Sensor breakthrough paves way for groundbreaking map of world under Earth surface

by University of Birmingham

24-02-2022 om 01:11 geschreven door peter  

This 9-Gigapixel Image Of the Milky Way Shows 84 Million Stars

This 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way reminds us just how small we truly are!

The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. If printed with the resolution of a typical book, it is so large that it would be 9 meters long and 7 meters tall.

You probably can’t even fathom how big the universe is until you observe an image showing a miniature, tiny, small, insignificant part of space, home to 84 million galaxies.

And yeah, that may sound as much. However, it’s only a small part of the stars and galaxies in the universe.

The jaw-dropping image published by the European South Observatory features 85 million stars and shows a view of the cosmos as observed by the VISTA telescope.

The VISTA telescope can peer through dust fields that usually obscure an optical telescope’s view thanks to three separate infrared filters.

A mind-boggling view

The image you see here below is just a small version of the original image, which has a resolution of 108,500×81,500 pixels.

In other words, it is a 9-gigapixel image of cosmic beauty that reminds us of just how small we are.

If you want to go ahead and download the original, zoomable image and explore the wonders of the cosmos, you can do so by clicking here.

But if you want to take a peek and zoom into the 84 million stars visible in the Vista image, click here.

The image is too large to be viewed at full resolution, so we suggest using the featured zoom tool to observe the image entirely.

As noted in a 2012 photo release from ESO, “this massive dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. If printed with the resolution of a typical book, it is so large that it would be meters long and 7 meters tall.”

The image seen here covers around 315 square degrees of the sky (a bit less than 1% of the entire sky).

{ https://curiosmos.com/ }

24-02-2022 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

How Could the Big Bang Arise From Nothing?

READER QUESTION: My understanding is that nothing comes from nothing. For something to exist, there must be material or a component available, and for them to be available, there must be something else available. Now my question: Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material? Peter, 80, Australia.

“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. All matter will eventually be consumed by monstrous black holes, which in their turn will evaporate away into the dimmest glimmers of light. Space will expand ever outwards until even that dim light becomes too spread out to interact. Activity will cease.

Or will it? Strangely enough, some cosmologists believe a previous, cold dark empty universe like the one which lies in our far future could have been the source of our very own Big Bang.

The First Matter

But before we get to that, let’s take a look at how “material”—physical matter—first came about. If we are aiming to explain the origins of stable matter made of atoms or molecules, there was certainly none of that around at the Big Bang—nor for hundreds of thousands of years afterwards. We do in fact have a pretty detailed understanding of how the first atoms formed out of simpler particles once conditions cooled down enough for complex matter to be stable, and how these atoms were later fused into heavier elements inside stars. But that understanding doesn’t address the question of whether something came from nothing.

So let’s think further back. The first long-lived matter particles of any kind were protons and neutrons, which together make up the atomic nucleus. These came into existence around one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang. Before that point, there was really no material in any familiar sense of the word. But physics lets us keep on tracing the timeline backwards—to physical processes which predate any stable matter.

This takes us to the so-called “grand unified epoch.” By now, we are well into the realm of speculative physics, as we can’t produce enough energy in our experiments to probe the sort of processes that were going on at the time. But a plausible hypothesis is that the physical world was made up of a soup of short-lived elementary particles, including quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons. There was both matter and “antimatter” in roughly equal quantities: each type of matter particle, such as the quark, has an antimatter “mirror image” companion, which is near identical to itself, differing only in one aspect. However, matter and antimatter annihilate in a flash of energy when they meet, meaning these particles were constantly created and destroyed.

But how did these particles come to exist in the first place? Quantum field theory tells us that even a vacuum, supposedly corresponding to empty spacetime, is full of physical activity in the form of energy fluctuations. These fluctuations can give rise to particles popping out, only to be disappear shortly after. This may sound like a mathematical quirk rather than real physics, but such particles have been spotted in countless experiments.

The spacetime vacuum state is seething with particles constantly being created and destroyed, apparently “out of nothing.” But perhaps all this really tells us is that the quantum vacuum is (despite its name) a something rather than a nothing. The philosopher David Albert has memorably criticized accounts of the Big Bang which promise to get something from nothing in this way.

Suppose we ask: where did spacetime itself arise from? Then we can go on turning the clock yet further back, into the truly ancient “Planck epoch”—a period so early in the universe’s history that our best theories of physics break down. This era occurred only one ten-millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At this point, space and time themselves became subject to quantum fluctuations. Physicists ordinarily work separately with quantum mechanics, which rules the microworld of particles, and with general relativity, which applies on large, cosmic scales. But to truly understand the Planck epoch, we need a complete theory of quantum gravity, merging the two.

We still don’t have a perfect theory of quantum gravity, but there are attempts, like string theory and loop quantum gravity. In these attempts, ordinary space and time are typically seen as emergent, like the waves on the surface of a deep ocean. What we experience as space and time are the product of quantum processes operating at a deeper, microscopic level – processes that don’t make much sense to us as creatures rooted in the macroscopic world.

In the Planck epoch, our ordinary understanding of space and time breaks down, so we can’t any longer rely on our ordinary understanding of cause and effect either. Despite this, all candidate theories of quantum gravity describe something physical that was going on in the Planck epoch—some quantum precursor of ordinary space and time. But where did that come from?

Even if causality no longer applies in any ordinary fashion, it might still be possible to explain one component of the Planck-epoch universe in terms of another. Unfortunately, by now even our best physics fails completely to provide answers. Until we make further progress towards a “theory of everything,” we won’t be able to give any definitive answer. The most we can say with confidence at this stage is that physics has so far found no confirmed instances of something arising from nothing.

Cycles From Almost Nothing

To truly answer the question of how something could arise from nothing, we would need to explain the quantum state of the entire universe at the beginning of the Planck epoch. All attempts to do this remain highly speculative. Some of them appeal to supernatural forces like a designer. But other candidate explanations remain within the realm of physics—such as a multiverse, which contains an infinite number of parallel universes, or cyclical models of the universe, being born and reborn again.

The 2020 Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose has proposed one intriguing but controversial model for a cyclical universe dubbed “conformal cyclic cosmology.” Penrose was inspired by an interesting mathematical connection between a very hot, dense, small state of the universe—as it was at the Big Bang—and an extremely cold, empty, expanded state of the universe—as it will be in the far future. His radical theory to explain this correspondence is that those states become mathematically identical when taken to their limits. Paradoxical though it might seem, a total absence of matter might have managed to give rise to all the matter we see around us in our universe.

In this view, the Big Bang arises from an almost nothing. That’s what’s left over when all the matter in a universe has been consumed into black holes, which have in turn boiled away into photons—lost in a void. The whole universe thus arises from something that, viewed from another physical perspective, is as close as one can get to nothing at all. But that nothing is still a kind of something. It is still a physical universe, however empty.

How can the very same state be a cold, empty universe from one perspective and a hot dense universe from another? The answer lies in a complex mathematical procedure called “conformal rescaling,” a geometrical transformation which in effect alters the size of an object but leaves its shape unchanged.

Penrose showed how the cold dense state and the hot dense state could be related by such rescaling so that they match with respect to the shapes of their spacetimes—although not to their sizes. It is, admittedly, difficult to grasp how two objects can be identical in this way when they have different sizes—but Penrose argues size as a concept ceases to make sense in such extreme physical environments.

In conformal cyclic cosmology, the direction of explanation goes from old and cold to young and hot: the hot dense state exists because of the cold empty state. But this “because” is not the familiar one—of a cause followed in time by its effect. It is not only size that ceases to be relevant in these extreme states: time does too. The cold dense state and the hot dense state are in effect located on different timelines. The cold empty state would continue on forever from the perspective of an observer in its own temporal geometry, but the hot dense state it gives rise to effectively inhabits a new timeline all its own.

