The scientists call them “xenobots.” They are tiny living robots assembled from the cells of frogs. Their creators promise advances from drug delivery to toxic waste clean-up.

Scientists from the University of Vermont (UVM) and Tufts University in Massachusetts said on January 13, 2020, that they’ve now assembled living cells into entirely new life-forms. They call them living robots, or xenobots for the frog species from whose cells the little robots sprang. The scientists describe them as tiny blobs, submillimeter in size (a millimeter is about 1/25th of an inch, so these little blobs are smaller than that). The blobs contain between 500 and 1,000 cells. They can heal themselves after being cut. The blobs have been able to scoot across a petri dish, self-organize, and even transport minute payloads. Maybe, eventually, they’ll be able to carry a medicine to a specific place inside a human body, scrape plaque from arteries, search out radioactive contamination, or gather plastic pollution in Earth’s oceans.

And, yes, the scientists do acknowledge possible ethical issues. More about that below.

Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research, said in a statement:

These are novel living machines. They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism …

You look at the cells we’ve been building our xenobots with, and, genomically, they’re frogs. It’s 100% frog DNA — but these are not frogs. Then you ask, well, what else are these cells capable of building?

The results of the new research were published January 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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A manufactured quadruped (4-footed) organism, 650-750 microns in diameter (a micron is a millionth of a meter). The scientists described this creature (if we can call it a creature) as “a bit smaller than a pinhead.”

Image via Douglas Blackiston/ Tufts University/ University of Vermont.

In their published paper, these scientists wrote:

Most technologies are made from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time and can produce harmful ecological and health side effects. It would thus be useful to build technologies using self-renewing and biocompatible materials, of which the ideal candidates are living systems themselves. Thus, we here present a method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with environmental remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and functions life may adopt.

The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM, and then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University. The scientists’ statement described their process this way:

With months of processing time on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM’s Vermont Advanced Computing Core, the team – including lead author and doctoral student Sam Kriegman of UVM [@Kriegmerica on Twitter] — used an evolutionary algorithm to create thousands of candidate designs for the new life-forms. Attempting to achieve a task assigned by the scientists – like locomotion in one direction – the computer would, over and over, reassemble a few hundred simulated cells into myriad forms and body shapes. As the programs ran – driven by basic rules about the biophysics of what single frog skin and cardiac cells can do – the more successful simulated organisms were kept and refined, while failed designs were tossed out. After a hundred independent runs of the algorithm, the most promising designs were selected for testing.

Then the team at Tufts, led by Michael Levin and with key work by microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston — transferred the in-silico designs into life. First they gathered stem cells, harvested from embryos of African frogs, the species Xenopus laevis [African clawed frogs; hence the name “xenobots.”]

These were separated into single cells and left to incubate. Then, using tiny forceps and an even tinier electrode, the cells were cut and joined under a microscope into a close approximation of the designs specified by the computer.

Assembled into body forms never seen in nature, the cells began to work together. The skin cells formed a more passive architecture, while the once-random contractions of heart muscle cells were put to work creating ordered forward motion as guided by the computer’s design, and aided by spontaneous self-organizing patterns – allowing the robots to move on their own.

These reconfigurable organisms were shown to be able move in a coherent fashion – and explore their watery environment for days or weeks, powered by embryonic energy stores. Turned over, however, they failed, like beetles flipped on their backs.

Later tests showed that groups of xenobots would move around in circles, pushing pellets into a central location – spontaneously and collectively. Others were built with a hole through the center to reduce drag. In simulated versions of these, the scientists were able to repurpose this hole as a pouch to successfully carry an object.

Wow … yes?

Sam Kriegman@Kriegmerica

I'm thrilled to finally tell the world about computer-designed organisms aka "xenobots" aka "living robots" aka "reconfigurable organisms"...

https://cdorgs.github.io/ 

You've heard of sim2real -- this is sim2life.

• 304

12:08 AM - Jan 14, 2020

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The scientists said they see this work as part of a bigger picture. And they acknowledged that some may fear the implications of rapid technological change and complex biological manipulations. 

AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in simulation (top row) to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems (bottom row) with the predicted behaviors

Levin commented:

That fear is not unreasonable. When we start to mess around with complex systems that we don’t understand, we’re going to get unintended consequences.

However, he said:

If humanity is going to survive into the future, we need to better understand how complex properties, somehow, emerge from simple rules.

He said much of science is focused on:

… controlling the low-level rules. We also need to understand the high-level rules.

I think it’s an absolute necessity for society going forward to get a better handle on systems where the outcome is very complex. A first step towards doing that is to explore: how do living systems decide what an overall behavior should be and how do we manipulate the pieces to get the behaviors we want?

In other words, he said:

… this study is a direct contribution to getting a handle on what people are afraid of, which is unintended consequences.

Bongard added:

There’s all of this innate creativity in life. We want to understand that more deeply – and how we can direct and push it toward new forms.

On the left, the anatomical blueprint for a computer-designed organism, discovered on a UVM supercomputer. On the right, the living organism, built entirely from frog skin (green) and heart muscle (red) cells. The background displays traces carved by a swarm of these new-to-nature organisms as they move through a field of particulate matter.

Image via Sam Kriegman/ UVM.

• Bottom line: Scientists said in early January 2020 that they’ve created the first living robots, or “xenobots,” assembled from the cells of frogs. Their creators promise advances from drug delivery to toxic waste clean-up.
• Source: A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms
• Via UVM

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

20-01-2020 om 01:43 geschreven door peter  

NASA wants to probe deeper into Uranus than ever before

Thanks to the advancement in technology of today we hear a great deal about the planets Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. In some cases, this has also gone as far as cruising around the surface of the planets. The planets further away from the Sun really have not got all that much attention, but this may be about to change as NASA are considering missions that will give people a much a better look at the planet Uranus.

Missions To Neptune And Uranus Would Be Scientifically Beneficial

Theoretical missions would mean that spacecraft from NASA could make their way to Neptune and Uranus, and they would be of great benefit scientifically. The idea behind it is for scientists to get a much better idea of just what the planets are made up of, to take many photographs and find out about the atmospheric composition of the planet.

The researchers are hoping that they will be able to study the weather and the overall climate of planets along with determining how they can fit into the makeup of the Solar System.

Both Uranus And Neptune Hold Many Undiscovered Secrets

Scientists have said that Neptune and Uranus are both holding a lot of secrets that have not yet been discovered and missions that have been proposed would include flybys along with using an orbiter to send an atmospheric probe up to Uranus so that the gasses can be sampled along with detection of elements.

