After all, how could you have a tsunami without an ocean?

Even if there was no ocean, though, Mars was still plenty wet, with rain, groundwater, aquifers, rivers and lakes. Early Mars was a lot more like Earth in many ways, but then the planet lost most of its atmosphere – for reasons still being investigated and debated – and the water dried up.

There have been recent findings that suggest liquid water aquifers still exist deep underground, and the Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL) features on some slopes near the equator may be evidence for trickles of briny water on the surface, but otherwise most of Mars’ current water is in the form of ice, at the poles and underground. Landers and rovers have also seen frost, snow and clouds (both water and carbon dioxide types), and orbiters have photographed fog in canyons and craters. But compared to a few billion years ago, Mars is much drier now, and colder, than it used to be. So we can only imagine what it would have been like to be able to stand there and watch the asteroid plummet into that Martian ocean.

• Bottom line: Evidence for a possible ancient ocean in Mars’ northern hemisphere has grown in recent years, and now additional evidence suggests that a massive asteroid impact created a mega-tsunami about 3.5 billion years ago.
• Source: The Lomonosov Crater Impact Event: A Possible Mega-Tsunami Source on Mars
• Via Discover

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

04-09-2019 om 01:43 geschreven door peter  

The Biggest Volcano on Jupiter's Moon Io Is Super Active. But Does It Run Like Clockwork?

An image based on data gathered by NASA's Voyager 1 mission shows Loki Patera in the lower right.

(Image: © NASA/JPL/USGS)

De Kleer and her colleagues started by pinning down the details of Io's orbit, which takes about 1.77 Earth days. That's too fast for scientists to develop a nuanced understanding of the orbit's impacts using Earth-based telescopes, which can only observe when Io is in their line of sight. 

But there are other, much slower cycles — on the scale of hundreds of days — that are embedded within that orbit, as other moons pull at Io. Those cycles could also influence the tidal heating that the moon experiences.

"It's been this interesting search for patterns in the volcanic activity; tidal heating should produce volcanism that follows specific patterns," de Kleer said. "So you should have volcanoes that are occurring at specific places on the surface and not at other places, and you might expect them to show specific patterns in time also."

To try to make sense of the volcano, the study authors gathered all the observations they could find of Loki over the past three decades. For much of that timeline, scientists' data was sporadic at best, but in 2013, de Kleer and her colleagues made a concerted effort to maximize observations of Loki.

The result is the most detailed look scientists have ever had of the volcano's activity. "It's the dataset which is the most impressive thing," Julie Rathbun, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who wasn't involved in the new research but who also studies Loki, told Space.com. "It's really hard to get all the data we want from the ground."

The other factor that de Kleer and her colleagues focused on, the details of Io's orbit around Jupiter, was less challenging to study. But it's not the sort of factor volcanologists might turn to first if they've been inspired primarily by volcanoes closer to home, which aren't strongly affected by any tidal heating.

"A lot of the geology is based on terrestrial geology and there's not a lot of things on Earth that are driven by tides, so it's not something I think people, especially when studying volcanoes, are used to looking for," Rathbun said. "When studying planets and moons, tides and periodicity are among the most obvious things to measure, they're the easiest things to measure."

• Related: Voyager at 40: 40 Photos from NASA's Epic 'Grand Tour' Mission

De Kleer and her colleagues were inspired by cycles scientists have noticed in plumes streaming off one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, which seem to brighten and dim in conjunction with that moon's orbit.

They found two cycles in Loki's activity that might be influenced by tidal heating: one lasting 454 days and the other 480 days. Both of those numbers are close to cycles in which Io's orbit is tweaked by the influences of its neighbors.

And realistically, that sort of cycle might make more sense in a volcano than a cycle tied directly to an orbital period as fast as Io's. "Those are the timescales that a volcano can actually evolve on," de Kleer said. She and her colleagues think one potential explanation for what's happening at Loki is that the plumbing of the volcano can't respond to tidal heating at the speed of the 1.77-day orbital cycle, leaving only slower cycles to affect the volcano.