It may help to understand the hot dense state as produced from the cold empty state in some non-causal way. Perhaps we should say that the hot dense state emerges from, or is grounded in, or realized by the cold, empty state. These are distinctively metaphysical ideas which have been explored by philosophers of science extensively, especially in the context of quantum gravity where ordinary cause and effect seem to break down. At the limits of our knowledge, physics and philosophy become hard to disentangle.

Experimental Evidence?

Conformal cyclic cosmology offers some detailed, albeit speculative, answers to the question of where our Big Bang came from. But even if Penrose’s vision is vindicated by the future progress of cosmology, we might think that we still wouldn’t have answered a deeper philosophical question—a question about where physical reality itself came from. How did the whole system of cycles come about? Then we finally end up with the pure question of why there is something rather than nothing—one of the biggest questions of metaphysics.

But our focus here is on explanations which remain within the realm of physics. There are three broad options to the deeper question of how the cycles began. It could have no physical explanation at all. Or there could be endlessly repeating cycles, each a universe in its own right, with the initial quantum state of each universe explained by some feature of the universe before. Or there could be one single cycle, and one single repeating universe, with the beginning of that cycle explained by some feature of its own end. The latter two approaches avoid the need for any uncaused events—and this gives them a distinctive appeal. Nothing would be left unexplained by physics.

Penrose envisages a sequence of endless new cycles for reasons partly linked to his own preferred interpretation of quantum theory. In quantum mechanics, a physical system exists in a superposition of many different states at the same time, and only “picks one” randomly, when we measure it. For Penrose, each cycle involves random quantum events turning out a different way—meaning each cycle will differ from those before and after it. This is actually good news for experimental physicists, because it might allow us to glimpse the old universe that gave rise to ours through faint traces, or anomalies, in the leftover radiation from the Big Bang seen by the Planck satellite.

Penrose and his collaborators believe they may have spotted these traces already, attributing patterns in the Planck data to radiation from supermassive black holes in the previous universe. However, their claimed observations have been challenged by other physicists and the jury remains out.

Endless new cycles are key to Penrose’s own vision. But there is a natural way to convert conformal cyclic cosmology from a multi-cycle to a one-cycle form. Then physical reality consists in a single cycling around through the Big Bang to a maximally empty state in the far future—and then around again to the very same Big Bang, giving rise to the very same universe all over again.

This latter possibility is consistent with another interpretation of quantum mechanics, dubbed the many-worlds interpretation. The many-worlds interpretation tells us that each time we measure a system that is in superposition, this measurement doesn’t randomly select a state. Instead, the measurement result we see is just one possibility—the one that plays out in our own universe. The other measurement results all play out in other universes in a multiverse, effectively cut off from our own. So no matter how small the chance of something occurring, if it has a non-zero chance then it occurs in some quantum parallel world. There are people just like you out there in other worlds who have won the lottery, or have been swept up into the clouds by a freak typhoon, or have spontaneously ignited, or have done all three simultaneously.

Some people believe such parallel universes may also be observable in cosmological data, as imprints caused by another universe colliding with ours.

Many-worlds quantum theory gives a new twist on conformal cyclic cosmology, though not one that Penrose agrees with. Our Big Bang might be the rebirth of one single quantum multiverse, containing infinitely many different universes all occurring together. Everything possible happens—then it happens again and again and again.

An Ancient Myth

For a philosopher of science, Penrose’s vision is fascinating. It opens up new possibilities for explaining the Big Bang, taking our explanations beyond ordinary cause and effect. It is therefore a great test case for exploring the different ways physics can explain our world. It deserves more attention from philosophers.

For a lover of myth, Penrose’s vision is beautiful. In Penrose’s preferred multi-cycle form, it promises endless new worlds born from the ashes of their ancestors. In its one-cycle form, it is a striking modern re-invocation of the ancient idea of the ouroboros, or world-serpent. In Norse mythology, the serpent Jörmungandr is a child of Loki, a clever trickster, and the giant Angrboda. Jörmungandr consumes its own tail, and the circle created sustains the balance of the world. But the ouroboros myth has been documented all over the world— including as far back as ancient Egypt.

The ouroboros of the one cyclic universe is majestic indeed. It contains within its belly our own universe, as well as every one of the weird and wonderful alternative possible universes allowed by quantum physics—and at the point where its head meets its tail, it is completely empty yet also coursing with energy at temperatures of a hundred thousand million billion trillion degrees Celsius. Even Loki, the shapeshifter, would be impressed.

• This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
• Image Credit: NASA

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://singularityhub.com/ }

24-02-2022 om 00:13 geschreven door peter  

CHINA SAYS ROVER DISCOVERED GLASS SPHERES ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

"THE GLOBULES SIMPLY BLOW OUR MIND..."

CHINA NATIONAL SPACE ADMINISTRATION

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

23-02-2022 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

De 87-jarige man werd opgenomen in het Vancouver General Hospital in Canada, om zijn epilepsiestoornis te behandelen. Tijdens zijn EEG of hersenscan kreeg hij plots een dodelijke hartaanval. Daardoor kregen artsen de unieke kans om te zien wat er zich in de hersenen afspeelt als iemand sterft.

Lees ook

• 

  Neuralink bevestigt dat apen gestorven zijn na proeven met ingeplante chip, maar ontkent dierenmishandeling

Het resultaat is verrassend: voor en na de laatste hartslag, werd er een toename van gammagolven gemeten. Deze hersengolven worden geassocieerd met cognitieve functies, en zijn vooral actief als we ons concentreren, dromen, mediteren en als we herinneringen ophalen.

“We kunnen hieruit leren dat als onze dierbaren hun ogen gesloten hebben en klaar zijn om te rusten, nog even de mooiste momenten uit hun leven kunnen afspelen”, zegt neurochirurg Ajmal Zemmar. “Bovendien daagt het ons uit om opnieuw na te denken over wanneer ons leven precies eindigt. Ook kunnen we ons vragen stellen over bijvoorbeeld de timing van orgaandonatie.”

Wetenschappers benadrukken wel dat het brein van 87-jarige man al beschadigd was door epilepsie. Er is dus nog verder onderzoek nodig om zeker te zijn van de theorie.  

Lees ook

• Neemt angst je leven (soms) over? Met deze simpele oefening herprogrammeer je je hersenen (+)

• Oorzaak van progressie ziekte van Alzheimer in hersenen ontdekt

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

23-02-2022 om 23:37 geschreven door peter  

Our lives really DO flash before us: Scientists record the brain activity of an 87-year-old man at the moment he died, revealing a rapid 'memory retrieval' process

• Researchers recorded brain activity of 87-year-old as he died from a heart attack

• Brain waves indicated rapid memory retrieval process occurred at time of death

• Findings suggest our life does flash before our eyes through 'memory retrieval'  

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

What happens in the brain as we die has been a source of mystery for centuries, but a new study suggests our lives really do flash before our eyes in our final moments. 

Neuroscientists inadvertently recorded a dying brain while they were using electroencephalography (EEG) to detect and treat seizures in an 87-year-old man, and he suffered a cardiac arrest.

It was the first time ever that scientists had recorded the activity of a dying human brain, according to the team. 

Rhythmic brain wave patterns were observed to be similar to those occurring during memory retrieval, as well as dreaming and meditation.  

This supports a theory known as 'life recall' – that we relive our entire life in the space of seconds like a flash of lightning just prior to death. 

In fact, the brain may remain active and coordinated during and after the transition to death, and may even be programmed to 'orchestrate the whole ordeal', according to the researchers. 