It was said that something similar could be happening for Neptune, however, at the moment the details of the mission or missions, have not been fleshed out fully and they need to be before they reach the stage of a formal proposal.

Any missions to Uranus and Neptune are still a long way from becoming a reality both in regards to the time-frame and funding. NASA said that it may be feasible to take a trip to Uranus 2030 through to 2036 and a trip to Neptune could take place before 2030 or if not after 2040 and this would be down to the timing of gravity assisted boosting around the planet Jupiter.

So while it may be some time away yet, it does look as though NASA does have some clear plans for heading out to Uranus and Neptune at some point in the future.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

20-01-2020 om 01:26 geschreven door peter  

NASA May Have Found the Goldilocks Planet of Goldilocks Planets: TOI 700 d

BY JEFFREY KLUGER 

If you ask astronomers how many planets in the universe harbor life, they will likely say there are only two possible answers: one or infinity. We can rule out zero, thanks to the decidedly alive Earth, which means that so far one is the answer. But if we discover another, the answer jumps straight past two to infinity. The reason: You can posit a universe in which the confluence of factors that made life possible here are so complex that the right roll of the dice could statistically happen only once. But if it can happen more than once, why should there be any limit? (Actually, something could be so rare in nature that it happens only two or three times, but the overall zero-one-infinity idea originated with theologians debating atheism, monotheism and infinite polytheism, and planetary scientists just kind of liked it and claimed it as their own.)

Humans have always hoped for infinity, since it would be an awfully lonely universe if we’re the only planet with its porch light on. And with the recent explosion in the discovery of exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars), astronomers now believe that virtually every star in the Milky Way is circled by at least one planet. There are up to 250 billion stars in our galaxy and about 100 billion other galaxies out there—trillions upon trillions of places life could be thriving.

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In their search for such worlds, astronomers focus their energy on Earth-like, rocky planets, with atmosphere, water and an orbit that places them in the so-called habitable zone, where temperatures are just right for the water to exist in liquid form. Last week, NASA announced a jackpot: an Earth-sized world in the habitable zone of a hospitable star, just 100 light years from here. The star is known as TOI 700 and the planet is TOI 700 d, the outermost of a litter of three planets. TOI 700 is a red dwarf, a class of stars smaller and cooler than our sun, which were at first thought of as poor candidates for nurturing life, due to their relatively low temperature. But the fact is, as long as the planets orbit close enough to the hearth of the star, they get plenty of light and warmth—and TOI 700 d does.

It was the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that discovered the star, and the Spitzer Space Telescope that took its environmental and chemical measures. TESS uses four on-board telescopes to look for the slight dimming in the light of a star when an orbiting planet passes in front of it. Spitzer makes its observations principally in the infrared spectrum, which is an indicator of heat that can, in turn, yield a lot of data on composition and chemistry.

TOI 700’s other two planets orbit too close to the star’s fires for water not to boil away. But TOI 700 D, which is about 20% larger than Earth, orbits its sun at a distance of about 15 million miles—that’s far closer than Earth’s 93 million miles from the sun, but given the lower temperature of a red dwarf, the planet receives roughly 86% of the stellar warmth Earth does.

Computer models for conditions on TOI 700 D based on that suggest the planet is tidally locked, meaning it keeps the same face turned toward its sun all the time. But an atmosphere could nonetheless help distribute heat to the dark side, and temperatures would certainly be comfortable in the border regions between light and shadow. In one model, the planet is watery, with an atmosphere that is principally carbon dioxide—similar to ancient Mars before it lost its atmosphere and water. In another, the planet is dry and cloudless. Overall, researchers modeled 20 different versions of TOI 700 d, any one—or none—of which could be correct.

That very wealth of possibilities is a statement both of our imagination and our ignorance: we can gather the data we need to imagine more than a dozen and a half plausible versions of the same planet—but don’t have enough data to say which, if any, is correct. And as for the possible existence of life there? We can’t even guess. But exoplanet science is a brand new game. It was only in 1992 that the first exoplanet was discovered. At this point, we’ve not even moved past the training-wheels stage of studying them. If TOI 700 d proves anything though, it’s that there may be extraordinary potential on an extraordinary number of worlds. If you’re a betting person trying to answer that astronomers’ multiple-choice question, consider putting your money on infinity.

• A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s Space newsletter. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.

{ https://time.com/ }

20-01-2020 om 01:18 geschreven door peter  

Are the aliens us? UFOs may be piloted by time-traveling humans, book argues

By Leonard David

The great distances covered by visiting "aliens" may be ones of time rather than space, a recent book argues.

Close encounters with our future selves?

(Image: © thortful.com)

Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have captured the public's attention over the decades. As exoplanet detection is on the rise, why not consider that star-hopping visitors from afar might be buzzing through our friendly skies by taking an interstellar off-ramp to Earth?

On the other hand, could those piloting UFOs be us — our future progeny that have mastered the landscape of time and space? Perhaps those reports of people coming into contact with strange beings represent our distant human descendants, returning from the future to study us in their own evolutionary past. 

The idea of us being them has been advanced before. But a recent book, "Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon" (Masters Creative LLC, 2019), takes a fresh look at this prospect, offering some thought-provoking proposals.

• Related: UFO Watch: 8 Times the Government Looked for Flying Saucers

"Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon" (Masters Creative LLC, 2019) argues that UFOs may be piloted by time-traveling humans. 

(Image credit: Masters Creative LLC, 2019)

Multidisciplinary approach

The book was written by Michael Masters, a professor of biological anthropology at Montana Technological University in Butte. Masters thinks that – given the accelerating pace of change in science, technology, and engineering –  it is likely that humans of the distant future could develop the knowledge and machinery necessary to return to the past. 

The objective of the book, Masters said, is to spur a new and more informed discussion among believers and skeptics alike. 

"I took a multidisciplinary approach in order to try and understand the oddities of this phenomenon," Masters told Space.com. "Our job as scientists is to be asking big questions and try to find answers to unknown questions. There's something going on here, and we should be having a conversation about this. We should be at the forefront of trying to find out what it is."

Human evolution

Dubbing these purported visitors "extratempestrials," Masters notes that close-encounter accounts typically describe UFO tenants as bipedal, hairless, human-like beings with large brains, large eyes, small noses and small mouths. Further, the creatures are often said to have the ability to communicate with us in our own languages and possess technology advanced beyond, but clearly built upon, today's technological prowess. 

Masters believes that through a comprehensive analysis of consistent patterns of long-term biocultural change throughout human evolution — as well as recent advances in our understanding of time and time travel — we may begin to consider this future possibility in the context of a currently unexplained phenomenon. 