Understanding how Loki works isn't just about understanding one massive planet's one weirdo moon. Earth and Io are the only worlds in our solar system where it's easy to study volcanoes, and Earth's aren't strongly influenced by tidal heating, but scientists believe that phenomenon is a vitally important one in the bigger picture of planetary science, in our solar system and beyond.

"This kind of global-scale tidally driven geophysics is just not something that you have on Earth," de Kleer said. "[Io] is kind of this alien world where we have these processes that you're not able to study on Earth, and if we can study them on Io we can broaden our idea of geophysics more generally so that it's less Earth-centric and encompasses more worlds."

De Kleer and her colleagues are hoping to continue regularly checking on Loki in order to sort out how Io's orbital cycles are governing its activity. They calculated out when the volcano could rumble based on each timeline, and within a few years, they're hoping to gather enough data to pin down a better understanding of Loki's dynamics.

"It's going to be a lot of fun when we get close to the predicted times that the brightenings should occur," de Kleer said. "We can watch and we notice right away in the images when Loki starts to brighten, and that's always fun."

• The research is described in a paper published May 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 
•  Photos: Mars Volcano Views Revealed by Spacecraft 
•  Raikoke Volcano's Eruption Seen from Space (Photos) 
•  Weird Volcanoes Are Erupting Across the Solar System 

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

04-09-2019 om 01:17 geschreven door peter  

Methane on Mars Isn't Being Released by Wind Erosion

By Mike Wall 

But the origins of the gas remain unclear.

This diagram shows possible ways by which methane might incorporate into Mars' atmosphere (sources) and disappear from the atmosphere (sinks).

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/SAM-GSFC/Univ. of Michigan)

One small piece of the Mars methane mystery may have just been solved.

NASA's Curiosity rover has spotted multiple surges of methane in Mars' air over the past few years — most recently in June, when levels of the gas inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater spiked to 21 parts per billion per unit volume (ppbv). 

That's far higher than background methane levels on Gale's floor, which Curiosity has determined range seasonally from 0.24 ppbv to 0.65 ppbv.

• Related: The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline

Scientists don't know what's producing this methane, or where exactly it's coming from. But they're keen to find out, because the gas is a possible sign of life. More than 90% of the methane in Earth's air, for example, was produced by microbes and other organisms.

A recent study may help researchers narrow the hunt. Scientists estimated the methane content of typical Red Planet rocks by analyzing Mars meteorites and native basalt and sedimentary rocks here on Earth — stand-ins for their Martian counterparts. 

The team then calculated how much of this methane could be liberated by scouring winds, the dominant form of erosion on modern Mars. (The Red Planet hasn't hosted stable bodies of surface water for more than 3 billion years.)

The researchers determined that, for wind erosion to produce detectable levels of methane in the Martian air, the scoured rocks would have to contain as much methane as the most hydrocarbon-rich shale here on Earth. That's a very unlikely scenario, study team members said.

"What's important about this [finding] is that it strengthens the argument that the methane must be coming from a different source," co-author Jon Telling, a geochemist at Newcastle University in England, said in a statement. "Whether or not that's biological, we still don't know."

Indeed, methane can be produced abiotically as well — by reactions involving hot water and certain types of rock, for example. And it's unclear if the methane detected by Curiosity (and Europe's Mars Express orbiter, which confirmed one of the surges the rover found) is modern or ancient. However it was originally generated, the gas could have been trapped underground for billions of years before bubbling up to the surface.

The cause of the methane spikes is "still an open question," study lead author Emmal Safi, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Natural and Environmental Sciences at Newcastle University, said in the same statement. 

"Our paper is just a little part of a much bigger story," she added. "Ultimately, what we're trying to discover is if there's the possibility of life existing on planets other than our own, either living now or maybe life in the past that is now preserved as fossils or chemical signatures."

• The recent paper was published in June in the journal Scientific Reports.

• Mars' Atmosphere: Composition, Climate & Weather
• 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars
• Ancient Mars Could Have Supported Life (Photos)

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. 