The team recorded a dying brain while they were using electroencephalography (EEG) to detect and treat seizures in an 87-year-old man and the patient suffered a heart attack. Pictured is EEG output over a 900 second period encompassing a seizure (S), suppression of left cerebral hemisphere activity (LS), suppression of bilateral cerebral hemisphere activity (BS), and cardiac arrest (CA). Point of death is CA, coinciding with changes in EEG patterns. FP1, F7, T3 and so on refer to different electrodes of the EEG which are attached or contact different regions on the scalp of the patient. Left indicates left brain hemisphere, right indicates right brain hemisphere

Scientists have recorded the brain activity of a 87-year-old male epilepsy patient while he was dying from a heart attack. Pictured are CT scans of the patient, whose identity was not disclosed. A and B show effects of subdural hematoma - a serious condition where blood collects between the skull and the surface of the brain - with a larger mass effect on the left side. C and D show the same scan sequences after decompressive craniotomy - a surgery to treat the condition

The patient, who is unnamed, was admitted to the Vancouver General Hospital in British Columbia, where neurosurgeon Dr Ajmal Zemmar was working at the time.  

The researchers took EEG recordings from his brain before he eventually underwent a fatal cardiac arrest. 

EEG is a method of recording electrical activity of the brain that involves electrodes placed along the scalp. 

'We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,' said Dr Zemmar, now based at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

'Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.'

Brain oscillations (more commonly known as 'brain waves') are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. 

The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks.

'Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,' Zemmar said. 

'These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation.'

While this study is the first of its kind to measure live brain activity during the process of dying in humans, similar changes in gamma oscillations have been previously observed in rats kept in controlled environments.

This means it is possible that, during death, the brain organises and executes a biological response that could be conserved across species.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method of recording electrical activity of the brain that involves electrodes placed along the scalp

(file photo)

These measurements are, however, based on a single case and stem from the brain of a patient who had suffered injury, seizures and swelling.

This complicates the interpretation of the data, although Dr Zemmar said he hopes to investigate more cases in future.  

'As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times. It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members,' he said.

'Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.'  

The study has been published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. 

ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHY (EEG) EXPLAINED

Read more:

• Frontiers | Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain | Aging Neuroscience

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

23-02-2022 om 23:23 geschreven door peter  

he Biggest 3D Map of the Milky Way is Here and it’s Ridiculously Stunning

Our planet isn't flat, and guess what? Neither is our galaxy.

An international team of scientists has created a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, the largest to date, and the results have been published in the journal  Science.

By measuring the distance from our Sun to thousands of pulsating stars scattered throughout our galaxy, researchers have managed to produce a 3D map that reveals the S-shaped structure of the combined star disk of the Milky Way galaxy, our cosmic address.

Earth isn’t flat, and the Milky Way isn’t either.

“Our map shows that the Milky Way disk is not flat. Instead, it is deformed and twisted in shape,” revealed study co-author Przemek Mróz of the University of Warsaw in Poland.

“This is the first time we can use individual objects to display it in three dimensions,” he added.

Much of the current knowledge of our galaxy’s spiral shape and structure is based on indirect measurements of celestial objects and inferences based on other distant galaxies in the Universe.

But as scientists have revealed, the galactic map produced by these limited observations is incomplete.

Like numerous distant lighthouses, the classical Cepheids (massive stars that burn hundreds, if not thousands, of times brighter than our Sun) pulse regularly and are visible through the vast interstellar dust clouds that often obscure less bright interstellar objects.

Warsaw University researcher Dorota Skowron, along with scientists from the Ohio State University in the United States and the University of Warwick, in the United Kingdom, traced the distance to more than 2,400 cepheids along the Milky Way,  most of which were identified by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a project that helped double the number of known galactic classical cepheids.

By assigning coordinates to each distant pulsating star in relation to our Sun, the researchers managed to develop a three-dimensional model of the Milky Way of very high precision.

The result is a stunning, never-before-seen map of the Milky Way Galaxy.

A twisted, warped place

The study results have allowed astronomers to understand our cosmic neighborhood better and accurately illustrate the galaxy’s shape.

And it’s not flat, but it has a strange shape.

As noted by Space.com, “this new map helped reveal more details on distortions that astronomers had “previously detected in the shape of the Milky Way.”

It took scientists six years to produce the map, but as revealed by participating astronomers, “it was worth it.”

We’ve found that the galaxy’s disk is not flat at a distance of over 25,000 light-years from the galactic core. It is warped. This warping was possibly caused by the galaxy’s interactions with surrounding galaxies, intergalactic gas, or even dark matter.

“Warping of the galactic disk has been detected before, but this is the first time we can use individual objects to trace its shape in three dimensions,” explained Mróz in a statement.

The astronomers explained that the amount of ‘warping’ spotted in our galaxy was surprisingly pronounced.

“It is not some statistical fact available only to a scientist’s understanding,” Mróz said. “It is apparent by eye.”

Map of 1.8 Billion Stars From Gaia’s New Data Release

{ https://curiosmos.com/ }

23-02-2022 om 23:06 geschreven door peter  

Since time unremembered we have sought to penetrate out beyond what our maps show and trudge out over the horizon to explore and conquer the uncharted lands that lie beyond. It is an innate characteristic of the human spirit to wonder at what lies beyond what we know and to delve into the mysteries these wildernesses hold. For centuries explorers have gone out into the unknown and brought back information that has helped us to better understand our world and even our place within it. On occasion, these explorers have brought back some strange stories indeed. It seems only natural that the intrepid explorers who first step foot into new, unexplored realms that are strangers to civilization should come across things no one has ever seen before, and often this comes in the form of coming across creatures that seemingly should only inhabit the wilds of the imagination. One explorer who brought back myriad tales of strange beasts within his journals is an intrepid explorer of the South American jungles, who went out looking for a lost city and would come back with a whole list of weird creatures never seen before.

One of the most well-known explorers of the Amazon jungle is the famed explorer Percy Fawcett, who is most famous for his ambitious and ill-fated expedition in 1925 to find a lost city he was convinced existed in the forgotten, unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle, a journey during which he would vanish off the face of the earth to become one of the most baffling disappearances in history. I have written of Fawcett and his various expeditions, in particular that of his lost city, in much more depth here at Mysterious Universe before, but one of the more interesting and lesser discussed aspects of his adventures are all of the strange and mysterious creatures he allegedly encountered along the way in that maze of wilderness. Throughout his journeys, Fawcett kept rather detailed journals of his expeditions, and flipping through the normal, more mundane everyday trials and tribulations of the expedition, one can at times find some rather amazing, bizarre accounts involving myriad strange creatures that just seem to jump off the page. Indeed, Fawcett’s journals hold a veritable zoo of strange and bizarre beasts that have never really been identified or explained, and he once cryptically and eerily wrote of the Amazon as being:

A poisoned hell that could never be explored on foot, 60 foot anacondas capable of picking a man out of a canoe, savage ape men, an infested plain of deadly snakes, bats so big they looked like pterodactyls, ferocious black panthers, white Indian tribes, swarms of biting bees, fires in the distance.

Percy Fawcett

Some of the strange creatures that are mentioned in his journals, and which are obviously something not officially known, are frustratingly mentioned only briefly or in passing, as if they are just a part of everyday life for them, another one of the menagerie of poisonous snakes and spiders, vampire bats, giant anacondas, electric eels, ferocious piranhas, jungle cats, and other dangerous animals that all conspired to make the expedition members miserable. One of these was something he called the “sauba ants” which could apparently reduce clothing and bedding to threads in a single night, mentioned in passing but obviously no normal ants that we presently know of. There are also casual mentions made of millipedes that “squirt cyanide” and a type of gigantic spider larger than a dinner plate he calls the Apazauca Spider, which he says has poison that could kill a grown man nearly instantaneously and liked to enter tents at night. Another creature described in only passing detail is what is described as a cat-like canid with a double nose, and he also makes mention of a shark called the manguruyú, which he writes is “a freshwater shark, huge but toothless, said to attack men and swallow them if it gets a chance.” These are all strange in that they give such short shrift to these oddities, maddeningly brief and lacking in detail, which was a bit odd for Fawcett, who normally went to great lengths to take meticulous and detailed notes during his expeditions. Fawcett made another brief mention in his many notes of something very strange, large, and seemingly very much like a dinosaur in the wilds of Bolivia, of which he wrote:

Some mysterious and enormous beast has frequently been disturbed in the swamps – possibly a primeval monster like those reported in other parts of the continent. Certainly tracks have been found belonging to no known animal – huge tracks, far greater than could have been made by any species we know.

