Several Residents Have Witnessed a UFO in the Dubai Sky

UAE residents who happened to be outdoors shared clips online, showing a glowing object that flew over Al Khalil Road on Wednesday night.

According to the report, a single UFO appeared for a short time at around 7:45 pm over the skies of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Astronomer Ebrahim Al Jarwan said that this was the second reported sighting within the month.

Al Jarwan, who works at Sharjah Planetarium as a general supervisor, stated that they have also been investigating the strange incident.

Indian expatriate Shiny Shajudheen and daughter Ashley spotted the UFO in the sky from Al Khail Gate in Al Quoz at around 7:50 pm.

According to Mr Shajudheen, he was driving within their community, and his daughter first saw the strange fireball. He then pulled over and took a video.

Before hitting the record button, he saw two trails of flares crisscrossing each other. The video only shows both of them swirling while slowing going down.

He said that it was an impressive sight, but they felt scared as they could not understand what they had witnessed.

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

26-11-2019 om 13:40 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Find a Spot Where No Life Can Survive. That's Bad News for Alien Hunters.

By Yasemin Saplakoglu - Search For Life

The Dallol hydrothermal pools are harsh environments.

(Image: © Shutterstock)

Unearthly greens and yellows color the scorching-hot landscape surrounding the Dallol volcano in northern Ethiopia. This alien-like world is filled with hydrothermal pools that are some of the most extreme environments on the planet — and some of them seem to be completely devoid of life, according to a new study.

Different life-forms on our planet have adapted to survive under some pretty harsh conditions, places that are superhot, superacidic or supersalty, to name a few, said study senior author Purificación López-García, the research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. 

But can life survive in a single environment that combines all three conditions, such as in the colorful waters of the Dallol hydrothermal region?

• Related: 7 Most Mars-Like Places on Earth

To figure out if this extreme environment oversteps the limits for life on our planet, the researchers sampled a number of brines— or pools of water with high concentrations of salt — in the area. Some were extremely hot, salty and acidic, while others were still very hot and salty but weren't too acidic or basic. The scientists analyzed all the genetic material found in the samples to identify any organisms living there. 

Some of the milder pools were chock-full of sodium chloride, a condition that some tiny organisms can withstand; the more extreme environments had high concentrations of magnesium-based salt, which is "deleterious for life," because magnesium breaks down the cell membrane, López-García said.

In these most extreme environments, that were really acidic, hot and contained magnesium salts, the researchers found no DNA and thus no trace of a living organism, the study said. The scientists did detect a small hint of DNA from single-celled organisms called archaea if they "forced the conditions" in those samples, López-García said. That means they took the sample and kept amplifying the DNA — imagine zooming into a picture —  to see if there was a very small quantity that they'd missed. But the researchers hypothesized that this small amount of DNA is likely the result of contamination from a neighboring salt plain, brought from people who visit the area or wind. 

On the other hand, in the less extreme ponds, the researchers found a large diversity of microbes, again mostly archaea. "The diversity of archaea is really very, very large and very surprising," López-García said. Researchers found some archaea that are well known to live in areas of high salt concentration and some that the scientists had no idea could survive in even the relatively less-salty ponds.

Their findings suggest that there is a gradient of extreme environments, some of which harbor life and others that don't and might serve as a bit of a caution in the search for life elsewhere in the cosmos, she added. "There is this idea … that says any planet with liquid water on the surface is habitable," she said. But as the lifeless pools of Ethiopia may suggest, water "might be a necessary condition, but it is far from sufficient."

What's more, using electron microscopes, the researchers also detected the presence of biomorphs or "mineral precipitates that can mimic tiny cells" in samples taken from both the lifeless pools and those found to harbor life, López-García said. "If you go to Mars or to fossil environments and you see little, rounded things, you might be tempted to say that these are microfossils, but they might not be."

Proving that life doesn't exist

There were some weaknesses in this study, John Hallsworth, a lecturer at The Institute for Global Food Security at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland wrote in an accompanying commentary published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. For example, the researchers' DNA analysis couldn't determine if the detected organisms were alive or active, and it's unclear if their measurements of the water factors such as pH were done accurately, he wrote. 

Even so, the team "managed to characterize the geochemistry and microbial diversity of a large number of brines that span a wide range of physicochemical conditions, revealing the extensive diversity of the archaeal communities present," Hallsworth wrote.

• Related: Gallery: Rainbow of Extreme Life in Great Salt Lake

What's more, a couple of months ago, another group of researchers came up with the opposite conclusion after they, too, sampled the waters in the Dallol area. In the most extreme ponds of the area, those researchers found that archaea were "thriving," and various types of analysis suggested that these microorganisms didn't originate from any type of contamination, said Felipe Gómez, a biochemist at Spain's Center of Astrobiology and the lead author of that study, which was published in May in the journal Scientific Reports. 

"Given the risk of detecting any type of contamination, microbiologists that work in extreme environments take many precautions to avoid it," he said. "In our work, we sampled in completely aseptic conditions," or those free from contamination. It's unclear why there is a discrepancy between the studies, and though "they claim that they do not see what we report," that doesn't mean the older findings are incorrect, he said. "More work needs to be done."

But this older paper is "weak" because the researchers only found traces of one type of archaea that's similar to archaea living in the neighboring salt plain, and didn't do enough to prevent contamination, López-García said.  

"Dispersal is active in the area," so this trace of archaea could have been carried in by the wind or tourists, similar to how her team also discovered traces of archaea but hypothesized that they were contaminants from the neighboring salt plain, she said.

The new findings were published on Oct. 28 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

• World's Most Extreme Laboratories
• The 8 Hottest Places on Earth
• Too Hot to Handle: 7 Sizzling Places on Planet Earth

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

26-11-2019 om 00:36 geschreven door peter  

Watch a Brilliant Fireball Flash Over St. Louis' Historic Arch (Video)

26-11-2019 om 00:19 geschreven door peter  

Physicists Just Created the Most Detailed Simulation of the Universe in History

25-11-2019 om 23:49 geschreven door peter  

What If Space-Time Were 'Chunky'? It Would Forever Change the Nature of Reality.

By Paul Sutter - Astrophysicist - Space 

(Image: © Shutterstock)

Is our fundamental reality continuous or is it chopped up into tiny, discrete bits?

Asked another way, is space-time smooth or chunky? The question cuts to the heart of the most fundamental theories of physics, linking together the way space and time intersect with the material of our everyday existence. 

However, experimentally testing the nature of space and time has been impossible, because of the extreme energies needed to probe such tiny scales in the universe. That is — until now. A team of astronomers has proposed an ambitious new plan to use a fleet of tiny spacecraft to detect subtle changes in the speed of light, a hallmark of some of the most mind-bending theories of the cosmos. If space and time are indeed broken up into little bits, the research could pave the way for a completely new understanding of reality.

• Related: The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics

Chunky vs. smooth

The question of "what is space and time?" goes back thousands of years, and our modern understanding rests on two strangely incompatible pillars: quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of general relativity.