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04-09-2019 om 00:58 geschreven door peter  

Were Ancient Martians Murdered by Nuclear Bomb-Dropping Aliens? An Investigation

IMAGES ALTERED BY AUTHOR. IMAGES: NASA & DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY

For that, let's take a look at an excerpt from Did Spacemen Colonize the Earth?, a book published by Robin Collyns in 1976. Earlier in the following passage, Collyns argues that there certainly were nuclear explosions on Mars.

"It is difficult to imagine a nuclear explosion on Mars that was not deliberately caused," Collyns writes. "It is very likely that the explosion was made for some constructional purpose. Thus, the [nuclear observations] can serve as one of the proofs in the favor of existence of rational life on mars."

Pseudoscience and wild conjecture are fun, but John Brandenburg, a plasma physicist who got his degree from UC Davis and who has seemingly had a relatively normal, distinguished career for a scientist, has staked his reputation on his theory that Martian life was, perhaps purposefully, destroyed with nukes.

"Was Mars murdered?" he muses in a book about the theory.

In an oddly disconcerting interview with "Supreme Master Television," a thoroughly bizarre station run by the Supreme Master Ching Hai International Association cult, Brandenburg notes that Mars had two ancient humanoid civilizations, called Cydonia and Utopia, which had a level of technology similar to that of the ancient Egyptians.

What happened to those Martians? Nukes, he says.

"Two great disasters happened on Mars," he told Supreme Master TV, pointing to Utopia on a map. "One here, and then an asteroid impact happened here, and Cydonia was right in between them. That's puzzling. Why would so many bad things happen in one area of mars that just so happened to have archaeology on it?"

That was back in 2011. Since then, Brandenburg has decided that both disasters were nukes, and possibly "natural" nuclear explosions that could have been caused by some cosmic weirdness like an asteroid hitting radioactive material or something like that. Today, however, he has upped the ante.

This weekend, he's going to present new research at a meeting of the American Physical Society that he says proves that there were indeed nuclear explosions on Mars and that they are consistent with nuclear bomb "airbursts," meaning that there's no possible way these were natural. He said in a statement emailed to me that the evidence he's found is "consistent with mixed fusion-fission explosions."

It's worth noting ​that the other sessions at the meeting appear to have well-regarded university researchers from all around the world presenting experimental particle physics results and things of that nature, so I have to say that Brandenburg's research (which certainly does not appear to be peer-reviewed) appearing alongside that is pretty weird.

Here's his case, set to be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astrophysics, a journal that just published a study about the Big Bang being a hologram:

"The high concentration of Xenon-129 atmosphere, the evidence from Krypton-80 and the detected pattern of excess abundance of Uranium and Thorium on Mars surface, relative to Mars meteorites, first seen by the Russians and now confirmed by the Mars Odyssey Spacecraft Gamma Ray Spectrometer, mean that the surface of Mars was apparently the site of massive radiological events, which created large amounts of signature isotopes and covered the surface with a thin layer of radioactive debris enriched in certain elements relative to its subsurface rocks. This pattern of phenomenon can be explained as due to two large anomalous nuclear explosions on Mars in the past."

So, there's the theory. Reading that, it's possible, until you get to the last line, to think that hey, here's a scientist who thinks something weird happened on Mars—the idea of there being a naturally occurring nuclear explosion on a planet that has radioactive elements on it hasn't been completely ruled out by NASA, after all.

But then, well, he is presenting published, quasi-scientific research suggesting that these were anomalous and not natural. If that's not clear enough, maybe the description and title of his upcoming book Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre will drive it home.

Or we can just read the conclusion to his paper, a preprint version of which he shared with me.

"Given the large amount of nuclear isotopes in Mars atmosphere resembling those from hydrogen bomb tests on Earth, Mars may present an example of civilization wiped out by a nuclear attack from space," he wrote.

