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...
29-07-2021
South Africa, serious broadcast on UFOs
South Africa, serious broadcast on UFOs
The US government has released a highly anticipated UFO report. The Pentagon studied more than 140 incidents reported by navy pilots of UAP seen over the last two decades for the report. Many were seen from the summer of 2014 into the spring of 2015. The report said that some incidents could be the result of technical errors in sensors or observers, but it noted that most of the UAP reported: “probably do represent physical objects” since they were registered across multiple sensors. UFO researcher Prof Tim Murithi spoke to SABC News about the report explaining how significant this first-of-its-kind report is.
The US government has released a highly anticipated UFO report. The Pentagon studied more than 140 incidents reported by navy pilots of UAP seen over the last two decades for the report. Many were seen from the summer of 2014 into the spring of 2015. The report said that some incidents could be the result of technical errors in sensors or observers, but it noted that most of the UAP reported: “probably do represent physical objects” since they were registered across multiple sensors. UFO researcher Prof Tim Murithi spoke to SABC News about the report explaining how significant this first-of-its-kind report is.
Borgs seem to be associated with single-celled microorganisms known as archaea, shown in this scanning-electron microscopy image.
Credit: Eye of Science/SPL
The Borg have landed — or, at least, researchers have discovered their counterparts here on Earth. Scientists analysing samples from muddy sites in the western United States have found novel DNA structures that seem to scavenge and ‘assimilate’ genes from microorganisms in their environment, much like the fictional Star Trek ‘Borg’ aliens who assimilate the knowledge and technology of other species.
Borgs seem to be associated with single-celled microorganisms known as archaea, shown in this scanning-electron microscopy image of Sulfolobus sp. archaea.
These extra-long DNA strands, which the scientists named in honour of the aliens, join a diverse collection of genetic structures — circular plasmids, for example — known as extrachromosomal elements (ECEs). Most microbes have one or two chromosomes that encode their primary genetic blueprint. But they can host, and often share between them, many distinct ECEs. These carry non-essential but useful genes, such as those for antibiotic resistance.
Borgs are a previously unknown, unique and “absolutely fascinating” type of ECE, says Jill Banfield, a geomicrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her colleagues describe their discovery of the structures in a preprint posted to the server bioRxiv1. The work is yet to be peer-reviewed.
Unlike anything seen before
Borgs are DNA structures “not like any that’s been seen before”, says Brett Baker, a microbiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Other scientists agree that the find is exciting, but have questioned whether Borgs really are unique, noting similarities between them and other large ECEs.
In recent years “people have become used to surprises in the field of ECEs”, says Huang Li, a microbiologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “However, the discovery of Borgs, which undoubtedly enriches the concept of ECEs, has fascinated many in the field.”
Their vast size, ranging between more than 600,000 and about 1 million DNA base pairs in length, is one feature that distinguishes Borgs from many other ECEs. In fact, Borgs are so huge that they are up to one-third of the length of the main chromosome in their host microbes, Banfield says.
Banfield studies how microbes influence the carbon cycle — including the production and degradation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas — and, in October 2019, she and her colleagues went hunting for ECEs containing genes involved in the carbon cycle in Californian wetlands. There, they found the first Borgs and later identified 19 different types from this and similar sites in Colorado and California.
Borgs seem to be associated with archaea, which are single-celled microorganisms distinct from bacteria. Specifically, those Banfield and her team have discovered are linked to the Methanoperedens variety, which digest and destroy methane. And Borg genes seem to be involved in this process, says Banfield.
Researchers found Borgs at this site on the East River, Colorado.
Credit: Jordan Hoff
Scientists can’t yet culture Methanoperedens in the laboratory — an ongoing challenge for many microbes — so the team’s conclusions that Borgs might be used by the archaea for methane processing are based on sequence data alone.
“They’ve made an interesting observation,” says systems biologist Nitin Baliga, at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. But he cautions that when researchers sift through fragments of many genomes and piece them together, as Banfield’s team has done, it’s possible to make errors. Finding Borgs in cultured Methanoperedens will be necessary for the finding to be considered definitive, he adds.
Costs and benefits
Assuming Borgs are real, maintaining such a massive ECE would be costly for Methanoperedens, Banfield and colleagues say, so the DNA structures must provide some benefit. To learn what that might be, the researchers analysed the sequences of hundreds of Borg genes and compared them with known genes.
Borgs seem to house many genes needed for entire metabolic processes, including digesting methane, says Banfield. She describes these collections as “a toolbox” that might super-charge the abilities of Methanoperedens.
So what makes a Borg a Borg? In addition to their remarkable size, Borgs share several structural features: they’re linear, not circular as many ECEs are; they have mirrored repetitive sequences at each end of the strand; and they have many other repetitive sequences both within and between the presumptive genes.
Individually, these features of Borgs can overlap with those seen in other large ECEs, such as elements in certain salt-loving archaea, so Baliga says the novelty of Borgs is still debatable at this stage. Borgs also resemble giant linear plasmids found in soil-dwelling Actinobacteria, says Julián Rafael Dib, a microbiologist at the Pilot Plant for Microbiological Industrial Processes in Tucumán, Argentina.
Banfield counters that although the individual features of Borgs have been seen before, “the size, combination and metabolic gene load” is what makes them different. She speculates that they were once entire microbes, and were assimilated by Methanoperedens in much the same way that eukaryotic cells gained energy-generating mitochondria by assimilating free-living bacteria.
Now that scientists know what to look for, they might find more Borgs by sifting through old data, says Baker, who used to work in Banfield's lab. He thinks he might already have discovered some candidates in his own genetic database since the preprint was posted.
Resistance is futile
When analysing the Borg genome, Banfield and colleagues also saw features suggesting that Borgs have assimilated genes from diverse sources, including the main Methanoperedens chromosome, Banfield says. This potential to ‘assimilate’ genes led her son to propose the name ‘Borg’ over Thanksgiving dinner in 2020.
Banfield’s team is now investigating the function of Borgs and the role of their DNA repeats. Repeats are important to microbes: differently-structured repeats called CRISPR are snippets of genetic code from viruses that microbes incorporate into their own DNA to ‘remember’ the pathogens so they can defend against them in the future.
CRISPR and its associated proteins have been a boon for biotechnology because they have been adapted into a powerful gene-editing technique — hinting that Borg genomes might also yield useful tools. “It could be as important and interesting as CRISPR, but I think it’s going to be a new thing,” says Banfield, who is collaborating on future investigations with her preprint co-author, Jennifer Doudna, a pioneer of CRISPR-based gene editing at the University of California.
One potential application that the researchers see for Borgs could be as an aid in the fight against climate change. Fostering the growth of microbes containing them could, perhaps, cut down the methane emissions generated by soil-dwelling archaea, which add up to about 1 gigatonne globally each year. It would be risky to do this in natural wetlands, Banfield says, but it might be appropriate at agricultural sites. So, as a first step, her group is now hunting Borgs in Californian rice paddies.
A mysterious crop circle has appeared on a field in Dorset.
These striking drone images captured from the skies show the geometric pattern on a field at Okeford Hill, near Blandford.
Incredible aerial shots clearly show the geometric pattern
Picture: Droning On (Echo Camera Club)
The images were taken after a heavy mist yesterday evening by a member of the Echo Camera Club, 'Droning On,' who said: "Whatever your views of such formations, I have to say this was an impeccably chosen location, made all the more stunning by the weather.
"The passing thunder storm and rising mist made for some great shots."
The pictures were made all the more dramatic by the weather Picture: Droning On
(Echo Camera Club)
Crop circles, or crop formations, are patterns produced by flattening crops.
Experts agree they are man-made although some people claim there are mysterious forces behind the patterns.
In May 2015 the Echo reported that an impressive crop circle, in a Celtic design, had appeared in a field at Thornicombe, near Blandford.
Farmers have reported finding strange circles in their fields for centuries. The earliest mention of a crop circle dates back to the 1500s.
Mentions of crop circles were rare until the 20th century, when circles began appearing in the 1960s and '70s in England and the United States.
The crop circle close up Picture: Droning On
(Echo Camera Club)
But the phenomenon didn't gain attention until 1980, when a farmer in Wiltshire county, England, discovered three circles, about 60 feet (18 meters) across each, in his oat crops.
UFO researchers and media descended on the farm, and the world first began to learn about crop circles.
The coronavirus sports a luxurious sugar coat. “It’s striking,” thought Rommie Amaro, staring at her computer simulation of one of the trademark spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, which stick out from the virus’s surface. It was swathed in sugar molecules, known as glycans.
“When you see it with all the glycans, it’s almost unrecognizable,” says Amaro, a computational biophysical chemist at the University of California, San Diego.
Many viruses have glycans covering their outer proteins, camouflaging them from the human immune system like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But last year, Amaro’s laboratory group and collaborators created the most detailed visualization yet of this coat, based on structural and genetic data and rendered atom-by-atom by a supercomputer. On 22 March 2020, she posted the simulation to Twitter. Within an hour, one researcher asked in a comment: what was the naked, uncoated loop sticking out of the top of the protein?