What was it? It is hard to say because he never mentions it again, although he at several points talks about hearing from natives of enormous, mysterious tracks along the Acre River, near where the borders of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil collide. Of the actual creature itself, no more is said of it, an afterthought in his otherwise sprawling details of the expedition. It is frustrating to say the least, and this is only just the beginning of tales of Fawcett’s encounters with mystery beasts in the remote rainforests of South America, but other reports get a bit more meat to them and are also at times quite a bit more spectacular. One of these is his expedition’s supposed encounters with a giant snake far larger than anything known, and also apparently more aggressive. Compared to the brief, matter-of-fact write-ups on the creatures already mentioned, Fawcett in this case goes into great detail about the team’s harrowing encounter with the serpent, writing:

We were drifting easily along in the sluggish current not far below the confluence of the Rio Negro when almost under the bow of the boat there appeared a triangular head and several feet of undulating body. It was a giant anaconda. I sprang for my rifle as the creature began to make its way up the bank, and hardly waiting to aim smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the wicked head. At once there was a flurry of foam, and several heavy thumps against the boat’s keel, shaking us as though we had run on a snag. With great difficulty I persuaded the Indian crew to turn in shore-wards. They were so frightened that the whites showed all round their popping eyes, and in the moment of firing I had heard their terrified voices begging me not to shoot lest the monster destroy the boat and kill everyone on board, for not only do these creatures attack boats when injured, but also there is great danger from their mates.

We stepped ashore and approached the reptile with caution. It was out of action, but shivers ran up and down the body like puffs of wind on a mountain tarn. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water, and 17 feet in it, making a total length of 62 feet. Its body was not thick for such a colossal length-not more than 12 inches in diameter -but it had probably been long without food. I tried to cut a piece out of the skin, but the beast was by no means dead and the sudden upheavals rather scared us. A penetrating foetid odour emanated from the snake, probably its breath, which is believed to have a stupefying effect, first attracting and later paralysing its prey. Everything about this snake was repulsive. Such large specimens as this may not be common, but the trails in the swamps reach a width of six feet and support the statements of Indians and rubber pickers that the anaconda sometimes reaches an incredible size, altogether dwarfing the one shot by me. The Brazilian Boundary Commission told me of one killed in the Rio Paraguay exceeding 80 feet in length!

That is certainly a really big snake, far beyond the size of anything known. Again, this is an isolated report in his journal, leaving the reader to decide what ever became of it. Besides giant snakes, Fawcett also wrote quite a lot on his encounters with a tribe of hairy, man-like beasts that he calls the Maricoxi, and which are mostly described as being little more than beastly hairy ape-like savages. By far his most detailed entry on these creatures is also the most sensational, in which Fawcett provides a blow by blow description of his expedition’s frightening encounter with these beasts as follows:

I whistled, and an enormous creature, hairy as a dog, leapt to his feet in the nearest shelter, fitted an arrow to his bow in a flash, and came up dancing from one leg to the other till he was only four yards away. Emitting grunts that sounded like ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ he remained there dancing, and suddenly the whole forest around us was alive with these hideous ape-men, all grunting ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ and dancing from leg to leg in the same way as they strung arrows to their bows. It looked like a very delicate situation for us, and I wondered if it was the end. I made friendly overtures in Maxubi, but they paid no attention. It was as though human speech were beyond their powers of comprehension.  

The creature in front of me ceased his dance, stood for a moment perfectly still, and then drew his bowstring back till it was level with his ear, at the same time raising the barbed point of the six-foot arrow to the height of my chest. I looked straight into the pig-like eyes half hidden under the overhanging brows, and knew that he was not going to loose that arrow yet. As deliberately as he had raised it, he now lowered the bow, and commenced once more the slow dance, and the ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!   A second time he raised the arrow at me and drew the bow back, and again I knew he would not shoot. It was just as the Maxubis told me it would be. Again he lowered the bow and continued his dance. Then for the third time he halted and began to bring up the arrow’s point. I knew he meant business this time, and drew out a Mauser pistol I had on my hip. It was a big, clumsy thing, of a caliber unsuitable to forest use, but I had brought it because by clipping the wooden holster to the pistol-butt it became a carbine, and was lighter to carry than a true rifle. It used .38 black powder shells, which made a din out of all proportion to their size. I never raised it; I just pulled the trigger and banged it off into the ground at the ape-man’s feet.   

The effect was instantaneous. A look of complete amazement came into the hideous face, and the little eyes opened wide. He dropped his bow and arrow and sprang away as quickly as a cat to vanish behind a tree. Then the arrows began to fly. We shot off a few rounds into the branches, hoping the noise would scare the savages into a more receptive frame of mind, but they seemed in no way disposed to accept us, and before anyone was hurt we gave it up as hopeless and retreated down the trail till the camp was out of sight. We were not followed, but the clamor in the village continued for a long time as we struck off northwards, and we fancied we still heard the ‘Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’ of the enraged braves.

What were these creatures? Considering they are only ever mentioned in Fawcett’s report in passing and there are no further details we will probably never know. Although it might be tempting to chalk some of these reports up to instances of Fawcett being a little imaginative and sprucing his journal up a bit, the thing is he was not really known for that at all. Fawcett was a respected explorer and naturalist, a consummate professional who kept very good and accurate journals for what he saw or witnessed, with no real hint that he was prone to just sudden flights of fancy or making things up, and these tales are also interspersed between totally normal accounts of mundane things and observations, so why would he do this in the first place? It seems to be unlikely he would have just made these stories up, and he was knowledgeable enough about the region and its wildlife that he likely would not have been making misidentifications that he spun into tall tales. In the end we are left to just wonder what was going on here, and they are all just more cryptic accounts brought back by explorers penetrating out into realms beyond our understanding.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-02-2022 om 22:03 geschreven door peter  

It’s a cliché that everyone has heard when person tells of being in danger or in a near-death experiences: “I saw my life flash before my eyes.” Could this really happen? An 87-year-old man with epilepsy was connected to a brain-scanning monitor tracking seizures when he suffered a heart attack and died … with the monitor recording his brain activity until it stopped. His doctors now had an image of his thoughts before death. What, if anything flashed before his eyes? Will it happen to all of us?

“We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating. Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.”

In a study published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, research leader Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, explains the unnamed man in Estonia was on a continuous electroencephalography (EEG) machine while doctors attempted to captures his brain waves during a seizure and attempt to diagnose and treat his problem. The sudden heart attack leading to death allowed them to inadvertently record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time. Those brain waves answered the question.

“Brain oscillations (more commonly known as ‘brain waves’) are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks.”

The man showed the same brain waves a person has during memory flashbacks. In addition, the waves showed signs of concentration, memory retrieval and information processing – exactly the activities a rain would perform when tasked with organizing the facts, images and memories of a person’s life. Zemmar sounds confident that’s when the EEG recorded.

“Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences.”

This new information affects both the science and ethics of death. This brain activity impacts determining the moment of death for organ donations. It also impacts how family, hospice providers and others present at the deathbed react to what they are seeing – while the loved one may be still, their mind may be racing though many decades of memories, which would dictate a bedside manner that allows it to finish and perhaps even aids in the activity.

Will this happen to all of us eventually?

Before drawing any conclusions, the press release reminds us that this is a single case and the patient had an epileptic brain that was injured. Nonetheless, this type of activity has been observed in a controlled rodent study. Taken together, it “suggests that the brain may pass through a series of stereotyped activity patterns during death.” In other words … we may all see our lives pass before our eyes at the time of death.

Time to start working on a better life to watch?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

23-02-2022 om 21:46 geschreven door peter  

NASA is Upping the Power on its Lunar Wattage Challenge!

