Here, The Debrief looks at three of the past most promising warp drive models, along with one brand new physics concept called the “Tri-Space Model,” which may hold the key to making faster-than-light travel possible.

THE ORIGINAL: ALCUBIERRE/WHITE WARP DRIVE

While Alcubierre’s warp drive concept showed that traveling faster than light was mathematically possible, it was widely criticized for its massive power requirements and use of purely theoretical “exotic matter.” Still, many scientists and engineers were intrigued by his work, including former NASA engineer and physicist Dr. Harold G. “Sonny” White.

Hoping to move Alcubierre’s metric from theory into a published, canonical form, White first looked at the idea more closely in 2003.

“I started working in the (NASA) space program in 2000,” White told The Debrief in an interview. “While I was working in the space program, I was thinking about this Advanced Power propulsion. I was thinking about this Alcubierre Warp metric. You know, it was not published in its canonical form. And so, in 2003, I published a paper in the journal General Relativity and Gravitation.”

White immediately noted how Alcubierre’s math worked but also spotted areas he thought his own background in engineering and physics could improve the concept.

“Some things didn’t quite make sense to me, but by putting it into canonical form, helped me figure out ‘how does this concept really work?’, White told The Debrief. “From the process of not being at warp to being at warp… what would that look like when you look at the mathematics? And the only way I could see to answer the question is to put it in the canonical form in 2003, so that’s what I talked about in that paper.”

Theoretical Warp Bubble Structure

(Image Credit LSI)

Years later, White was asked by NASA to present his updated warp concept, leading to his 2011 paper and the warp drive concept now known as the “Acubierre/White Warp Drive.”

“I got asked to give a talk [about the warp drive] to DARPA and NASA at the DARPA 100-year Starship Symposium in 2011,” he told The Debrief. “I did a sensitivity study on the metric. I looked at what happens when you change the parameters and the mathematics.”

Specifically, White looked at the geometry of the classic warp drive model and found something that dramatically reduced the amount of energy required by Alcubierre.

“It basically comes down to how thick you make the toroidal ring and negative vacuum energy density,” he explained. “How thick or thin to make it, topologically? What does that do to the overall energy required? And so, during that work, I had no ‘objective’ objectives, per se, other than just to explore. In the process of doing that, I discovered that by making that ring a little thicker, instead of being like a wedding band wrapped around your finger, it’s a little bit more like a lifesaver, was key.”

In fact, White’s geometric adjustment to the classic model dramatically reduced the amount of exotic matter required to a much more manageable concept.

“By using that optimization technique, I was able to reduce the amount of exotic matter from a Jupiter-sized amount down to something about the size of the Voyager spacecraft,” said White. “So about two metric tons or just under two metric tons.”

As White notes, even a few tons of a theoretical substance like exotic matter is still unachievable by today’s scientists and engineers, but his changes definitely improved the ultimate viability of Alcubierre’s idea.

“Instead of just being mathematically possible in our work, we potentially move it into the category of maybe it’s plausible,” he noted with a lighthearted shrug. “There are now two metric tons of this stuff we’re not quite sure exactly how to make.”

White’s views about the feasibility of warp drives and their related effects have garnered a fair amount of attention from critics over the years. Among them is astrophysicist Ethan Siegel who, while remaining skeptical of White’s claims, has noted that the warp drive concept “remains an interesting possibility and one worthy of continued scientific investigation, but one that you should remain tremendously skeptical about given the current state of affairs.”

THE LENTZ DRIVE

A decade after White updated the original warp drive concept, reducing the need for exotic matter down from a Jupiter-sized amount to a few tons, another scientist named Dr. Eric W. Lentz decided to take a stab at his own warp drive concept. Published in 2021, his paper “Breaking the warp barrier: hyper-fast solitons in Einstein–Maxwell-plasma theory” lays out a whole new warp drive concept. And unlike Alcubierre and White, Lentz believed that his faster-than-light warp drive model could be accomplished in a completely new and different way.

“The Alcubierre solution provided an intuitive picture of what a warp drive would do: contract the space immediately in front of the central region containing the ship or transport, and expand the space immediately behind,” Dr. Lentz explained in an email to The Debrief. “This gives us the picture of the warp drive as a wave of curvature on which a ship will ride to its destination.”

However, Lentz explains, “this picture is not an essential feature of a warp drive.” Instead, he says, a solution proposed by physicist Jose Natario back in 2002 showed that the expansion and contraction weren’t necessary to transport the ship forward. That work, says Lentz, was critical to forming his own theory, one where a warp field could be created using only traditional matter and not exotic matter.

“[Natario] showed that the expansion could be trivial (zero) everywhere and still perform the same task of transporting a ship,” Lentz told The Debrief. This is a significant breakthrough, he says, because it means that exotic matter that warps the space in front of the theoretical passenger, as well as behind them (as depicted in nearly all theoretical warp drive solutions), is no longer needed to achieve faster-than-light travel.

Could dark matter allow physicists a path toward overcoming the challenges of faster-than-light travel?

(Credit: ESO)

“In the Alcubierre solution, the energy density and curvatures are maximally separated, with the energy being restricted to a small torus between the regions of high contraction and expansion,” Lentz told The Debrief, once again evoking the classic image of the Alcubierre Warp model. “The curvatures and sources in my proposal are instead highly correlated, with the regions of high energy density and high expansion and contraction overlapping almost exactly.”

As his published paper explains, “This is the first example of hyper-fast solitons resulting from known and familiar sources, reopening the discussion of superluminal mechanisms rooted in conventional physics.”

Lentz does freely admit that his theory is somewhat novel, even in this highly theoretical arena. “The expansion factor in my proposal is stranger still [than in Natario or Alcubierre], having regions of large expansion and contraction of space surrounding the central region containing a ship.”

Still, the issue of power requirements is not totally solved by Lentz, although he told The Debrief there is some hope in this area.

“There are a number of very effective energy-saving mechanisms for the Alcubierre drive described in the literature,” he explained. “The challenge would be to either modify these mechanisms to operate using only conventional sources, [like his proposed theory which does not require exotic matter] or to innovate novel energy saving techniques.”

In other words, if these proposed energy reduction techniques don’t work on his drive concept due to the lack of exotic matter, a legitimate concern, then an entirely new solution, the likes of which has not yet been proposed, would need to be found. Fortunately, Lentz says, his drive already accomplishes some of that goal since “not all the energy needs to come directly from the reactor, as we expect much of the energy sourcing the bubble to come from the particles’ rest masses.”

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/space/ }

01-02-2024 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

New York-based Applied Physics first achieved recognition with the 2021 publication of a peer-reviewed theoretical paper detailing the mathematics behind the construction of a physical warp drive. More recently, the organization published a method for using Cal Tech’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect the use of warp drives in outer space, co-authored by Dr. Manfred Paulini, the Associate Dean of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Now, the group says their peers working in the field warp field mechanics have a tool that didn’t exist previously or was simply too expensive and impractical to utilize. Their findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Universe, are setting the pace for a small but growing community of researchers hoping to explore the mechanics of gravity and bring about humanity’s first real warp-drive spacecraft.

SOUND WAVES AND GLYCERIN PROVED TO BE THE KEY INGREDIENTS

To create their simulated black hole, the paper’s lead author, Dr. Edward Rietman, and his co-author, Dr. Brandon Melcher, filled a chamber with an everyday, non-toxic liquid. “The dielectric medium used was glycerin,” explained Rietman in an exclusive email to The Debrief. “It has the nice property of being optically transparent and dense, and its normal refractive index is 1.4768.”

Next, the researchers bombarded the dielectric medium with targeted sound waves. Once the waves were tuned correctly, Rietman and Melcher employed a Thorlabs FS30SMA-1550 fiber collimator to send the light into a Thorlabs CSS 100 series spectrometer, which confirmed the bending of light, exactly like a real black hole in space.

“The team induced a black hole by modulating acoustic waves in a dense fluid, building on recent research that explores the use of high-frequency acoustic waves for analog simulations of gravity and general relativity in the laboratory,” the Applied Physics team told The Debrief. “The acoustic waves alter the medium through which they travel, deflecting laser light in the lab similarly to how the gravitational pull of black holes bends the light of distant stars behind them.”

In other words, sound waves were focused into a thick fluid, causing light to bend around like they were close to a black hole. “This discovery provides a novel method to gain insight into the physics of black holes, all within the safety of a laboratory,” the team explained.

Also significant, the team says that their measurements of the degree to which bent light the artificial black hole bent light jibe perfectly with the real thing. “We show the calculations comparing our results with the Schwarzschild metric (in our paper),” Rietman told The Debrief.

“CHEAPER, BETTER, FASTER” BLACK HOLE OPENS UP GRAVITY RESEARCH TO EVERYONE

While simulated black holes are currently used in labs to explore a wide range of phenomena, the team at Applied Physics says their particular black hole is more accessible to operate than the alternatives and is markedly less expensive. This cost-benefit, they note, will allow the small but growing community of physicists and engineers trying to advance science toward the construction of a real warp drive to afford a highly-specialized tool that is critical to their work.

“A Bose-Einstein condensate requires liquid He (helium) temperatures plus a room full of costly equipment (that can total) over $1 million,” Gianni Martire, founder of Applied Physics, explained in a message to The Debrief, “whereas our system is truly benchtop, with total costs around $10k.”

“We couldn’t afford $1 million,” added Martire,” so we invented a cheaper, better, faster way simply out of need.”

ARTIFICIAL BLACK HOLE COULD ENABLE DEVELOPMENT OF A REAL WORLD WARP DRIVE SPACECRAFT

The researchers behind the artificial black hole caution that the first flight of a working warp drive spacecraft could still be decades away, or that such technology may simply be too complex to ever really come to fruition. However, they reiterate that their solution provides a new tool to like-minded researchers who are banking on the possibility that making warp drive a reality can be achieved.

“Nobody has used glycerin to create a black hole system in the lab,” Melcher told The Debrief. “We view this advance as offering another tool to analog system researchers. We view the pressure variations in glycerin as fertile soil for more complicated space/time possibilities.”

“We’re here to scale science,” the physicist added, “not conjecture, so measuring is important.”

When asked how their work can help facilitate advancements toward a working warp drive, Rietman was notably cautious, though still optimistic.

“This discovery demonstrates the exciting potential of analog systems for studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena in the laboratory,” he told The Debrief. “With this innovation, we can better understand the effects of curved space/time and advance the future of warp drive research.”

“It is too early to answer clearly [how this will lead to a warp drive] as we need to publish more papers on work we’ve done,” he later added. “Science and technology advance one step at a time, so we can say it will, but going into the details is a deep science hole that will take away focus. We need this to measure and prove theories in warp [mechanics]. That’s the simple way to say it.”

Ultimately, the Applied Physics research team says their new tool is sorely needed by researchers like themselves who hope to advance humanity’s understanding of gravity. But they also point out that the top benefit of their new laboratory-created black hole may be its safety since creating an actual black hole here on earth could have catastrophic consequences.

“Just don’t leave your black hole unattended,” Martire joked before adding, “We should probably make that into a sign.”

• Christopher Plain is a novelist, comedian, and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on Twitter, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/space/ }

01-02-2024 om 22:45 geschreven door peter  

Campus Puritans Come for an Astronomer—And His Byline

By demanding that morality tests be imposed on scientific journal authorship, Geoff Marcy’s critics are creating a dangerous precedent.

Lawrence M. Krauss

Are we alone in the universe? It’s one of the most compelling existential questions facing humanity. And the past half-century has witnessed a revolution in our ability to scan the cosmos in search of an answer. When I was a university student, the possibility of discovering, much less observing, planets in other star systems seemed like science fiction. But that has changed. Thanks to orbiting observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope, and huge ground-based telescopes such as the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea Hawaii, astronomers could be on the cusp of finding evidence for life around one or more of the thousands of extrasolar planets (also known as exoplanets) that have now been discovered.

And yet, even as new technology allows humanity to peer into distant galaxies and answer profound questions about the universe, some scientists working in this field are being hounded by colleagues more focused on leading terrestrial outrage mobs than finding new discoveries in the heavens.

The existence of planets orbiting other main sequence stars (a category that includes about 90 percent of the stars in the universe) was first demonstrated in 1995, when Swiss astrophysicist Michel Mayor and Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz inferred the existence of a Jupiter-mass companion of the star 51 Pegasi, approximately 50 light years away from our own solar system. They did this by observing cyclic “wobbles” in the star’s path—tiny oscillatory movements whose maximum speed is about 70 meters per second, negligible in astronomical terms. These oscillations reflect the gravitational tug of 51 Pegasi’s planetary companion, which orbits the star once every four days, at a distance far closer than Mercury orbits our Sun.

The discovery was accomplished using a technique that Mayor and Queloz spearheaded in parallel with similar work done by American astronomer Geoff Marcy. Both teams based their observations on the Doppler effect, the well-known phenomenon by which a wave’s apparent frequency will change depending on whether the observer is moving toward, or away from, the radiation source. (It’s similar to the principle that police use to measure your car’s speed with a radar gun.) To the extent that a star’s wobble aligns with the axis of observation, the frequency of its emitted light, as observed on Earth, would also vary, albeit by a minute amount.

The two teams used sensitive spectrometers that could measure such shifts. And within a month of Mayor and Queloz’s observations becoming known, their results were confirmed by Marcy and his own colleagues. Marcy’s team went on to identify 70 of the first 100 known exoplanets, including the first exoplanet located as far from its star as Jupiter is from the Sun. In 2005, Marcy and Mayor shared the prestigious Shaw Prize in Astronomy, awarded for outstanding contributions in the field.

Another planet-detecting technique—which I will admit to having previously dismissed as nearly impossible—was uncovered by Marcy’s group, working with Tennessee State University astronomer Greg Henry. Using this method, a planet’s existence is inferred from the fact that its associated star is dimmed (to a terrestrial observer) by a minute amount (less than one part in a thousand) when the planet passes in front of it. This “transit” technique of exoplanetary detection was used by NASA’s 2009 Kepler Mission, of which Marcy was a Science Team member, to discover approximately 4,000 planets. Many of these are the size of our Earth, and would seem to have surface temperatures conducive to biology (as we know it).

By now, we have discovered many systems with multiple planets orbiting a single star. And this naturally invites the question: Is the character of our own solar system, with large giant gas planets (Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune) orbiting farther out, and smaller rocky planets (Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury) orbiting closer in (allowing the surface of at least one of these latter planets, Earth, to be sufficiently warm to host liquid water), a prerequisite for the development of life?