Amaro had no idea. But ten minutes later, structural biologist Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin chimed in: the uncoated loop was a receptor binding domain (RBD), one of three sections of the spike that bind to receptors on human cells (see ‘A hidden spike’).
Source: Structural image from Lorenzo Casalino, Univ. California, San Diego (Ref. 1); Graphic: Nik Spencer/Nature
In Amaro’s simulation, when the RBD lifted up above the glycan cloud, two glycans swooped in to lock it into place, like a kickstand on a bicycle. When Amaro mutated the glycans in the computer model, the RBD collapsed. McLellan’s team built a way to try the same experiment in the lab, and by June 2020, the collaborators had reported that mutating the two glycans reduced the ability of the spike protein to bind to a human cell receptor1 — a role that no one has previously recognized in coronaviruses, McLellan says. It’s possible that snipping out those two sugars could reduce the virus’s infectivity, says Amaro, although researchers don’t yet have a way to do this.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have been developing a detailed understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells. By picking apart the infection process, they hope to find better ways to interrupt it through improved treatments and vaccines, and learn why the latest strains, such as the Delta variant, are more transmissible.
What has emerged from 19 months of work, backed by decades of coronavirus research, is a blow-by-blow account of how SARS-CoV-2 invades human cells (see ‘Life cycle of the pandemic coronavirus’). Scientists have discovered key adaptations that help the virus to grab on to human cells with surprising strength and then hide itself once inside. Later, as it leaves cells, SARS-CoV-2 executes a crucial processing step to prepare its particles for infecting even more human cells. These are some of the tools that have enabled the virus to spread so quickly and claim millions of lives. “That’s why it’s so difficult to control,” says Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London.
It starts with the spikes. Each SARS-CoV-2 virion (virus particle) has an outer surface peppered with 24–40 haphazardly arranged spike proteins that are its key to fusing with human cells2. For other types of virus, such as influenza, external fusion proteins are relatively rigid. SARS-CoV-2 spikes, however, are wildly flexible and hinge at three points, according to work published in August 2020 by biochemist Martin Beck at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, and his colleagues3.
That allows the spikes to flop around, sway and rotate, which could make it easier for them to scan the cell surface and for multiple spikes to bind to a human cell. There are no similar experimental data for other coronaviruses, but because spike-protein sequences are highly evolutionarily conserved, it is fair to assume the trait is shared, says Beck.
Cryo-electron tomography images of SARS-CoV-2 virions. (Scale bar: 30 nanometres.)
Credit: B. Turoňová et al./Science
Early in the pandemic, researchers confirmed that the RBDs of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins attach to a familiar protein called the ACE2 receptor, which adorns the outside of most human throat and lung cells. This receptor is also the docking point for SARS-CoV, the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). But compared with SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 binds to ACE2 an estimated 2–4 times more strongly4, because several changes in the RBD stabilize its virus-binding hotspots5.
Worrying variants of SARS-CoV-2 tend to have mutations in the S1 subunit of the spike protein, which hosts the RBDs and is responsible for binding to the ACE2 receptor. (A second spike subunit, S2, prompts viral fusion with the host cell’s membrane.)
The Alpha variant, for example, includes ten changes in the spike-protein sequence, which result in RBDs being more likely to stay in the ‘up’ position6. “It is helping the virus along by making it easier to enter into cells,” says Priyamvada Acharya, a structural biologist at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute in Durham, North Carolina, who is studying the spike mutations.
The Delta variant, which is now spreading around the world, hosts multiple mutations in the S1 subunit, including three in the RBD that seem to improve the RBD’s ability to bind to ACE2 and evade the immune system7.
Restricted entry
Once the viral spikes bind to ACE2, other proteins on the host cell’s surface initiate a process that leads to the merging of viral and cell membranes (see ‘Viral entry up close’).
The virus that causes SARS, SARS-CoV, uses either of two host protease enzymes to break in: TMPRSS2 (pronounced ‘tempress two’) or cathepsin L. TMPRSS2 is the faster route in, but SARS-CoV often enters instead through an endosome — a lipid-surrounded bubble — which relies on cathepsin L. When virions enter cells by this route, however, antiviral proteins can trap them.
SARS-CoV-2 differs from SARS-CoV because it efficiently uses TMPRSS2, an enzyme found in high amounts on the outside of respiratory cells. First, TMPRSS2 cuts a site on the spike’s S2 subunit8. That cut exposes a run of hydrophobic amino acids that rapidly buries itself in the closest membrane — that of the host cell. Next, the extended spike folds back onto itself, like a zipper, forcing the viral and cell membranes to fuse.
An animation of the way SARS-CoV-2 fuses with cells.
The virus then ejects its genome directly into the cell. By invading in this spring-loaded manner, SARS-CoV-2 infects faster than SARS-CoV and avoids being trapped in endosomes, according to work published in April by Barclay and her colleagues at Imperial College London9.
The virus’s speedy entry using TMPRSS2 explains why the malaria drug chloroquine didn’t work in clinical trials as a COVID-19 treatment, despite early promising studies in the lab10. Those turned out to have used cells that rely exclusively on cathepsins for endosomal entry. “When the virus transmits and replicates in the human airway, it doesn’t use endosomes, so chloroquine, which is an endosomal disrupting drug, is not effective in real life,” says Barclay.
The discovery also points to protease inhibitors as a promising therapeutic option to prevent a virus from using TMPRSS2, cathepsin L or other proteases to enter host cells. One TMPRSS2 inhibitor, camostat mesylate, which is approved in Japan to treat pancreatitis, blocked viral entry into lung cells8, but the drug did not improve patients’ outcomes in an initial clinical trial11.
“From my perspective, we should have such protease inhibitors as broad antivirals available to fight new disease outbreaks and prevent future pandemics at the very beginning,” says Stefan Pöhlmann, director of the Infection Biology Unit at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, who has led research on ACE2 binding and the TMPRSS2 pathway.
Deadly competition
The next steps of infection are murkier. “There are a lot more black boxes once you are inside the cell,” says chemist Janet Iwasa at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who is developing an annotated animation of the viral life cycle. “There’s more uncertainty, and competing hypotheses.”
After the virus shoots its RNA genome into the cell, ribosomes in the cytoplasm translate two sections of viral RNA into long strings of amino acids, which are then snipped into 16 proteins, including many involved in RNA synthesis. Later, more RNAs are generated that code for a total of 26 known viral proteins, including structural ones used to make new virus particles, such as the spike, and other accessory proteins. In this way, the virus begins churning out copies of its own messenger RNA. But it needs the cell’s machinery to translate those mRNAs into proteins.
How a rampant coronavirus variant blunts our immune defences
Coronaviruses take over that machinery in many ways. Virologist Noam Stern-Ginossar and her team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, zoomed in on three mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 suppresses the translation of host mRNA in favour of its own. None are exclusive to this virus, but the combination, speed and magnitude of the effects seem unique, says Stern-Ginossar.
First, the virus eliminates the competition: viral protein Nsp1, one of the first proteins translated when the virus arrives, recruits host proteins to systematically chop up all cellular mRNAs that don’t have a viral tag. When Stern-Ginossar’s team put that same tag on the end of a host mRNA, the mRNA was not chopped up12.
Second, infection reduces overall protein translation in the cell by 70%. Nsp1 is again the main culprit, this time physically blocking the entry channel of ribosomes so mRNA can’t get inside, according to work from two research teams13,14. The little translation capacity that remains is dedicated to viral RNAs, says Stern-Ginossar.
Finally, the virus shuts down the cell’s alarm system. This happens in numerous ways, but Stern-Ginossar’s team identified one clear mechanism for SARS-CoV-2: the virus prevents cellular mRNA from getting out of the nucleus, including instructions for proteins meant to alert the immune system to infection. A second team confirmed this finding, and again pointed to Nsp1: the protein seems to jam up exit channels in the nucleus so nothing can escape15.
Because gene transcripts can’t get out of the nucleus, the infected cells don’t release many interferons — these are signalling proteins that alert the immune system to the presence of a virus. SARS-Cov-2 is particularly efficient at shutting down this alarm system: compared with other respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV and respiratory syncytial virus, SARS-CoV-2 infection induces significantly lower levels of interferons16. And this June, researchers reported mutations in the Alpha variant that seem to enable it to subdue interferon production even more efficiently17.
“It’s clear that SARS-CoV-2 is a very fast virus that has a unique ability to prevent our immune system from recognizing and combating infection in the first stages,” says Stern-Ginossar. By the time the immune system does realize there is a virus, there is so much of it that immune-response proteins sometimes flood the bloodstream at a faster rate than normal — which can cause damage. Doctors saw early in the pandemic that some people with COVID-19 who become very ill are harmed by an overactive immune response to SARS-CoV-2, as well as by the virus itself. Some proven treatments work by dampening down this immune response.
Renovation station
Once the virus has taken over host translation, it starts a home makeover, extensively remodelling the interior and exterior of the cell to its needs.
First, some of the newly made viral spike proteins travel to the surface of the cell and poke out of the host-cell membrane. There, they activate a host calcium-ion channel, which expels a fatty coating onto the outside of the cell — the same coating found on cells that naturally fuse together, such as muscle cells. At this point, the infected cell fuses to neighbouring cells expressing ACE2, developing into massive individual respiratory cells filled with up to 20 nuclei.