In general relativity, space and time are woven together into the unified fabric of space-time, the four-dimensional stage that underpins our universe. This space-time is continuous, which means that there are no gaps anywhere; it's all a smooth texture. Space-time isn't just a platform for us to act our parts, however; it's also a player too: The bending and warping of space-time gives us our experience of gravity.

• Related: 8 Ways You Can See Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Real Life

In the opposite corner, a set of rules called quantum mechanics governs the interactions of the very tiny things in the universe. Quantum mechanics rests on the idea that not much of our everyday experience is smooth and continuous, but chunky. In other words, it's quantized. Energy, momentum, spin and so many other properties of matter come in only discrete little packets.

What's more, quantum mechanics itself also splits itself into two camps. On one hand, we have the familiar particles of our everyday existence, such as electrons and protons, that interact and do other interesting things. These are obviously very chunky, as they're discrete "things." On the other hand, we have the quantum fields. In the subatomic world, each kind of particle has its own field that spreads throughout space-time; when we think of particles, we think of little vibrations in their fields, which in turn interact with other particles, and do some other interesting things. The fields are understandably very smooth.

Bits of time and space

So, we have some smooth pictures of our universe and some chunky ones. When it comes to space-time itself, we can easily imagine extending the concepts of quantum mechanics all the way to their logical conclusion, and ruling that space and time are discrete: The very fabric of reality is divided up like pixels on a computer screen, and what we experience as smooth, continuous movement is nothing but a grid of discrete pixels at the tiniest of scales.

• Related: The Illusion of Time: What's Real?

Many theories of merging together quantum mechanics and general relativity, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, predict some form of discrete space-time (although the precise predictions, interpretations and implications of that chunkiness are still poorly understood). If we could find evidence for discrete space-time, it would not only completely rewrite our understanding of reality, but also open the door to a revolution in physics.

This discreteness can reveal itself only in the most subtle ways; otherwise we would've spotted it by now. Various theories have predicted that if space-time were indeed chunky, then the speed of light may not be entirely constant — it may shift ever so slightly depending on the energy of that light. Higher energy light has a shorter wavelength, and when the wavelength becomes small enough, it can "see" the chunkiness of spacetime. Imagine walking down sidewalk: with big feet you don't notice any small cracks or bumps, but if you had microscopic feet you would trip over every little imperfection, slowing you down. But this shift is incredibly tiny; if space-time is discrete, it's on a scale more than a billion times smaller than what we can currently probe in our most powerful experiments.

A quest for the grail

Enter GrailQuest: the Gamma-ray Astronomy International Laboratory for Quantum Exploration of Space-Time. A team of astronomers submitted a proposal for this mission in response to a call for new space-time-hunting ideas from the European Space Agency (ESA). Their proposal is detailed in the arXiv database, meaning that it hasn't yet been reviewed by peers in the field.

Here's the scoop: In order to see if the speed of light changes with different energies, we need to collect a huge amount of the highest-energy light in the universe, and GrailQuest hopes to do just that.

GrailQuest consists of a fleet of small, simple spacecraft (the exact number varies, from just a few dozen if the satellites are larger to well over a few thousand if they're smaller) to constantly monitor the sky for gamma-ray bursts. These are some of the most powerful explosions in the universe. Like their name suggests, these bursts release copious amounts of high-energy photons, a.k.a. gamma rays. These gamma rays travel across billions of years before reaching the fleet of spacecraft, which record the energy of the gamma rays and the differences in timings as the burst washes over the fleet.

With enough accuracy, GrailQuest might be able to reveal if space-time is discrete. At least, it has the right setup: It's examining the highest-energy light (which is affected the most in theories that predict that space-time is chunky); the gamma rays have been traveling for billions of light-years (allowing the effect to build up over time); and the spacecraft are simple enough to produce en masse (so the entire fleet can see as many events as possible, all across the sky).

How would our conceptions of reality change if GrailQuest were to find evidence for the discreteness of space-time? It's impossible to say — our current theories are all over the map when it comes to implications. But no matter what, we're going to have to wait. This round of ESA proposals is for launches sometime between 2035 and 2050. While we're waiting, we can debate if the time elapsed between now and then is fundamentally smooth or chunky.

• The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe
• From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time
• The Large Numbers That Define the Universe

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe.

• Originally published on Live Science. 

{ https://www.livescience.com/news }

25-11-2019 om 23:39 geschreven door peter  

NASA cameras capture ‘soundwaves from mystery spacecraft’ hurtling across Earth

The images taken from the International Space Station have sparked a fierce debate online, with some believing it was proof of the US government controlling the weather. Others claimed the “craft” was actually a top-secret sonic weapon

By Simon Green - Video News Editor

NASA cameras on the International Space Station have captured soundwaves travelling across Earth from a new form of “space technology”, conspiracy theorists have claimed.

The collection of baffling photos appear to show something cutting through the clouds to send miles upon miles of “ripples” trailing off behind it.

YouTube conspiracists Blake and Brett Cousins – of thirdphaseofmoon – noticed the images on NASA’s website and posted footage giving their thoughts earlier today.

“These are some of the best images I’ve seen from NASA, this is blowing me away,” Brett says.

“What we’re seeing is something ripping through the clouds that is creating a pattern that we haven’t seen before.

“What kind of craft is zipping through the clouds to cut clouds and make this ripple effect?

“Whatever it is, it’s massive.”

Blake then likens the patterns to those created by soundwaves and claims the fact the ISS was over the Earth at the exact spot to capture the images was no coincidence.

“What’s amazing to me is that NASA and the ISS were in the exact spot at the right time to capture this, I think this was an experiment,” he continues.

“The ISS wanted to get some good images of this – they are super hi-res.

“Is this some sort of secret sonic weapon that we’re not aware of?”

NASA/thirdphaseofmoon/YouTube

His brother agrees, suggesting that the agency was showcasing “new space technology”.

The footage has sparked fierce debate since surfacing on YouTube.

Some viewers suggested the “craft” could be alien in origin, while others believed it looked like a “cloaked military mother ship”.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

25-11-2019 om 23:17 geschreven door peter  

China's Microsatellite Crash Site on the Moon Spotted by NASA Lunar Orbiter

Longjiang-2 was designed to orbit the moon for a year. The satellite exceeded that estimate, but its mission still needed to come to an end, and China wanted to crash the spacecraft to ensure it wouldn't clutter up lunar orbit.

Now, a new lunar crater has been identified, and it's most likely the result of that impact, according to a statement from Mark Robinson, leader of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team at Arizona State University.

In his remarks about the images released from the instrument, Robinson saluted the team — led by amateur radio operator Daniel Estévez of Tres Cantos, Spain — that estimated that the small spacecraft impacted the lunar surface somewhere within Van Gent crater (16.69 degrees North, 159.52 degrees East).