In March, a group of 16 authors—including Marcy; lead author Lauren Weiss, a junior faculty member in the astrophysics group at Notre Dame University, and a former PhD student of Marcy; and Caltech astronomer Andrew Howard, a former postdoctoral researcher who’s worked under Marcy’s direction—posted a paper entitled ‘The Kepler Giant Planet Search. I: A Decade of Kepler Planet Host Radial Velocities from W. M. Keck Observatory’ to arXiv, an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in certain fields. One of the authors’ purposes was to explore how the existence of Jupiter-size outer planets might correlate with the existence of smaller rocky inner planets. (A layperson might ask what the existence of a gas giant such a Jupiter has to do with the emergence of life on a rocky planet much closer to the sun. One answer is that—to take our own solar system as a representative example—Jupiter is believed to have absorbed or deflected large asteroids and comets from the outer solar system that otherwise would have vaporized Earth’s oceans, from which life first emerged.) Here is part of the abstract of that paper:

Despite the importance of Jupiter and Saturn to Earth’s formation and habitability, there has not yet been a comprehensive observational study of how giant exoplanets correlate with the architectural properties of close-in, sub-Neptune sized exoplanets. This is largely because transit surveys are particularly insensitive to planets [whose orbit radius is greater than that of Earth], and so their census of Jupiter-like planets is incomplete, inhibiting our study of the relationship between Jupiter-like planets and the small planets that do transit. To establish the relationship between small and giant planets, we conducted the Kepler Giant Planet Survey (KGPS). Using W. M. Keck Observatory HIRES [High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer], we spent over a decade collecting 2,858 [exoplanets detected using the Doppler wobble method] (2,181 of which are presented here for the first time) of 63 sun-like stars that host 157 transiting planets.

But if you visit arXiv to read the paper now, you can’t. It’s been withdrawn. Why? Was the data incorrect? Was the analysis conducted improperly? No. The problem was that Geoff Marcy’s name was on it.

Nine years ago, Marcy was investigated by his then-employer, the University of California, for behaviour that was described as sexual harassment. (You can read his take about the claims here, wherein he describes the infractions as resulting from him treating students as friends, hugging them or kissing them on the forehead if they related personal problems, and so forth.) It is worth adding that during his time at the University of California, Marcy also developed a record of working to promote a welcoming environment for women in science, advocating progressive university policies, and mentoring many female PhD students who subsequently went on to successful careers.

It is true that a University of California investigator decided in favour of Marcy’s complainants, albeit based on a (weak) preponderance-of-the-evidence standard. (And the low levels of due process that typify campus investigations of this type are well-known.) But even so, following the investigation, U.C. Berkeley recommended that Marcy should continue as a full professor, as he’d recently demonstrated five years of more careful behavior, which had elicited no further complaints.

Nevertheless, the online pressure against him became intolerable, and so Marcy eventually chose to leave his position voluntarily, so as to allow his colleagues and the department as a whole to get past the controversy surrounding his continued presence in the department. Grant sponsorship of his research ended, and he was removed from various collaborations. The Nobel Prize was awarded to Mayor and Queloz in 2019 for their work on exoplanets, but Marcy wasn’t included, in spite of the seminal role he and his group had played. In 2021, Marcy was ejected from the National Academy of Sciences, a shockingly severe response to behaviour that not only wasn’t criminal in nature, but which his university hadn’t even considered a firing offense. The pattern was clear: The imperatives of academic virtue signaling required individuals and institutions to publicly humiliate Marcy as a means to indicate their own moral bona fides.

Marcy’s name had been included in the authorship of ‘The Kepler Giant Planet Search’ on the basis of his long-standing contributions to the project therein discussed. He helped design, build, and even fund the Doppler system at the Keck Observatory; and he helped write the novel computer algorithm used to distill evidence of stellar wobbles from the background data.

One might imagine that the previous sanctions meted out to Marcy might have been enough. But not so: Once Astronomy Twitter discovered his name on the paper, a wave of outrage manifested itself. Many complained that it was wrong to have such a person’s work “promoted” in such a way—as if scientific publications were press releases. The pressure became so great that Weiss, the lead author, withdrew the paper from the arXiv altogether on April 7th, indicating, euphemistically, “It has come to my attention that there are significant concerns about the author list of this manuscript. It is very important to me that I honor everyone’s contribution to this work appropriately. Accordingly, I am revisiting the author list, with the goal of setting a standard for authorship that fairly acknowledges everyone’s contribution.” I have learned that, as a result of the social-media furor, several co-authors had requested their names be removed from the author list. As of now, the status of the paper is still in limbo.

In the style of a Soviet apparatchik announcing that one of his comrades had fallen from favour, the aforementioned Caltech astronomer and former Marcy-supervised post-doc, Andrew Howard, publicly assured everyone that Marcy, in a reporter’s words, “won’t co-author any papers the group publishes going forward.” These remarks were published in a May 16th Science hit piece on Marcy’s reputation, whose author appeared to agree with those seeking to bounce Marcy from the author list. The torqued title: “After outcry, disgraced sexual harasser removed from astronomy manuscript.”

A student who co-authored earlier publications as part of the same collaboration—in which Marcy’s name had appeared as co-author—now claims that having Marcy’s name on this new manuscript would be bad for her career. On what basis she made this claim is not clear. As noted above, Lauren Weiss, the lead author, is one of Marcy’s former students. Her name, like Howard’s, has appeared on numerous publications alongside Marcy’s. It appears that their association with the so-called “disgraced sexual harasser” helped, not hurt, their careers.

Another student, whose role on the project was confined to collecting data, complained that the appearance of Marcy’s name on the paper would somehow serve to “promote” Marcy at the expense of the student. Putting aside the respective importance of the contributions being made, the complaint reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific publication works. These articles are not press releases, and one’s appearance on an author list is not a form of “promotion.” Rather, it is meant to indicate one’s actual intellectual contribution to the design and implementation of a project—a form of recognition the lead author and other co-authors presumably agreed upon before the paper was submitted for publication.

The Science article also included a student’s extremely dubious claim that the presence of Marcy’s name on the author list would produce “potential psychological harm.” Specifically: “A lot of people in astronomy, especially a lot of women, are survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment themselves, so seeing your name next to his—seeing his name at all—can be extremely triggering for a lot of people.” At the risk of appearing insensitive, anyone whose psychological trauma is so severe that it causes them to be emotionally triggered by the sight of someone’s name on a publication is in need of therapy. More importantly, such personal sensitivities should not serve to award individuals with veto power on the appearance of bylines in scientific publications.

Such is the (new) outcry over Marcy that the American Astronomical Society (AAS), a publisher of journals in which his name has appeared frequently, felt compelled to get in on the act. One might imagine that it would stand on the side of proper scholarship, asserting that author credits should reflect project contributions; which is to say that the only grounds for removing an author’s name should be a disclosure to the effect that he or she did not actually contribute to the underlying science, or that he or she was involved in falsifying or distorting data.

Instead, AAS President Kelsey Johnson publicly confirmed that the society’s ethics working group is now considering whether to classify “sexual harassment—and, indeed, all forms of harassment, discrimination, and bullying”—as grounds for restricting authorship. Under this standard, any number of people might have their names stripped from scientific papers, including, ironically, many of those same individuals now demanding that Marcy’s name be removed from ‘The Kepler Giant Planet Search.’ After all, how was lead author Weiss (a junior faculty member, it should be remembered) induced to withdraw the paper with its current author list except through mob bullying tactics?

Indeed, one of Marcy’s SETI collaborators, Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics researcher Beatriz Villarroel, has filed harassment complaints on this very basis. Recently, she was blocked from presenting at an astrobiology conference at Penn State because of her collaboration with Marcy. She also had to withdraw an application to become an affiliate at the SETI institute in California after being instructed not to publish any papers, or apply for any grants, for a project involving Marcy.

The campaign against not only accused harassers, but also those who are accused of even dealing with accused harassers, including producing good science with them, is beginning to take on the flavour of anti-collaborator campaigns during wartime. Some organizations are even seeking to encode this mob logic in their formal rules, through codes of conduct that serve to punish those who collaborate with, or even cite the work of, those deemed to have committed harassment or offences against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

In the current political environment, few are willing to stand against the pitchforks. Two senior female astronomers to whom I sent a draft of this piece for possible comment prior to publication indicated that they agreed with the expressed views, but would not be willing to say so publicly. One stated that she didn’t want her students and postdocs to have a supervisor who could be viewed as “guilty by association.” Shouldn’t the mob mentality that produces this kind of fear be deemed at least as worthy of condemnation by the scientific community?

Even the AAS leadership seems to have recognized the hypocrisy at play here, albeit grudgingly. A 2021 online note authored by the AAS’s then-President, University of Washington astronomer Paula Szkody (who herself co-authored a paper with Marcy in 2012), affirmed that the AAS ethics code states that “all persons who have made significant contributions to a work intended for publication should be offered the opportunity to be listed as authors” (a policy consistent with that of Springer, a major science publisher, which warns contributors that “it is dishonest to omit an author who has made significant contributions”). But in the same breath, she noted that the AAS anti-harassment policy “allow[s] for the denial of authorship privileges”—a provision that, when implemented, would plainly make nonsense of the idea that “all persons” who’d made “significant contributions to a work intended for publication” would be entitled to appear as listed authors. The two principles, the then-President acknowledged, “could be construed as being in potential conflict.” Could be?

The slippery slope here is very slippery indeed. In the future, will everyone who writes scientific papers first have to be vouched for by some social-justice tribunal that assesses their moral purity? And if so, using what criteria—and under what statute of limitations?

It has long been seen as a progressive habit of mind to understand that people can change, and that past sins do not inevitably define a human’s worth. There are famous examples of scientific papers being written from prison. And the same people baying for Marcy’s ongoing humiliation would likely be horrified to see the authorship of such then-incarcerated individuals stricken from the published record. Their puritanism is highly selective, in other words, being guided by the cyclic wobbles (to apply an astronomical metaphor) of political fashion.

Members of the anti-Marcy contingent might peer into their own closets, and remember that there are many ways that one can run afoul of online mobs. In recent years, it has become seen as normal for scientists to be required to put their signature to DEI pledges and anti-racism manifestos as a condition of academic employment. And the broad language in these documents leaves signatories vulnerable to all manner of accusations. Once we accept the principle that a scientist’s “significant contributions” to a project stop being significant simply because of his or her alleged moral defects, there is no particular reason to expect that such scrutiny won’t be extended to one’s political views, social-media posts, and even private conversations and jokes.

As Canadian science historian, Yves Gingras, put it in a thoughtful article last year, scientists are hardly immune from social panics. The Soviets were fond of judging science based on the politics of the men and women who conducted it, often denouncing the work of “bourgeois” scientists, whom they accused of being lackeys to Western imperialists. Google the name “Trofim Lysenko” to learn how that story ended. As Gingras stressed, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

My wife recently reminded me of a quote from Henry Adams, which suggests, I think, an apt lesson to end on: “A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops.” The same principle applies to scientists. Members of the mob that came after Marcy won nothing for themselves but a brief spasm of schadenfreude. The consequences of this kind of precedent will last much, much longer.

Editor’s note:

• On May 27, the text of this article was modified so as to clarify that Caltech astronomer Andrew Howard was not among those who had requested that his name be removed from the author list of The Kepler Giant Planet Search. Additionally, the article has been corrected in regard to the quoted text indicating that Geoff Marcy “won’t co-author any papers the group publishes going forward.” Due to an editing error, these words were originally attributed to Howard. In fact, they are properly attributed to a Science magazine writer who’d summarized Howard’s comments.

{ https://quillette.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 21:58 geschreven door peter  

According to the new assessment, 247 new reports, as well as 119 “that were either since discovered or reported after the preliminary assessment’s time period,” have been accumulated since the publication of the last report on UAP issued by the ODNI in June 2021, spanning a 17 year period.

“This totals 510 UAP reports as of 30 August 2022,” the report’s authors state. “Additional information is provided in the classified version of this report.” Most of the new reporting “originates from U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force aviators and operators who witnessed UAP during the course of their operational duties,” the report adds.

“AARO and ODNI assess that the observed increase in the UAP reporting rate is partially due to a better understanding of the possible threats that UAP may represent,” the report states, “either as safety of flight hazards or as potential adversary collection platforms, and partially due to reduced stigma surrounding UAP reporting.”

“This increased reporting allows more opportunities to apply rigorous analysis and resolve events,” the report adds.

Although leaving open the possibility that irregularities in the detection capabilities of sensors and other errors in equipment function may account for some UAP reports, “ODNI and AARO operate under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer’s accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments,” the report states.

Based on AARO’s analysis and characterization of the 366 reports collected since the issuance of the last ODNI report, it says that “more than half” appear to exhibit “unremarkable characteristics,” with half a dozen attributed to aerial clutter, 26 believed to represent Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) craft or “UAS-like entities,” and 163 determined as being representative of “balloon or balloon-like entities.”

The report states that such initial characterization of these events “does not mean positively resolved or unidentified” but is intended to enable AARO “to efficiently and effectively leverage resources against the remaining 171 uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports.” The report also emphasized that “many reports lack enough detailed data to enable attribution of UAP with high certainty” despite the methods employed in collecting and reporting those incidents.

Mirroring themes from the 2021 report, flight safety challenges associated with the presence of UAP over the U.S. and in other airspace remains a concern, characterized as “a safety of flight and collision hazard to air assets” in Thursday’s report. However, the summary notes that AARO and its partner agencies have logged no known collisions with UAP.

New to the DOD’s assessment of concerns related to UAP is what the new report characterizes as potential “health implications” related to the phenomenon, although noting that presently, there are “no encounters with UAP confirmed to contribute directly to adverse health-related effects to the observer(s).”

“Acknowledging that health-related effects may appear at any time after an event occurs, AARO will track any reported health implications related to UAP should they emerge,” the report adds.

The report acknowledges that UAP reporting has increased since the issuance of the 2021 ODNI report, possibly due to the removal of stigmas associated with the topic in years past and the institution of new formalized methods of reporting by military personnel. Fundamentally, in addition to the potential hazards to flight safety that some UAP may represent, AARO is focused on assessing the possibility of adversary collection threats that could be related to many UAP incidents.

The report, an unclassified document based on a classified version that was originally set for arrival on October 31, 2022, was published on the ODNI website on Thursday, with a classified version delivered to Congress yesterday, according to a statement issued by Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder. It is the second in an ongoing series of periodic updates in coordination with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on findings related to what the DOD characterizes as unidentified anomalous phenomena.

