The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
21-01-2020
Bright UFO recorded over Scotland 20-Jan-2020
Bright UFO recorded over Scotland 20-Jan-2020
This 2020 UFO sighting was just submitted to me through Latest UFO Sightings Facebook page. It was filmed over Inverurie, a town in Aberdeenshire, Scotland on 20th January 2020.
Witness report:
Yesterday at 6pm Inverurie Aberdeenshire Scotland. I have seen satalites before and you can see them move. This didnt look like it moved. I watched for over half hour. Then left it for half an hour went to show my husband and it had completely vanished
Underground Wars: Something Strange Is Going On Under The Earth
Underground Wars: Something Strange Is Going On Under The Earth
High strangeness, deep underground military bases and the end times. I sat down with Darrin Geisinger, Author of Zero-G’s for this very special interview, find more about Darrin and his work at this link, https://darringeisinger.com/
Following a devastating global economic collapse, civilization struggles on. Christians everywhere proclaimed the Meltdown to be the Great Tribulation, but instead of a rescuing rapture, “they” came on the scene to save us. The Messengers turned the lights back on, cleaned up the radiation, stopped the pandemics.
But a handful of doubters suspect that these extraterrestrials might not be the benevolent benefactors they claim to be. Some even believe that they are a Great Deception: “And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie” (2nd Thess 2:11). Those who spoke out against the Messengers have mysteriously vanished. Earth’s foremost robotics scientist was one such believer and now he’s gone too.
To his only son, he leaves behind two things. The first is a way to fight back, in the form of an armored exo-suit—possibly humanity’s last and only hope. The second is a hastily scrawled message…
Something Has Escaped Antarctica Secret Underground Base?
Something Has Escaped Antarctica Secret Underground Base?
Google Earth images show a possible entrance leading to an underground secret base located at King George Island in Antarctica.
The following stands out when checking the timeline at that specific location:
Year 2005 – Something seems to break out of the snow/ice wall.
Year 2007 – A large cave or entrance of 75 x 75 meters has emerged and something seems to have moved into the ocean.
Year 2019 – The cave or entrance is again completely covered by snow and ice.
The image of 2005 clearly shows that something from inside the cave has pushed with an enormous force resulting in the huge opening of 75 x 75 meters.
The image of 2007 not only shows some sort of trail coming from the cave leading to the ocean but it also shows a weird anomaly of about 14 meters width floating in the ocean just in front of the cave.
The image of 2019 shows that everything is covered with snow and ice again.
We know that Antarctica has many secrets related to the UFO and aliens phenomena, could it be that the massive hole leads to a secret base built into a giant ice-cave and something broke out?
Shock: NASA Interrupted by Red Object During Live Stream Feed
Shock: NASA Interrupted by Red Object During Live Stream Feed
live feed shock NASA interrupted by Red Object during stream
live feed shock NASA interrupted by Red Object during stream. It was captured from the ISS Space Station and my first thought was some kind of reflection from the optics, a sun flare, or something.
Photos of a UFO Buzzing a Commercial Jet Over the United Kingdom
Photos of a UFO Buzzing a Commercial Jet Over the United Kingdom
JANUARY 19, 2020 …..NEWTON ABBOT DEVON ENGLAND
Hi Ken : The sky was clear and blue and I was watching a passenger plane pass over the area when I decided to take some photographs of it with my Nikon P900 camera. I was in the process of taking photographs when a white sphere of light just appeared out of no where and flew around the sky right in front of the passenger plane. I captured the white sphere of light in four of the photographs before I lost sight of it. I couldn’t believe it I wasn’t even trying to capture a UFO… It was just sheer luck that I just happened to be photographing the passenger plane at that precise moment. I often like to take photographs of passing passenger planes as they fly over the area and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is out there trying to spot UFOs as they are clearly drawn to commercial aircraft.