"The book ties together those known aspects of our evolutionary history with what is still an unproven, unverified aspect of UFOs and aliens," he said.

But why not argue that ET is actually a traveler from across the vastness of space, from a distant planet? Wouldn't that be a simpler answer?

"I would argue it's the opposite," Masters responded. "We know we're here. We know humans exist. We know that we've had a long evolutionary history on this planet. And we know our technology is going to be more advanced in the future. I think the simplest explanation, innately, is that it is us. I'm just trying to offer what is likely the most parsimonious explanation."

• Related: 5 Bold Claims of Alien Life

Archaeological tourism

As an anthropologist who has worked on and directed numerous archaeological digs in Africa, France and throughout the United States, Masters observes that it is easy to conceptualize just how much more could be learned about our own evolutionary history if we currently possessed the technology to visit past periods of time. 

"The alleged abduction accounts are mostly scientific in nature. It's probably future anthropologists, historians, linguists that are coming back to get information in a way that we currently can't without access to that technology," Masters said. 

"That said, I do think that some component of it is also tourism," he added. "Undoubtedly in the future, there are those that will pay a lot of money to have the opportunity to go back and observe their favorite period in history. Some of the most popular tourist sites are the pyramids of Giza and Machu Picchu in Peru … old and prehistoric sites."

Masters calls his UFO research "an evolving project."

"There's certainly still missing pieces of the puzzle," he said. "There are aspects of time that we don't yet understand. Wanted is a theory of quantum gravity, and we can meld general relativity and quantum mechanics. I'm just trying to put forth the best model I can based on current scientific knowledge. Hopefully, over time, we can continue to build on this." 

Solve this mystery

"Masters postulates that using a multidisciplinary scientific approach to the UFO phenomenon will be what it takes to solve this mystery once and for all, and I couldn't agree more," said Jan Harzan, executive director of the nonprofit Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

"The premise that UFOs are us from the future is one of many possibilities that MUFON is exploring to explain the UFO phenomenon. All we know for sure is that we are not alone," Harzan added. "Now the question becomes, 'Who are they?' And Masters makes a great case for the time-traveler hypothesis." 

'Highly dubious claim'

But not everybody is on board with the idea, as you might imagine.

"There is nothing in this book to take seriously, as it depends on the belief that 'time travel' is not only possible, but real," said Robert Sheaffer, a noted UFO skeptic.

Supposedly our distant descendants have mastered time travel, Sheaffer said, and have traveled back in time to visit us. "So, according to Masters, you just spin something fast enough and it will begin to warp space, and even send stuff backwards in time. This is a highly dubious claim," he said.

Moreover, Sheaffer said that Masters tries to deduce aliens' evolutionary history from witness descriptions, "suggesting that he takes such accounts far too literally."

• Related: 7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs

The problem of 'if'

David Darling is a British astronomer and science writer who has authored books on a sweeping array of topics – from gravity, Zen physics and astrobiology to teleportation and extraterrestrial life.

"I've often thought that if some UFOs are 'alien' craft, it's just as reasonable to suppose that they might be time machines from our own future than that they're spacecraft from other stars," Darling told Space.com. "The problem is the 'if.'

Darling said that, while some aerial phenomena have eluded easy identification, one of the least likely explanations, it seems to him, is that they're artificial and not of this world.

"Outside of the popular mythos of flying saucers and archetypal, big-brained aliens, there's precious little credible evidence that they exist," Darling said. "So, my issue with the book is not the ingenuity of its thesis, but the fact that there's really no need for such a thesis in the first place."

Exotic physics?

Larry Lemke, a retired NASA aerospace engineer with an interest in the UFO phenomenon, finds the prospect of time-travelling visitors from the future intriguing.

"The one thing that has become clear over the decades of sightings, if you believe the reports, is that these objects don't seem to be obeying the usual laws of aerodynamics and Newtonian mechanics," Lemke said, referring to the relationship, in the natural world, between force, mass and motion. 

Toss in for good measure Einstein's theory of general relativity and its consequences, like wormholes and black holes, along with other exotic physics ideas such as the Alcubierre warp-drive bubble. 

"There's a group of thinkers in the field of UFOs that point out that phenomena reported around some UFOs do, in fact, look exactly like general relativity effects," Lemke said. Missing time is a very common one."

Lemke said that the idea that somebody has figured out how to manipulate space-time, on a local scale with a low-energy approach, would explain a lot of things across the UFO phenomenon, including those baffling Tic-Tac-shaped objects recently reported by jet-fighter pilots and radar operators. 

"No matter how much knowledge we have, how much we think we know, there's always some frontier beyond," he said. "And to understand that frontier is getting more and more esoteric."

• Where Does the Concept of Time Travel Come From?
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• 13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens

Leonard David is the author of the recently released book, "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

20-01-2020 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX is about to destroy a rocket in a critical Crew Dragon test flight. Here's why.

19-01-2020 om 23:48 geschreven door peter  

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES

They named their discovery Lokiarchaeota, after the Loki's Castle hydrothermal vent near Greenland where it was found; but doubt shadowed the finding. Could the sample have been contaminated by something else in the core?

Now, thanks to the work of Japanese scientists, those doubts can be put to rest. For the first time, they have isolated Lokiarchaeota, and grown it in a lab.

That means, for the first time, researchers can closely study and interact with living Lokiarchaeota, which could help us to find our very first ancestors on this incredible blue planet. Their research has been published on preprint server bioRxiv, and awaits peer review.

The tree of life, at its base, is divided into three domains. One of those is occupied by bacteria - single-celled microbes that don't have a nucleus or membrane-bound organelles, and get around by waving hair-like structures called flagella. Another is eukaryotes, organisms whose cells have nuclei and membranes. That domain includes us humans, animals, plants, and algae.

And then there are archaea. These are a lot like bacteria, in that they lack nuclei and membrane-bound organelles, and get around using flagella. But there are a few key differences. They divide differently. Their cell walls are made of slightly different stuff. And their RNA is different enough to separate them on the phylogenetic tree.

But then along came Lokiarchaeota - followed by other archaea specimens that had eukaryotic characteristics. These were named Thorarchaeota, Odinarchaeota and Heimdallarchaeota (to follow the same naming convention).

Collectively, they are called the Asgard archaea, and some scientists think they could be the origin of eukaryotic life - perhaps after an Asgard-like archaeon swallowed up a bacterium.

But it's hard to tell without studying the organisms in isolated detail. This is where the Japanese scientists come in. They retrieved a sediment core from the seabed in the Nankai Trough, 2,533 metres (8,310 feet) below sea level, in 2006.

