Archaeology Discoveries That Mainstream Historians Hope You NEVER Get To See

This presentation shows we do not know the whole truth about human origins.

{ http://earthmysterynews.com/ }

09-10-2019 om 01:52 geschreven door peter  

NASA is testing a 3D-printed prototype of unusual mini robots that can roll, fly, float and swim, then morph into a single machine. They’re called Shapeshifters. The team envisions them as a way to explore Saturn’s moons.

Shapeshifting has been an enduring device throughout literature, and we see shapeshifting everywhere in modern science fiction, for example, the shapeshifting android assassin in the Terminator movies. Even my 6-year-old grandson – who loves to spend an afternoon building with Legos – knows about shapeshifting robots. And now NASA engineers have gone into shapeshifting robots in a big way … for real. According a September 25, 2019, statement from NASA, a robotics team is testing a 3D-printed prototype of an unusual mini-robot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The robot can roll, fly, float and swim, then morph into a single machine. NASA is calling this series of robots Shapeshifters.

A prototype of the transforming robot Shapeshifter is tested in the robotics yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Shapeshifter is made of smaller robots that can morph into rolling spheres, flying drones, swimming submersibles, and more.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption

Robotics technologist Ali Agha – who leads the Shapeshifter program for JPL – envisions Shapeshifter as a mission to Saturn’s largest moon Titan, the only other world in the solar system known to have liquid in the form of methane lakes, rivers and seas on its surface. NASA said Shapeshifter is:

… a developing concept for a transformational vehicle to explore treacherous, distant worlds.

A contraption that looks like a drone encased in an elongated hamster wheel rolls across the yard, then splits in half. Once separated, the two halves rise on small propellers, effectively becoming flying drones for aerial exploration. These 3D-printed parts are only the beginning; the team imagines a series of up to 12 robots that could transform into a swimming probe or a team of cave explorers.

Okay, maybe it sounds cooler than the actual prototype looks, for now. But NASA engineers are just starting down the path of shapeshifting robots, and who knows what the future will bring? In the meantime, here’s what the prototype looks like:

A prototype of the transforming robot Shapeshifter is tested in the robotics yard at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Shapeshifter is made of smaller robots that can morph into rolling spheres, flying drones, swimming submersibles and more. This flying amphibious robot is part of the early-stage research program NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), which offers several phases of funding to visionary concepts. NASA says the program “helps turn ideas that sound like science fiction into science fact.”

Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

NASA’s most recent mission to Saturn and its moons was the Cassini mission, which began orbiting Saturn in 2004 and ended with a dramatic plunge into Saturn’s clouds in 2017. Cassini spent 13 years orbiting Saturn, flying different pathways among its moons. It flew by Titan over 100 times, with the goal, NASA said, of mapping its surface for future missions. Cassini found that Titan is similar to Earth but – because it’s so much farther from the sun, in a colder part of the solar system – Titan has key differences. It has cold rivers, lakes and rain made up of liquid methane and ethane, both of which exist on Earth in gaseous form. NASA said the moon’s hazy atmosphere could also conceal caves or icy volcanoes that spew ammonia or water instead of magma. Agha explained in the NASA statement why shapeshifting robots would be so useful there:

We have very limited information about the composition of the surface. Rocky terrain, methane lakes, cryovolcanoes – we potentially have all of these, but we don’t know for certain.

So we thought about how to create a system that is versatile and capable of traversing different types of terrain but also compact enough to launch on a rocket.

NASA said:

Agha and his Shapeshifter co-investigators, who include researchers from Stanford and Cornell universities, came up with the concept of a self-assembling robot made of smaller robots called ‘cobots.’ The cobots, each housing a small propeller, would be able to move independent of one another to fly along cliffsides of scientific interest. They could also go spelunking, forming a daisy chain to maintain contact with the surface. Or they could transform into a sphere to roll on flat surfaces and conserve energy.

For now, Shapeshifter is semi-autonomous, but its future design will depend on cobots that can auto-assemble without needing commands from Earth.

Agha’s ultimate vision includes a lander like the European Space Agency’s Huygens Probe, which touched down on Titan after being deployed via parachute by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This ‘mothercraft,’ as Agha calls it, would serve as an energy source for the cobots and carry the scientific instruments to perform in-depth sample analysis. But rather than staying in place, as landers usually do, this one would be portable. Flight is easier on Titan, where the atmosphere is dense and gravity is low. Agha calculates that 10 cobots could easily lift a lander the size of Huygens (roughly 9 feet, or 3 meters, wide) and gently carry it to different locations.

Jason Hofgartner is JPL’s lead scientist for Shapeshifter. He said:

It is often the case that some of the hardest places to get to are the most scientifically interesting because maybe they’re the youngest, or they’re in an area that was not well characterized from orbit.

Shapeshifter’s remarkable versatility enables access to all of these scientifically compelling places.

The next mission to Titan will be Dragonfly, NASA’s first rotorcraft lander, which is scheduled to launch in 2026. Shapeshifter won’t be aboard. It’s too new and too undeveloped. The next step for the Shapeshifter team is to submit its concept to NIAC’s Phase II selection process in 2020. After that, there are many more years of development ahead.

Still, the concept is a compelling one. And people like my grandson might be around long enough to see some amazing solar system exploration, using real Shapeshifters.

Artist’s concept of proposed design for future Shapeshifter robot, which would consist of many robots in one.

• Bottom line: NASA is testing a 3D-printed prototype of unusual mini robots that can roll, fly, float and swim, then morph into a single machine. They’re called Shapeshifters. The team envisions them as a way to explore Saturn’s moons.
• Via NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

09-10-2019 om 01:39 geschreven door peter  

Scientists have found earliest signs of life on earth in “exceptionally preserved” 3.5 billion year old microbes which could start explain how life began

The discovery could also help researchers find proof of life on Mars - or other planets.

 by Jim Leffman

Scientists have found the earliest signs of life on earth in “exceptionally preserved” 3.5 billion year old microbes which could start to explain how it all began.

The discovery could also help researchers find proof of life on Mars – or other planets.

The astonishing find was made in some of Earth’s oldest rocks, called stromatolites – ancient bacterial formations in Western Australia.

The stones are found in an ancient geological anomaly called Dresser Formation.

While scientists have long believed the rocks contained evidence of prehistoric life since they were discovered in the 1980s, they haven’t been able to prove it until today.

Dr Raphael Baumgartner, a research associate of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), said: “This is an exciting discovery – for the first time, we’re able to show the world that these stromatolites are definitive evidence for the earliest life on Earth.”

Professor Van Kranendonk, director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at UNSW who led the research, said the discovery is the closest the team have come to a “smoking gun” to prove the existence of such ancient life

He said: “This represents a major advance in our knowledge of these rocks, in the science of early life investigations generally, and – more specifically – in the search for life on Mars.

“We now have a new target and new methodology to search for ancient life traces.”

Dr Baumgartner added: “Understanding where life could have emerged is really important in order to understand our ancestry. And from there, it could help us understand where else life could have occurred – for example, where it was kick-started on other planets.”

Their study is published in the journal Geology.

Stromatolites in the Dresser Formation are usually sourced from the rock surface, and worn down so scientists had to drill further down into the rock.

Dr Baumgartner continued: “In this study, I spent a lot of time in the lab, using micro-analytical techniques to look very closely at the rock samples, to prove our theory once and for all.

“Looking at drill core samples allowed us to look at a perfect snapshot of ancient microbial life.”

He couldn’t contain his excitement when he realised he was onto the discovery of a lifetime.