Fused cell structures (syncytia) seen in cells expressing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (green). Nuclei are in blue and the cell skeleton is in red.
Credit: Mauro Giacca
These fused structures, called syncytia, are induced by viral infections such as HIV and herpes simplex virus, but not by the SARS virus, says molecular biologist Mauro Giacca at King’s College London, who led the team that published the finding in April18. He hypothesizes that forming syncytia allows infected cells to thrive for long periods of time, churning out more and more virions. “This is not a hit-and-run virus,” he says. “It persists.” A second team, led by researcher Qiang Sun at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing, found that some COVID-19-infected cells even form syncytia with lymphocytes — one of the body’s own immune cells19. This is a known mechanism of immune evasion by tumour cells, but not by viruses. It suggests that infected cells avoid immune detection by simply grabbing on to and merging with nearby immune scouts.
On the inside of the cell, even more change is occurring. Like other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 transforms the long, thin endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a network of flat membranes involved in protein synthesis and transport, into double-membrane spheres, as if the ER were blowing bubbles. These double-membrane vesicles (DMVs) might provide a safe place for viral RNA to be replicated and translated, shielding it from innate immune sensors in the cell, but that hypothesis is still being investigated.
Proteins involved in making DMVs could be good drug targets, because they seem to be necessary for viral replication. For instance, a host protein, TMEM41B, is needed to mobilize cholesterol and other lipids to expand the ER membranes so that all the virus parts will fit inside20. “When you take TMEM41B out, it has a major impact on infection,” says Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who was involved in the research. The coronavirus transmembrane protein Nsp3 could also be a target: it creates a crown-like pore in the walls of the DMVs to shuttle out newly made viral RNA21.
Most viruses that have an outer wrapping, known as an envelope, form this feature by assembly directly at the edge of the cell, co-opting some of the cell’s own plasma membrane on their way out. But newly made coronavirus proteins take a different path.
For years, evidence has suggested that coronaviruses are transported out of the cell through the Golgi complex, an organelle that works like a post office, packaging molecules in membranes and sending them off to other parts of the cell. There, the virus forms a lipid envelope from the Golgi complex’s membrane; newly formed virions are then carried inside Golgi vesicles to the cell surface, where they are spat out of the cell, says virologist and cell biologist Carolyn Machamer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who has studied coronaviruses for 30 years.
But in December, cell biologist Nihal Altan-Bonnet at the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues reported that they had detected coronaviruses leaving the cell through lysosomes — cellular rubbish bins full of enzymes that break down cell parts22. Blocking the Golgi-based secretory pathway didn’t seem to affect the amount of infectious virus being released, says Altan-Bonnet. Her team’s evidence22 suggests that viral proteins form an envelope by budding into the ER, then take over lysosomes to get out of the cell. The researchers are currently testing inhibitors that block the lysosomal exit process as potential antiviral candidates.
Leaving a cell through either the Golgi or lysosomes is slow and inefficient compared with budding out of a plasma membrane, so scientists don’t know why SARS-CoV-2 does it. Machamer suspects that the lipid composition of a Golgi- or lysosome-derived envelope is somehow more beneficial to the virus than one from the plasma membrane. “If we understood this part a little bit better, there would be great opportunities for novel antiviral therapeutics,” she says.
Last slice
On the way out of the cell, one more event makes this virus into an infectious juggernaut: a quick snip at a site of five amino acids prepares the virus to strike its next target.
Where other coronaviruses have a single arginine amino acid at the junction of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike, SARS-CoV-2 has a line of five amino acids: proline, arginine, arginine, alanine and arginine. “Because the site was unusual, we focused on it, and it turned out that, yes, the site is essential for invasion of lung cells,” says Pöhlmann. In May 2020, he and his colleagues reported that a host-cell protein called furin recognizes and clips that string of amino acids — and the cut is “essential” for the virus to enter human lung cells efficiently23.
It’s not the first time that researchers have identified a furin cleavage site on a virus; highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses also have it, says Barclay. When a colleague sent Barclay a strain of SARS-CoV-2 in culture that had spontaneously lost the furin cleavage site, her team found that ferrets infected with this strain shed viral particles in lower amounts than did those infected with the pandemic strain, and did not transmit the infection to nearby animals9. At the same time as Barclay’s team reported its results in a September 2020 preprint, a study in the Netherlands also found that coronavirus with an intact furin cleavage site enters human airway cells faster than do those without it24.
Furin is suspected to cut the site at some point during virion assembly, or just before release. The timing might explain why the virus exits through the Golgi or lysosomes, says Tom Gallagher, a virologist at Loyola University Chicago in Illinois. “The virus, once assembled, moves into an organelle where it can be bathed in the presence of the furin protease.”
By snipping the bond between the S1 and S2 subunits, the furin cut loosens up virion spike proteins so that during cell entry they respond to a second cut by TMPRSS2, which exposes the hydrophobic area that rapidly buries itself in a host-cell membrane, says Gallagher. If spikes are not pre-clipped by furin —and they aren’t always — they bypass TMPRSS2, and enter through the slower endosomal pathway, if at all.
The race for antiviral drugs to beat COVID — and the next pandemic
Two coronavirus variants, Alpha and Delta, have altered furin cleavage sites. In the Alpha variant, the initial proline amino acid is changed to a histidine (P681H) ; in the Delta variant, it is changed to an arginine (P681R). Both changes make the sequence less acidic, and the more basic the string of amino acids, the more effectively furin recognizes and cuts it, says Barclay. “We would hypothesize that this is the virus getting even better at transmitting.”
More furin cuts mean more spike proteins primed to enter human cells. In SARS-CoV, less than 10% of spike proteins are primed, says Menachery, whose lab group has been quantifying the primed spike proteins but is yet to publish this work. In SARS-CoV-2, that percentage rises to 50%. In the Alpha variant, it’s more than 50%. In the highly transmissible Delta variant, the group has found, greater than 75% of spikes are primed to infect a human cell.
Known unknowns
The scientific community is still scratching the surface of its understanding of SARS-CoV-2. Key unknowns include the number of ACE2 receptors needed to bind to each spike protein; when exactly the S2 site is cleaved by TMPRSS2; and the number of spikes needed for virus–cell membrane fusion, says McLellan — and that’s just for entry. In April 2020, a team at the University of California, San Francisco, identified at least 332 interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins25.
It is not easy to keep pace with the quickly mutating virus. Most mutations so far are associated with how effectively the virus spreads, not with how much the virus damages the host, experts agree. This month, a study reported that the Delta variant grew more rapidly and at higher levels inside people’s lungs and throats than did earlier versions of the virus26.
But it is not yet certain how Delta’s mutations have supercharged the variant in this way, says Stern-Ginossar. “This is something many labs are trying to figure out.”
9,350-year-old structure found in the Mediterranean “could rewrite history”
9,350-year-old structure found in the Mediterranean “could rewrite history”
In 2015 a strange 11.88 meter high monolith was discovered off the coast of Sicily, 39 meters deep. This structure is very similar to Stonehenge and could rewrite history.
The Stonehenge was found off the coast of Sicily.
The Stonehenge found in the Mediterranean Sea is at least 9,350 years old . Studies revealed that it weighs about 15 tons and is divided into two parts.
An underwater Stonehenge?
Emanuele Lodolo , an oceanographer at the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics in Italy, along with Zvi Ben-Avraham, from the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv, were responsible for finding the monolith.
“The monolith is made of stones other than those that make up all the neighboring outcrops, and is quite isolated from them.”
The stones that compose it are chalcirudites, from the late Pleistocene age , as determined from radiocarbon measurements.
The structure was found on the Bank of Panteleria Vecchia, an ancient island in the Sicilian Channel. This island, according to archaeologists, was submerged during a flood 9,300 years ago.
This time chronologically squares with the beginning of the Mesolithic of Europe and the Middle East. The discovery of this monolith fully expands the knowledge of the first civilizations of the Mediterranean basin and the knowledge about their technology and development.
The structure required a cutting, extraction, transportation and installation system that undoubtedly demonstrates advanced engineering skills and techniques.
“The belief that our ancestors lacked the knowledge, skill and technology necessary to exploit marine resources or make sea voyages must be progressively abandoned.
The recent findings of submerged archeology have definitively dismantled the idea of technological primitivism that is usually attributed to the hunter-gatherer coastal settlers ”, the archaeologists concluded.
Radar view of the monolith.
Who built the monolith?
While it is true that the monolith of Sicily is very similar to Stonehenge, this could explain more about the civilizations that inhabited the Mediterranean basin.
To date it is not known if the structure was alone and if it was part of a group, like the monument in England , which is much younger.
Currently, little or nothing is known about the inhabitants of Pantalleria Vecchia some 10,000 years ago . However, this construction demonstrates his skill for construction.
Experts believe that this town traded with the fish they caught, with other islands. The stone may have served as a primitive “lighthouse” , even as a place to moor or anchor ships.
Although, its enormity does not convince much that it was used for that purpose. If so, the boats must be huge.