This was before anyone knew about Asgard archaea. Only later, an RNA analysis of their rich sample revealed the presence of a Lokiarchaeota-like organism.

When the team started their work, they didn't know this yet. They carefully cultivated their samples for five years, in a methane-fed continuous-flow bioreactor system designed to mimic the conditions of a deep-sea methane vent. Very slowly, the microbes multiplied.

The next step was to place samples from the bioreactor in glass tubes with nutrients to keep them fed and growing. There they sat for another year, finally starting to develop a very faint population of Lokiarchaeota.

Then, the team invested even more time into isolating, cultivating and growing this slow-dividing population. Common bacteiral populations usually take about half an hour to double. Lokiarchaeota took 20 days.

"Repeated subcultures gradually enriched the archaeon with extremely slow growth rate and low cell yield," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"The culture consistently had 30-60 days of lag phase and required over 3 months to reach full growth [..] Variation of cultivation temperatures, and substrate combinations and concentrations did not significantly improve the lag phase, growth rate or cell yield."

In all, the experiment took 12 years. The researchers named their cultivated microbe Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum - after Prometheus, the ancient Greek mythological Titan who was credited with creating humans out of clay.

They made several curious findings. The first is that Prometheoarchaeum would only grow in the presence of one or two other microbes, the archaeon Methanogenium and the bacterium Halodesulfovibrio. When Prometheoarchaeum breaks down amino acids into food, it produces hydrogen, which the other microbes eat.

If the hydrogen was allowed to hang around, the experiments revealed, this could further hinder Prometheoarchaeum's already slow growth, indicating the archaea has a symbiotic relationship with other microbes, in this case syntrophic - meaning the growth of one species or both depends on what the other eats.

Then, when the organism was examined under an electron microscope, it revealed an unusual shape for an archaeon - long tentacles sprouting from its body, within which its partner microbes nestled. When oxygen started increasing on Earth, the researchers hypothesised, this organism could have switched to a relationship with bacteria that used oxygen, increasing its chances of survival, and setting out on the path to eukaryotic life.

And indeed, DNA sequencing revealed the eukaryotic characteristics seen in other Asgard archaea.

Obviously more work needs to be done. Prometheoarchaeum might be quite different from the archaea of billions of years ago. And it's far from definitive proof that eukaryotes evolved from archaea.

The study is so far available ahead of peer-review, so it will be interesting to see what the scientific community makes of it, in time. But no matter what happens now, we're going to learn a heck of a lot from this work.

"This is a monumental paper that reflects a tremendous amount of work and perseverance," evolutionary microbiologist Thijs Ettema of Wageningen University, who wasn't associated with the paper, told Nature.

"It's a major step forward in understanding this important lineage."

The research is available on bioRxiv.

{ https://www.sciencealert.com/ }

19-01-2020 om 23:31 geschreven door peter  

'Monumental': Scientists successfully grow mysterious ancient organism that could be origin of life as we know it

The previously unknown organism was unearthed on the floor of the Arctic ocean in 2010. It was dubbed Lokiarchaeota in honor of the Loki’s Castle hydrothermal vent where it was found.

What made the finding significant was that the peculiar organism was a type of microbe, called an Archaea, but it appeared to have characteristics of a completely separate type of early life form, a eukaryote. Significantly, all animals, including humans, that have ever walked on Earth are eukaryotes.

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However, doubt hung over the stunning discovery, with some claiming that it was the result of contamination. That doubt has finally been laid to rest after a team of Japanese scientists, who were already studying deep sea microbes, managed to isolate Lokiarchaeota and regrow it in a laboratory.

To achieve this the researchers collected deep sea sediment core from the Nankai Trough, 2,533 metres (8,310 feet) below sea level, off the coast of Japan in 2006. They then carefully cultivated the samples for five years in a methane-fed system, to mimic the conditions of a deep-sea methane vent. 

The team then placed the samples in glass tubes, fed them with nutrients and watched to see what would develop. After a year the first faint signs of Lokiarchaeota started to develop. 

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After several more years the patient scientists had developed a healthy population of the strange organism. They named their cultivated microbe Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum - after Prometheus, who created humans out of clay in Greek mythology.

Further testing revealed that the organism only grew in conjunction with one or two other microbes and it had long tentacles sprouting from its body, under which the partner microbes nestled.

In their paper, published in Nature this week, the scientists hypothesized that the adaptable organism could have switched its partners to bacteria that used oxygen as that vital element started increasing on Earth. This crucial move would have increased its chances for survival and could have set the course for life as we know it.

“This is a monumental paper that reflects a tremendous amount of work and perseverance,” evolutionary microbiologist Thijs Ettema, who wasn't involved with the research, told Nature. “It's a major step forward in understanding this important lineage.”

ALSO ON RT.COM NASA discovers alien SUGAR on board two fallen meteorites indicating possible origin of LIFE on Earth

{ https://www.rt.com/ }

19-01-2020 om 23:17 geschreven door peter  

We're All Going to Live in Mushroom Houses on Mars

 By Caroline Delbert

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/CORNELL/ARIZONA STATE

UNIVERSITY/BASKER_DHANDAPANI© 

NASA thinks its fungus-based building technologies could be the feasible future of Mars habitats. Are we ready to live in mushroom houses on Mars?

• Architectural fungus could be the secret to realistic Mars habitation plans.
• The "turtle principle" means we'll have to carry everything we need to Mars, including furniture and all building materials.
• Fungus grows fast, has versatile chemical properties, and can be used in a closed ecosystem in a Mars habitat.

NASA is sharing information about its myco-architecture program, in which experimental fungus-based building technologies could be the feasible future of Mars habitats. “Science fiction often imagines our future on Mars and other planets as run by machines, with metallic cities and flying cars rising above dunes of red sand,” NASA says. “But the reality may be even stranger.”

The myco-architecture (myco is the prefix meaning “fungus”) NASA is excited about isn’t only a new way to make furniture, although it can do that, the agency says. Mushroom House—not its real name—is an integrated habitat with layers. The tough, complex fibers made by fungal mycelia are building blocks of furniture, interior walls, and the innermost layer of the outer shell. After that comes a layer of cyanobacteria, which photosynthesize water and CO₂ into “oxygen and fungus food.” The outermost layer in the model is solid ice, which is both protective and nourishing to the cyanobacteria below.