For years, NASA has been gearing up for its long-awaited return to the Moon with the Artemis Program. Beginning in 2025, this program will send the first astronauts (“the first woman and first person of color”) to the Moon since the end of the Apollo Era. Beyond that, NASA plans to establish the necessary infrastructure to allow for a “sustained program of lunar exploration,” such as the Lunar Gateway and the Artemis Base Camp.

Beyond these facilities, several elements are essential to ensuring a long-term human presence on the Moon. These include shelter from the elements, food, air, water, and of course, power. To address this last element, NASA has teamed up with HeroX – the leading crowdsourcing platform – to launch the NASA Watts on the Moon Challenge. This competition is entering Phase II and will award an additional $4.5 million for innovative concepts that supply power to future lunar missions.

For this challenge, NASA is not seeking proposals for power generation but innovative engineering approaches for integrating power transmission and energy storage into lunar missions. Specifically, these solutions will need to support astronauts, hardware, and systems in the conditions prevalent in the South-Pole Aitken Basin. This permanently shadowed, cratered region is located around the Moon’s southern polar region and has large deposits of ice water.

In addition to NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the China National Space Agency (CNSA), and Roscosmos are all eying this region as a site for future bases. While these craters present numerous advantages (such as the availability of ice water), they also present several hazards. These environments are not subject to the extreme variations that occur around the equator, where temperatures range from -173 to 117 °C (-279 to 243 °F).

On the other hand, polar craters are permanently shadowed, and temperatures are perennially freezing, averaging -269 °C (-452 °F). Current proposals for lunar bases include placing solar arrays around the crater’s rim, but these are still limited by the extended periods of darkness and light around the poles – which last for 706 hours (or 29d 12h 44m 03s) at a time. As such, NASA and other space agencies are looking for options to provide power during extended periods of darkness.

The first phase of the competition ran from September 2020 to May 2021 and focused on theoretical approaches to energy management, distribution, and storage solutions. In the end, seven competitors were awarded a total of $500,000 in prize money for their approaches, which showed considerable promise. As a result, NASA and HeroX have launched Phase 2 to allow the winners to develop and demonstrate their proposals in simulated lunar conditions.

This phase of the competition will consist of three levels that will award up to 17 prizes in total. The specified requirements remain the same from Phase I, where teams chose one or more activities (collecting regolith, water production, and oxygen production) and offered solutions for energy distribution, management, and/or storage. For Phase Two, NASA has identified two specific areas that are need of improvement:

1. Power Transmission: that can deliver power from a remote generation source to critical mission operation loads where (1) power loads are frequently or permanently immersed in extreme cold and (2) there are large variations in average power loads versus peak power loads. NASA has significant interest in both wired and wireless transmission, and the Challenge seeks to incentivize and demonstrate both types of solutions.
2. Energy Storage: that can (1) power mission operation loads when intermittent power generation is not available and (2) survive and operate in extreme cold environments.

For this phase, NASA is looking for solutions that can be designed, built, and then tested in a simulated lunar environment with conditions mirroring the real thing (freezing cold, near-vacuum, and permanently shadowed). NASA also seeks solutions that can proceed toward flight readiness and future operation on the surface after the challenge is complete. It is also essential that these proposals work with ideas for power generation, which NASA is pursuing through many programs.

This includes the Fission Surface Power (FSP) system, a lightweight ten kilowatt (kW) nuclear reactor that emerged from the Kilopower project – which yielded the Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Tech (KRUSTY) demonstrator. There’s also the novel “Light Bender” system that would use solar collectors and telescope optics to capture and distribute sunlight in shadowed craters on the Moon.

As always, the challenge is expected to advance similar technologies and have public and commercial applications here on Earth. As such, it is hoped that proposals for this competition could be adapted for power distribution and storage here at home. The competition is open to all residents in the U.S., individuals or teams, that are 18 years of age or older. Organizations must be incorporated in and maintain a primary place of business in the U.S. (some restrictions apply).

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

23-02-2022 om 21:21 geschreven door peter  

Does the Entire Planet Have a Mind of its Own?

What is humanity? Do our minds set us apart from the rest of nature and from the rest of Earth? Or does Earth have a collective mind of its own, and we’re simply part of that mind? On the literal face of it, that last question might sound ridiculous.

But a new thought experiment explores it more deeply, and while there’s no firm conclusion about humanity and a planetary mind, just thinking about it invites minds to reconsider their relationship with nature.

Overcoming our challenges requires a better understanding of ourselves and nature, and the same is true for any other civilizations that make it past the Great Filter.

Humanity is pretty proud of itself sometimes. We’ve built a more-or-less global civilization, we’ve wiped out deadly diseases, and we’ve travelled to the Moon. We’re so smart we’re taking steps to protect Earth from the type of calamitous impact that wiped out Earth’s previous tenants, the dinosaurs. But that’s just one perspective.

Another perspective says that we’re still primitive. That billions of us are in the grip of ancient superstitions. That nuclear war haunts us like a spectre. That tribalism still drives us to do horrible animalistic things to one another. That we’re not wise enough to manage our own technological advancement.

Both perspectives are equally valid. All that can really be said is that we’re not as primitive as we used to be, but we’re nowhere near as mature as we need to be if we hope to persist beyond the Great Filter.

Can we come up with a way to explain what stage we’re at in our development? The authors of a new article think they can. And they think we can only do that if we take into account Earth’s planetary history, the collective mind, and the state of our technology.

This trio of scientists wrote the new article in the International Journal of Astrobiology. It’s titled “Intelligence as a planetary scale process.” The authors are Adam Frank from the University of Rochester, David Grinspoon from the Planetary Science Institute, and Sara Walker from Arizona State University. The article is a thought experiment based on our scientific understanding of Earth alongside questions about how life has altered and continues to alter the planet.

Humans tend to think of intelligence as a property belonging to individuals. But it’s also a property belonging to collectives. Social insects use their collective intelligence to make decisions. The authors take the idea of intelligence even further: from individual intelligence to collective intelligence, to planetary intelligence. “Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale,” the authors write. “We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary-scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon.”

We’ve divided Earth’s life forms into species. We recognize that evolution drove the development of all these species. But are we missing something in our urge to classify? Is it more correct to view life as planetary rather than as individual species? After all, species didn’t suddenly appear; each one appeared in an ongoing chain of evolution. (Except for the original species, whose origins remain clouded in mystery.) And all species are linked together in the biosphere. It’s often pointed out that Earth is a bacterial world and the rest of us are only here because of bacteria.

It’s worthwhile to recall the work of Vladimir Vernadsky. Vernadsky was an important founder of biogeochemistry. Wikipedia defines biogeochemistry as “… the scientific discipline that involves the study of the chemical, physical, geological, and biological processes and reactions that govern the composition of the natural environment (including the biosphere, the cryosphere, the hydrosphere, the pedosphere, the atmosphere, and the lithosphere).

Vernadsky saw that the biosphere system is strongly linked to the Earth’s non-living systems. It’s difficult to understand the biosphere without looking at how it’s linked with other systems like the atmosphere. The linkage allows the biosphere to shape Earth’s other “spheres.”

Vernadsky wrote: “Activated by radiation, the matter of the biosphere collects and redistributes solar energy and converts it ultimately into free energy capable of doing work on Earth. A new character is imparted to the planet by this powerful cosmic force. The radiations that pour upon the Earth cause the biosphere to take on properties unknown to lifeless planetary surfaces, and thus transform the face of the Earth.”

In their article, the authors point out how organisms changed Earth’s biosphere. When the ability to photosynthesize appeared in lifeforms, individual lifeforms used it to great benefit. But collectively, they oxygenated Earth’s atmosphere in the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE.) The photosynthesizers opened a pathway for their own continuation and for more complex life to develop. It not only changed the course of evolution, but it also changed the very geology and geochemistry of the planet. The authors liken the collective activity of photosynthetic organisms to collective intelligence.