The question is where are these strange objects coming from and how do they just seem to appear out of thin air like that? I really would like to know. I believe that the government knows what these strange object really are and is purposely withholding this information from the public. There’s still time left for the government to come out and save face and tell the general public the truth. Why are they allowing these unidentified objects to freely fly around in the sky with complete impunity. I am calling the government out on their cowedly cover up of the whole situation. This cowedly cover up as gone on for far to long. Enough is enough It just isn’t right. The general public have the right to know the truth and need to be informed as to what is really going on in the skies above them! This truth embargo won’t last forever. The photographs where taken at 11:58 AM on the 19th of January 2020, at Newton Abbot Devon England. All the best John.
I’ve asked a friend of mine to review this new book about UFOs that’s available on Amazon:
If you want to be sure of unusual things such as aliens or UFOs, then you must think about it from an unusual way of thinking.
This book not only gives you a proof of the sightings of UFO, but it changes the way of thinking and perception about them. UFO sightings are becoming more and more popular and no one can deny it. Even the Pentagon has admitted that the aerial objects in the videos are simply unidentified, and for now, unexplained.
I never believed in aliens or UFOs. I always thought that this is something created by man himself to become popular or something but after reading the book ”top 10 UFO Sightings by Sebastian Privett’’ my whole perception has changed. This book gives me all the answers to my questions. And now I have started believing in these things.
After reading this book I ask myself how people can close their minds off to the size of the
After reading this book I ask myself how people can close their minds off to the size of the Universe. With billions of stars, millions of galaxies, and possibly a googol of planets, how can it be that human beings are the only thinking animal in creation?
This book unfolds a thrilling journey with a lot of information with proof, so I suggest everyone to read this book.Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they’re here, I want to know about them.
Disc-shaped UFO over Volcano Colima, Mexico 19-Jan-2020
Disc-shaped UFO over Volcano Colima, Mexico 19-Jan-2020
Some kind of bright flying saucer was caught on tape over Volcano Colima, also known as Volcán de Fuego, part of the Colima Volcanic Complex. This happened on 19th January 2020.
To some, he was a prophet. To others, a laughing stock. Even today, more than half a century after his death, George Adamski remains one of the most curious and controversial characters in UFO history.
Adamski had multiple claims to UFO fame. Starting in the late 1940s, he took countless photos of what he insisted were flying saucers. But experts, including J. Allen Hynek, scientific consultant to the Air Force’s Cold War-era UFO investigation team Project Blue Book, dismissed them as crude fakes.
Then, in 1952, Adamski reported that he had met and conversed with a visitor from Venus in a California desert, using a combination of hand gestures and mental telepathy.
A cigar-shaped Venusian interplanetary carrier photographed through a 6" telescope over Palomar Gardens, California taken by Adamski.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett
Adamski chronicled his alleged adventures in several books. The first, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), coauthored with Desmond Leslie, recounted his chat with the Venusian. Widely read at the time, it later gained a new generation of fans in the trippy 1960s.
Adamski’s 1955 sequel, Inside the Space Ships, described further meetings, not only with the Venusian but also with emissaries from Mars and Saturn. In Adamski’s telling, every planet in our solar system was populated with human-like inhabitants, as was the dark side of the earth’s moon.
In the 1955 book, Adamski claimed that his new friends took him aboard one of their scout ships, flew him to an immense mother ship hovering over the earth, gave him a ride around the moon and treated him to a colorful travelogue about life on Venus.
Along the way, he was also tutored by a space man he called “the master.” The master, who was said to be nearly 1,000 years old, shared the secrets of the universe with Adamski, only some of which he was allowed to divulge back on earth.
Preposterous as his stories seemed, Adamski became an international celebrity and lectured widely. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands raised a public stir after inviting him to her palace in 1959 to discuss extraterrestrial doings. Adamski supposedly claimed a secret 1963 meeting with the pope, as well.
Adamski soon had followers all over the planet. But not everybody was on board. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not only denounced Adamski’s work but characterized his believers as “nitwits.”
George Adamski with a photograph of a Venusian Scout on February 18, 1959.