Bricks produced using mycelium, yard waste, and wood chips as a part of the myco-architecture project. Similar materials could be used to build habitats on the Moon or Mars. -

NASA 2018 STANFORD-BROWN-RISD IGEM TEAM

Bricks and other structures made using myco-architecture are lightweight, easily blended with reused materials like wood chips to make something like plywood, but with mushrooms. NASA pithily says sci-fi relies on shiny metal and flying cars, but the idea of organically grown housing or even spaceships goes back decades. And NASA isn’t alone in suggesting that fast-growing natural fibers are the future: In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2018 novel Red Moon, bamboo forms the backbone of an international moon station where thousands of people live and work. Characters marvel at how much the plants grow within even just a day.

On the food podcast Check the Pantry, an Alaska mushroom farmer said once his mushroom cave has taken root, so to speak, new mushrooms can be harvested about every three to five days for the whole growing season. Some fungi grow so fast that scientists are attempting to slow them in order to better study and prevent environmental harm. Different kinds feed on decaying organic material or have symbiotic relationships with plants. The relationship in the NASA myco-architectural model resembles naturally occurring lichen, which are composite organisms made of cyanobacteria and different kinds of fungi.

The lab running the myco-architectural experiments explains that any travel to Mars will follow the so-called “turtle model”: If we want to live there, we have to carry everything with us in order to do that. (Remember what Matt Damon has to do in order to make nutritious soil for growing potatoes in The Martian?)

On our planet, scientists would build and seed a full-scale fungal Chia Pet house. “On Earth, a flexible plastic shell produced to the final habitat dimensions would be seeded with mycelia and dried feedstock and the outside sterilized. [...] At destination, the mycelial and feedstock material would be moistened with water and heated, initiating fungal growth.”

MORE FROM MARS

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Star Trek Logo Found On Mars. Really.

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Listen as NASA's InSight Lander Works on Mars

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The Mars 2020 Rover Is Coming Together

Inside the Chia Mushroom House, myco-architecture research lead Lynn Rothschild says the fungi could be biologically tuned to make all kinds of other materials like bioplastics and latex. The fungal materials are insulating, self-repairing, fire-retardant, and with the right melanin levels, reflective of incoming radiation. Finally, science is catching up to what Mario and friends have known since 1988’s Super Mario Bros. 3: A Mushroom House bestows a valuable bonus.

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

19-01-2020 om 23:01 geschreven door peter  

19-01-2020 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

NASA / ISAAC WATSON

Yet for each major achievement, there was a major failure. Here are the five biggest space failures of 2019. Brace yourself.

The most positive spin to put on the failure of Mars One is that it was a naïve dream. A more realistic assessment might be that it was a scam. A Dutch group managed to convince a bunch of investors to pour tens of millions of dollars into a plan to send the first humans to Mars and have them establish a colony. This was going to be a one-way trip. In truth, the plans seemed outlandish and insufficiently funded. The PR push was impressive, but the organization was not developing its own spaceflight architecture and had simply assumed it would be able to get everything it needed from the commercial market. The timeline kept slipping. To no one’s real surprise, Mars One finally declared bankruptcy on January 15.

Israeli company SpaceIL was founded back in 2011 as a contestant for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, a competition for privately funded groups to launch a robotic mission to the surface of the moon. Although the contest ended without a winner, SpaceIL decided to forge ahead anyway, with support from the Israeli Space Agency itself. Its Beresheet lander almost made it before unfortunately crash-landing into the lunar surface on April 11. Beresheet was mourned, and SpaceIL was lauded for its efforts (and for its plans to attempt another lunar landing). Then the story got weird. In August, it was reported that the lander’s payload secretly included a capsule of tardigrades that may very well have survived the crash and could be sitting on the surface as we speak. So now there might accidentally be life on the moon. Oops.

After successfully launching its Crew Dragon vehicle to the International Space Station in March, SpaceX was feeling pretty good about itself. April 20 rolled around, and the company was preparing for a standard static test of the vehicle’s Super Draco Engines. Then something went very wrong, and the capsule went up in flames and was completely destroyed. The company later found out a leaky propellant valve was to blame. The explosion set back SpaceX’s Crew Dragon time line, and as a result, 2019 came and went without any NASA astronaut going up into space from US soil.

Iran’s space program is still in its infancy, and its three launch failures in a single year only underscore that fact. The latest, this past August, was perhaps the most devastating. In unsuccessful missions conducted in January and February, the country’s rockets failed to reach orbit. In the latest one on August 29, however, the rocket didn’t even get off the ground. An explosion on the launchpad destroyed the small Safir rocket and its payload, likely because of an accident during launch preparation. President Trump tweeted about the explosion in what many interpreted as a taunt directed at Iran’s government.

India was looking forward to becoming the fourth nation in history to land a spacecraft on the moon. Its Chandrayaan-2 mission had reached lunar orbit a month earlier, and India’s space agency was ready to send its Vikram lander to the surface of the south pole and tell us more about the moon’s fabled reserves of water ice. Vikram never made it; on September 6, like Beresheet before it, the lander crashed and was lost forever. Space is hard, and that goes double for landing on the moon.

{ https://www.technologyreview.com/ }

19-01-2020 om 22:25 geschreven door peter  

Which concept is more believable (or unbelievable) … that the Milky Way galaxy has wandering supermassive black holes or that supermassive black holes (wandering or otherwise) could be hiding advanced alien civilizations? Both concepts have been seen in models and both could someday have an impact on Earth. Is it too soon to either run or put out a welcome mat … or both?

Supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole and as such usually occupy the premier location in a galaxy – namely, smack dab in the middle. That’s the case with the Milky Way galaxy, whose supermassive black hole is at its center at Sagittarius A* (A-star), which is near the border of the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius. While not yet proven, astronomers assume that every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. It’s also likely that some may have two in that same center location. Now, a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters proposes that some galaxies, including the Milky Way, have wandering supermassive black holes whose cause and possible effects are a concern for other stars.

Study lead author Michael Tremmel (who summarizes it in this video) reports that researchers from Yale, the University of Washington, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, and University College London used a new simulation model appropriately named Romulus (one of the twin founders of Rome) to predict the existence of these wandering supermassive black holes – appropriate because the secondary wandering holes are likely the result of the incomplete merging of two galaxies where the bigger SMBH didn’t assimilate the smaller one. The smaller SMBHs, being too far out to absorb gas and generate radiation, are invisible, but could still be deadly to a nearby star and its planets. Like us?

“It is extremely unlikely that any wandering supermassive black hole will come close enough to our Sun to have any impact on our solar system. We estimate that a close approach of one of these wanderers that is able to affect our solar system should occur every 100 billion years or so, or nearly 10 times the age of the universe.”