He found that the stromatolites are essentially composed of pyrite – a mineral also known as ‘fool’s gold’ – that contains organic matter.

Dr Baumgartner said: “The organic matter that we found preserved within pyrite of the stromatolites is exciting – we’re looking at exceptionally preserved coherent filaments and strands that are typically remains of microbial biofilms.

“Such remains have never been observed before in the Dresser Formation, and that actually seeing the evidence down the microscope was incredibly exciting.

“I was pretty surprised – we never expected to find this level of evidence before I started this project. I remember the night at the electron microscope where I finally figured out that I was looking at biofilm remains.

“I think it was around 11pm when I had this ‘eureka’ moment, and I stayed until three or four o’clock in the morning, just imaging and imaging because I was so excited. I totally lost track of time.”

The new findings come just two years after another study which found evidence of the same rocks in hot springs in the same region – telling the researchers microbial life on land had existed 580 million years earlier than they previously thought.

Just last month, NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) scientists spent as week in the Pilbara with Martin Van Kranendonk for specialist training in identifying signs of life in these same ancient rocks.

It was the first time that Van Kranendonk shared the region’s insights with a dedicated team of Mars specialists – a group including the Heads of NASA and ESA Mars 2020 missions.

Professor Van Kranendonk said: “It is deeply satisfying that Australia’s ancient rocks and our scientific know-how is making such a significant contribution to our search for extra-terrestrial life and unlocking the secrets of Mars.”

 

{ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/ }

09-10-2019 om 01:10 geschreven door peter  

08-10-2019 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

Archaeologists claim 'Swiss Stonehenge' discovered under Lake Constance is a man-made Neolithic monument built 5,500 years ago

• The stones — or cairns — have been discovered as part of an ongoing research project at lake Constance  
• It involved a boat equipped with a digger designed to shift sediment around the vast rocks 
• Now researchers have preliminary claimed that they are up to 100 inches wide and 5,500 years old 
• Further analysis is needed in order to understand how the allegedly man-made rocks made it to their location

By JOE PINKSTONE FOR MAILONLINE 

Archaeologists claim that a range of mysterious man-made stones submerged beneath the surface of an European lake are 5,000 years old.

Local media reports that the so-called 'Swiss Stonehenge' sits 15feet down at the bottom of Lake Constance and is a Neolithic relic, with stones ranging in size up to around 100 inches wide.  

The man-made piles of stones were found on the Swiss side of the lake, a 207-square-mile body of water on the borders of Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

Each stone was located at regular intervals running completely parallel to the Swiss shoreline.

Scroll down for video 

Archaeologists claim that a range of mysterious man-made stones submerged beneath the surface of an European lake are 5,000 years old (pictured)

Local media reports that the so-called 'Swiss Stonehenge' (pictured) sits 15feet down at the bottom of Lake Constance and is a Neolithic relic, with stones ranging in size up to around 100 inches wide

A spokesman at the Archaeology Office of the Swiss Canton of Thurgau described the findings as 'sensational' after carrying out excavations of the lake bed.

A ship equipped with a digger with a 15-metre-long arm removed material alongside the stones to reveal them for study.  

Analysis of how they were placed shows they were put down by humans and not by nature, archaeologists claim.  

Using underwater georadar developed by the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, the team of scientists managed to study the lake's sediment and stone deposits in search of the origin and purpose of the formations.

The Archaeology Office wrote: 'With high-frequency electromagnetic pulses, the hidden layer of the lake bed in the vicinity of the stone structures was recorded.'

'It is obvious that the stones of up to 40 centimetres in size rest on the post-glacial, banded lake deposits and clearly above the underlying upper edge of the moraine [a glacially formed accumulation of unconsolidated glacial debris].

'Thus, it is now scientifically proven that the cairns did not originate naturally from the glacier, but were piled up by human hands.'

The man-made piles of stones were found on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, a 207-square-mile lake on the borders of Switzerland, Germany and Austria and work is ongoing to learn more about them 

Each stone was located at regular intervals running completely parallel to the Swiss shoreline at a depth of about 15 feet

Analysis of how the rocks (pictured) were placed shows they were placed there by humans and not by nature, archaeologists claim

A spokesman at the Archaeology Office of the Swiss Canton of Thurgau described the findings as 'sensational' after carrying out extensive excavations on the lake bed

The spokesman added: 'The first results produced using carbon dating show that the stones in area 5 were placed there around 5,500 years ago in the Neolithic period.'

In the following months, further investigations will be carried out with the hope of discovering more about the artefacts, which will be analysed by an international team of researchers.

Initially, it was unclear whether the stones were natural formations from the remnants of a glacier which was located in the area 18,000 years ago.

The researchers had originally suspected that the formations were from the Bronze Age dating back to around 1000 BC.

Pictured@ : A piece of Poplar wood retrieved by the divers which may have been used as part of the construction or excavation of the rocks. Experts have confirmed these mysterious piles of stones - compared to an underwater Stonehenge - found at the bottom of Lake Constance are much older than previously thought

Using underwater georadar tech (pictured) developed by the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, the team of scientists managed to study the lake's sediment and stone deposits in search of the origin and purpose of the formations

Pictured: The research team on Lake Constance where the Neolithic rocks have been discovered. Experts have confirmed these mysterious piles of stones on the bottom of Lake Constance which have been compared to an 'underwater Stonehenge' were man-made

Currently, there are various theories about the purpose of the stones, such as that they served as weirs, burial mounds or signposted transportation routes.

Urs Leuzinger, a researcher on the project, estimates that at the time of construction, the cairns were located along the shoreline or even in shallow water.

He said: 'I've never really experienced anything like this. Whenever we dig something up, we usually know what it's all about.'

He said that his team 'has no intention to compete with the original Stonehenge', saying that the moniker had been 'chosen by German media' and not by archaeologists. 

However, he said that there are some similarities with the Wiltshire monument as it required an equally impressive feat by prehistoric humans to transport such stones.

Dr Leuzinger said: 'After all, our 170 cairns of 500 cubic metres of stones each does bring quite a decent amount to the shores of Lake Constance.'

The cairns were first discovered in 2015 by the Institute for Lake Research in the town of Langenargen in the south-western German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

It is thought they would have been near to a settlement of lake dwellings which are much deeper under water perhaps close to what was once a prehistoric shoreline and are yet to be discovered, according to the Thurgau Office for Archaeology.

But they added: 'It may also be the case that the lake dwellings have already eroded away due to the erosion over the years.'

Divers investigating the site have been finding out more about the rocks, including their age.Currently, there are various theories about the purpose of the stones, such as that they served as weirs, burial mounds or signposted transportation routes

A ship equipped with a digger with a 15-metre-long arm removed material alongside the stones and revealed the stones (pictured)

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

08-10-2019 om 22:45 geschreven door peter  

Deep below a European lake lies a man-made monument that scientists have called the “Swiss Stonehenge”. The mysterious stones rest 15 feet below the surface on the Swiss side of Lake Constance which is a 207-square-mile body of water that borders Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. They were initially discovered in 2015 by the Institute for Lake Research in Langenargen, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany.

The Neolithic relic consists of 5,000-year-old stones with some of the stones measuring as wide as 100 inches and was laid out in a way that they were situated parallel to the Swiss shoreline. A ship with a digger removed seabed materials that had gathered beside the stones in order to study them further. A spokesman at the Archaeology Office of the Swiss Canton of Thurgau said that the discovery was a “sensational” find.

Lake Constance

The Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany created an underwater georadar to study the stones in hopes of finding out their origin and why they were put there in the first place. It has been determined that the stones were put there by humans and not created naturally by nature.