“Making sense of how a planet’s intelligence might be defined and understood helps shine a little light on humanity’s future on this planet—or lack thereof,” they write. “If we ever hope to survive as a species, we must use our intelligence for the greater good of the planet,” said Adam Frank.

That won’t come as a shock to Universe Today readers.

The authors point out how collective activity changes the planet. They base their experiment partly on the Gaia hypothesis, which says that the Earth’s non-biological systems—geochemistry, plate tectonics, the atmosphere, the oceans—interact with living systems to maintain the entire planet in a habitable state. Without the “collective intelligence” of the biological world, the Earth wouldn’t be habitable.

The authors use an example from forests to illustrate the point.

Earth’s great forests couldn’t exist without the network of mycorrhizal fungi that live below ground. Tree roots interact with the network and the network moves nutrients around in the forest. The fungi get carbon in return. Without this network, the trees couldn’t survive, and no great forests would emerge.

As schoolchildren, we learn that plants produce the oxygen we need to breathe. Without photosynthetic organisms, we couldn’t survive. So the collective activity of the plant world (and algae, etc.) changes the planet to a place hospitable for humanity and other complex life. But now in our short time on Earth, we’ve developed technology, which is the most powerful expression of our collective planetary intelligence. What does that mean for Earth?

The authors talk about four stages of Earth’s development and how we can understand the idea of collective planetary intelligence as those stages evolve.

The first stage is an immature biosphere. Billions of years ago the Earth was an immature biosphere. The only lifeform was bacteria, which couldn’t exert much force on Earth’s planetary systems. Because of this, there was no important global feedback between life and the planet. There was no collective intelligence.

The second stage was a mature biosphere. This was about 2.5 billion to 540 million years ago. Photosynthesis appeared and then plants. Photosynthesis oxygenated Earth’s atmosphere and an ozone layer developed. Life was making the Earth more stable and hospitable for itself. This is the collective planetary intelligence the authors are talking about.

The third stage is where we’re at now, according to the authors. We live in an immature technosphere of our own creation. Our communication, transportation, electrical, and governmental networks are increasingly linked into a technosphere. A quick scan of headlines in consumer tech media shows how we can get a little excited about what we’ve created as a species (Meta, anyone?) But it’s wise not to get too excited. Why?

Because our technosphere is not linked with natural systems. Our immature technosphere largely ignores its impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and the biosphere in general. We extract fossil fuels and push carbon into the atmosphere in an unregulated way. The danger is that this technological immaturity will force the Earth’s systems into a state that imperils the technosphere itself. The immature technosphere is working against itself and the biosphere that supports it.

The fourth stage represents a workable future. It’s the mature technosphere, and in a mature technosphere, our technological intelligence benefits the Earth. For example, renewable energy sources like solar energy will displace fossil fuels and help the climate regulate itself and maintain its habitability. Technological agriculture will strengthen the Earth’s soil systems rather than degrade them. We’ll use our technology to build cities that co-exist with natural systems rather than dominating them. But there are a lot of unknowns.

“Planets evolve through immature and mature stages, and planetary intelligence is indicative of when you get to a mature planet,” Frank says in a press release. “The million-dollar question is figuring out what planetary intelligence looks like and means for us in practice because we don’t know how to move to a mature technosphere yet.”

In a mature technosphere, systems would interact in mutually beneficial ways, like the trees and the mycorrhizal network in forests. A network of feedback loops both technological and natural would work intelligently to maintain habitability. This would be an entirely new arrangement, and the complexity would allow new capabilities to emerge. The emerging capabilities are one hallmark of a mature technosphere. Another is self-maintenance.

“The biosphere figured out how to host life by itself billions of years ago by creating systems for moving around nitrogen and transporting carbon,” Frank says. “Now we have to figure out how to have the same kind of self-maintaining characteristics with the technosphere.”

There are some signs that we’re groping towards a mature technosphere, but they’re mostly crisis-driven. In 1987, we banned the ozone-harming class of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) after scientists found a hole in the ozone layer. Acid rain is caused by sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide and we’ve developed international agreements to limit them after scientists found that acid rain damages soil, trees, fish and other aquatic animals. DDT was used to kill pests and malarial mosquitoes but many countries banned their use when scientists found that it persisted in the environment and led to population declines in birds of prey, among other biosphere-harming effects.

So there’s been some progress towards planetary intelligence. But those successes are mostly corrections to previous bad behaviour. Can we be more proactive?

We might be starting to. We’re developing systems to detect, catalogue, and deflect dangerous asteroids that pose a collision hazard with Earth. If we can do that, we can protect the entire biosphere from calamity, along with our own civilization. NASA and the ESA are working on planetary defence, and NASA launched a technology demonstration mission in 2021. If we can use technology to protect the entire planet, that must constitute a step toward a mature technosphere.

Some of these efforts are heartening, but we have a long ways to go, and this thought experiment can help us think more clearly about it. “We don’t have planetary intelligence or a mature technosphere yet,” Frank said. “But the whole purpose of this research is to point out where we should be headed.”

Are the development of planetary intelligence and a mature technosphere hallmarks of civilizations that make it past a “Great Filter?” Maybe. That idea dovetails with Frank’s other work in the search for alien technosignatures on distant exoplanets.

“We’re saying the only technological civilizations we may ever see—the ones we should expect to see—are the ones that didn’t kill themselves, meaning they must have reached the stage of a true planetary intelligence,” he says. “That’s the power of this line of inquiry: it unites what we need to know to survive the climate crisis with what might happen on any planet where life and intelligence evolve.”

For we lifeforms on Earth at this time, Anthropogenic Global Warming is the biggest threat to a sustainable biosphere. While we can debate what it is about our species that drives us to want more stuff, consume more stuff and create more pollution, the debate about AGW itself is over. It’s happening and we’re causing it.

There are some glimmers of planetary intelligence flickering on the horizon. But we’ve got a long way to go yet. Will we become intelligent enough to make it past the climatic Great Filter?

More:

• Press Release: Can a planet have a mind of its own?
• Research Article: Intelligence as a planetary scale process
• Universe Today: Technosignatures are NASA’s New Target for Detecting Other Civilizations in Space. Wait. What’s a Technosignature?

The post Does the Entire Planet Have a Mind of its Own? appeared first on Universe Today.

Source: 

• https://www.universetoday.com/154579/does-the-entire-planet-have-a-mind-of-its-own/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

23-02-2022 om 20:45 geschreven door peter  

Revealing interview on Exopolitics Today, John DeSouza discusses cases involving extraterrestrial life and UFOs, the mysterious Men in Black phenomenon, the Moon being an artificial structure, the activation and appearance of huge motherships or 'arks'. 

He predicts that UAPs/UFOs are going to behave more aggressively and this is part of a fake alien invasion scenario that may be unleashed on the world. 

John DeSouza is a retired FBI Special Agent who served for 25 years on Counter-Terrorism and Paranormal cases. He has a law degree and possessed a Top Secret security clearance during his FBI career. 

Special Agent DeSouza collected true life X-Files that were used in the hit show "The X-Files". He has written several best-selling books and discussed his paranormal cases in presentations given around the world.

  

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

23-02-2022 om 20:22 geschreven door peter  

Incredible shape-shifting UFO spotted

A teacher in Italy records a strange donut shaped object in the sky, in this clip from Season 2, “Yeti Sighting / Italian UFO.”

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ )

23-02-2022 om 18:47 geschreven door peter  

Well, the answer to the question above is a definitive “Yes!” The U.S. government may not have much understanding of who the Men in Black really are, but the military, and various agencies, have certainly followed the activities of the MIB. As you will see now. Thanks to the phenomenally successful Men in Black movie franchise, there can be very people who have not heard of the sinister MIB. In the movies starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as agents “J” and “K,” the MIB are employed by a secret government body that is dedicated to wiping out hostile aliens on the Earth. The reality of the Men in Black, however, is very different. Unlike their movie counterparts, the real MIB are described as looking definitely non-human: their skin is extremely pale, they have large, bulging eyes; they are extremely skinny and often very tall. In other words, they don’t even look like regular people. This has given rise to the theory that the MIB may be alien-human hybrids. Possibly, even supernatural entities. Not only that, there is strong evidence that suggests the U.S. Government has secretly investigated the MIB phenomenon, to try and figure out who – or what – the Men in Black are.