The amount of money wagered on lotteries shows how little humans respect long odds, but something far different that annihilation might also occur if our solar system is approached by a SMBH … alien contact. With the news of the wandering SMBHs, it’s worth revisiting an older report where Russian cosmologist Vyacheslav Vyacheslav Dokuchaev at Moscow’s Institute for Nuclear Research and the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed that supermassive black holes are so large, their centers may have enough space that their gravitational pull is less, allowing for planets to potentially exist. And not just planets, but also …

“We hypothesize that the advanced civilizations may live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei being invisible from the outside.”

Really? Dokuchaev says supermassive black holes have two ‘point of no return’ event horizons with a space between them.

“The naked central singularity illuminates the orbiting internal planets and provides the energy supply for life supporting. This internal black hole domain, hidden by the two horizons from the whole external universe, is indeed a suitable place for safe inhabitation.”

REALLY? Dokuchaev admits that this advanced civilization would have to be advanced enough to deal with “huge tidal forces and massive energy densities … [and] causality violations, where the rules of space-time don’t apply.” If they’re so advanced, why don’t they move to a better galactic neighborhood?

So, a simulator shows that supermassive black holes are wandering the Milky Way, a Russian cosmologist says they may contain advanced life forms, and the odds of either getting close to us are worse than the lottery … but not impossible.

What do we know for sure? Supermassive Black Hole is already a great song and the Naked Singularities would be a great name for a band.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-01-2020 om 21:44 geschreven door peter  

With all of the bad news and tensions going on in the world, you’d think there would be one group looking beyond our globe and finding places that are safe and pleasant and wholesome – a group like astronomers. You would be wrong … at least about astronomers. A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal reveals the discovery of a new class of supermassive black holes (isn’t that redundant?) that wander around dwarf galaxies (an oxymoron?) looking for planets, stars and space rocks instead of staying in their centers like other supermassive black holes. Can they wander out of their own galaxies and into others? Could this be the future of the Milky Way … and the demise of us?

“I was very surprised.”

That’s not what you want to hear from the astronomer who discovered these unusual pradatory wandering black holes, but that’s the comment given to Cosmos magazine by Amy Reines, an astrophysicist at Montana State University and lead author of the paper. In a press release, she describes how, like many other discoveries, this one came while she and fellow astronomers were using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to look for normal stationary supermassive black holes in the centers of dwarf galaxies – ancient galaxies so small that these black holes have been nearly impossible to detect. Instead, they were surprised to find predators.

Num-num … stars and planets.

“The new VLA observations revealed that 13 of these galaxies have strong evidence for a massive black hole that is actively consuming surrounding material. We were very surprised to find that, in roughly half of those 13 galaxies, the black hole is not at the center of the galaxy, unlike the case in larger galaxies.”

This is not the first time that wandering supermassive black holes have been observed, but this new study is the first to show that a dwarf galaxy’s only central black hole can not only move but actually consume its own galaxy from the inside. As always, when there’s one – or in this case, 13 – there’s bound to be more, so Reines and her fellow astronomers are using their new-found techniques to scan other dwarf galaxies with the intent of finding more predatory wandering black holes that may help explain how the earliest black holes were formed after the Big Bang.

Should we residents of the Milky Way be worried about wandering predatory supermassive black holes? No … and possibly yes. While the Milky Way is not a dwarf galaxy and its central black hole seems to being staying put, it does have some wandering black holes eating their way around the galaxy. Even more worrisome – a least a little more – is the fact that there are dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, including the Large Magellanic Cloud.

If any astronomers on the next wandering predatory supermassive black hole project are reading this, could you check the Large Magellanic Cloud first?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-01-2020 om 21:25 geschreven door peter  

If you are a regular to Mysterious Universe, you’ll know that one of my particular interests when it comes to UFOs and the paranormal is that of the Men in Black. I don’t think there’s a single MIB case out there that isn’t weird. But, some are really weird. Such as the one I’m going to share with you today. It comes from a source in British Columbia who provided the following story to me in 2013. It’s a case that is made notable by the fact that it predates the MIB phenomenon that has developed since 1947. In fact, it dates back to the 1930s. The source began: “Hello Nick; I have a MIB story that comes from a pretty good source. 1930s. MIB met at a prairie crossroads by a Ukrainian man. Very interesting outcome. It should be noted that the three brothers from Ukraine that were involved in this encounter also encountered incredible strange phenomena on their farm. If you would like to read about it I will relate it as told by one of the brothers. Of course, I asked for more information. And got it.

The source continued: “I was told this by a reliable source, a family friend that did not BS. He was one of the three brothers that immigrated to Saskatchewan from Ukraine in the 1930s. These people, I suspect brought with them some beliefs that resulted in very strange activity on their farm. They had no wives, just three brothers. Some mornings they would find the horses’ manes and tails ‘braided’ in a very impressive fashion, but so tight that the horses would not allow them to be undone due to pain from pulling, so they cut them off. One night the brothers awoke to their barn on fire. They fought the fire with water from buckets to no avail as the barn burned to the ground. As morning approached they went in very tired to wash the smoke and ash from their face and hands. With the smoking ruins of their barn on their minds they went for a well earned sleep. When they awoke later that same day, they gazed out at their barn…exactly as it was before it had burned. Or had it really burned? Who knows, but it was it had always been.

“One of the brothers was walking down the prairie dirt road when he came upon a very clean well dressed man at a ‘crossroads.’ The man wore a black high class suit with a tail and a fancy stove pipe hat, all black and no dust, but clean. The Farmer said to him, ‘What you doing out here all dressed up like that?’ As he spoke those words he was taking from his pocket his corn cob pipe to fill and talk a while. Upon seeing the corn cob pipe the MIB said ‘Oh, what a very nice pipe’ as he admired it. The MIB pulled from his pocket a very expensive looking silvery-looking pipe and offered to trade if the farmer would. The old Ukrainian said, ‘What, this old thing?’ and quickly traded. This seemed to end the conversation, as the farmer sped home to show everyone at home. When the MIB saw the farmer’s corn cob pipe, the MIB was transfixed by the pipe and appeared to be amazed by it; he wouldn’t take his eyes off it.

“Apparently there were other people over for a stay at the time, and they all marveled at the beautiful pipe that had been traded from the MIB. It was proudly put on the fireplace mantle and stayed there as they all went to bed for the night. When they awoke the next day, apparently the ‘spell’ had been broken because where the beautiful silver pipe had been proudly displayed on the mantle was instead a stick!! Yes, a stick. I am thinking that with the farmer came some hypnotic spell to allow them all to see the silver pipe. The brother’s name was Alex Delawski and he told me this happened. There were more strange things too but this is what he told me. A side occurrence: For the last week or so I have been falling asleep with YouTube videos playing about MIB. I was in the back bedroom of my mobile home and I heard a loud knocking on my door. It was quite a loud and unmistakable sound of a closed fist on the door. I was surprised to see no-one and continued to look through the widows. There were no tracks in the fresh snow!”