Since there had been a glacier in that area 18,000 years ago, it was first thought that the stones may have been made by nature, but that hypothesis has been disproven. “It is obvious that the stones of up to 40 centimeters in size rest on the post-glacial, banded lake deposits and clearly above the underlying upper edge of the moraine [a glacially formed accumulation of unconsolidated glacial debris]”, the Archaeology Office wrote, adding, “Thus, it is now scientifically proven that the cairns did not originate naturally from the glacier, but were piled up by human hands.”

It’s still unclear as to why the stones were put there in the first place, but several theories have emerged, such as that they were used as weirs, burial mounds, and signposted transportation routes. Urs Leuzinger, who works as a researcher on the project, believes that the stones were put either along the shoreline or in shallow water during the time of its construction.

With several similarities to the famous monument in Wiltshire, England, this Neolithic relic has been nicknamed the “Swiss Stonehenge”.

“I’ve never really experienced anything like this. Whenever we dig something up, we usually know what it’s all about,” he said. He continued on by stating, “Our 170 cairns of 500 cubic meters of stones each does bring quite a decent amount to the shores of Lake Constance.”

An international team of researchers will conduct further studies in the upcoming months to learn more about these fascinating stones. Several pictures of the stone monument called “Swiss Stonehenge” can be seen here.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

08-10-2019 om 22:19 geschreven door peter  

Peculiar Sounds Recorded on Mars

Put an ear to the ground on Mars and you’ll be rewarded with a symphony of sounds. Granted, you’ll need superhuman hearing, but NASA’s InSight lander comes equipped with a very special “ear.”

The spacecraft’s exquisitely sensitive seismometer, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), can pick up vibrations as subtle as a breeze. The instrument was provided by the French space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), and its partners.

Clouds drift over the dome-covered seismometer, known as SEIS, belonging to NASA’s InSight lander, on Mars.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

SEIS was designed to listen for marsquakes. Scientists want to study how the seismic waves of these quakes move through the planet’s interior, revealing the deep inner structure of Mars for the first time.

But after the seismometer was set down by InSight’s robotic arm, Mars seemed shy. It didn’t produce its first rumbling until this past April, and this first quake turned out to be an odd duck. It had a surprisingly high-frequency seismic signal compared to what the science team has heard since then. Out of more than 100 events detected to date, about 21 are strongly considered to be quakes. The remainder could be quakes as well, but the science team hasn’t ruled out other causes.

Quakes

Put on headphones to listen to two of the more representative quakes SEIS has detected. These occurred on May 22, 2019 (the 173rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission) and July 25, 2019 (Sol 235). Far below the human range of hearing, these sonifications from SEIS had to be speeded up and slightly processed to be audible through headphones. Both were recorded by the “very broad band sensors” on SEIS, which are more sensitive at lower frequencies than its short period sensors.

The Sol 173 quake is about a magnitude 3.7; the Sol 235 quake is about a magnitude 3.3.

• https://soundcloud.com/nasa/quake-sol-173
• https://soundcloud.com/nasa/quake-sol-235

Each quake is a subtle rumble. The Sol 235 quake becomes particularly bass-heavy toward the end of the event. Both suggest that the Martian crust is like a mix of the Earth’s crust and the Moon’s. Cracks in Earth’s crust seal over time as water fills them with new minerals. This enables sound waves to continue uninterrupted as they pass through old fractures. Drier crusts like the Moon’s remain fractured after impacts, scattering sound waves for tens of minutes rather than allowing them to travel in a straight line. Mars, with its cratered surface, is slightly more Moon-like, with seismic waves ringing for a minute or so, whereas quakes on Earth can come and go in seconds.

Mechanical Sounds and Wind Gusts

SEIS has no trouble identifying quiet quakes, but its sensitive ear means scientists have lots of other noises to filter out. Over time, the team has learned to recognize the different sounds. And while some are trickier than others to spot, they all have made InSight’s presence on Mars feel more real to those working with the spacecraft.

“It’s been exciting, especially in the beginning, hearing the first vibrations from the lander,” said Constantinos Charalambous, an InSight science team member at Imperial College London who works with the SP sensors. “You’re imagining what’s really happening on Mars as InSight sits on the open landscape.”

Charalambous and Nobuaki Fuji of Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris provided the audio samples for this story, including the one below, which is also best heard with headphones and captures the array of sounds they’re hearing.

On March 6, 2019, a camera on InSight’s robotic arm was scanning the surface in front of the lander. Each movement of the arm produces what to SEIS is a piercing noise.

Wind gusts can also create noise. The team is always on the hunt for quakes, but they’ve found the twilight hours are one of the best times to do so. During the day, sunlight warms the air and creates more wind interference than at night.

Evening is also when peculiar sounds that the InSight team has nicknamed “dinks and donks” become more prevalent. The team knows they’re coming from delicate parts within the seismometer expanding and contracting against one another and thinks heat loss may be the factor, similar to how a car engine “ticks” after it’s turned off and begins cooling.

You can hear a number of these dinks and donks in this next set of sounds, recorded just after sundown on July 16, 2019 (Sol 226). Listen carefully and you can also pick out an eerie whistling that the team thinks may be caused by interference in the seismometer’s electronics.

• https://soundcloud.com/nasa/dinks-and-donks-sample

What does it sound like to you? A hall full of grandfather clocks? A Martian jazz ensemble? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter.

About InSight

JPL manages InSight for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.

A number of European partners, including France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.

Contacts and sources:

• Andrew Good, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
  Alana Johnson, NASA Headquarters

Source: 

• http://www.ineffableisland.com/2019/10/strange-sounds-recorded-on-mars.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

08-10-2019 om 21:35 geschreven door peter  

If you could travel back in time 3.5 billion years, what would Mars look like? The picture is evolving among scientists working with NASA’s Curiosity rover.

Imagine ponds dotting the floor of Gale Crater, the 100-mile-wide (150-kilometer-wide) ancient basin that Curiosity is exploring. Streams might have laced the crater’s walls, running toward its base. Watch history in fast forward, and you’d see these waterways overflow then dry up, a cycle that probably repeated itself numerous times over millions of years.The network of cracks in this Martian rock slab called “Old Soaker” may have formed from the drying of a mud layer more than 3 billion years ago. The view spans about 3 feet (90 centimeters) left-to-right and combines three images taken by the MAHLI camera on the arm of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

That is the landscape described by Curiosity scientists in a Nature Geoscience paper published today. The authors interpret rocks enriched in mineral salts discovered by the rover as evidence of shallow briny ponds that went through episodes of overflow and drying. The deposits serve as a watermark created by climate fluctuations as the Martian environment transitioned from a wetter one to the freezing desert it is today.

Scientists would like to understand how long this transition took and when exactly it occurred. This latest clue may be a sign of findings to come as Curiosity heads toward a region called the “sulfate-bearing unit,” which is expected to have formed in an even drier environment. It represents a stark difference from lower down the mountain, where Curiosity discovered evidence of persistent freshwater lakes.

Gale Crater is the ancient remnant of a massive impact. Sediment carried by water and wind eventually filled in the crater floor, layer by layer. After the sediment hardened, wind carved the layered rock into the towering Mount Sharp, which Curiosity is climbing today. Now exposed on the mountain’s slopes, each layer reveals a different era of Martian history and holds clues about the prevailing environment at the time.

“We went to Gale Crater because it preserves this unique record of a changing Mars,” said lead author William Rapin of Caltech. “Understanding when and how the planet’s climate started evolving is a piece of another puzzle: When and how long was Mars capable of supporting microbial life at the surface?”