"It is possible the Fermi Paradox means that our interstellar neighborhood contains forces hostile to young, noisy, civilizations such as ourselves," he added. "Such hostile forces could range from things as alien as AI (Artificial Intelligence) 'with a grudge' against flesh and blood, as in the movie Terminator, all the way to things as sadly familiar to us as a mindless humanoid bureaucrat like Governor Tarkin in Star Wars, eager to destroy planet Alderann as an example to other worlds."

It is of course worth noting that no high profile scientists have given any credence at all to this theory.

To gauge whether Brandenburg's thoughts have gained any traction with conspiracy theorists, I hunted around for their reactions to his earlier work. Here's what I came across:

Arkcode.com:

"Having seen the evidence presented by Dr. Brandenburg, I feel certain that we need to actively plan for a possible defense against whoever perpetrated the assault on Mars. In fact, as U.S. Space Command has access to all the data that he (and this family) have, as well as all the other pertinent data that exists out there, I'd be amazed to learn that our preparations have not been underway for a very long time." ​

Ross Holcomb, Mysterious Universe comment:

"There are other possibilities as well. Consider a very high tech civilization where a few folks mis-applied high energy technology and it got out of hand, causing a sever explosion and catastrophe a couple of million years ago. Perhaps a similar thing occurred on earth about 13,000 ya resulting in a cataclysmic event sinking Atlantis and energetically causing the Bermuda Triangle (and other anomalies) to activate. It may not have been "nuclear" and may not have been used in warfare."

Mercurio, Above Top Secret Forums:

"I think if it was a weapon, it was something much more powerful than nuclear bombs. Something more advanced than what we have now."

Shorty, Above Top Secret Forums:

"I believe that after a nuclear war broke out on Mars. The surviving Martian race emigrated to the Earth, building the Pyramids and Sphinx to represent the features on mars so that when we were intelligent enough we might discover that there was once a thriving powerful E.T race on mars."

So, there you have it. Were ancient Martians blown up by other aliens? Almost certainly not, but if we are similarly destroyed, at least one dude will be able to say "told you so."

{https://www.vice.com/en_us }

04-09-2019 om 00:26 geschreven door peter  

MORGAN MCFALL-JOHNSEN, BUSINESS INSIDER

The life of an asteroid is lonely. The rocks spend eons drifting through the cold vacuum of space.

But on Wednesday, the asteroid Ryugu welcomed a special visitor: Japan's Hayabusa-2 probe successfully landed on the asteroid's surface at 21:06 ET (01:06 UTC on Thursday).

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched Hayabusa-2 into space in December 2014. Its mission: explore and collect samples from Ryugu, a primitive asteroid half-a-mile in diameter that orbits the sun at a distance up to 131 million miles (211 million kilometers).

The probe reached its destination in June 2018, then got to work making observations, measuring the asteroid's gravity, and rehearsing to touch down.

It blasted the asteroid with a copper plate and a box of explosives in April in order to loosen rocks and expose material under the surface, then successfully landed on Ryugu last night to gather up the rock and soil debris.

The spacecraft captured the images below as it left the asteroid's surface.

"First photo was taken at 10:06:32 JST (on-board time) and you can see the gravel flying upwards. Second shot was at 10:08:53 where the darker region near the centre is due to touchdown," JAXA tweeted.

(JAXA)

Ancient rock samples

Asteroids are made of rock and metal, and they take all kinds of quirky shapes, ranging in size from pebbles to 600-mile megaliths. Most of them hang out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, though Ryugu's orbit sometimes takes it between Mars and Earth.

Some asteroids date back to the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, when materials leftover from the formation of planets coalesced into these chunks of rock. In that sense, asteroids can serve as time capsules: What scientists find in those primitive rocks could tell us a lot about the solar system's history.

Ryugu is a C-type asteroid, which means it's rich with organic carbon molecules, water, and possibly amino acids. Amino acids form the building blocks for protein and were essential to the evolution of life on Earth. Some theories posit that an asteroid first brought amino acids here, gifting our planet with the seeds of life, though that's still debated.

About three-quarters of our solar system's asteroids are C-type. Hayabusa-2 aims to be the first mission to bring samples from such an asteroid back to Earth.