Another weird saga in the world of the MIB.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-01-2020 om 21:12 geschreven door peter  

NASA scientists are testing fungus, pursuing the possibility of building a lunar base and other space habitats from natural, living materials, according to a recent press release. The concept is simple, but profound: What if life-sustaining environments could be grown instead of built? This idea could revolutionize current planetary exploration efforts. Growing on-site structures from mushrooms is a promising prospect, a real possibility that may dramatically reduce weight and energy costs when compared to other options.

“Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle — carrying our homes with us on our backs – a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs,” said Lynn Rothschild, the principal investigator on the early-stage project. “Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.

NASA began research and development on the idea in 2018, but in 2020 scientists are continuing the work, aiming to find out just how feasible the plan is for Martian colonization. Researchers are now seeking ways to help mushroom mycelium grow in Martian soil. If they are successful, explorers could establish viable colonies by growing off-world settlements without the need to transport bulky building materials. These natural environments present the ultimate sustainability model, providing strong, lightweight living space that is also flexible, insulated, flame-retardant, radiation-protected, and self-healing. Want to add an addition? No need to hire a contractor. Just add water (or something like that). Of course the structures would be non-toxic and, at the end of their life cycle, could be plowed under to become fertilizer for future space gardens.

Not actually the moon, but quite a simulacrum, a moon-shaped, giant puffball mushroom bigger than my head. Who’d have thought I could find a use for this mushroom selfie?

Dormant spores could be activated with water and the right conditions. Photosynthetic bacteria would serve as fungus food, triggering growth. The mushroom architects could be bio-engineered to extrude bioplastics, latex, and other materials. Perhaps they could even provide light through harnessing a natural property in some mushroom species, bioluminescence.

The myco-architecture prototypes are being developed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is no stranger to mushroom fueled innovation, but this takes tech to new heights.

Ultimately, the project envisions a future where human explorers can bring a compact habitat built out of a lightweight material with dormant fungi that will last on long journeys to places like Mars. Upon arrival, by unfolding that basic structure and simply adding water, the fungi will be able to grow around that framework into a fully functional human habitat – all while being safely contained within the habitat to avoid contaminating the Martian environment.

This research is supported through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, known as NIAC, and is part of a field known as synthetic biology – the study of how we can use life itself as technology, in this case fungi. We’re a very long way from being able to grow useable habitats for Mars, but the early-stage research is well under way to prove the potential of these creative solutions. That work all starts with experimenting with fungi.

Science fiction often imagines a mechanized future, dominated by cold, dead metal environments and gigantic machines. But I’m rooting for a stranger, “greener” tomorrow, populated by adorable, glowing shroom rooms at home and throughout the galaxy. We could really use more sustainable building options on Earth right now. Hopefully, NASA won’t reserve these living technologies for other planets. Look for them popping up like fungal friends in a neighborhood near you. 

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-01-2020 om 20:05 geschreven door peter  

Why has the task force set up to investigate the cause and/or find the owners of the mysterious giant drones seen for weeks now flying in formation over parts of Colorado and Nebraska suddenly shut down … saying it’s not needed because it found ‘nothing criminal’? Could it be because the owner is our own military testing secret futuristic aircraft … aircraft that may be the same genre as those mysterious “Tic Tac” UFOs witnessed by US Navy pilots who have also never received an explanation of what they saw? That’s the theory proposed by a former military intelligence expert and investigative reporter after analyzing videos of the drones. Is he right? Is our own military testing secret technology on its own people (again)? Or is it trying to stir up UFO talk to hide real advanced technology (also again)?

“I’m guessing it’s Navy related. I’ve seen several videos that have gotten me into this. I’m a debunker and I’ve never jumped on the UFO bandwagon. But as I’m watching these videos, I’m seeing some objects that look a lot like a tic-tac would be. There’s one where an aircraft is zooming by at a ridiculous speed.”

Why can’t anyone identify the drones?

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Star Online, Mike Turber appears to be the first expert to link the mysterious Colorado drones to the mysterious USS Nimitz Tic Tac UFOs. Turber is a well-known investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert who served in the Air Force as an Electronic Operations Specialist. If his name sounds familiar, he was involved in the investigation of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. More recently, he has been touting the idea (along with a few other people) that the 2004 USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” UFOs are actually secret US military aircraft. Thus it may come as no surprise that he believes the Colorado drones are also military aircraft tests and possibly Tic Tac aircraft as well.

“As far as I know, they very well could be these tic-tacs but I have no inside knowledge of what these are and can’t really confirm anything.”

That’s not exactly a rousing endorsement of his own claim. Few if any eyewitness accounts of the Colorado drones, including those of local law enforcement, have stated anything unusual about their speed and, since all occurred at night, none seem to have reported a Tic Tac shape, just blinking lights. Unfortunately, Turber attracts skepticism with some of his other past claims, including that he himself has flown in a gravity-defying Tic Tac and … get ready … so has President Trump during his trip to North Korea as a way of impressing Kim Jong-Un.

Stranger things have happened.

OK, that seems kind of far-fetched, but so does the blanket denial by the government task force set up to investigate the fleets of giant drones flying in formation that they’re doing anything criminal and shutting things down without even identifying the owners or locating their base or even the alleged vehicles controlling them. That leaves the sightings open to a wide variety of conclusions and theories and the officials don’t seem to mind … which draws even MORE skepticism and theories.

Are the Colorado drones of the same technology as the Tic Tac UFOs? Until they’re positively identified by SOMEONE, anything is possible.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-01-2020 om 19:03 geschreven door peter  

As a follow-up to my “M.I.B.: You Want Weird? You’ve Got It!” article, I thought I would share another case with you. From a firsthand eyewitness we have a compelling story of Men in Black, thinly-veiled threats, and what may have been some form of secret, underground, military facility in Arizona. As the witness states: “The following event took place in the spring of 1998 around 2PM. The approximate location the event occurred is about 15 miles SE of the Bill Williams Wildlife Refuge, which is a remote desert area off the Colorado River with the closest town being Parker, Arizona. Growing up in Lake Havasu City, you are surrounded by hundreds of miles of open desert with mountain ranges and endless dirt roads that are great for off-roading. The area this event took place is dotted with abandoned mines which we often explored. I was driving my Jeep and my buddy was behind me in his Toyota Land Cruiser.