(Nick Redfern) 

Men in Black: What does the U.S. Government Know?

Thanks to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act legislation, we now have in our possession a number of official, previously secret, U.S. military documents that confirm those secret investigations, that were clearly covered up at the time the government was doing its utmost to solve the mysterious riddle of who these strange characters were. Now, to the next part: John Keel was not only the author of the acclaimed book, The Mothman Prophecies. He was also someone who dug very deeply into the matter of the MIB, who they were, and where they came from. In February 1967, Keel had the opportunity to speak with Colonel George P. Freeman. Colonel Freeman, of the U.S. Air Force, made the following, written statement about the MIB. Keel took careful note of it: “Mysterious men dressed in Air Force uniforms or bearing impressive credentials from government agencies have been silencing UFO witnesses. We have checked a number of these cases, and these men are not connected to the Air Force in any way. We haven’t been able to find out anything about these men. By posing as Air Force officers and government agents, they are committing a Federal offense. We would sure like to catch one – unfortunately the trail is always too cold by the time we hear about these cases, but we are still trying.”

Less than one month later, specifically on March 1, 1967, Lieutenant General Hewitt T. Wheless, USAF, penned the following memo. It was widely circulated within the military: “Information, not verifiable, has reached HQ USAF that persons claiming to represent the Air Force or other Defense establishments have contacted citizens who have sighted unidentified flying objects. In one reported case, an individual in civilian clothes, who represented himself as a member of NORAD, demanded and received photos belonging to a private citizen.” The document continues: “In another, a person in an Air Force uniform approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO, assembled them in a school room and told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting. All military and civilian personnel and particularly information officers and UFO investigating officers who hear of such reports should immediately notify their local OSI offices.” Clearly, not only does the above-documentation demonstrate that the Men in Black were nothing to do with the government; it also shows that the government had no more understanding of who the MIB were than did the average UFO researcher. Moving on to the FBI…

(Nick Redfern)

Bender, Barker and the G-Men

In 1956, paranormal/UFO investigator Gray Barker wrote and published a book titled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. A significant percentage of the book was focused on the MIB-themed experiences of Albert Bender, who, in the early 1950s, established the International Flying Saucer Bureau (in Bridgeport, Connecticut). It wasn’t long before the IFSB was no more. Bender supposedly closed it down after receiving repeated, menacing visits from the Men in Black. Bender’s MIB were far less like 1950s-era G-Men or agents of the CIA. They were far more like something from the pages of a Bram Stoker novel, mixed in with a greater than liberal sprinkling of H.P Lovecraft. As a result of the publication of Barker’s book, a number of people contacted the FBI, demanding to know who the dark-suited silencers really were – and particularly because certain ufologists, such as Barker, were claiming the MIB were from “the government.”

The FBI has declassified some of its documents on Bender and Barker. They demonstrate something notable. Namely, that just like the U.S. military, the FBI too had no real understanding of who the MIB were; but, they knew the MIB existed and were terrorizing people. On January 22, 1959, none other than J. Edgar Hoover instructed the Chicago office of the FBI: “The Bureau desires to obtain a copy of the book written by Gray Barker entitled ‘They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.'” Records demonstrate that behind closed doors and after reading Barker’s book, the FBI was as baffled in the Fifties as the Air Force was, almost a decade later.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

22-02-2022 om 22:37 geschreven door peter  

In October 2017, a post appeared on the 4chan message board from an anonymous account calling itself “Q Clearance Patriot.” This poster, who became known as “Q,” claimed to be a high-ranking government insider with access to classified information from President Trump’s administration, about an alleged global cabal against Trump. Since then, despite many postings, much speculation on both political sides and numerous investigations, the identity of Q has never been proven with certainty. That may have changed with the announcement that two independent groups of linguistic detectives using machine learning software to track speech patterns in Q’s myriad of social media messages have put a name to the letter … in fact, two names. There is much information about QAnon online – you can start here if you need some. The purpose of this article is examine the techniques each group used to make their determinations.

“The two analyses — one by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of OrphAnalytics, a Swiss start-up; the other by the French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps — built on long-established forms of forensic linguistics that can detect telltale variations, revealing the same hand in two texts.”

The New York Times was the first to reveal the results of these independent analyses which both used stylometry — the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another – albeit in different ways. The groups began with text samples, including more than 100,000 words by Q and at least 12,000 words by each of the 13 other writers that they identified as likely suspects in the quest to out Q. The Swiss researchers used AI which searched for three-character patterns across multiple texts and compared vocabulary and syntax. The French group used AI that learned to recognize patterns in writing the same way facial-recognition software learns patterns in human features. Both techniques had their doubters.

“Gerald McMenamin of the University of Nevada, Reno, a renowned forensic linguist critical of the machine-learning techniques, said he doubted that software could pick out the telltale individual variations from the quirks of the distinctive voice assumed in the Q messages — full of short sentences, cryptic statements, military jargon and Socratic questions.”

Both groups focused primarily on Q’s tweets so the comparisons between writers were apples-to-apples. At some point, the Swiss and French groups heard about each other and decided to share resources. The Swiss team identified six writers as possible Q’s, while the French examined those and seven more people from inside the Trump administration. In the end, both AIs pointed to the same person — make that persons.

“At first most of the text is by Furber. But the signature of Ron Watkins increased during the first few months as Paul Furber decreased and then dropped completely.”

Florian Cafiero says the conclusions were the same – the first Q was Paul Furber, a South African software developer and tech journalist whose name appeared on message boards as an early follower but who the AI determined was actually the first writer of the messages. Eventually, minute aspects of the messages prompted the AI to show that Furber had left and Ron Watkins, who operated a website where the Q messages began appearing in 2018 and is now running for Congress in Arizona, became the new Q. While not perfect, the Swiss team said its software linked the writings of these two men to that of Q 93 percent of the time, while the French team said its software linked Watkins’s writing in 99 percent of tests and Furber’s in 98 percent. The New York Times says it contacted two prominent experts in linguistic detective work who both called the conclusions “credible and persuasive.”

“(Q’s messages) took over our lives, literally. We all started talking like him.”

When contacted by The New York Times, Furber denied being Q, implying the real Q’s influence made his own writings sound like him. Watkins, known to QAnon fans as CodeMonkeyZ, simply said, “I am not Q.”

The Times calls this “the first empirical evidence of who invented” QAnon. Forensic analyses, linguistic detective work, artificial intelligence and machine learning are all accepted science whose results regularly hold up in the court of law. Will they hold up in the court of public opinion?

Are Paul Furber and Ron Watkins Q?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

22-02-2022 om 20:42 geschreven door peter  

The Unidentified: Are we alone in the universe?

A topic previously pushed into science fiction is suddenly being taken very seriously based on an extraordinary video, taken, and authenticated by the US Military.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted  by peter2011

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

22-02-2022 om 20:31 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Reveal Device that Can Project Holograms Into Your Brain to Create New Experiences

SCIENCE

R2-D2 being able to transmit a hologram of Princess Leia was the coolest thing ever back in the late 70s when “Star Wars: A New Hope” was first on the big screen. More recently, we have seen holograms in our cards or money.

In 2019, there are card game enthusiasts who are designing holographic images of the monsters in games such as Yu-Gi-Oh for use in tournaments.  When we imagine our future, we might see holographic projections of cell phone apps in front of our faces as we walk down the street.

What if those same holographic images were able to create sensations such as touch, memory, or hearing things that weren’t actually real?  What if certain sensations could be omitted, such as painful ones?   Scientists recently revealed a device that can project holograms into your brain to create new experiences.