Norman Victor Herfort/Fairfax Media/Getty Images
George Adamski was reportedly born in Poland in 1891, came to the U.S. with his parents at as a young boy and grew up in far-northern New York state.
He seems to have had little formal education, though the press would later refer to him as “Professor Adamski”—a habit he appears to have encouraged.
Adamski enjoyed his first glimpse of glory in 1934 as the leader of a group calling itself the Royal Order of Tibet. The Los Angeles Times reported they had bought an old estate in Laguna Beach, California, and planned to establish the first Tibetan monastery in America on the site. The Times described “Prof. George Adamski” as being “as strange as the cult he sponsors.”
Somehow, Adamski convinced the reporter he had lived in the “ancient monasteries” of Tibet as a child. “I learned great truths up there on ‘the roof of the world,’” he was quoted as saying.
In 1936, he was back in the papers again, this time as the leader of a group called Universal Progressive Christianity, whose international headquarters, he said, would soon be established in Laguna Beach.
Aside from offering a tax plan to end the Great Depression in 1938, the “professor” stayed out of the news until after World War II. But when the postwar UFO craze took off, Adamski hopped right on.
A Venusian 'scout craft' photographed by George Adamski, 1952.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett
In October 1946, he said, he spotted his first UFO—“a large black object, similar in shape to a gigantic dirigible, and apparently motionless.”
His next sighting came in August 1947. This time, it wasn’t just a single object but a procession of them—at least 184 by his count. Then, in late 1949, at what he said was the urging of the U.S. military, he attached a camera to his six-inch telescope and began scanning the skies at every opportunity. Soon he had what he considered two good UFO pictures.
“Since then, winter and summer, day and night, through heat and cold, wind, rains and fog, I have spent every moment possible outdoors, watching the skies,” he wrote.
By the end of 1952, the skies over his California home had become a sort of UFO shooting gallery. Adamski estimated he took another 500 flying saucer photos, from which he got a dozen good ones. He claimed to have provided prints to the Air Force, but he kept the negatives.
By now, newspapers and magazines were publishing Adamski’s photos, and he was giving lectures as an authority on UFOs. Because he happened to live near Mount Palomar, home of the famous observatory, he was often misidentified as a professional astronomer. But as the genuine astronomer Carl Sagan later noted, the truth was a little more mundane: Adamski “operated a tiny restaurant” in the vicinity and had “set up a small telescope out back.”
A close encounter of the Venusian kind
A painting depicting an encounter with a visitor from Venus at Desert Center, California, 1952.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Michael Buhler/Everett
It was in November 1952, in a remote patch of California desert, that Adamski came face to face with his supposed visitor from Venus. “The beauty of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen,” Adamski wrote. “And the pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a little child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love…”
The Venusian’s flesh was as soft as a baby’s, Adamski reported after they touched palms, while his “hair was sandy in color and hung in beautiful waves to his shoulders, glistening more beautifully than any woman’s I have ever seen.”
When the two finally got around to communicating, it became clear that the Venusian had come to deliver a message. Earthlings should stop messing around with atomic bombs, he told Adamski, before they destroyed their entire planet. To punctuate his point, and to show that he had picked up at least one word of English, the alien added, “Boom! Boom!”
Adamski wasn’t the first American to claim he’d met an alien, but he was the first to go public, and he quickly became the most famous “contactee.” Countless others would follow in the decades to come, telling their own tales of what Project Blue Book’s Hynek famously labeled “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
His new notoriety turned the humble restaurant where he worked into a tourist attraction. One visitor was Edward J. Ruppelt, then head of Project Blue Book, who dropped by, incognito, in 1953 to find Adamski holding court and hawking copies of his UFO pix. “To look at the man and to listen to his story, you had an immediate urge to believe him,” Ruppelt wrote in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, adding that he had “the most honest pair of eyes I’ve ever seen.”
While Ruppelt clearly didn’t believe him, he was impressed all the same. “As I left, he was graciously filling people in on more details and the cash register was merrily ringing up saucer picture sales.”