“The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount,” Ryder stated. “We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one.”

“There is no single explanation that addresses the majority of UAP reports,” said Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough in a statement provided to The Debrief in response to queries about the report and the DOD’s position on current findings related to U.S. government UAP investigations.

“We are collecting as much data as we can, following the data where it leads, and will share our findings whenever possible,” Gough said, adding that the DOD would not rush to conclusions in its analysis of incidents involving unidentified phenomena.

“In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as ‘unidentified’ simply because sensors were not able to collect enough information to make a positive attribution,” Gough further clarified, adding that the DOD continues to improve its data collection capabilities in order to help ensure that “sufficient data for our analysis” can be collected when UAP events occur.

Similar inquiries were made with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence by The Debrief, although ODNI Spokesperson Jamie Mason conveyed that the Office could not offer any guidance or additional comments on the UAP report at that time.

In recent days, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 was signed into law by President Biden. Included within the annual defense bill are provisions aimed at improving government transparency on the UAP issue by providing protections for whistleblowers, in addition to expanding the scope of current investigations by the DOD’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).

Earlier in December, the Pentagon held a media roundtable that briefly addressed the findings of the DOD’s new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in advance of the release of the report. In attendance were Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, who also appeared at a Congressional hearing earlier this year that addressed the subject, and Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of AARO, whose participation marked his first public appearance since taking over the DOD’s new office.

“We have an important and yet challenging mission to lead an interagency effort to document, collect, analyze and when possible, resolve reports of any unidentified anomalous phenomena,” Kirkpatrick said during the briefing, adding that the DOD has “transferred the data and responsibilities from the previous Navy-led UAP task force, and disestablished it.”

“During that transition, we’ve taken the opportunity to expand and standardize and integrate UAP reporting and reevaluate the data we’ve collected,” Kirkpatrick added.

Moultrie also emphasized that the DOD “takes public interest in UAPs seriously,” adding that “we are fully committed to the principles of openness and accountability to the American people. We are committed to sharing as much detail with the public as we can.”

Last November, the DOD announced the establishment of what it then called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Group (AOIMSG), the mission for which had been limited primarily to incidents occurring within military airspace. The scope of the AOIMSG was later broadened in July 2022 following additional direction from Congress, as outlined in wording that appeared in the FY 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

“On July 15, 2022, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), amended her original direction to the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security by renaming and expanding the scope of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Group (AOIMSG) to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO),” read a portion of a July 20, 2022, DOD release.

According to the DOD release, the FY 2022 NDAA “included a provision to establish an office, in coordination with DNI, with responsibilities that were broader than those originally assigned to the AOIMSG.”

Wording within the NDAA also required an annual report on the DOD’s latest findings on UAP to be delivered to Congress by no later than October 31.

Some have noted that the delivery date for the annual report, which according to last year’s NDAA was scheduled to coincide with Halloween, seemingly nods to the long-held flippant attitudes maintained by both the military, and the academic community, toward anomalous aerial phenomena.

Several weeks in advance of the report’s late arrival, an October 28 article by New York Times reporter Julian Barnes also seemingly downplayed the significance of unresolved incidents in the DOD’s current UAP dataset. Citing government officials familiar with the document and its findings who spoke on background, Barnes reported that “surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne clutter” could account for most UAP incidents investigated by the DOD in recent years, adding that such sightings have given weight to “theories about visiting space aliens” and espionage by adversaries like China and Russia.

The newly released report, by contrast, while noting that “more than half” of the UAP reports currently collected by AARO seem to display “unremarkable” behavior, nonetheless conveys that a significant number remain that do not appear to have such prosaic characteristics, and remain a focus of AARO’s further investigations.

In her statement provided to The Debrief, Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough emphasized that the Pentagon does not downplay UAP incidents and recognizes the current level of public interest in these events, as well as issues of transparency related to them, statements in-line with those expressed by Moultrie and Kirkpatrick earlier in December.

“DoD takes public interest in UAP seriously,” Gough told The Debrief, adding that the Department “is committed to the principles of openness and accountability to the American people which it must balance with its obligation to protect sensitive information, sources and methods.”

• Micah Hanks is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on Twitter: @MicahHanks. 

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

01-02-2024 om 21:40 geschreven door peter  

Clouds of vaporized rock, and perhaps even glittering gems, could fill the skies of some distant worlds. Add howling winds and broiling temperatures, and you begin to catch the first glimpse of wildly different environments on one of the many varieties of exoplanets ­– planets around other stars.

Exoplanet scientists are on the edge of their seats. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has begun to deliver its first science images and data. The targets for observations to come include the atmospheres of some of the strangest exoplanets found so far.

Among the best ways to understand these atmospheres, and even the planets themselves, will be the first-ever direct observations of clouds, however weird and exotic they might be.

“On Earth, a lot of these minerals are jewels,” said Tiffany Kataria, an exoplanet scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “A geologist would study them as rocks on Earth. But they can form clouds on exoplanets. That’s pretty wild.”

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These planets – hot gas giants – are among many exoplanet types confirmed in the galaxy. They could have clouds of vaporized rock because they orbit so close to their stars, making their atmospheres ferociously hot.

And while clouds of rock, rubies, or sapphires might sound enchanting, actually detecting such minerals in an exoplanet atmosphere also would be a giant step forward in scientific knowledge.

“Clouds tell us a lot about the chemistry in the atmosphere,” Kataria said. “It then becomes a question of how the clouds formed, and the formation and evolution of the system as a whole.”

The Webb telescope's many capabilities include “spectroscopy” – splitting the light Webb receives from distant stars and planets into a spectrum, a bit like a rainbow. That would allow scientists to read the types of molecules present in an exoplanet atmosphere.

And that means Webb could detect specific types of minerals in clouds.

Detailed study of exoplanet clouds might even yield evidence of a habitable, potentially life-bearing planet – say on a small, rocky world like Earth.

“Clouds are an important feature on Earth, to regulate temperature,” Kataria said. “They’re an important consideration for Earth’s climate. It stands to reason that clouds could also be a vital component in the atmosphere of a habitable exoplanet. The more we understand how clouds form in general – as they have on Earth and other solar system planets – the more we understand how clouds evolved in more exotic environments.”

Probing the hearts of exoplanet clouds could bring together experts from many scientific fields as they seek to understand the origin, evolution, and environments of other planets in our galaxy.

“This further illustrates that exoplanets as a field really is interdisciplinary, borrowing lessons learned from astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and other areas of science,” Kataria said. “It’s so important to build these connections with scientists in all these different fields to better understand the many exotic worlds out there.”

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

For more information about Webb, visit www.nasa.gov/webb.

{ https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/ }

01-02-2024 om 21:28 geschreven door peter  

Rock that punched hole in New Jersey house confirmed to be 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite

A metallic-looking rock that smashed through the roof of a residential home in New Jersey's Hopewell Township earlier this week is indeed a meteorite — a rare one about 4.6 billion years old, scientists confirmed on Thursday (May 11).

"It was obvious right away from looking at it that it was a meteorite in a class called stony chondrite," Nathan Magee, chair of the physics department at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), whose office was contacted by the Hopewell Township police soon after the rock was found on Monday (May 8), told Space.com.

Chondrites are primitive rocks that make up 85% of meteorites found on Earth. Most chondrites found to date have been discovered in Antarctica; only rarely does one crash in populated areas. 

Related: 

• What are meteorites?

The New Jersey rock, which is about 6 inches long by 4 inches wide (15 by 10 centimeters), is a notable exception. It slammed into the Hopewell Township house, dented the floorboard, punched two holes in the ceiling and was still warm when it was discovered by Suzy Kop in her father's bedroom around noon on Monday. 

"I'm looking up on the ceiling and there's these two holes, and I'm like, 'What in the world has happened here?'" Kop told 6 ABC's Trish Hartman.

Once emergency responders cleared Kop, her family and their home of any harmful radioactive residues, Kop handed over the space rock to the nearby college for further inspection.

At TCNJ, Magee's team consulted Jerry Delaney, a retired meteorite expert who had worked on the meteorite collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The team confirmed the space rock to be about 4.56 billion years old, which means it has been around since the beginning of our solar system and represents the leftover fragments from its creation.

The 2.2-pound (0.9 kilograms) meteorite, which will likely be named Titusville, NJ — the postal address closest to its landing site — is "in excellent condition, and one of a very small number of similar witnessed chondrite falls known to science," Magee said in a statement on Thursday.

The top layer of the meteorite has a blackened crust a few millimeters thick from partially burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Using a hand lens designed to look at rocks closely, his team found that the meteroite's minerals are blue and gray in color, with a small amount of other metals mixed in, Magee told Space.com.

The team studied the rock's texture and composition by placing it inside a large chamber of a scanning electron microscope. Based on initial estimates, the meteorite is a chondrite of class LL-6, which has less iron than other members of its family and is at least 30 to 40% denser than the most common rocks on Earth, like slate or granite. 

"So it was clear it was not an Earth rock," Magee told Space.com.

Even before the space rock had breached Earth's atmosphere, it was exposed to a lot of heat in outer space that had heavily altered its structure and composition, so much so that it is difficult to easily distinguish individual grains or chondrules that make up the meteorite, scientists shared in Thursday's update.

• Follow Sharmila Kuthunur on Twitter @skuthunur. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 21:17 geschreven door peter  

Breathtaking Footage of 1,000 Lego Astronauts Flying to Space

Two cameras captured 1,000 Lego astronauts flying to the edge of space on a 3D-printed mini space shuttle.

The voyage was powered by a stratospheric balloon that burst after taking the Legonauts 22 miles above the Earth’s surface when they safely landed back on terra firma with the help of a parachute.

Lego sent 1,000 mini-astronauts on a trip to near space.

(Image credit: LEGO/Kreativ Gang)

A Kreativ Gang team member with the 3D-printed space shuttle made for Legonauts.

The 3D-printed space shuttle was made from a lightweight carbon composite material, built by a team of space architects and engineers from Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

There were three separate space flights with roughly 330 Legonauts going up each time and the team from Kreativ Gang, a marketing agency producing a Lego campaign, had to ensure none of the astronauts fell off the open-air shuttle.

“To make the figures stay on the space shuttle after the balloon burst was a major challenge,” says Dominik Matusinsky, an executive at Kreativ Gang, tells Space.com.

“We wanted the figures to be exposed directly to space, not to be stored inside anything. But during the free fall stage [before the parachute opened], they experienced speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour [186 miles per hour], so that was a challenge.”

In an Instagram post, the Kreativ gang explained that the Legonauts flew from Malé Bielice Airport near Partizánské in Slovakia on Saturday, May 20 on a shuttle made of carbon fiber and 3D-printed stainless steel.

“They have landed in three different places and are ready to end their journey on your nightstand,” the team jokes.

“This space feat of ours was captured by two cameras during the entire ride. One monitored the space with the mini-crew from the cockpit, and the other, attached to the shoulder, took a view of the entire platform.

“In the photos and videos, you can see breathtaking shots of the Earth as well as figures who are fully enjoying their flight into space.”

The stunt was a promotional campaign for Lego. Anyone who buys a new Lego set and registers it could win the Lego astronauts as a prize. More details are avaialbe on Kreativ Gang’s website.

Image credits: All photos by Kreativ Gang/LEGO.

According to Dominik Matusinsky, an executive at marketing agency Kreativ Gang that produced the campaign for Lego, the team had to make sure that none of the astronauts fell off the open-air shuttle during the early stages of the platform's descent. 

"To make the [Lego] figures stay on the space shuttle after the balloon burst was a major challenge," Matusinky told Space.com in an email. "We wanted [the figures] to be exposed directly to space, not to be stored inside anything. But during the free fall stage [before the parachute opened], they experienced speeds of up to 300 km/h [186 mph], so that was a challenge."

For the balloons to comfortably lift off, the whole platform including its passengers had to weigh no more than 6 pounds (2.7 kilograms).

"The challenge was to build the space shuttle as lightweight as possible," added Rousek. "We ended up making it from carbon fiber, 3D printed stainless steel and plastic."

Two cameras filmed the rides: One monitoring the crew compartment;, the other attached to a boom filming a view of the entire platform.

The Lego astronauts will now be put up as a prize in a drawing in the Czech Republic and Slovakia for anyone who buys and registers a new Lego set.

{ https://petapixel.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 21:04 geschreven door peter  

Multiple Pilots Describe Seeing UFOs ‘Forming Triangles’ To Air Traffic Control In Canada

BY DOUGLAS CHARLES

Several pilots recently reported seeing UFOs in Canada, describing “multiple lights sometimes in a triangle formation” to air traffic control.

“I’m certainly no expert, but they’re moving side-to-side and then going away from each other and then forming triangles. That doesn’t really seem like they’re in any type of orbit. But I mean, I’m no expert,” an Air Canada pilot from Seattle to Winnipeg said while flying over Saskatchewan in audio obtained by CTV News from two feeds at LiveATC.net.

“Yeah, it’s quite bizarre,” echoed a pilot on a Flair Airlines flight from Vancouver to Toronto. “There’s around six of them just randomly in formation flying at a high altitude at 12 o’clock.”

“Definitely not satellites,” said another pilot on a Morningstar Air Express cargo flight from Calgary to Toronto. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the 15 years of night flying that I’ve done.”

“There’s no active airspace, military airspace, anything like that we’re aware of,” an air traffic controller told the pilots. “I honestly have no idea what that might be.”

The total audio of the conversations between the pilots and air traffic control in Canada discussing the mysterious lights was originally 2.5 hours long, but has been condensed down to a 13-minute video.

At least four different pilots reported seeing the strange lights of these UFOs on Jan. 19, with some appearing as high as 100,000 feet in the sky.

Daniel Otis, who reported about the UFO sightings for CTV News, also wrote on YouTube, “Their reports appeared in Transport Canada’s online aviation incident database on Jan. 23. NORAD was also notified of the incident, which occurred over Saskatchewan and Manitoba.”

The Canadian Air Defence was also notified about the UFOs, according to the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORS) report.

As is almost always the way in UFO cases such as this, much like in America, no one in power wants to talk or provide an actual explanation.

“Reports of unidentified objects can rarely be followed up on as they are as the title implies, unidentified,” a Transport Canada spokesperson told CTV News. “The department is reviewing the circumstances of this incident and will take appropriate action if non-compliance with the regulations is identified.”