The LROC team used these coordinates to image the area on Oct. 5. Through a careful comparison of pre-existing LROC Narrow Angle Camera images, the LROC team located a new impact crater (16.6956 degrees N, 159.5170 degrees E, plus or minus 10 meters) just 1,076 feet (328 m) from the estimated site.

The crater is 13 feet by 16 feet (4 by 5 m), with the long axis oriented southwest to northeast.

Based on the crater's size and proximity to the estimated crash coordinates, "we are fairly confident that this new crater formed as a result of the Longjiang-2 impact," Robinson wrote.

• China's Chang'e Program: Missions to the Moon
• See the Moon Like the Apollo Astronauts with These Epic Panoramic Photos
• Photos from the Moon's Far Side! China's Chang'e 4 Lunar Landing in Pictures

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 22:46 geschreven door peter  

Building a Planet B for Humanity Isn't a Good Enough Reason to Explore Space

An artist's depiction of life on Mars.

(Image: © NASA)

That reliance on Earth is not surprising considering how many characteristics of other worlds make them inhospitable or even threatening to humans. But the tie to Earth does throw a wrench in dreams of shuffling off our terrestrial coil — dreams that can be an attractive alternative to the difficulty of tackling the challenges of life at home.

"For me, the question is balance," Denning said. "How can we be enthusiastic about the human capacity to explore while maintaining our focus on what needs to happen here on this planet?"

Some approaches developed to address challenges of spaceflight can also shape life on Earth; NASA regularly highlights "spinoff" technologies you don't need to go to orbit to appreciate. Other challenges and solutions of space lack those spinoff applications.

Sometimes, the idea of a fallback world is stretched even further beyond the bounds of possibility, to places we can't pragmatically visit. "Amazing scientific discoveries, for example, exoplanets, get co-opted into problematic stories about our own life here on Earth. Exoplanets do get framed as a Planet B," Denning said. "That's become the story, that that is why exoplanets are important, because maybe we can go there when we've destroyed Earth." That reasoning ignores the scientific importance of studying these distant alien planets.

Transferring humanity elsewhere also has consequences for destination worlds. Some of those concerns are addressed by planetary-protection guidelines, which are designed in part to reduce the odds that terrestrial contamination will prevent scientists from being able to determine whether life exists on other worlds.

Still, Denning said she's not convinced that those guidelines are enough to protect either other worlds and any life there or even astronauts themselves. "I'm not saying Mars off limits forever or anything like that," she said. "In my ideal universe, we would just be slowing down and taking more time and making sure that we get it right for everybody's sake, for the sake of any humans you're sending out there as well."

Those concerns apply to exploration on the scale of just a handful of astronauts as well as to the more sizable and permanent migration implied by the term Planet B. But in both cases, humans have a lot of potential to change the worlds they visit, purposefully or accidentally. And Denning said she wishes we would spend more time now discussing what those worlds' futures may someday look like.

"We've got worlds out there that we haven't really messed up yet," Denning said, wistfully pointing out that if we're careful, we can keep them that way. "Wouldn't it be nice?"

• Mars One's Red Planet Colony Project (Gallery)
• The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)
• Mars Ice Home: A Red Planet Colony Concept in Pictures

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

{ https://www.space.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 22:32 geschreven door peter  

PYRAMIDS of GIZA: The Orion Mystery

Were the Pyramids of Giza designed to be a mirror of the stars?

Conventional archeology tells us the great pyramids at Giza were built as tombs for the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.

Constructed during the Old Kingdom’s 4th dynasty 4500 years ago, the monuments many mysteries have cast a spell on mankind for millennia.

Built with incredible accuracy and containing many puzzling features, the true purpose of the pyramids has inspired endless speculation.

Why, if they were built as tombs for the pharaohs, are the Giza pyramids completely bare? Unlike other Egyptian tombs, they contain no inscriptions, hieroglyphics or indeed pharaoh’s bodies.

Mainstream Egyptology tells us the tombs were stripped bare by grave robbers — but did they also strip them of all inscriptions?

Sceptics of the tombs theory have long wondered why pharaohs would build such incredible monuments to themselves and then fail to put their name on them.

Even more puzzling — just why were the pyramids built with such astonishing accuracy?

The Great Pyramid’s 4 faces are aligned almost perfectly with the compass, with its south face aligned so precisely with true south that its average error is just 2 minutes of arc — astonishing accuracy even today.

It’s construction also shows the builders knowledge of Pi, the golden ratio and even the dimensions of the Earth and Sun.

In the 1980s, an extraordinary new theory emerged that attempted to explain some of these mysteries.

Robert Bauval, a Belgian engineer, noted how the smallest of the 3 pyramids at Giza — The Pyramid of Menkaure, was offset slightly from the other two.

Noting the similarity between this and the offset in the 3rd star of Orion’s Belt, Bauval overlaid the stars of Orion over an aerial view of the pyramids and was astonished to discover they matched almost exactly.

Publishing his findings in a best-selling book in 1994, Bauval’s theory captured the public’s imagination and became a global sensation, spawning newspaper articles, documentaries and numerous other books.

Not only did the 3 pyramids match Orion’s Belt, Bauval argued that the Great Sphinx mirrored the constellation of Leo, and the monument’s alignments to the Nile matched the stars positions relative to the Milky Way.

Were the Ancient Egyptians really trying to create a map of the stars on the Earth?

Evidence for

The alignments

Whilst Bauval’s basic thesis was even accepted by some Egyptologists, he massively expanded on it for his 1994 book.

Looking out beyond the pyramids to the wider Giza plateau, Bauval and fellow researcher Graham Hancock began to look for other alignments.

Perhaps the Great Sphinx, a vast stone statue of a lion with a human face, located next to the pyramids, was intended to represent the constellation of Leo?

Using astronomical computer programs, the pair dialed back the skies over Giza to the supposed date of the construction of the Pyramids — 2500BC. Disappointingly they could find no match.

But 2500BC was during the astronomical Age of Taurus — represented by a bull. Perhaps they could find a match in the Age of Leo?

Dialing the starfields back thousands of years, Bauval and Hancock were able to find an amazing match — in 10500BC, whilst the pyramids matched Orions belt, the Sphinx was looking directly at the constellation of Leo.

10500BC marked the dawning of the Age of Leo, and even more astonishingly at that date the pyramids and Sphinx’s position relative to the nearby River Nile matched Orion and Leo’s position relative to the Milky Way.

This clinched it for the 2 authors — whilst the original Orion correlation theory was dismissed by many Egyptologists as a coincidence, this was surely beyond any possible coincidence.

The layout of the monuments at Giza really did appear to be a ground map of the heavens.

The Duat

The stars that appeared to be mapped in stone on the Giza plateau were of great significance to the ancient Egyptians.

Their most sacred religious writings — the Pyramid Texts, describe a region of the sky called the Duat that represented the afterlife, the underworld and rebirth.

This is where the Egyptians believed their Gods resided and it’s guardian was Osiris, the God of the dead and rebirth.