Hynek also paid a visit to Adamski’s eatery, along with some fellow astronomers. Although he tried to engage Adamski on more scientific matters, Hynek later recalled, “All he wanted to do was sell me photos.”
Con man, crackpot or cosmic messenger?
George Adamski stands in front of a painting by Gay Betts depicting the Venusian space pilot he met in the Mojave Desert, California.
Mary Evans Picture Library/Everett
Adamski published at least one more book, Flying Saucers Farewell (1961) and continued to lecture widely.
At a press conference in March 1965, he predicted that a large fleet of flying saucers would soon descend on Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, Adamski wouldn’t be there to greet them—had they actually arrived. He died that April at age 74.
Since his death, Adamski’s critics have tended to portray him as a harmless crackpot, small-time con artist or perhaps a bit of both.
Others, like J. Allen Hynek, took a somewhat dimmer view, accusing Adamski and others like him, of discrediting the entire field of UFO research.
Author Arthur C. Clarke had made the same point years earlier, saying that Adamski and coauthor Leslie did “a real disservice by obscuring the truth and scaring away serious researchers from a field that may be of great importance.”
But Adamski stuck to his story to the end—including the upbeat but somehow ominous message he’d delivered in Flying Saucers Have Landed:
“My most urgent message and plea to every person who reads it is: Let us be friendly. Let us recognize and welcome the men from other worlds! THEY ARE HERE AMONG US.”
REUTERS"De eerste gegevens geven aan dat de test perfect was", aldus Musk op een persconferentie.
RUIMTEVAARTSpaceX, het ruimtevaartbedrijf van Tesla-oprichter Elon Musk, heeft vandaag met succes een mislukte lancering gesimuleerd waarbij astronauten zichzelf in veiligheid moesten brengen, enkele ogenblikken na de lancering in Florida. Bedoeling was na te gaan of alle reddingssystemen goed werken als de lancering echt zou mislukken. Bij de test waren geen astronauten aan boord. Alles is verlopen volgens plan.
De eerste gegevens geven aan dat de test perfect was, aldus Musk op een persconferentie. Nasa-topman Jim Bridenstine noemde de test dan weer “heel heel geslaagd”. De volgende vlucht van de SpaceX-capsule Crew Dragon zal dus de eerste zijn met astronauten aan boord. Dat kan al gebeuren in het tweede trimester van 2020, aldus Musk. Dat wordt de eerste keer sinds 2011 dat Amerikanen naar de ruimte vliegen aan boord van een Amerikaans ruimtevaartuig. “Dit betekent de terugkeer van de Amerikaanse astronauten in de ruimte aan boord van een Amerikaans toestel, gelanceerd vanop het Amerikaans grondgebeid”, zei Bridenstine.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
DE 28 DAGEN CYCLIS WAAR NIEMAND NAAR KIJKT...
DE 28 DAGEN CYCLIS WAAR NIEMAND NAAR KIJKT...
De meeste mensen zullen ervan op de hoogte zijn dat een menstruatiecyclus gemiddeld 28 dagen duurt, maar dat er nog een andere 28-daagse cyclus bestaat weten ze niet.
Een cyclus die er iedere 28 dagen voor zorgt dat we een toename zien van het aantal aardbevingen en vulkaanuitbarstingen en die steeds heftiger worden.
Naar aanleiding van ons eerdere artikel over de toenemende vulkaanuitbarstingen ontvingen wij een heel interessante reactie van een lezer (dank!) met een theorie die weleens de verklaring zou kunnen zijn voor wat er nu op aarde gebeurt.
Terwijl je alleen maar de cijfers hoeft te kijken om vast te kunnen stellen dat zware aardbevingen wereldwijd fors zijn toegenomen de afgelopen jaren.
Wanneer we kijken naar aardbevingen met een kracht van zes of hoger op de Richterschaal dan zien we in de periode 1980 tot 1989 dat er gemiddeld op jaarbasis 108,5 van dit soort aardbevingen voorkwamen. In de 9 daarop volgende jaren, de periode 2000 tot 2009, maakten we gemiddeld 160,9 van dit soort aardbevingen mee, een stijging van 38,9 procent.