All this information suggests that a prehistoric civilization not only prospered, but was much more advanced than is believed. This could change the history of the region completely. Here is an interesting video of submerged cities.
Osirians: the “advanced civilization” that lived in Egypt before the pharaohs
Osirians: the “advanced civilization” that lived in Egypt before the pharaohs
The Osirians, a civilization that comes from the Mediterranean and predates Dynastic Egypt. Many researchers have discovered vestiges of the advanced of this civilization, showing that they had ships similar to the Vimanas.
Evidence has been found that the Osirians inhabited the Mediterranean.
Years of research have revealed that the Mediterranean was an immense fertile valley . Specifically in times where Atlantis existed. During that time, another possible civilization existed , known as the Osirians.
It is believed that they were extremely advanced , having inappropriate technology for the time. Making use of ships equivalent to the Hindu Vimana .
The Osirians: Ancient Technology
During the existence of the Osirian civilization, the Nile was known as the Stix River , and it traveled a different course.
Instead of emptying into the Mediterranean Sea, it continued to the Osirian Valley and then turned west, to flow into the deepest part of the Mediterranean Valley, where it created a large lake.
It then flowed between Malta and Sicily and south to Sardinia, reaching the Atlantic at Gibraltar. This immense valley, together with the Sahara, was the territory where the Osirians inhabited.
The archeology agree that there are in the Mediterranean Sea, to the least 200 sunken cities . The Egyptian civilization, along with the Minoan and Mycenaean of Crete and Greece are, in theory, remains of the Osirian culture.
This civilization erected earthquake-proof buildings , they possessed electricity and other common technologies in the time of Atlantis.
“They also had flying craft similar to Vimanas and other means of transportation, usually powered by electricity . One of the great proofs of this are the car tracks found in Malta, which cross large cliffs until they are lost under the water ”.
The Osirians are believed to have used these routes to transport stones from quarries to cities that are now submerged .
The Ba’albek platform , in Lebanon, has been one of the main mysteries of archeology, and is believed to be Osirian technology .
This platform is made of the largest carved rocks in the world ; the ashlars of Ba’albek. Some of these pieces are more than 24 meters long and 4 meters long . They are believed to weigh between 1,200 to 1,500 tons .
The Ba’albek platform Osirian technology?
Birth and end of the Osirian civilization
According to mythology, this civilization was created by the god Osiris . According to Egyptian legends, Osiris is the son of Nut, goddess of the sky and Geb, god of the Earth.
Osiris married Isis and from that union, the god Horus was born. Osiris is the brother of Nepthys, goddess of death and of Set, god of chaos and disorder.
It is even believed that the name Osiris comes from the Greek corruption of the word Asar or Uso, which means “the force of the Eye” or “He who sees the throne.” This translation is based on the hieroglyphs used to represent Osiris: a throne and an eye.
As for his disappearance, it is also a mystery. It is believed to have existed about 15,000 years ago and was “one of the most sophisticated civilizations of the time of Atlantis.”
They had magnificent cities and roads, ports, trade routes, and more. It was home to sailors and merchants. In addition, he built megalithic structures with unique earthquake-proof technology.
However, during the destruction of Atlantis, it is believed that there was a colossal change in the Atlantic Ocean. This caused the Stix River to completely change its course, and the Mediterranean basin began to flood.
The churning of the water destroyed most of the Osirian cities, forcing them to move to higher ground.
This theory would explain the mysterious megalithic remains that have been found throughout the Mediterranean. This has caused thousands of sailors, archaeologists and researchers to venture each year in search of the ruins of the Osirian civilization.
With billionaire Jeff Bezos joining billionaire Richard Branson in almost-space, and billionaire Elon Musk raking in more money transporting NASA astronauts to space, winning NASA contracts to put humans on the moon and planning – with or without NASA – to send humans to Mars, it’s no wonder a popular meme making the rounds asks the question, “What if UFOs are just billionaires from other planets?” Unlike many memes, it’s a serious question … and one reason why space travel may be just for billionaires is a main reason why NASA’s budget is so high – the cost of space food. Is a new NASA study researching bacteria that eat rocks actually creating a future menu?
Food — $2000 per person, per day Rate for food and beverages from NASA (free-flight and/or docked). Upmass and trash disposal not included.
That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? What’s upmass?
Upmass/Disposal — $88,000 – $164,000 per person, per day Estimated rate for pre-staging food and crew provisions on ISS, as well as disposing of pre-staged items on NASA vehicles. Cost will vary depending upon quantities of items flown and disposed of on NASA vehicles.
View of Astronaut Peggy Whitson, flight engineer (left) and Cosmonaut Valery Korzun, commander (right), eating a meal in the Service Module (SM)/Zvezda. Tomato and hamburger are floating. Photo was taken during Expedition Five on the International Space Station (ISS).
(NASA)
NASA recently updated its prices for “private astronaut missions” to the ISS and the cost of food and waste disposal alone may be the real hidden reason why Bezos and Branson only spent a few minutes in near-space and didn’t serve snacks to their passengers. NASA isn’t competing with either company for the space tourism business – those prices are for corporations interested in conducting scientific and research missions on the ISS. As it explains:
“The new pricing for private astronaut missions reflects full reimbursement for the value of NASA resources that are above the space station baseline capability.”
“Due to the complexity of private astronaut missions and differing mission concepts, reimbursable values for these missions may vary.”
Of course they will. NASA knows that government contracts never go down in price – only up. To put these prices in layman’s terms, Space Daily looked at the cost of sending an item that most people travelers want to take along with them on a flight.
“The cost of a single 16-ounce bottle of water ranges from $9,100 to $43,180.”
$43,800! Can you go with water from Costco instead of the truffle-infused, gold-flaked artisan stuff from the Alps? Of course, when you’re on an expense account and someone else is paying for it, money is no object. An Italian astronaut who took an espresso machine with him to the ISS set the Italian government back $1.9 million.
Perhaps we should just wait for a Star Trek-style replicator which fictionally turned pure energy into food, complete with plates and utensils. Physicists from Imperial College London’s Blackett Physics Laboratory proved in 2014 that it’s possible to create matter from light, and Cemvita Factory Inc. in Houston is said to be developing a photobioreactor that converts carbon dioxide into nutrients and pharmaceutics. However, most current projects use 3D printers that merely turn matter into different forms of matter. No wonder NASA is still recycling urine into water.
Astronaut Brian Duffy, STS-92 mission commander, samples a beverage during a crew food evaluation session in the food laboratory at the Engineering and Applications Development Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center (JSC).
(NASA)
If all else fails, NASA’s BRAILLE Project is studying life in volcanic caves as an analog for possible life on Mars and found bacteria that lives by consuming rocks. Is it any wonder Elon Musk is now saying Tesla’s new Cybertruck’s may cost a million dollars each?
As Giorgio Tsoukalos might say:
“I’m not saying it’s billionaire aliens … but it’s billionaire aliens.”
Eduard “Billie” Albert Meier was born in the town of Bülach in the Zürcher Unterland of Switzerland in 1937, and from a very young age he would begin to have some very odd experiences. At the age of just 5, when in 1942 he claims to have met a gentleman by the name of “Sfath,” who was supposedly from a race of extraterrestrials he would call the Pleiadians, from the Pleiadian star cluster. Over the years he would make telepathic contact with other Pleiadians, in particular a woman named Asket, and they would purportedly teach him of their ways, culture, and life on their world, as well as instructing him on how to get humanity back on track after having lost our way long ago. This would continue until 1964, when Meier would claim that all contact with the aliens suddenly ceased. However, this seems to have not been the end of his strange adventures, and he would go on to become a very controversial figure in the field of UFOs.
In 1975, Meier claims that he was contacted once again by the Pleiadians, this time a woman named Semjase, who was apparently the granddaughter of Sfath. This contact would inspire Meier to start a program called the Freie Interessengemeinschaft für Grenz- und Geisteswissenschaften und Ufologiestudien (Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies), and over the decades he would claim hundreds of telepathic meetings with these aliens, especially Semjase, and it was with her that he would start to churn out photographs that have been simultaneously iconic and controversial in Ufology to this day.
Eduard Albert Meier
According to Meier, the Pleiadians began allowing him to clearly photograph what he calls their “beamships,” and he would begin to release these photographs at a rapid clip, ultimately taking 1,476 photos and 34 films between the years of 1975 and 1981, all remarkable in their clarity. He even took photos of the aliens themselves, as well as those that were allegedly taken off world or even in the prehistoric past. In addition to this, he would take transcripts of his conversations with the aliens, as well as metal samples, sound recordings and film footage, often supposedly giving technological insights and predictions claimed to be well ahead of their time. Much of this has actively embraced by some in the field, with one article on the prnewswire, which refers to the research of UFO researcher Michael Horn and says:
Some of Billy Meier’s 1,200, were independently authenticated, pre-digital era UFO photos, taken 1975 – 1981, provided to Harvard professor Avi Loeb as the best evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs. During the course of researching thousands of pages of information Meier claims the extraterrestrials provided, Horn and other researchers have found over 250 examples of specific, previously unknown scientific information that Meier published up to more than 60 years before “official discovery.” Ironclad proof that Meier published the information first is established by internationally recognized copyrights. Conveyed in the clear language of science, and subsequently confirmed by NASA discoveries, is information about every planet in the solar system, as well as black holes, the speed of gravity, the impending threat posed by asteroid Apophis, and terrestrial environmental, seismic and volcanic events, etc.