The probe initially landed on Ryugu in February and collected shallow samples from just below the surface, but mission managers decided to gather some deeper rock samples as well, since that material hasn't been exposed to harsh weathering from space.

To accomplish that, the probe had to lift back off the asteroid, then blast a 10-meter crater into the surface in order to access to the rock beneath.

So in April, Hayabusa-2 released and detonated a box of explosives in space that shot a copper plate into the asteroid.

Wednesday's landing then made a splash in all that freed-up material.

(JAXA/Twitter)

"These images were taken before and after touchdown by the small monitor camera (CAM-H). The first is 4 seconds before touchdown, the second is at touchdown itself and the third is 4 seconds after touchdown. In the third image, you can see the amount of rocks that rise," JAXA tweeted.

After it touched down, Hayabusa-2 then collected a new set of samples and left Ryugu's surface. At the end of this year, it will begin the 5.5 million-mile (9 million-kilometer) journey home.

So far, everything is on schedule.

NASA is on a similar mission

NASA is also studying a far-off asteroid.

The agency's OSIRIS-REx mission reached a much smaller C-type asteroid, Bennu, in August 2018. But the probe didn't land on Bennu's surface; instead, it's been orbiting at a record-breakingly close distance.

The plan is for OSIRIS-REx to approach Bennu's surface in July 2020, but the spacecraft will only make contact for about five seconds. During that quick instant, it will blow nitrogen gas to stir up dust and pebbles and collect the samples. If all goes according to plan, it will return that material to Earth in 2023.

The asteroid's surface has turned out to be rougher than expected, however, and debris flying off the space rock can pose a threat to the orbiting spacecraft. So NASA is still choosing its sampling site.

But Bennu has already made a significant finding: In December, before it entered orbit around Bennu, the probe discovered that the asteroid harbored ingredients for water (oxygen and hydrogen atoms bonded together).

Though Bennu is too small to host liquid water, it's possible that water could have once existed on its parent asteroid, which Bennu broke away from between 700 million and 2 billion years ago.

Though NASA's asteroid-exploration mission will collect a larger quantity of sample material than Japan's, the JAXA team hopes that comparing the samples from two different sites on the same asteroid will yield novel information about how long-term space exposure changes asteroids over time.

Both Bennu and Ryugu could also teach scientists a lot about the history of the solar system and potentially – if they contain organic materials – about the origins of life on Earth.

• This article was originally published by Business Insider.

{ https://www.sciencealert.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 23:57 geschreven door peter  

Why We Need to Get Back to Venus

By Paul K. Byrne. 

On June 5-6, 2012, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory collected images of one of the rarest predictable solar events: the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun.

(Image: © NASA/SDO)

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Just next door, cosmologically speaking, is a planet almost exactly like Earth. It's about the same size, is made of about the same stuff and formed around the same star.

To an alien astronomer light years away, observing the solar system through a telescope, it would be virtually indistinguishable from our own planet. But to know the surface conditions of Venus – the temperature of a self-cleaning oven, and an atmosphere saturated with carbon dioxide with sulfuric acid clouds – is to know that it's anything but Earth-like.

So how is it that two planets so similar in position, formation and composition can end up so different? That's a question that preoccupies an ever-growing number of planetary scientists, and motivates numerous proposed Venus exploration efforts. If scientists can understand why Venus turned out the way it did, we'll have a better understanding of whether an Earth-like planet is the rule – or the exception.

I'm a planetary scientist, and I'm fascinated by how other worlds came to be. I'm particularly interested in Venus, because it offers us a glimpse of a world that once might not have been so different from our own.

A once-blue Venus?

The current scientific view of Venus holds that, at some point in the past, the planet had much more water than its bone-dry atmosphere suggests today – perhaps even oceans. But as the Sun grew hotter and brighter (a natural consequence of aging), surface temperatures rose on Venus, eventually vaporizing any oceans and seas.