Wanneer we de bevingen met een kracht groter dan 7,5 nemen, zien we ook een spectaculaire stijging gedurende de laatste jaren
.Eenzelfde verschijnsel doet zich voor bij vulkanen en dan vooral de supervulkanen. Bijna alle actieve supervulkaansystemen beginnen nu tekenen van leven te vertonen wat als gevolg heeft dat de druk erin aan het opbouwen is.
Wanneer deze reuzen zullen exploderen is raden, maar ondertussen groeit de activiteit in Zuid Amerikaanse vulkanen zoals de Turrialba in Costa Rica.
Hij schrijft het volgende:
Gelukkig besteed er iemand aandacht aan wat er gebeurt ten aanzien van vulkanen en aardbevingen, waarvoor mijn dank.
Ik maak mij ernstige zorgen over de mensen die in risicogebieden wonen en het is uitermate belangrijk dat er wordt begrepen wat er hier aan de hand is. Dit is een fenomeen dat niet meer weggaat en waarschijnlijk alleen maar erger zal worden.
Misschien heeft u net als ik gemerkt dat er een verbazend regelmatig patroon is tussen perioden van kalmte en uitbarstingen. Zo zeker ben ik hiervan dat ik durf te stellen dat we nu na misschien nog wat naschokken een kalme periode krijgen betreffende aardbevingen en uitbarstingen tot zeker 23 januari, (waarschijnlijk tot eerste week februari).
Er is sinds geruime tijd een duidelijk aantoonbaar patroon van 28 dagen te herkennen in de cyclus van aardbevingen, deze cyclus-bevingen zijn nooit genoemd in de pers, zo ver ik weet geen enkele pers! Het patroon is steeds duidelijker geworden en de bevingen heftiger, sinds de laatste twee cycli zelfs 5.5 en erger.
Nu beginnen ook vulkanen onder hun druk te bezwijken. Opvallend is dat alle activiteit plaatsvindt enkele dagen nadat er heftige corona uitbarstingen waren welke later gevolgd door zonnewind (geladen deeltjes, geen”’wind’). Vanaf het moment dat de ‘vlammen’ de aarde raken duurt het nog 1 à 2 dagen voordat er weer activiteit komt in de vorm van bevingen en of vulkaanuitbarstingen.
Zoals ik u reeds zei dit is al een hele poos aan de gang maar het wordt steeds sterker. Het is te verklaren. Er draait een object om de zon in een cyclus van 28 dagen waarbij deze tweemaal per maand de zon dicht nadert, misschien wel minder dan een miljoen kilometer. Dit object kan zich niet in hetzelfde plat als ons bevinden anders zouden we constant last hebben van deze verre buur.
Waarom zien we het object dan niet?
Hier moet ik opmerken dat het waarschijnlijk wel is gezien en vaker dan eens ook. Stel de vraag waarom stereo-camera B (NASA) geen data meer doorstuurt en waarom er data vertraging is op de cruciale dagen van activiteit? Wanneer je nu wilt zien wat er gebeurt, geen probleem alle voorspellingen tot en met 22 januari en alle live feeds werken, wacht maar tot begin februari!
De afgelopen keer zijn de corona uitbarstingen op 7 januari geweest, ze raakten de aarde 11/12 januari, hierna volgden de aardbevingen en vulkaanuitbarstingen. Dus wanneer de volgende corona uitbarstingen te verwachten zijn rond 4/5 februari dan ben ik bang dat het de tweede week februari weer onrustig zal worden. Ik hoop dat ik er naast zit maar zo niet dan hebben we weer een kans gemist om mensen te waarschuwen!
Waarom zien we het object niet met het blote oog?