He and his co-authors describe salts found across a 500-foot-tall (150-meter-tall) section of sedimentary rocks called “Sutton Island,” which Curiosity visited in 2017. Based on a series of mud cracks at a location named “Old Soaker,” the team already knew the area had intermittent drier periods. But the Sutton Island salts suggest the water also concentrated into brine.

Typically, when a lake dries up entirely, it leaves piles of pure salt crystals behind. But the Sutton Island salts are different: For one thing, they’re mineral salts, not table salt. They’re also mixed with sediment, suggesting they crystallized in a wet environment – possibly just beneath evaporating shallow ponds filled with briny water.

Given that Earth and Mars were similar in their early days, Rapin speculated that Sutton Island might have resembled saline lakes on South America’s Altiplano. Streams and rivers flowing from mountain ranges into this arid, high-altitude plateau lead to closed basins similar to Mars’ ancient Gale Crater. Lakes on the Altiplano are heavily influenced by climate in the same way as Gale.

“During drier periods, the Altiplano lakes become shallower, and some can dry out completely,” Rapin said. “The fact that they’re vegetation-free even makes them look a little like Mars.”

This animation demonstrates the salty ponds and streams that scientists think may have been left behind as Gale Crater dried out over time. The bottom of the image is the floor of Gale Crater, with the peak being the side of Mount Sharp.

Credit: ASU Knowledge Enterprise Development (KED), Michael Northrop 

Signs of a Drying Mars

Sutton Island’s salt-enriched rocks are just one clue among several the rover team is using to piece together how the Martian climate changed. Looking across the entirety of Curiosity’s journey, which began in 2012, the science team sees a cycle of wet to dry across long timescales on Mars.

“As we climb Mount Sharp, we see an overall trend from a wet landscape to a drier one,” said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the Mars Science Laboratory mission that Curiosity is a part of. “But that trend didn’t necessarily occur in a linear fashion. More likely, it was messy, including drier periods, like what we’re seeing at Sutton Island, followed by wetter periods, like what we’re seeing in the ‘clay-bearing unit’ that Curiosity is exploring today.”

Up until now, the rover has encountered lots of flat sediment layers that had been gently deposited at the bottom of a lake. Team member Chris Fedo, who specializes in the study of sedimentary layers at the University of Tennessee, noted that Curiosity is currently running across large rock structures that could have formed only in a higher-energy environment such as a windswept area or flowing streams.

Wind or flowing water piles sediment into layers that gradually incline. When they harden into rock, they become large structures similar to “Teal Ridge,” which Curiosity investigated this past summer.

“Finding inclined layers represents a major change, where the landscape isn’t completely underwater anymore,” said Fedo. “We may have left the era of deep lakes behind.”

Curiosity has already spied more inclined layers in the distant sulfate-bearing unit. The science team plans to drive there in the next couple years and investigate its many rock structures. If they formed in drier conditions that persisted for a long period, that might mean that the clay-bearing unit represents an in-between stage – a gateway to a different era in Gale Crater’s watery history.

“We can’t say whether we’re seeing wind or river deposits yet in the clay-bearing unit, but we’re comfortable saying is it’s definitely not the same thing as what came before or what lies ahead,” Fedo said.

For more about NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover mission, visit:

1. https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/
2. https://nasa.gov/msl

• Contacts and sources:
  Alana Johnson, NASA
• Andrew Good, Jet Propulsion Laborato

Citation:

• An interval of high salinity in ancient Gale crater lake on Mars.  W. Rapin, B. L. Ehlmann, G. Dromart, J. Schieber, N. H. Thomas, W. W. Fischer, V. K. Fox, N. T. Stein, M. Nachon, B. C. Clark, L. C. Kah, L. Thompson, H. A. Meyer, T. S. J. Gabriel, C. Hardgrove, N. Mangold, F. Rivera-Hernandez, R. C. Wiens, A. R. Vasavada. Nature Geoscience, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0458-8

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

08-10-2019 om 21:20 geschreven door peter  

The Essentials of Ufo Sightings That You Will be Able to Benefit From Beginning Immediately

New Step by Step Roadmap for Ufo Sightings

There isn’t a great deal of in between when it has to do with UFOs. The UFO looks like it’s been seen by plenty of individuals. Throughout that time period, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the exact same location. By way of example, over Midlothian, many sightings are made from January to March. UFO sightings are now able to easily be captured on video, while it’s through a telephone or video camera. The most typically known UFO sighting in the USA is known as the Roswell UFO sighting of 1947.

Take a look at the pictures and videos and you decide by yourself. Some video footage implies that the objects move quickly. What earns the video footage even more credible is that there’s footage taken by different individuals in various areas of town.

The Fight Against Ufo Sightings

Real aliens are less inclined to be evil. In terms of Bigfoot sightings, ape-like creatures are seen all over the usa and Canada. There’s no unitary creature known as the government, which is in fact a group of interrelated hierarchies with diverse incentives and power structures. It’s not clear to me that the only means to generate an intelligent creature that evolves to the cap of the food chain is to produce a human with bilateral symmetry.

At the start of spring for the previous two thousand decades, the sun is apparently drifting across the stars of Pisces with each passing year. Earth is nowhere to be viewed. Even when you kept to lots of earth based templates for life it would be quite simple for chance and accident to create something very different from that which we know. The planet has to be in a comparatively circular orbit otherwise it will stray from the habitable zone. It must be large enough to hold an atmosphere.

Science isn’t so superficial. Someone has to cover science and every previous scientist. Mimicking science isn’t the exact same as doing science. Scientists have been searching for about a hundred decades. Two decades afterwards the scientists publicized the results of their test that they argued revealed that the animal isn’t human. Actually, scientists and a great deal of non-believers make no fuss about expressing their scepticism in regards to extrasensory perception.

There are lots of theories,” Kay explained. There are not many very good explanations for the majority of the Hudson Valley sightings. Among the arguments that scientists use to debunk UFO sightings is that our planet has existed for at least four billion decades, therefore the odds are very small that the aliens would just chance to arrive here during the few decades that we’ve got technology.

The Upside to Ufo Sightings

Many still seek out proof of aliens. The evidence might have been much more compelling, in the event the very first recorded incident was not revealed as a hoax. No, you won’t locate any evidence in case you don’t look. If you’re still not convinced or want to read more evidence an Arizona UFO might not be a laughing matter, you might delight in seeing for yourself, more UFO Evidence. In the Washington Post Dan Drezner implies that the simple fact that the Department of Defense is starting to engage with the thought of UFOs weakens their thesis, but I am not certain that’s appropriate. Why is everyone slightly obsessed with the thought of extraterrestrial life. So, there’s no need to fret about the 156,353 UFO sightings and warnings.

Source: 

• http://footageofufos.com/2019/10/the-essentials-of-ufo-sightings-that-you-will-be-able-to-benefit-from-beginning-immediately/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

08-10-2019 om 20:59 geschreven door peter  

Why Everybody Is Mistaken Regarding Ufo Sightings and Why You Should Read This Article Right Now

Usually once you speak about UFO sightings, most individuals believe that I mistook it for something else or they may think that it is merely a crap. UFO sightings are now able to easily be captured on video, while it’s through a telephone or video camera. They have become an ever-popular subject. In any event, UFO sightings aren’t something which’s new to society. On weekdays it appears that UFO sightings are driven by men and women that are routinely outside daily, rain or shine. During February in Minnesota, for instance, only 69 UFO sightings are reported since the start of the 21st century. The most typically known UFO sighting in america is called the Roswell UFO sighting of 1947.