The pictures themselves are iconic and instantly recognizable, even if you don’t consciously realize where they came from. For instance, Agent Mulder’s “I want to believe” UFO poster in his office in the hit show X Files is one of Meier’s, although only in the first three seasons and was changed in the 4th season due to an intellectual property suit brought by Meier, as the creators of the show never obtained permission to use the image. When the photos were first released, they made major waves, becoming the most highly publicized UFO photos of all time. You can see a selection of some of the photos here. No one had ever seen such clear photos of UFOs before, but it was this clarity and the prolific nature of them that immediately drew skeptics. For one, the photos have been pointed out as, well, looking pretty fake and staged, with sometimes even strings visible. There is also the fact that the aliens themselves conveniently look exactly like humans, and none of this was helped by Meier’s wife’s confession in 1997 that he had been making plastic UFO models to photograph, and that the aliens he had taken pictures of were merely photos of Michelle DellaFave and Susan Lund, members of the singing and dancing troupe The Golddiggers, which was later verified. Also fueling the skepticism was Meier’s group being increasingly seen as a creepy UFO cult, and his bold claims that he was the seventh reincarnation after six prophets common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
This all seems pretty damning for the veracity of Meier’s famous collection of photographs, but he has had those willing to stand up for him as well, and who continue to vouch for his authenticity. There have even been claims that the fake looking photos have been manipulated to seem that way in order to be dismissed as fake as part of a government cover-up and disinformation program. The 1988 booklet, The Truth About Billy Meier says of this:
UFO contact person, Billy Meier, is often attacked by uninformed people who do not have the slightest knowledge of Billy’s comprehensive contacts and his mission, and all the details. They have never even met Billy in person. Uninformed critics and untrustworthy people who feel Billy’s contacts and mission are impossible, discredit and accuse him of being a charlatan or worse, and try to ridicule him. However, generally speaking, they are ill-informed on the issues and contexts and, therefore, are in no position to pass any realistic and competent judgement on the mission, the contacts, or Billy’s person. Billy did not strive for these contacts with extraterrestrials. On the contrary, he was sought out by the Pleiadians, because of an ancient mission from thousands of years ago. Furthermore, it has been shown that Billy did not agree to these contacts for financial gain, publicity, or personal fame, which can be evidenced by his withdrawn lifestyle.
Many people still claim that Billy faked the hundreds of UFO photos he has taken to achieve some form of personal fame and/or monetary gain for himself, despite the positive analyses performed by several competent scientists and photo experts. In particular, they seem to be people who, because of some strange opinions concerning the rest of the world, politics, or religions, cannot bear the truth that may differ from their own beliefs. They are willing to suppress the truth with the aid of mean, dishonest methods, and to extinguish it, if possible, even if it means going over dead bodies, tarnishing and destroying the reputation of another human being. Most of these allegations are not even backed up by scientific research, or they contain false, distorted data. In addition, it is a known fact that numerous photos of Billy’s were carefully manipulated in the past to show strings and similar anomalies and were widely distributed in attempts to discredit him. However, the decision as to their authenticity ultimately lies with each and every individual.
One of Meier’s photos
There is also the researcher Horn, who has tirelessly stood up for Meier’s photographs and data, urging people to look deeper into the matter and not disregard this supposed “evidence.” He has said of it:
While Meier’s evidence is certainly extraordinary, the term itself is prejudicial. Wasn’t it once ‘extraordinary’ to claim that the earth moved around the sun? Testing any claims using scientific methodologies will determine the actual facts. The internet allows anyone to examine Meier’s evidence, check copyright dates, etc., and use today’s state-of-the-art software – not available until decades after Meier took his UFO photos – to analyze and authenticate his evidence. If deemed genuine, we are now confronted with the most important – and unexpected – discovery in science and human history, the confirmed existence of, and ongoing contact with, intelligent extraterrestrial life. Should that be the case, we will want to pay particular attention to the warnings they have provided about coming environmental, geopolitical and financial events that may threaten our future survival. And I think this may be the underlying…reason for the Meier contacts.
It’s all pretty sketchy reasoning, and the photos definitely look fake. Whatever one may think, the infamous Billy Meier photos have been largely debunked, although there are still plenty of people who hold them up as the real deal. Regardless of their pedigree, they are among some of the most well-publicized, instantly recognizable UFO photos there are, and have managed to reverberate through the UFO community to this day, for better or worse.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
UFO Sighted Over Orlando, Florida ( July 9, 2021 )
STATEMENT : Fantastic Sighting in Orlando, Florida ; Huge glowing orange light sphere filmed rising from the sea. Orlando , FL on July 9th , 2021
This sphere shines so brightly that it could be mistaken for the sun if it wasn't for the logical reason it was filmed overnight. The powerful glow of orange light reflects off the ocean creating a trail much like the full moon in the clear night sky.
We can observe that the sphere that seems to have left the ocean, slowly ascends towards the layers of clouds and as soon as it crosses , its strong glow forms an imense orange colored disk that slowly disappears in the darkness of the night.
It's just extraordinary when the sphere touches the clouds and starts to cross it, an impressive and powerful orange disk of light is created as if the sky itself was melting and the intense glow spreads out completely illuminating the entire area over the ocean around Orlando. Quickly researchers literally rushed to get information if any spacecraft had been launched that night nearby or even anywhere in the United States...
... and researching government agencies and space programming on that particular night, neither NASA and SPACE X or any other private space companies launched any kind of spacecraft or rocket to space .
In addition , any kind of rocket would leave a huge trail in the night sky , as it happens all over the world . So any activity related to space missions or any other is totally ruled out and the huge orange ball of light emerged from the ocean near the beach and we can clearly see that it is slowly rising towards the clouds until it crosses and its glow disappears behind the clouds. Just as the coast of California is a hotspot of incredible sightings of extraterrestrial crafts and glowing lights underwater , Unidentified Submerged Objects ( USOs ) , the coast of Florida is also another place where hundreds if not thousands of UFO sightings have been properly recorded by both civilians as military .
I think it is not necessary to remember you all that right in front is the Bermuda or Devil's Triangle , one of the greatest mistery of world ufology until present day which has an overwhelming arsenal with the most bizarre UFOs sightings all time .
credit : Uillian Braga
RELATED VIDEOS
UFO Sighted Over Russia ( July 25, 2021 )
Impressive UFO making Strange lights was sighted over the skies of Russia on July 25, 2021 : what is this ?
credit : U.S.F
Shapeshifting UFO Sighted Over Newport, Rhode Island ( July 16, 2021 )
Amazing Shapeshifting UFO was sighted over Newport, Rhode Island on July 26, 2021
STATEMENT : Do ufo hide in clouds? This is in Newport
In October 2019, U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor, who was the subject of a New York Times articleabout his 2004 UFO sighting, discussed a spooky new sighting a fellow pilot revealed to him after they were both out of the Navy.
According to Fravor, the eyewitness was a former pilot of the MH-53E Sea Dragon, the Navy version of the Marine Corps’ CH-53E Sea Stallion, based at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads, on the island of Puerto Rico. Twice while recovering spent practice munitions out of the water, the pilot spotted a weird underwater object.
This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
In the first incident, the pilot saw a "dark mass" underwater as he and his team retrieved a flying practice drone. The pilot described the object as a “big” mass, “kinda circular,” and he was certain it wasn't a submarine. In the pilot’s second sighting, a practice torpedo that the pilot was sent to recover was “sucked down” into the depths of the ocean in the presence of a similar underwater object. The torpedo was never seen again.
Elsewhere in the interview, Fravor reveals that a 79-year-old woman contacted him after his sighting went public. The woman explained that her father, a naval officer, was at one time based at the naval station in San Francisco in the 1950s. When she was a child, her father showed her a telegram that stated unidentified objects had been sighted going in and out of the water at a now forgotten set of latitude and longitude coordinates. The woman’s father told her, “We get these all the time, and it’s always in the same area.”
A BQM-174 high performance target drone similar to that recovered according to retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor.
DAN KITWOODGETTY IMAGES
These sightings are similar to Fravor’s own sighting. According to the retired Navy pilot, the only reason he had seen the now-infamous "Tic Tac" UFO was because it was hovering above a mysterious larger object that was sighted underwater. Fravor describes the object as cross shaped and approximately the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner. He has further described the water above it as though it were "boiling" or "frothing," and said the object disappeared after it caught his attention.
United Airlines 737-924 airliner.
ICON SPORTS WIREGETTY IMAGES
In 1970, biologist Ivan Sanderson published the book Invisible Residents. Sanderson, a noted student of unusual phenomena, devoted the book to sightings of what were later called Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs. USOs are defined as unknown craft that are sighted in the water, sighted rising up out of the water, or diving into the water. Sanderson catalogued scores of reports of USOs:
On the 19th of April, 1957, crew members aboard the Kitsukawa Maru, a Japanese fishing boat, spotted two metallic silvery objects descending from the sky into the sea (original emphasis). The objects, estimated to be ten meters long, were without wings of any kind. As the hit the water, they created a violent turbulence. The exact location was reported as 31° 15’ N and 143° 30’ E.