A Canadian NORAD and Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) spokesperson told CTV News, “NORAD detects radar tracks and if required, provides a threat assessment of those tracks based on a variety of factors. For operational security reasons, we do not discuss how NORAD assesses threats.”

 { https://brobible.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 18:38 geschreven door peter  

Ufology: Why Scientists Are Finally Turning UFO Sightings Into Serious Research

For as long as humans have claimed they’ve seen UFOs—and it’s been a long, long time—the established scientific community has more or less considered them to be nonsense. While that hasn’t changed much, even as we’re in the midst of a modern ufological renaissance, some renegade scientists are fighting to bring academic rigor to UFO research.

Take Richard Hoffman, an information technology expert with over 25 years of experience, formerly contracted with the U.S. Army’s Materiel Command at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. As a senior lead architect, he kept the Army’s digital infrastructure running and safe from attack.

He’s also a UFO researcher.

“The scientific community still has to deal with the decades of stigma associated with what they see as pseudoscience or fringe science,” Hoffman tells Popular Mechanics. “Many scientists do have interests in the phenomena, but are most often discouraged by others to embrace it so they hide it.”

Hoffman is one of three executive board members who run a nonprofit scientific organization known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU).

✅ Unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) is the current rebranding of unidentified flying objects (UFO), a term that many believe to carry too much cultural baggage.

“There are very few UFO organizations remaining today,” Hoffman says. “Of the few that do remain, they each have their unique contributions to the phenomena, but most are in data collection roles versus long-term scientific study of cases.”

The difference with the SCU—and it’s a big one—is that it collects data that can be analyzed and studied by scientific experts, subsequently generating peer-reviewed papers published in journals and on websites, says Hoffman. The SCU doesn’t collect day-to-day UAP sighting reports, but rather digs into the more complex cases where multiple sensory data, like radar tracks and video, may exist.

Getty Images

An Objective of Legitimacy

The SCU played a significant role in studying the 2004 Nimitz UFO Encounter, when the organization released a nearly 300-page report on the incident. In 2017, the story hit the mainstream when the New York Times published a groundbreaking story about the Navy pilots who intercepted a strange object off the coast of San Diego in November 2004, and captured video of the object with their F-18’s gun camera.

In 2019, Popular Mechanics published a story about several other military personnel who also witnessed the Nimitz encounter on their radar systems and over their ship’s video system.

The SCU paper examined the available public data and testimony regarding the case, concluding that the “results suggest that given the available information, the AAV’s capabilities are beyond any known technology.”

To be clear, the SCU hasn’t concluded that some non-human intelligence is responsible. Fully aware of the significant gaps in data, the organization has suggested that “the public release of all Navy records associated with this incident to enable a full, scientific and open investigation is strongly recommended.”

The UFO research community is used to having scant data on UFO incidents; the vast majority of cases are purely anecdotal. When physical evidence or data is available, the well-established ufological conspiracy and myth-making machines begin to put that data into jeopardy.

“To date, there hasn’t been an extensive and well-funded scientific investigation of these phenomena using state-of-the-art investigative tools and a dedicated investigative team,” Robert Powell, an SCU executive board member and device physics expert, tells Popular Mechanics. The SCU is aiming to change that. Membership in the organization requires a resume submission, and a committee meets to thoroughly vet each new member.

So who makes up the 120+ members of the SCU, exactly? Mostly scientists, former military officers, and former law enforcement personnel with technical experience and investigative backgrounds, Powell says. While SCU encourages all UAP scientists to publish their work through peer-reviewed journals, and SCU members have been authors in peer-reviewed journals, a stigma still exists about UAP research. “This prevents quality papers from being published in mainstream journals simply because the topic is UAP. Therefore, SCU also provides a peer-review process for UAP papers submitted to SCU for publication,” Powell says.

To begin bridging the gap between the UFO research community and the scientific community, the SCU formed its own open-access peer-reviewed academic journal, Limina. “Anyone wishing to submit a paper to the journal should contact SCU,” Powell says.

Bettmann//Getty Images

Fighting the Stigma

Yet for all the promising progress, the SCU and similar organizations are still facing an uphill battle. The decades-long taboo surrounding UFOs and their study is thoroughly entrenched in established scientific and academic communities. They are, in essence, a dirty subject that can kill a professional career.

In 1953, the Robertson Panel was formed to look at UFO reports at the behest of the government due to a string of odd aerial objects being spotted over Washington, D.C. the previous year. The panel concluded in its classified report that UFOs posed no risk to national security, and proposed that the National Security Council actively debunk UFO reports with the intention to ideologically inoculate the public to ensure UFOs would become the subject of ridicule. The Panel even recommended that UFO investigative and research groups be monitored by intelligence agencies for subversive activity.

Seventeen years later, the infamous Condon Report, which was a product of the U.S. Air Force and the University of Colorado, was responsible for the death of the Air Force’s UFO study, Project Blue Book. The report became embroiled in controversy when a memorandum was released, explaining that the report itself had to “trick” the public into thinking the study was objective, but would ensure that the final and official position is that all UFO incidents were hoaxes, delusion, and human error.

Officially, UFOs became the subject of ridicule. Tie that in with the rise of new-age UFO prophets and cults, stories of space men from Venus, alien bases in Antarctica, and the merging of UFO and conspiracy cultures, and those who used empirical data or maintained a rational and logical research approach became lumped into the same subculture as people claiming to be alien channelers or time-traveling alien ambassadors who often use people’s gullibility to earn a living.

It’s no wonder academics, professionals, and scientists publicly shy away from the subject. In research for this article, one physicist from a university in New York expressed their discomfort and asked that their name not be used because they were still trying to get tenure.

“I don’t get the sense the scientific community is any more interested or open than it was before,” Alexander Wendt, Ph.D., a political science professor at the Ohio State University, tells Popular Mechanics. “But what has changed, I think, is the politics. I think that the wind is changing on this, just like it is on a lot of things. And it’s probably young people in particular who are driving the change and are more open.”

Forging a Scientific Future

Wendt, who has done academic work on the UFO question and presented a lecture at TEDx Columbus on the science of UFOs, sits on the board of UFOData, a project designed to create high-tech observation systems to monitor the skies and track anomalous phenomena. He knows that the taboo exists surrounding UFO research, and getting any grant money to study UFOs is still practically impossible. According to Wendt, neither the government nor any established scientific organizations are going to fund UFO research. The solution seems to be crowdfunding or finding private donors who will invest in these projects.

UFOData isn’t the only group engaged in observational studies. For three decades, Project Hessdalen, a small observatory station that monitors a valley in Norway subject to strange light phenomena, has been jointly funded by the Østfold University College and personal donations. Another organization, the UFO Data Acquisition Project (UFODAP), is also building small computer units designed to monitor and track aerial oddities. Using multiple sensors, the UFO Data Acquisition Unit is designed to record and track UAP, as well as provide metadata which can be analyzed.

Hoffman recognizes that contemporary ufology still makes academics and scientists nervous. Even with the 2019 Navy announcement that UAPs do violate American airspace and that the Pentagon was running the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, people are starting to ask more questions and some scientists are starting to participate.

“We are encouraged by this and believe it will continue to advance, however, the UFO community itself is composed of factions which continue to make scientists cringe,” Hoffman says. “SCU is attempting to support scientists and serious researchers by focusing on what science can do to advance their interests. They see us as being a safe place where conspiracy theories are non-existent and scientific methodologies win.”

So while the existence of UFOs is no longer up for debate, their source very much is. The UFO community has always been comprised of cultural and social renegades who haunt the fringes of mainstream culture, subjects of ridicule more than respect. While some still smirk at the thought of anomalous aerial objects occupying our skies, the information slowly coming out into the public domain is starting to prove that these objects may not be a laughing matter.

Whether the source of some of these data-rich UFO incidents is secret government technology, an alien nonhuman intelligence, or something fundamentally beyond our physical and philosophical understanding, we’re left to wonder, as countless thinkers and, yes, even scientists, have before: “What if?”

• Editor’s Note: This story was originally published on July 2, 2020.

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 18:27 geschreven door peter  

Area 51 Insider Witnesses: Disc-Shaped UFOs and Extraterrestrial Encounters

Nestled within the Nevada desert, Area 51 has long been a focal point of intrigue and speculation for enthusiasts of the unexplained and scholars of extraterrestrial phenomena alike. This highly classified military base, officially acknowledged by the U.S. government only in recent years, remains shrouded in secrecy, fueling theories about alien spacecraft, extraterrestrial encounters, and advanced technology far beyond human capabilities.

Eyewitness Accounts and Whistleblower Testimonies

Among the myriad of tales surrounding Area 51, few are as compelling as the accounts of individuals who claim to have worked within its confines, witnessing the unimaginable. These whistleblowers speak of disc-shaped crafts and non-human entities, often referred to as “Greys,” housed within the depths of the facility. Such testimonies offer a tantalizing glimpse into a world where the lines between science fiction and reality blur.

One notable account comes from a supposed former sentry at S-4, a sector allegedly located near Area 51. This individual described observing multiple disc-shaped crafts, each with unique characteristics, some of which appeared capable of hovering and others that boasted sleek, aerodynamic designs reminiscent of descriptions in popular UFO lore. These crafts were said to be stored on platforms, suggesting they were either the subject of reverse engineering efforts or perhaps even ready for flight.

Government Secrecy and Surveillance

The veil of secrecy enveloping Area 51 extends beyond the base itself, encompassing alleged monitoring and intimidation tactics aimed at silencing those daring to reveal its secrets. Whistleblowers have reported experiences ranging from phone tapping and mail interception to outright threats, painting a picture of a government desperate to keep the lid on potentially Earth-shattering revelations. Such measures only serve to deepen the mystery and stoke the fires of speculation regarding the activities conducted far from the public eye.

VIDEO:

• Eyewitness to disc-shaped craft and aliens at Area 51 discussed by UFO researcher Wendelle Stevens

• https://youtu.be/eLKEOxfkOk8

The narrative surrounding Area 51 challenges us to question the boundaries of our understanding and the lengths to which governments might go to protect secrets of cosmic significance. It beckons the brave and the curious to look to the skies and ponder what might be, fueling a relentless quest for truth in a world brimming with mysteries yet to be unraveled.

As we stand on the precipice of discovery, the stories of Area 51 remind us that reality may indeed be stranger than fiction, urging us to keep our minds open to the infinite possibilities that lie beyond our current grasp. The journey into the unknown continues, with each whispered tale and leaked document adding a new piece to the ever-expanding puzzle of our universe.

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

01-02-2024 om 17:46 geschreven door peter  

'It's getting closer and closer for sure.' How SETI is expanding its search for alien intelligence (exclusive)

Related: 

• SETI scientists begin huge new hunt for intelligent aliens

• https://youtu.be/Tcaqq1j69UQ

Space.com caught up with Bill Diamond, President and CEO of the SETI Institute for an exclusive, mind-stretching close-encounter discussion regarding the mounting evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. 

Spoiler alert! It's not that old tried, true and tired query "are we alone?" Rather, it's more like "just how crowded is it?"

Early stages

There's a lot going on today in terms of searching for and trying to understand potential extraterrestrial life in the universe, Diamond said.

"Much of the first several decades of SETI, the effort has been quite minimal, looking with fairly 'insensitive' instruments in fairly narrow parts of the radio spectrum in random parts of the sky. So hardly anything that could be considered a comprehensive endeavor," said Diamond.

But even today, in many ways, SETI work is still in the early stages. However, more and more is taking place with an increasing number of instruments and technologies around the world. "There's an extensive and expanded effort ongoing now," Diamond said.

COSMIC collaboration

For example, there's the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — mercifully shortened to COSMIC SETI. 

All 27 antennas that constitute the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico have been outfitted with new gear to perform 24/7 SETI observations under a collaboration between the SETI Institute and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the group that operates the VLA. 

Yes, that's the same VLA showcased in the 1997 sci-fi film "Contact," replete with actress Jodie Foster adorned with a tight-fitting stereo headset. In reality, the VLA was never used for SETI, Diamond noted, but now it is.

Detectable signatures

"COSMIC is really the most comprehensive SETI search on a single instrument in history. That's very exciting," Diamond said, and gives the COSMIC effort access to a complete and independent copy of the data streams from the entire VLA.

COSMIC will analyze data for the possible presence of "technosignatures" - detectable signatures and signals that shout out the presence of distant advanced civilizations. 

In scientific circles, technosignatures are viewed as a subset of the far more established search for "biosignatures" — evidence of microbial or other primitive life loitering on some of the billions of exoplanets we now know exist.

Newly augmented

"For classical radio SETI, there's more going on now around the world than there has ever been," Diamond said. That uptick also includes the SETI Institute's newly augmented Allen Telescope Array situated northeast of San Francisco. It was named after Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, given his generous financial backing of the facility in its early phases.

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) has undergone antenna redesign and now is outfitted with high-end computers, signal processors, and other electronics making it far faster than ever before, Diamond adds. "The instrument is performing at a level that it has never performed at since it was built. All of that is fairly new in the two to three years."

One output from ATA has been its use by SETI Institute scientists to delve into powerful Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), a head-scratching phenomenon wanting of explanation. 

Philanthropic gift

A passionate booster in ATA's overhaul was Franklin Antonio, a co-founder of Qualcomm, a communications chip company. Antonio's support as an institute technical advisor continues with his philanthropic gift to the SETI Institute of $200 million after his passing last May.

That bequest is sparking an action plan that will enhance the institute's multi-disciplinary, multi-center research, education and outreach make-up, Diamond said.

Also on the institute's agenda is taking in and evaluating ideas from SETI researchers anywhere in the world to tap into a pool of money for such things as technology, software, or to run an experiment. 

"If we like what you're doing, we'll fund it," Diamond said. "We will kind of take the place of NASA for the time being as the only place in the world where you can submit a proposal to do SETI work."

Those three words

Roll back time to Columbus Day in 1992 when NASA initiated a formal, more intensive, SETI program. But less than a year later, Congress short-circuited the program. 

Is it time for the government to re-embrace the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

"Yes, absolutely," Diamond responded. NASA, he said, has a trio of science questions it's spearheading: How does the Universe work? How did we get here?  Are we alone?

Almost every time NASA leadership publicly speaks, said Diamond, they invoke those three words — Are we alone?

"We all want to know. NASA clearly wants to know as it's one of their science priorities," Diamond said. "So isn't it time they get back in the business of trying to answer that question?"