With ever more water vapor in the atmosphere, the planet entered a runaway greenhouse condition from which it couldn't recover. Whether Earth-style plate tectonics (where the outer layer of the planet is broken into large, mobile pieces) ever operated on Venus is unknown. Water is critical for plate tectonics to operate, and a runaway greenhouse effect would effectively shut down that process had it operated there.

But the ending of plate tectonics wouldn't have spelled the end of geological activity: The planet's considerable internal heat continued to produce magma, which poured out as voluminous lava flows and resurfaced most of the planet. Indeed, the average surface age of Venus is around 700 million years – very old, certainly, but much younger than the multi-billion-year-old surfaces of Mars, Mercury or the Moon.

The exploration of Planet 2

The Venus-as-a-wet-world view is just a hypothesis: Planetary scientists don't know what caused Venus to differ so much from Earth, nor even if the two planets really did start off with the same conditions. Humans know less about Venus than we do about the other inner solar system planets, largely because the planet poses several unique challenges to its exploration.

For example, radar is needed to pierce the opaque, sulfuric acid clouds and see the surface. That's a lot trickier than the readily visible surfaces of the Moon or Mercury. And the high surface temperature – 470 degrees Celsius (880 degrees Fahrenheit) – means that conventional electronics don't last more than a few hours. That's a far cry from Mars, where rovers can operate for more than a decade. In part because of the heat, acidity and obscured surface, then, Venus hasn't enjoyed a sustained program of exploration over the past couple of decades.

That said, there have been two dedicated Venus missions in the 21st century: the European Space Agency's Venus Express, which operated from 2006 to 2014, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki spacecraft currently in orbit .

Humans haven't always ignored Venus. It was once the darling of planetary exploration: between the 1960s and 1980s, some 35 missions were dispatched to the second planet. The NASA Mariner 2 mission was the first spacecraft to successfully carry out a planetary encounter when it flew past Venus in 1962. The first images returned from the surface of another world were sent from the Soviet Venera 9 lander after it touched down in 1975. And the Venera 13 landerwas the first spacecraft to return sounds from the surface of another world. But the last mission NASA launched to Venus was Magellan in 1989. That spacecraft imaged almost the entire surface with radar before its planned demise in the planet's atmosphere in 1994.

(Image credit: NASA)

Back to Venus?

In the last few years, several NASA Venus missions have been proposed. The most recent planetary mission that NASA chose is a nuclear-powered craft called Dragonfly, destined for Saturn's moon Titan. However, one proposal to measure the composition of the Venus surface was selected for further technology development.

Other missions being considered include one by the ESA to map the surface at high resolution, and a Russian plan to build on its legacy as the only country to successfully put a lander on Venus' surface.

Some 30 years after NASA set course for our hellish neighbor, the future of Venus exploration looks promising. But a single mission – a radar orbiter or even a long-lived lander – won't solve all the outstanding mysteries.

Rather, a sustained program of exploration is needed to bring our knowledge of Venus to where we understand it as well as Mars or the Moon. That will take time and money, but I believe it's worth it. If we can understand why and when Venus came to be the way it is, we'll have a better grasp of how an Earth-size world can evolve when it's close to its star. And, under an ever-brightening Sun, Venus may even help us understand the fate of Earth itself.

Paul K. Byrne, North Carolina State University

• Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.  

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03-09-2019 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

On Icy Moons, Alien Life May Go with the Flow of Ocean Currents

By Meghan Bartels

An artist's depiction of NASA's Cassini spacecraft flying through plumes shooting out of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech)

One of the key determinants of which worlds can host life may lie in the motion of their oceans.

Right now, calculating that motion is a challenge. After all, scientists can't just dip their toes in the water. But new research pulls together information about four of the most intriguing ocean worlds to inform models of what their subsurface oceans might be doing.

"These oceans are really interesting in and of themselves," Krista Soderlund, an expert on planetary fluid dynamics at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the new research, told Space.com. "You often are first drawn to a satellite by what it looks like on its surface, but I think that what is going on beneath the surface is just as exciting and interesting."