Sanderson also reports an incident that reportedly took place off the coast of Puerto Rico in 1963 during an anti-submarine warfare exercise.
The maneuvers were conducted off Puerto Rico in the Atlantic some 500 miles southeast of the continental United States. All reports seem to agree that there were five “small” naval vessels concerned, but in more than one account the aircraft carrier Wasp is stated to have been the command ship…
A sonar operator on one of the small vessels, otherwise listed as a destroyer, reported to his bridge that one of the submarines had broken formation and gone off in what appeared to be pursuit of some unknown object. This operator did not, of course, know if this was a “plant”, since the maneuvers they were engaged in were exercises designed to train personnel in detection of enemy craft...However, this operator’s report was not all within the limits of any such simulation,. Trouble was that said subaqueous object was traveling at “over 150 knots”!
USS Wasp in 1964.
U.S. NAVY VIA NAVSOURCE
According to Sanderson, “no less than [13] craft,” including anti-submarine warfare patrol aircraft, tracked the high-speed, unknown object. Furthermore:
It is said that technicians kept track of this object for four days, and that it maneuvered round about, and to depths of 27,000 feet.
USS Wasp was indeed an anti-submarine warfare carrier in 1963 and served in the Atlantic Fleet until decommissioning in 1972. Unfortunately, Sanderson doesn't provide any sourcing for the incident nor is there any other information about it posted on the internet.
The National UFO Recording Center maintains a database of sightings reported to the NUFORC, both by email and hotline. There are many reports of UFO-type objects seen coming out of or going into the ocean.
Off the coast of Half Moon Bay, California, an eyewitness reported that in 2007 she observed three UFOs while aboard the cruise ship Dawn Princess (renamed in 2017 Pacific Explorer.)
“After about 5 minutes, three softly glowing objects came into view – three uniform, nearly spherical objects, evenly spaced in a line parallel to the ship’s hull and hovering just above the water surface… They appeared to stay in one place while the ship moved past them. They were hovering, but didn’t disturb the water below them. Just as they went out of my sight, the left one (toward the bow) splashed down into the water and disappeared."
The cruise ship Dawn Princess, Western Australia, 2013.
JAMES D. MORGANGETTY IMAGES
One report logged in April 2019 states that an object resembling a “small white boat” flew up out of the water near Imperial Beach, California, “at about [500] feet.” The object promptly “flew south at a very high rate of speed.”
Whatever USOs are—figments of the imagination, mechanical malfunctions, secret government craft, or even the work of extraterrestrials—there's a long history of sightings. Fravor’s anonymous helicopter pilot is just the latest in a long line of mysteries.
On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a much-anticipatedreport on UFOs to Congress.
The military has rebranded unidentified flying objects as unidentified aerial phenomena – UAPs – in part to avoid the stigma that has been attached to claims of aliens visiting the Earth since the Roswell incident in 1947. The report presents no convincing evidence that alien spacecraft have been spotted, but some of the data defy easy interpretation.
I'm a professor of astronomy who has written extensively on the search for life in the universe. I also teach a free online class on astrobiology. I do not believe that the new government report or any other sightings of UFOs in the past are proof of aliens visiting Earth. But the report is important because it opens the door for a serious look at UFOs. Specifically, it encourages the U.S. government to collect better data on UFOs, and I think the release of the report increases the chances that scientists will try to interpret that data. Historically, UFOs have felt off limits to mainstream science, but perhaps no more.
Three videos from the U.S. military sparked a recent surge in interest in UFOs.
What's in the UFO report?
The No. 1 thing the report focuses on is the lack of high-quality data. Here are the highlights from the slender nine-page report, covering a total of 144 UAP sightings from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021:
“Limited data and inconsistent reporting are key challenges to evaluating UAP."
Some observations “could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception."
“UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security."
Of the 144 sightings, the task force was “able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained."
“Some UAP many be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or non-governmental entity."
UFOs are taboo among scientists
UFO means unidentified flying object. Nothing more, nothing less. You'd think scientists would enjoy the challenge of solving this puzzle. Instead, UFOs have been taboo for academic scientists to investigate, and so unexplained reports have not received the scrutiny they deserve.
Another reason for the scientific hesitance is that UFOs have been co-opted by popular culture. They are part of a landscape of conspiracy theories that includes accounts of abduction by aliens and crop circles. Scientists worry about their professional reputations, and the association of UFOs with these supernatural stories causes most researchers to avoid the topic.
However, a review in 1998 by a panel led by Peter Sturrock, a professor of applied physics at Stanford University, concluded that some sightings are accompanied by physical evidence that deserves scientific study. Sturrock also surveyed professional astronomers and found that nearly half thought UFOs were worthy of scientific study, with higher interest among younger and more well-informed astronomers.
If astronomers are intrigued by UFOs – and believe some cases deserve study with academic rigor – what's holding them back? A history of mistrust between ufologists and scientists hasn't helped. And while UFO research has employed some of the tools of the scientific method, it has not had the core of skeptical, evidence-based reasoning that demarcates science from pseudoscience.
A search of 90,000 recent and current grants awarded by the National Science Foundation finds none addressing UFOs or related phenomena. I've served on review panels for 35 years, and can imagine the reaction if such a proposal came up for peer review: raised eyebrows and a quick vote not to fund.
Radio telescopes like the Allen Telescope Array seen here scan the sky looking for signs of intelligent life in the universe.
While the scientific community has almost entirely avoided engaging with UFOs, a much more mainstream search for intelligent aliens and their technology has been going on for decades.
The search is motivated by the fact that astronomers have, to date, discovered over 4,400 planets orbiting other stars. Called exoplanets, some are close to the Earth's mass and at just the right distance from their stars to potentially have water on their surfaces – meaning they might be habitable.
This confidence has fueled an active search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI. It has been unsuccessful so far. As a result, researchers have recast the question “Are we alone?" to “Where are the aliens?" The absence of evidence for intelligent aliens is called the Fermi paradox. First articulated by the physicist Enrico Fermi, it's a paradox because advanced civilizations should be spread throughout the galaxy, yet we see no sign of their existence.
The SETI activity has not been immune from scientists' criticism. It was starved of federal funding for decades and recently has gotten most of its support from private sources. However, in 2020, NASA resumed funding for SETI, and the new NASA administrator wants researchers to pursue the topic of UFOs.
In this context, the intelligence report is welcome. The report draws few concrete conclusions about UFOs and avoids any reference to aliens or extraterrestrial spacecraft. However, it notes the importance of destigmatizing UFOs so that more pilots report what they see. It also sets a goal of moving from anecdotal observations to standardized and scientific data collection. Time will tell if this is enough to draw scientists into the effort, but the transparency to publish the report at all reverses a long history of secrecy surrounding U.S. government reports on UFOs.
I don't see any convincing evidence of alien spacecraft, but as a curious scientist, I hope the subset of UFO sightings that are truly unexplained gets closer study. Scientists are unlikely to weigh in if their skepticism generates attacks from “true believers" or they get ostracized by their colleagues. Meanwhile, the truth is still out there.
This article has been updated to clarify that the report was produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Mysterious orbs and ray of light in the sky over Zhengzhou, China
Mysterious orbs and ray of light in the sky over Zhengzhou, China
Asuspected ray of light and two orbs appear in the clouds over Zhengzhou, China on July 24, 2021.
The video shows two bright orbs and a strange ray of light with blue lights flashing and moving around the two orbs. It is unknown what the phenomenon could have been.
Welcome to UFO Seekers℗ Radio. Tim explains what’s inside of AREA 51 and why you can’t take pictures of it. Disclaimer: The opinion(s) of the host do not represent the view(s) of UFO Seekers®. “Let’s see what’s out there.” UFO & Alien Investigators based in Bakersfield, California founded in 2016. Join us in the field as we sky-watch for UFO activity, talk to witnesses, investigate hot spots, visit locations, search for aliens, and more.
NASA’S CURIOSITY MARS ROVER IS DESIGNED TO TEAR OFF ITS OWN WHEELS
NASA’S CURIOSITY MARS ROVER IS DESIGNED TO TEAR OFF ITS OWN WHEELS
WHO NEEDS 'EM?
NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS
Body Mod
Over the course of its nearly decade-long stay on Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover team has considered making a couple of unusual modifications to the robot’s structure.
Driving around on Mars for that long has been pretty rough on Curiosity’s wheels. And as the damage worsens over the coming years, the NASA crew might decide to steer Curiosity into a sharp rock in order to rip out its own wheels, IEEE Spectrum reports. That way, there’s less of a chance that the damaged pieces end up breaking Curiosity’s wiring or other components, bringing the whole mission to a halt.
Break a Leg
Thankfully, IEEE Spectrum reports that even the most damaged of Curiosity’s wheels could survive for another decade or more before they need to be removed. That’s based on NASA’s predictions for how much driving the rover will do over the coming years, coupled with a recent effort to stick to gentler terrain as much as possible.