Planets are everywhere

NASA's own Kepler space telescope served as the space agency's first planet-hunting mission. During nine years of deep space scoping, Diamond emphasized, it showed our galaxy contains billions of exoplanets. "It told us that planets are everywhere and a lot of them are potentially habitable."

NASA is starting to chip away at SETI work, Diamond noted. A NASA-funded grant to a SETI Institute scientist is using observations from the space agency's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The intent is to purge out of the TESS data possible technosignatures aided by artificial intelligence/machine learning tools.

"So yes, I think the winds of change are blowing a little bit in favor of the government getting back into this business. And, in my opinion, I think they should step up and do it," Diamond said

Neighborhood watch

With all the in-motion SETI research underway, just how prepared are we for a confirmed, door-ringing neighborhood watch revelation?

"The straight answer to that question is no, we are not necessarily ready, although it depends on what the answer is," Diamond responded. It's only a matter of time before this question is answered, he added, at one level or another. 

We should begin to think about how we convey this information, possible impacts to society, to religion, to politics, to technology, to governments, said Diamond. 

"I do think that with all these technologies, modalities, instruments looking in different ways," Diamond concluded, "it's getting closer and closer for sure."

{ https://www.space.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 01:14 geschreven door peter  

MULTI-TERRAIN INVISIBILITY INSPIRED BY UNIQUE CLASS OF ANIMAL

In nature, certain animals have adapted themselves to appear virtually invisible to both predators and prey. The most famous of these is the chameleon, which can adapt its outer appearance to match its environment almost perfectly.

However, the chameleon is not the only poikilotherm lauded for its ability to achieve a form of invisibility to aid its survival. For example, the bearded dragon is noted for its ability to conceal itself thermally by matching the temperature of its environment, while the glass frog can make itself transparent so that predators cannot see it directly.

Now, a team of researchers says they have combined the adaptive ability of all three animals to produce a metamaterial that is effectively invisible across microwave, visible, and infrared spectra to achieve previously impossible multi-terrain invisibility.

CHIMERA COMBINES ADAPTIVE ABILITIES OF THREE DIFFERENT POIKILOTHERMS

“Although camouflage technology has been a long-standing topic, the enthusiasm towards a practical[1]oriented invisibility has never weakened,” the researchers explain in the recently published research paper. “Past decades have witnessed a proliferation of metasurface-based invisibility owing to the advent of metasurfaces that can freely customize the electromagnetic waves. However, state-of-the-art works only achieve broadband invisibility in an individual terrain with its specific electromagnetic background.”

To surpass these limitations, the researchers studied the camouflage techniques used by animals that achieve some form of invisibility across a range of electromagnetic spectra, including microwave, visible, and thermal (infrared). Specifically, they studied how poikilotherms like the chameleon, the bearded dragon, and the glass frog can hide themselves and then incorporated all three abilities into one metamaterial they called Chimera.

Conceptual illustration of the Chimera metasurface with multi-terrain adaptive invisibility. The proposed metasurface, just like the Chimera made up of three animals in Greek mythology, incorporates the environment-adaptation traits of three poikilotherms. The photo of the bearded dragon is reproduced from previous literature (5). Chameleon, glass frog, and terrain photos are reproduced from Visual China Group Co., Ltd. All the photos are used with permission.

“In this study, we introduce a multi-terrain invisibility metasurface that integrates biomimetic camouflage strategies, enabling dynamic invisibility across diverse terrains characterized by varying electromagnetic properties,” they explain. “This innovation is designed to effectively counter advanced synthesized detection methods encompassing microwaves, infrared, and visible light.”

Their new material achieves three distinct methods of multi-terrain invisibility. According to the researchers, the first ability is a “chameleon-like broadband in situ tunable microwave reflection mimicry” of a wide spectrum of natural terrains across a range of 8 to 12 GHz, including a water’s surface, shoal, beach/desert, grassland, and frozen ground environments. The same material can remain as optically transparent as an “invisible glass frog” while also successfully mimicking the bearded dragon’s “electrothermal effect” that can decrease the maximum thermal imaging difference between it and its local environment down to a paltry 3.1 degrees Celsius. This tiny temperature difference, the researchers note, “cannot be recognized by human eyes.”

By understanding the mechanisms behind all of these capabilities, the researchers say they have created a three-tiered “Chimera” incorporating the natural camouflage capabilities of all three animals into one surface. So, while some previous methods that mimic one of these capabilities in a narrow range of environments have been shown to create a limited amount of invisibility, the researchers say that their breakthrough metamaterial can accomplish all three at the same time and operate effectively across a wide range of natural environments.

“Compared to previous tunable invisibility strategies, our demonstration artificially reconstructs the environment-adaptive behaviors of chameleons, bearded dragons, and glass frogs in an integrated manner with the outstanding camouflage properties of broad bandwidth, polarization insensitivity, and angular allowance,” they explain.

ACHIEVING MULTITERRAIN INVISIBILITY COULD HAVE SCIENTIFIC AND MILITARY APPLICATIONS

While the Jilin University researchers behind the new metamaterial say they are still in the laboratory stages, the potential uses for Chimera they identify include uses for scientists and researchers hoping to remain effectively invisible while studying animals in their natural habitat to potential military uses that involve hiding soldiers and their equipment from electromagnetic detection including microwave, optical and infrared scanning.

“Our work has potential practical applications,” they write. “On one hand, the continuous low-dispersion in-situ tunability between quasiperfect reflection and strong absorption provides an abundance of states to mimic the electromagnetic characteristics of various real-world terrains, thus avoiding recognition by microwave radars from natural surroundings. On the other hand, the proposed metasurface may also reduce the long-distance detected probability of infrared detectors and optical video equipment by reappearing the thermal regulation of bearded dragons and the self-transparency of glass frogs.”

Finally, they also note that their Chimera metasurface retains potential compatibility with currently available infrared and visible camouflage materials and equipment, which may accelerate their implementation.

“Our work extends the applicable range of camouflage techniques from the constrained scenario to more terrains and advances reconfigurable electromagnetic devices to a multistable and circuit-topology-dynamic stage,” they conclude.

• Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

01-02-2024 om 00:43 geschreven door peter  

Nebraska Police Officer Abducted By Aliens From Nearest Galaxy Found Out Earth Was Their Energy Source

Schirmer assumed that it was just a truck, so he passed the intersection, drove his car to the object, stopped at 40 feet, and switched on his cruiser’s headlights. He was totally amazed to see that the object was nothing like a truck. It was shining brightly and had a metallic body. The policeman also noticed that the blinking lights were coming from the saucer’s window.

In a report, he later wrote: “At 2:30 a.m. On December 3, 1967, I saw a UFO at the junction of (U.S. Highway) 6 and (Nebraska Highway) 63. Believe it or not.”

Read also:

• Real UFO Story of Argentina Trucker, Abducted by 3 Blonde Nordic Aliens In 1973
• CIA Chilling Document Reveals Presence Of Giant Aliens On Mars 1 Million Years B.C
• Ex-Israeli Space Head Claims Aliens Exist And Working With US Astronauts On Mars’ Underground Base
• Grey Aliens Took Man From Puerto Rico To Their Underground Base In 1988 And Told Him They Want Peace

He described the object to be oval-shaped, 20 feet wide, and 15 feet tall. He also said that when he approached the UFO, it rose to 50 feet off the ground, emitted a loud beep sound, suddenly shot a light beam to the ground and vanished in the sky.

At that moment, Schirmer thought his encounter with the alien spacecraft was over. But when he returned to his station, it was 3 a.m., so he lost 20 minutes between the spacecraft’s disappearance and returning to his station.

When he got home, Schirmer went to bed but could not fall asleep because of a severe headache. He found a red scar under his left ear.

Schirmer used to make notes in his log, and he wrote down everything about his UFO encounter.

As soon as the news hit the media, Schirmer’s phone was flooded with prank calls. One man called him and said he was from Mars. Once, he was flagged down by a local tire shop owner who said: “Herb, if you ever see another flying saucer, and it lands, you tell them (aliens) I want to sell ’em a set of tires.”

Schirmer joined the US navy at the age of 17 and also served in the Vietnam war although he had never supported the war. After the navy, he decided to join law enforcement.

The policeman struggled to remember what had happened to him in the 20 minutes following the UFO encounter. After several months in 1968, a psychologist from the University of Wyoming, Dr. Leo Sprinkle conducted a hypnosis session with him, during which it was possible to partially restore information erased from his memory. Those hypnotic sessions were conducted by the Condon Committee, a University of Colorado project, funded by the U.S. Air Force.

Schirmer said that the engine of his car stalled and the radio turned off. He saw something white, and a fuzzy figure that resembled a man came out of the spacecraft and approached his police cruiser.

Schirmer’s sketch of the alien

Schirmer replied, “Yes, sir,” and then the alien asked him to go with him.

The alien took him into his spacecraft which was full of lights, cables, and various instruments. The policeman met several aliens onboard who were smaller in size. They told him that there were other flying objects of the same kind, flying in the atmosphere of our planet.

He also said that aliens had bases in the United States, but they themselves came from the nearest galaxy and stayed on Venus for a while. The aliens said their propulsion system was based on reverse electromagnetism, and Earth was their energy source. Their goal was to prevent humanity from destroying the Earth.

After further investigation, which included hypnotic regression, Sprinkle, worried about a perceived bias on his part, wrote:

“The writer [Sprinkle] believes that there is sufficient empirical evidence to support the views that the following phenomena exist: hypnotic processes or varying levels of awareness; extra sensory perception and psychokenetic (sic) processes (ESP or psi processes); and spacecraft (“flying saucers”) from extraterrestrial sources which are controlled by intelligent beings who seem to be conducting an intensive survey of the earth.

Because these views are different from those of many persons in contemporary society, the writer [Sprinkle] offers his impressions with the recognition that other observers may have obtained different, and even conflicting, impressions of the interview with Sgt. Schmirer.”

The Condon Committee unanimously dismissed Schirmer’s message as sheer delusion and hallucination. Dr. Sprinkle had a different opinion but could not convince them. The state of mind of his patient was not brilliant.

“Evaluation of psychological assessment tests, the lack of any evidence, and interviews with the patrolman, left project staff with no confidence that the trooper’s reported UFO experience was physically real,” Condon Committee concluded.

However, the abduction story of Schirmer continued hitting the headlines throughout the 1970s. He left Ashland and settled in the Pacific Northwest.

Schirmer died in 2017, but before his death, Cartoonist Michael Jasorka released a graphic novel: “December 3, 1967: An Alien Encounter” at a launch party on Dec. 3, 2011, in Los Angeles. In the novel, he illustrated Schirmer’s story in black and white color. The artist, who also believes this story, dedicated the novel to Schirmer.

The case has been picked apart by UFO researchers ever since, and it is hard to know what to make of it all. It is certainly notable that Schirmer has always stuck by his story even in the face of ridicule and his own life falling apart around him, so is this perhaps indicative of him maybe telling the truth, or at least what he truly believes to be the truth? Or is this just the ramblings of someone who has lost their grip on reality? It is difficult to say for sure, and the case of Herbert Schirmer remains unsolved.

{ https://www.howandwhys.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 00:29 geschreven door peter  

Elon Musk's Neuralink Is Now Inside A Human Being

Few details are available, but this is Neuralink’s first big step toward its lofty ambition of connecting humans to computers.

BY MIRIAM FAUZIA

 

Costfoto/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

01-02-2024 om 00:08 geschreven door peter  

Vallée’s lecture at the event, titled “The Age of Impossible: Anticipating Discontinuous Futures,” dealt with how the speed at which modern technology accelerates has resulted in events that would have seemed impossible to many people only years before they transpired. With examples ranging from the collapse of General Motors in 2009 to Bernie Madoff’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Vallee presented what he called a “Typology of the Impossible” that hinged on four main kinds of scenarios: events that escalated too quickly, convergences of “low-p scenarios,” events that appear to violate current cultural norms, and finally, scenarios that involve the appearance of a “completely alien concept within a particular culture.”

“There are many things in our culture today that fit that model,” Vallée said at one point during the talk, as he described historical instances where things that seemed unimaginable at one time later became technological norms. Such things, Vallee said, “are possible, but we cannot imagine them. The public is not aware that they can be done. History provides many examples, and the internet itself is an example of something that was unimaginable.”

After discussing his own part in helping create ARPANET, Vallée went on to share several more examples from recent history where unforeseen scientific advancements occurred, seemingly out of the blue.

“And finally,” the scientist said, never evincing a change in his measured tone and demeanor, “the Pentagon could not imagine that fast, erratic, mobile, oval objects in the sky were anything other than mental illusions, and they…” After a brief pause, Vallée cryptically added, “and you can fill out the answers in the next few years.”

Despite his success as a venture capitalist and “co-creator of the Internet”, most of the attendees at the 2013 TEDx event in Geneva were likely aware of what Vallée is best known for: his decades of involvement with the study of unidentified aerial phenomena. As a young computer scientist and astronomer in the 1960s, Vallee not only worked alongside Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the official scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book but also authored Anatomy of a Phenomenon, one of the earliest popular books written on the UFO subject by a professional scientist. Though he never uttered any of the popular names or abbreviations for the phenomenon, it was obvious what Vallee had been alluding to during this brief, passing reference to “oval objects” during his talk.

At least at that time, what had not been so obvious had been why Vallée specifically referenced the Pentagon’s relationship to UAP, nor why a series of seemingly impossible future events might come to pass involving this subject “in the next few years.”

THE CALL FROM DR. VALLÉE came through earlier than I expected.

The scientist’s voice, softened by age yet still resonant with the French he learned as a youth in Pontoise before emigrating to America many decades ago, was unmistakable to me, having heard it in many interviews and documentaries over the years. Vallée, now 83, is a man whose work in the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is only one finger on the glove of his impressive resume, spanning decades of work in astronomy, physics, computer science, and venture capitalism.

As evidenced by his billing at the TEDx event in 2013, one could indeed argue that Vallée is partly responsible for the creation of the Internet, although the affable Frenchman is modest on this point, nearly to a fault. This much was evident almost immediately as we began our discussion, and I wasted no time in bringing up the talk in Geneva and some of the intriguing hints he had dropped at that time.

“I’ve seen the development and the unfolding of a number of technologies,” Vallée told me during our call. “Very often what happens is that a discovery is made, and everyone agrees that it is important, and people write papers, and so on. And then it disappears.” 