Wanneer het object inderdaad de zon zo dicht nadert als één miljoen kilometer dan is dat zoiets als een speldekop voor een bouw-lamp houden. En omdat stereo camera B niet meer werkt (komt dat even goed uit) kunnen we nooit iets zien aankomen en er is nauwelijks camera bereik voor de baan van vertrek. Nog een reden waarom we het object niet makkelijk zien is mogelijk de densiteit, het object zou zelfs zo’n hoge dichtheid kunnen hebben dat het licht opneemt en dus niet met het blote oog te zien is. Als dit alles waar blijkt te zijn dan is dit bedrog op wereldniveau, het zou de chemtrails verklaren (radiatiescherm creatie) al zou dat nooit werken. Het zou de klimaatsveranderingen verklaren en gekke Greetje zou haar jurk opeten!
Zolang het kan blijf ik de beelden volgen maar de NASA censureert nog erger dan youtube en facepuke.
Tot zover de lezer
Alhoewel hij dit niet met name noemt, denken wij dat het object dat draait om de zon de planeet Nibiru kan zijn, of beter gezegd het mini zonnestelsel Nibiru. De beschrijving van de loopbaan van het object past bij een ellipstische baan die ook wordt toegeschreven aan de planeet of het mini zonnestelsel.
In een toevoeging vraagt de lezer zich verder nog af of de Parker Solar Probe hier misschien ook iets mee te maken kan hebben en beveelt iedereen aan om ook zelf op onderzoek te gaan en geeft daarbij een aantal bronnen die hij zelf regelmatig gebruikt, zoals:
Nineteen-sixty-nine was the year in which an elaborate UFO-themed Soviet ruse was put into place. It was highly sophisticated and revolved around a crashed UFO and the autopsy of an alleged alien creature. There’s no doubt in my mind that this was the creation of Soviet intelligence, doing its best to try and convince the United States that Russia had alien technology in its hands – when it actually had nothing of the sort in its hands. The story itself is undeniably fascinating, though – which is what the Russians were surely counting on – as the “evidence” is an old piece of film-footage that reportedly chronicled the whole thing. While the crash of the UFO is said to have occurred in March 1969, the story – and the attendant film – did not surface until 1998, almost three decades later. That was the year in which a television production, The Secret KGB UFO Files, was broadcast in the United States and elsewhere. A great deal of money was put into the over-sensationalized production and it was hosted by the late Roger Moore, the star of seven of the phenomenally successful James Bond movies. The documentary covered a wide body of UFO-based data; however, there’s no doubt that it was specifically the film of the supposed crashed UFO and its deceased crew-member which caught the attention of most of those who bothered to watch it.
Certainly, a great deal of effort went into the production of the film: this was no amateur, halfhearted operation. The footage is grainy, appears old, and was filmed by someone with a hand-held camera. It shows around fifteen-to-twenty men wearing Russian uniforms, thick coats and hats; they are all armed and are guarding a small, circular-shaped craft which appears to have slammed into the ground in a wooded, frosty area. The location was said to have been Sverdlovsky, Russia. The trees are largely bereft of leaves and everything points to the incident having occurred in very cold, bleak weather. Only around a half of the saucer-shaped vehicle protrudes out of the soil, in an angled fashion. The inference is that the military unit found the craft shortly after it hit the ground and, at the time of the filming, were in the process of guarding the site from any and all onlookers that might have come along. To this day, we don’t know where the film came from, and how it reached the producers of The Secret KGB UFO Files. We’re told that the production company had to pay $10,000 U.S. dollars to secure it, after it was smuggled out of KGB archives. Supposedly.
It is worth noting the following from the National UFO Center: “The footage at the crash site does seem to be authentic at least on several points. The truck in the film is a circa 1950 model ZIS151, which has not been used by the military for quite some time, and the truck would have been difficult to find to stage a hoax with. Other elements of the film do not exhibit any obvious signs of a hoax.” It should be noted there are two other, old military vehicles in the film, too.