• Related: Photos: Enceladus, Saturn's Cold, Bright Moon

And according to her new calculations, there is indeed plenty going on beneath the surface of the solar system's icy moons. Soderlund focused on Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede and on Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan.

In each case, she tried to understand how factors like the world's rotation rate, the thickness of its ice shell and the density of its seawater might affect how much water moves around the hidden oceans.

Her calculations suggest that the oceans on Enceladus and perhaps Titan could host currents in alternating bands and particularly strong heat flow near the poles. Europa, on the other hand, because its spin is less of a factor, seemed to sport the most noticeable heat flow near its equator. (Scientists don't know enough about Ganymede to quite settle on a specific ocean current model.)

Predicting such activity inside icy moons is a promising indicator for those who wonder whether such oceans could be home to life. "When we think about ocean dynamics, it's really important for habitability," Alyssa Rhoden, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute focused on ice shells, told Space.com. Rhoden wasn't involved in the new research but is co-leading a new network for ocean worlds research. "It gives us a sense of how much that swirling and whirling is going on and how you get nutrients from one place to another place, how you move energy from one place to another place."

More swirling and whirling means better odds that the ingredients of life can actually collide. But despite the work Soderlund has put into trying to understand these hidden oceans, the result is still an echo of what could be happening on these worlds.

It's the universal challenge of modeling as a scientific approach: a model will never be quite as intricate or comprehensive as reality. "All of our models are wrong, they're all wrong," Rhoden said. "Because we can't actually model everything."

(Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

But getting more data about these moons and their hidden oceans will fine-tune these models, Rhoden said, and that doesn't necessarily require directly sampling the oceans — although needless to say, scientists would love to do that.

Long before such feats are possible, a different mission, scientists can turn to NASA's Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), both scheduled to launch in the 2020s.

Soderlund is on the team behind one of Europa Clipper's instruments, the Radar for Europa Assessment and Sounding: Ocean to Near-Surface device, or REASON. Because an ocean's dynamics affect the ice shell above it, REASON data should help scientists vet some of their hypotheses about Europa's ocean activity, she said.

If her prediction that heat flow is strongest in Europa's ocean at the equator is correct, for example, the moon's ice shell should be thinner there. It's an approach that turns the massive annoyance of an ice sheet blocking a direct view of your research subject into a tool and recognizes the ways these strange oceans must be connected to their surroundings — just as is true here on Earth.

"The fact that we're predicting they have strong ocean currents in itself is pretty exciting, since then it's not just a really passive body of water, it actually has some really cool, intriguing and fun characteristics," Soderlund said. "It's kind of like our own Earth's ocean in that respect, where there's just a lot going on."

• The research was described in a paper published on July 29 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 
•  Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter 
•  Mesmerizing Satellite Video Captures Magical View of Earth 
•  Europa’s Buried Ocean Could Rise to the Surface (Video) 
• Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 23:16 geschreven door peter  

Video – 3D bioprinter patches up wounds using a patient’s own skin cells

While the advent of 3D printers is commonly thought of as a revolution for manufacturing, it could have huge benefits for medicine as well. To help patch up large wounds that might normally require a skin graft, researchers at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) have developed a new bioprinter that can print dual layers of a patient’s own skin directly into a wound.

The idea of 3D printing skin has been in development for a few years. In 2014, a prototype machine was unveiled that could print large sheets of human skin that could then be cut to size and grafted onto a patient. The tech evolved over the years into more detailed machines and eventually a handheld device that works like a tape dispenser for skin.

The new machine looks like a cross between those last two. It’s much larger than the handheld device, but it’s still relatively portable in a hospital setting. The machine can be wheeled to a bedside, and a patient lies underneath the printer nozzle while it goes to work.

Like earlier devices, the new printer uses an “ink” made up of a patient’s own cells, to minimize the risk of rejection. First a small biopsy of healthy skin is taken, and from that two types of skin cells can be isolated: fibroblasts, the cells that help build the structure to heal wounds, and keratinocytes, which are the main cells found in the outermost layer of skin.