“The road we were on was a dirt road no different than any other dirt road in the area. The area was fairly flat with a lot of low brush and creosote bushes.  I pulled off the right side of the road to look around.  There were no signs, no marking, no dirt piles; nothing at all out of the ordinary. I got out of my truck and waked about 30 feet. I came across a hole about 15’ across, I don’t know how deep it was but there was no end in sight. This hole was not visible from the road at all because of the low bushes that are all over in this area. The hole went straight down. Since I have seen a lot of mines, I had come to know what the surrounding area of a mine looks like.  The area surrounding the mine is always disturbed with dirt piles from the excavation, roads to the mine and often times warning or no trespassing signs and fences.

“This particular hole had no disturbances at all. I only found it because I stumbled upon it by accident. I was surprised that there were no signs or safety fences at all. Aside from the natural camouflage of the surrounding bushes there was no attempts made to hide this hole. The only camouflage to hide the hole was the fact that there was nothing at all such as sign or roads to lead you to believe there was a hole there.   Within a minute or 2 of us seeing the hole, a black suburban with dark tinted windows rolled up on us.  We saw it coming up the road but by the time we saw it, it was almost to our location.  I have no idea how they knew we were there so quickly. Two men, wearing all black military fatigues, with black hats and black sunglasses, got out of the driver and passenger side.  Both were Caucasians about 6’ tall carrying side arms. They shut their doors and simply said, ‘You need to leave.’

“Being a bit of a smart ass at times and with no fences or signs showing private property or no trespassing, I figured the desert is for everyone. I simply said, ‘I don’t see any signs saying no trespassing.’ I said it more as a joke because I really don’t like to be messed around with so I wanted to see how serious they were. With no emotion whatsoever the driver simply said: ‘I will ask you one more time to leave now.’ He never took his sunglasses off or made any other movements at all. I got the point and we drove off. I really did not think too much about it back then because there are a lot of mines out there. I am now 39 and looking back and looking into similar stories, I can now say it was likely not just a mine. If it were a mine, there would have been much more security to prevent injury.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-01-2020 om 18:28 geschreven door peter  

Elon Musk wil tegen 2050 een miljoen mensen naar Mars sturen - HLN.be

Bron: Business Insider

De plannen van de ruimtevaartpionier om de rode planeet te koloniseren zijn niet nieuw. In september vorig jaar werd op de lanceerbasis van zijn ruimtevaartbedrijf SpaceX in Texas een prototype voorgesteld van een ruimteschip dat mensen en vracht op termijn naar Mars en de maan moet brengen. Met het tuig, dat de naam Starship kreeg, zouden mensen al vanaf 2025 naar Mars kunnen reizen. NASA zegt ten vroegste vanaf 2030 een bemande missie naar Mars te kunnen sturen.

Lees ook

Excentrieke Japanse miljardair zoekt vriendin voor reis rond de maan

Op Twitter deelde Musk donderdag wat meer details over dat plan. Hij hoopt de komende tien jaar maar liefst duizend Starships te bouwen. Daarmee wil Musk op termijn drie ruimteschepen per dag lanceren naar Mars, met aan boord telkens honderd man. Binnen dertig jaar moet de kolonie op Mars zo een bevolking van maar liefst een miljoen mensen hebben. Een verhuis naar een buitenaardse stad moet volgens de Teslabaas “mogelijk zijn voor iedereen die dat wil. Voor wie geen geld heeft, zullen er leningen beschikbaar zijn.” Hij voegde er nog aan toe dat er heel wat jobs zullen zijn op Mars.

 AFP 

Elon Musk

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

19-01-2020 om 17:39 geschreven door peter  

Antarctica Black Project? Senator Privy to 'Intelligence Secrets' Once Visited South Pole

Lockheed’s Skunk Works is responsible for the development of stealth fighters and even more exotic projects. Steve Justice, former Director for Advanced Systems there, now serves as COO for Tom Delonge’s To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science. Justice suggested in an interview one objective of TTSA was to reverse-engineer technology recovered from UAPs, or UFOs.

When browsing through declassified CIA files: we found something interesting. One of the most “in-the-know” Senators (Allen Ellender) from the 1970s, who oversaw Senate appropriates to the intelligence community and special “secret projects” took a peculiar trip to Antarctica in 1971.

The CIA catalogued papers related to his trip in a half-dozen different documents. We reviewed Ellender’s entire file and only came across one formerly classified as top secret (now declassified). It occurred after he returned from Antarctica, discusses a [redacted] vehicle, and in the meeting, Ellender also warned about concealed intelligence expenditures. We don’t know if his trip to Antarctica is connected to his insider knowledge of secret projects.

But this is one of the first times there has been evidence in the public record suggesting a potential link. Or, we could just be reading too much into this. Let us know what you think in the comments.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

19-01-2020 om 17:14 geschreven door peter  

Underground Alien Base Beneath Mount Hayes Alaska Discovered By An Intelligence Analyst

By the late 1980s, the Stargate Project was in full swing. Declassified files show the US government had used remote viewing, the ability to psychically see locations at a distance, for over a decade.

via https://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/

When browsing through CIA archives, we found something that made us do a double take: the apparent discovery of three extraterrestrial bases by an intelligence analyst.

The obscure handwritten document, sub-classified “Sun Streak” under preview of the DoD’s Defense Intelligence Agency, describes secret, underground facilities.

One is reported beneath Mount Hayes, Alaska. Despite its status as the highest mountain in the state’s eastern range, Hayes is rarely climbed due to its remoteness and inaccessibility.

It’s also at the epicenter of what locals call the Alaska Triangle…a hot spot for reports of unexplained lights, vanishing hikers and even diminutive beings living in the wilderness.

So, what exactly did the U.S. government discover? And could a subterranean facility have anything to do with strange reports in the area dating back decades?

 

Description of Personnel Associated ET Bases:

• https://www.cia.gov/library/readingro...

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

19-01-2020 om 16:38 geschreven door peter  

What appears to be a massive cloaked flying saucer-like UFO has been caught on camera hovering in the sky near Las Vegas.

The video recorded on January 15, 2020 by Rafa Torres who was on the way to Las Vegas came across the strange looking cloud and decided to film the phenomenon. Forward the video to when Rafa lowers the window to get a clear view of the UFO.

Often lenticular clouds have been mistaken for cloaked UFOs particularly in the shape of a "flying saucer", but in this case it is without a doubt a cloaked UFO since there are defined shapes, shadows as well as edges on top of the cloud indicating the upper part of the UFO.

 

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

19-01-2020 om 16:24 geschreven door peter