Pharoahs regarded themselves as the embodiment of Osiris on Earth and when they died they believed they would travel up to the Duat and be reborn in the afterlife.

Tellingly, Osiris was represented in the night sky by the very constellation mapped out by the 3 Pyramids of Giza — the constellation of Orion.

Whilst mainstream archeology declares the pyramids were tombs for the pharaohs, they also acknowledge them as vehicles to facilitate the pharaoh’s travel to the afterlife through the Duat.

The pharaohs were Osiris, the pyramids were vehicles to the Duat, and Osiris was represented in the Duat by Orion.

With so many other connections the prospect, suggested by many Egyptologists, that the correlation between the layout of the pyramids and Orion’s belt occurred by chance would seem to be unlikely.

The shafts

Khufu’s Pyramid is the largest and most magnificent of the 3 pyramids at Giza. The only survivor of the 7 Wonders of the World, it contains some unusual features that have long resisted explanation.

Both the King and Queen’s Chamber in the pyramid have 2 mysterious 8-inch wide shafts, unique in all Egypt, that travel out diagonally through hundreds of feet of the pyramid’s vast body.

These shafts would have been unfathomably complex to construct — each of hundreds of thousands of blocks had to be separately carved into shape to form the shaft. Clearly they were of fundamental importance.

Whilst traditionally described as ventilation shafts by egyptologists, this is unlikely to be their true purpose since 2 of the shafts do not connect with the exterior of the monument.

They do, however, exhibit several significant astronomical alignments that reinforce the Orion correlation theory.

The astronomer Virginia Trimble noticed in 1964 that the southern shaft in the King’s Chamber pointed towards Orion — the very constellation mapped out on the ground by the 3 pyramids. Could this really be another coincidence?

Robert Bauval then traced the path of the southern shaft of the Queen’s chamber and discovered it pointed at Sirius. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky was considered by the Egyptians to represent Isis — Osiris’s sister and lover.

Like the 3 pyramids and the Sphinx, these correlations all fitted best at 10500BC. The real question is — why that date?

If the Great Pyramid was built in 2500BC, why were the Egyptians pointing to this much earlier date?

Could the pyramids actually be much older that conventional archeology tells us? Or was 10500BC a date of great significance that the Egyptians wished to mark in stone for eternity?

Whatever the reason its hard to dismiss the idea that the ancient Egyptians were trying to mirror the heavens above on Earth at the Giza plateau.

Evidence against

Replanning

Several Egyptologists have responded to the Orion correlation theory by pointing out the extensive replanning that occurred during the construction of the 2nd and 3rd pyramids.

The location of the main chamber in Khafre’s pyramid suggest the original plan was for its footprint to be some 50% further north. It could be that topological problems with the underlying rock necessitated a change in location.

The smaller 3rd pyramid, whose offset so distinctly mirrors Orion’s belt, also seems to have been replanned during its construction. Dead ends in some of the main passages suggest that the pyramid was considerably enlarged during its construction.

If either of these pyramids really were re-built in this ad-hoc fashion, then it undermines the idea they were laid out toatch a grand plan to mirror the constellation of Orion.

Magnitude of the stars

Another objection to the Orion correlation centres on the relative magnitude of the 3 stars in Orions belt.

Critics point out that the smallest of the 3 monuments — Menkaure’s Pyramid, is considerably smaller than the others, it’a total volume only 1/10th of the Great Pyramid.

However, the supposed corresponding star in Orions Belt — Mintaka, is only slightly less bright than it’s neighbours. Neither through the naked eye or telescopes is Mintaka anywhere near 1/10th as bright as its neighbours.

Whilst a small discrepancy may be written off to artistic license, the difference here would seem too large if the intention was to accurately mirror the constellation on the ground.

• Cover photo credit — Nina Aldin Thune/wiki

{ https://theunredacted.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 18:26 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers Find Three Supermassive Black Holes in NGC 6240

NGC 6240, a well-studied nearby galaxy system in the process of merging, contains three supermassive black holes at its core, two of which are active and each with a mass of about 90 million solar masses, according to a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

NGC 6240 is a system of merging galaxies approximately 400 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.

It spans 300,000 light-years and has an elongated shape with branching wisps, loops and tails.

Until now, astronomers have assumed that it was formed by the collision of two galaxies and therefore contains two black holes in its core.

“Through our observations with extremely high spatial resolution we were able to show that NGC 6240 hosts not two but three supermassive black holes in its center,” said Professor Wolfram Kollatschny, an astronomer at the University of Göttingen.

“Each of the three heavyweights has a mass of more than 90 million Suns.”

“They are located in a region of space less than 3,000 light-years across, i.e. in less than one hundredth of the total size of the galaxy.”

Professor Kollatschny and colleagues observed NGC 6240 using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

“Up until now, such a concentration of three supermassive black holes had never been discovered in the Universe,” said Dr. Peter Weilbacher, a researcher in the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam.

“The present case provides evidence of a simultaneous merging process of three galaxies along with their central black holes.”

According to the team, the discovery of the triple supermassive black hole system is of fundamental importance for understanding the evolution of galaxies over time.

“Until now it has not been possible to explain how the largest and most massive galaxies, which we know from our cosmic environment in the ‘present time,’ were formed just by normal galaxy interaction and merging processes over the course of the previous 14 billion years,” the scientists said.

“If, however, simultaneous merging processes of several galaxies took place, then the largest galaxies with their central supermassive black holes were able to evolve much faster. Our observations provide the first indication of this scenario,” Dr. Weilbacher said.

• W. Kollatschny et al. 2019. NGC 6240: A triple nucleus system in the advanced or final state of merging. A&A, in press; doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201936540

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 18:03 geschreven door peter  

by Matthew Hart

 

Usually it’s possible to find both the good and bad in things. When it comes to the Phallaceae family of fungi, a.k.a. the stinkhorn mushrooms, however, there is only side to the story, and it is maximally disgusting. Everything from their name to their taste to the way they look is 100% grade-A barf-o-rama. Keep reading for proof of that statement, if you can stomach it.

We first learned of the stinky, bloomin’ mushroom from YouTuber zefrank1’s latest “true facts” video on the Phallacea fungi, which is featured above. The hilarious video, which is also quite disgusting, of course, outlines most of what that stanky stinkhorn life is about, but let’s rehash it real quick because just how repulsive the stinkhorn is as a life form needs to be appreciated on every level.

Phallus impudicus covered in gleba, which is, in turn, covered in flies.

Birger Fricke 

First of all, there’s that name. Not the colloquial name, stinkhorn, which sounds like a deranged Pokémon or something Elon Musk would put on a Tesla, but that scientific name. The name of the family, Phallacea, sounds kind of off in its own right, but that’s nothing compared to the moniker of the common stinkhorn (pictured above), Phallus impudicus, which translates literally to “immodest phallus.” By the by, botanist John Gerard referred to Phallus impudicus as the “pricke mushroom” or “fungus virilis penis effigie,” when he discovered it in the late 16th century.