“Since other mitigations that the team has put in place are extending wheel life predicts further and further into the future, it is unlikely that we will need to perform a wheel shed maneuver,” Curiosity team member Evan Graser told IEEE Spectrum. “There’s always a chance of reaching the end of a wheel’s life during the mission, but we’re many years away from even needing to make the decision whether to pursue shedding further.”
Lessons Learned
The big question is whether NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, will face the same risks. Graser told IEEE Spectrum that NASA was well aware of the damage to Curiosity’s wheels before Perseverance left Earth, so engineers were able to build far more resilient wheels that should last a lot longer.
But maybe, someday, if Perseverance happens to last for years and years as well, we may someday see it scooting along the Martian landscape with some shredded up wheels left behind in its dust.
When you’re in an unexplored wilderness, you’d better be quiet, because you never know whether there might be dangerous predators lurking. Unfortunately, Earth has not been following this cautionary principle so far: we’ve been broadcasting radio waves into space for more than a century. If there are technological civilizations within a hundred light-years that monitor their sky with radio telescopes similar to ours, then they may already know about our existence. We could hear from them in the future. Our saving grace might be that chemical rockets, similar to those used in the Voyager or New Horizons missions, would take a million years to traverse that hundred light years. And so, we might be out for prolonged suspense before encountering our cosmic neighbors.
If extraterrestrials eventually arrive at our doorstep, the question is: how should we respond? Clearly, interstellar affairs are not an imminent policy concern for any nation at this moment, so there is no international protocol issued by the United Nations for what to do. We should keep in mind that within a million years, humans might reside on the moon, Mars or free-floating space platforms, and each community might choose to respond differently. It is premature to contemplate a global policy long before it is required.
How much advance warning will we have? That depends on the size of the vehicle used by the ETs. Even without generating artificial light, any alien spacecraft would reflect sunlight. The Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii can detect reflected sunlight from objects bigger than a few hundred feet, the scale of a football field, that pass within the orbit of the Earth around the sun. The first interstellar visitor of such size was discovered by this telescope on October 19, 2017, and named ‘Oumuamua—“scout” in the Hawaiian language. The object showed many anomalous properties that made it different from any natural comet or asteroid that we had witnessed before in the solar system, allowing for the possibility that it is a product of alien technology, as discussed in my new book, Extraterrestrial.
If it is, the question arises as to whether it is likely to be a probe intended to spy on us. The chances are small, since it took ‘Oumuamua more than 10,000 years to traverse the entire solar system, and our civilization has obviously not been transmitting signals for that long. Even if ‘Oumuamua is an artificial craft, it is ancient and likely out of commission. Most stars formed billions of years before the sun, and the technological relics that their civilizations launched to space are probably too old to be functional. We can retrieve more information about technological relics by taking close-up photographs or by searching on the surface of the moon (or Mars) for unusual objects that have collected there over the past billions of years. The lack of an atmosphere or geological activity would make the moon’s surface, in particular, like a museum of extraterrestrial equipment.
Are we the smartest kid on our cosmic block? To find out, we should keep our eyes open and search through our telescopes for items from our nearest neighbors, taking proper precaution about a vessel masquerading as a Trojan Horse. There might be plenty of small, fast-moving objects that are constantly traveling through the solar system and that we fail to recognize given the limited sensitivity of our telescopes. It would be interesting to search for them in future data streams from the Large Survey of Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin observatory, which will start monitoring the Chilean sky in less than three years. In addition, my student Amir Siraj and I have shown that a global network of several hundred optical cameras on Earth can identify flares from interstellar meteors entering the Earth’s atmosphere at an unusually high speed of up to the speed of light.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) discovered gravitational waves only after the National Science Foundation (NSF) invested $1.1 billion in it. Similarly, we should expect to find extraordinary evidence for ETs only after we invest major funds in a search. It would be most appropriate to allocate taxpayer funds to the search for our cosmic neighbors, given the major impact that such a discovery would have on society—far exceeding the implication of discovering gravitational waves.
Putting our hands on a piece of alien technology would change the way we perceive our place in the universe, our aspirations for space and our philosophical and theological beliefs. Our psychological shock would resemble the one encountered by my daughters when they met kids smarter than they were on their first day in the kindergarten.
Or we could choose to stay ignorant about our neighbors until they show up. This would be equivalent to my daughters choosing to stay at home. The possible existence of ETs will not go away if we ignore them, just like the Earth continued to move around the sun after religious authorities refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. The dinosaurs dominated the planet for many millions of years, but their reign was abruptly ended 66 million years ago, when the giant Chicxulub rock showed up on the sky, on a collision course with Earth.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
UFO Leaves Aviation Authority Clueless As Blue Spaceship Passes Hawaii
UFO Leaves Aviation Authority Clueless As Blue Spaceship Passes Hawaii
Some people spotted a blue unidentified flying object (UFO) in the skies of Hawaii on Dec. 29, 2020. Several residents reported to have seen the blue spacecraft in the sky and that it had eventually landed on the sea. Another white light, according to eyewitnesses, took the same direction as the blue UFO and then vanished into the sea. They were taken aback by what they saw that they dialed 911. But they were still "at a loss" for words when officers arrived.
A few moments after, the Freedom of Information Act requested the Federal Aviation Administration to elucidate the mystery sighting. However, aviation authorities unveil that they are entirely unaware of the sighting. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, no planes were in the region when locals saw the mysterious object in the sky.
John Greenewald of Black Vault asked for the FAA's report on the incident via a Freedom of Information request. He received a response on Apr. 12. Authorities said that they are still "at a loss" to identify the UFO.
As the Hawaii sighting continues to confuse people, some internet users claim that these sightings may be genuine evidence of alien life. According to these alien hunters, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations from deep space have been visiting Earth in UFOs for hundreds of thousands of years, and governments and space agencies such as NASA are well aware of alien life.
A few weeks ago, Former Israeli space security chief Haim Eshed suggested that alien presence on Earth is possible. Eshed also confirmed that world forces such as the United States and Israel are collaborating with extraterrestrials. He also hinted that a galactic union may exist. According to the former space security chief, there is a deep underground base on Mars where aliens and humans collaborate.
"The Unidentified Flying Objects have asked not to publish that they are here, humanity is not ready yet," Eshed said. Former President Donald Trump knew the extraterrestrials' presence, according to Eshed. Trump, Eshed mentioned, was "on the verge of disclosing" facts. However, he was asked not to do so to avoid "mass hysteria."
Nobody beli eved him until he grabbed a cellphone and recorded the phenomenon.Shutterstock/Dennis van de Water
What Really Lies Hidden in the Vatican Secret Archives?
What Really Lies Hidden in the Vatican Secret Archives?
What Really Lies Hidden in the Vatican Secret Archives?
Mystery and intrigue are inherent to the Holy See. People will always wonder what religious authorities are conspiring to behind closed doors, what treasures lie within the vaults of the Vatican. Despite claims that the Pope has evidence of extraterrestrials and demons tucked away in his catacombs, the truth of the secret archives is much more realistic. Because of this, it is also much more interesting.
From handwritten letters of historic personages such as Mary Queen of Scots and Abraham Lincoln to papal bulls excommunicating Martin Luther, the contents of the archives are enough to make any scholar’s eyes go wide. Yet, the high-level nature that makes the contents so fascinating is also what makes them so closely guarded. For in truth, it is not evidence of aliens that the Vatican is hiding from the public eye but rather documents that may show the Church was complicit in Mussolini’s state-sponsored terror and, possibly, even in Hitler’s anti-Semitic pogroms.
Archivum Secretum
The truth behind the secret archives stems from a mistranslation of Latin. The actual name of the Vatican archives is Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum . ‘Secretum’ in Latin does not mean ‘secret’ as some may suppose. It is more accurately translated to mean ‘personal’ or ‘private’. The archives are in fact made up of the private letters and historic records of past popes over the past four centuries.
The archives were established by Pope Paul V. The Pope clearly had a sense of the historic importance of papal correspondence and knew that such documents should be preserved. However, the 17th century was firmly of the mentality that common people should not be privy to words exchanged by kings and popes. So the archives were kept under lock and key.
It was not until 1881 that Pope Leo XIII allowed researchers to view some of the archive’s contents. However, it was no simple matter for one to view the documents and the procedure has not changed much over the last 200 years. First of all, journalists, students, and amateur historians are not given access.
Once an interested party has proven that he or she is a serious enough scholar, credentials are granted that must be renewed every six months. To enter the archives, a “scholars enter through the Porta Sant’Anna , pass Swiss Guards, walk through the Cortile del Belvedere , and present credentials” (O’Loughlin, 2014).
The Porta Sant Anna, where visitors must pass through to reach the archives.
Once admitted, scholars must request which specific documents they wish to review. They are only allowed to request three per day. So instead of being able to browse the contents of the archive, they must select articles from catalogs in which items are handwritten in Italian or Latin. These catalogs are quite imposing considering that the archives contain “50 miles [80km] of shelving and documents dating back to the eighth century” (Keyser, 2015).