• Don’t miss Jacques Vallée’s recent interview on Rebelliously Curious with Chrissy Newton over on The Debrief’s YouTube Channel, and linked at the end of this article.

“You know, the Arpanet was essentially dead for a while,” Vallée recalls from his years working on the project decades ago. “Until [the] National Science Foundation picked up the funding, thinking that there would be several internets.” Initially a simple matter of accounting, the NSF initially believed it would be easier to fund three separate projects that looked at using networks through which computers could connect for purposes of communication.

THE PATH THAT BROUGHT

Vallée into the tempest that is the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is a long one, which stems back to his early years in Pontoise at an age when the world was still at war.

“There are things you don’t forget,” Vallée said during our call, describing his memories of seeing American aircraft being shot down over his town when he was five years old.

“I remember seeing the crew dropping out in parachutes and the Germans shooting at them.”

By 1945, the war had ended, although fears of a return to conflict lingered throughout parts of Europe. To the north, reports of ghostly “rockets” over countries like Sweden in the summer of 1946 kept many guessing whether the Soviets were conducting tests, perhaps with a form of secret new aerial weapon they had captured from the Germans. The following year, an all-new kind of paranoia would erupt across the Atlantic, as American newspapers were flooded with stories of “flying saucers” seen careening through the skies, especially in airspace around sites of importance to U.S. national security.

By the Autumn of 1954, as the wave of sightings of strange objects was cresting over North America, France was having its own torrent of reports of similar phenomena. Major newspapers like L’Aurore and France-Soir were carrying stories about unidentified flying objects almost daily, and Vallée began collecting clippings of stories like those of Marius Dewilde, a railroad worker who described his observation of a pair of diminutive “robots” next to a dark machine resting on the train tracks.

The reports seemed incredible, and very well might have remained so had it not been for what occurred the following year in May 1955, when Vallée had his own sighting.

“My mother saw it first,” he would later recall of the incident. She had been working in the garden when Vallée, sixteen at the time, heard her screaming for him and his father. Vallée made his way from the attic where his father’s woodworking shop was located, and down three flights of stairs just in time to observe a metallic disc-shaped object “with a clear bubble on top” as it hovered over the nearby church of Saint-Maclou.

The object reminded them of the parachutists the family had watched descending from the skies during the war. His mother, who continued watching it, recalled how it sped away, leaving only a few wisps of white vapor where the object had been. Vallée would later learn that a schoolmate nearby had also noticed the object, observing it through binoculars.

Despite his father’s disapproval, Vallée maintained his interest in these unusual aerial objects. “I realized,” he would later write in his journal, “that I would forever be ashamed of the human race if we simply ignored ‘their’ presence.” The young Frenchman began to educate himself on the topic by reading the works of Aimé Michel, one of the earliest serious French researchers to undertake the study of unusual aerial phenomena. It was an interest he maintained through his college years, completing his degree in mathematics at the University of Paris in 1959 and going on to receive his M.S. from the University of Lille Nord de France two years later. By 1961, Vallée was employed at the Paris Observatory as an astronomer with its artificial satellite service, tracking space objects through theodolites by night.

“Naively, I started work here with great enthusiasm, assuming that we would be engaged in genuine research,” Vallée would recall of his years at the observatory. “That is not what I found.” In July of 1961, he and the other astronomers recalled a few instances where they observed objects passing overhead that they could not identify. “The next morning,” he recalled of one incident, his superior “simply confiscated the tape and destroyed it.” Vallée inquired as to why they hadn’t sent this seemingly important information along with their normal Telex tape dispatches to U.S. Navy officials in Paris.

“The Americans would laugh at us,” his superior scoffed.

Having his fill of the prevailing attitudes in Paris, by 1962, Vallée had emigrated to the United States, first working at the University of Texas, Austin, as a research associate in astronomy, and thereafter for a short stint at the McDonald Observatory, where he helped to compile the first informational map of the planet Mars with fellow French astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs. However, by the summer of 1963, Vallée was looking ahead at new opportunities, one of which arrived following a meeting in September with astronomer J. Allen Hynek, chair of Northwestern University’s astronomy department, who helped the young scientist find work as a systems analyst on campus. Hynek, at the time the scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book UFO investigation, was a natural ally; not only would he serve as a mentor to Vallée, who went on to receive his Ph.D. from the institution in 1967, but for years thereafter the two would remain close colleagues in the pursuit of their mutual interest.

An undated photo of astronomer J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée

(public domain).

However, by the late 1960s, it seemed evident that scientific opinions on the UFO subject in the United States had finally begun to sour, despite the efforts of Hynek, Vallée, and a close network of like-minded scientists looking into the problem. By the end of 1968, the University of Colorado UFO Project, a U.S. Air Force-funded study headed by physicist Edward U. Condon, had delivered its findings; in an introductory summary to the lengthy report, Condon wrote that “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” adding that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”

Vallée, musing over the Condon study during our call, remembered his incredulity at the time he first heard about its conclusions.

“That’s an interesting chapter in science,” he said. “Or the failure of science.”

By then, Vallee had already returned to France. As he, his wife Janine, and their son, Oliver, were acclimating to life in Europe again, Vallée was quietly readjusting his approach to the UFO question.

“Once I was back in France, in a way, it served to give me the space to rethink what we had done,” Vallée told me. “I mean, I knew the Condon Committee was a joke… and that science was somewhere else. So it forced me to ask some fundamental questions that I would not have asked if I had stayed at Northwestern.”

“So I thought, where does all this come from, anyway?”

Vallée began haunting the old Paris bookshops, acquiring rare historical texts and early treatises on the sciences. An interesting question had begun to form in his mind, as he recorded in a journal entry on October 29, 1967: What about the forgotten accounts of Little People, of Elementals, of Leprechauns? If these beings are part of the same phenomenon we see now, what does that mean for their nature? Are we necessarily dealing with extraterrestrials?

“I found that the phenomenon has always been there,” Vallée says of his years spent mining observations of unusual aerial phenomena from texts that date back to classical antiquity. “Of course, they are describing it in the language of the time,” he notes, “but they are describing something that’s very, very much like what I get from witnesses today.”

The fruits of such musings culminated in Vallée’s seminal 1969 effort, Passport to Magonia, widely regarded as one of his most influential early works and, paradoxically, the effort that cast him as a pariah in the eyes of many of his ufological peers.

“At first, it was completely rejected.” he says, recalling one UFO magazine that featured his likeness shortly after Magonia was published, accompanied by the headline, “Vallée has gone off the deep end.” Today, Vallée laughs about the chiding he received from his peers, and I note a hint of nostalgia about those early works behind the dry chuckle that emerges.

“Maybe the truth was in the deep end.”

OVER THE COURSE OF the ensuing decades, Vallée would continue to challenge the extraterrestrial hypothesis favored particularly among American UFO researchers. Parallel to this effort, his professional career brought him into work with the Institute for the Future in the mid-1970s, where he worked as principal investigator on the National Science Foundation computer networking project that gave rise to one of the earliest iterations of the ARPANET conferencing system. In the following decade, Vallée would become involved in venture capitalism, first as a partner at Sofinnova, then moving on to become a general partner in multiple different Silicon Valley funds, including his involvement in private investments today.

As his professional career flourished, Vallée never lost sight of his fascination with strange aerial phenomena. He authored a string of follow-ups to Magonia on the topic of UFOs throughout the 1970s and 80s, each continuing to build on the premise that the phenomenon could be far more complex than conventional opinions on UFOs would offer. His pioneering work continued to garner attention along the way, even serving as the inspiration for Claude Lacombe, a French scientist portrayed by actor François Truffaut in Stephen Spielberg’s classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

In the 1990s, Vallée authored a trilogy of books that focused on the prospects of alien contact. However, he always maintained a healthy distance from drawing conclusions about what any exotic technologies behind UFOs might represent. It was also during this period that Vallée began working with real estate developer Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a privately funded scientific research effort that looked at UFOs and related phenomena.

In July 2014, Vallée presented a paper at the GEIPAN International Workshop in Paris, France, titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: A Strategy for Research,” offering both a snapshot of what he had learned about the complexities of the phenomenon over several decades of study, as well as what he believed might be a path toward more fruitful future research.

“After years of ideological arguments based on anecdotal data the field of UAP research appears ready to emerge into a more mature phase of reliable study,” Vallée wrote in the paper’s abstract. Citing the mounting scientific interest in UAP around the world, based in part on documents conveying an official military interest in these phenomena, the scientist argued that the path forward would require the analysis of hard data, paired with intelligently informed theoretical studies.

“Without pre-judging the origin and nature of the phenomena, a range of opportunities arise for investigation,” Vallée wrote, warning that “such projects need to generate new hypotheses and test them in a rigorous way against the accumulated reports of thousands of observers.”

The problem was that in 2014, despite the existence of several notable independent catalogs containing information on historical incidents, there was no single collection of reliable UAP reports—a centralized database, in other words—upon which such studies could rely. This had been part of what prompted Vallée to assemble such a database for NIDS, work that would later carry over as Bigelow’s efforts moved out of the private sector and into the official world as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP).

“In the United States the National Institute for Discovery Science (“NIDS”) and the Bigelow Aerospace Corporation have initiated a series of special catalogues to safeguard their own reports from public sources and from their staff,” Vallée wrote in his 2014 paper, adding that he had been asked to develop a UAP data warehouse containing 11 individual databases.

“The project is known as ‘Capella,’” it stated.

According to slides accompanying Vallée’s 2014 presentation, the Capella project focused on several areas that ranged from patterns emerging from UAP data to possible physics underlying the phenomenon and its impact on humans.

During our call, Vallée spoke candidly about the project and what he hopes it might still be used to achieve.

“There is such a database. It is the one we built as part of the AATIP/BAASS project in Las Vegas,” Vallée told me. Comprising roughly 260,000 cases from countries around the world, the scientist said during our call that the Capella database had been one of the major focal points of the program.

“Contrary to what people believe, [Capella] is the largest part of the budget that was spent on the classified project,” Vallée said. This included paying for translations of incident reports from Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and several other languages into English, and providing funding for teams that conducted additional research on-site.

“It was a large effort for two years, Vallée said, though he added that in reality, “probably close to fifty or sixty years of work went into the database.” Although Capella constitutes what is arguably the most extensive database containing information on UAP ever built, don’t expect to see it any time soon; it remains classified as a part of the data developed under the DIA’s AAWSAP program managed by James Lackatski between 2008 and 2010.

• 

See Also

EARTH ‘ON COURSE’ FOR SATURN-LIKE RING OF SPACE JUNK

“The database is still classified, to my knowledge,” Vallée said during our call, prompting me to ask whether such a vast amount of historical information on the UAP subject shouldn’t be made publicly available.

Speaking with The Debrief in December 2021, Mark Rodeghier, Ph.D., director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies and a longtime colleague of Vallée, expressed frustration over previous statements made by Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., another of the scientists who worked on the AAWSAP program, who noted that much of the AAWSAP data will likely remain classified.

“I mean, isn’t that discouraging, disappointing, [and] ridiculous,” Rodeghier told The Debrief. “It’s not work on how we can get a hypersonic missile. It’s UFO investigations. How can that be classified at this point? And the answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t be classified now.”

During our call, Vallée expressed similar sentiments to Rodeghier’s, although he also defended Capella’s current classified status on account of some of the information it protects.

“You make a good point,” Vallée told me. “That’s the kind of thing that should be accessible to science,” although adding that “it will be accessible to very highly competent people who can continue to look at it under the proper classification.”

“I think it’s properly classified,” Vallée added, “because it contains a lot of medical data that should be private.” However, he said that he thinks that over time, perhaps portions can be “sanitized” for release to the public, “so that we don’t invade the privacy of individuals who have reported those things, especially their medical data.”

“It’s not classified for any military or intelligence reason as far as I know,” Vallée said. “But I’m not part of the project anymore.” Vallée noted that even he no longer has access to Capella, although several longtime colleagues of his who still work in government do.

“I’m very proud to have worked on that,” Vallée said. “It’s probably the high water mark in the computer study of UFOs so far.”

“But as we know, the high water mark is going to go even higher after this.”

DESPITE HIS OWN LEVEL of involvement with government UAP studies, as well as the level of interest generated by videos of unidentified objects collected by the U.S. military—the existence of which Vallée himself hinted at in Geneva as early as 2013—the 83-year-old scientist still doesn’t necessarily hold military UAP data in higher regard than that collected by civilians.

“The military cases in the databases I know of are less than ten percent in every country,” Vallee said during our call. “They are really good because the military has radar. They have, of course, planes that can chase the objects… pilots who are very well trained and very well positioned to give a description.”

“Those are excellent reports,” Vallée concedes. “But what about the farmer in the field, who sees [an object] close to him, and has traces, and has materials? Who has felt physiological reactions?”

“What about those cases?” he asks. “They are full of information.”

Vallée’s appreciation for UAP information collected from non-governmental sources is particularly evident in his latest book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, coauthored with Italian journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris. In it, they unravel the story of two men, Jose Padilla and Reme Baca, who claim to have witnessed the crash of an unusual aircraft near San Antonito, New Mexico, in August 1945. Padilla, who went on to become a State Trooper in Rowland Heights, California, maintained that as children, he and Baca had seen a large, dull-gray avocado-shaped object—along with its frantic occupants—where it had apparently crashed near his family’s ranch. The object, they say, was later recovered by the military.

In a newly updated second edition of the book, Vallée and Harris present additional witness testimony they have gathered about the alleged incident, which includes an observation of the crash remembered by the family of Lt. Colonel William J. Brothy, who at the time had been piloting a B-25 on a training mission. According to Brothy, he and his crew had flown over the site and recalled, “There were a lot of pieces.”

In Trinity, Vallée emphasizes what he believes are undeniable similarities between descriptions of the 1945 incident and a UAP landing in New Mexico observed by police officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964. Then, the following year another strikingly similar incident occurred near Valensole, France, involving the close observation of a landed craft and its apparent pilot or occupant.

“There is a case in Valensole, in France, and the case in Socorro. The object is identical to the Trinity object,” Vallée said. “And the [occupants] are identical to the creatures that Mr. Padilla is describing to me at Trinity, that he saw.”

“I was involved in Socorro, and I was involved in Valensole. Those are cases I know very well,” Vallée said, adding that Trinity contains new information on the Socorro case, once referred to by Hector Quintanilla, director of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book at the time of the incident, as being “the best documented case on record.”