The physiology of the stinkhorn mushrooms is where things get really interesting. And when we say interesting, we mean gut-wrenchingly gross. The fruiting body of Phallus impudicus (that’s the part of the fungus that’s ejected from out of the ground) is produced from a squishy, bizarre egg, which looks from a cross-sectional view like a slimy piece of sushi. After it bursts its way through the ground, the fruiting body also oozes out a gelatinous goop known as gleba, which contains the stinkhorn’s spores. According to the stinkhorn wiki, the gleba smells like the dead, rotting flesh of animals or dung, which is unsurprising considering the fact that the stinkhorn uses flies to spread its spores. Also, there’s that name.

The fruiting body of Aseroë rubra, a member of the stinkhorn family, in action. 

zefrank1

Perhaps the only non-disgusting quality of the stinkhorn is the fact that it stands as an emblem of the lengths life will go to keep on keepin’ on. That, and the fact that it is indeed edible and has a taste that lies somewhere between radish and nothing at all. Although make sure not to eat it at the wrong time in its life cycle, ’cause it’s definitely possible to get some gleba on your hands and mouth if you’re not careful.

What do you think of these stinkhorn mushrooms? Are you immensely happy that you’ll probably never get a whiff of one, or have they somehow carved out a little stinky, oozing home in your heart? Discuss all this disgustingness in the comments!

• Feature image: Bernard Spragg. NZ

{ https://nerdist.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 17:50 geschreven door peter  

New observations appear to confirm the existence of water vapor geysers on Europa. The findings are tantalizing, but some scientists are not convinced yet.

Artist’s concept of a water vapor plume on Jupiter’s large moon Europa. It’s thought that this moon has a liquid ocean of water beneath its icy crust.

Image via NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SwRI/SYFY.

Jupiter’s large moon Europa is one of the most intriguing places in the solar system, an ocean world that might support life of some kind. As well as a subsurface ocean, it might also share another characteristic of Saturn’s moon Enceladus: geyser-like water vapor plumes bursting through its icy surface. The evidence for geysers on Europa has been tentative up to now, but this month (November 18, 2019) scientists said they’ve found what might be new confirmation: they reported the direct detection of water vapor above the moon’s surface.

The peer-reviewed findings, from scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, were published in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18, 2019.

Like Enceladus, Europa has a deep ocean below the outer ice crust. On Enceladus, water percolates up to the surface from the ocean below, erupting into space through cracks in the ice as water vapor. It has long been thought that the same thing could be happening on Europa, but the evidence hasn’t been as solid yet, with hints of activity seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

According to NASA scientist Lucas Paganini:

Essential chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur) and sources of energy, two of three requirements for life, are found all over the solar system. But the third — liquid water — is somewhat hard to find beyond Earth. While scientists have not yet detected liquid water directly, we’ve found the next best thing: water in vapor form.

• EarthSky 2020 lunar calendars are available! They make great gifts. Order now. Going fast!

Composite photos from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo spacecraft, showing a suspected plume erupting on Europa in 2014 and 2016.

Image via NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center/JPL.

Another composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo spacecraft, showing a “finger-like” plume in the lower left in 2016.

Image via NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center.

Europa’s cracked icy surface as seen by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s. Yellowish regions on the moon’s surface have now been confirmed to be irradiated sodium chloride, aka table salt.

Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute.

So how much water vapor was detected?

According to Paganini, about 5,202 pounds (2,360 kilograms) per second, enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes.

But like earlier observations have suggested, the outbursts of water vapor appear to be infrequent, unlike those on Enceladus, which erupt on a regular basis. Paganini said:

For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.

The signal of water vapor is distinct but faint, and was only seen once in 17 nights of observations in 2016 and 2017. That suggests that Europa’s plumes are much more sporadic than those on Enceladus. The science team detected the water molecules on Europa’s leading hemisphere, the side of the moon that’s always facing in the direction of the moon’s orbit around Jupiter. Like Earth’s moon, Europa is gravitationally locked to its planet, so the leading hemisphere always faces the direction of the orbit, while the trailing hemisphere always faces in the opposite direction. The detection was made using a spectrograph at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The spectrograph measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. From the paper:

Previous investigations proved the existence of local density enhancements in Europa’s atmosphere, advancing the idea of a possible origination from water plumes. These measurement strategies, however, were sensitive either to total absorption or atomic emissions, which limited the ability to assess the water content. Here we present direct searches for water vapor on Europa spanning dates from February 2016 to May 2017 with the Keck Observatory. Our global survey at infrared wavelengths resulted in non-detections on 16 out of 17 dates, with upper limits below the water abundances inferred from previous estimates. On one date (26 April 2016) we measured 2,095 ± 658 tonnes of water vapor at Europa’s leading hemisphere. We suggest that the outgassing of water vapor on Europa occurs at lower levels than previously estimated, with only rare localized events of stronger activity.

Some of the tentative evidence for Europa’s plumes came from studying data sent back by the Galileo spacecraft. The disturbances in Jupiter’s magnetic field that provided clues about the subsurface ocean also hinted at possible plumes, according to researchers in 2018. In 2013, the HST had detected the chemical elements hydrogen and oxygen in plume-like configurations in Europa’s extremely tenuous atmosphere. Then, in 2016, Hubble imaged “finger-like projections” in silhouette while Europa passed in front of Jupiter. All of these findings were tantalizing, but still tentative. But now the first detection of water vapor itself is additional evidence for the plumes. As Lorenz Roth, an astronomer and physicist at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, said:

This first direct identification of water vapor on Europa is a critical confirmation of our original detections of atomic species, and it highlights the apparent sparsity of large plumes on this icy world.

One problem that Paganini and his team needed to address, however, was that water in Earth’s atmosphere can distort the readings of water vapor on distant worlds taken by ground-based telescopes like Keck. To compensate, complex mathematical and computer modeling was used to simulate the conditions of Earth’s atmosphere so they could differentiate Earth’s atmospheric water from Europa’s in the data. According to Avi Mandell, a Goddard planetary scientist:

We performed diligent safety checks to remove possible contaminants in ground-based observations. But, eventually, we’ll have to get closer to Europa to see what’s really going on.

Saturn’s moon Enceladus was confirmed to have water vapor plumes by the Cassini spacecraft. This stunning photo shows then erupting through cracks in the ice crust at the moon’s south pole.

Image via NASA Science.

Not all researchers, however, are convinced that the new findings prove the existence of the plumes, and emphasize how they show that the geyser activity is probably lower than had been anticipated. Astronomer Phil Plait wrote about this in an addendum to his Nov. 19, 2019, article on SYFY about the news:

Correction, and it’s a big one: When I wrote this, I thought the conclusions based on the observations were much more solid than they were reported in a NASA press release. But after being alerted by a couple of astronomers, and looking things over again, I see that the idea that a plume of water from a geyser is not “confirmed” as I originally wrote, but more like “maybe.” The detection by itself was marginally statistically significant, but was part of 16 other observations that showed nothing. I was thinking about the single observation taken alone, but when placed in context of the other observations the statistical significance drops. That means the likelihood of this observation being real – that is, that the light from a plume of water was definitely seen – is lower than I originally stated.