There isn’t a great deal of in between when it has to do with UFOs. The UFO looks like it’s been seen by lots of individuals. Take for instance the lot of photographs that have been published of UFOs. Throughout that time period, there were two triangle UFOs sighted in the exact same location.

Why Almost Everything You’ve Learned About Ufo Sightings Is Wrong

UFO clubs operate on the internet to cover a huge geographical place. The video has become the fodder for quite a few arguments and debates about the authenticity of the same. It shows three different sightings of suspected UFOs in three different parts of the world. Take a look at the pictures and videos and you decide by yourself. Some video footage implies that the objects move quickly.

The Argument About Ufo Sightings

Starting a UFO club may sound unearthly as a means for young entrepreneurs to earn money. So, there’s no need to fret about the 156,353 UFO sightings and warnings. Why is everyone slightly obsessed with the concept of extraterrestrial life. There’s very little doubt that the web has played a part in the development of UFO reports in the past several years, though most can be explained by natural or human-caused phenomena. In the Washington Post Dan Drezner implies that the simple fact that the Department of Defense is starting to engage with the thought of UFOs weakens their thesis, but I am not certain that’s suitable. Most UFO sightings were reported in america, with 26 sightings happening during November.

Many still find proof of aliens. Before you make a decision as to what you believe, we implore you to comprehend the evidence. It is not easy to know what’s real evidence and what’s fake evidence. To begin with, so many men and women say reflexively that there’s no evidence of an ET presence engaging our planet, when they don’t really know the evidence. The unexplained cases appear to be similar in a lot of ways. Among the arguments that scientists use to debunk UFO sightings is that our planet has existed for over four billion decades, hence the odds are really small that the aliens would just chance to arrive here during the few decades that we’ve got technology.

What You Can Do About Ufo Sightings Starting in the Next Ten Minutes

Science isn’t too superficial. Someone has to cover science and every previous scientist. Mimicking science isn’t the exact same as doing science. Scientists have been on the lookout for about a hundred decades. Two decades afterwards the scientists publicized the results of their test that they argued revealed that the animal isn’t human. UFO experts claimed that the quantity of sightings has increased in recent decades. UFO enthusiasts think that the region is the ideal hotspot in the nation for UFO sightings.

Source: 

• http://footageofufos.com/2019/10/why-everybody-is-mistaken-regarding-ufo-sightings-and-why-you-should-read-this-article-right-now/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

08-10-2019 om 20:44 geschreven door peter  

Pulsing UFO Seen Over Black Sea On Oct 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Oct 2, 2019

Location of sighting: Black Sea, Burgas, Bulgaria

Here is an extraordinary video of a UFO seen just a few days ago over the Black Sea. The UFO seems to change shape and pulse as if it wanted to be seen. This type of UFO has been seen around the world and often appears over cities to observe the human reactions below. I myself recorded a similar UFO over my apartments one night...a few years ago...and on the TV news a few days earlier I saw the same UFO seen over China. It gets around. 
Scott C. Waring

 

Eyewitness states: 

UFO big spaceship with changing type, trajectory , shape , sizes , color and very dynamic flexi - pulsations ; Location -- in the international space area over Black Sea -- around Burgas city , BULGARIA.

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

08-10-2019 om 20:25 geschreven door peter  

Researcher Richard Sauder spoke about underwater bases associated with UFOs, as well as the secret government, and a coming economic implosion.

The late investigator and cryptozoologist Ivan T. Sanderson concluded that underwater UFOs were real and operated by undersea inhabitants, said Sauder, who added that Lake Erie is a hotspot for such activity.

A remarkable UFO sighing over Lake Erie was reported last year when a resident of Huron, Ohio captured a strange large cone shaped metal looking object with two triangular bright lights came out of it over Lake Erie before it all disappeared.
Large cone shaped metal looking UFO in the sky over Lake Erie

There are underground salt deposits in the lake area, which are easier to drill into and create caverns than regular rock, he explained. Intriguingly, he also suggested that the underground bases may be connected with time travel, as water has many unusual properties and it may somehow facilitate the malleability of time.

  

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

08-10-2019 om 20:04 geschreven door peter  

NASA Apollo 15 Camera Caught A UFO In Moon Crater

The newly-published YouTube video of NASA’s Apollo 15 Moon mission has attracted wide attention of UFO enthusiasts. Aside from the astronauts roaming around the moon’s surface, something so strange has been observed by curious viewers.

The shaky camera caught what many UFO pundits consider to be an alien spaceship parked in the background of the American astronauts rambling on the surface of the moon.

Meanwhile, some commentators are disappointed with the video quality as it difficult to verify the authenticity of the footage.

However, many others have remained convinced that there’s something visible on the Moon horizon. They believe the video seems to show a white-colored, alien spacecraft in the distance.

Apollo 15 was the fourth to land on the Moon and the 9^th human-crewed mission in Apollo program of NASA. It was the first mission with a greater focus on science and had a more extended stay on the Moon than earlier landings. It also saw the first utilization of the Lunar Roving Vehicle.

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

08-10-2019 om 19:37 geschreven door peter  

“The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about 4 billion years. So knowing what kind of a monster our galaxy is up against is useful in finding out the Milky Way’s ultimate fate.”

Navaneeth Unnikrishnan of Kerala, India, created this wonderful stacked image of the Andromeda galaxy with images taken in 2014.

Standing outside on a clear night, in a dark country location, you can look across vast space to see the Andromeda galaxy, aka M31 – the large spiral galaxy next door to our Milky Way – the most distant thing we humans can see with the eye alone. This huge galaxy is twice the diameter of our Milky Way at about 200,000 light-years. It contains about a trillion stars, in contrast to the Milky Way’s 250-400 billion. To the eye, it looks peaceful, but, as astronomers have studied it, they’ve uncovered a violent past and future. For example, on October 1, 2019, astronomers announced evidence for two major “migration events” in the history of the Andromeda galaxy, that is, events where smaller dwarf galaxies merged with the larger galaxy. The more recent one happened a few billion years ago and the older event many billions of years before that.

The evidence for the two events comes from the relatively new field of galactic archaeology, that is, the use of the motions and properties of stars and star clusters – in this case, globular star clusters – to reconstruct a galaxy’s history. A statement from Gemini Observatory explained:

Gas and dwarf galaxies in the vast cosmic web follow the gravitational paths laid out by dark matter – traversing filaments, they migrate slowly toward collections of dark matter and assemble into large galaxies. As dwarf galaxies are pulled in by gravity, they are also pulled apart, leaving behind long trailing streams of stars and compact star clusters.

Astronomers study the leftover streams of stars – still visible in modern galaxies – to unearth a galaxy’s history. In this case, the astronomers analyzed data from the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey, known as PAndAS. Their study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on October 2. Australian National University researcher Dougal Mackey co-led the study with Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney.

The Andromeda galaxy. Image credit: 7244907 via Pixabay 

(Free Pixabay licence)

Lewis commented:

We are cosmic archaeologists, except we are digging through the fossils of long-dead galaxies rather than human history.

Dougal Mackey said:

By tracing the faint remains of these smaller galaxies with embedded star clusters, we’ve been able to recreate the way Andromeda drew them in and ultimately enveloped them at the different times.

View larger. | Here is part of the evidence for 2 ancient migration events in the Andromeda galaxy. Astronomers studied this galaxy’s globular star clusters (lower right insets), indicated by colored circles. They are located in the outer halo of the Andromeda Galaxy, beyond the bright disk of the galaxy (upper left inset). The clusters separate into 2 groups: one associated with stellar streams and one not associated with stellar streams. The orbits of these groups of globular clusters are very different from each other, a result that points to 2 separate migration events in the history of the galaxy. The color of each circle indicates the line-of-sight velocity of the corresponding star cluster.