Today, much of Vallée’s research is focused on the collection and study of material samples believed to have been collected from UAP. Compared with his earlier work, which challenged popular notions about extraterrestrials being associated with UAP, this might surprise longtime followers of the scientist’s work. For Vallée, however, it is only the next phase in the many decades he has spent working toward resolving the mystery.

“It’s all one thing,” Vallée said during our call. “The first book I wrote was Anatomy of a Phenomenon, which… I took as a study of extraterrestrial intelligence in general, and how it was I thought UFOs illustrated the idea of life elsewhere and intelligence elsewhere… that’s definitely the place from which we started.”

“Then, when I started working with Dr. Hynek, and I started working with—in those days, it was just called ‘computer catalogs,’ it wasn’t dignified as databases or data warehouses—but those catalogs held thousands of cases. My first complete catalog was donated to the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado, when they did the study funded by the Air Force.”

“Which,” Vallée notes, “to my surprise, concluded the problem didn’t exist. So, we’ve come a long way from that.”

Given his level of involvement in working to resolve the UAP question—an effort now spanning more than six decades, including his involvement in official government UAP investigations in several countries and having authored some of the most popular books ever written on the subject—perhaps the most surprising thing expressed by Vallée during our discussion had been his predictions about how he thinks his own work will be remembered by future generations.

“I think everything I’ve done, and everything my contemporaries have done, is going to be forgotten,” he said, mirroring his observations of the invention, and subsequent reinvention, of so many other innovations in science over time, not least among them the World Wide Web.

“And then in a few years, it’s going to be reinvented by, you know, great people at Stanford and Harvard in a new way,” he tells me, accompanied by the distinctive chuckle I had by now come to expect after one of his witty responses.

“That’s always the way science works.”

• Micah Hanks is Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on Twitter: @MicahHanks. 

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

01-02-2024 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

Verrassende feitjes over Adam en Eva

©Shutterstock

Verrassende feitjes over Adam en Eva
Het verhaal van Adam en Eva is een van de bekendste bijbelverhalen en legde de basis voor de scheppingsleer. Bovendien is het het eerste verhaal waarin het concept van de erfzonde naar voren komt. Waar sommigen mensen het als fictie beschouwen, wat geldt voor veel Bijbelverhalen, zien anderen het als iets dat echt gebeurt is. Of je het nu wel of niet gelooft, in deze galerij kom je interessante en minder bekende feitjes tegen over Adam en Eva.

Nieuwsgierig? LEES verder voor meer!

©Getty Images

Er zijn meerdere verhalen over Adam en Eva
Het verhaal van Adam en Eva komt inderdaad niet alleen in de bijbel voor. Er zijn soortgelijke scheppingsverhalen te vinden in andere culturen en religies.

©Getty Images

Er zijn meerdere verhalen over Adam en Eva
Chnemoe, de oude Egyptische god van de vruchtbaarheid, zou mensen uit klei hebben geschapen. Ook van Prometheus, de Griekse god van het vuur, wordt gezegd dat hij op die manier de mens heeft geschapen.

©Getty Images

De herkomst traceren
Het verhaal is zowel aan het Babylonische scheppingverhaal Enuma Elish ontleent als die van Gilgamesj, een epische held uit Mesopotamië. In het eerste verhaal wordt gezegd dat de mens geschapen zou zijn door het gebruik van stof.

©Getty Images

De herkomst traceren
In het tweede verhaal creëeren de goden een mannelijke metgezel voor Gilgamesj. De held verliest op een gegeven moment zijn onsterfelijkheid nadat hij voor de truc van een slang is gevallen. Dan stormt er een vrouw binnen die de mannen van een vredig bestaan weerhoudt. Klinkt dit jullie bekend?

©Getty Images

Adam had twee vrouwen
Adam had een eerdere vrouw genaamd Lilith, die uit de Hof van Eden werd verdreven omdat ze zich tegen haar man verzette. Lilith, een prominent figuur in de joodse mythologie, werd toen een demoon.

©Getty Images

Adams tweede vrouw
Pas toen werd Eva uit een van Adams botten geschapen. De interpretaties dit deel van het verhaal lopen uiteen. De meesten van ons geloven dat het om een rib ging, zo blijkt ook uit de vertaling van het Hebreeuws.

©Shutterstock

Het bot van Adam?
De term die in de oorspronkelijke tekst wordt gebruikt, is 'tsela'. Hoewel het in de context van Eva's schepping gewoonlijk als 'rib' wordt vertaald, verwijst het in feite naar de zijkant of 'een deel dat uitsteekt ten opzichte van de verticale as van een menselijk lichaam'. Daarom is Eva wellicht geschapen uit een van Adams botten die in het buitenste deel van zijn lichaam zitten.

©Shutterstock

Het bot van Adam?
Sommige onderzoekers wijzen op Adams baculum (penisbot) als oorzaak van de schepping. Zij stellen dat mensen, in tegenstelling tot veel andere zoogdieren, geen baculum hebben en dat Eva daaruit zou zijn geschapen. Als gevolg hiervan zouden volgende generaties mensen zonder baculum geboren worden.

©Getty Images

Hadden Adam en Eva navels?
Vraagt men dit oprecht af? Door fundamentalistische christenen wordt verondersteld dat zij geen navels hadden.

©Getty Images

Hadden Adam en Eva navels?
Veel kunstenaars hebben er misschien niet bij stilgestaan (of misschien juist wel) dat Adam en Eva ontzettend vaak met navels worden afgebeeld.

©Getty Images

Was het de duivel die Eva verleidde?
In de joodse theologie bestond Satan aanvankelijk niet. Daardoor kwam de duivel in het oorspronkelijke verhaal niet voor. Het is echter mogelijk dat de slang later met de duivel in verband werd gebracht.

©Shutterstock

Was het de duivel die Eva verleidde?
De islamitische versie van het verhaal is opvallend anders. Allah schepte Adam en beval de engelen om hem te vereren, maar Iblis (ook bekend als Satan) koos ervoor om niet naar hem te luisteren. Uit de Koran blijkt dat de slang inderdaad de belichaming van het kwaad is.

©Getty Images

Wat was nou precies de verboden vrucht?
De verboden vrucht wordt in de Bijbel niet expliciet beschreven als een appel, in tegenstelling tot wat vaak wordt gedacht.

©Getty Images

Wat was nou precies de verboden vrucht?
De vrucht wordt niet uitgebreid beschreven. De Hebreeuwse term 'peri' heeft meerdere betekenissen, waaronder vijgen, druiven en zelfs tarwe. Hierdoor zijn meerdere interpretaties mogelijk.

©Shutterstock

Waarom denken mensen dan dat het een appel was?
Dit is te wijten aan een grappige woordspeling uit de 4e eeuw. Het Latijnse woord 'malus' lijkt een dubbele betekenis te hebben: 'kwaad' en 'appel'. Jerome, een geleerde die de bijbel in het Latijn heeft vertaald, gebruikte dit woord om de vrucht van de boom van de kennis van goed en kwaad te beschrijven.

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Waarom denken mensen dan dat het een appel was?
John Milton, een dichter uit de 17e eeuw, omschreef de verboden vrucht in zijn boek 'Paradise Lost' tweemaal als een appel, waardoor nog meer mensen hierin geloven.

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Pijn bij de bevalling wordt toegeschreven aan Eva
In Genesis 3:16 staat:"Ik zal uw moeite in uw zwangerschap zeer groot maken; met pijn zult u kinderen baren." Dit stuk uit de bijbel heeft de bevalling er voor vrouwen niet makkelijker op gemaakt.

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Pijn bij de bevalling wordt toegeschreven aan Eva
Hier zijn echter weer twijfels omtrent de vertaling. In alle andere voorbeelden van de Bijbel wordt de Hebreeuwse term etzev vertaald als 'arbeid', 'zwoegen' of 'werk'. In de context van een bevalling wordt het echter geïnterpreteerd als 'pijn' 'verdriet' of 'angst'.

©Getty Images

Islamitische versie van Adam en Eva
Zoals gezegd wordt het verhaal van Adam en Eva ook in de Koran beschreven. Er is echter een opmerkelijk verschil: zowel Adam als Eva worden verleid om een vrucht uit de boom te plukken. Daarnaast komt in de islamitische versie het idee van de erfzonde niet voor. Ze aten dus allebei van de boom en werden gestraft voor hun zonde, zonder dat de hele mensheid er voor altijd de dupe van was.

©Getty Images

Islamitische versie van Adam en Eva
Nadat ze uit het paradijs waren verdreven, brachten ze 200 jaar zonder elkaar door. Ze kwamen elkaar daarna echter weer tegen en kregen twee zonen samen, Qābīl en Hābīl. Net als in het verhaal van Kaïn en Abel vermoordt een van de broers op tragische wijze de ander. Adam en Eva kregen nog veel meer kinderen, twintig tweelingen zelfs!

©Getty Images

De pre-adamitische theorie
Deze theorie dateert uit 1655 en stelt dat er vóór Adam en Eva al mensen op aarde waren.

©Getty Images

De pre-adamitische theorie
Volgens de theorie werd aangenomen dat niet ieder mens op aarde een nakomeling van Adam en Eva was. Degenen die niet als nakomelingen werden beschouwd, werden als minder belangrijk en gemakshalve als 'minder blank' gezien, wat leidde tot de grondgedachte die volgens sommige mensen slavernij rechtvaardigde.

©Getty Images

De locatie van de Hof van Eden
Waar de Hof van Eden zich bevindt is al lang een raadsel, waardoor veel mensen nieuwsgierig blijven. De bijbel geeft ons een paar hints.

©Getty Images

De locatie van de Hof van Eden
In Genesis 2:10 staat: "In de tuin van Eden was de bron van een rivier, die de tuin vochtig hield. Deze rivier splitst zich in vier andere rivieren" (afhankelijk van de vertaling). Dit zijn de rivieren Pison, Gichon, Tigris en de Eufraat.

©Getty Images

De locatie van de Hof van Eden
Er wordt gedacht dat de Hof van Eden zich mogelijk in Mesopotamië (het huidige Irak en Koeweit) of in het huidige Turkije of Armenië bevond. Waar hij precies lag blijft echter onbekend.

©Getty Images

De genen van Adam en Eva
Volgens een onderzoek bestond de mitochondriale Eva tussen 100.000 en 230.000 jaar geleden, terwijl de Y-chromosomale Adam ongeveer 75.000 jaar ouder was.

©Getty Images

De genen van Adam en Eva
Er wordt in dit onderzoek verwezen naar gemeenschappelijke mitochondriale voorouders van de mens van nu. Deze voorouders waren niet aan elkaar gekoppeld en waren ook niet de eerste mensen op aarde.

Bron:

• (Grunge)

{ http://starsinsider.com/ }

31-01-2024 om 23:29 geschreven door peter  

“Our work suggests several key time windows for Curiosity to collect data,” said John Ortiz, a graduate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory who led the research team. “We think these offer the best chance of constraining the timing of methane fluctuations, and (hopefully) down the line bringing us closer to understanding where it comes from on Mars.”

The presence of methane (CH4) in the Martian atmosphere is of great interest to planetary scientists and exobiologists because it could indicate present or past microbial life. Or, it could also be related to nonbiological processes, such as volcanism or hydrothermal activity.

The problem with detecting methane is that it doesn’t last long. Once released into the atmosphere, it can be quickly destroyed by natural atmospheric processes. Therefore, any methane detected in Mars’ atmosphere means it must have been released recently, which only adds to the intrigue.

On Earth, most methane is produced by living creatures such as microorganisms in sedimentary strata, or in the guts of ruminants (cows, sheep, deer, etc.). For methane produced through abiotic or non-living processes, there is a high likelihood it could have been produced millions or even billions of years ago, lying trapped in underground rock formations.

But still, finding methane on Mars is a big deal because of the potential for biological sources, such as methanogenic microbes.

In 2004, the Mars Express Orbiter (MEO) detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. In 2013 and 2014 Curiosity detected spikes in methane in the atmosphere at Gale Crater. Interestingly, MEO detected a methane spike again, at the same location that Curiosity did, only one day later.

Ortiz and his team wanted to better understand Mars’ methane levels, and used high-performance computing clusters to simulate how methane travels through networks of underground fractures, and then released into the atmosphere when driven by atmospheric pressure fluctuations. They also modeled how methane is adsorbed onto the pores of rocks, which is a temperature-dependent process that may contribute to the methane level fluctuations.

The team said their simulations predicted methane pulses from the ground surface into the atmosphere just before the Martian sunrise in the planet’s northern summer season, which just recently ended. This corroborates previous rover data suggesting that methane levels fluctuated not only seasonally, but also daily. With these insights, the Curiosity rover team can figure out when and where to look for methane, which could aid in the rover’s main goal, searching for signs of life.

“Understanding Mars’ methane variations has been highlighted by NASA’s Curiosity team as the next key step towards figuring out where it comes from,” Ortiz said. “There are several challenges associated with meeting that goal, and a big one is knowing what time of a given sol (Martian day) is best for Curiosity to perform an atmospheric sampling experiment.”

Paper: 

• “Sub-diurnal methane variations on Mars driven by barometric pumping and planetary boundary layer evolution.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. DOI: 10.1029/2023JE008043
  LANL press release

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

31-01-2024 om 22:33 geschreven door peter  

The detections more than double the number of known tidal disruption events in the nearby universe.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News

Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by MIT scientists, appearing today in the Astrophysical Journal.

The study’s authors are reporting the discovery of 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs) — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. As the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Astronomers have detected previous tidal disruption events by looking for characteristic bursts in the optical and X-ray bands. To date, these searches have revealed about a dozen star-shredding events in the nearby universe. The MIT team’s new TDEs more than double the catalog of known TDEs in the universe.

The researchers spotted these previously “hidden” events by looking in an unconventional band: infrared. In addition to giving off optical and X-ray bursts, TDEs can generate infrared radiation, particularly in “dusty” galaxies, where a central black hole is enshrouded with galactic debris. The dust in these galaxies normally absorbs and obscures optical and X-ray light, and any sign of TDEs in these bands. In the process, the dust also heats up, producing infrared radiation that is detectable. The team found that infrared emissions, therefore, can serve as a sign of tidal disruption events.

By looking in the infrared band, the MIT team picked out many more TDEs, in galaxies where such events were previously hidden. The 18 new events occurred in different types of galaxies, scattered across the sky.

“The majority of these sources don’t show up in optical bands,” says lead author Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “If you want to understand TDEs as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”

Other MIT authors include Kishalay De, Christos Panagiotou, Anna-Christina Eilers, Danielle Frostig, and Robert Simcoe, and MIT assistant professor of physics Erin Kara, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Heat spike

The team recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations. The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.