So at this point, it may be safer to say that the new observations add to the evidence for water vapor geysers on Europa, but are still not 100% conclusive. This does not take away from the abundant evidence for the subsurface ocean, it only addresses how much of that water may actually make it to the surface and erupt as vapor into space. Hopefully NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission – due to launch in the mid-2020s – will be able to finally settle the question of whether the geysers are real or not, and how frequent they are, if other observations don’t beforehand. It could even sample them directly, just like Cassini did at Enceladus.

• Bottom line: Scientists have found new evidence for water vapor geysers on Europa, although whether they have actually been proven now is a matter of debate.
• Source: A measurement of water vapour amid a largely quiescent environment on Europa
• Via NASA

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 17:21 geschreven door peter  

25-11-2019 om 15:27 geschreven door peter  

Scientists 'have found a FIFTH force of nature': Researchers claim to have observed energy that 'connects the visible world to dark matter'

• Hungarian Academy of Sciences researchers' results could show fifth force work
• They saw an excited, decaying helium atom emit light when the particles split
• This came at a strange angle that could not be explained by current physics logic
• Is second time Attila Krasznahorkay and his team seen new particle dubbed X17

By JAMES GANT FOR MAILONLINE

Scientists claim they have observed a fifth force of nature that could transform our understanding of how the universe works.

Researchers at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have revealed results that could show it in action.

They saw an excited, decaying helium atom emit light when the particles split in a strange way that could not be explained by the current understanding of physics.

Hints of a fifth fundamental force have set the physics world abuzz. Researchers at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have revealed results that could show it in action. The discovery could completely upend our understanding of the universe. Pictured is an image of the cosmic web

It was the second time lead scientist Attila Krasznahorkay and his team had seen the new particle they called X17.

They found its mass to be 17 megaelectronvolts.

Mr Krasznahorkay told CNN: 'X17 could be a particle, which connects our visible world with the dark matter.'

STANDARD MODEL OF PARTICLE PHYSICS AND WHY THE FIND IS SO EXCITING

The Standard Model says everything in the universe is made from the most basic building blocks called fundamental particles, that are governed by four forces: gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. 

The Higgs boson, named after professor Higgs (pictured), was discovered in 2012 and is an essential component of the Standard Model

The forces work over different ranges and have different strengths. 

This new particle, if it exists, would not fit into the description given by the Standard Model and so would lead to a whole new area of particle physics. Some have suggested it might even lead to the discovery of a fifth fundamental force.

 This development is exciting because the Standard Model has left some questions unanswered for years, so scientists are keen to break free of it and find new theories.

It can't explain gravity, for example, because it is incompatible with our best explanation of how gravity works - general relativity, nor does it explain dark matter particles.

The quantum theory used to describe the small particles in the world, and the general theory of relativity used to describe the larger objects world, are also difficult to reconcile. 

Nobody has managed to make the two mathematically compatible in the context of the Standard Model.

According to the Big Bang theory, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the start of the universe and so they should have annihilated each other totally in the first second or so of the universe's existence.

This means the cosmos should be full of light and little else. 

But because it isn't there must have been a subtle difference in the physics of matter and anti-matter that has left the universe with a surplus of matter and that makes up the stars we see, the planet we live on and ourselves.

But the observations seen so far are not enough to confirm the existence of a particle.

Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, Jonathan Feng, who has closely watched the Mr Krasznahorkay's team's efforts, said it could be a 'game changer', adding if it could be replicated, 'this would be a no-brainer Nobel Prize'.

It comes three years after the Hungarian team spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay, suggesting the existence of a new particle.

If their tests prove accurate, the discovery could completely upend our understanding of how the universe works.

The current working model of physics states that there are four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong forces between atoms.

The 2016 experiment by Mr Krasznahorkay and his team of physicists suggested there was another force.

The team said at the time that they had found a bizarre radioactive decay irregularity, according to a report by Nature News.

They published their results in late 2015 in the prestigious Physical Review Letters.

Despite the radical claim, their paper received very little attention, according to a report in Gizmodo.

That is, until physicists at the University of California checked their method and results – and found the study to be accurate.

'What it's telling us if it is correct is that there is something going on in the way that one particle talks to another particle that we haven't got inside our mathematics at the moment,' Geraint Lewis, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sydney told ABC News at the time.

Scientists have theorised that a fifth force exists for decades.

They claim it could help explain the inability of the standard model of particle physics to explain dark matter.

Dark matter is invisible substance thought to make up more than 80 per cent of the universe's mass.

Theorists have proposed a number of exotic-matter particles, including 'dark photons', that carry the electromagnetic force.

The Hungarian scientists were looking for dark photons by blasting protons at a thin strip of lithium.

As the lithium absorbed the protons, it transformed into an unstable version of beryllium, which decayed even further, creating electrons and positrons.

When the protons hit against the lithium at 140 degrees, more electrons and positrons were created than were expected.

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Krasznahorkay suggested this extra material was being created by a particle that was 34 times heavier than the electron.

'We are very confident about our experimental results,' said Krasznahorkay at the time, adding that the team had repeated its test several times.

But many scientists were sceptical of the claim.

Physicists at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, said this apparatus — an electron-positron spectrometer — found evidence for a new particle

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

25-11-2019 om 15:26 geschreven door peter  

Throughout history there have been scientific theories and hypotheses pushed forward that have either driven us forward as a species or have served to become historical oddities that make us ask “What were we thinking?” It is all part of our stumbling, bumbling quest to feel our way through this morass of mysteries that is the natural world and our universe, and there is not always a clear beacon of light to pave the way forward. While some hypotheses have fallen by the wayside and others have pushed us forward into new realms of knowledge, others have sort of swirled about in a limbo, mere curiosities that cannot be proven or disproven, and one of these is certainly the notion that at some point in human history we were amphibious beings.

The bizarre notion known as the “Aquatic Ape Hypothesis” was first seriously proposed by the marine biologist Alister Hardy in 1960, as a way to try and explain what he thought were a great many quirks in our physiology and evolutionary path when compared to other great apes. Hardy proposed that at one point in our evolutionary history human beings had increasingly turned to aquatic food resources such as fish and shellfish in response to fierce competition from other terrestrial animals. He speculated that this had caused our species to take a different path than the other apes, as we began to swim and wade out into the sea to pursue this semi-aquatic lifestyle rather than life on the savanna, with our bodies adapting to this new way of living in myriad intriguing ways.