“If in just a few minutes they realize that what they’re seeking isn’t in the requested folders, they’re forced to pack up for the day - a challenge for scholars on a deadline or those who have traveled long distances” (O’Loughlin, 2014). Computers are allowed but not photography, so scholars spend most of the sessions in reading rooms typing up notes.
The Vatican Archives Contain Historical Gems
If a person is fortunate enough to gain access to the Vatican Archives, he or she would be able to pursue such historical gems as:
The 197-foot-long (60 meters) scroll containing the minutes of the trials of the Knights Templar, which lasted for several years starting in 1307.
The Inter caetera , the papal bull issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 that split the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese
The 1521 papal bull of Pope Leo X excommunicating Martin Luther
The 1530 petition Henry VIIIsent to Pope Clement VII in order to request an annulment of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which includes the signatures and seals of over 80 English lords and clergymen (the Pope refused)
A letter to Pope Sixtus V from Mary, Queen of Scots begging the Church to intervene shortly before her execution
Notes relating to the 1633 trial against Galileo
A letter to Pope Innocent X from Grand Empress Dowager Helena Wang of China
A letter from Pope Clement XII to the Seventh Dalai Lama requesting protection for Franciscan missionaries in Tibet.
Letters from both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis (both written in 1863, neither man Catholic) in efforts to have Pope Pius IX come down in favor of the Union or the Confederacy
A letter from King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, held in the Vatican archive.
David Kertzer, a historian from Brown University, was able to examine documents from the reign of Pope Pius XII (1922 - 1939). He concluded that the pope “made deals with Mussolini to protect the Church’s interest in exchange for silence on state-sponsored anti-Semitism, a conclusion at odds with the Church’s account” (O’Loughlin, 2014). Groups pressured Pope Francis to make fully available the contents relating to Pope Pius XII (1939 - 1958) in order that the world may finally know for certain the man’s involvement with the Nazis.
Some say that he supported Hitler, either in a manner similar to the Church’s support of Mussolini or perhaps even more substantially. Others say that the Pope worked against the Nazis and helped to hide Jews and other targets of Nazi aggression. “People talk, scholars talk. Are there things that aren’t being made available because they’re seen as unflattering from a Church point of view?” said Kertzer. Still, Kertzer admits, the Secret Archives are staffed by professionals, and “there’s an appreciation of serious historical scholarship.” (O’Loughlin, 2014)
In March 2020, Pope Francis made “the fundamental documentation of Pius XII’s pontificate” available to historians, saying that that the church is “not afraid of history.” When researchers convened this year in a webinar to discuss their assessment of the archives so far they said, “it would likely take years to assess the material the Vatican has made available,” according to National Catholic Reporter .
Nonetheless, David Kertzer states, “I do not think there is going to be one smoking gun — in fact, I would despair of any evidence that's actually changing people’s minds these days.” However, Nina Valbousquet, a researcher at the Ecole Française de Rome, said that she found some Vatican correspondence from a time shortly after the war which suggests some officials had “a deep lack of understanding of what had happened during the Holocaust and harbored antisemitic sentiments.”
In 2012, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the archives, 100 documents were made available for the public to see in an exhibit called Lux in Arcana . However the tradition of only granting permission for about 1,000 scholars to access the archives in-person per year continues.
Lux in Arcana - The Vatican Secret Archives Reveals Itself.
Credit: The Vatican
According to Pope Francis, the Vatican Archives are no longer ‘secret,’ instead they’re ‘apostolic.’ In 2019 he decided to change the centuries-old title of the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum , the Vatican Secret Archives , to the Vatican Apostolic Archives because, Vatican News reports, “in Latin both secretum (which means separate, private) and apostolicum (that is, belonging to the domnus apostolicus , who is only the pope) refer to the same reality, even juridical.”
The Pope made his decision based on the need to meet modern ‘sensibilities’, which often associate the word secretum with ideas of mysteries and hidden artifacts locked away in vaults.
Nevertheless, the Vatican Archives remain the Pope’s private archives – “subject to him alone and to his exclusive governance,” as Vatican News states.
Top image: Some of the 50 miles of bookshelves in the Vatican secret archive Photo: The Vatican
Just 7% of Human DNA Is Unique, Says Latest Large-scale Genetic Study
Just 7% of Human DNA Is Unique, Says Latest Large-scale Genetic Study
Among all the species of man that ever existed, Homo sapiens (modern man) is the sole survivor. But that doesn’t make us quite as special as we thought. A genetic study carried out by researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz) found that modern humans only possess a small fraction of fully unique human DNA. The vast majority of our collective genetic inheritance is something we shared with other species of ancient man, specifically our long extinct “cousins” the Neanderthals and the Denisovans
So how much of human DNA belongs exclusively to us, and was never carried by any other human species? Just seven percent, the researchers responsible for this research explain in their Science Advances journal study .
“That's a pretty small percentage,” UC Santa Cruz computational biologist and study co-sponsor Nathan Schaefer told the Associated Press . “This kind of finding is why scientists are turning away from thinking that we humans are so vastly different from Neanderthals.”
That seven percent is something we share with all modern humans who have lived and died over the past 200,000 years, the approximate time that has passed since Homo sapiens first evolved. Of this seven percent, the majority is present in some people but not others. Just 1.5 percent of their DNA is both unique to us and shared by everyone currently living on the planet.
Modern humans are not a singular or special creation of evolution. They are mostly a mixture of genetic materials taken from other ancient species, all of which developed long before Homo sapiens came into existence.
Fig. 2 from the Science Advances study: Performance of SARGE on SGDP and archaic hominin dataset: (A) Pairwise coalescence times for randomly sampled sets of up to 10 pairs of phased genome haplotypes per population in ka (thousands of years ago). Values are calibrated using a 13 million years ago (13 Ma) human-chimp divergence time. (B) Unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean trees computed using nucleotide diversity from SNP data (top and left) against similarity matrix from shared recombination events inferred by SARGE (Speedy Ancestral Recombination Graph Estimator).
Tracking The Shared Genetic Inheritance in Human DNA
To complete this study, the team of researchers from UC Santa Cruz examined genetic data collected from the fossilized remains of Neanderthals and Denisovans that lived between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago. They compared this ancient DNA to genetic material extracted from 279 people living today, searching for overlaps and differences.
Since ancient genomes taken from human fossils aren’t always complete, this is a difficult comparison to make. But the researchers developed a method that allowed them to fill in the blanks when information was missing from ancient genomes . As a result, they were able to identify all the genetic material shared between modern humans and Neanderthals or Denisovans, which represented 93 percent of the total found in the Homo sapiens genome.
It is important to emphasize that Neanderthals and Denisovans are not the direct ancestors of Homo sapiens (we didn’t evolve from them, in other words). Instead, they share common ancestors with us, which is why they are often referred to as our cousins. The 93 percent of our DNA that we share with Neanderthals and Denisovans was inherited from those ancestors, who lived on earth millions of years ago.
This shows how close the genetic relationship between these three species actually was and explains how humans could interbreed with the others despite their differences.
It is known that interbreeding occurred, since a small part of the human genetic code contains DNA inherited from Neanderthals and Denisovans (interbreeding with Neanderthals was far more common ). Modern humans began migrating out of Africa and spreading across the planet in significant numbers between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago. They would have lived side by side with the other two species for 50,000 years or so after that, until the Denisovans and Neanderthals became extinct ( the exact dates when that happened are disputed ).
It is possible to see the Neanderthal and Denisovan decision to interbreed with modern humans as a kind of survival strategy. By doing so, they guaranteed their species would never die out completely. They exist even now, as traces of DNA that are still shaping our development.
What is it then that makes humans unique? The answer is neural development and brain function. This modern woman's brain is "wired" differently than the brains of our prehistoric ancestors.
Human Uniqueness? Neural Development and Brain Function!
Some of the most eye-opening information obtained in this new study emerged from an analysis of the 1.5 percent of modern human DNA that is shared by everyone. Further study of this genetic material may help scientists understand what separates Homo sapiens from other species of man, since it never existed in those other species but is universal in us.
"We can tell those regions of the genome are highly enriched for genes that have to do with neural development and brain function ," explained UC Santa Cruz computational biologist Richard Green, a co-author of the Science Advances study.
The primary goal of this study was to uncover what genetic factors make modern humans unique. Homo sapiens is the only hominin (the biological group made up of modern humans, extinct humans, and all our immediate ancestors) that survived into the modern era, meaning it likely possessed some qualities that the others lacked.
It is presumed the advantage had something to do with cognitive abilities . This would seem to make the discovery of unique genes in humans that affect mental development and brain function highly significant.
Of course, it is possible that Homo sapiens survived by luck rather than skill. As the populations of all three species grew, maybe Homo sapiens just happened to be living in the right places at the right times, enjoying more favorable weather and more access to food and water when resources started to become scarce.
Most likely, good luck and evolutionary advantages both played a role in deciding the final outcome.
Top image: Neanderthal skull (left) compared with a modern human skull (right). A recent study has revealed that only 7% of human DNA is unique. The other 93% of human DNA is shared with our ancient “cousins” the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Source: procy_ab / Adobe Stock
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