Image via Australian National University/NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/Gemini Observatory.

The discovery presents several new mysteries, with the two bouts of galactic feeding coming from completely different directions. Lewis said:

This is very weird and suggests that the extragalactic meals are fed from what’s known as the ‘cosmic web’ of matter that threads the universe.

More surprising is the discovery that the direction of the ancient feeding is the same as the bizarre ‘plane of satellites,’ an unexpected alignment of dwarf galaxies orbiting Andromeda.

Mackey and Lewis were part of a team that previously discovered such planes were fragile and rapidly destroyed by Andromeda’s gravity within a few billion years. Lewis said:

This deepens the mystery as the plane must be young, but it appears to be aligned with ancient feeding of dwarf galaxies. Maybe this is because of the cosmic web, but really, this is only speculation.

We’re going to have to think quite hard to unravel what this is telling us.

These astronomers also spoke of the future of the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way. The two large galaxies are currently approaching each other, and they are expected to collide several billion years from now. Mackey said:

The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about four billion years. So knowing what kind of a monster our galaxy is up against is useful in finding out the Milky Way’s ultimate fate.

Artist’s concept of Earth’s night sky in 3.75 billion years. The Andromeda galaxy (left) will fill our field of view then, astronomers say, as it heads toward a collision, or merger, with our Milky way galaxy.

Image via NASA/ESA/Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI/T. Hallas; and A. Mellinger. 

Read more about the eventual merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.

• Bottom line: Astronomers used galactic archaeology – the study of star motions in a modern galaxy – to uncover past mergings of small galaxies with the Andromeda galaxy. They say this work will help them understand a collision due to occur between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way billions of years from now.
• Source: Two major accretion epochs in M31 from two distinct populations of globular clusters
• Via Australian National University
• Via Gemini Observatory

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

08-10-2019 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

Navy Pilot Who Reportedly Encountered UFO Reveals New Incidents About Alien ‘Dark Mass’

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

08-10-2019 om 01:01 geschreven door peter  

2,000 Atoms Exist in Two Places at Once in Unprecedented Quantum Experiment

By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer 

The new experiment demonstrated a bizarre quantum effect from the double-slit experiment at an unprecedented scale.

An illustration suggests the behavior of big, complex molecules spreading out like ripples across space.

(Image: © Yaakov Fein, Universität Wien)

Giant molecules can be in two places at once, thanks to quantum physics.

That's something that scientists have long known is theoretically true based on a few facts: Every particle or group of particles in the universe is also a wave — even large particles, even bacteria, even human beings, even planets and stars. And waves occupy multiple places in space at once. So any chunk of matter can also occupy two places at once. Physicists call this phenomenon "quantum superposition," and for decades, they have demonstrated it using small particles.

But in recent years, physicists have scaled up their experiments, demonstrating quantum superposition using larger and larger particles. Now, in a paper published Sept. 23 in the journal Nature Physics, an international team of researchers has caused molecule made up of up to 2,000 atoms to occupy two places at the same time.

• Related: How Quantum Entanglement Works (Infographic)

To pull it off, the researchers built a complicated, modernized version of a series of famous old experiments that first demonstrated quantum superposition.

Researchers had long known that light, fired through a sheet with two slits in it, would create an interference pattern, or a series of light and dark fringes, on the wall behind the sheet. But light was understood as a massless wave, not something made of particles, so this wasn't surprising. However, in a series of famous experiments in the 1920s, physicists showed that electrons fired through thin films or crystals would behave in a similar way, forming patterns like light does on the wall behind the diffracting material.

If electrons were simply particles, and so could occupy only one point in space at a time, they would form two strips, roughly the shape of the slits, on the wall behind the film or crystal. But instead, the electrons hit that wall in complex patterns suggesting the electrons had  interfered with themselves . That is a telltale sign of a wave; in some spots, the peaks of the waves coincide, creating brighter regions, while in other spots, the peaks coincide with troughs, so the two cancel each other out and create a dark region. Because physicists already knew that electrons had mass and were definitely particles, the experiment showed that matter acts both as individual particles and as waves.

(Image credit: Johannes Kalliauer/CC BY-SA 4.0)

But it's one thing to create an interference pattern with electrons. Doing it with giant molecules is a lot trickier. Bigger molecules have less-easily detected waves, because more massive objects have shorter wavelengths that can lead to barely-perceptible interference patterns. And these 2,000-atom particles have wavelengths smaller than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom, so their interference pattern is much less dramatic.

• Related: The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics

To pull off the double-slit experiment for big things, the researchers built a machine that could fire a beam of molecules (hulking things called "oligo-tetraphenylporphyrins enriched with fluoroalkylsulfanyl chains," some more than 25,000 times the mass of a simple hydrogen atom) through a series of grates and sheets bearing multiple slits. The beam was about 6.5 feet (2 meters) long. That's big enough that the researchers had to account for factors like gravity and the rotation of the Earth in designing the beam emitter, the scientists wrote in the paper. They also kept the molecules fairly warm for a quantum physics experiment, so they had to account for heat jostling the particles.

But still, when the researchers switched the machine on, the detectors at the far end of the beam revealed an interference pattern. The molecules were occupying multiple points in space at once.

It's an exciting result, the researchers wrote, proving quantum interference at larger scales than had ever before been detected.

"The next generation of matter-wave experiments will push the mass by an order of magnitude," the authors  wrote.

So, even bigger demonstrations of quantum interference are coming, though it probably won't be possible to fire yourself through an interferometer anytime soon. (First of all, the vacuum in the machine would probably kill you.) Us giant beings are just going to have to sit in one place and watch the particles have all the fun.

• 18 Times Quantum Particles Blew Our Minds
• What's That? Your Physics Questions Answered
• Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.livescience.com/ }

07-10-2019 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

Photo courtesy of Raytheon

As reported by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, military scientists have developed a “Terminator-like” liquid metal that can autonomously change the structure, just like in a Hollywood movie.

The scientists developed liquid metal systems for stretchable electronics – that can be bent, folded, crumpled and stretched – are major research areas towards next-generation military devices.

Conductive materials change their properties as they are strained or stretched. Typically, electrical conductivity decreases and resistance increases with stretching.

The material recently developed by Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) scientists, called Polymerized Liquid Metal Networks, does just the opposite. These liquid metal networks can be strained up to 700%, autonomously respond to that strain to keep the resistance between those two states virtually the same, and still return to their original state. It is all due to the self-organized nanostructure within the material that performs these responses automatically.

“This response to stretching is the exact opposite of what you would expect,” said Dr. Christopher Tabor, AFRL lead research scientist on the project. “Typically a material will increase in resistance as it is stretched simply because the current has to pass through more material. Experimenting with these liquid metal systems and seeing the opposite response was completely unexpected and frankly unbelievable until we understood what was going on.”

Wires maintaining their properties under these different kinds of mechanical conditions have many applications, such as next-generation wearable electronics. For instance, the material could be integrated into a long-sleeve garment and used for transferring power through the shirt and across the body in a way that bending an elbow or rotating a shoulder won’t change the power transferred.

AFRL researchers also evaluated the material’s heating properties in a form factor resembling a heated glove. They measured thermal response with sustained finger movement and retained a nearly constant temperature with a constant applied voltage, unlike current state-of-the-art stretchable heaters that lose substantial thermal power generation when strained due to the resistance changes.