In Hardy’s opinion, human bodies show a great many adaptations that he was convinced had come about through this amphibious way of life, including functional hairlessness, subcutaneous fat, regression of our olfactory organ, hooded nose and large sinuses, webbed fingers, big brains, greasy skin with an abundance of sebaceous glands perhaps as waterproofing, as well as our distended larynx, all of which are features common for aquatic animals but not apes, as well as our almost innate ability to swim. Bipedalism was thought to have come about to help us wade about in the water and keep our hands free to forage on the bottom or break open shellfish, and even our predilection for eating seafood, our ability to hold our breath for long periods compared to other apes, and our expressive faces, which could help with visual communication underwater, as well as our our ability to produce speech have gone on to be put forward as evidence.This was all seen as not consistent with the paradigm that we had evolved on the African savanna as long thought, and therefore suggested an aquatic stage of our evolution.

Hardy was not the first to suggest this, as the German pathologist Max Westenhöfer had also played with this hypothesis, but it was Hardy who truly ran with it and brought the whole concept to the public consciousness. It was an idea he had actually been percolating for decades, and only first officially came forward with it after he had become a respected academic and scientist, when in 1960 he presented it all to the British Sub-Aqua Club in Brighton. Although it was met with quite a few raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders, there would be quite a few who would support the theory and go on to further bolster it, such as famed naturalist Sir David Attenborough, and one proponent of the hypothesis who would catapult it into greater awareness was writer Elaine Morgan. Like Hardy, Morgan believed that humans had gone through a stage in our natural history in which we had turned to the vast food resources of aquatic environments and had gone on to demonstrate convergent evolution of mammals living in these sorts of environments. She would write about the theory in her book The Descent of Women, which would go on to become an international bestseller and really increase the prominence of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, and she would go on to pen other books on the matter such as The Aquatic Ape (1982), The Scars of Evolution (1990), The Descent of the Child (1994) and The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (1997). She has said of the notion:

Waterside hypotheses of human evolution assert that selection from wading, swimming and diving and procurement of food from aquatic habitats have significantly affected the evolution of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens as distinct from that leading to Pan.

There have been many other researchers who have followed up on this hypothesis, such as researchers Michael Crawford and David Marsh, who wrote of this in their book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future. They are a big fan of the idea that out large brains could not have possibly evolved in a savanna lifestyle, and that they would only have come about through a diet rich in protein and Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid that is found in in seafood, that would only be available with an aquatic lifestyle. Crawford would say of this:

A branch of the line of primitive ancestral apes was forced by competition to leave the trees and feed on the seashore. Searching for oysters, mussels, crabs, crayfish and so on they would have spent much of their time in the water and an upright position would have come naturally. The evolution of a large brain on the savannas of Africa was impossible. The only way it could have happened was with the resources of the marine food-web which initiated the growth and development of the brain in the first place.

It is all a very intriguing notion, and on the surface it seems that the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis could explain a lot about our many unique attributes that seem to separate us from terrestrial apes, but there are of course a lot of skeptics, and indeed the hypothesis is mostly treated as pseudoscience today and mostly ignored by the mainstream scientific community. Some of the main arguments are that is absolutely no fossil evidence of such a thing ever happening, and many of the adaptations credited to an aquatic lifestyle can be explained in other ways that fit more into the current evolutionary paradigm of the human species. For instance, hairlessness would be more likely due to sexual selection and adaptations to heat loss, whereas bipedalism would allow us to peer out over tall grass and keep our hands free for tool use, and breath control would be related to our development of speech. It has also been pointed out that we have a similar distribution of body fat to other land animals, and also that we are in reality really not that particularly good at swimming after all. There are plenty of explanations for our various quirks that can be fit into the current savanna mold of evolution that do not require some radical shift away. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is also criticized for being basically an umbrella theory for a wide variety of adaptations that would have gradually evolved over a very long period of time rather than all at once, meaning they cannot really be lumped together into a single explanation. One professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London has said of this:

I think that wading in a watery environment is as good an explanation, at the moment, for our upright gait as any other theory for human bipedalism. But the whole aquatic ape package includes attributes that appeared at very different times in our evolution. If they were all the result of our lives in watery environments, we would have to have spent millions of years there and there is no evidence for this.

Also rather a strike against the hypothesis is that if we evolved to an aquatic environment, then why did we go back out to a terrestrial one and then keep those features? This has not really been adequately explained, and remains a sticking point for those who see this all as wishful thinking and fringe science. While some scientists have sort of just ignored the hypothesis, others have soundly dismissed it and even gone as far as to lump it together with creationism as an untenable and absurd idea. Despite the criticism, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has remained very tenacious, and still is discussed and has its staunch supporters to this day. In the realm of cryptozoology it has importance as a possible explanation for sightings of a wide range of entities, such as mermaids or other aquatic mystery beasts such as the Kappa of Japan and many others which could be some offshoot of this amphibious evolutionary history. Is there anything to the Aquatic Ape Theory or is it all a bunch of bunk? Whatever the case may be, as long as it is being discussed it will be out there swirling about in the periphery, and it is probably important to at least understand what it is all about.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 14:44 geschreven door peter  

Often when visiting historic places there is a feeling or a “presence” that one may begin to sense. For some, this might represent a literal connection to the people who visited there long ago; others may liken it to simple reverence for the amount of time that has passed, and the number of individuals that might have come and gone there.

Whether one literally ascribes to the idea of “ghosts” or not, this feeling is hard to ignore, particularly at early human habitation sites, or looking even further back, at locations where earlier forms of life on earth once existed, which predates the arrival of humans.

However, new technologies may soon also play a role in shedding light on these “ghosts” of the ancient past.

“Sometimes paleontologists uncover ghosts,” wrote Riley Black, in a recent article at Scientific American. What he referred to specifically had been trace fossils, among which are the “ghost tracks” of ancient life forms that are indiscernible to the naked eye, but with the help of modern science, are beginning to give up their long-held secrets.

Ichnofossils can be defined as “an expression of the alteration of the depositional fabric of in sedimentary rocks by living organisms.” In other words, these are the footprints or other alterations to an environment that become fossilized and are thus preserved, even in the absence of any actual fossilized organisms.

Fossil footprints on display at the Natural History Museum, Bonn University

(Wikimedia Commons).

Black refers to a set of tracks that made news in months past, located at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico which tell a very unique story of ancient American hunters in pursuit of a giant sloth, which they stealthily followed leading up to a presumed Pleistocene-era ambush.

A recent study published in the journal Nature expounds on the White Sands discovery, where the authors  note that data has now been recovered from various locations which presents “evidence for the successful detection and 3-D imaging of such footprints via ground-penetrating radar (GPR), including co-associated mammoth and human prints.”

In other words, ground-penetrating radar technology can now successfully uncover trace fossil footprints, even when they are not exposed at ground level.

Motorized Ground-Penetrating Radar System

(Wikimedia Commons).

According to the study’s extract:

“Using GPR we have found that track density and faunal diversity may be much greater than realized by the unaided human eye. Our data further suggests that detectable subsurface consolidation below mammoth tracks correlates with typical plantar pressure patterns from extant elephants. This opens future potential for more sophisticated biomechanical studies on the footprints of other extinct land vertebrates. Our approach allows rapid detection and documentation of footprints while enhancing the data available from these fossil archives.”