As for the remaining portion of the film, it very much mirrors the notorious “Alien Autopsy” film, which, in 1995, was foisted on the world by a man named Ray Santilli, and to wildly varying degrees of fanfare. Three men appear to be working on the autopsy of a small, humanoid creature, while a woman take notes. Numerous websites claim that the woman has been “identified” as a “KGB stenographer” named “O.A. Pshonikina.” This statement has been repeated time and again; yet, there is no evidence to prove the claim. Such is the reliability – or not – of the Internet.
I found this giant UFO in a NASA photo this week. Its bigger than the state of Texas and is shaped like an ocean ship. It has a very deep hull area and has lots of long dark rectangular windows in the side. The top has a bridge area for the captain, which is raised up higher than the rest of he ship. Extraordinary that this is in a NASA photo. 100% proof that NASA has been taking photos of Alien ships all along, but probably didn't even know it. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
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.
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.”
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"...
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.
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.
NASA wants to probe deeper into Uranus than ever before
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.
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.
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.
Unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have captured the public's attention over the decades. Asexoplanet 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 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."
Artist's view of an aerial encounter with an unidentified flying object. (Image credit: MUFON)
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."
Tic-Tac-shaped objects were recently reported zipping through the sky by jet-fighter pilots and radar operators. The Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was created to research and investigate Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), including numerous videos of reported encounters, three of which were released to the public in 2017. (Image credit: U.S. Department of Defense/To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science)
'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."
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."
Reported UFOs take on all shapes and sizes. (Image credit: U.K. National Archives sightings chart, circa 1969)
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."
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@SpacedotcomorFacebook.
Liftoff is set for Saturday, Jan. 18, at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT).
Editor's note: SpaceX has delayed the launch of its Crew Dragon in-flight abort test flight to Sunday, Jan. 19, at 8 a.m. EST (1300 GMT). Read our full story.
Original story:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX will intentionally destroy one of its rockets in the name of safety this weekend.
This is the last major hurdle the company needs to clear before its Crew Dragon spacecraft can begin to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Scheduled for a 4-hour launch window opening at 8:00 a.m. EST (1300 GMT) Saturday (Jan. 18), the mission stars an unpiloted crew capsule that will blast off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center here in Florida. (You can watch the flight here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly through the company's YouTube page.) Its goal: to test the spacecraft's emergency escape system.
When NASA's fleet of space shuttles was retired in 2011, the agency shifted its focus to the commercial sector, selecting SpaceX and Boeing as its future space taxi providers. These two companies have worked to build a spacecraft capable of safely carrying crew, under contracts worth a total of $6.8 billion. Once operational, their vehicles — SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner — will be NASA's primary means of transporting astronauts to space.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule is perched on a Falcon 9 rocket in preparation for an in-flight abort test on Jan. 18, 2020. (Image credit: SpaceX/Twitter)
But before that can happen, SpaceX has to prove that its Crew Dragon capsule has what it takes to keep astronauts safe during flight. One of the difficult lessons learned from the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 was that all future crewed vehicles would need emergency escape systems, which the shuttle did not have.
While in-flight anomalies are rare, they do happen. Most recently, October 2018, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were carried to safety by a similar abort system when their rocket failed during flight. NASA wants to ensure that, if one of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets were to have a similar anomaly, its astronauts would still be brought home safely; this is what the in-flight abort test is all about.
There are two approaches to such escape systems. The spacecraft of the Mercury and Apollo eras, as well as the Russian Soyuz capsule that astronauts ride in today, relied on a rocket that pulled the spacecraft away from its launch vehicle. In contrast, both the Crew Dragon and the Starliner use a built-in system to push the spacecraft to safety.
Embedded within the outer hull of the Dragon capsule are eight engines called SuperDracos. If the vehicle's computer senses that something is amiss during flight, it will trigger these thrusters to fire. Then, the SuperDracos will push the Crew Dragon up and away from the rocket. Once the capsule is at a safe distance from the troubled rocket, the Crew Dragon will deploy its parachutes and land in the Atlantic Ocean, where recovery vessels will retrieve the capsule and the crew.
The company has conducted similar testing on the ground, but this is the first time the company is executing the entire escape process midflight. Here's the breakdown.