This project started within the last year and was developed in AFRL with fundamental research dollars from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It is currently being explored for further development in partnership with both private companies and universities. Working with companies on cooperative research is beneficial because they take early systems that function well in the lab and optimize them for potential scale up. In this case, they will enable integration of these materials into textiles that can serve to monitor and augment human performance.

The researchers start with individual particles of liquid metal enclosed in a shell, which resemble water balloons. Each particle is then chemically tethered to the next one through a polymerization process, akin to adding links into a chain; in that way all of the particles are connected to each other.

As the connected liquid metal particles are strained, the particles tear open and liquid metal spills out. Connections form to give the system both conductivity and inherent stretchability. During each stretching cycle after the first, the conductivity increases and returns back to normal. To top it off, there is no detection of fatigue after 10,000 cycles.

“The discovery of Polymerized Liquid Metal Networks is ideal for stretchable power delivery, sensing and circuitry,” said Capt. Carl Thrasher, research chemist within the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at AFRL and lead author on the Journal Article. “Human interfacing systems will be able to operate continuously, weigh less, and deliver more power with this technology.”

“We think this is really exciting for a multitude of applications,” he added. “This is something that isn’t available on the market today so we are really excited to introduce this to the world and spread the word.”

{ https://defence-blog.com/ }

07-10-2019 om 23:31 geschreven door peter  

Five bull carcasses are found WITHOUT genitals, tongues or any blood in unexplained Oregon deaths that mirror 1970s livestock mutilations

• Bull carcasses have been discovered missing their tongues and sex organs
• Five have been found so far in Burns, Oregon, baffling state police 
• Theories suggest it could be a human attack or flesh-eating bugs 
• Scenes replicated mutilations in the 1970s which spurred ranchers to carry guns
• Colby Marshall, who owned the bulls, thought it might be the actions of a cult 

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

The first dead bull was found in a timbered ravine in eastern Oregon. There was no indication it had been shot, attacked by predators or eaten poisonous plants. The animal's sex organs and tongue had been removed. All the blood was gone.

In the next few days, four more Hereford bulls were found within 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) in the same condition. There were no tracks around the carcasses. Ranch management and law enforcement suspect that someone killed the bulls. Ranch hands have been advised to travel in pairs and to go armed.

Ever since the bulls were found over several days in July, Harney County Sheriff's Deputy Dan Jenkins has received many calls and emails from people speculating what, or who, might be responsible.

The theories range from scavengers such as carrion bugs eating the carcasses to people attacking the animals to cause financial harm to ranchers. One person suggested that Jenkins look for craters underneath the carcasses, saying it would be evidence the bulls had been levitated into a spaceship, mutilated, and then dropped back to the ground.

Jenkins, who is leading the investigation that also involves state police, has run into only dead ends, with no witnesses. 'If anyone has concrete information or knows of any cases that have been solved in the past, that would definitely be helpful,' he said from his office in Burns.

Colby Marshall, vice president of the Silvies Valley Ranch that owned the bulls, has another theory: 'We think that this crime is being perpetuated by some sort of a cult,' he said.

A Hereford bull lies dead in Burns, Oregon, one of five apparently healthy bulls that were found dead and with sex organs and tongues removed. Authorities suspect the bizarre deaths and mutilations were human caused, but have no leads

The case recalls mutilations of livestock across the West and Midwest in the 1970s that struck fear in rural areas. Thousands of cattle and other livestock were found dead with the reproductive organs, and sometimes part of their faces, removed, in territory ranging from Minnesota to New Mexico.

Ranchers began carrying guns. Folks said helicopters had been heard around the kill sites. A federal agency canceled an inventory by helicopter of its lands in Colorado, worried that it would get shot down.

A couple of U.S. senators urged the FBI to investigate, according to FBI documents. After saying it lacked jurisdiction, the FBI agreed to investigate cases on tribal lands. But the mutilations stopped. Former FBI agent Kenneth Rommel, who headed the investigation, said there was no indication that anything other than common predators were responsible.

Cases have emerged sporadically since then. In the 1980s, a few cows were found dead and mutilated in eastern Oregon. More recently, there have been cases on a ranch near Flagstaff, Arizona.

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Some of the mutilations can be attributed to natural causes. An animal drops dead, the blood pools at the bottom of the carcass, the carcass bloats and the skin dries out and splits. The tears often appear surgical. Carrion bugs, birds and other scavengers go for soft tissues like rectum, genitals, udders and eyes.

Dave Bohnert, director of Oregon State University's Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Burns, said he believes people killed the Silvies bulls because there is no indication they were felled by predators or had eaten poisonous plants. However, the state of the carcasses could be attributable to nature, said Bohnert, who is not officially investigating the case.

If people killed the bulls, a motive could be to financially harm the ranch, he said, noting that breeding bulls cost thousands of dollars each, and the 100-plus calves each of them sire are collectively worth much more.

Marshall doubts it was a malicious attack on the ranch, which employs 75 people, many from local communities. Silvies Valley Ranch covers 140,000 acres (57,000 hectares) of deeded and leased National Forest lands around a mile above sea level.

Colby Marshall (above), vice president of Silvies Valley Ranch poses for a picture in Burns, Oregon.  Silvies Valley Ranch owns five bulls that were found dead with sex organs and tongues removed. Here Marshall is pictured in September 2017

In 2006, a wealthy veterinarian bought the ranch and made it a combination working ranch and an elite destination resort. It has four golf courses, a spa, shooting ranges, fishing and luxury cabins going for up to $849 per night.

Marshall suspects the bulls were killed to get the organs of the free-ranging bulls for some reason. The bull parts would be available cheaply or free at a slaughterhouse, but he believes some people are going to a lot of trouble to get these parts on the range.

There's no sign that scavengers removed the organs of the bulls, and instead someone using a knife or scalpel probably did, Marshall said.

'To lose a completely healthy animal would be an oddity,' Marshall said. 'To lose five young, very healthy, in great shape, perfect bulls that are all basically the same age ... that is so outside the bounds of normal activity.'

Marshall speculates the bulls were darted with a tranquilizer that knocked them out. While some people acted as lookouts, others bled the animals out by inserting a large-gauge needle into the tongue and into an artery, then removed the organs after the heart stopped beating, he surmised.

Jenkins, the deputy, has a similar theory.

'Personally, I would lean more toward the occult, where people for whatever reason -- whether it's a phase of the moon or whatever rituals they're going to do with their beliefs -- are coming to different areas and doing that,' he said.

The Oregon Cattlemen's Association is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of those responsible. The ranch is offering $25,000.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

07-10-2019 om 23:07 geschreven door peter  

5 bulls found dead in Oregon; then the story gets weird

07-10-2019 om 22:48 geschreven door peter  

A long-exposure photograph of the Milky Way overlaid by the Drake equation for estimating the number of extra terrestrial civilizations in it

The so-called Drake equation is a probabilistic argument purposed to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. The equation is:

where

• R* represents the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
• fp is the fraction of stars that have planets
• ne is the fraction of planets that are in the circumstellar habitable zone, i.e. can potentially support life
• fl is the fraction of planets that could support life that actually do develop life at some point
• fi is the fraction of planets with life that develop (intelligent) civilizations
• fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop technology which emit detectable signals of their existance into space
• L is the length of time for which extra terrestrial civilizations release detectable signals into space

Subject to the assumptions that give rise to these variables, estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy have ranged widely from as low as 0.000000000091 (we are probably alone in our galaxy) to as high as 15,600,000 (our galaxy is populated by millions of intelligent civilizations). The following animation eloquently explains the factors that go into the estimation:

The Drake Equation

The Drake equation in other words summarizes the factors which are thought to affect the likelihood that humans will be able to detect radio-communication from intelligent extraterrestrial life (Burchell, 2006). The argument was first proposed in 1961 by American astronomer Frank Drake, for the purpose of stimulating scientific dialogue at the meeting of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) community:

As I planned the meeting, I realized a few day[s] ahead of time we needed an agenda. And so I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it’s going to be to detect extraterrestrial life. And looking at them it became pretty evident that if you multiplied all these together, you got a number, N, which is the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy. This was aimed at the radio search, and not to search for primordial or primitive life forms. 