That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs. For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NEOWISE — the renewed version of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This satellite telescope launched in 2009 and after a brief hiatus has continued to scan the entire sky for infrared “transients,” or brief bursts.

The team looked through the mission’s archived observations using an algorithm developed by co-author Kishalay De. This algorithm picks out patterns in infrared emissions that are likely signs of a transient burst of infrared radiation. The team then cross-referenced the flagged transients with a catalog of all known nearby galaxies within 200 megaparsecs, or 600 million light years. They found that infrared transients could be traced to about 1,000 galaxies.

They then zoomed in on the signal of each galaxy’s infrared burst to determine whether the signal arose from a source other than a TDE, such as an active galactic nucleus or a supernova. After ruling out these possibilities, the team then analyzed the remaining signals, looking for an infrared pattern that is characteristic of a TDE — namely, a sharp spike followed by a gradual dip, reflecting a process by which a black hole, in ripping apart a star, suddenly heats up the surrounding dust to about 1,000 kelvins before gradually cooling down.

This analysis revealed 18 “clean” signals of tidal disruption events. The researchers took a survey of the galaxies in which each TDE was found, and saw that they occurred in a range of systems, including dusty galaxies, across the entire sky.

“If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them,” Masteron says. “It’s not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches.”

“It is now possible to peer through the dust and complete the census of nearby TDEs,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, who was not involved with the study. “A particularly exciting aspect of this work is the potential of follow-up studies with large infrared surveys, and I’m excited to see what discoveries they will yield.”

A dusty solution

The team’s discoveries help to resolve some major questions in the study of tidal disruption events. For instance, prior to this work, astronomers had mostly seen TDEs in one type of galaxy — a “post-starburst” system that had previously been a star-forming factory, but has since settled. This galaxy type is rare, and astronomers were puzzled as to why TDEs seemed to be popping up only in these rarer systems. It so happens that these systems are also relatively devoid of dust, making a TDE’s optical or X-ray emissions naturally easier to detect.

Now, by looking in the infrared band, astronomers are able to see TDEs in many more galaxies. The team’s new results show that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not only post-starburst systems.

The findings also resolve a “missing energy” problem. Physicists have theoreticially predicted that TDEs should radiate more energy than what has been actually observed. But the MIT team now say that dust may explain the discrepancy. They found that if a TDE occurs in a dusty galaxy, the dust itself could absorb not only optical and X-ray emissions but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, in an amount equivalent to the presumed “missing energy.”

The 18 new detections also are helping astronomers estimate the rate at which TDEs occur in a given galaxy. When they figure the new TDEs in with previous detections, they estimate a galaxy experiences a tidal disruption event once every 50,000 years. This rate comes closer to physicists’ theoretical predictions. With more infrared observations, the team hopes to resolve the rate of TDEs, and the properties of the black holes that power them.

“People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them,” Kara says. “This gives us confidence that we don’t need all this exotic physics to explain what we’re seeing. And we have a better handle on the mechanics behind how a star gets ripped apart and gobbled up by a black hole. We’re understanding these systems better.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

{ https://news.mit.edu/ }

31-01-2024 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

Astronomers Discover 18 New Tidal Disruption Events

A tidal disruption event occurs when a star winds up so close to a supermassive black hole that the tidal forces exceed the star’s self-gravity and shred the star; as the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Masterson et al. identified 18 new tidal disruption events — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds.

Image credit: Masterson et al., doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad18bb.

“The majority of the new sources don’t show up in optical bands,” said Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

“If you want to understand tidal disruption events (TDEs) as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”

Masterson and her colleagues recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations.

The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.

That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs.

For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NASA’s NEOWISE mission.

They looked through the mission’s archived observations using an algorithm that picks out patterns in infrared emissions — likely signs of a transient burst of infrared radiation.

They then cross-referenced the flagged transients with a catalog of all known nearby galaxies within 600 million light-years.

They found that infrared transients could be traced to about 1,000 galaxies.

The authors then zoomed in on the signal of each galaxy’s infrared burst to determine whether the signal arose from a source other than a TDE, such as an active galactic nucleus or a supernova.

After ruling out these possibilities, the team then analyzed the remaining signals, looking for an infrared pattern that is characteristic of a TDE — namely, a sharp spike followed by a gradual dip, reflecting a process by which a black hole, in ripping apart a star, suddenly heats up the surrounding dust to about 1,000 K before gradually cooling down.

The team’s analysis revealed 18 clean signals of tidal disruption events.

The authors took a survey of the galaxies in which each TDE was found, and saw that they occurred in a range of systems, including dusty galaxies, across the entire sky.

“If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them,” Masteron said.

“It’s not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches.”

“It is now possible to peer through the dust and complete the census of nearby TDEs,” said Harvard University’s Professor Edo Berger.

“A particularly exciting aspect of this work is the potential of follow-up studies with large infrared surveys, and I’m excited to see what discoveries they will yield.”

The new discoveries help to resolve some major questions in the study of TDEs.

For instance, prior to this work, astronomers had mostly seen TDEs in one type of galaxy — a post-starburst system that had previously been a star-forming factory, but has since settled.

This galaxy type is rare, and astronomers were puzzled as to why TDEs seemed to be popping up only in these rarer systems.

It so happens that these systems are also relatively devoid of dust, making a TDE’s optical or X-ray emissions naturally easier to detect.

Now, by looking in the infrared band, astronomers are able to see TDEs in many more galaxies.

The team’s new results show that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not only post-starburst systems.

The findings also resolve a missing energy problem. Physicists have theoretically predicted that TDEs should radiate more energy than what has been actually observed.

But the authors now say that dust may explain the discrepancy. They found that if a TDE occurs in a dusty galaxy, the dust itself could absorb not only optical and X-ray emissions but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, in an amount equivalent to the presumed ‘missing energy.’

The 18 new detections also are helping astronomers estimate the rate at which TDEs occur in a given galaxy.

When they figure the new TDEs in with previous detections, they estimate a galaxy experiences a tidal disruption event once every 50,000 years.

This rate comes closer to physicists’ theoretical predictions. With more infrared observations, the team hopes to resolve the rate of TDEs, and the properties of the black holes that power them.

“People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them,” said MIT’s Dr. Erin Kara.

“This gives us confidence that we don’t need all this exotic physics to explain what we’re seeing.”

“And we have a better handle on the mechanics behind how a star gets ripped apart and gobbled up by a black hole. We’re understanding these systems better.”

• The team’s paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
• Megan Masterson et al. 2024. A New Population of Mid-infrared-selected Tidal Disruption Events: Implications for Tidal Disruption Event Rates and Host Galaxy Properties. ApJ 961, 211; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad18bb

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

31-01-2024 om 21:59 geschreven door peter  

Story by Matty Jacobson 

©Source: Wikimedia Commons

12 Archaeological Finds That Show the Bible is Real
Over the centuries, archaeologists have made discoveries that confirm the historical accuracy of the Bible. From artifacts to cities, here are 12 remarkable finds that provide evidence for the Bible's reliability.

©Source: Wikimedia/Funhistory at English Wikipedia

Seal of King Hezekiah Discovered in Jerusalem
In 2009, archaeologists uncovered a seal belonging to King Hezekiah, who ruled Jerusalem in the 8th century BC. The artifact features his name and iconography, verifying the king's identity and reign as described in 2 Kings.

This rare discovery substantiates that Hezekiah was a real historical figure, confirming the Bible's account of his rule during a pivotal period. The artifact also validates the scripture's depiction of governmental practices at the time.

©Source: Wikimedia/SteinsplitterBot

Ancient Biblical Scrolls Found Intact in Qumran Caves
In 1947, Bedouin shepherds stumbled upon jars in Qumran housing incredibly preserved Dead Sea Scrolls. These manuscripts contain Hebrew texts of every Old Testament book except Esther, verifying the Bible's historical integrity.

The Dead Sea Scrolls provide tangible proof that biblical accounts were recorded accurately, remaining unchanged for over a thousand years. They also open a window into early Judaism and the roots of Christianity.

©Source: Wikimedia/Fallaner

Archaeologists Unearth Biblical Pool of Bethesda

According to John 5:2-9, Jesus healed a paralyzed man by the pool with five porches in Bethesda. In the 19th century, archaeologists found this large reservoir near Jerusalem's Sheep Gate surrounded by four colonnaded porticoes. Coincidence? I think not.

This discovery of the rare pentagonal pool confirms the existence and recognition of Bethesda during the Second Temple times. It also verifies the setting of this Gospel narrative regarding one of Christ's miracles.

©Source: Wikimedia/GeorgianJorjadze

House of King David Reference Found on Ancient Inscription
In 1993, archaeologists discovered the earliest extra-biblical reference to the dynasty of King David on the Tel Dan inscription. The fragment explicitly uses the phrase "House of David" validating the biblical King's line.

This artifact provides concrete evidence that David had a ruling family - a fact often disputed by a multitude of scholars worldwide. It confirms that the biblical account of a Davidic line of kings is factual, not mythical.

©Source: Wikimedia/NedaKewan

Ancient Remains of the Coastal City Tyre Unearthed
In Ezekiel 26, the prophet predicts the destruction of Tyre at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. Excavations have revealed sieges, collapsed walls, and ruins - evidence of this demise.

With ancient cities, absence of evidence doesn't mean evidence of absence. In Tyre's case, the unequaled, lasting ruins testify to the Bible's account coming true concerning the city's great collapse.

©Source: Wikimedia/Markbarnes

Siloam Pool Where Jesus Healed Blind Man Identified
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus commanded a blind man to wash the mud from his eyes in the Pool of Siloam located southeast of Jerusalem.

In 2004, archaeologists uncovered the remains of this very pool dating back to the Second Temple Period, providing geographical context for the Gospel account.

©Source: Wikimedia/BRBurton

Inscription Bearing Name of Pontius Pilate Found at Herod's Palace
In 1961, Italian archaeologists excavating Herod's palace near Bethlehem uncovered a limestone block bearing the inscription "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea" confirming he governed during the time of Jesus. This artifact cements Pilate as a verifiable biblical figure who sentenced Jesus to crucifixion. It also supports the historical accuracy of crucifixion as a punishment used by the Romans during that period.

This discovery verifies Caesarea as Pilate's center of administration, where he would travel from Jerusalem. As part of Herod the Great's coastal palace, the identification of this stone lintel definitively proves Pilate and Herod both occupied this complex. The artifact's origin from this important site also anchors the pivotal biblical moments between these two rulers in a real geographic location during a volatile political era in Judea's history.

©Source: Flickr/James Emery

Hometown Proof: Remains of Nazareth Houses Excavated
Some historians questioned Nazareth's existence since the New Testament mentions it as Jesus' childhood town. However, house remains were uncovered in 2009 proving a small village existed there in Jesus' time.

This evidence categorically refutes skepticism over whether Nazareth was still inhabited between the 7th century BC and the late 1st century AD when Jesus lived there. It bolsters the scriptural authenticity regarding Christ's upbringing.

©Source: Wikimedia/SkybirdForever

Western Wall Ruins Demonstrate Jewish Temple Destruction
According to historical sources, the Second Temple fell in 70 AD after a Roman siege. The sole survivor - the Western Wall - still stands in Jerusalem's Old City testifying to this catastrophic biblical event.

The remains of Judaism's holiest site prove its documented destruction, providing visible confirmation regarding this pivotal moment. They also illustrate the Wailing Wall's enduring spiritual significance.

©Source: Wikimedia/ABRAHAM GRAICER

Seaside Town Capernaum is Confirmed as Jesus' Base
In the Gospels, Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee serves as Jesus' home base during his ministry. In 1838, American explorer Edward Robinson pinpointed its location, with excavations uncovering fishing equipment, houses, and roads.

Archaeological evidence substantiates Capernaum as a fishing village inhabited from the 2nd century BC to the 11th century AD. This proves Jesus could have made it central for performing miracles and preaching to crowds as recounted in Gospel passages.

©Source: Wikimedia/Reinhard Dietrich

Rare Limestone Inscription Confirms Pontius Pilate's Role
In 1961, archaeologists recovered a partial inscription bearing "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea" who authorized Jesus' crucifixion per the Bible. This stone lintel was reused in Herod's palace near Bethlehem.

As the only non-biblical reference to Pilate, it puts to rest doubts over his existence and governance in Judea. It also supports the scriptural timeline, placing his rule from 26 to 36 AD aligning with Jesus' death.

©Source: Shutterstock/DyziO

Evidence of Christ's Path on Via Dolorosa Street Unearthed
The winding Via Dolorosa through Jerusalem's Old City is believed to have been the route Jesus walked, carrying his cross. Excavations revealed flagged paving stones from Hadrian's time.

This discovery dates the pathway to the 1st century AD, coinciding with the Holy Week timeline. The unearthed street spans the entire Via Dolorosa, lending credence that Christ trod this path during his agonizing journey.

©Source: Golgotha

Nearby Garden Tomb Offers Evidence Supporting Christ's Burial
Just outside Jerusalem's Old City walls, a rock-cut tomb reflecting the 1st-century burial style resides in a garden setting. This site's location and features suggest it is a strong candidate for Jesus' grave.

While its precise authenticity is debated, this tomb's characteristics match John's description. Nearby rock features also point to evidence of crucifixion taking place there, indicating the site's credible link to Jesus' death and burial.

©Source: Alexandra Tranta

Artifacts Support Biblical Exodus Account of Enslaved Israelites
For years skeptics doubted the Biblical Exodus story due to the absence of artifacts in Egypt's archaeological records. However, evidence found confirms slavery practices, brick-making methods, and living conditions align with scriptural accounts.

These small fragments provide subtle clues that echo the biblical story of Hebrew enslavement by Egypt's pharaohs. They present strands in a complex historical tapestry that lends plausibility to the scriptural narrative.

©Source: Wikimedia/Leon Brooks

Tangibility from Texts to Towns that Affirms Scripture
Spanning thousands of years, these 12 archaeological discoveries shed light on biblical events and figures that reshaped spiritual history. The unearthed ruins, artifacts, and inscriptions make tangible what was once only ink on parchment.

From the monumental Jerusalem temple remains to a fragment bearing Pilate's name, the physical evidence paints a portrait aligned with scriptural accounts - affirming its historical authenticity through the ages.

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31-01-2024 om 21:46 geschreven door peter