Larger amounts of these cells are grown from the biopsy sample, then mixed into a hydrogel to form the bioprinter ink. And here’s where it differs from previous bioprinters – rather than just applying the new skin over the injury, the new machine first uses a 3D laser scanner to build a picture of the topology of the wound. Using that image, the device then fills in the deepest parts with the fibroblasts, before layering keratinocytes over the top.

That technique mimics the natural structure of skin cells, allowing the injury to heal faster. The team demonstrated that it works using mouse models, observing that new skin began to form outward from the center of the wound. Notably, it only worked when the ink was made using the patient’s own cells – in other experiments the tissue was rejected by the body.

“If you deliver the patient’s own cells, they do actively contribute to wound healing by organizing up front to start the healing process much faster,” says James Yoo, co-author of the paper. “While there are other types of wound healing products available to treat wounds and help them close, those products don’t actually contribute directly to the creation of skin.”

The researchers say that the next steps involve conducting clinical trials in humans. Eventually, the new device could be put to work treating burn victims, patients with diabetic ulcers and other large wounds that have trouble healing on their own.

• The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Source: Wake Forest School of Medicine

{ https://gaf.news/ }

03-09-2019 om 21:33 geschreven door peter  

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

03-09-2019 om 21:24 geschreven door peter  

Elon Musk Predicts Asteroid Will Hit Earth, ‘we Currently Have no Defence’

At one point it will travel more than the width of the full Moon within a minute and it will get as bright as stars.

By IANS

{ https://www.india.com/ }

03-09-2019 om 21:14 geschreven door peter  

2 miljard jaar geleden stierf tot 99 procent van alle leven op aarde - HLN.be

Joeri Vlemings

Bron: PNAS, Newsweek, Fox

Het internationaal team van wetenschappers onderzocht gesteenten in Hudson Bay in Canada die miljarden jaren geleden zouden zijn gevormd. Ze keken naar bariet, een mineraal dat informatie bevat over hoeveel zuurstof er op dat moment in de atmosfeer was. Zo ontdekten ze dat er 2,05 miljard jaar geleden een zware terugval van leven was. Die viel samen met het einde van de periode van oxidatie (GOE of Great Oxygenation Event), waarbij er eerst een enorme toename van zuurstof was 2,4 miljard jaar geleden, gevolgd door een dramatische dip van het zuurstofniveau.

“Meer dan 100 tot 200 miljoen jaar vóór dit uitstervingsevent was er heel veel leven op de planeet, maar na dit evenement viel een groot deel daarvan weg”, zei co-auteur Peter Crockford aan Newsweek. “Maar in plaats van een herstel, zoals bij recentere massa-uitstervingen, bleef de hoeveelheid leven op de planeet of de grootte van de biosfeer klein gedurende het volgende miljard jaar van de geschiedenis van de aarde - ongeveer van twee miljard tot een miljard jaar geleden.” 

Crockford schat dat twee miljard jaar geleden tussen de 80 en 99,5 procent van het leven op onze planeet stierf. Ter vergelijking: bij de massa-uitsterving van de dinosauriërs verdween ongeveer driekwart van het leven op aarde, terwijl de Great Dying-gebeurtenis of Perm-Trias-massa-extinctie - de grootste bekende massa-uitsterving ooit - de ondergang betekende van ongeveer 70 procent van alle aardse leven en 96 procent van het zeeleven.

Crockford vindt overigens het woord ‘uitsterven’ niet geschikt voor het bewuste evenement, “omdat we waarschijnlijk nooit zullen weten welke soorten uitsterven, als dat al het geval was”. Op een blog over het artikel schreef hij: “Maar het lijkt er wel op dat er sowieso een dramatische vermindering van het leven op de planeet was”.

Volgens Crockford kunnen de bevindingen inzicht geven in hoe de aarde in de toekomst zal veranderen. Hij vermoedt ook dat er nog heel wat massa-extincties geweest zijn die we nu nog niet kennen.

selectie videos peter2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

03-09-2019 om 20:58 geschreven door peter