A used Falcon 9 rocket, stripped of its iconic landing legs and grid fins, will sit perched atop its launchpad at Kennedy Space Center's historic Launch Complex 39A. The rocket will roar to life at 8:00 a.m. EST (1300 GMT). About a minute and a half after liftoff, the Crew Dragon's SuperDraco engines will fire, separating the capsule from the rocket.
As the capsule is being pushed away, the rocket's main engines will cut off; the Falcon 9 will then fall back to Earth,, breaking apart during its descent. SpaceX will recover the rocket debris at the end of the test, according to a recent NASA statement.
Meanwhile, the capsule's parachutes will allow for a soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean, where recovery teams will be standing by to scoop the vehicle out of the ocean. It is currently unknown where precisely Crew Dragon will splash down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Weather conditions on launch day will impact how much of the action spectators on the Space Coast will see. But fireworks have been advertised: Following a successful test firing of the rocket on Jan. 11, SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk tweeted that the Falcon would be "destroyed in Dragon fire."
No one will be on board the Crew Dragon during this test, but SpaceX is treating the drill as if it were an actual emergency. To that end, SpaceX outfitted one of its boats with a helicopter landing pad designed to facilitate the recovery of the Crew Dragon during nominal and emergency landings alike.
This test is the last major hurdle that SpaceX must clear before it can launch astronauts. As such, both NASA and SpaceX will be paying close attention to the test. In May 2015, the company conducted a ground-based version of this test, known as a pad abort, designed to mimic an emergency prior to launch. During that test, the system performed exactly as intended.
But not every test has gone according to plan. Last April, while the company was test-firing the Crew Dragon's SuperDraco engines following a brief sojourn at the International Space Station, the capsule exploded. An investigation revealed that a leaky valve caused the anomaly, and SpaceX modified the abort system. The company successfully test-fired the system in November 2019.
Once the Crew Dragon is cleared to carry humans, SpaceX will fly two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, to the space station for a two-week stay. If that flight goes smoothly, NASA will certify Dragon, and the vehicle will be able to begin regular crewed flights, even carrying international partners.
Scientists Grew a Mysterious Life Form That Could Reveal The Origins of Complex Life
Scientists Grew a Mysterious Life Form That Could Reveal The Origins of Complex Life
MICHELLE STARR
When scientists ran DNA analysis on a sediment core taken from the floor of the Arctic ocean back in 2010, they found something surprising. A previously unknown organism belonging to the strange domain of microbes called Archaea appeared to have genomic characteristics associated with a totally different domain - Eukaryota.
The manned submersible Shinkai 6500 collected deep-sea mud from which researchers isolated microbes potentially key to the evolution of complex cells.
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."
The amount of work described in manuscript represents a monumental effort, of which the importance cannot be understated! A thread.
David Quammen@DavidQuammen
Origin of complex life?: new insight from this Japanese lab, adjacent to work from @Ettema_lab. Very damn interesting. PacMan or octopus, grabbing the first endosymbiont, in the ocean trenches? pic.twitter.com/RJSwnvXvtd We'll stay tuned for the paper.
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."
'Monumental': Scientists successfully grow mysterious ancient organism that could be origin of life as we know it
'Monumental': Scientists successfully grow mysterious ancient organism that could be origin of life as we know it
A team of researchers has unravelled a scientific mystery by successfully growing an ancient life form in a lab, a breakthrough that brings us one step closer to discovering our very first ancestors on Earth.
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.
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.
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.”
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 furnitureand 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 podcastCheck the Pantry, an Alaska mushroom farmer said once his mushroom cave has taken root, so to speak, new mushrooms can be harvestedabout every three to five daysfor the whole growing season. Some fungi grow so fast thatscientists are attempting to slow themin order to better study and prevent environmental harm. Different kinds feed on decaying organic material orhave symbiotic relationshipswith plants. The relationship in the NASA myco-architectural model resembles naturally occurring lichen, which arecomposite organismsmade 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.”
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.
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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