This is exciting, in part due to the fact that the ability to discover trace fossils below ground, or in areas that are otherwise inaccessible, may be useful not only in the discovery of unrecognized archaeological sites, but also in their preservation. Excavation is an intrusive process, and despite what it helps us to learn about the past, it requires the removal of layers of earth that may once have coincided with early human living spaces or other historically significant areas. Ground-penetrating radar, on the other hand, reveals these features of the past without ever having to dig.

Short of having a time machine, such technologies are the next best thing to being able to open a window in time, through which these “ghosts” of the past become available to the modern eye.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 14:32 geschreven door peter  

“Your vision only sees a sliver, a tiny range of the electromagnetic spectrum. You are unaware of most of it If you had to interact with the world in the full range of what’s going on, you would be frozen. So biology has developed a user interface that ultra simplifies what you are interacting with. It is constantly updating your model of reality and interacting with it. It is your matrix. You interact without knowing there is anything else out there.”

“It is your matrix.” That sounds like an opening line in a sci-fi movie or a New Age homily, not business plan, but it may be a little of all three as it was uttered an unusual two-day festival exploring “the intersection between creativity, technology, and humanity.” The festival is the annual Cucalorus Connect, held this past week in Wilmington, North Carolina, and the speaker was University of North Carolina at Wilmington Julian Keith, Ph.D. He and fellow professor Curry Guinn, Ph.D, addressed a popular movie plot as a potential real-life scenario – that we’re living in a matrix or computer simulation created by an advanced society and the ghosts we see are actually glitches in said matrix.

“We may be actually living in a computer simulation. I’m not the only one who says this. Elon Musk of Telsa and Space X has said there is a billion to one chance we are not living in a computer simulation.”

Musk again! This guy is everywhere these days — with or without that breakable truck he probably wishes was a simulation. Professor Julian Keith opened his half of the joint presentation, “You’re in The Matrix, You Just Don’t Know It,” by pointing out that Musk believes we could be living in a simulation and points out to rapid advances in technology – like the ones Musk himself is making – as a sign of it … especially computer games.

“Look at where computer games are now compared to where they were 40 years ago in the era of Pong.”

Pong

Curry points out that we’re already approaching games similar to the Star Trek Holodeck where players can lose the sense that they’re in a simulation. If we’re on our way to creating a matrix, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched that a more advanced society has already created it … and it is us. The question is: how can we tell?

“Glitches in the system. Deja Vu, such as in the Matrix movie when a character sees a cat crossing a doorway repeatedly, may be one glitch. Ghosts, ESP, coincidences may be others. The laws of physics in our universe seem peculiarly designed with a set of constants that make carbon-based life possible. Where are the edges?”

“Where are the edges?” There’s some ready-made movie plot point dialogue for you budding screenwriters. Here’s another one: “Spooky action at a distance.” Curry references Einstein’s comment about quantum entanglement—the ability of separated objects like atoms and electrons to share a condition or state across a vast distance. Einstein didn’t buy quantum entanglement but he has since been proven wrong … at least on a particle scale. What if it exists on a human scale? What if there’s a connection between the beings in simulations and those in our perceived realities … us?

“We run a ton of them all the time. Supercomputers run simulations for weather predictions. We use them to better understand our environment and make changes. We use them to study human activity and ask questions such as how does population grow? What things work best? It is us running these simulations.”

Are our own simulations already influencing our actions? Curry’s example of weather simulations is a perfect example of exactly that. Based on hurricane simulations, we make decisions on where to run for safety. However, a few people may see a ghost or have a premonition that following those directions could be dangerous and they take a different path. Those who follow the simulation end up in a place where they drown, while the others survive. Could the ghostly warning have been a ‘glitch in the matrix’?

The Cucalorus Festival began 25 years ago as an underground film festival, but presentations like those of Keith and Curry show it has evolved into so much more. Or … are THEY just another glitch in the matrix.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-11-2019 om 14:19 geschreven door peter  

3D RADAR IMAGING UNCOVERS 3 CLOAKED UFO'S HOVERING OVER FLORIDA RIVER! Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: November 2019

Location of sighting: Florida, USA

Google Earth Web Based Chrome Version with 3D Imaging  

Craft 1: 29°47'8.00"N 81°16'40.00"W 
Craft 2: 29°46'59.41"N 81°16'37.61"W 
Craft 3: 29°46'55.86"N 81°16'35.99"W

Here is an intersting discovery made by Youtube user Florida Maquis. He shows us three unique and flying objects above the coastal area of Florida. When I added contrast to the screenshots, they really came into focus. Each of the three objects are flying and all have an intelligent design to them. They do appear to be three large UFOs. At the time of sighting, they were probably cloaked in a cloud or using some other cloaking device, but google earth radar caught them and included them into the map. Just mindblowing! Absolute proof that aliens are visiting coastal regions of Florida. 

 

If you have trouble finding it...open Chrome browser and click on Google earth web version. It will take you there if you drop the coordinates into it. 

Scott C. Waring-Taiwan

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 13:52 geschreven door peter  

75km Mothership Seen On Weather Radar Map Over Philippines, Nov 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: Nov 23, 2019
Location of sighting: Philippines 
Source: Weather map

I was looking at my weather map radar and noticed that there was a huge mothership red disk over the Philippines. I recorded it and thought that this UFO was similar to the red UFOs seen on weather radar over Australia back in 2010. Sadly the weather radar map I use doesn't give me such high detail. This is about 2,000 km from Australia so it may be one of those motherships returning to an underwater base. Google rule says the UFO was approximately 75km across. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

25-11-2019 om 13:45 geschreven door peter  

Bizarre ‘pyramid in the sky’ appears at night above Philadelphia in baffling clip

A 'sky pyramid' has appeared above Philadelphia surrounded by an eery orange glow, with truth-seekers claiming the object could be an alien black triangle UFO, also known as a TR-3B

By Sofie Jackson - News Reporter

A mysterious pyramid in the sky has been captured hovering over the US city of Philadelphia in a photo, according to a stunned witness.

Youtuber researcher MrMBB333 said the "simply amazing" phenomenon – which was photographed by a woman called Venetia – appeared to show the triangle shape in the night sky.

There seems to be an orange-red tint behind the shape – giving the impression of the "object" on fire.

"It looks like a pyramid in the sky", MrMBB333 said, adding that there "is definitely something there".

He continued: “Look behind this thing, it looks like there is a tint behind it.

“Maybe it’s a cloud behind it that has a weird colour to it.

"This is simply amazing, it definitely looks like a pyramid in the sky."

The footage was seen more than 20,000 times since it was posted to YouTube yesterday.

Some dubbed the object a "flaming pyramid" while others suggested it "looks like an erupting volcano".

But several viewers likened the object to the infamous TR-3B spy plane.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

25-11-2019 om 01:26 geschreven door peter