Neuron, Cell of the nervous system allowing information to be carried in the form of electrical and... [+]

How is a hologram created?

A hologram, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a three-dimensional image reproduced from a pattern of interference produced by a split coherent beam of radiation.  A laser is a great example.”  The scientific term for the process of making a hologram is holography.

Light travels in waves.  A hologram records the light waves as they bounce off an object.  When a light wave bounces off an object, its changed form is called an interference wave.  Think of when you toss a pebble into a pond over your reflection; you see an image of yourself in the water but that image appears slightly distorted. In a light wave, due to the discovery of lasers, that distortion is minimal and can be projected onto an outside source.

Lasers help create 3D holographs due to how the light operates from a laser.  Light from a laser has a constant flow of light that moves in consistent phases.  Therefore, the entire area is getting consistent light waves, which then bounce off more equal to the original light source.  Holography acts like photography.  Original photograph images can be captured by allowing the light bouncing off an object to be reflected off a mercury-coated surface and then it is captured onto a different surface.

Real-world uses for holograms

Holograms have several uses, and their potential for changing how we interact in the world is impressive.

Use of holograms in the entertainment and marketing industry:

Various big-name brands are using holograms to invoke excitement for their products and to gain information about the users.

In Los Angeles, CA, September of 2017, an augmented reality company, VNTANA, partnered with an intelligent engagement company, Satisfi Labs, and created the first AI concierge.  This concierge was designed to be interactive in its responses to the public.  People could communicate with the hologram and ask questions related to the particular event it was hosting.

The Death Star hologram was made available to those who purchased a deluxe edition of the Star Wars soundtrack for the Star Wars’ 40th anniversary.

Coachella put on a holographic concert in 2017 of Tupac Shakur.  The same company who put on that concert has also opened an all-holographic theatre in Hollywood.

In Chicago, Pepsi and Aquafina put on a hologram of a baseball player which allowed visitors to play baseball with it.

The benefits of these holograms for the industries:

Well, other than the coolness factor, here are some others:

• The companies can request visitors’ names and email addresses either to gain access or to obtain a digital copy of the event after the fact.
• With more involvement, the companies have better feedback on the crowd’s reaction.
• Listening in on social sharing. In most instances, the public took pictures or video of themselves with the hologram and shared it on social media.  Not only is that continued free advertising, but it also creates more comments and reactions.
• Should a company display more than one type or style of a hologram, they can find out the consumer’s preference.
• It leaves an impression of the brand or company not easily forgotten.
• Encourages longer engagement from the public at events.

On a more personal level, one company, 8i Studios in Culver City, Ca., is working on creating holographic images of people that can be recorded and then viewed through a VR headset or 8i’s app, Holo.  The purpose of this is to create authentic, recorded memories; for example, recorded images of your parents while you were a child, or a favorite pet, or your newborn baby.  Just imagine, re-experiencing people you have lost or who have grown up, all over again in the now. It would be like a photo album but with the sensation of the people truly being in the room.

How are holograms used in medicine?

The science of medicine began due to inquisitive individuals who wanted to know how our bodies worked and how we could heal people. In order to learn more about our bodies, scientists used cadavers. Now, medical students can peer at the holographic image of the human body. This also allows for a more intensive, in-depth study of how the neurological, vascular, and musculoskeletal systems are laid out and react with each other.

Other medical holographs are of the cell structure, organs, and our DNA.  This then encourages further advancement in the biomedical field.

Holograms find their primary uses by scientists, biomedical professionals, and researchers.  Through holographic imaging, these professionals can see what is going on in your body without having to undertake any risky procedure.  It also allows for research and further understanding of the complexities of how our brain and neurological systems operate and react under various circumstances.  They can trigger events without causing harm and see how it all reacts.

All of this increases the opportunity to make a more accurate diagnosis and treatment for patients in a far less obtrusive and risky manner.

The benefits of creating new experiences through holograms into the brain

Could you ever imagine that holographic images could project into our brains and target specific neurons in order to recreate a sensation? It could also potentially project a false memory for the betterment of an individual’s life.

Researchers at the University of Berkley are working on designing a way to create a hologram within the brain. They have found that this would allow them to read the activity of the neurons in the brain and then influence them.

The scientists had to match the speed of the pulsing neurons in our brain and then recreate the pattern with lasers.  The goal was to mimic the brain’s activity in order to fool it into believing it was part of its own pattern.  They then created a holographic image of a brain with a focus on the individual neurons to isolate the particular ones they wished to influence.  The scientists then projected that image onto a thin slice of a brain.

They first did this to affect the touch, motor, and vision neurons of mice.  While the mice did not demonstrate any change through behavior, a reading of the neurons did demonstrate that the stimuli were received by the brain. The next step in the process is to train the mice to alter their behavior depending upon the stimuli.

The hope of this experiment is to aid with many diseases or disorders.

The first they feel it would be most effective with is those who have lost a limb.  It would help by allowing the body to respond the same with a prosthetic as one would with a limb.  As technology and their knowledge advances, they hope to see areas where the brain misfires; examples include a seizure or schizophrenia. Then they may find a way to alter the brain’s neurons to fire correctly. They even believe it could offer a return of sight to those who lost their vision.

In an article in Digital Trends, the assistant professor at Berkley, Hillel Adesnik, is quoted as saying:

“But as basic neuroscientists, we are also primarily interested in using this system to ‘crack’ the neural codes of sensory perception.”

We want to understand how our brain builds perceptions of our external world all through the language of neurons …. We believe this new technology can address this fundamental question in neuroscience because we can attempt to generate artificial perceptions by writing specific patterns of activity into the brain and see what’ works.'”

Closing Thoughts

Can you believe it? Scientists have created a device that can project a hologram to create experiences in our brain! They have also found a way to isolate individual, tiny neurons. Amazing!

The capability of being able to communicate directly to the brain has many possibilities.  Not only does this make feasible the ability to read what is happening in the brain, but it can also “write” changes onto your brain.  The implied possibilities are awe-inspiring to even think about. They add more hope for those who would benefit.

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{ https://www.powerofpositivity.com/ }

22-02-2022 om 18:48 geschreven door peter  

A touchable, morphing 3D hologram has been invented in Japan

by Colm Gorey

Laser beams on dancefloor

image via Shutterstock

Holograms just got a lot more exciting with the news that a team of researchers in Japan has developed a 3D hologram projector that responds to a person’s touch, allowing it to completely change shape.

Dubbed ‘Fairy Lights’, and developed by researchers from five Japanese universities, the project was started as a means of improving existing 3D hologram technology and ones that react to touch in mid-air.

According to Hacked, the technology behind touchable holograms has been in existence for a number of years now, but has been nowhere near capable of being introduced to the commercial market because the laser beams, which generate the hologram, actually burn human skin on contact with it.

To fix this, the Japanese researchers decided to develop a system whereby their device will fire laser pulses that are fired at high frequencies, ionising the air molecules that exist in one particular spot.

The lasers in question are known as femtosecond lasers, which create pulses of light that last a few tens of femtoseconds, which to you and me means one millionth of one billionth of just one second.

This leads to the formation of the pixels, which respond to touch when the pulses are interrupted.

Scientists Reveal Device that Can Project Holograms Into Your Brain to Create New Experiences

From the video they have published to show their results, the minute scale of the holograms shows great promise for bringing the technology on a larger scale in the near future during a time when augmented reality (AR) is seen as being a realistic alternative to interactive hologram technology.

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{ https://www.siliconrepublic.com/ }

22-02-2022 om 18:20 geschreven door peter  

SCIENTISTS CREATE HOLOGRAMS THAT YOU CAN TOUCH

THEY CREATED A BASKETBALL PROJECT THAT CAN BE "TOUCHED, ROLLED AND BOUNCED."

PHOTOHOLGIC VIA UNSPLASH

22-02-2022 om 17:55 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

22-02-2022 om 17:12 geschreven door peter