— Frank Drake

The 1961 meeting of the SETI community was arranged following a surge of interest among various well-known physicists and astronomers’ in searching for extra terrestrial communications. Evidence of this interest includes Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s Nature article Searching for Interstellar Communications which first proposed the idea of using radio telescopes to try to detect transmissions broadcast by extraterrestrial civilizations. It also includes a newspaper article entitled Life on other Planets? in the Sydney Morning Harald (1959) in which Harlow Shapley (father of Nobel laureate mathematician Lloyd Shapley) and William Howells’ work for the Darwin Centennial celebration is highlighted.

Original estimates

Depending on the assumptions, as many skeptics have pointed out, the Drake equation can give a very wide range of values. Original “educated guesses” for each parameter proposed by Drake and his colleagues in 1961 were:

• R* ≈ 1, the yearly average rate of star formation in our galaxy
• fp ≈ 0.2– 0.5, one fifth to one half of all stars will have planets
• ne ≈ 1–5, stars with planets will have between one and five planets in the habitable zone
• fl ≈ 1, every planet in the habitable zone will develop life
• fi ≈ 1, every planet will life will develop intelligent life
• fc ≈ 0.1–0.2, between 10% – 20% of planets with intelligent life will be able to communicate
• L ≈ 1000–100 000 000, the length of time for which extra terrestrials will send detectable signals into space and these signals’ duration

If we assume the lower estimates, the solution to the Drake equation then yields:

If we instead assume the higher estimates, the solution to the Drake equation then yields:

Suggesting that intelligent extra terrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way number somewhere between 20 (two zero) and 50 million. In other words, if one agrees with the 1961 assumptions of Drake and his colleagues’, it is likely that there currently exists intelligent extra terrestrial civilizations capable of communicating with Earth, as we speak. However, as should be clear, a few of these assumptions seem implausibly optimistic.

Better informed estimates

Although we have a fairly good idea of the rate of stellar formation, a dearth of data for the other components means that calculations are often reduced to the creative speculations of quixotic astronomers.

— Michael Shermer

Since the above first estimate was proposed in 1961, each factor of the Drake equation have been further researched, altering the original estimation drastically. The only factor we can claim to have empirically valid, statistically significant estimates for, as Michael Shermer points out, is the first, the rate of star formation in the Milky Way (Shermer, 2002):

The star formation rate

The first factor (R*) representing the rate of star formation in the Milky Way was in 2010 estimated by researchers Thomas Robitaille and Barbara A. Whitney to be approximately equal to between R* = 0.68 M☉ and 1.45 M☉, where M☉ represents a solar mass. Using the data from the GLIMPSE infrared survey conducted with NASA’s Spitzer infrared telescope, the study derived the galactic star formation rate (SFR) by comparing the number of young stellar objects (YSO) with a refined stellar-population synthesis model (Wanjek, 2015). The approximation yields a star formation rate of about 1.5–3 stars per year.

Fraction of stars with planets

The current best estimate of how many stars have planets (fp), perhaps surprisingly, argues that the fraction may approach 1, suggesting that not only do most stars have planets, every star does.

Fraction of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars

A 2013 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences purported that based on Kepler space mission data, there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars and red-dwarf stars in the Milky Way (Petigura et al, 2013). Considering that there are an estimated 100 billion stars in our galaxy, this implies that the fraction of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars (ne) is equal to 0.4.

Fraction of habitable planets that develop life

Considering no other planet than Earth have as of yet shown signs of life, estimations of the fraction of habitable planets that go on to develop life (fl) are speculative at best. If signs of life were to be found on e.g. Mars, Europa or Titan (which developed independently of life on earth), it could imply a value of fl approaching 1.

Fraction of habituated planets that develop intelligent life

Estimations of the fraction of habituated planets that go on to develop not only life, but intelligent life (fi), expectedly, varies widely. Among those who argue for low values, it is pointed out that among the billions of species on earth, only one (that we know of) has become intelligent, and so 1 divided by billions appears to argue for a small fraction. Among those who argue for high values, it is commonly pointed out that as the complexity of life increases over time, intelligence appears almost inevitable, given long enough time (Bonner, 1988).

Fraction of habituated planets with intelligent life that send signals into space

The motivation and incentives for the discovery of the usefulness of electromagnetic waves for the purposes of long-distance communications appear strong enough to argue for the inevitability of a fraction of intelligent civilizations eventually emitting signals into space (fc), revealing their existence. This would argue for a high fraction. Arguments for a low fraction vary widely from those who claim that civilizations broadcast detectable radio signals only for a brief period of time before superior technology takes over, to those who argue that civilizations tend to isolate themselves. Either estimate of course, varies widely and is essentially purely speculative.

Lifetime of an intelligent, communicative civilization

Although we do have empirical data to support estimations of the final factor, how long an intelligent, communicative civilization stays communicating (L), we lack an ability to extrapolate this data to other planets. Shermer (2002) argues that there have been 60 such civilizations thus far on earth (going back to Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Ancient Egypt and Greece, the Roman Empire, Chinese, Japanese, African, Indian and South American dynasties, and including six modern states of Europe and America) which survived a total of 25,234 years, giving an estimated average lifetime of an intelligent, communicative civilization to be L = 420.6 years. Others have added that at a certain level of complexity, civilizations overcome threats to their existence and go on forever. It has also been noted that as more civilizations arise and are extinct, future civilizations become increasingly sophisticated by learning from history.

A modern estimation

Inputing the estimates found above and using fractions of 0.5 where there is no data to rely on, we obtain:

Suggesting, somewhat nonsensically, that there are approximately 46 extra terrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way currently capable of communicating with earth.

Relationship to the Fermi paradox

The Drake equation has a relationship with the famous Fermi paradox which argues that there exists a contradiction between:

1. The lack of empirical evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations; and
2. The high estimates of the probability of extraterrestrial life (such as those arrived at by choosing high values for the factors in the Drake equation);

The argument for the paradox was formalized by Michael H. Hart in 1975, but bears Fermi’s name due to a well-known conversation about recent UFO reports between Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Herbert York and Emil Konopinski at the end of which Fermi supposedly proclaimed “But where is everybody?”.

Hart’s paper Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth highlights the following axioms for the claim:

• There are billons of other stars in our galaxy that are similar to our sun;
• It is highly probable that some of these stars have Earth-like planets;
• If the earth is typical, some of these planets may have developed intelligent life and interstellar travel;
• Even at the slow velocity of envisioned interstellar travel, one could travel across the Milky Way in a few million years;

Following this reasoning, Hart argues, earth should already have been visited by extra terrestrial aliens or their probes, if they existed.

Howard: Are you not familiar with the Drake equation?
Sheldon: The one that estimates the odds of making contact with extraterrestrials, 
by calculating the product of an increasingly restrictive series of fractional values, 
such as those stars with planets and those planets likely to develop life,
 N = R* × fₚ × nₑ × fₗ × fᵢ × f𝒸 × LHoward: Yeah, that one.

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07-10-2019 om 22:28 geschreven door peter